I have another question: It seems to me that philosophy of mind is valuable for ethical reasons because it attempts to figure out which things have minds that can experience enjoyment and suffering, which has implications for how we should act. Do you disagree?
Thanks. What is PNSE? "Persistent non-symbolic experience"?
Good question!
I have gained a lot of emotion handling skill. This lets me be calmer and kinder to my wife and my son and other people. It also means I suffer less because I can more easily detect negative thoughts and feelings and (to some extent) disengage from them rather than feed them.
I am also slowly getting better at actively cultivating positive/happy/pleasant mind states.
I speak not from experience here, but according to my limited understanding, the idea is that most or all ideas of the "self" are more-or-less arbitrary abstractions like the Ship of Theseus.
Via western philosophy of mind you can gain some understanding of this idea and convince yourself that it is probably true, but via meditation AFAIU it becomes possible to observe this directly in your own mind.
The benefits of "transcending" the concept of self, I believe, is that you suffer less and become happier.
E.g., I expect someone from Camp 1 to have a much harder time "vibing".
Could I ask you to please elaborate on what you mean by this?
May I ask you some questions about your Camp #1 intutions (since I have pretty strong Camp #2 intuitions)?
As I see it, the really interesting qualia are not things like redness. The really interesting qualia are the ability to experience enjoyment and suffering.
I hope it is obvious that there exist some things that are able to suffer and enjoy - for example, humans. (And there probably exist other things which cannot.) Likewise, there exist things which can process information and act on it by moving their bodies and manipulating their environment. (This i...
The true test of a saint is this - if doing the right thing would lead to lifelong misery for you and your family, would you still do it?
This seems to be based on a false dichotomy: "Either I genuinely want to do good AT ANY AND ALL COSTS, or all my attempts to do good are insincere."
I would argue that there are other possibilities besides those two. A person can genuinely desire to do good because he truly likes to do good, but he has other likes and goals as well and will sometimes sacrifice one goal for the other.
As far as I can tell, you do not really argue why you think platitudes contain valuable wisdom. You only have one example, and that one is super-vague.
For me this post would be much better if you added several examples that show in more detail why the platitude is valuable.
I have heard a number of people saying that they don't want to give money to charity because they don't trust the charities spend the money well.
I'd feel much more comfortable with someone not in control over their own utility function than someone that is in control, based on the people I have encountered in life so far.
May I ask what kind of experiences you base this on?
Evidently you think your niece is worth more than half a sandwich.
I do personally feel that there is some emotional core to love, so I'm sympathetic to the "it's a specific emotion" definition.
The definition of love as an emotion seems wrong to me, because emotions are short-lived. Intuitively, we think of statements like "I love my son" as being true all the time. But I do not experience an emotion of "love" towards him all the time. When I am away from him, hours can pass where I do not think of him at all, and when I am with him I sometimes feel an emotion of annoyance rather than "love".
So this kind of definition does not seem to match how people use the concept.
I think the overwhelming majority of people in the US who are 'working 60-hour weeks, at jobs where they have to smile and bear it when their bosses abuse them' are also consuming large amounts of luxuries, and I think it's reasonable to conceptualize this as 'they are working longer hours than they have to in order to consume lots of luxuries'.
May I ask you two questions?
Yes. Thanks. Good explanation.
which sucks incredibly and is bad.
Your wording here makes me curious: Are you saying the same thing twice here, or are you saying two different things? Does the phrase "X sucks" mean the same thing to you as "X is bad", or is there a distinction?
Realizing that your preferences can and do develop obviously opens the Pandora's box of actions which do change preferences.[1] The ability to do that breaks orthogonality.
Could you please elaborate on how this "breaks orthogonality"? It is unclear to me what you think the ramifications of this are.
And sometimes communities do in fact have explicit “preferences” that will cost people status just by having different ones. It might even be costly to find out what those diffuse preferences are, and especially daunting for people new to a community.
Could you please give some examples of this? It is unclear to me what kind of things you are talking about here.
or you don't really know yourself well
Why do you think that?
What I mean is that the distribution has a crazy variance (possibly no finite variance); take two "opportunities to do good" and compare them to each other, and an orders-of-magnitude difference is not rare.
Do you mean the differences between the expected utility upfront? Or do you mean the differences between the actual utility in the end (which the actor might have no way to accurately predict in advance)?
I also think that in any kind of complex system, monocultures are fragile.
This is a valid point. But the world is far from a monoculture. Even if all currently endangered languages die out, we will have plenty of cultures left.
If the world ends up with less than, say, 100 languages, then I agree it starts to make sense to preserve them. As it stands now, I think we have more than enough cultural diversity, and keeping tiny minority languages and cultures alive is not worth the opportunity cost.
It can be too slow to catch up to rapid change, but then in that case one of the things you want is a diversity of cultures for selection to act on.
Is this the problem that you are trying to solve by preserving cultures? Make the human race as a whole more resilient in the face of rapid change?
Is this really the reason why you think culture is important? Or is it a rationalization?
I am skeptical for two reasons:
In those words it sounds like a bad thing, but look past the words and is it, really?
In my opinion, yes. That is why I posted the question.
Why is culture so important, again?
I agree that the utility of preserving endangered languages is greater than zero. But how much greater.
These alternative ways of conceptualizing... how useful are they? What can we achieve with them? As far as I can tell, they are fun and interesting, but insignificant compared to other problems we can help solve.
Preservation of endangered languages involves raising children bilingually in the majority and endangered language...
Generally speaking, endangered languages are from a cultural minority and members of that minority culture enjoy being able to speak that language.
If the minority cultures can fix the problem themselves by teaching their children, great! Far be it from me to stop them from that. And of course the dominant cultures should not actively oppress minority languages.
But when outsiders are expected to put in extra effort to preserve minority langua...
I was talking specifically about childhood language acquisition, where learning a new language doesn't require you to forgo reading tvtropes or watching buffy the vampire slayer, it's just part of your background acquisition the same way that children learn how gravity works and how to manipulate small objects as they grow up.
It maybe easy for the child, but it can take a lot of effort and energy from the parents.
I am the father of a sort-of bilingual child. I am Danish and we live in Denmark, but my wife is Chinese. Our 4-year-old son speaks good Da...
To me this sound suspiciously like the "Fallacy of Grey".
The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”
The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view . . .”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray
Is there any place in your sequence where you define what you mean by God? I have tried to read closely every time you mention the term, and I still do not understand what the term is supposed to refer to.
But my vague sense is that people mostly want frisbee and tea. I guess this isn't that surprising either, there's some kind of horror that's related to a nerd staring at the media that is actually popular and realizing "it's not bad [by nerd standards] by mistake. The people really did want Transformers 3."
I did not understand this. Could I get you to please explain it again?
(It is worth noting that I am a nerd who enjoyed Transformers 3...)
the amount of awe I feel going into European churches feels like some evidence against this.
This sounds to me like selection bias. Most people did not build churches. And I suspect you do not feel awestruck in every church. I suspect that you remember the new most awesome ones, built by exceptional people who felt exceptionally religious.
...It really seems like these rituals, the architecture, all of it, was built to instill the sort of existential intensity that taking God seriously requires, and I have to imagine that this was at least somewhat real for mos
Contemplation of the vastness of everything we know about, of the tremendous unplumbed chasm of the unknown, of the vertigo-inducing forever of infinity, of the mystery of why there is anything at all or any subjectivity with which to try to confront it… any of these things can induce a shudder of humble awe in the most dyed-in-the-wool atheist.
Not me. At least, not reliably. When I contemplate the vastness of the universe I feel at most a very mild curiosity. When I contemplate philosophical problems such as "why there is anything at all" I mostly feel a mild frustration. Definitely not a shudder of awe.
I would think that some kind of "yay field" plays a part in addiction. Even very mild addictions. I feel a "yay field" each time I go to eat a cookie or a bowl of ice cream or the like.
I often use mystical language with phenomenal empiricism in mind.
Could you please give some examples of this?
I am interested in evidence that there are large parts of society that have benefitted from mysticism in the way they benefited from quantitative reasoning (in the domain of getting things done, not in the domain of feeling good), or at least individuals who seem to have performed impressive feats I clearly care about.
Does "being happier" count as a feat that you care about?
The point, if you like, is that if you’re asked to explain some “woo” or “mysticism” or whatever, and you find yourself sounding like Morpheus sounds in the movie, you’re doing it wrong.
In my opinion this is true about most mentors in fiction. The mentoring we see on screen tends to be shitty mentoring, presumably because the writers or bosses believe that showing actual mentoring will lead to a less dramatic story.
So mentors in fiction should not be used as role models.
(Scott Alexander had a blog post where he mentioned that the thing that got him to stop believing in history cranks was reading many different history cranks who all had very convincing but mutually exclusive theories of history. Kind of like that - if you can play with many different ways of seeing the world and noticing how they all seem convincing, then they may all become less convincing as a result.)
You might be thinking of this post about learned epistemic helplessness: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/
There is this video: https://youtu.be/OfgVQKy0lIQ on why Asian parents don't say "I love you" to their kids, and it analyzes how the same word in different languages has different meaning.
As I see it, the video is compatible with my claim. Aini argues that "I love you" is a useful emotional signal in many situations, which I agree with in my OP.
Aini also argues around 19-21 minutes in for clearer communication. Her example is that saying "I love you" is in some situations clearer communication than giving someone a platter of fruit. I agree, an...
Thanks. I will get around to watching that video later.
If you tried to define humour, analyze jokes, divide them in categories, and extract the hormones triggered in response to some stimuli caused by a certain joke, I would say you did not (on a certain level) understand humour better than a child who made a good joke and enjoy a good laugh.
...Finale example I heard recently brought up again is Mary's room knowledge argument - no amount of classification of blue, understanding of light spectrum data etc replaces the experience of seeing blue. Likewise with l
"I loved her so much! How dare she dump me and start ignoring me! Now I will commit violence as revenge."
In this line of reasoning we have selfish desires masquerading as a virtue. The thing I label love is a complex of desire, attachment, and (limited) altruism. If I lump them all together as love, I can more easily convince myself that my desire and attachment are actually virtuous. Thus I can convince myself that my feeling of anger is righteous rather than petty. Thus I am more likely to act upon that anger and lash out with violence, on a small or lar...
That's funny. :) Thanks for the recommendation.
Could I please get you to elaborate on what you think gets lost when I replace love with more well-defined terms?
I can think of one thing. It is a kind of emotional attachment to an idea due for cultural/memetic reasons. People are brought up to think that love is something super-important and valuable, even if they do not understand what it is. In this way, the term love can have a strong emotional effect. It communicates less actual meaning than a more specific term, but it communicates more emotion.
I think I covered it in my OP when I conceded that the ...
Most people and situations don't need more clarity than that for human relationships to progress.
As far as I can tell, a lot of romantic relationships are highly dysfunctional, and it is widely agreed that good communication is vital in a relationship. Given that, I think a lot of people would benefit from thinking more clearly about what love is supposed to be and what they expect from it.
If you mean "most people and situations don't need more clarity than that for human relationships to procreate", then I agree. But I think we can aim higher than that.
Is the thing that you are talking about clearly distinct from this thing from my OP?
Love as giving: The drive to protect someone and do stuff for them. (Altruism is a variant of this.)
Most people aren't confused, because they're not trying to be clear and rational.
It is used to mean a very wide range of positive feelings, and should generally be taken as poetry rather than communication.
Are you saying that most people only use term love as "poetry" and never when they are trying to be clear? I think this is a strong over-generalization.
Of course people are not always trying to be clear, but the concept of love also appears often when people are doing their best to be clear. In my experience, people will often say things li...
In my experience, when I am tempted to fail with abandon, it has to do with resentment against some rule which I - in that moment at least - consider stifling and unfair. As you also cover in your article about "Should considered harmful".
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pFatcKW3JJhTSxqAF/p/HqQ3CpMqQyaaLLKew
I found the opening parts quite interesting.
I found your usage of the terms yin and yang confusing. Skimming the Wikipedia article about it did not help. In my opinion it would help if you would lead with a link to an article that explains yin and yang in the sense you use them and in a relatively concise way. (If such an article exists. If it does not, you might want to consider writing it.)
Likewise the term God. You seem to be using it to refer to something ineffable that you cannot describe adequately. It was not obvious to me that this concept was cohe...
I do not think I communicated my point properly. Let me try again:
Showing compassion is not free. It has a cost. To show compassion for someone you might need to take action to help them, or refrain from taking some action that might harm them.
How much effort do you spend on showing compassion for a human being?
How much effort do you spend on showing compassion for an earthworm?
How much effort do you spend on showing compassion for a plant?
How much effort do you spend on showing compassion for an NPC in a video game?
I don't know about you, but I am willing... (read more)