Waiting for Margot: Ep. 5 "Angela"

Here is the fifth episode of Waiting for Margot, "Angela".

Synopsis:

You go to ride a bus to nowhere, and happen to meet someone on her own journey...

Waiting for Margot: Ep. 4 "Brian"

Here is the fourth episode of Waiting for Margot, "Brian".

Synopsis:

A regular rainy day at the cafe, until something happens on earth...

Waiting for Margot: Ep. 3 "Robert"

Here is the third episode of Waiting for Margot, "Robert".

Synopsis:

You (Beth) spend the day with Robert, your ex, running away from Death the Inevitable at Anderson Reservoir.

Waiting for Margot: Ep. 2 "Jackson"

Here is the second episode of Waiting for Margot, "Jackson".

Synopsis:

Julia is on a first date with Jackson. Meaning and human happiness react -- chemistry. A different element cuts in.

Waiting for Margot: Introduction, Ep. 1 "Pilot"

In 2019, I wrote a kind of sitcom script called Waiting for Margot. It has taken me all this time to edit it and decide to release it. At first it was ahead of its time in my life, but now it's somewhat a thing of the past, something to look back at.

It touches on many of the issues of this blog and in this year in which I don't have many blog posts to offer, this can be somewhat like a continuation of this blog.

The series overall (in script form) can be followed at 10v24.net/margot.

The first episode, released today, is "Pilot", the pilot episode.

Synopsis:

You (Beth) meet someone named Julia whom you may or may not already know, at your favorite cafe, Mitzi's. Your friend Brian appears and reveals that he is waiting for Margot.

2022 to 2023

Review of 2022:

In the first few months of 2022, I wrote some posts related to the Bible commentary project I have wanted to work on (which I did work on toward the end of 2021). Starting in March and April, I moved toward the main work of the year, which was a set of book reviews, and other posts, related to culture, family, nationhood, politics, the "exilic-familial", etc. I finished all that at the end of September. Then, I didn't do much writing for the rest of the year. I was trying to figure out what to do next. I did restart, but then stopped again, the Bible commentary project. I also wrote some movie reviews, but stopped doing that.

I found myself somewhat losing interest in effective altruism. Maybe wanting to get some distance after 10 years under the influence of it, and about 2.5 years of more intensive study of it. Also the big publicity push for What We Owe the Future made me feel like EA's real work was coming to a close (being deeply in touch with reality however it could turn out to be) and it was headed toward cashing in its chips. I don't think EA will miss my occasional posts on the EA Forum, so I don't feel committed to them. I never felt like I really belonged (or really didn't belong) to the EA movement, but it seems like I could turn my attention elsewhere since there isn't definitely a place for me in it. Perhaps in the future things will change and it might make sense for me to pay attention to them more.

I moved toward and away from Twitter during 2022, and got very close to deleting my account, but I want to leave up my old tweets, especially those related to Establishedness and Loving God.

Comparison of expectations with reality

I predicted that I would keep working on the cross book, MSLN book, and Bible commentary, and I did not do so very much. I predicted that I would not write blog posts, but that I did.

I predicted that I wouldn't interact with the Christian humanists much, and that proved true. I mentioned making contact with EACH (Effective Altruism for Christians) and said that I might interact with them in 2022, but I mostly didn't.

I had a mixed record in the quality of my predictions. These predictions don't matter too much, practically speaking, but it is interesting to ask why I was correct and incorrect in the way I was.

Possibly I was able to predict my (non-)experience with the Christian humanists because a) I had no real connection with any person in the scene and b) I did not really love the scene. If you decide to ignore something, and you succeed, then you forget about it unless something outside you (your desires, memories, mental ties; or someone else drawing you in) brings it back to your attention. If I were asked about a) and b), could I have understood at the time last year that those obtained, or could that only be seen in hindsight? I'm not sure, but I think it's possible I would have seen those things if I had thought to ask.

In that case, maybe in the future, if I am evaluating some social element of my life, I can predict that if a) I am not really into it deeply and b) I have no real social tie with anyone in it, I will probably not think about it and won't get back into it if I choose to ignore it. However, it's always possible that like in the case of the Christian humanists, maybe I would have gotten really interested in, let's say, the topic of Christianity and politics, and then found my way back to the scene -- so I could still find my way back even if a) and b) hold. But I guess if they do hold, then it's possible I will forget about the social element in question, and by default I will avoid it for some time just because of my decision to ignore it. But if they don't hold, then I probably shouldn't assume I'll stay away.

Maybe this is a useful thought to come out of studying past predictions? Maybe somewhat interesting.

I failed in predicting about what kind of writing I would do (book vs. blog). I think I was anchoring too much to how I felt at the time and what I was working on at the time. Should I learn from this not to do that? I think then I might not trust my instincts as much. I might stop sensing my intuitions in the first place, since I would know that they weren't that reliable in the long run.

A connection to the intuitive side of me is valuable, and I think worth protecting at some cost. So maybe as a trade-off, I will be somewhat bad at predicting my future, so that I can live in my current moment fully. I think I'm more likely to get social pressure toward representing myself and my future correctly. But I sometimes think that our society is too wise and does not care enough, and doesn't see with its own two eyes. It corrects itself toward accurate predictions rather than toward caring about what really matters. (Maybe there is a way to correct society toward caring?)

Why should I engage in predictions about my life? Maybe to get better at predicting, or update my model of the world? I think the impulse for me is more (in this moment) to have something to say about the future. Not to control it, as a plan or promise might, but just to relate to it. I guess I could list my hopes for the coming year instead of, or in addition to, my predictions. But hopes are heavy and loaded things. A prediction, especially one which is decorative rather than functional, is a lighter thing, simply a way to say words, have a somewhat casual relationship with the future.

--

In terms of what was retrospectively surprising, the most notable thing to me was my new interest in Indonesia. I had no idea that I would become interested in it at the beginning of the year, and it has been a fairly significant interest.

Preview of 2023

In 2023, I can think of a few possible things to work on.

Songwriting: I wrote a lot of songs, some with words, over the past 2.5 years, as a side project or hobby, and am close to recording a demo of an album (or it may well be the final version). I have a lot more material I could finish writing and recording, and I think it likely enough that I will continue to have new ideas.

Similarly with poetry.

I will probably write some blog posts, occasionally.

I hope to release an old book I've alluded to here on the blog.

You Don't Have to Profit if You Don't Want To

Let's say you have a single-family house with extra space on your lot. You could build another little house on your property and rent to some tenants. In San Diego, people are doing this. The market rate for an apartment is high. You could make money this way.

But what if you don't want to make money? You don't have to make money if you don't want to. At least, you don't have to make money over what it takes to make it sustainable for you to provide this housing.

If you want this housing to pay for itself, it should provide for its own construction costs. It could take you a decade to pay off the construction costs, renting at market rate. But after that, it's like if you've paid off your mortgage on your house. You just have to pay property tax, maintenance, and utilities.

Dealing with tenants is sometimes stressful, and maybe you have to price that in for it to be sustainable for you to provide this housing.

And there might be other factors to consider that I'm not aware of, and I guess in some cases they may force you to rent at market price, or not rent at all.

But once you take care of all the factors you have to, in order to sustainably rent your property, you can charge as little additional as you want. So you don't have to profit if you don't want to. You can just pay yourself for your costs and your work.

"Aletheism" and "Omnism" as alternatives to "Altruism"

This is something I first posted to the Effective Altruism Forum.

--

(I wrote this before the FTX scandal, so it was not intended as part of the following discourse.)

I don't think it makes sense to replace the word "altruism" in the name of the "effective altruism" movement, but I can think of a couple of reframings of "what it is people who call themselves 'altruists' tend to be and be pursuing" which might be interesting or even useful to think about. These reframings can be discussed through the thought experiment of "what other words could be used besides 'altruism'?".

Omnism

"Altruism" could be seen as "an ethical orientation toward beings other than yourself". (Caring about other beings, acting for the sake of other beings, etc.) If we want an alternative to "altruism" but still want our ethical orientation to end up including beings other than ourselves, we can use the term "omnism", for "an ethical orientation toward all, or the whole of, morally significant beings". ("Omnism" from "omni", meaning "all".)

One potentially useful difference between "omnism" and "altruism" is that if you care about all morally significant beings, you care about yourself, because you are a morally significant being. This is something an "other-oriented" altruist might miss.

Another potentially useful difference is that omnists might remember more often to think not of specific small-scale interventions with certain "others", but also of collectives, systems, or the overall collective or system (the whole). I can see why a small-scale mindset is practically useful, but it could be good to bias yourself against that to some extent.

If I adopt the identity of omnism instead of altruism, I feel balanced and interrelated, plus some hard-to-express feeling from how the word "holism" or "holistic" is loaded in our culture or in my personal cultural experience.

Aletheism

Altruism and omnism are both about an orientation toward well-being, and potentially "engineering reality" to produce well-being. (Maybe that could be called "welfarism"? (Maybe not the best term).)

"Aletheism", by contrast, could be seen as "an ethical orientation toward the truth, knowing it and speaking it". ("Aletheism" from "aletheia", meaning "truth"[1].) But, this can include the goals of altruism/omnism if we understand that to really understand moral truths, we must act. For instance, if you really understand that something should not be, you must act against it if you can. That which should not be inherently calls out to be changed into that which should be.

One potentially useful difference between "aletheism" and what I guess could be called "welfarism" is that aletheists are biased against manipulation, misrepresentation, self-delusion and premature epistemic optimization.

When I try on the "aletheist" identity instead of the "altruist", I feel a clarity, honesty, and lack of controllingness, as well as perhaps some hard-to-express feeling from how the word "truth" is loaded in our culture, or in my personal cultural experience. As an aletheist, I follow reality without an agenda, and because moral truth is part of reality, I try to do the right thing. (That may make aletheism sound like a clear winner over "welfarism", but maybe "welfarism" is more "muscular", competitive, and effective, at least in the short-term. My preference/bias is with aletheism, for what it's worth.)

[1] I chose this term ["aletheism"] not with ancient Greek or Heideggerian resonances in mind, but because it's the modern Greek for "truth" according to https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=el&text=truth&op=translate

News: 29 November 2022

I decided to quit Twitter, but thought that deleting my Twitter would be too drastic. So I'm resolving not to check it. (I've done this before and we'll see how long I go this time.)

I started a project to help me keep in touch with the intellectual / artistic / cultural worlds where new things are happening and conversations are being had. This being a directory of intellectual / artistic / cultural sources.

I've been trying to find something to do for this blog, and I think what I will do next is movie reviews. I've done a couple so far, and it seems to be a productive format.

I think it's time to re-start my Bible commentary project (which will probably take between 5 and 15 years to finish). I started it last year, but maybe I wasn't ready.

News: 26 October 2022

For a few years I've felt like I was supposed to take a break from doing philosophy, but there hasn't seemed to have been a good time to do that. But now I think I will take that break. So unless there's something really important to address, I won't do philosophy for a while.

That accounts for a lot of what this blog is about, so maybe I won't post as often. But I will try to come up with other things to post. I still write on Twitter.

To keep my mind busy, I'm focusing more on learning Indonesian than I have so far. Also working on some music.

--

Update: I added a section on "domestic missions" to Things to Do.

Everything is Conscious Experience?

Epistemic status: I could delay posting this to try to perfect it more, but I guess I'm going to err on the side of posting it, then later on fixing it when I become aware of problems.

I don't think I've ever explained directly why I should think that everything is conscious experience.

Some people look for proof, and other people don't listen to that category, or are somewhere in-between. I will attempt a proof, and then discuss things from the perspective of epistemic uncertainty.

--

Certainty?

--

Argument

1. What conscious experience is, is conscious experience. That is what it is in itself, and it is nothing else, and can't be anything else. If conscious experience experienced something unconsciously, it would not be conscious, and would not be conscious experience.

2. Conscious experience is that which is consciously experienced, and thus is the only thing which can be consciously experienced.

3. We have experience of conscious experience and thus know that it exists. The question is whether non-conscious beings exist.

4. We can posit non-conscious beings. According to the argument being developed here, we don't presuppose anything about them other than that they are beings and that they are not conscious experience. What they are in a more positive sense would depend on which non-conscious beings we were talking about. But this argument needs to take into account non-conscious beings in general.

5. What non-conscious being is in itself is not conscious experience. So conscious experience can't experience it.

6. For conscious experience to change or be causally affected is for there to be a change in what it experiences based on itself or some other being.

7. If conscious experience can't experience non-conscious being, it can't be changed or causally affected by it.

8. Conscious experience can't experience non-conscious being, so it can't change or causally affect it.

9. The world we live in, the world which can affect us in any way, is completely made up of conscious experience.

--

25 September 2023:

I think in the Argument above, #6 was not clearly put. What I should have said was something like "For a conscious experience to change or be causally affected is for there to be a change in what it experiences based on itself or some other being. That experience that changes has to connect with the being that changes it, has to experience it."

--

Objection: Consciousness Monism might not work

(Pluralism: conscious experience and non-conscious being exists. Consciousness monism: only conscious experience exists. By "exist", perhaps I could really mean "exists in such a way that it can affect us".)

What if a world consisting entirely of conscious beings is incoherent? Maybe the world isn't reason-apt in this area, and neither pluralism nor consciousness monism work? Then, we are left to making decisions in uncertainty, or based on other considerations.

What are some problems with consciousness monism?

Here's one: How can there be multiple conscious beings? I am conscious of my own experience, and nothing else. How is it that I am not conscious of, say, God's experience? My experience body has boundaries. Speaking metaphorically, how does my experience "know" which boundaries it belongs to? Does it belong to God's boundaries, or to mine? Do the boundaries exist apart from the contents? (Then, maybe, "boundaries" = Berkeley's "minds", and "contents" = Berkeley's "ideas"?) I have thought that experiences themselves have causal power ("wills"). So which "boundaries" produce the will that arises from an experience?

Two responses:
a) "Somehow or other" God's experiences contain within their boundaries multiple sub-experiences (God's experience is of multiple boundaried experiences). I find myself able to conceive of this, mostly. Still, I'm somewhat unsatisfied.
b) These problems attend thoughts of any beings that overlap with or are contained by any others, including any non-conscious beings that are not in their own "solipsisms". So maybe the problem is in thinking that when two beings relate, the metaphor is overlap or containment, and not something like contact?

What would it mean for two conscious experiences to contact each other? Let's say there is Experience A and Experience B. What Experience A is, in itself, is Experience A, and what Experience B is, in itself, is Experience B. Since they touch, they participate in the edges of each other. But an experience body is a unitary thing (at least, so it seems in my experience -- and maybe by definition it is, if an experience body is a unit of experience). So they participate in the whole of each other while remaining separate. This is possible if they become identical copies of each other. They remain separate beings, so that consciousness monism is only a monism of substance, and does not mean that there is only one being. Experience A could contact only a part of Experience B, which could have many other experience bodies, some of these other experience bodies mirroring other beings' experience bodies besides Experience A. So there could be more to Experience B than just its mirroring of Experience A. If "Experience A" is "a creature's experience body" and "Experience B" is "God's experience bodies", then the creature contacts part of God's experience.

(This explanation is new to me and is different from the overlap/containment explanation I've favored in the past. Without investigating, my first thought is that this could cause problems with various things I've relied on in the past, such as "the set of all things" existing, and maybe others.)

Now, by allowing for contact (rather than overlap or containment), have I opened up a way for non-conscious being to interact with conscious experience, by a non-conscious being contacting rather than overlapping/containing/being-contained-by a conscious experience? No, because of #5 in the argument above ("What non-conscious being is in itself is not conscious experience. So conscious experience can't experience it."). Conscious experience can't experience even the edge of non-conscious being, because non-conscious being's edge is not conscious experience.

--

Objection: Becoming Conscious (Matrices vs. Metaphysical Darkness)

Can non-conscious being become conscious experience? If so, then maybe it could turn into conscious experience, affect another experience body, stop affecting it, turn back into non-conscious being.

This doesn't work because the past has to be able to cause the present. If the past is not made of conscious experience, it can't cause a present of conscious experience.

Or, if that argument proves unsound or controversial, then here is another:

If non-conscious being became conscious, it could no longer be affected by any non-conscious beings. So it would be cut off from them. But, until it became a conscious experience, it could not contact (or overlap, or contain) any conscious experience. It would be separated by "metaphysical darkness" from conscious experience. There is no way to cross metaphysical darkness, no way to relate through it or conceive of anything on the other side of it. It's a state of total disconnection, which inherently rules out any interaction. There's either darkness, contact, overlap, or containment, and only the last three allow beings to interact.

Two beings that are not contacting, overlapping, or containing each other can come to interact if they are both connected by a matrix (or set of matrices that form one big matrix). For example, in the world of conscious experience, space is a matrix that contain physical objects and allow them to find each other. Matrices contact, overlap, or contain each of the beings that they interrelate.

Non-conscious beings can't contact, overlap, or be contained by matrices made of conscious experience. So they are separate from conscious experience and if they changed into conscious beings at best could become isolated experience bodies (they still wouldn't affect the universe of conscious experience that we inhabit).

--

Objection: Consciousness Monism denies our natural intuitions that material things exist

I don't find it difficult to believe that matter exists, as a consciousness monist. In fact, I think there is something material about all experience, even noetic experience. There is a solidity and reality to all experience, as though it is made out of some substance.

From another angle, I like Berkeley's idea of the "perceptual object". The rock that I see is made up of perceptions of it. Its solidity is made up of experience. The rock is real, hurts the foot, breaks the leg, etc. While my personal experience of the rock and what it means are idiosyncratic, they are not divorced from a kind of objective reality of that exact particular rock. The only thing is that all of that reality mentioned in this paragraph is experienced.

Our natural intuitions are not always correct. Or, from another angle, they are always correct in a sense, but when we think about things scientifically, we can add new natural intuitions that follow from rational argument. (This is how we believe that rocks are made up of tiny, invisible objects called molecules.)

The idea with this post is to present a scientific/rational kind of eye-opening, so that new natural intuitions can be observed in our "noetic environment". Like pointing out an object on a table which your eye technically took in already, but which you never noticed, but now you do.

I don't think consciousness monism is a serious offender against natural intuitions and can be as natural to believe as something like the theory that things are made out of things we can't see.

--

Probabilities/Credences

--

Here is another perspective, for those more attuned to a worldview of epistemic uncertainty.

--

Credences

1. We know that conscious experience exists. The question is whether non-conscious being exists. Let's say, naively, that since the existence of non-conscious being is intuitively plausible, but we have no evidence or argument (at this point), to lead us more specifically, that we say that there is a 0.5 probability that non-conscious being exists. ("It either exists or it doesn't, even chance it does or doesn't, 50-50 chance.") (So P(nCB)₁ = 0.5).

2. The numbered "Argument" I gave above, including my responses to the "Objections", is plausible and has some evidential weight, we'll say. Maybe it sounds good, but we have somewhat lost the ability to commit to beliefs because we think that there might be some counterargument we haven't heard yet. Let's say we aren't convinced of it, but it also could be true. This substitutes for coming to a conclusion of "proved"/"disproved". The naive value here to assign to how the "Argument" affects credence will again be 0.5. (So P(nCB)₂ = 0.5).

3. Should P(nCB)₂ be combined in some way with P(nCB)₁ to produce P(nCB)_{1 and 2} (probability of non-conscious beings given both step 1 and 2 in this section)? There's probably a neat answer to this that I don't know. I'm not really sure what to say. Part of me wants to say that a) the new evidence provided by the 0.5 credence "Argument" should cause me to update in some direction, maybe weakly toward P(nCB)_{1 and 2} = 0 (like to a credence of 0.45). Another part of me feels vaguely like b) it doesn't work that way, like 2 supersedes 1. I rejected the earlier thought c) that 1 and 2 "stack" so that P(nCB)_{1 and 2} = (0.5 * 0.5) = 0.25. Maybe a) is a compromise between b) and c).

N. Add any other arguments for or against non-conscious beings.

The exact numbers used here for these credences should be updated by the interested reader to reflect their own beliefs, and, unfortunately, I haven't produced a finished formula, but this provides a sort of template for calculating credences, and maybe a weak first anchoring value of P(nCB) (such that there is a 50%, or somewhat less than 50%, chance that there are non-conscious beings).

Blog Chapter 4 Summary and Bibliography

Looking at my blog posts, I realized that they naturally came in different periods or phases. The 2019 posts were one, then there were those from 2020 - 2021, and then those from 2021 - 2022. In spring of 2022, I decided to deliberately create a phase, which I called a "blog chapter", this being the fourth one.

I think the previous three were things that arose spontaneously and in response to my own needs, while this fourth one was premeditated and a bit artificial. Somewhat like doing a year of school.

This chapter has been about the "exilic-familial", among other things. I explored themes of nation, culture, family, childhood, and education. These topics connect to a vision that I had before officially starting the blog chapter (or, I was hypomanic and wrote something), about "cultural altruism", a path for those trying to do good through culture or in cultural areas, articulating with art, religion, humanities, politics, and effective altruism and especially its "Long Reflection" idea. When we try to govern the world, we are, and should be, informed by nation, culture, family, childhood, and education.

Two specific cultures were themes, Jewish (especially as I best know it, from the Old Testament), and Indonesian. Jewish culture is a family of holiness, and also has a history of enduring exile. I saw in Judaism (at least in the Old Testament itself) a kind of honesty coming out of having lost, and the idea of not winning and that being a route to peace and holiness. I saw in it families broken and reconciling.

Indonesian culture is (to me) about syncretism and unity-in-diversity, as well as a connection to Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Indonesia is a nation that attempts to pull together diverse groups, and which has a history of mixing religions. (I didn't really explore these themes in depth, but only discussed Indonesia a little.)

The war in Ukraine and the polarization of US politics are in the background.

This chapter, written in about seven months if you include the cultural altruism writings drafted in March and April, surprisingly (to me) is in the same order of magnitude of number of words as the three preceding chapters combined, about 20% less. I keep feeling like I do the math wrong when I count (maybe somehow I do), but I think it's right. I didn't feel like I was working any harder when I wrote. Perhaps I was under the influence of hypomania? I clearly had it in late March, but maybe it continued in a non-obvious, attenuated form throughout the seven months.

I've felt different ways over the last few weeks. Sometimes depleted, sometimes not. I've thought about quitting or drastically cutting back on writing, and also going on full bore. I think what has been particularly hard has been working to finish this after I had already moved on from being into this blog chapter. I could use much of myself as usual to work, but not all of me.

--

These are the books reviewed in this blog chapter. Links are to my reviews:

Holy Resilience, by David M. Carr, hardback (1st ed.?) ISBN 978-0-300-20456-8

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bantam Classic paperback, ISBN 0-553-21277-X

In the Shadow of the Banyan, by Vaddey Ratner, 1st hardback ed., ISBN 978-1-4516-5770-8

Between Man and Man, by Martin Buber, tr. Ronald Gregor Smith, Macmillan Paperbacks Edition, 1965, no ISBN

Creative Destruction, by Tyler Cowen, paperback, ISBN 0-691-11783-7

The Meaning of Marriage, by Timothy Keller (with Kathy Keller), hardback (1st ed.?), ISBN 978-0-525-95247-3

Along the Way, ed. Ron Bruner and Dana Kennamer Pemberton, paperback (1st ed.?), ISBN 978-0-891-12460-3

On the Genealogy of Morality, by Friedrich Nietzsche, tr. Carol Diethe, Cambridge edition, paperback (Revised Student ed.), ISBN 978-0-521-69163-5

Teaching Children to Care, by Ruth Sidney Charney, paperback (1st ed.?), ISBN 0-9618636-1-7

Reading List Postview: The Long Reflection

I read some articles and books about the Long Reflection. I don't have a lot to add to the preview for this reading list (which goes in depth in considering problems with the Long Reflection and ways I think it should, will, or would turn out), other than the notes I have taken on the readings, and also the reviews of the two books I included in the list, On the Genealogy of Morality and Teaching Children to Care.

I wish I could be more helpful in relating what I got from my readings with the issues from the preview, to be able to write a nice summary here, but I guess this will have to do, for now, or for the foreseeable future.