pjeby: Can you subjectively discriminate brain states of yours with high medial prefrontal cortex activity and brain states of yours with low medial prefrontal cortex activity? What behavior is primed by each brain state?
Alicorn has intuited that brain states with low mPFC activity prime rationalization of oppression and collusion in oppression. Alicorn also intuits that that signals of social approval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, as well as absence of signals of social disapproval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, are signals of social approval of oppression and of willingness to collude in and rationalize oppression.
Also, Alicorn did not express these intuitions clearly.
(Also, on this subject: I think utilitarian moral theorizing and transhumanist moral theorizing are two other brain states that are, by most people, mainly intuitively distinguished as characterizable by low mPFC activity. This makes not signaling disapproval of utilitarianism or transhumanism feel like signaling approval of totalitarianism and slavery.)
alicorn has intuited that brain states with low mPFC activity prime rationalization of oppression and collusion in oppression. alicorn also intuits that that signals of social approval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, as well as absence of signals of social disapproval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, are signals of social approval of oppression and of willingness to collude in and rationalize oppression.
Wow, that’s an awful lot of projection in a tiny space—both your projection onto her, and the projection you’re projecting she’s making.
I don’t think that you can treat the mere use of the word “get” to imply the sort of states you’re talking about, for several reasons.
First, I think it’s interesting that the study in question did not have men look at people—they looked at photographs of people. Photographs of people do not have intentions, so it’d be a bit strange to try to figure out the intentions of a photograph. (Also, human beings’ tendency to dehumanize faceless persons is well-known; that’s why they put hoods on people before they torture them.)
Second, I don’t think that a man responding to a woman’s body as if it were an object—it is one, after all—is a problem in and of itself, any more than I think it’s a problem when my wife admires, say, the body of Jean Claude van Damme when he’s doing one of those “splits” moves in one of his action movies. Being able to admire something that’s attractive, independent of the fact that there’s a person inside it, is not a problem, IMO.
After all, even the study you mention notes that only the sexist men went on to deactivate their mPFC… so it actually demonstrates the independence of enjoyment from oppression or objectification in the negative sense.
So, I’m not going to signal social disapproval of such admiration and enjoyment experiences, whether they’re engaged in by men OR women. It’s a false dichotomy to assume that the presence of “objective” thought is equal to the absence of subjective/empathic thought.
After all, my wife and I are both perfectly capable of treating each other as sex objects, or telling one another we want to “get some of that” in reference to each other’s body parts without it being depersonalizing in the least. (Quite the opposite, in fact.)
We can also refer to someone else (male or female) as needing to “get some” without any hostile or depersonalizing intent towards the unspecified and indeterminate party from whom they would hypothetically be getting “some”.
In short, both your own projections and the projections you project Alicorn to be making, are incorrect generalizations: even the study you reference doesn’t support a link between “objectification” and low mPFC, except in people who are already sexist. You can’t therefore use even evidence of “object-oriented” thinking (and the word “get” is extremely low quality evidence of such, anyway!) as evidence of sexism. The study doesn’t support it, and neither does common sense.
It’s a false dichotomy to assume that the presence of “objective” thought is equal to the absence of subjective/empathic thought.
Yes. But when women like Alicorn intuitively solve the signaling and negotiation game represented in their heads, using their prior belief distributions about mens’ hidden qualities and dispositions, their beliefs about mens’ utility functions conditional on disposition, and their own utility functions, then their solutions predict high costs for any strategy of tolerating objectifying statements by unfamiliar men of unknown quality. It’s not about whether or not objectification implies oppressiveness with certainty. It’s about whether or not women think objectification is more convenient or useful to unfamiliar men who are disposed to depersonalization and oppression, compared with its convenience or usefulness to unfamiliar men who are not disposed to depersonalization and oppression. If you want to change this, you have to either change some quantity in womens’ intuitive representation of this signaling game, improve their solution procedure, or argue for a norm that women should disregard this intuition.
Change what? Your massive projection onto what “women like Alicorn” do? I’d think that’d be up to you to change.
Similarly, if I don’t like what Alicorn is doing, and I can’t convince her to change that, then it’s my problem… just as her not being able to convince men to speak the way she wants is hers.
At some point, all problems are our own problems. You can ask other people to change, but then you can either accept the world as it is, or suffer needlessly.
(To forestall the inevitable analogies and arguments: “accept” does not mean “not try to change”—it means, “not react with negative emotion to”. If you took the previous paragraph to mean that nobody should fight racism or sexism, you are mistaken. It’s easier to change a thing you accept as a fact, because your brain is not motivated to deny it or “should” it away, and you can then actually pay attention to the human being whose behavior you’d like to change. You can’t yell a racist or sexist into actually changing, only into being quiet. You can, however, educate and accept some people into changing. As the religious people say, “love the sinner, hate the sin”… only I go one step further and say you don’t have to hate something in order to change it… and that it’s usually easier if you don’t.)
The double negative is because of peoples’ different assumed feelings about utilitarianism or transhumanism and totalitarianism or slavery. There is a strong consensus about totalitarianism and slavery, but there is not a strong consensus about utilitarianism and transhumanism. So I expect most people to feel like other people will assume that they already disapprove of totalitarianism or slavery, but not to feel like other people will assume that they already disapprove of utilitarianism or transhumanism.
Thanks for the clarification. I think that you should not have indicated it in such a subtle way: either you should have spelled it out, as in the follow-up, or you should have probably left it out. It’s the kind of thing footnotes are good for.
I think you intuited that there are some states of mind that cause oppression of women when they are socially tolerated and approved. I also think you intuited that, if women see men in a forum saying things that might be expressions of those states of mind, and see that those things are tolerated, it will cause the women to feel uncomfortable in that forum. I think that your intuition does refer to a real difference between states of mind that can be objectively characterized. (I don’t mean to say that you intuited that mPFC measurements were part of that objective characterization.)
I think you intuited that there are some states of mind that cause oppression of women when they are socially tolerated and approved.
I think you’re mistaken. I’m not a consequentialist! I can complain about some thing X without necessarily thinking it causes anything bad, and especially without thinking that X is a problem because it causes something bad. I think objectifying people in thought, word or deed is wrong. I can still think that the “thought” and “word” varieties of objectification are wrong even if they don’t lead to the “deed” kind, so it’s not at all necessary for me to have intuited the leap you suggest. That doesn’t make it false, it just means you’re reading your own views into mine.
But… if objectification never caused oppression, would you still want to complain about it or think it was wrong? Causally? In that world, what would be the cause of your wish to complain about it or think it was wrong?
My ethical views are based on rights. I think that people have the right to be thought of and spoken about as people, not as objects. Therefore, thinking or speaking of people as objects is a violation of that right. Therefore, under my ethical system, it is wrong, even if it really never went any farther.
I’m happy enough to accept that people should be spoken of as people. But I can’t get my head round the idea that we have a right to the contents of other people’s heads being a certain way.
But what does the word right mean to you? To me, it mostly means “the state does or should guarantee this”. But I’m guessing that can’t be what you have in mind.
Can rights conflict in your understanding of the term? Can you have a right to someone not thinking certain thoughts, while at the same time they have a right to think them anyway?
My use of the word “right” has nothing to do with any political structure. If you have a word that carries less of a poli-sci connotation that otherwise means more or less the same thing (i.e. a fact about a person that imposes obligations on agents that causally interact with that person) then I’ll happily switch to reduce confusion, but I haven’t run across a more suitable word yet.
My ethical theory is not fully developed. I’ve only said this on three or four places on the site, so perhaps you missed it. But my first-pass intuition about that is that while people may not have the right to think objectifying thoughts, they do have the right not to be interfered with in thinking them.
That seems cumbersome, although maybe in lengthy expositions I could get away with saying “moral right” once, footnoting it, and saying just “right” for the rest of it...
But… if violations of rights never caused oppression, would you still want to complain about them or think they were wrong? Causally? In that world, what would be the cause of your wish to complain about them or think they were wrong?
Want to? Maybe not. There are other demands on my time, after all, and it’s already annoying enough being the only person who (locally) catches these things here in the actual world where the objectification is more hazardous. (It was never my ambition to be the feminism police or the token girl on the site, I assure you.) I would still think it was wrong, but you keep emphasizing causality and I’m just not sure why you think that’s an interesting question. I guess for the same cause as the (beginnings of) the development of my ethical theory to start out with, which aren’t even clearly memorable to me.
. . . you keep emphasizing causality and I’m just not sure why you think that’s an interesting question.
This is hard to explain.
What makes it an interesting question for me is your disagreement with my causal explanation of your motivations (that I gave to pjeby, so he would understand your motivations and not dismiss them).
I think you intuited that there are some states of mind that cause oppression of women when they are socially tolerated and approved.
which could be reworded as,
I think the cause of your being motivated to object to objectification is that you intuited that objectification is a state of mind that causes oppression of women when it is socially tolerated and approved.
I think you’re mistaken. I’m not a consequentialist! I can complain about some thing X without necessarily thinking it causes anything bad, and especially without thinking that X is a problem because it causes something bad.
This means,
I think you’re mistaken. I’m not a consequentialist! If I am motivated to think that objectification is a problem generally, and complain about instances of objectification, it does not necessarily mean that I think it causes something bad.
But to counterargue what I had meant, and what I had thought I had said, you would have had to say:
I think you’re mistaken. I’m not a consequentialist! If I am motivated to think that objectification is a problem generally, and complain about instances of objectification, it does not necessarily mean that I ever intuited the emotional association that objectification or toleration of objectification could sometimes cause situations (such as oppression) that I and other women would, reasonably, want to avoid being in.
But if that is true, then how could you be caused to be motivated to think that objectification is a problem generally, and to complain about instances of it?
If the cause of your motivation to think that objectification is a problem is that it is a violation of a right, then what was the cause of your motivation to think that objectification is a violation of a right? Would you also say:
I think you’re mistaken. I’m not a consequentialist! If I am motivated to think that objectification is a violation of a right, this does not necessarily mean that I ever intuited the emotional association that objectification or toleration of objectification could sometimes cause situations (such as oppression) that I would want to avoid, even though the ways I would want to avoid those situations would be the same ways that I would want to avoid the situations (such as oppression) that could sometimes be caused by other violations of rights or by toleration of other violations of rights.
But if that is true, then how could you be caused to be motivated to think that objectification is a violation of a right?
I think there is human-universal psychological machinery for intuitively learning subtle differences between states of mind in other people that might be advantageous or disadvantageous to oneself or one’s allies, and for negotiating about those states of mind and the behaviors characteristic of those states of mind. “Objectification” and “depersonalization” would be two of these states of mind. I think the cause of your being motivated to think that objectification is bad, and the cause of your being motivated to think that objectification is a violation of a right, is that in your mind this machinery intuitively learned that “objectification” is a state of mind in other people that might be disadvantageous to you or people you cared about, and the machinery made you want to negotiate about objectifying states of mind in other people and the behaviors characteristic of those states of mind. (I think the concepts of “rights” and “dignity” are partly ways to talk about intuitions like that.)
If I am mistaken that this is an essential part of the cause of your motivations, then what is the cause of your motivations? What is the alternative that makes me mistaken?
If the cause of your motivation to think that objectification is a problem is that it is a violation of a right, then what was the cause of your motivation to think that objectification is a violation of a right?
At that point, I’m relying on intuition.
I hope that answers your question, because I didn’t understand anything you said after that.
Steve was attempting to go half-meta and have you independently come to the conclusion he had reached about where that intuition came from by getting you to look back at the probable sequences of events that had led to the intuition and realize that your position was simply a higher level abstraction of the actual causal process that he was describing, thus allowing him to credibly claim to pjeby and others that your objections to perceived objectification were not entirely silly and thereby resolve the whole gender wars thing via a chain of absurdly long and complex sentences whose veracity is totally overpowered by their inscrutability.
I’m not a consequentialist! I can complain about some thing X without necessarily thinking it causes anything bad, and especially without thinking that X is a problem because it causes something bad.
It’s not against consequentialism to see some things as bad in themselves, not because they cause something else to be bad. It’s easy to see: for it to be possible for something else to be bad, that something else needs to be bad in itself.
pjeby: Can you subjectively discriminate brain states of yours with high medial prefrontal cortex activity and brain states of yours with low medial prefrontal cortex activity? What behavior is primed by each brain state?
Alicorn has intuited that brain states with low mPFC activity prime rationalization of oppression and collusion in oppression. Alicorn also intuits that that signals of social approval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, as well as absence of signals of social disapproval of intuitively distinguished brain states characterized by low mPFC activity, are signals of social approval of oppression and of willingness to collude in and rationalize oppression.
Also, Alicorn did not express these intuitions clearly.
(Also, on this subject: I think utilitarian moral theorizing and transhumanist moral theorizing are two other brain states that are, by most people, mainly intuitively distinguished as characterizable by low mPFC activity. This makes not signaling disapproval of utilitarianism or transhumanism feel like signaling approval of totalitarianism and slavery.)
[edit fix username capitalization]
Wow, that’s an awful lot of projection in a tiny space—both your projection onto her, and the projection you’re projecting she’s making.
I don’t think that you can treat the mere use of the word “get” to imply the sort of states you’re talking about, for several reasons.
First, I think it’s interesting that the study in question did not have men look at people—they looked at photographs of people. Photographs of people do not have intentions, so it’d be a bit strange to try to figure out the intentions of a photograph. (Also, human beings’ tendency to dehumanize faceless persons is well-known; that’s why they put hoods on people before they torture them.)
Second, I don’t think that a man responding to a woman’s body as if it were an object—it is one, after all—is a problem in and of itself, any more than I think it’s a problem when my wife admires, say, the body of Jean Claude van Damme when he’s doing one of those “splits” moves in one of his action movies. Being able to admire something that’s attractive, independent of the fact that there’s a person inside it, is not a problem, IMO.
After all, even the study you mention notes that only the sexist men went on to deactivate their mPFC… so it actually demonstrates the independence of enjoyment from oppression or objectification in the negative sense.
So, I’m not going to signal social disapproval of such admiration and enjoyment experiences, whether they’re engaged in by men OR women. It’s a false dichotomy to assume that the presence of “objective” thought is equal to the absence of subjective/empathic thought.
After all, my wife and I are both perfectly capable of treating each other as sex objects, or telling one another we want to “get some of that” in reference to each other’s body parts without it being depersonalizing in the least. (Quite the opposite, in fact.)
We can also refer to someone else (male or female) as needing to “get some” without any hostile or depersonalizing intent towards the unspecified and indeterminate party from whom they would hypothetically be getting “some”.
In short, both your own projections and the projections you project Alicorn to be making, are incorrect generalizations: even the study you reference doesn’t support a link between “objectification” and low mPFC, except in people who are already sexist. You can’t therefore use even evidence of “object-oriented” thinking (and the word “get” is extremely low quality evidence of such, anyway!) as evidence of sexism. The study doesn’t support it, and neither does common sense.
Yes. But when women like Alicorn intuitively solve the signaling and negotiation game represented in their heads, using their prior belief distributions about mens’ hidden qualities and dispositions, their beliefs about mens’ utility functions conditional on disposition, and their own utility functions, then their solutions predict high costs for any strategy of tolerating objectifying statements by unfamiliar men of unknown quality. It’s not about whether or not objectification implies oppressiveness with certainty. It’s about whether or not women think objectification is more convenient or useful to unfamiliar men who are disposed to depersonalization and oppression, compared with its convenience or usefulness to unfamiliar men who are not disposed to depersonalization and oppression. If you want to change this, you have to either change some quantity in womens’ intuitive representation of this signaling game, improve their solution procedure, or argue for a norm that women should disregard this intuition.
Change what? Your massive projection onto what “women like Alicorn” do? I’d think that’d be up to you to change.
Similarly, if I don’t like what Alicorn is doing, and I can’t convince her to change that, then it’s my problem… just as her not being able to convince men to speak the way she wants is hers.
At some point, all problems are our own problems. You can ask other people to change, but then you can either accept the world as it is, or suffer needlessly.
(To forestall the inevitable analogies and arguments: “accept” does not mean “not try to change”—it means, “not react with negative emotion to”. If you took the previous paragraph to mean that nobody should fight racism or sexism, you are mistaken. It’s easier to change a thing you accept as a fact, because your brain is not motivated to deny it or “should” it away, and you can then actually pay attention to the human being whose behavior you’d like to change. You can’t yell a racist or sexist into actually changing, only into being quiet. You can, however, educate and accept some people into changing. As the religious people say, “love the sinner, hate the sin”… only I go one step further and say you don’t have to hate something in order to change it… and that it’s usually easier if you don’t.)
Why the double negative in the last sentence? Are you claiming that utilitarianism and transhumanism feel stronger than totalitarianism and slavery?
The double negative is because of peoples’ different assumed feelings about utilitarianism or transhumanism and totalitarianism or slavery. There is a strong consensus about totalitarianism and slavery, but there is not a strong consensus about utilitarianism and transhumanism. So I expect most people to feel like other people will assume that they already disapprove of totalitarianism or slavery, but not to feel like other people will assume that they already disapprove of utilitarianism or transhumanism.
Thanks for the clarification. I think that you should not have indicated it in such a subtle way: either you should have spelled it out, as in the follow-up, or you should have probably left it out. It’s the kind of thing footnotes are good for.
Can I really be said to have intuited something that makes less than no sense to me?
I think you intuited that there are some states of mind that cause oppression of women when they are socially tolerated and approved. I also think you intuited that, if women see men in a forum saying things that might be expressions of those states of mind, and see that those things are tolerated, it will cause the women to feel uncomfortable in that forum. I think that your intuition does refer to a real difference between states of mind that can be objectively characterized. (I don’t mean to say that you intuited that mPFC measurements were part of that objective characterization.)
I think you’re mistaken. I’m not a consequentialist! I can complain about some thing X without necessarily thinking it causes anything bad, and especially without thinking that X is a problem because it causes something bad. I think objectifying people in thought, word or deed is wrong. I can still think that the “thought” and “word” varieties of objectification are wrong even if they don’t lead to the “deed” kind, so it’s not at all necessary for me to have intuited the leap you suggest. That doesn’t make it false, it just means you’re reading your own views into mine.
But… if objectification never caused oppression, would you still want to complain about it or think it was wrong? Causally? In that world, what would be the cause of your wish to complain about it or think it was wrong?
My ethical views are based on rights. I think that people have the right to be thought of and spoken about as people, not as objects. Therefore, thinking or speaking of people as objects is a violation of that right. Therefore, under my ethical system, it is wrong, even if it really never went any farther.
I’m happy enough to accept that people should be spoken of as people. But I can’t get my head round the idea that we have a right to the contents of other people’s heads being a certain way.
But what does the word right mean to you? To me, it mostly means “the state does or should guarantee this”. But I’m guessing that can’t be what you have in mind.
Can rights conflict in your understanding of the term? Can you have a right to someone not thinking certain thoughts, while at the same time they have a right to think them anyway?
My use of the word “right” has nothing to do with any political structure. If you have a word that carries less of a poli-sci connotation that otherwise means more or less the same thing (i.e. a fact about a person that imposes obligations on agents that causally interact with that person) then I’ll happily switch to reduce confusion, but I haven’t run across a more suitable word yet.
My ethical theory is not fully developed. I’ve only said this on three or four places on the site, so perhaps you missed it. But my first-pass intuition about that is that while people may not have the right to think objectifying thoughts, they do have the right not to be interfered with in thinking them.
Perhaps “moral right” or somesuch.
That seems cumbersome, although maybe in lengthy expositions I could get away with saying “moral right” once, footnoting it, and saying just “right” for the rest of it...
But… if violations of rights never caused oppression, would you still want to complain about them or think they were wrong? Causally? In that world, what would be the cause of your wish to complain about them or think they were wrong?
Want to? Maybe not. There are other demands on my time, after all, and it’s already annoying enough being the only person who (locally) catches these things here in the actual world where the objectification is more hazardous. (It was never my ambition to be the feminism police or the token girl on the site, I assure you.) I would still think it was wrong, but you keep emphasizing causality and I’m just not sure why you think that’s an interesting question. I guess for the same cause as the (beginnings of) the development of my ethical theory to start out with, which aren’t even clearly memorable to me.
This is hard to explain.
What makes it an interesting question for me is your disagreement with my causal explanation of your motivations (that I gave to pjeby, so he would understand your motivations and not dismiss them).
When I said,
which could be reworded as,
you said, intending it as a counterargument,
This means,
But to counterargue what I had meant, and what I had thought I had said, you would have had to say:
But if that is true, then how could you be caused to be motivated to think that objectification is a problem generally, and to complain about instances of it?
If the cause of your motivation to think that objectification is a problem is that it is a violation of a right, then what was the cause of your motivation to think that objectification is a violation of a right? Would you also say:
But if that is true, then how could you be caused to be motivated to think that objectification is a violation of a right?
I think there is human-universal psychological machinery for intuitively learning subtle differences between states of mind in other people that might be advantageous or disadvantageous to oneself or one’s allies, and for negotiating about those states of mind and the behaviors characteristic of those states of mind. “Objectification” and “depersonalization” would be two of these states of mind. I think the cause of your being motivated to think that objectification is bad, and the cause of your being motivated to think that objectification is a violation of a right, is that in your mind this machinery intuitively learned that “objectification” is a state of mind in other people that might be disadvantageous to you or people you cared about, and the machinery made you want to negotiate about objectifying states of mind in other people and the behaviors characteristic of those states of mind. (I think the concepts of “rights” and “dignity” are partly ways to talk about intuitions like that.)
If I am mistaken that this is an essential part of the cause of your motivations, then what is the cause of your motivations? What is the alternative that makes me mistaken?
At that point, I’m relying on intuition.
I hope that answers your question, because I didn’t understand anything you said after that.
Steve was attempting to go half-meta and have you independently come to the conclusion he had reached about where that intuition came from by getting you to look back at the probable sequences of events that had led to the intuition and realize that your position was simply a higher level abstraction of the actual causal process that he was describing, thus allowing him to credibly claim to pjeby and others that your objections to perceived objectification were not entirely silly and thereby resolve the whole gender wars thing via a chain of absurdly long and complex sentences whose veracity is totally overpowered by their inscrutability.
I’m stupid that way too sometimes.
It’s not against consequentialism to see some things as bad in themselves, not because they cause something else to be bad. It’s easy to see: for it to be possible for something else to be bad, that something else needs to be bad in itself.