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Gunnar_Zarncke comments on Notes on Imagination and Suffering - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
I'm sorry to hear about your sisters addition. That must be hard on you too.
Yes, but that to what degree of fidelity? You also have special hardware to simulate objects. The question is one of fidelity and I understood the example thus. After all his analogy wasn't between emotions and objects but between amount of emotion and number of objects.
Yes, but that doesn't strike at the core of the matter, namely to what degree "you have no idea how I feel!" can be true.
True - and as you say often not persuasive. What would be a persuasive or emphatic way to nudge her?
I don't know enough to say much, but I am wary about any speculation that glosses over social cognition as a very special kind of imagination that can seem identical to the other kind of imagination if you don't know that they happen in different places anatomically. It seems to make it harder to believe that any analogies will hold.
I meant to link this to the part of the article that says that can feel like a challenge. Sometimes things feel like a challenge because someone's started counting points instead of writing down facts. Now that I reread it though, it doesn't seem like he was being very serious about the feeling of challenge. It probably means my original comment seemed less relevant than I thought it did.
Granted. That's true.
Thanks that you point this out. Indeed I didn't see that part so clearly.