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MixedNuts comments on Ego syntonic thoughts and values - Less Wrong
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Wait, what? What on Earth is the purpose of guilt if you can avoid it? Though it does disminish guilt, so it's a mechanism that removes some guilt for actions you're going to continue despite guilt... but what for? It it completely removed guilt, might as well not generate guilt for actions reinforced that strongly. (And if not, why does it exist?) And it's not like you don't continue - so why would it replace guilt as a signal of cooperation?
Two hypotheses: Someone with voices saying "Kill them!" is more likely than someone with voices saying "Let's go fishing!" to be institutionalized. Mental illness is influenced by culture, which propagates this cliché.
Anecdote: Once I had a voice. It told me to do minor random stuff - cross the street at an unusual point, take a parallel street, explore a part of town. I obeyed because why not. Then out of the blue it told me to kill the next person I saw. I laughed at the obvious cliché and pushed the voice away until it was gone.
I'm not sure what's surprising you here. You don't think John would feel more guilty if he had to beg Lisa for an antidote that she also wanted, than if Lisa said "I gave it to you this morning in your coffee, the decision was never in your hands"?
You can find more on what I think of guilt here.
As for your voice - did it sound more like an intrusive thought? Or did it sound like an external person talking, heard exactly as loudly and clearly as if it were your mother or your friend talking to you? Was it your own voice, the voice of someone you knew, or a stranger?
It sounds like you're saying that evolution built a self-punishment system (which we call "guilt"), but then built another mechanism that let's certain behaviors escape that self-punishment system (by having our minds view them as compulsions). Is that right?
Can you explain why it might be evolutionarily advantageous to visibly self-punish some socially unacceptable behaviors, but not others? And what criteria does the brain actually use to make this (subconscious) choice?
Thanks for the rephrasing. I now understand MixedNuts' question better.
I don't think the purpose of the ego syntonic/dystonic distinction is to get rid of guilt, but to create a more socially acceptable framing, which may accompany guilt.
Consider the case of a pastor with homosexual urges. If they're mild, he can hide it from himself. If they're stronger, and he engages in homosexual behavior, he can't. If he gets caught, then he'll probably phrase it as "I get these temptations, can't do anything about it" instead of as "Yeah, turns out I'm a homosexual and following the Bible isn't that important to me", go to some sort of 'therapy', and be forgiven while continuing to hold most of his previous beliefs about himself. He'll probably still feel guilty about it either way.
I'm confused because in the post you wrote:
Which makes it sound like the purpose of the ego syntonic/dystonic distinction is to get rid of guilt. Are you actually saying that the purpose is really to create a more socially acceptable framing, but as a side effect it might sometimes alleviate guilt?
I think this is a case where I knew what I meant and so I wrote something that activated the appropriate ideas in my head but was misleading and unable to communicate the appropriate ideas. I've fixed it by changing "guilt" to "social stigma".
Thanks for the clarification. I think I agree with Nesov that conscious goals are not necessarily those that are socially acceptable. It may be that the conscious/subconscious distinction originally had much to do with signalling socially acceptable values, but I think since then our actual consciously held values have been the result of a memetic evolution where fitness is determined by many factors besides just "social acceptability". Otherwise it seems hard to explain why some people endorse utilitarianism, others endorse egoism, still others endorse Christian deontology, and so on, even when they live in the same society.
ETA: One example of such a memetic fitness "factor" is how well the values prescribed by the meme fits with our existing intuitions about what an ethical system ought to look like, which might in turn come from thinking about something that's not necessarily related, such as math. See my Why Do We Engage in Moral Simplification? for a more detailed example of this.
(nods) Agreed in principle.
Though it's worth noting that the threshold for self-deception isn't quite as low as you suggest. There exist pastors (and non-pastors) who engage in same-sex sex acts but maintain a heterosexual self-image, or who engage in opposite-sex sex acts but maintain an ascetic self-image. One easy way to do this, for example, is to ascribe all the agency to their sex partners ("I'm straight/celibate, but that tempter/temptress seduced me"), or the situation ("...but I'd had a few drinks too many"), or to more complicated ontological entities (e.g., Satan). That way they get to reframe themselves as helpless-and-blameless.
I'm pointing out that guilt as a signal you won't (can't) defect is made useless by having a system to remove guilt.
That one voice sounded like an intrusive thought, yeah. I get other voices of this type (thoughts in my head, and compulsion to write down things I can't (much) predict), but they don't want to grab me and direct me to do stuff, though they may advise (the most coherent ones are usually religious figures telling me religious stuff I should do; they're accompanied with emotions, usually serenity or awe). I also get regular auditory hallucinations, but if they're voices they just tend to call my name or whatever.
It's not like John is removing his own guilt for breaking Lisa's neck and taking the antidote by making himself believe that what really happened is that she actually gave it to him in his coffee and then died of poisoning. Here, guilt is removed sort of from the outside, by the society, which actually seems to make sense from the point of view of removing false (from the society's point of view) positives, while keeping all the social benefits of guilt. But, true, this mechanism can be exploited via making up imaginary friends.