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Gram_Stone comments on Notes on Imagination and Suffering - Less Wrong
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Comments (17)
You have special hardware for simulating others' cognition. Neurologically, imagining how someone feels is a completely different thing from imagining a collection of 35 apples.
I can't tell what context you're getting this from, but I've seen "You don't understand how I feel!" used as bad epistemology.
My sister's a heroin addict, and she'll use the fact that I've never been addicted to heroin or experienced opioid withdrawals as a debate tactic. It goes something like:
Only plans to kill my sister's addiction that account for my sister's feelings will work.
Only my sister can fully account for my sister's feelings.
Therefore, only my sister can invent successful plans to kill her addiction.
As a corollary, anyone else's plans to kill my sister's addiction will fail.
It is known that heroin addicts invent good-looking plans for killing their addictions, but do not invent good plans for killing their addictions. By this argument she can ensure that all plans to kill her addiction will always eventually fail.
The epistemically correct response, even if it's not necessarily persuasive in this form (for otherwise I would have persuaded her), is to say that I don't actually need to experience what she has to come up with good plans for killing addictions. "Not knowing what it's like to be an addict doesn't make me bad at making decisions about addictions," pattern-matches to, "I don't empathize with you," and, if she really wasn't listening, "I claim to know more about your own phenomenal experiences than you."
Sometimes how someone feels really doesn't matter, in really specific cases. That is, sometimes it's not necessary for an argument to follow. If you let people conflate this specific and useful objection with a more general sort of paternalism where you always ignore the relevance of everyone's feelings, then you might flinch from being right or doing right.
Eek, I'd be really really careful with arguments like that.
If she doesn't agree that this is one of those cases where what she feels doesn't matter, why doesn't she? Maybe when she sees you as being insufficiently empathetic, it's on this level, not on the object level of how much her feelings about specific plans matter?
If she doesn't give her stamp of approval to your description of her thoughts, how would you know if you had it wrong? How would you notice if you were missing something important?
I get the kinds of things that you're talking about, but we're strictly talking about the argument "If Gram had been a drug addict, then he would know what kind of plan I actually need." Even if we take as an assumption that I have been a drug addict, then it does not follow that I am better at making plans that turn addicts into nonaddicts. If anything, I probably get the epistemic advantage from not being wireheaded. This is not about saying that there are times when someone's feelings don't have instrumental or moral weight. This is about saying that sometimes, people will make you think that an argument that includes knowledge of someone's values as a proposition is itself a value judgment, making something that should not be off limits into something that is off limits. I can say, "No, I would not be better able to help you if I became a drug addict. That argument can be false even if its premises are assumed true." If I stop talking about logical validity, which is always free game, and start being someone who blows off other people's feelings for no good reason, then cut my head off.
It's perhaps worth mentioning that this was a short encounter after a long separation, so this was an urgent situation where you cannot allow an addict to argue for credibility from expertise.
Let me know if this doesn't address your concerns in any way.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m not saying that you can afford to let logically invalid arguments go unchallenged as if there was nothing wrong with them. Or that emotions ought to be free from criticism or something. Or that you haven’t earned your confidence or that her listening to you wouldn’t be massively beneficial for her. And I certainly don’t see you as someone who blows off other people’s feelings for no reason - in fact, a big reason I wanted to respond to your comment was because I got the exact opposite impression from you. I’m sorry if it came across otherwise.
If you want I can try to explain more carefully what I was getting at, but I certainly don't want to drag you into a conversation like this if it's not something you want to get into here or now. I'm actually in a somewhat similar situation myself so I’m well aware that it’s not always the time for that kind of thing.