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TheOtherDave comments on The Human's Hidden Utility Function (Maybe) - Less Wrong
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This concern is not-abstract and very personal for me. As I've said around here before, I often find myself exhibiting borderline-sociopathic thinking in many situations, but the arrangement of empathy and ethical inhibitions in my brain, though off-kilter in many ways*, drives me to take even abstract ethical problems (LW examples: Three Worlds Collide, dust specks, infanticide, recently Moldbug's proposal of abolishing civil rights for the greater good) very personally, generates all kinds of strong emotions about them - yet it has kept me from doing anything ugly so far.
(The most illegal thing I've done in my life during the moments when I 'let myself go' was some petty and outwardly irrational shoplifting in my teenage years; reflecting back upon that, I did it not solely to get an adrenaline rush but also to push my internal equilibrium into a place where this "superego" thing would recieve an alarm and come back online)
What if this internal safety net of mine is founded solely upon #2 and #3?
(* As I've mentioned in some personal anecdotes, - and hell, I don't wish to drone on and on about this, just feeling it's relevant - this part of me has been either very weak or dormant until I watched Evangelion when I was 18. The weird, lingering cathartic sensation and the feeling of psychological change, which felt a little like growing up several years in a week, was the most interesting direct experience in my life so far. However, I've mostly been flinching from consciously trying to push myself towards the admirable ethics of interpersonal relations that I view as the director's key teaching. It's painful enough when it's happening without conscious effort on your part!)
Do you have any particular reason for expecting it to be?
Or is this a more general "what if"? For example, if you contemplate moving to a foreign country, do you ask yourself what if your internal safety net is founded solely on living in the country you live in now?
I'm not Multiheaded, but it feels-as-if the part of brain that does math has no problem at all personally slaughtering a million people if it saves one million and ten (1); the ethical injunction against that, which is useful, feels-as-if it comes from "avoid the unpleasant (c.q. evil) thing". (Weak evidence based on introspection, obviously.)
(1) Killing a million people is really unpleasant, but saving ten people should easily overcome that even if I care more about myself than about others.
Rougly that; I've thought about it in plenty more detail, but everything beyond this summary feels vague and I'm too lazy currently to make it coherent enough to post.
It feels like I do, but it'll take a bit of very thoughtful writing to explicate why. So maybe I'll explain it here later.