ISTM that the good can be arbitrarily defined as the absence of a bad, and vice versa.
Only if you’re speaking in an abstract way that’s divorced from the physical reality of the hardware you run on. Physically, neurologically, and chemically, we have different systems for acquisition and aversion, and good/bad are only opposites at the extremes. At the hardware level, labeling something “bad” is different from labeling it “not very good”, in terms of both experiential and behavioral consequences. (By which I mean that those two things also produce different biases in your thinking.)
Some people have a hard time grokking this, because intellectually, it’s easier to think of a 1-dimensional good/bad spectrum. My personal hypothesis is that we evolved a simple mechanism for predicting others’ attitudes using the 1-dimensional model, as a 1-dimensional predictive model is more than good enough for figuring out that predators want to attack you and prey wants to escape you.
However, if you want to understand your own behavior, or really accurately model the behavior of others (or even just be aware of the truth of how the platform works!), then you’ve got to abandon the built-in 1D model and move up to at least a 2D one, where the goodness and badness of things can vary semi-independently.
Only if you’re speaking in an abstract way that’s divorced from the physical reality of the hardware you run on. Physically, neurologically, and chemically, we have different systems for acquisition and aversion, and good/bad are only opposites at the extremes. At the hardware level, labeling something “bad” is different from labeling it “not very good”, in terms of both experiential and behavioral consequences. (By which I mean that those two things also produce different biases in your thinking.)
Some people have a hard time grokking this, because intellectually, it’s easier to think of a 1-dimensional good/bad spectrum. My personal hypothesis is that we evolved a simple mechanism for predicting others’ attitudes using the 1-dimensional model, as a 1-dimensional predictive model is more than good enough for figuring out that predators want to attack you and prey wants to escape you.
However, if you want to understand your own behavior, or really accurately model the behavior of others (or even just be aware of the truth of how the platform works!), then you’ve got to abandon the built-in 1D model and move up to at least a 2D one, where the goodness and badness of things can vary semi-independently.