Seductively Mild Depression / Disengagement

Sometimes I experience a kind of mental disengagement. This correlates with my bipolar depression. My depression takes different forms, sometimes a proneness to irritability, sometimes a slowed-down mind, sometimes an increased openness to despair or giving up, sometimes fatigue.

All of these either now or in the past have taken on blatant, extreme forms. For instance, in an extreme mental disengagement spell, I can't focus the best, can't work on things. My eyes might go somewhat blank, and I might find it difficult to pursue lines of thought or to recall words.

If my disengaging depression is mild enough, I don't sense it as being something that should not be. A strong depression is obviously a problem, something to fight and not something to trust or build your life around. Instead, you want to separate yourself from it and what it tells you, and get back to normal. Fortunately, having bipolar disorder means my depression spells go away more or less on their own. I think it would be harder for someone with clinical depression that had no mood cycling. But for me, I can write off strong depression as "not me" and then wait it out so I can be in the mood that reflects my real values, something euthymic, or less depressed, or whatever.

But a mild depression can trick me sometimes, and make me feel like I'm experiencing normal -- a new normal. As I grow, I experience different flavors of depression, some of them for the first time. I am uncorking the mellow wines of older age, perhaps? Maybe I like these mild depressions? There's something seductive about a sufficiently mild depression.

(In a disengaged depression, I may feel like nothing matters, because I can't engage with reality. But it isn't really true that nothing matters, it's just my mood. Or I may feel like I'm not interested in working to engage with reality. I can choose whether to identify with the disengagement or lack of desire to work, or to reject them. But in the moment, it's telling me that I'm a certain way, and external reality is a certain way, and what it tells me covers my mind.)

Feeling bad doesn't bother me -- at least, it doesn't seem like a real threat to my ability to do what matters. But being slowed-down -- mellowed out -- with a relatively positive hedonic "flavor" is pretty dangerous, exactly because it doesn't feel dangerous. The danger is that I get caught in a habit of being disengaged. My mind can't do heavy lifting, or see things sharply and clearly in these mild depressions. So, I am less able to do what I need to do or even to witness the truth. I can go with the flow of my culture, but I have lost my purpose. I am indexed to the flow around me, and I no longer am indexed to God. I am no longer myself, I cease to exist on some level, and that's actually not a good thing.

My different moods are like being plunged underwater (or hypomania is like some kind of opposite equivalent, like being stuck in the sea of air, flying 10,000 feet above the ground). So I don't expect to be able to do too much to control them, since they are what they are and have their power. But I still fight them, and maybe if I didn't, I would stay in them longer. And maybe milder moods are more within my power to fight effectively. At the very least, even if moods like this are persistent until they "decide" to leave, I can learn to identify when I am drifting, when I am disengaged or unable to engage, and see this psychological state as being other than me, instead of attaching to it, as I sometimes automatically do. Hopefully then I can get out of that state as soon as possible.

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How does rest play into this? Disengagement and rest may necessarily correlate.

Most people go on vacation without worrying about whether they will choose to go back to work at the end of it. But imagine if when you went on vacation (maybe to a beach resort in another country), you were concerned that you might not be able to tear yourself away from it to get on the plane to go home. If you stayed there, you would lose your job. Maybe in that case, vacation would sound like a bad idea.

Maybe with my life, some rest is relatively safe, and some of it is dangerous. If rest is something that will reliably lead back to work, then that's relatively safe. But rest that takes on a life of its own, and cuts me off from doing what I need to do, is dangerous.

Reading List Review and Postview: Population Ethics

This is the review and post-view for the population ethics reading list.

I found the articles to be of varying relevance to my project. Some of them were long, and I didn't finish them. The two most useful were "Infinite Ethics" by Nick Bostrom and "Population Axiology" by Hilary Greaves.

I thought of reading through the articles twice. But I decided against it due to my declining interest in the subject. Picking low-hanging fruit (/ giving an idea of how I think MSLN applies to infinite and population ethics) seems like a reasonable thing for me to do, but anything that slows me down is probably a bad use of my time, because I'm not really an expert in ethics anyway, and think it unlikely that I ever will be. So I can sketch out relatively obvious things, and see if someone more qualified finds problems with them.

I think from now on, unless I feel particularly moved, I won't re-read reading list papers. Although I did refer to Greaves' paper in writing my response.

Besides this post and the preview post, I derived two posts from reading this list: God is a Good Utility Monster and MSLN Infinite and Population Ethics.

Looking back at the preview, I see that one of my starting intuitions was that population could be any size, as long as people live lives of true well-being. This is fulfilled (unless there are problems I don't currently see with it) by the "rest view" of "MSLN Infinite and Population Ethics". The other was something like the Mere Addition Principle: if one new baby is born and their life goes well, that's good, right? The rest view isn't as favorable to this intuition, but I'm basically satisfied with the compromise in it (a large but finite population, necessarily limited by God's need for rest).

I see that I left some questions for my future self to see:

"1. Is there a rational way to decide how large a population should be? If not, then we are in a situation where we have to decide without a right answer."

The rest view recommends that we have whatever size population is most effective at reducing hardening. Answering this question is not trivial, but in principle there is an answer. We can't have a firm, verified measure of hardening, but we can make common sense guesses as to how hardening works and what kinds of environments are better or worse for it, and then measure our progress using those. With that in place, if we have enough resources to think this question through, we should be able to come up with a best guess.

"2. Questions of moral philosophies affecting population-ethical views:"

The basic idea with these was to see if there were any ideas that could help choose between expansionary and contented growth strategies. We could find ourselves unsure whether to choose between, say, total and average utilitarianism, and "break the tie" by considering one of the following.

"a. Hedonism lends itself to having more and more. Preferentialism can lend itself to that but also can lend itself to saying 'everybody got what they wanted, so we don't need any more.' With preferentialism, there's a question of 'what should people prefer?' The answer to that might answer the question 'should we want more and more, or should we be content?' Or we could say that there's no good or bad preferences. Then we wonder what random preferences humans might have, and how they might tilt toward more or fewer people."

I don't have much more of an answer as of this writing.

"b. What about fiducialism? Is fiducialism a "more and more" thing ('adventure', as in the Fiducialism booklet), or inherently about connecting with what is ('mission', or "receptivity to reality")? 'Mission' is itself about the reality of people. This lends itself to saying 'connect with the reality of existing people'. But then, couldn't it lend itself to saying 'there ought to be more people', to whose reality one could connect? So that's a hole in fiducialism to try to fill."

As of the date of posting this, my general sense is that there's nothing greedy or compelled about fiducialism, but there's also something open to expansion in it. So, too hard to tell whether it's more in favor of growth or contentment? Effectively neutral? There are different flavors of "neutral". For instance, a high variance and low variance life can be very different, even if on average they might be the same. So a neutral of "I don't care" is different than a fiducialist neutral.

"c. What do people mean to us? Are they to be seen economically, or in some other way? And given the answers to those questions, how strict should we be in making ourselves live according to economic thinking?"

I guess MSLN suggests that God sees nobody solely economically, even if we have to. (Even if there were an infinite number of us, God would directly and personally relate to each of us). But I suppose even God might have to think about quantities of people, in order to make things go best for the most number. This would be in addition to his direct relationship. This relationship with all individuals is something human utilitarians are unable to have. But maybe there are cases where we can think of people less economically.

"3. What might population ethics look like given the God of MSLN?"

Answered in "MSLN Infinite and Population Ethics".

"a. God had some reason for creating people in the first place (unless there is no reason). Does this mean that in absence of a defeater, he will never stop creating people?"

According to the rest view, no.

"b. Would God value having more and more for its own sake? Is God a slave to maximization?"

The rest view avoids having to answer this question by saying God can't keep having more and more people. Plausibly, God lives according to fiducialism, and feels both the adventure and mission side of it, but maybe mission is the stronger impulse in God. So maybe he would favor rest and contentment, and thus be immune to the compulsion to maximize.

"c. Are people created new, or is there a fixed supply of people created once and for all at the beginning of time, which God then brings into consciousness during their time in history?"

I wouldn't assume that there is a hard limit from a kind of "pre-existence", and I don't think there is a reason why there would be one (at least, not that I can think of).

"Possible answer: We are called to enter God's rest, and presumably God seeks rest, too. New people have to work out their salvation, which is not restful for God. So it seems like there is some finite limit to population, so that there can be a time of permanent rest afterward.

"If so, maybe if we increase population above baseline, what we're doing is accelerating the end of the world.

"Or, if God can handle our turmoil forever, he can create people forever. If he thinks there aren't enough people, he can always create more. Ultimately, it's his decision how many people there are, because he pays the biggest price for human experience and ultimately has power over the way things are. So if we create more people, he may cause fewer to be created elsewhere."

How could God handle our turmoil forever? Maybe by taking periods of rest in between batches of new people. I tend to think that wouldn't work, because God can anticipate the pain of what is to come, and that anticipation would be at least a little bit unbearable. Or very unbearable, depending on the interplay between God's sensitivity and his patience. Jesus had a moment where he was in anguish over having to go the cross, and the Father might have a similar moment in anticipation of creating a new world.