Tranquility Seems to Autovalidate; Hedonism and Buddhism

Wireheading (my rough definition for this post:) is when we make ourselves feel rewarded, apart from some kind of reality. The default means is through some kind of pleasure or sense of well-being.

In Wirehead Gods On Lotus Thrones, Scott Alexander points out that wireheading sounds repugnant:

Wireheading is commonly considered an ignoble end for the human race -- our posthuman descendants reduced to sitting in dingy rooms, taking never-ending hits of some ultra-super-drug, all their knowledge and power lying fallow except the tiny fraction necessary to retain delivery of the ultra-drug and pump nutrients into their veins.

but that something similar does not for him:

Imagine instead our posthuman descendants taking the form of Buddhas sitting on vast lotus thrones in a state of blissful tranquility. Their minds contain perfect awareness of everything that goes on in the Universe and the reasons why it happens, yet to each happening, from the fall of a sparrow to the self-immolation of a galaxy, they react only with acceptance and equanimity. Suffering and death long since having been optimized away, they have no moral obligation beyond sitting and reflecting on their own perfection, omnipotence, and omniscience -- at which they feel boundless joy.

I am pretty okay with this future. This okayness surprises me, because the lotus-god future seems a lot like the wirehead future. All you do is replace the dingy room with a lotus throne, and change your metaphor for their no-doubt indescribably intense feelings from "drug-addled pleasure" to "cosmic bliss". It seems more like a change in decoration than a change in substance. Should I worry that the valence of a future shifts from "heavily dystopian" to "heavily utopian" with a simple change in decoration?

I generally consider wireheading to be undesirable, but also I found a similar thing happening as Alexander did, when considering the two images of it. I found the lotus-god scenario basically acceptable, despite finding the dingy room scenario basically unacceptable. So I want to try to understand what is going on.

Maybe it's the imagery of the setting?

The future wireheading I imagine is clinical and efficient, each human (or post-human) slimmed down to the minimal size and complexity needed to experience maximal bliss, all lined up in a quiet hospital/factory/clean room, with robots maintaining them as necessary. Each (post-)human might be identical (because it turns out there's only one optimal way to solve for maximum bliss per resource expended). (In this scenario, we have no rational concept of what value ought to be anchoring us to a given axiology. So the concept drifts down economic gradients toward something that enables value to be mass-produced for as cheaply as possible. [Actually, maybe the cheapest value function to maximize is to say all matter/energy is of inestimable value and that nothing is needed to be done -- it's all conserved. Then, whatever was driven by value functions would cease. But maybe that idea should go in a different post.])

I think this (mass-production mini-hedonist factory) is more realistic than the dingy room idea. Aesthetically, I find this (the kind of hospital/factory/clean room setting) neutral compared to a dingy room (negative) or the more spiritual framing of Alexander's Buddhas (positive).

Having (from my perspective) neutralized the effect of the negative physical setting, do I still feel wireheading is repugnant?

Not as much. To be true to my thought as to what may actually happen in the future, I had to add the part about people being simplified and maybe made identical. That erases human individuality, and it may be the case that this turns full-fledged personal beings into mere blobs of conscious experience. That sounds objectionable. But what if I adjust for that as well? If I imagine that somehow they are persons, who have histories and whose proper names each have a unique denotation and set of connotations? (I'm not sure how they would acquire histories in the perfected future, but I can set that aside for the sake of a thought experiment.)

I still find wireheading to be undesirable in this version of the thought experiment, but I find that when I imagine wireheading to be just "real personal beings being in a state of blissful tranquility", as opposed to simply "bliss", it seems fine to me in the moment. I think the thing that makes a difference is that normally I think of pleasure in terms of "euphoria" or "being high". But "tranquility" gives it a different spin. I've experienced both intense euphoria and tranquility, and it's the tranquility that I find more trustworthy. As one might expect, the Buddha situation also seems fine when I imagine it.

I even feel like my MSLN-related arguments against things like wireheading and hedonism can't be worth worrying about. I intuitively know that they aren't true, just by imagining being in a state of blissful tranquility.

I am (like plenty of people, I guess) susceptible to imagining things. When I imagine blissful tranquility, I enter into that psychological state (enough to have an effect, although not fully) and find myself accepting things in general, including tranquility itself. This hedonic state is a feeling of ought-to-be-ness, and it persuasively validates itself -- or, has the psychological effect of validating itself in my experience -- exactly what you would expect from the feeling of ought-to-be-ness.

But rationally, should I ignore the possibility that when I'm blissed out, I may be preparing to harden myself against feeling real love, and against truly becoming kin to God? This would break God's heart -- can I comprehend his valuing of me and the pain I cause him when I'm on the drugs of imagining blissful tranquility? (And it threatens my destruction.)

When we perceive something that should be, it makes sense to feel the feeling of ought-to-be-ness. This is the natural function of the feeling. But if we are feeling the feeling all the time, it washes out our normative perception, our ability to sense what is acceptable through our direct perceptions of acceptability.

So perhaps the right way to think about the Buddha future is not to really understand what it would be like to experience, what the experience would be in itself. Or at least, not to let that be the definitive truth of it. There is reality outside the experience itself, and I want to know something about it, so I have to look at the Buddha future two ways: in itself (which says that on the hedonic levels of the hierarchy of betrayal it's 100% valid by definition), and abstractly, in its relationship with other truths (which says that it crowds out love / real valuing, a relationship with God and the truth, a kinship with the God who loved the world through its whole history, and a chance to live with God and the truth forever).

Beauty works very much the same way as tranquility. (Maybe beauty always brings tranquility, or they both always bring feelings of ought-to-be-ness.) The psychological state is nice, but can be a way we sell ourselves evil.

From an outsider's perspective, the overall appeal of Buddhism could often seem to be "feel tranquility no matter what reality is". But, to be accurate, I should note that the emphasis on psychological peace and beauty can be found in the Christian scriptures as well. Jesus is a beautiful person who says "My peace I give to you." But he also warns of hell and denounces evil. (Speaking from memory and not from having studied to address this topic,) Jesus is balanced somewhere between Buddhism (or hedonism) on one hand and something like perhaps the worst of anxious Christianity or materialism on the other. There is both "spirit" (experiential/hedonic ought-to-be-ness?) and "truth" (rational relations; matters of fact?) in God.

The Tails Come Apart on Trusting

Trust is receptivity to enhancement. So if we think that a thing or person, for instance God, is 100% reliable, doesn't that mean we trust that thing or person 100%?

It might sound like we would. But part of trusting something is being awake to it. That's part of receptivity to enhancement. To even consider something as being enhancement is part of what makes it enhancement. On a deeper level, we can't receive the gift of a person unless we value them. So we can't trust them if we don't value them. And we tend to value the things that are contested. So then maybe the tails come apart on trust. An obvious form of trust is to find something safe, but another is to be awake to it, to connect to it, and the two values may exclude each other to some extent if either is maximized. Thus the way to increase trust to the maximum in something (especially obvious with a person) is to not take it for granted, and if we take "not take for granted" literally, we would need to not be assured of it 100%.

People used to care more about the assurance that they were saved, and that God existed. There's an extent to which anxiety over these things inhibits trust in God. So assurance is a good thing -- up to a point. >90% or even >99% assurance may be good, but 100% assurance of the existence of God and of one's salvation are things that aren't so clearly good. Using numbers here is a little misleading (are all 99% assurances the same?). So maybe the real point is to not take God for granted, or our own salvation.

In times past, people were more certain that God existed, and less sure that they were saved, but now it is more true that we think that if God exists, we're definitely saved, but God may not exist. In either case, we are kept out of complacency, which is at least partially a good thing. I think that maybe it's okay to be 100% sure that God exists, as long as you are not 100% sure that you are saved, and that's preferable to me than the other way around.

As to belief in God, not being 100% sure of the existence of God can keep you awake to the truth. You keep asking "does the truth say that God exists?" If God is truth, then truth should say that God exists, so you should listen to truth, be open to it on a deeper level. So then it could be good to not be 100% sure that God exists, so that truth can tell you that he does.

Lack of 100% certainty isn't a good in itself, rather trust is. Insofar as lack of 100% certainty awakens you and teaches you to value, it is a good thing. Uncertainty of a certain kind or degree can cause you to trust less.

The MSLN position on assurance is that until we are completely done with sin, there is some chance that we can get to a state where we hold onto a sin forever, never letting God work it out of us. In this life, we never know if we've reached that state of being done with sin, where no new sins can come to light, and we can never be sure that we are done being tempted, even if we get to some state where it seems like we aren't being tempted anymore. But when we are done with sin, in heaven, then can we have 100% assurance? Maybe, but why? We would have God himself instead.

--

I can picture a lot of people living in innocence, rather than presumption, when they take God for granted. Maybe children or child-like people can be forgiven their taking God for granted in that way. But children grow up, and maybe we will all grow up, in this life or in the Millennium, and have to grapple with the fact that we have sins in us, ways in which we are incompatible with God, and as long as we do, there is some risk, small though it may be, that we will commit to those sins more than to him and become hardened.

Also, I can see that people might say "the way to not take God for granted is to be grateful for him and his gifts, rather than to doubt your own salvation". One aspect of trusting someone is listening to them, waiting to hear what they have to say, and valuing what they have already said, responding to it. It's possible to be very grateful to someone and not listen to them. In this case, trust is defective. A person who is uncertain (but not perniciously uncertain) of another person will listen to what they say and take them seriously, and thus trust them. The stance of listening to God, listening to hear if we need to let go of any more idols or sins, is similar to or exactly the same as (a certain kind of) doubting your own salvation. There's nothing wrong with gratitude (certainly it's more trusting than being positively ungrateful), but it doesn't solve the problem of not taking God for granted by itself.

Book Review: X-Risk by Thomas Moynihan

22 April 2021: see this addendum.

16 June 2022: this post contains a section about this post, with an update partially in favor of some criticized aspects of transhumanism.

See also this review's preview and postview.

I would characterize X-Risk, by Thomas Moynihan, as a kind of sermon exhorting people to take X-risk more seriously, perhaps becoming "longtermist" effective altruists. He "preaches" by talking about the history of ideas that led up to our realizing that (as it appears), we are completely responsible for maintaining all that is good, for even the possibility of having the perception of anything as good, having any kind of concept of goodness. Thus, we must do whatever is in our power to avoid X-risks. X-risks are "existential risks", which threaten the existence of human civilization or even the human species itself.

I am not competent to judge history writing (in terms of being able to be critical of his use of evidence). I did find the book to be fairly well-written. Moynihan obviously gets some enjoyment out of writing (for instance, his humorous section titles and the panache with which he says things like "not the sense of an ending, but the ending of sense").

As to the history, I did appreciate learning about concepts like plenitude, seeing the non-biblical but non-modern worldview that was replaced by modern science. Also it was interesting to see how far back people were seeing trends develop that we're still in the grips of. (For instance, seeing humans as parasites on their machines, and machines as parasites on us.) Things that a few people saw generations ago, but which generally were not discussed and were not decisively addressed, as though people just forgot about them in the course of living their lives.

I do agree with Moynihan that the future is something worth investing in, and I generally agree that avoiding various kinds of existential risks is a good thing. In order to explain why I give this book three stars instead of four, I mention that I disagree with Moynihan's worldview. I don't think that expansionary values are obviously better than those of rest, nor that humans (individually or collectively) are in any (implicit or explicit) sense obligated to try to live forever, unless there is something outside human judgment that compels us to keep living even if we don't feel like doing the work to make it happen. I do think that Moynihan's point of view does well as an atheistic rationale for motivating work -- at least for many atheists. But not everyone is an atheist.

If Moynihan's basic project is to motivate people to pursue a vision of superlative human well-being in the far future, requiring that they oppose X-risks, I think that human well-being is better described by (a certain kind of) theism, valuing quality of people more than quality of people's lives, and that theistic metaethics / motivational structure stands a chance of motivating the average person (and even many of the not-so-average people who are probably Moynihan's intended audience, or adjacent to it) to care about superlativeness, motivating action, while atheistic metaethics / motivational structure does not. Moynihan may wish to arouse a sense of value by describing some sort of superlative future we could someday bring about, and a sense of "iniquity" if we don't, but I find that I don't really care about what he says, and that I don't have to. But this is not as true if I am concerned what an active and worthy God thinks, or one who will respond negatively to me if I don't care.

I think Moynihan may hope for a future atheistic moral realism to present itself, but absent that hoped-for realism, what I see left is moral anti-realism that's vulnerable to us hacking our own biology to rewrite our moral intuitions to something cheap and convenient, so that we can maximize some variable we choose (likely for its maximizability), on the one hand; or, on the other, (a certain kind of) theistic realism which holds a higher view of human nature (higher than being wireheads, certainly) as being necessary for human survival on some level, and thus something that we must include in what we try to maximize. (I'm also aware of one attempted atheistic moral realism, that of Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, which (I think) if adopted implies that we should wirehead to produce the positive normative qualia she favors.)

Perhaps Moynihan hopes that the hoped-for atheistic moral realism never needs to be brought to light -- even if one doesn't exist, we can hope that there will be one, and the hope will get us to do whatever Moynihan thinks is good. But people might just say "Well, I want to do what I want to do, so let me know if there's ever a moral realism that actually constrains that". Certainly some people may say that theistic moral realism is tangible and present (if someone can offer one), and prefer that, and to the extent that that conflicts with Moynihan's axiology, then it might come to fruition in contradiction to him.

It occurs to me that Moynihan may not really care what the majority of people think, but only those who might form the elite that can do anything about X-risk. Perhaps most people will only be consumers in the future, patients but not agents. Will they still be voters? If they are disenfranchised, then there is some risk that the elite will lord it over the non-elite, a risk factor for the abuse or annihilation of the non-elite. The average person should have some power, and thus needs to understand why X-risk matters. Therefore it is best if we have an ideology that motivates the greatest number of people to avoid X-risk.

Thinking pragmatically, perhaps it is best to offer atheistic anti-X-risk ideologies to those atheists who can (or will only) be motivated by them, and theistic ideologies to those who can (or will only) be motivated by those. Perhaps there need to be ideologies based in each of the major religions.

For more detail on what I think about this book, see these notes below, which I took while reading. (They also get into my own intellectual project.)

--

X-Risk notes

[Quotes from Moynihan set off by --.]

p. 11 --And the more we accept responsibility for this truth, the more we are compelled to do what is prudent and righteous within the world of the present.--

A way I might put this is "good futurism makes for a good present". I agree broadly with Moynihan that if we are to have a future, it has to come from a better sense of history, of having a project as civilization.

[I would suggest the project of seeking kinship with God, being set apart to God (holiness). My idea of God being this.]

p. 22 --There is untold scope for self-improvement, self-exploration, and self-expression across such time frames, in ethics as much as politics, in the arts as much as in the sciences. Our current capacities to do good, to pursue justice, to comprehend nature, and to produce beauty may be just a vanishing fraction of our full potential.--

Moynihan is painting a picture of high expected value, if we should manage to not kill ourselves off. In what way could we really have "untold scope for self-improvement, self-exploration, and self-expression, across such time frames, in ethics as much as politics, in the arts as much as in the sciences."? I can see that we could pile up works of art and scientific discoveries, but why would we care? And ethics and politics are both things that it seems like you would just want to get right, from which point they could only get worse, like how you cease to be able to climb higher than the peak of a mountain, and can only go down if you want to change your location.

Could we care about piles and piles of art and science? Maybe if we modified ourselves to care. At some point, there's something silly about that. We are trying to create meaning (one meaning of "meaning", importance to us) apart from meaning (the other meaning of "meaning", communication from the ultimate). We avoid reality (that communication) in favor of wealth. Moynihan talks about our great responsibility. But the future he looks forward to is one where most or all people would lose touch with reality, and instead live in dream worlds engineered to be superlative by the standards humans naturally fall for. If there is a God, and that is a real possibility, we should be concerned about hearing from him (God). He is the being in which ultimate reality has its concrete ontological instantiation. Therefore a vision of human-engineered superlativeness is risky, if we do not also listen for God.

[Re: silly self-modification. Progress Quest is a game where you leave your computer running and your character keeps on leveling up without you doing anything. Before Progress Quest, it used to be that playing, putting in attention, got you a level up. And a level up felt like an accomplishment. So surely, leveling up is what makes the game good? Similarly, getting cool items that make you more effective makes a game good. So Progress Quest just gives you the cool items and levels, more and more. So on a certain level, we are playing Progress Quest with ourselves when we engineer ourselves to like more and more art and science and whatever, the things which are civilization will provide in abundance. We choose to play an easy game, setting ourselves up to be rewarded without having to go through the inner motions that accompany accomplishment, which are, to recognize reality and rise up to meet it. The engineers and the engineered alike play an easy game in their respective pursuits. The inner motions are a personal reality. The engineers who make people such that they fit into a world of easy rewards knowingly avoid the personal reality, even if the engineered don't know what they're missing. One way around this, if we absolutely have to engineer reality, is to engineer a reality of frightfulness and the desert experience for people to go through, not knowing it's only a simulation -- but we can make it a different kind of frightful and a different kind of dry, so that it does not have the evil consequences that life can have on people as personal beings, in our world where we can have a kind of raw, chaotic and even evil frightfulness and dryness.]

10 July 2021: Why would giving people frightful and dry experiences connect them with meaning, or reality? I think the MSLN answer is that God is present in all conscious experience, and can speak to us through all conscious experience, but it is possible that his register of communication is limited by the kind of experiences we actually have. From another angle, our spiritual development is incomplete if we do not learn to trust. We can't come to trust fully if we do not learn to trust (to the extent that is possible) frightening or dry experiences. While God can always cause us to experience these things after this liife, if we grow to love pleasure or other psychological wealth too much in this one, we may close ourselves off to the experience of dryness or fear or pain or whatever, and may find it easier to close down on idols which get between us and really loving God. Some of us may choose those idols rather than God and reject God permanently. Ease can be like plaque that eventually becomes calculus on teeth. Without the calculus, we can hear God. As above, not all frightfulness or dryness (or pain, etc.) leads to trusting on a deep level. So there may be some room to improve on the brutal, wild status quo.

p. 43 --This brings us neatly to the core claim of this book: that the discovery of human extinction may well prove to have been the very centrepiece of that unfolding and unfinished drama that we call modernity. Because, in discovering our own extinction, we realised that we must think ever better because, should we not, then we may never think again.--

Moynihan may get into this later (a page later, he mentions a future chapter on "extinction is the inevitable culmination of technological modernity"), but it occurs to me to point out that the insecurity that makes humans think harder makes them think hard enough to come up with anthropogenic X-risks. [When we think harder, for instance come up with basic research, we feed uncontrolled or insufficiently-controlled competitive dynamics which are why we have anthropogenic X-risks. You have to have all of technology or none of it, more or less.]

And anthropogenic X-risks are the most urgent. We could have had a history where we solved our social problems, and thus didn't have Molochian dynamics pushing us. (Apparently Moloch was not as strong in the pre-Enlightenment days, since we didn't have to think as hard, lulled by theistic and perennialistic assumptions.) At some point in the future, we could have devised the technology to ward off asteroids or survive supervolcanoes.

Which would be better, to spend 10,000 years overcoming Moloch through cultural change, and then turning our attention toward asteroids and the like, or our current course, where we figure out technology without adjusting human nature first? A lot depends on how much we really could accomplish through culture alone in adjusting human nature, and how strong culture can be in the face of warfare. [Warfare being able to conquer "nicer" civilizations, though they are superior in the sense of being more humane to themselves. So conquering cultures supplant humane ones, at least in principle.] Culture is enough of what makes a person who they are that it seems like maybe culture could create a society immune-enough from Moloch.

We could say that the Enlightenment was the moment when humanity really started going crazy with fear, and it seemed like we might drive ourselves to death in our unstable state. Whether this craziness was a necessary part of our development (the view that culture couldn't have tamed Moloch) or unnecessary, is an empirical question that we may not be able to answer. But if in some unexpected way, we find a way to make culture stronger than technology, we could prove that Moloch can be tamed by culture. And if we find a way to believe in God, we see that the Enlightenment was the moment where we ran away from our father, taking our inheritance with us, out on our own in the world, trying to make it without him. [Is it really a mark of maturity to reject your parents? Maybe we should see Enlightenment maturity as a somewhat sad thing. Even if atheism is correct, we have to live in the world we live in, and while the Enlightenment sense of maturity has its good points, and, on atheism, may simply be the truth, something that's always valuable, there's something sad about us, striving so hard to live.]

[Maybe a more defensible way to try to argue this point would be to say that theistic and perennialistic assumptions, or ones which might tend to go with them -- the overall sense that things work out in the end, the sense that things do not change, the sense that there is justice inherent in the universe and so we couldn't (as much) imagine abusing people and being abused, the sense that there really is a way things should be which we can expect of humans -- were things that we increasingly lost in the modern era. As we lost our old beliefs (our relationship with God), we entered a precarious world, where we used our freedom to try to maximize our wealth and power, and also increased our anxiety, a process (the maximizing and increasing) that is out of our control. The world always had some element of the "there is no God -- rejoice in your freedom (to do good and bad), and be afraid (of bad people or blind circumstance)", but it had the theistic and perennialistic (and other similar, I suppose) things as somewhat of a counterweight.]

pp. 94 - 95 --A key driver behind the philosophy of the Enlightenment was a growing realisation that moral values are questions of self-legislation. That is, we do not inherit them unquestioningly from divine fiat or the state of nature. We render them through our own -- fallible and revisable -- search for what is right. What, after all, is any 'decree' that is not the result of our own deliberation, except for an imposition of arbitrary -- and thus immoral -- force? The key idea of the Enlightenment was this: only that which has been given a justifying reason is to be considered as legitimate -- in belief as in action, in epistemology as in ethics, in science as in politics.

This master idea of the Age of Reason reached its culmination in Kant's mature philosophy of the 1780s and 1790s, where Kant realized that values are maxims by which we elect to bind ourselves and are, accordingly, always dependent upon this ongoing election. Such values are not part of the furniture of the natural world -- they do not exist apart from our active upholding and championing of them. This entails that our values are entirely our own responsibility, and that we are accountable for everything we care about and cherish.--

But why should anyone care about the above paragraph enough to inconvenience themselves? Our culture has a kind of nihilist strain to it. Is that less valid than Moynihan's urgings that we be responsible? It's the product of his reason, the way he deliberates -- he feels a certain way and therefore acts on it. Maybe he will make a case for moral realism in this book (such as Rawlette's). But if he doesn't, and to the extent that that's a controversial topic, people will take the self-legislating option to be anti-realists, and then, if they do not happen to feel like saving the world, they won't.

Moynihan strikes me as being like a preacher. He uses turns of phrase (like his "instead of the sense of an ending, the ending of sense" device) like a preacher would. Moral anti-realism breeds preaching. The preacher has to use the force of rhetoric to move his or her audience, to create the inner urges that cause them to have the same moral values as the preacher. If not, something terrible will happen -- from the preacher's perspective.

[Part of the notes starting here seemed about equally relevant to Rawlette's project, so I split them off for easier linking. See here.]

--

It's possible to want humans to care about getting whatever it is they care about. But, do the things we care about really matter? Is it that when we care, we are of the opinion that something really matters? I think so. But then, does it really matter, in fact? Is there any way a thing can inherently matter, in an absolute way, apart from human judgment?

--

"Teaching children to care" [I have a book by that title, by Ruth Sidney Charney, which I intend to read someday] -- instilling reason in people who might not naturally have it -- are these educative acts justifiable? If we know the value of reason, then they may be. If by reason we see that reason is valid and implies certain things, we can teach it and its deliverances to those who are irrational or nihilistic, using means other than reason (since irrational and nihilistic people aren't interested in reason). Unfortunately, this sounds like it is justified or even obligatory to use relatively impolite means of inculcating reason and caring, by contrast with the relative politeness of reason. So there is additional nuance needed, to not traumatize people as we teach them apart from reason.

--

Plenitude is a potestas clavium [term taken from Lev Shestov's Potestas Clavium], [in the limited sense of] a reason which is taken to save. If it is a comforting illusion, then it does so based on the prestige of reason. People who trust in reason, at least to some extent, are the ones who need comforting reasons, as opposed to just not caring about, for instance, the cold sterility of space and the utter contingency of human evolution and culture.

--

[A gap of a month or two between writing the above and what follows.]

p. 349

[Whether he intends to or not,] Moynihan seems to offer a constitution for culture [to prevent cultural drift as X-risk], such that the thing that we most know to be true morally is to preserve moral agents, and if we follow this, we know what to do for the rest of our existence. (my addition:) This is the thing that we can all agree on as right, and so it may not be necessary to figure out something like moral realism vs. anti-realism. As long as there's the possibility of there being some kind of value, which we suppose can only be within the minds of humans or other sentient beings, then to preserve those minds would seem to be worth perhaps full commitment, something we could know firmly, producing an outpouring of effort.

I think maybe this meta-morality axiology ("moral agent survival necessary, all else serving this") is a "One True Axiology", a moral realism, although one that is somewhat open-ended. It would seem to be the default choice for atheists in selecting a constitution for human society.

["One True Axiology" comes from Lukas Gloor's sequence on moral anti-realism.]

But if value is only in our minds, is it real? Does value itself need to be treated with great reverence? Or could value be like a pile of old one dollar bills? -- trash, basically. What grounds value itself? That is, the value of the perception of value in human minds. Maybe, as anti-realists, we don't care about such things, and just want our desires fulfilled, with respect to value itself.

Is there a good reason for an atheist to not be a nihilist? Atheists might personally prefer not to be, but is that supported by reason? If not, then the meta-morality moral realism has an Achilles' heel.

[Meta-morality moral realism has its greatest force given an atheistic background. Theism can play the role of perennialism in blunting the meta-moral responsibility: keeping alive some kind of moral agents so that those agents can figure out what morality is someday. Assuming that atheism becomes an intellectual monoculture, it could produce both responsibility, like Moynihan's, among those who care, and nihilism, among those who don't care. Some people feel like caring no matter what, some people don't feel like caring, no matter what you try to get them to believe, but there are a lot of people in the middle, for whom a good moral realism might shift their perspective and make them care more. And given that (perhaps through genetic engineering) we will have the ability to choose how much people care, we will have to ask "should we care?" If there isn't really a solid reason why we should care, why, for instance, even the idea of value should matter, or the vocation of metamorality (keeping burning the torch of someday figuring out what morality really is) should matter, then what will we decide? And we may have the question come up for our culture as a whole over and over, once every few generations.]

[I suppose a caring atheist could engineer everyone to care meta-morally, because it fits the atheist's preferences. Note that this closes off one of the possible answers that a moral agent could come up to define what morality is -- that morality doesn't matter, or that it is moral to leave everyone to their own judgments about morality, even if that allows them to be nihilistic with respect to survival. By engineering desirable outcomes, you run the risk of closing yourself off to reality. Maybe the moral intuition to just let things happen and not control things, or to trust the universe, or even the lack of moral intuition, are all signals from some deeper reality. Is there a good reason why the urgent responsibility to preserve meta-moral ability is better than those? It seems like we need the fruits of meta-morality to really justify it. And who knows what morality is other than people more or less as they are now, with their various more or less natural moral intuitions? Similarly, a caring atheist with the ability to engineer people to care may feel like lopping off inconvenient aspects of human cognition while they're at it, like the capacity to believe in God. But maybe we are like antennae for hearing from God -- at least, many of us are.]

[Maybe more realistic (or graspable) by someone like me or Moynihan, is the more immediate situation where persuasion is not yet dominated by bioengineering, and people need to be roused not from stark, pure nihilism, but from a kind of low-key mix of nihilism and caring about what is present to them (rather than distant or future people), which seems like a plausible description of most well-adjusted people in our culture, both atheists and theists. How do you rouse those people to go beyond what is required into what would seem to them to be supererogatory before they grasp its necessity? That seemingly supererogatory thing being to care about X-risk.]

Another Achilles' heel would be, why do we have to care about reason? If we can arbitrarily disregard reason, then we can have whatever culture we want, for good or ill [this freedom allowing for cultural drift as X-risk]. I suppose any ideology is vulnerable to this. Is there a reason within atheistic meta-morality moral realism to compel people to be rational? [Maybe the struggle to survive does. But there are utopian reasons for us to forget that struggle.]

In MSLN, rationality is enforced by, if you're not looking for the truth, you might miss God, and if you throw away truth because you want to, you might be closing yourself off to God's voice, in danger of hardening and losing your personal salvation. It appears from the Bible that there is a punishment you will experience if by your self-closing to reality, you fail to fully grow up in God. So it is instrumentally rational for individual humans to be epistemically rational and thus more-expansively-instrumentally rational / altruistic. It's still possible to ignore this rationality-enforcement, but I think the warning reaches further into the pool of people who might need to hear it.

[MSLN is a set of natural theological arguments that I begin to propose. It has implications for motivation and meaning. Another, perhaps better, way to explain MSLN's position on reason is to say "If you ignore reason, you might not find God. If you have found God, you may need reason to be in tune with him." But I would add that there are practical limits on a person's ability to pursue reason, and that it is possible that in the search for more knowledge, the further application of reason, you neglect seeking to love and trust God, or fall into or fail to address some kind of already-known sin. Nevertheless, having a disposition that disregards reason (whatever your ability to exercise reason is) is dangerous, both for the non-believer and the believer.]

[People are rational in the sense of common sense, without help, but to say "I'm going to apply common sense consistently and rigorously" (which might be just what reason is) is something that is hard to do and generally not done, nor that all aspire to.]

--

Also, I could see a civilization deciding that value was very important, but that the finitude of civilization was very important, of inestimable value, of greater value than the continuance of it. (Why not locate value outside human psychology and thus its continuance?) This might be the [or a] anti-natalist way to counter the meta-morality moral realism.

--

Having a moral philosophy that is all about the survival of moral agents through time could lend itself to a Temporal Repugnant Conclusion: for every good civilization there is a civilization barely worth instantiating which lasts longer. [Maybe a better point to make would be that there's at least theoretically a tradeoff between the longevity of a civilization and its quality. So if we think "avoid X-risk at all costs" we might have to sacrifice something -- like conflict or struggle (to protect us from Moloch), or perhaps in some resource-saving way (austerity to save resources; or simplifying humans so that they are happy with less, at the expense of their capabilities).]

--

pp. 380 - 382

This section mentions that love and altruism come from nature, but they just blindly evolved. Why should we think that love and altruism are all that great? Why are they more meaningful than the tendency of water to drip from trees, or for species to go extinct? Why not say that extinction and fluid dynamics are of inestimable worth? Or say that nothing is of inestimable worth except what we feel like saying it is? [And so working hard to protect civilization isn't worth it if we don't feel like it's worth it.]

The MSLN answer is to say that worth itself (legitimacy) is what everything is made out of, and it is a person, about whom we can know some things. The things that truly would be of worth to it, are, and they are necessarily -- worth itself declares them worthy.

pp. 414 - 416

This section talks about (I think) turning humans into art- and game- -making and -consuming machines. In my personal life, I have been fortunate (or not) enough to have a lot of free time, and I have had my fill of art and games. I have been fortunate (or not) enough to be able to make art and games, and I have also had my fill of doing that. I need to pass time, and so I keep doing things. But I don't have a deep need to do things, I think from having had my fill. When I was younger, I could get into these things, but now I'm older. I think this might be considered maturity (although I don't think of it as true maturity). Why isn't this [having had my fill] maturity just as good as the maturity of "tiling the universe" with art and games, making super sure that we can do this for the maximum amount of time?

[On further reflection, I would say "I try to find, for instance, music, with which I might form some kind of connection and I begin to succeed sometimes, so maybe I haven't had my fill. But compared to my younger self, and on a deeper level, I have."]

Maybe in some objective sense, more is better, like in Total Utilitarianism. There's a total utilitarianism of artworks. But who really cares?

We might be made to care, for objective reasons (X artworks are good; the creative processes of making X artworks are good; so 10^100 artworks must be so much better), but why? And if we do make people into the kind of people who care about that thing our society was engineered to bring about, that's like making a video game where if you click "OK" on the dialogue box on the opening screen you win and get 148,297,237,923 points. We would have engineered ourselves to be easily pleased. We could have gotten that result cheaply, with some simple wireheading, without bothering with art. And, Repugnant Conclusion-fashion, we could generate even more "win states" if we go with the cheap version, even more (apparent) moral value.

[Once we start to engineer things (including humans), if we get good enough, we might as well wirehead, unless there's some reason why we wouldn't. We can engineer the definition of "win state", make anything seem like a win to humans that we want. Moynihan might say that the point of continuing civilization is so that someday we can figure out how values really work, and thus come up with that reason. As though there's something outside human engineering that ought to constrain human engineering. Is there an atheistic reason that's solid enough to prevent wireheading? Rawlette's moral realism isn't quite. (Maximizing qualia of "ought-to-be-ness" / minimizing qualia of "ought-not-to-be-ness" seems like something wireheading could accomplish, and would accomplish more cheaply even than an experience machine.)]

[Maybe another way to put all this is: 1. Is value human-judgment-dependent? 1. a. If yes, then we can engineer value itself and if we are trying to maximize some variable, we should define value so that it can be instantiated as cheaply and numerously as possible. 2. Is value human-judgment-independent? a. We need some kind of moral realism. Does Rawlette's work? No, it's as vulnerable to wireheading (generating positive normative qualia is potentially very cheap, and she recommends simple aggregation of value). b. Is there another atheistic moral realism that can avoid wireheading? c. Should we bite the bullet and wirehead? d. If neither b. or c. work, are we left with theistic moral realism?]

["Human-judgment-dependent" comes from Rawlette's "judgment-dependent". The impression I got from her book is that there is a clear distinction between moral realism and moral anti-realism. For her, moral realism is not judgment dependent, while moral anti-realism is. But then I read Gloor's sequence on moral anti-realism (as much as has been written as of end of 2020), and now I am not so sure there is a clear distinction, at least that Gloor's version isn't clearly distinct from realism. Maybe it's anti-realist to not be clearly anti-realist. Nevertheless, the question remains, in terms of the risk of wireheading, is Gloor's anti-realism effectively human-judgment-dependent or not? Can a person hack the outputs of "what is moral?" (as processed by his kind of anti-realism) by changing human biology? And not just in the sense that if all thinkers recognize X as valuable, X is effectively valuable, but in the sense of "what is moral?" in some sense ought to be tied to human judgments, and those judgments can then be bioengineered?]

[Biocultural change takes time. By leaving the meta-moral process running longer, it's more vulnerable to drift or engineering. So it might be good to bring it to a close sooner rather than later, choose a motivational structure / find the true moral realism.]

We might want some analogue to MSLN's population ethics (the rest view), for the value of artworks.

One thing that we lose out on with an easier and nicer, even if creative [make lots of games and art] rather than narcotic [wireheading], future, is the capabilities of human beings, the moral capabilities. Humans are currently capable of undergoing childbirth to bring humans into the world, going mad alone for the sake of the truth or art, of living lives of stress and fear to resist corrupted social orders, or of willingly suffering, experiencing psychological defeat, and dying, for the sake of other people. The altruism of the cleaned-up future, whether the other for which we live altruistically is human, intellectual, or aesthetic, is pale in comparison to these things.

At the end of the movie, you can ask "was it a happy ending because the heroine got what she wanted, or because she was good, herself?" That's the question I asked myself after watching the great X-risk movie Testament, from 1983. I thought the movie had a happy ending [in a sense] in that the protagonist acquitted herself well, although by conventional standards suffering through a hopeless situation (humanity dying out from fallout after a nuclear war). [This "acquitting ourselves well" requires that we really be put to the test. Utopia tends to prevent this.] We may be unable to resist lives of ease and pleasantness, but at least we could recognize that we have lost what was truly greatest in humanity, in our idyllic future.

It's true that the cruelty and brutality of the cross is something that we shy away from, and to an extent, rightly so. But I think we could have a society that is in some sense "millennial", if not heavenly, where people themselves genuinely learn to value what is good, learning lessons that are bitter, but only bitter if necessary for learning, and for which they get adequate support. (This world may be what is depicted in the second part of "The Future of Beauty".)

[This millennial world one in which people themselves are brought up to some kind of standard, where value resides in people themselves.]

["Millennial" comes from the Millennium in Christian eschatology, a time where people are taught morally / spiritually so that they can be fit for heaven.]

[I think Moynihan might reply to this whole section on art and game making / consuming, something like: "If you find yourself teleported in time to the far future where everything is art and games, you certainly don't have to participate", although he could take what he said on p. 416 as the opposite of that:

--Instead of creating 'dead semblances of what has passed away' or 'simulations' of the currently flawed universe, art could be the genuine restitution of all the wasted opportunities that past extinctions and deaths represent. In this, intelligence will finally have justified its existence -- and thus fulfilled its vocation -- by reversing and recompensing all the countless silent sufferings and unjust extinctions that provided its past and prologue. To achieve this future is to justify its past. The implication here is that the only way to fully escape the iniquity of extinction, in this irrational universe, is for reason to rectify all the past perishings that made us possible.--

I would have to make art whether I wanted to or not, to help rectify past perishings. Since this is taken to be a moral imperative, how strictly would it be enforced? And if it is the moral imperative (if it is the deliverance of the conclusion of the meta-morality process), then how can we allow people to rebel against it, by not being wholly adapted to bringing it about? How can we be allowed to see things any other way? Moral realisms always threaten a certain amount of human freedom, but I personally would not want my freedom taken away for the sake of art and games.]

[I used to hang out with Nietzsche fans, and have read a few of his books. The Übermensch teaching I found to be kind of odd. Supposedly, once God has died, we create our own values. I've tried to think what that would mean, and would guess that values are simply opinions that X is good, maybe ones that we share with other people. So, to create our own values, we... plug in different things for X? That doesn't sound markedly better than herd morality to me. Or at least, not as revolutionary, or universe-expanding. Maybe not even new at all -- each of us already selects different things to consider good, selections which we don't share with people around us -- perhaps ones which no one else has ever valued before. So we are already übermenschen? (Maybe I don't understand Nietzsche on this point.) I think of this when I read transhumanist or posthumanist superlatives about the great things we can engineer for ourselves in the future. Art is basically just art, games are basically just games, sex is basically just sex, the feeling of well-being is basically just the feeling of well-being. You can make it more refined, but not make something really new. Experience with experience leads to diminishing returns on all experience seeming that amazing. (And if my jaded view means I need to be re-engineered, then we might as well re-engineer people to appreciate the cheapest good-feeling lives possible, and we would have closed off some important meta-moral possibilities by no longer paying attention to whatever in me seemed to need something better than super-art, super-games, and super-sex in order to not be jaded.) I guess my feeling is, why should I invest in Moynihan's cause, running so hard and putting my shoulder to the plow, if the outcome is not that much better than what we have now? It seems nice for people to keep living into the far future, but I'm not that inspired, and lack of political will is what happens when everyone thinks something (that's really important) is nice, but don't find themselves inspired to do anything for its sake.]

[One Nietzsche teaching I took to a lot more was the one about (paraphrase) one moment of true reality and joy making the rest of life, no matter how miserable, worth living. I think for some people, when stressed by terrible experiences, this is tested, and the sources of joy and reality come out even stronger. Life is affirmed even more. But for other people, when the terrible times come, they come to hate stress so much that they only want things to be happy, safe, and fun. And this comes at the risk of them perhaps hating life, or turning away from reality. But I'm not sure I can blame someone for being traumatized by life, thus turning away from it; instead of being challenged by it, thus drawn to trust it. I'm not sure what the proper treatment is for that condition (something favoring both health and strength, both mental and spiritual). But maybe someday I will know better what to prescribe for it.]

--

p. 424

--Keeping history going means acknowledging our ability, and thus our duty, to learn from our mistakes. It means acknowledging our obligation to continue and to survive, to avoid the precipice of X-risk, in order to find out where we might be taking ourselves. This remains our duty even when the world of tomorrow appears a progressively worse place; it remains regardless of immediate disillusionment, weariness, or resignation, because, as long as ethical beings are still around, there is at least potential for the world to become astronomically better.--

If we keep going in our world-birthing process despite how bad things may seem in the short term ["short term" relatively speaking -- a short term that could consume a whole human lifetime], we may have to suffer and die for what we believe in. Altruism can be bitter. There's the story of the mugger who offers a nonzero chance of giving some arbitrarily astronomical reward to someone in exchange for a measly $100. The mugger could have offered an even higher reward to someone in exchange for them experiencing a lifetime of loneliness, suffering, and madness. A rational altruist would have to take the offer, in both cases, because they knew if they won (and the expected value would justify this rationally), they would distribute the reward to benefit all living beings. There's a kind of self-giving, to reason and to morality, as we must reach for what's best, a kind of excellence here, which is both horrifying and transcendent of all that is cheap. But it seems like altruists (or at least, the ones that would follow Moynihan's basic path) are trying to make a world that can't elicit that anymore. They seem to be trying to end their own kind, by fixing the world.

Book Review Notes: The Feeling of Value, pass 1

See also the main review for The Feeling of Value.

Here are the notes on my first pass reading The Feeling of Value. I have added comments in blockquotes. Quotes of Rawlette in my notes are set off by --'s.

Feeling of Value notes, pp. 1 - 145

These were written in two files.

Chapter 1

pp. 15 - 16

The high school boy (Hare's example) is told that you can still care about things that have no intrinsic meaning/"mattering". Basically, you can say with your body, subconscious, self, you can trust as though, things matter. But verbally, they don't. Is reality something that is found in words, or do words describe reality, point to it? If the latter, then what Hare and the high school boy do by "having concern for what doesn't matter" is actually relating to things that do matter, and they're only speaking as though they don't. And the things that do matter raise the question "why do these things matter? What is mattering?" which they may or may not recognize, either verbally or really. If they spoke in accordance with what they lived, then it might open up the lived experience of wonder, fear, curiosity, obligation, toward finding out why things matter, whether they matter independent of each observer, and if so, how that would work.

16 - 18

If the validity of values is judged from the perspective of your own values, and nothing else, then is it ever meaningful to say that you should change them? If not, then is it ever valid to try to change other people's values? Maybe there's some range in which people's values can be changed more in line with themselves (I desire to be a better chef, which requires me to value being careful, which I didn't before). So the whole valueset can be furthered. But it seems like people want to change other people's values -- are we sure that such people always change other people's values in ways that are actually in line with those other people's deepest values?

Changing people's values can be depicted, in an extreme way, by the Ministry of Love in 1984, which beats people to the point that they love what they used to hate (and which the reader will tend to feel was evil). Milder "ministries of love" might involve shaming, isolating, and humiliation rather than physical abuse. These measures are needed, perhaps, because people are not being changed in line with their existing values. And they are justified, if they are, because the values being inculcated are better than the ones they have. But who's to say that one person's values are better than another's? If they're not really better than another's, then isn't value changing just a power-play, and isn't morality contingent on who has the power to force other people to change their minds?

Perhaps this does not concern people as much as it could because they spend most of their time around people like them, who reinforce their values. So they feel like they're safe, nobody will come after them to force them to change their values arbitrarily. Or, it does not concern most people as much as it could because most people are part of the mainstream, and being in the value-majority, they take their security for granted. And they take their own values for granted.

A test: how do you behave when you're in power? When your views are popular?

pp. 19 - 22

The previous section (ministries of love, justification for changing other's values) connects to Rawlette's perspectival bias discussion. Perspectival bias can be seen as something which ought to change about people's values.

-- Sidebar: "Disvalue found in inability to will or act, painful or not. Likewise in confusion, painful or not." --

p. 24

Rawlette argues that if I see my own pleasure as having value, I will believe that since other people's pleasure is like my own, it also has value. It's possible to seek your own pleasure and enjoy it without valuing it. Buber (in Good and Evil) somewhat neatly redefines and boils down evil to "indecision" and good to "deciding with your whole soul". So with a similar style, one could say "evil is to hunger for what you do not value" or to "not value what you hunger for". Now we wonder "are hungers automatically to be regarded as indicating value?" We could ask "which world is real, the one of hungers, or the one of Forms, or of God (or something else in that vein)?" "Reality" in this case meaning "the one in which real value can be found, the one whose apparent features can be trusted enough such that a hunger there calls for the valuing of the thing hungered for.

--

p. 25

Rawlette contrasts the situation of the "dogmatic" realist and that of the realist who reflects on reasons for whether their motivations reflect judgment-independent value. The dogmatic person, who accepts the strength of their motivations, or the authority of a third party, may be even more perspectivally biased due to their realism.

It's costly to think reflectively about your biases -- a cost which may or may not be affordable. Also, it's possible that intuition grants us true knowledge, in addition to reason. This might appear in our motivations.

It's possible that the process of evaluating evidence for our own compliance with judgment-independent value is flawed (maybe we have bad information, like perhaps we think that this world is real when it's not), and we are better off relying on some kind of third party, or our own motivations.

--

pp. 25 - 26

If we attend to our own feelings, and are forced to see them as having value, and are then forced to see all people's feelings as having value, we lose freedom. On some level we still have discretion, but on a deeper, simpler/broader level, we don't. Freedom on that deeper, simpler/broader level is a good in itself. The danger of some kind of "totality"?

I got the word "totality" from Levinas, but I use it "in ignorance of him". I think the word I use has some connection to his use in Totality and Infinity. It may also connect to Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. (I finished but did not read Totality and Infinity very successfully, and only began One-Dimensional Man, but I have a sense that these are two fruitful connections to explore.) I would say for me, "totality" can mean "everyone conforms to the same unbroken thought pattern and culture, and everyone is made to conform" -- very dangerous if this is not sufficiently good, and dangerous to the individual who lives for a different, perhaps more correct, good. Ethics (the call of the Other?) can turn into totality. Whether Levinas falls into that trap, I can't say, but if he doesn't, he may provide some needed nuance to supplement Rawlette.

Rawlette mentions that "all of us at least have reason to want others to treat our interests as equal to theirs". But some people don't, are willing to subordinate their interests to others. Is Rawlette saying they "ought" to demand equality? If so, then what grounds this "ought"?

----- Sidebar: Addicted to rationality --> a slave to rationality --> addicted/slave to morality. Rationality and morality are psychological tendencies that have "gravity", like lust or hate (or a kind of love). They are impersonal. But God is a person, who is related to through "grace". You can love God and God can be your father, rather than your slave-master.

"Gravity" and "grace" taken fairly faithfully from Simone Weil.

It's possible to relate to morality (be the friend of it, want what it wants and thus behave according to its pattern -- maybe relate to it "Spiritually"<as in "Spiritual Reality">). But if you don't already want what morality wants, why would you start, unless it was out of compulsion?

"Spiritual Reality" from this blog post.

What kind of compulsion is legitimate? We are compelled by physical hungers (sometimes with unfortunate results).

If you relate to morality, is it then possible to be called to it more deeply in a way that morality is not a slave-master?

A father's authority is different than a tyrant's or a law code's.

-----

Chapter 2

pp. 28 - 33

Is it possible to completely escape intuitionism? In other words, Rawlette wants us to be able to use reason to sort through moral questions. Should we? Isn't that an intuition? Yudkowsky may be grounding his belief-set on "what doesn't get us physically killed". Those who don't die exist to judge things morally. But should they? Or is there an intuition in that case as well?

I would guess that characterizing Yudkowsky's epistemology as "believing what doesn't get us physically killed" is at least somewhat simplistic, but here's the passage (from his "The Simple Truth") that I was thinking of:

Inspector Darwin looks at the two arguers, both apparently unwilling to give up their positions. "Listen," Darwin says, more kindly now, "I have a simple notion for resolving your dispute. You say," says Darwin, pointing to Mark, "that people's beliefs alter their personal realities. And you fervently believe," his finger swivels to point at Autrey, "that Mark's beliefs can't alter reality. So let Mark believe really hard that he can fly, and then step off a cliff. Mark shall see himself fly away like a bird, and Autrey shall see him plummet down and go splat, and you shall both be happy."

We all pause, considering this.

"It sounds reasonable . . ." Mark says finally.

"There's a cliff right there," observes Inspector Darwin.

Autrey is wearing a look of intense concentration. Finally he shouts: "Wait! If that were true, we would all have long since departed into our own private universes, in which case the other people here are only figments of your imagination -- there's no point in trying to prove anything to us--"

A long dwindling scream comes from the nearby cliff, followed by a dull and lonely splat. Inspector Darwin flips his clipboard to the page that shows the current gene pool and pencils in a slightly lower frequency for Mark's alleles.

--

One thing to worry about: how can there be real morality if people disagree on what is moral?

--

p. 34

"no justificatory work" -- but maybe self-evidence could be doing partial justificatory work? An election depends on the weighing of multiple opinions, but each opinion is at least a little valid in itself.

--

A way to get rid of defeaters to my moral intuitions: kill everyone else -- no more opinions left standing. However, I might argue with myself.

Maybe killing all other people is highly unlikely. But withdrawing, on some level, from everyone else (living, on a deeper level, as though no one else exists), seems to be common.

--

p. 43

Mention is made that realism in math and non-moral philosophy is difficult to establish for analogous reasons to moral realism. Does this mean that there might be some analogous argument to Rawlette's "feeling of value" to apply to those domains?

--

p. 46

An explanation of why ethics might care about moral facts (why the existence of ethics would call for caring about moral facts) is that ethics says "X is valuable". In one ethical view, X = Y, in another, X = Z. If Y and Z conflict, then we might want to know which is more valuable, which means we have to judge between ethical views.

---

p. 54

----- Sidebar: A question to ask of ethicists (e.g. Rawlette): is there such a thing as judgment-independent facts about morality? Is it possible that there is not, though it would be desirable to us that there are? Would we think that there was such a thing as judgment-independent moral facts for any other reason than that they make our ethics work better? ------

pp. 54 - 55

--But if our ultimate desires are so highly contingent and malleable, what reason do we have for thinking that they are the basis for anything deserving the name of "objective value"? It doesn't seem that there needs to be anything good about the objects of our desires themselves in order for us to desire them as ultimate ends. It suffices for our brains to be wired in certain ways. It thus seems quite odd to call whatever one happens to have a foundational positive attitude or inclination toward "objectively valuable."--

To what extent is hedonism immune from a parallel problem?

Rawlette's hedonism may be immune (in itself) because normative qualia are what they are, no matter who feels them or for what reason they feel them. The effective altruists who are opposed to "tiling the universe with mouse orgasms" are perhaps tapping into some intuitions that there are other values besides simplistic "lots of pleasure, no pain".

Maybe Rawlette's brain is just wired to be more hedonism-leaning, and normative-qualia-theory-endorsing, than someone else's, who might disagree with her. How should our brains be wired, in terms of the values that inform our metaethics?

(After listening to the 2020 podcast with Rawlette and Gus Docker, I see that Rawlette favors qualia of goodness more essentially than qualia of pleasure. So then the question could come, let's say it's really cheap to produce mouse brains which constantly orgasm and dollar-for-dollar, this is the cheapest way (the only way, given resource constraints) to maximize normative qualia of any kind -- is there something lost?

--

pp. 64 - 66

----- Sidebar: does the moral realism of MSLN pass Rawlette's tests? -----

MSLN is my own natural theology and related theories. Rawlette's tests come up in the second pass notes, where I attempt to provide an answer to the question here.

Chapter 3

---- Sidebar: Why should human judgment track what it ["is"] human-judgment-independent? Why feelings? Why God's judgment? ------

I guess my answer would be "if we ask 'why should' judgment do something", the answer ultimately is "should / legitimacy itself impels judgment to do that". If we're looking for the glue that connects human judgment to Rawlette's normative qualia or to God's judgment, then there is some brute "should" (legitimacy) which does that, at the fundamental level.

p. 69 - 75

Feeling the quale of badness is bad, but should it be bad? From the MO perspective, God has to agree with us that bad is bad. But he doesn't have to agree that bad should be bad. We don't have to think that bad should be bad, either. (But Rawlette ought to have argued that we should somewhere in her book.)

"MO" refers to the "metaphysical organism", a term from MSLN.

Where did the simantic word "bad" come from, and who defined it? Why is it legitimate that "bad" be bad?

"Simantic word" is a term from MSLN.

--

p. 82

One can choose to forego goodness (can have thoughts to avoid goodness even though goodness feels like goodness). Could this choice be valid?

---- Sidebar: Something to ask during second reading: Is Feeling of Value a good example of an account of "ought as feeling", even something to hold up as a potential paragon of the view? -----

p. 91

What is the quale that gets us to listen to judgments that we have made about how good things are? Or to recognize the truth? Maybe "quale" is the wrong word. Is there such a thing as a "meta-quale", something found in a set of qualia, which can have a certain tendency? That might be the word.

Are human beings response machines, to feelings of value? Or are we persons, who see things according to *ourselves*? "I see that X is good." vs. "I am compelled to say that X is good because of how it feels".

--More simply put, "in a situation of conflict of motivations, one can predict the future choice of the subject from the algebraic sum of affective ratings of pleasure and displeasure, given by the subject, to the conflicting motivations."--

In the experiments connected with that statement, was there a dimension of conviction? The actual pains/pleasures tested were "sweetness and sourness", "temperature and fatigue", "chest fatigue and leg fatigue". What if they had tested sexual pleasure, something that is more loaded? Or something to do with religious devotion? (Hunger for someone fasting, perhaps.)

--

pp. 95 - 96

Rawlette does not see normative qualia as being intentional -- i.e., essentially badness is not badness of an object, but rather badness in itself.

Isn't it our direct experience, though, that objects are bad (or good, etc.)? Isn't this as direct as our experience of goodness and badness themselves? (Or is it?)

If it is as direct, then we have a piece of evidence in favor of the universality of something normative outside each human (qualia of goodness and badness) and one against (we find goodness and badness in things in many different ways).

----- Sidebar: What is good is God's will, and God's will just is God, and just is all reality, in a sense even including what is bad, though the horror is bad. (A horror: Two goods that conflict?) -----

This is more or less a restatement of ideas found in MSLN, in Legitimacy

Chapter 4

pp. 106 - 108

What is the definition of "good"? Not, "what instantiates goodness", but "what is this 'goodness' thing itself?"

What immediately comes to my mind: "what ought to be desirable / desired".

--

pp. 108 - 109 (footnote)

Rawlette contrasts a "good" criminal from a "good" taste by saying that a criminal would be good if you needed a criminal, but a taste is just good in itself. I don't think taste is necessarily good in itself. Maybe tasting something helps you be a certain kind of person. Then you might prefer more bitter, more plain, and less sweet food.

She might respond "isn't being a different kind of person ultimately more goodness-quale-having and less badness-quale-having?" Is it possible that being a good person is the point, and the goodness quale ought to only follow from the objective state of being a good person? We might be reassured that in a universe ruled by a God who has our salvation as an absolute interest of his, he will make sure that the things that appeal to us and persuade us (goodness qualia) actually do connect us with real goodness, reality, good states of being as instantiated, or things that we will be led to instantiate by the promise given by goodness qualia.

Rawlette might reply "So what about people's disagreements over value?" The MSLN reply might be "Existence is provisional -- we will come to conform to God more, and the world will come to conform to God, so that in the end, all our valuings will be within the range allowed by God, and all promise of good will be fulfilled."

--

p. 110 - 111

Can goodness be predicated of real objects as opposed to phenomenal objects?

In the simantist view, everything that exists (in at least one meaning of "exist") is a phenomenal object. I think it's a Berkeleian thing to say that the potted plant I see just is the set of phenomena I experience. It would be simantist to say that the potted plant isn't just a bundle of sensations, but is a potted plant. So that goes a little further than a purely phenomenal object. It's a fusion of phenomena and concept. I see the plant as being beautiful, or, perhaps "that-particular-potted-plant-y" as well. "That-particular-potted-plant-y" has something to do with me, how I see that unique plant. I see goodness in that plant.

"Simantism" is a part of MSLN. I have not read Berkeley (only have read about him).

Is it really good? Well, someone else may see an analogous plant, in their own experience-body. Is it really the same plant? It's arguable that it is, and that it isn't. It can be useful to say that it's the same, and sometimes it feels intuitively like it's the same, but sometimes it doesn't.

"Experience body is a term from MSLN.

In simantism, we trust God to speak reality to us in an ultimately trustworthy way. If it seems that the plant is the same in someone else's world, then it is. Maybe from God's perspective, there is one simantic word for the plant that is seen by many different people, the word that gives rise to many different words.

So do goodness qualia go any further than to say "in my experience-body, this seems good to me right now"? I think Rawlette would want to be able to say "in everybody's experience-bodies, the simantic word 'goodness' is inherently a good thing", and thus if we know that everyone finds something good, it is good. Do we really know that other people exist, unless we know that God speaks them to us in a trustworthy way? Maybe we say "other people probably exist". Do we really know enough to say what everyone finds good in a thing? If we reject materialism, then we are left with solipsisms (experience-bodies) that need a reason to not be solipsist. We are quasi-solipsists who can affect other people in ways we don't understand. We might want to know what is universally good, so that we can practically pursue it, but practically speaking, we can't know it.

I don't think this is Rawlette's project, but what would follow her project is to practically live according to the knowledge that "value comes from feeling". Her project might not be useful of ["if"] the project that might ought to follow hers doesn't work.

"[...]if the project[...]". I'm not sure why Rawlette should be deterred by that thought. Maybe it's simple enough to say that we know when we experience good, and can choose it more and more. Unless the problem is that we don't know the effects our choice of goodness have on other people. Or that opinions differ on the goodness-quale is goodness idea. Maybe we are in a state where we are unsure that other people's phenomenal worlds are too similar to our own (perhaps a belief arising from some kind of immaterialism). In a "public reality" world, such as materialism, it might still be difficult to really know what was going on in other people's world, unless perhaps we have a kind of "benevolent panopticon AI".

--

p. 113

--For example, we may not be able to think of the pleasure of a torturer without also feeling some empathy for his victim, and this may lead us to think that the badness of the torturer's pleasure is intrinsic rather than merely instrumental.--

So empathy makes us think it's bad. Is that trustworthy? In other words, the feeling of value makes us think things are good. Should that feeling be trusted? Or is it just "I happen to have felt a feeling, so I responded in a certain way" -- stimulus-response, rather than people responding to what is real.

--

p. 114

--What matters in determining the intrinsic value of pleasure is not what feelings we have when thinking about pleasure, but the feeling we have that is pleasure. We can have this latter feeling without contemplating it and without even consciously labeling it "pleasure." And if we manage to direct our attention to this particular feeling -- all by itself, allowing no other associations to interfere -- I believe we will not be able to help but recognize that this feeling is intrinsically good.--

The simantic word "good" is good because God speaks it and the phenomena of it is unified with the concept (the set of all objectively/human-independently good states of affairs). The coiner of "good" (God), connects it to reality. And it's hard to see how the simantic word "good" could fail to itself connect people to goodness, not be the criterion for goodness -- by definition. But otherwise, we might wonder if the feeling of good is only good in itself, but not an exhaustive definition of what good really is. Good, conceptually, can lie outside of the feeling of good.

--

----- Sidebar: A difference between that which is unbearable and that which is bad. If we have reason to believe that humans ought to exist, ought to bear experiences, then experiences which are unbearable are bad, or something like bad. Given the God of MSLN, that which is unbearable will go away in the end, whether it be good or bad.

It's possible to find something unbearable, but not feel that it's bad. I can say that's been my experience with most of the (more or less) unbearable suffering I've had. It certainly sounds like a bad thing to cause unbearable pain to someone else, and I feel like that's bad, I judge that that's bad, even if my own experience of unbearable pain often enough has lacked that judgment. So it's not in unbearable pain itself that there is badness, but in the idea of unbearable pain, or of causing unbearable pain. At least, I'm one data point against a claim that we all always find unbearable pain to be bad when, in that, we experience it.

Rawlette might say it's not my judgment that something is bad that is the real badness which necessarily follows from the experience of pain, but rather something else, true badness, the feeling of badness, pre-rational / no-B.S. badness, maybe one of those things.

But then, perhaps that begs the question away from the possibility that value is an opinion rather than a feeling.

I'm not sure that it would literally beg the question, but it could do something in the neighborhood of begging the question.

What I felt wasn't badness, but unbearability. Does Rawlette want to say that I didn't understand the words I was using, and that if I had been more reflective, I would have said "unbearability is really that, plus badness"? Badness is something that I see, or I don't see. Maybe I would know if I didn't see badness in something. Did I feel badness, and that makes all the difference? I don't see that very claim. I act based on what I see, not on what I feel. I think the idea of Rawlette's project is to convince us to see feeling itself, and thus see according to its deliverance. But if I see badness, or don't see it, in ways that weaken Rawlette's argument, then should I see feeling as fundamental, or does my (non)seeing of badness cancel out her claim that I ought to have seen myself as having felt badness, and that that seeing is binding on my actions.["?"]

(But I think I really just didn't even feel badness, but rather just unbearability.)

Is it okay for seeing to be as direct as feeling? I think so, because seeing is fundamental to seeing that feeling is the foundation of values -- or of seeing that it is not. Some feeling has to be something like "properly basic". --------

--

Chapter 5

pp. 126 - 127

Rawlette mentions problems with utilitarian calculus, additive, bites the bullet with "there's no other way to be realist, no other judgment-independent fact to ground moral realism".

Because we are concerned with how to live out morality, as well as knowing exactly where it comes from, might we accept the MO argument as a source of practical guidance, a probabilistic non-human ground for moral realism?

--

pp. 127 - 128

Rawlette wants to say that the qualia of others matters as much as that of oneself. We might want to agree but be uncertain due to an innate pre-rational valuing of what we see directly over what we don't. And this can be justified rationally by thoughts of solipsism. (So we might need to argue against solipsism to justify stringent moral concern.)

--

p. 128

--I have argued that when we experience normative qualia, our experience is characterized by intrinsic goodness or badness; that is, it is characterized by the feeling that the very experience we are having is such that it either ought to be happening or ought not to be happening (though the feeling itself is just a feeling, not an awareness of or assent to any particular propositional characterization of it). We might wonder, though, whether the experience is really best described as being one of agent-neutral value, as being a blanket "ought-to-be-ness" or "ought-not-to-be-ness."--

Maybe what we really want to maximize is "ought-to-be-ness", rather than pleasure. Or, to read all of Rawlette's "pleasure"s as "ought-to-be-ness"es. In that case, what she's talking about is perception of ought, maybe a pre-rational perception of ought. Why should the perception of ought have anything to do with the real thing? It might, as much as perceiving anything does, that is, we are justified in thinking something we see exists until there is a defeater. So in terms of action, the perception of ought forms a soft realism -- we should probably act to minimize the feeling of ought-not-to-be-ness and maximize the feeling of ought-to-be-ness. This sounds sort of like preference utilitarianism. How does "ought-to-be-ness" differ from "preference"? Perhaps Rawlette is saying that what you ought to prefer is what you feel like preferring, and that what you feel like preferring is pleasure, what you feel like not preferring is pain.

Rawlette might say "it's not that Object X is necessarily good because it occasions qualia of ought-to-be-ness, but that qualia of ought-to-be-ness ought to be." But why should my perception of the ought-to-be-ness of ought-to-be-ness indicate true value? I think Rawlette probably does address this in some way, but I have forgotten how.

I don't tend to find my own pain provoking "ought-not-to-be-ness" -- even if it's unbearable. Is it that I'm diseased, and can't adequately reconcile myself to my feelings? Or is it that my feelings stand apart from me and the truth -- have some connection, but no hard, necessary connection to either me or the truth?

--

p. 130

Rawlette says that "ought-not-to-be-ness/ought-to-be-ness"/"pain/pleasure" are more fundamental than the concept of action and arise earlier in a person's mental development.

This raises the question: when an infant feels pain, do we have any reason to say that they feel "ought-not-to-be", as opposed to feeling "unbearability"?

--

------ Sidebar: Feeling of love vs. opinion of love. When you fall in love, do you have a choice whether you love the other person? If you don't have a choice, was it really *you* who fell in love? Usually this is a moot point in longer-term relationships because there are times when people are hard to love and if you believe you really love them, you have to prove it by deliberately choosing to love.

But it's possible that on rare occasions, there's never a clear test of love, whether it's *you* who loves, or whether you're just filled with a spirit of love, outside of who you are.

We might be able to induce the spirit of love artificially, but if it means anything for a person, themselves, to love or value someone, then that couldn't be induced artificially. The opinion of love is something that has to flow from you, while the feeling of love does not ultimately have to.

It's possible to have the feeling of love, but have an opposite opinion. Likewise having the opinion of love, but having opposite feelings.

Maybe if you have the feeling of love, without it ever having been put to the test, you could ask yourself if your opinion appeared to be in line with that feeling. You might have prima facie reason to believe that you had the opinion of love, such as would survive the loss of the spirit or feeling of love.

The opinion of love is connected to respect. Seeing people a certain way is part of respect.

The spirit of love causes the feeling of love, which inclines you to have the opinion of love. ------

--

p. 144 - 145

What if there are particular different ought-to-be-nesses, and we need to "collect them all"? It's possible that things that ought to be, when instantiated, conflict with each other. Perhaps we ought to be content -- there's a special "ought to be" to contentment -- and maybe that makes sense, if we think of contentment as the ultimate, global sense of "ought to be" -- "all's well". Contentment is at odds with maximization, unless maximization hits some kind of hard limit.

Feeling of Value notes, 145 -

(con't)

If you think the world should be a better place, then you are connected with some kind of bad -- which gives you a quale of "ought-not-to-be-ness". Is it better to find the world good, or to make the world good?

You can get tired of a specific bad, including the bad of "ought-to-keep-improving". Maybe we will get tired of all "ought-not-to-be"s and eliminate them all, settling for a certain level of "ought-to-be". This requires contentment.

Maybe "ought-to-be" and "ought-not-to-be" are binary, without degrees. That which ought to be, ought to be. That which ought not to be, ought not to be. There is no neutral zone. Everything that we might think is neutral, ought to be. So then there is no way to pile up infinite ought-to-be. Once we have eliminated ought-not-to-be, there is no point in striving, because plain experience is as good as exciting experience.

This reminds me of MSLN's population ethics, the "rest view".

--

pp. 140 - 149

Is Rawlette going to support the Repugnant Conclusion? How would this make sense?

How do people make sense of lives that are barely worth living? Hope? Endurance? You never know, if you hang in there, things could get better. Another factor might be self-love. People love themselves more than they love the quality of their lives.

--

p. 152

--First, even on this view, it would never actually be the case that we ought to produce many billions of people living only barely happy lives, rather than a smaller number of people living happier lives. The resources necessary to produce the huge population would actually produce more total happiness if they were concentrated on fewer individuals, just because it takes so many resources to produce and maintain each additional life, before we can start increasing its happiness.--

This is an interesting empirical claim.

--

Intro to Part III

p. 164

Rawlette is relatively content to concern us with situations we are likely to find ourselves in. Does hedonistic utilitarianism work the same ways as our intuitions in those? Where the "tails don't come apart".

"Tails don't come apart" is a reference to this Slate Star Codex post.

But EAs (longtermists, especially) contemplate plausible futures where things get weird / where the tails would come apart.

--

Ch. 6

p. 169

In deontological moral systems, we say "X is wrong". In consequentialism, we say "Pain/disutility is wrong. X is instrumentally bad in avoiding disutility." Having X be immediately wrong strengthens our aversion to it. So, utilitarianism could weaken our motivation to not do bad, or to do good. Rawlette wants to strengthen our motivation -- that's the (or a?) point of moral realism.

A utilitarian could say "When I'm doing my moral philosophy, I'm a utilitarian, but in my unreflective daily life, I'm a deontologist."

The trolley problem: thinking it through could weaken your desire to not harm people in the >99% of cases that are not isomorphic to trolley problems. Not thinking it through could weaken your ability to act in the <1% of cases that are.

What is utilitarianism good for? Why have a simplistic moral framework? It can be extended into weird cases, like administering a government or designing an AI. Are government people professionally utilitarians and privately deontologists? Is there any spillover between one's professional and personal lives?

--

-----

Sidebar: Humans don't necessarily know what is best in the end. God does. God's will is in itself not to be violated. "What is best in the end" is in conformity with God's will. God's will ordains both the rules and the final outcome. It is possible that by obeying the rules, we always are furthering the best final outcome. The basic motivator of consequentialism ("things need to turn out well in the end") and deontology ("to kill, lie, steal, etc. are immediately wrong") can both be satisfied by a theistic metaethics.

This is a strong claim that I would need to do more work to endorse.

Having said that, the Bible (at least) specifically contains relaxations of its own rules. Therefore, humans may not always know for sure that a rule that we think we ought to obey is really one of the fundamental rules that God really cares about necessarily. Apart from the Bible, or other holy books, it might prove difficult to come up with sets of rules, and definitions of those rules, which are culture-invariant. Therefore we might find it hard to be completely sure that we really know what the rules should be.

However, the existence of God allows us to think that it is possible that things could be wrong in themselves, even if we're wrong in our thinking about which things are wrong in themselves.

I suppose we have to argue that "being wrong in itself" is necessarily just "being a violation of God's will in itself". Wrongness would have to be defined as "what ought not to be" and then "ought" is simply "what is in the ultimate opinion".

Contemplating the above makes me feel at least a little more motivated to be deontological (in a Christian way) than consequentialist. -----

p. 185

Mention of perspectival bias. Preference for the interests of oneself. I think it's possible to act as though you think your interests are better than others, out of compulsion or instinct, but not really believe that you are any more deserving than anyone else.

How you behave when not under compulsion or in a state of instinct-satisfaction might reflect your real views about the values of yourself and others.

How hard should you work against instincts and psychological compulsion?

--

p. 189

--This sort of decision procedure -- one that prohibits certain actions unless utility is overwhelmingly on the side of performing them (and perhaps allows certain other actions unless utility is overwhelmingly on the side of not performing them) -- looks an awful lot like the decision procedure our moral intuitions prompt us to follow.--

The function of moral reasoning is to fulfill moral intuitions? Someone like a NT Pharisee imposing rules that are neither fulfillments of human moral intuitions nor God's will. Keeping people from healing on the Sabbath. If you go away from common moral intuitions, what's your justification?

--

----- Sidebar: Say that I am worth something apart from my life: I am worth preserving even if my life isn't worth living. Where does the feeling of value exist? In me, or in my life? Doesn't my life contain all my qualia? Or is it the case that there's part of my experience which is not me, and part which is me? If the experience which is me is bad, then I am not worth living? But do I experience that experience? What is the "I" in the preceding sentence?

--

----- Sidebar: The truth: if you go hard enough against society, you will tend to have unbearable experiences as it beats you down, and these will teach you to value feeling okay, and thus you don't go against what society values. (1984's Ministry of Love.) -----

Ch. 7

p. 206 -- Pain is a present feeling that dissuades us from doing things that will lead to death or future pain. Do humans need to be the ones who take care of themselves, or could AI do that for them? If the latter, then they don't need to feel pain anymore. And people will probably choose that, once they trust the AI, unless they have some kind of reason not to be hedonists (psychological or philosophical reason, psychological or philosophical hedonists).

If concern for ultimate good feeling for as long as possible is what hedonism really is or ought to be, in a more steel-man version of hedonism, then what if we consider the possible existence of God (MO)? Or a stronger proof of the existence of God? In a sense, hell is a hedonistic argument for allegiance to God. So Rawlette's hedonism might lead naturally into at least an attempt to connect with or believe in God.

--

p. 208

Rawlette says that she takes care of the objection that some things ought to cause more pleasure than others by founding that ought in future pleasures. What if people take great pleasure in building pyramids (in San Diego), whereas in parts of Los Angeles, people derive great pleasure from building ziggurats? This leading to tensions between the Angelenos, those who are into pyramids, and those who are into ziggurats, spilling over into conflict between San Diego and Los Angeles at the governmental level. Some people in San Diego try to build both pyramids and ziggurats, and they are at odds with everyon else. You have to build one kind of monument or the other, or even if you choose both, that's a political statement. Is there a rational way to sort this out? It's unclear which option will lead to the greatest pleasure or pain. Currently, the ziggurat-Angelenos derive a great deal of pleasure from ziggurats, and will continue to derive pleasure from future ziggurats, so they want to keep going with that. The pyramidists, likewise, except with pyramids instead of ziggurats. Which of the two should give more pleasure? Or if we choose both, then should we find both to give pleasure? By choosing both, we're probably only going to be able to devote the same amount of resources to both as we could have just to one. So "both" competes with "ziggurat" and "pyramid". It's a cultural thing.

What we could do, is sand down culture until nobody cares about anything but the basics of life. This is a process that modern culture has already done to a large extent. But should it have? One casualty is meaning. Fewer things mean as much to us, because we're so fixated on our own present and future pleasure and pain. It's all about human beings, and humans can't see outside their own concept of well-being. Our concept of well-being controls our concept of what ought to give us pleasure and pain.

The pyramid/ziggurat example is a little contrived, but maybe consider the war between people who value courage and those who value pragmatism. Which ought we to "take more pleasure in"? "Take more pleasure in" almost begs the question from the beginning in favor of pragmatism. Courage wants us to be willing to lay down our lives and disregard our personal comfort. Otherwise we live in fear, inside ourselves. Because courage is a negation of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, how can we value it without rejecting hedonism? How can hedonism figure out if courage ought to be pleasurable (or, in Rawlette's more plausible terminology, one which gives the quale of "ought-to-beness")? Can hedonism give that result without undermining itself? Or does hedonism as a framework automatically bias a thinker (or even force a thinker) to say "courage, the independence people have from survival and well-being, is invalid, by definition"? So then is there some meta-framework to determine whether to be pragmatic or courageous? This would tell us whether we ought to find ought-to-be-ness in courage or pragmatism, and thus provide the input to our hedonism. I don't think hedonism can answer the question of whether courage or pragmatism ought to be found trustworthy, because hedonism lends itself to pragmatism. Maybe hedonism is a species of pragmatism, or vice versa.

I guess this gets back to the question "is our sense of ought-to-be a reliable guide to what really ought to be?" If we say "Yes" or even say "Yes, by definition", then whatever we all agree ought to be, ought to be. And currently, something like hedonism could succeed in capturing that sociological reality. We will not be able to value things like pyramids or ziggurats. Or religious texts, or God, etc... this war against the impractical has been waged slowly for a long time. But again, if a hedonist is like Rawlette, they need to look into the somewhat unknown future, and also consider whether God exists, because his existence could have the greatest effect on maximizing hedonism of any fact.

(Maybe better than the ziggurat/pyramid example: American Indians find their land to be sacred. It gives them a feeling of "ought-to-be". But white Americans find the Indian land to be useful. This also gives them a feeling of "ought-to-be". The Indians have a choice, hold onto the sacred land, or sell it. As long as it's sacred, they have to hold onto it. If it remains sacred, they will get the most ought-to-beness in the future out of holding onto it. If they persuade themselves to no longer find it sacred, then they will get the most ought-to-beness in the future out of selling it. Perhaps Rawlette would say "Well, they just have to somehow know which one gives them more ought-to-be-ness and pick that one" (which goes against the very mindset of sacredness). But even then, the difference between the two (projected) ought-to-be-ness qualia might be so small as to be impossible to tell apart, and then we would still have the problem of figuring out what ought to give pleasure.)

--

----- Sidebar: Rawlette relies a lot on phenomenology. A phenomenological being (I could say) has to see the qualia of positivity and negativity as good and bad. There's nothing else. But in contrast to a phenomenlogical being, there could be a personal being. Do *you*, the human you are, by your lights, see such qualia as inherently good or bad? What Rawlette might be wanting to do is to reduce the personal, opinion-having person to the phenomenological person, as a way to avoid the problems of establishing what is the best opinion.

Can opinion overrule phenomenology? If not, why not? We're looking to know what our opinions should be. If in our opinions our opinions should not necessarily just be what the phenomenological self would choose, then how can we be wrong?

Rawlette might ought to have spent more time on phenomenology. -----

To be fair, phenomenology is well-known and by now basic, and perhaps I'm the one who should have gotten sufficiently familiar with it before reading The Feeling of Value.

----- Sidebar: Something that makes me queasy about hedonism: the focus on self-reward. This would make me queasy about preferentialism as well. About all utilitarianism? The love of wealth. Unless the ultimate wealth to be free of wealth-thinking. -----

Post-Reading Notes:

p. 218

Rawlette says that hedonists find it furthers hedonism to find things to be intrinsically valuable. If we remembered hedonism all the time, we couldn't do this. We would always be plugging things into a utility calculus.

Is it as though there are two people? The utility calculator and the one who finds things intrinsically valuable?

Parallels to MSLN: in MSLN, we might value another person because that's what God wants. Do we need to forget that God wants that in order to value the person, or can we keep both in mind? To think "God values you" doesn't take away from "I value you". So is it the same thing with hedonism? "Valuing you maximizes utility" and "I value you" -- "you serve a purpose" and "you are valuable in yourself" -- are different from "you are valuable in yourself according to the Ultimate Opinion" and "you are valuable in yourself according to my opinion".

A utilitarian could say "you are valuable in yourself according to the fact that you contribute to aggregated well-being". But there's still a difference between "I value you", plain and simple (I see you to be valuable in yourself), and "I value you you because of this abstract and holistic line of thinking I'm into". The utilitarianism may be valid, but it's less personal than "I value you".

Perhaps if we value other people because that's what God wants, and we feel compelled to claim that we have the same opinions as God, then that's not as clean a connection to intrinsic value. But if we identify our opinions with God's opinion, then there's a merger between "objective value values you" and "I value you". "I" become, in a sense, one with God, and so my opinion is the Ultimate Opinion.

By analogy, the difference between teleological theory of mind ("I can figure out A, B, and C about you, which enables me to project that you will do or feel D") and mentalization ("I have a comfortable, intuitively mirroring grasp of your mental process."). As we become comfortable and more fully trusting in our relationship with God, we develop an effortless kinship with him, which inclines our opinions to track his.

Is it possible to have an opinion about something if God does not exist (simantism and legitimism)?

See https://formulalessness.blogspot.com/2020/06/simantism.html and legitimism.

--

The following section was going to be the opening to the review, as presented to effective altruists.

What is the good of a moral philosophy? A way to program AI, or to program humans. AI don't have their own intuitions, unless we give them intuitions. But we have intuitions, either from birth or from education. In either case, inherited from our ancestors.

I could add that intuitions might come from spirits (beings or perhaps less-personal psychic forces), noetic relationships, or be something like ESP, as well. Noetic relationships would be the way that we just know that certain things are or are not good, or that there is such a thing as good in the first place. We have contact with what is real through our intuitions.

Humans can say "I know what's right" based on intuition, and thus choose to disregard a bad moral philosophy. A moral philosophy might be bad for being incomplete, or giving "counter-intuitive" results. AI don't have that counterweight. Humans can judge moral philosophies to be bad, as they have some kind of privileged information, not derived from the words and thought structures of moral philosophy, about what is right or wrong.

But humans can be persuaded by moral philosophy. If they accept it, having found it trustworthy in familiar things, they can extend it into unfamiliar areas. (Should they? Is that a valid way to proceed?) But they can always say "that seems too counter-intuitive, let's not be insane here" and back off a weird result from moral philosophy. It's possible for people to switch back and forth arbitrarily (or intuitively) between moral philosophy and moral intuition.

A longtermist might ought to care about this human programming. If people become more rational over time, they will lean harder on moral philosophy in forming their moral intuitions. So we could see things we currently consider insane becoming normal in the future, if people can bite the bullet and accept reason. But intuition might know better than reason in this area. After all, the whole point of moral philosophy was to represent intuition better. One might think that someone like Bentham wanted to extend personal values of happiness into the weirder world of government. His utilitarianism may have lined up with sane values, with moral intuition. But the idea of hedonistic utilitarianism itself, unmoored from intuition, might give us insane results, like wanting to "tile the universe with mouse brains having orgasms", or whatever other kind of simplistic bliss. Reason can have a corrosive effect on intuition as expressed by culture, and we can't necessarily take for granted that humans in the future will stay in touch with any recognizable intuitions of our own. How this might cash out could be something like "mouse brain orgasms" or "yes machines" (beings that say yes to everything, which prefer everything so as to make preferentialism trivial to satisfy). The intuition that reason ought to be applied consistently in moral areas, and thus that moral consideration ought to be applied to people (or other sentient beings) equally, the extension of the moral circle, might be rolled back to extreme regressiveness -- from just our point of view, or in some way independent of our reason and intuition nowadays? (How could that happen? Maybe it becomes too impractical to actually help all sentient beings -- maybe panpsychism is both too compelling and too practically difficult to respond to, or maybe something like wild animal suffering proves intractable, and people come up with some reason to say "well, morality is based on intuition, right? It's not based in any fact of the matter, right? So we can kind of rewrite it as is convenient for us". Similarly, once survival pressure is off of the decision-makers (presumably humans or a human elite, if we manage to keep control of AI), we may stop caring about reason, not being forced to by competition or the struggle to survive.) Everything any longtermist works for now could be made futile at some point in the future due to the change in moral intuitions caused by the evolution of culture according to moral philosophy. And how can we say that what longtermists care about now ought to apply to people in the future? Unless somehow there is a true note of moral reality which is buried for some reason in human biology or past culture, which the present can hear better than the future can.

"Longtermist" is a term from effective altruism, people who seek to benefit the far future.

Once changed by moral philosophy (or some irrational force), can it be said that moral intuition is wrong? We might think so, with respect to past moral intuition. But once changed, past moral intuition would now be wrong. If anything can take over the formation of moral intuition, could such a being rewrite what morality actually is? And thus justify whatever it wanted -- really justify, not just convince people that it was justified. Or is morality founded in something that does not change?

All this gives us reason to wonder if we can know a history-invariant morality. It would have to be independent of the judgments of human beings -- we know this because human judgments change over time. It would have to be some kind of moral realism.

This is one motivation for reading The Feeling of Value, a book which attempts to ground moral realism in phenomenal consciousness and not in human judgment -- perhaps a candidate for a history-invariant morality. It [this motivation] is not given [as a reason for seeking a moral realist theory] by the author, Sharon Hewitt Rawlette <check>. But she does point to a short-termist reason to be into moral realism, which is that it can overcome perspectival bias and thus motivate people to do whatever it is people already know to do from their moral intuitions but don't do because they don't have a motivating moral philosophy.

"Short-termism" is a term for altruism in the short term (within a few decades or so).

So her book is something that at least some EAs would or ought to be interested in reading. So what follows is a summary of the book, and then some of my thoughts on how successful I think her project is.

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I happened across something related to this project in a novel I read.

Bearable vs. ought:

Rosamunde Pilcher, Another View, p. 84, 1989 ed.

"How could you bear to go and swim? You'll die of pneumonia."

(Emma went swimming on a cold day and came back. Robert is concerned for her and thinks she's done something foolish.)

[This is as much context as is needed for the purposes of the review.]

As though a voice tells you not to swim, but you endure it and swim anyway? Or your impending death is something that ought to scare you but you ignore it by bearing it?

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A personal note.

My feelings/thoughts for/about [Person X] are ones that I endure -- they are lightweight -- they are pleasant -- but there is something inherently unbearable about them, which I endure.

Maybe more clear is to think about one specific thought/feeling complex, the intuitive life reality of [Person X]. I can intuit this as a simple thing. It is pleasant, lightweight, and something I have to bear.

"Life reality" definition.

What is the ought-to-be-ness of this one simple thing that I intuit? It seems somewhat orthogonal to me, like it is neither. The one feeling has both the ought-to-be-ness of pleasantness and the ought-not-to-be-ness of its burdensomeness.

Burdens can be borne and the weightier, the closer to being unbearable.

Pains can also be unbearable. Is it that the pains themselves are burdensome? Or that some pains and burdens often go together?

I think that for my purposes "burden" means "that which, if you have enough of it, it is unbearable".

What is the opposite of something needing to be borne? Something being attractive?

This may be a source of this post