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Hmmm, so the question I'm thinking about is, "what does it mean to say that a motivation is traced back to something". It seems to me that the answer to that involves terminal and instrumental values. Like if a person is motivated to do something, but is only motivated to do it to the extent that it leads to the persons terminal value, then it seems that you could say that this motivation can be traced back to that terminal value.
And so now I'm trying to evaluate the claim that "motivations can always be traced back to happiness and goodness". This seems to be conditional on happiness and goodness being terminal goals for that person. But people could, and often do choose whatever terminal goals they want. For example, people have terminal goals like "self improvement" and "truth" and "be man" and "success". And so, I think that for a person with a terminal goal other than happiness and goodness, they will have motivations that can't be traced back to happiness or goodness.
But I think that it's often the case that motivations can be traced back to happiness and goodness. Hopefully that means something.
Wait... so the Timmy example was used to argue against correspondence theory? Ouch.
Perhaps. Truth might be an exception for some people. Ex. some people may choose to pursue the truth even if it's guaranteed to lead to decreases in happiness and goodness. And success might also be an exception for some people. They also may choose to pursue success even if it's guaranteed to lead to decreases in happiness and goodness. But this becomes a question of some sort of social science rather than of philosophy.
I like the concept! I propose that you call it an altruism ratio as opposed to a psychological motivation ratio because I think the former is less likely to confuse people.
Eh, I think that this would conflict with the way people use the word "like" in a similar way to the problems I ran into with "preference". For example, it makes sense to say that you like mind-state A more than mind-state B. But I'm not sure that it makes sense to say that you necessarily like action A more than action B, given the way people use the term "like". Damn language! :)
I had just reached the same conclusion myself! So I think that yeah, happiness and goodness are the only terminal values, for the vast majority of the thinking population :)
Note: I really don't like the term "happiness" to describe the optimal mind-state since I connect it too strongly with "pleasure" so maybe "satisfaction" would be better. I think of satisfaction as including both feelings of pleasure and feelings of fulfillment. What do you think?
I think that all these are really just instrumental goals that people subconsciously, and perhaps mistakenly, believe will lead them to their real terminal goals of greater personal satisfaction and/or an increase in the world's satisfaction.
It was an example of whatever convoluted theory my professor invented as a replacement for correspondence theory.
Exactly. I think people like the ones you mention are quite rare.
Ok, thanks :)
What if language isn't the problem? Maybe the connection between mind-states and actions isn't so clear-cut after all. If you like mind-state A more than mind-state B, then action A is mind-state-optimizing, but I'm not sure you can go much farther than that... because goodness.
:)
I haven't found a term that I really like. Utility is my favorite though.
Idk, I want to agree with you but I sense that it's more like 95% of the population. I know just the 2 people to ask though. My two friends are huge proponents of things like "give it your all" and "be a man".
Also, what about religious people? Aren't there things they value independent of happiness and goodness? And if so wouldn't their motivations reflect that?
Edit:
Friend 1 says it's ultimately about avoiding feeling bad about himself, which I classify as him wanting to optimize his mind-state.
Friend 2 couldn't answer my questions and said his decisions aren't that calculated.
Not too useful after all. I was hoping that they'd be more insightful.
Oooooo I like that term!
It seems clear-cut to me. An action leads to one state of the world, and in that state of the world you have one mind-state. Can you elaborate?
Not sure what you mean by that either.
Yeah, ask those friends if in a situation where "giving it their all" and "being men" made them less happy and made the world a worse place, whether they would still stick with their philosophies. And if they genuinely can't imagine a situation where they would feel less satisfied after "giving it their all," then I would postulate that as they're consciously pursuing these virtues, they're subconsciously pursuing personal satisfaction. (Edit: Just read a little further, that you already have their responses. Yeah, not too insightful, maybe I'll develop this idea a bit more and ask the rest of the LW community what they think.) (Edit #2: Thought about this a little more, and I have a question you might be able to answer. Is the subconscious considered psychological or physical?)
As for religious people...well, in the case of Christianity, people would probably just want to "become Christ-like" which, for them, overlaps really well with personal satisfaction and helping others. But in extreme cases, someone might truly aspire to "become obedient to X" in which case obedience could be the terminal value, even if the person doesn't think obedience will make them happy or make the world a better place. But I think that such ultra-religiosity is rare, and that most people are still ultimately psychologically motivated to either do what they think will make them happy, or what they think will make the world a better place. I feel like this is related to Belief in Belief but I can't quite articulate the connection. Maybe you'll understand, if not, I'll try harder to verbalize it.
No, if that's all you're saying, that "If you like mind-state A more than mind-state B, then action A is mind-state-optimizing" then I completely agree! For some reason, I read your sentence ("But I'm not sure that it makes sense to say that you necessarily like action A more than action B, given the way people use the term "like") and thought you were trying to say they necessarily like action A more..haha, oops
How about this answer: "If that makes me less happy and makes the world a worse place, the world would be decidedly weird in a lot of fundamental and ubiquitous ways. I am unable to comprehend what such a weird world would be like in enough detail to make meaningful statements about what I would do in it."
Let's just focus on "giving it your all." What is "it"?? You surely can't give everything your all. How do you choose which goals to pursue? "Giving it your all" is a bit abstract.
That's exactly what I asked them.
The first one took a little prodding but eventually gave a somewhat passable answer. And he's one of the smartest people I've ever met. The second one just refused to address the question. He said he wouldn't approach it that way and that his decisions aren't that calculated. I don't know how you want to explain it, but for pretty much every person I've ever met or read, sooner or later they seem to just flinch away from the truth. You seem to be particularly good at not doing that - I don't think you've demonstrated any flinching yet.
And see what I mean about how the ability to not flinch is often the limiting factor? In this case, the question wasn't really difficult in an intellectual way at all. It just requires you to make a legitimate effort to accept the truth. The truth is often uncomfortable to people, and thus they flinch away, don't accept it, and fail to make progress.
I could definitely answer that! This really gets at the core of the map vs. the territory (maybe my favorite topic :) ). The physical/psychological distinction are just two maps we use to describe reality. In reality itself, the territory, there's no such thing as physical/psychological. If you look at the properties of individual atoms, they don't have any sort of property that says "I'm a physical atom" or "I'm a psychological atom". They only have properties like mass and electric charge (as far as we know).
I'm not sure how much you know about science, but I find the physics-chemistry-biology spectrum to be a good demonstration of the different levels of maps. Physics tries to model reality as precisely as possible (well, some types of physics that is; others aim to make approximations). Chemistry approximates reality using the equations of physics. Biology approximates reality using the equations of chemistry. And you could even add psychology in there and say that it approximates reality using the ideas (not even equations) of biology.
As far as psychology goes, a little history might be helpful. It's been a few years since I studied this, but here we go. In the early 1900s, behaviorism was the popular approach to psychology. They just tried to look at what inputs lead to what outputs. Ie. they'd say "if we expose people to situation X, how do they respond". The input is the situation, and the output is how they respond.
Now, obviously there's something going on that translates the input to the output. They had the sense that the translation happens in the brain, but it was a black box to them and they had no clue how it works. Furthermore, they sort of saw it as so confusing that there's no way they could know how it works. And so behaviorists were content to just study what inputs lead to what outputs, and to leave the black box as a mystery.
Then in the 1950s there was the cognitive revolution where they manned up and ventured into the black box. They thought that you could figure out what's going on in there and how the inputs get translated to outputs.
Now we're almost ready to go back to your question - I haven't forgotten about it. So cognitive psychology is sort of about what's going on in our head and how we process stuff. Regarding the subconscious, even though we're not conscious of it, there's still processing going on in that black box, and so the study of that processing still falls under the category of cognitive psychology. But again, cognitive psychology is a high-level map. We're not there yet, but we'd be better able to understand that black box with a lower level map like neuroscience. And we'd be able to learn even more about the black box using an even lower level map like physics.
If you have any other questions or even just want to chat informally about this stuff please let me know. I love thinking about this stuff and I love trying to explain things (and I like to think I'm pretty good at it) and you're really good at understanding things and asking good questions which often leads me to think about things differently and learn new things.
Interesting. I had the impression that religious people had lots of other terminal values. So things like "obeying God" aren't terminal values? I had the impression that most religions teach that you should obey no matter what. That you should obey even if you think it'll lead to decreases in goodness and happiness. Could you clarify?
Edit: I just realized something that might be important. You emphasize the point that there's a lot of overlap between happiness/goodness and other potentially terminal values. I haven't been emphasizing it. I think we both agree that there is the big overlap. And I think we agree that "actions can either be mind-state optimizing, or not mind-state optimizing" and "terminal values are arbitrary".
I think you're right to put the emphasis on this and to keep bringing it up as an important reminder. Being important, I should have given it the attention it deserves. Thanks for persisting!
It took me a while to understand belief in belief. I read the sequences about 2 years ago and didn't understand it until a few weeks ago as I was reading HPMOR. There was a point when one of the characters said he believed something but acted as if he didn't. Like if believed what he said he believed, he definitely would have done X because X is clearly in his interest. I just reread belief in belief, and now I feel like it makes almost complete sense to me.
From what I understand, the idea with belief in belief is that:
a) There's your model of how you think the world will look.
b) And then there's what you say you believe.
To someone who values consistency, a) and b) should be the same thing. But humans are weird, and sometimes a) and b) are different.
In the scenario you describe, there's a religious person who ultimately wants goodness and would choose goodness over his virtues if he had to pick, but he nevertheless claims that his virtues are terminal goals to him. And so as far as a) goes, you both agree that he would choose goodness over his virtues. But as far as b) goes, you claim to believe different things. What he claims to believe is inconsistent with his model of the world, and so I think you're right - this would be an example of belief in belief.
Yup, that's all I'm trying to say. No worries if you misunderstood :). I hadn't realized that this was ultimately all I was trying to say before talking to you and now I have, so thank you!
Well, thanks! How does that saying go? What is true is already so? Although in the context of this conversation, I can't say there's anything inherently wrong with flinching; it could help fulfill someone's terminal value of happiness. It someone doesn't feel dissatisfied with himself and his lack of progress, what rational reason is there for him to pursue the truth? Obviously, I would prefer to live in a world where relentlessly pursuing the truth led everyone to their optimal mind-states, but in reality this probably isn't the case. I think "truth" is just another instrumental goal (it's definitely one of mine) that leads to both happiness and goodness.
Yeah! I think I first typed the question as "is it physical or psychological?" and then caught myself and rephrased, adding the word "considered" :) I just wanted to make sure I'm not using scientific terms with accepted definitions that I'm unaware of. Thanks for your answer!! You are really good at explaining stuff. I think the "cognitive psychology" is related to what I just read about last week in the ebook too, about neural networks, the two different brain map models, and the bleggs and rubes.
I don't know your religious background, but if you don't have one, that's really impressive, given that you haven't actually experienced much belief-in-belief since Santa (if you ever did). But yeah, basically, this sentences summarizes perfectly:
Any time a Christian does anything but pray for others, do faith-strengthening activities, spread the gospel, or earn money to donate to missionaries, he is anticipating as if God/hell doesn't exist. I realized this, and sometimes tried to convince myself and others that we were acting wrongly by not being more devout. I couldn't shake the notion that spending time having fun instead of praying or sharing the gospel was somehow wrong because it went against God's will of wanting all men being saved, and I believed God's will, by definition, was right. But I still acted in accordance with my personal happiness some of the time. I said God's will was the only an end-in-itself, but I didn't act like it. So like you said, inconsistency. Thanks for helping me with the connection there.
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Litany_of_Gendlin
I agree with you that there's nothing inherently wrong with it, but I don't think this is a case of someone making a conscious decision to pursue their terminal goals. I think it's a case of "I'm just going to follow my impulse without thinking".
Haha thanks. I can't remember ever believing in belief, but studying this rationality stuff actually teaches you a lot about how other people think.
I was raised Jewish, but people around me were about as not religious as it gets. I think it's called Reform Judiasm. In practice it just means, "go to Hebrew school, have a Bar/Bat Mitzvah, celebrate like 3-4 holidays a year and believe whatever you want without being a blatant atheist".
I'm 22 years old and I genuinely can't remember the last time I believed in any of it through. I had my Bar Mitzvah when I was 13 and I remember not wanting to do it and thinking that it's all BS. Actually I think I remember being in Hebrew school one time when we were being taught about God and I at the time believed in God, and I was curious how they knew that God existed and I asked, and they basically just said, "we just know", and I remember being annoyed by that answer. And now I'm remembering being confused because I wanted to know what God really was, and some people told me he was human-like and had form, and some people just told me he was invisible.
I will say that I thoroughly enjoy Jewish humor though, and I thank the Jews very much for that :). Jews love making fun of their Jewish mannerisms, and it's all in good fun. Even things that might seem mean are taken in good spirit.
Hey, um... I have a question. I'm not sure if you're comfortable talking about it though. Please feel free to not answer.
It sounds really stressful believing that stuff. Like it seems that even people with the strongest faith spend some time deviating from those instructions and do things like have fun or pursue their personal interests. And then you'd feel guilty about that. Come to think of it, it sounds similar to my guilt for ever spending time not pursuing ambitions.
And what about believing in Hell? From what I understand, Christians believe that there's a very non-negligible chance that you end up in Hell, suffering unimaginably for eternity. I'm not exaggerating at all when I say that if I believed that, I would be in a mental hospital crying hysterically and trying my absolute hardest to be a good person and avoid ending up in Hell. Death is one of my biggest fears, and I also fear the possibility of something similar to Hell, even though I think it's a small possibility. Anyway, I never understood how people could legitimately believe in Hell and just go about their lives like everything is normal.
Few people make that many conscious decisions! But it could be a subconscious decision that still fulfills the goal. For my little sister, this kind of thing actually is a conscious decision. Last Christmas break when I first realized that unlike almost all of my close friends and family in Wisconsin, I didn't like our governor all that much, she eventually cut me off, saying, "Dad and I aren't like you, Ellen. We don't like thinking about difficult issues." Honesty, self-awareness, and consciously-selected ugh fields run in the family, I guess.
That's funny. I just met someone like you, probably also a Reform Jew, who told me some jokes and about all these Jewish stereotypes that I had never even heard of, and they seem to fit pretty well.
It's exactly like that, just multiplied times infinity (adjusted for scope insensitivity) because hell is eternal.
Yeah, hell is basically what led me away from Christianity. If you're really curious, how convenient, I wrote about it here to explain myself to my Christian friends. You'll probably find it interesting. You can see how recent this is for me and imagine what a perfect resource the rationality book has been. I just wish I had discovered it just a few weeks earlier, when I was in the middle of dozens of religious discussions with people, but I think I did an okay job explaining myself and talking about biases I had recognized in myself but didn't even know were considered "biases" like not giving much weight to evidence that opposes your preferred belief (label: confirmation bias) and the tendency to believe what people around you believe (label: I forget, but at least I now know it has one) and many more.
But how did I survive, believing in hell? Well, there's this wonderful book of the Bible called Ecclesiastes that seems to mostly contradict the rest of Christian teachings. Most people find it depressing. Personally, I loved it and read it every week to comfort myself. I still like it, actually. It's short, you could read it in no time, but here's a sample from chapter 3: 18-22:
Indeed.
True. In the case of my friend, I don't think it was, but in cases where it is, then I think that it could be a perfectly sensible approach (depending on the situation).
This was the relevant part of the conversation:
It's possible that he had legitimately decided earlier to not put that much calculation into these sorts of decisions, because he thinks that this strategy will best lead to his terminal goals of happiness or goodness or whatever. But this situation actually didn't involve any calculation at all. The calculations were done for him already - he just had to choose between the results.
To me it seems more likely that he a) is not at all used to making cost-benefit analyses and makes his decisions by listening to his impressions of how virtuous things seem. And b) in situations of choosing between options that both produce unpleasant feelings of unvirtuousness, he flinches away from the reality of the (hypothetical) situation.
I should mention that I think that >99% of people are quite quite stupid. Most people don't seem very agenty to me, given the way I define it. Most people seem to not put much thought behind the overwhelming majority of what they do and think and instead just respond to their immediate feelings and rationalize it afterwards. Most people don't seem to have the open-mindedness to give consideration to ideas that go against their impulses (this isn't to say that these impulses are useless), nor the strength to admit hard truths and choose an option in a lose-lose scenario.
Really, I don't know how to word my thoughts very well on this topic. Eliezer addresses a lot of the mistakes people make in his articles. It'd take some time for me to really write up my thoughts on this. And I know that it makes me sound like a Bad Person for thinking that >99% people are really stupid, but unfortunate truths have to be dealt with. The following isn't a particularly good argument, but perhaps it's an intuitive one: consider how we think people 200 years ago were stupid, and people 200 years ago think people 400 years ago were stupid etc. (I don't think this means that everyone will always be stupid. Ie. I think that not being stupid means something in an absolute sense, not just a relative one).
I'm truly truly sorry that you had experienced this. No one should ever have to feel that. If there's anything I could do or say to help, please let me know.
I had actually seen the link when I looked back at your first post in the welcome thread at some point. I confess that I just skimmed it briefly and didn't pick up on the core idea. However, I've just read it more carefully.
I love your literary device. The Banana Tree thought experiment and analogy that is (I don't actually know what I literary device is). And the fact that people believe that - a) God is caring, AND b) God created Hell and set the circumstances up where millions/billions of people will end up there - is... let's just say inconsistent by any reasonable definition of the words consistent, caring and suffering.
In the same way that you talk about how God is bad for creating Hell, I actually think something similar about life itself. I'm a bit pessimistic. The happiness set point theory says that we have happiness set points and that we may temporarily deviate above or below them, but that we end up hovering back to our set points.
Furthermore, this set point seems to be quite neutral and quite consistent amongst humans. What I mean by neutral is that minute-to-minute, most people seem to be in a "chill" state of mind, not really happy or sad. And we don't spend too much time deviating from that. And there's also the reality that we're all destined to die. Why does life have to be mediocre? Why can't it be great? Why do we all have to get sick and die? I don't know how or if reality was "created", but to anthropomorphize, why did the creator make it like this? From the perspective of pre-origin-of-reality (if that's even a thing), I feel the same feelings about neutralness that you expressed about the badness of Hell (but obviously Hell is far worse than neutralness). From a pre-origin perspective, reality could just as easily have been amazing and wonderful, so the fact that it's neutral and fleeting seems... disappointing?
If it got you through believing in hell, I will most certainly read it.
So a possible distinction between virtue ethicists and consequentialists: virtue ethicists pursue their terminal values of happiness and goodness subconsciously, while consequentialists pursue the same terminal values consciously... as a general rule? And so the consequentialists seem more agenty because they put more thought into their decisions?
Yeah, that's what I was trying to get across, and it's why I titled the post "Do You Feel Selfish for Liking What You Believe"! I hesitated to include the analogy since it was the only part with the potential to offend people (two people accused me of mocking God) and taint their thoughts about the rest of the post, but in the end I left it, partly as a hopefully thought-provoking interlude between the more theological sections and mostly so I could give my page a more fun title than Deconversion Story Blog #59845374987.
The happiness set point theory makes sense! Actually, it makes a lot of sense, and I think it's connected to the idea that most people do not act in agenty ways! If they did, I think they could increase their happiness. Personally, I don't find that it applies to me much at all. My happiness has steadily risen throughout my life. I am happier now than ever before. I am now dubbing myself a super-agent. I think the key to happiness is to weed not only the bad stuff out of your life, but the neutral stuff as well. Let me share some examples:
I got a huge scholarship after high school to pursue a career in the medicine field (I never expected to love my career, but that wasn't the goal; I wanted to fund lots of missionaries). I was good at my science classes, and I didn't dislike them, but I didn't like them either. I realized this after my first year of college. I acknowledged the sunk cost fallacy, cut my losses, wrote a long, friendly letter to the benefactor to assuage my guilt, and decided to pursue another easy high-income career instead, law, which would allow me to major in anything I wanted. So I sat down for a few hours, considered like 6 different majors, evaluated the advantages and disadvantages, and came up with a tie between Economics and Spanish. I liked Econ for many reasons, but mainly because the subject matter itself was truly fascinating to me; I liked Spanish not so much for the language itself but because the professor was hilarious, fun, casual, and flexible about test/paper deadlines, I could save money by graduating in only 3 years, and I would get the chance to travel abroad. I flipped a coin between the two, and majored in Spanish. Result: a lasting increase in happiness.
My last summer after college, I was a cook at a boy scout camp. It was my third summer there. I worked about 80 hours a week, and the first two years I loved it because my co-workers were awesome. We would have giant (dumping 5 gallon igloos on each other in the middle of the kitchen, standing on the roof and dropping regular balloons filled with water on each other, etc) water fights in the kitchen, we would play cribbage in between meals, hang out together, etc. I also had two good friends among the counselors. Anyway, that third year, my friends had left and it was still a pretty good job in a pretty and foresty area, but it wasn't super fun like it had been. So after the first half of the summer, once I had earned enough to pay the last of my college debt, I found someone to replace me at my job and wrote out pages of really detailed instructions for everything (to assuage my guilt), and quit, to go spend a month "on vacation" at home with my family before leaving for Guatemala. Result: a lasting increase in happiness.
I dropped down to work part-time in Guatemala to pursue competitive running more. I left as soon as I got a stress fracture. I chose a family to nanny for based on the family itself, knowing that would affect my day-to-day happiness more than the location (which also turned out to be great).
My belief in God was about to cause not only logical discontent in my mind, but also a suboptimal level of real life contentment that I could not simply turn into an "ugh field" as I almost set off to pursue a career I didn't love to donate to missionaries. Whatever real-life security benefits it brought me were about to become negligible, so I finally spent a few very long and thoughtful days confronting my doubts and freed myself from that belief.
Every day examples of inertia-breaking happiness-inducing activities: I'm going for a run and run past a lilac bush. It smells really good, so I stop my watch and go stand by it for a while. I'm driving in the car, and there's a pretty lookout spot, so I actually stop for a while. I do my favorite activities like board games, pickup sports, and nature stuff like hiking and camping every weekend, not just once in a while. I don't watch TV because there's always something I'd rather be doing. If I randomly wake up early, I consciously think about whether I would get more satisfaction out of lazing around in bed, or getting up to make a special breakfast for the kids I nanny for.
What's my point? I have very noticeably different happiness levels based on the actions I take. If I'm just going with the flow, taking life as it comes, I have an average amount of happiness compared to those around me; I occasionally do let myself slip into neutral situations. If I put myself in a super fun and amazing situation, I have way more happiness than those around me (which is a good thing, since happiness is contagious). Sometimes I just look at my life and can't help but laugh with delight at how wonderful it is. If I ever get a sense that my happiness is starting to neutralize/stabilize, I make a big change and get it back on the right track. For instance, I think that thanks to you, I have just realized that my happiness is not composed of pleasure alone, but also personal fulfillment. I always knew that "personal fulfillment" influenced other people, but I'm either just realizing/admitting this to myself, or my preferences are changing a bit as I get older, but I think it influences me too. So, I'm spending some time reading and thinking and writing, instead of only playing games and reading fiction and cooking and hiking. Result: I am even happier than I knew possible :)
Maybe I don't fully understand that happiness set point theory, but I don't think it is true for everyone, just 99% of people or so. I don't think it is true for me. That said, I will acknowledge that an individual's range of potential happiness levels is fixed. Some happy-born people, no matter how bad their lives get, will never become as unhappy as naturally unhappy people with seemingly good lives are.
tl;dr Being an agent is awesome!
I've tried to clarify my thoughts a bit:
Terminal values are ends-in-themselves. They are psychological motivators, reasons that explain decisions. (Physical motivators like addiction and inertia can also explain our decisions, but a rational person might wish to overcome them.) For most people, the only true terminal values are happiness and goodness. There is almost always significant overlap between the two. Someone who truly has a terminal value that can't be traced back to happiness or goodness in some way is either (a) ultra-religious or (b) a special case for the social sciences.
Happiness ("likes") refers to the optimalness of your mind-state. Hedonistic pleasure and personal fulfillment are examples of things that contribute to happiness.
Goodness refers to what leads to a happier outcome for others.
Preferences ("wants") are what we tend to choose. These can be based on psychological or physical motivators.
Instrumental values are goals or virtues that we think will best satisfy the terminal values of happiness and goodness.
We are not always aware of what actually leads to optimal mind-states in ourselves and others.
Sounds good to me! Given the way you've defined things.
Edit: So what do you conclude about morality from this?
Good question. I conclude that morality (which, as far as I can tell, seems like the same thing as goodness and altruism) does exist, that our desire to be moral is the result of evolution (thanks for your scientific backup) just as much as our selfish desires are results of evolution. Whatever you call happiness, goodness falls into the same category. I think that some people are mystified when they make decisions that inefficiently optimize their happiness (like all those examples we talked about), but they shouldn't be. Goodness is a terminal value too.
Also, morality is relative. How moral you are can be measured by some kind of altruism ratio that compares your terminal values of happiness and goodness. Someone can be "more moral" than others in the sense that he would be motivated more by goodness/altruism than he is by his own personal satisfaction, relative to them.
Is there any value in this idea? No practical value, except whatever personal satisfaction value an individual assigns to clarity. I wouldn't even call the idea a conclusion as much as a way to describe the things I understand in a slightly more clear way. I still don't particularly like ends-in-themselves.
Reduction time:
Why should I pursue clarity or donate to effective charities that are sub-optimal happiness-maximizers?
Because those are instrumental values.
Why should I pursue these instrumental values?
Because they lead to happiness and goodness.
Why should I pursue happiness and goodness?
Because they're terminal values.
Why should I pursue these terminal values?
Wrong question. Terminal values, by definition, are ends-in-themselves. So here the real question is not why should I, but rather, why do I pursue them? It's because the alien-god of evolution gave us emotions that make us want to be happy and good...
Why did the alien-god give us emotions?
The alien-god does not act rationally. There is no "why." The origin of emotion is the result of random chance. We can explain only its propogation.
Why should we be controlled by emotions that originated through random chance?
Wrong question. It's not a matter of whether they should control us. It's a fact that they do.
I pretty much agree. But I have one quibble that I think is worth mentioning. Someone else could just say, "No, that's not what morality is. True morality is...".
Actually, let me give you a chance to respond to that before elaborating. How would you respond to someone who says this?
Very very well put. Much respect and applause.
One very small comment though:
I see where you're coming from with this. If someone else heard this out of context they'd think, "No... emotion originates from evolutionary pressure". But then you'd say, "Yeah, but where do the evolutionary pressures come from". The other person would say, "Uh, ultimately the big bang I guess." And you seem to be saying, "exactly, and that's the result of random chance".
Some math-y/physicist-y person might argue with you here about the big bang being random. I think you could provide a very valid bayesian counter argument saying that probability is in the mind, and that no one has a clue how the big bang/origin came to be, and so to anyone and everyone in this world, it is random.
Thanks :)
Yeah, I have no clue what evolutionary pressure means, or what the big-bang is, or any of that science stuff yet. sigh I really don't enjoy reading hard science all that much, but I enjoy ignorance even less, so I'll probably try to educate myself more about that stuff soon after I finish the rationality book.
Ok, that's perfectly fair. My honest opinion is that it really isn't very practical and if it doesn't interest you, it probably isn't worth it. The value of it is really just if you're curious about the nature of reality on a fundamental level. But as far as what's practical, I think it's skills like breaking things down like a reductionist, open mindedness, knowledge of what biases we're prone to etc.
Yeah, I guess one person has only so much time... at least for now... I am curious, but maybe not quite enough to justify the immense amount of time and effort it would take me to thoroughly understand.
Example case:
True morality is following God's will? Basically everyone who says this believes "God wants what's best for us, even when we don't understand it." Their understanding of God's will and their intuitive idea of what's best for people rarely conflict though. But here's an extreme example of when it could: Let's say someone strongly believes (even in belief) in God, and for some reason thinks that God wants him to sacrifice his child. This action would go against his (unrecognized) terminal value of goodness, but he could still do it, subconsciously satisfying his (unrecognized) terminal value of personal happiness. He takes comfort in his belief in God and heaven. He takes comfort in his community. To not sacrifice the child would be to deny God and lose that comfort. These thoughts obviously don't happen on a conscious level, but they could be intuitions?
Idk, feel free to throw more "true morality is..." scenarios at me...
What if it does conflict? Does that then change what morality is?
And to play devils advocate, suppose the person says, "I don't care what you say, true morality is following God's will no matter what the effect is on goodness or happiness." Hint: they're not wrong.
I hope I'm not being annoying. I could just make my point if you want.
But it seems like morality is just a word people use to describe how they think they should act! People think they should act in all sorts of ways, but it seems to me like they're subconsciously acting to achieve happiness and/or goodness.
As for your quote... such a person would be very rare, because almost anyone who defines morality as God's will believes that God's will is good for humanity, even if she doesn't understand why. This belief, and acting in accordance with it, brings her happiness in the form of security. I don't think anyone says to herself "God has an evil will, but I will serve him anyway." Do you?
It often is. My point is that morality is just a word, and that it unfortunately doesn't have a well agreed upon meaning. And so someone could always just say "but I define it this way".
And so to ask what morality is is really just asking how you define it. On the other hand, asking what someone's altruism or preference ratios are is a concrete question.
You seem to be making the point that in practice, peoples definitions of morality usually can be traced back to happiness or goodness, even if they don't know or admit it. I sense that you're right.
I doubt that there are many people who think that God has an evil will. But I could imagine that there are people who think that "even if I knew that God's will was evil, following it would still be the right thing to do."