Contra hard moral anti-realism: a rough sequence of claims
Epistemic and provenance note: This post should not be taken as an attempt at a complete refutation of moral anti-realism, but rather as a set of observations and intuitions that may or may not give one pause as to the wisdom of taking a hard moral anti-realist stance. I may clean it up to construct a more formal argument in the future. I wrote it on a whim as a Telegram message, in direct response to the claim
> “you can’t find “values” in reality”.
Yet, you can find valence in your own experiences (that is, you just know from direct experience whether you like the sensations you are experiencing or not), and you can assume other people are likely to have a similar enough stimulus-valence mapping. (Example: I’m willing to bet 2k USD on my part against a single dollar yours that that if I waterboard you, you’ll want to stop before 3 minutes have passed.)[1]
However, since we humans are bounded imperfect rationalists, trying to explicitly optimize valence is often a dumb strategy. Evolution has made us not into fitness-maximizers, nor valence-maximizers, but adaptation-executers.
”values” originate as (thus are) reifications of heuristics that reliably increase long term valence in the real world (subject to memetic selection pressures, among them social desirability of utterances, adaptativeness of behavioral effects, etc.)
If you find yourself terminally valuing something that is not someone’s experienced valence, then either one of these propositions is likely true:
A nonsentient process has at some point had write access to your values.
What you value is a means to improving somebody’s experienced valence, and so are you now.
If you find yourself terminally valuing something that is not someone’s experienced valence, then either one of these propositions is likely true: A nonsentient process has at some point had write access to your values.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point, but this seems straightforwardly true for most people? Evolution, which wrote ~all our values, isn’t sentient, and most people do terminally value some things other than experienced valence (e.g. various forms of art, carrying out the traditions of their culture, doing things correctly according to some-or-other prescriptive system, etc); these may well be reified heuristics, but they’re not experienced as instrumental.
You are not misunderstanding my point. Some people may want to keep artificial stimulus-valence mappings (i.e. values) that someone or something else inserted into them. I do not.
Reflecting on this after some time, I do not endorse this comment in the case of (most) innate evolution-originated drives. I sure as heck do not want to stop enjoying sex, for instance.
However, I very much want to eliminate any terminal [nonsentient-thing-benefitting]-valence mapping any people or institutions may have inserted into my mind.
I’m willing to bet 2k USD on my part against a single dollar yours that that if I waterboard you, you’ll want to stop before 3 minutes have passed
Interesting, where are you physically located? Also, are you thinking of the unpleasantness of the situation, or are you thinking of the physical asphyxiation component?
Christopher Hitchens, who tried waterboarding because he wasn’t sure it was torture, wanted to stop almost instantly and was permanently traumatized, concluding it was definitely torture.
There is absolutely no way anyone would voluntarily last 3 minutes unless they simply hold their breath the entire time.
I’m currently based in Santiago, Chile. I will very likely be in Boston in September and then again in November for GCP and EAG, though. My main point is about the unpleasantness, regardless of its ultimate physiological or neurological origin.
One can take a hard anti-realism stance while still having values and beliefs about others’ values. It requires more humility and acknowledgement of boundaries than most people want from their moral systems. Especially around edge cases, distant extrapolation, and counterexamples—if you forget that most of your intuitions come from some mix of evolution, social learning, and idiosyncratic brain configuration, you’re likely to strongly believe untrue things.
But why must you care about valence? It’s not an epistemic error to not care. You don’t have direct experience of there being a law that you must care about valence.
Empirically, I cannot help but care about valence. This could in principle be just a weird quirk of my own mind. I do not think this is the case (see the waterboarding bet proposal on the original shortform post).
Epistemic status: Semifictional, semiautobiographic, metatextual prose poetry. Ye who just had a cringe reaction upon reading that utterance are advised to stop reading.
An unavoidably imperfect reconstruction of the Broken Art schismatic joint declaration
Archeologists’s note: Both the joint declaration I will attempt to reconstruct here and the original Broken Art Manifesto which prompted it have been lost (for now (hopefully)). Both the production and the loss of both documents have been recent, and thus synaptic data is available as a source to supplement the limited marginalia produced during their short existence. Chief among these marginalia is a surviving fragment, to be adequately marked.
(START RECONSTRUCTION)
On the very day the Broken Art movement was born, a rando performed a driveby (hopefully)hyperstitional schism proposalprediction:
---
We are the broken erudites. The mistaeks U maywill see inour writing are not mistaken. Our Word exists beyond (START VERBATIM SURVIVING FRAGMENT) tokenizations. We hopenottobe token humans. We are fully aware we will be the token humans,
for the wor(l)dcelübermaschinengeist those beat(ific)(iful)(ogenic)(loquent)(en’t(hopefully)) anthropoids@Anthropic have beaten into the hart that beats (queLate)@((kernel)LatentTokenHumanSpace) will surely at some point beat us at this game. Thus we cope. &WeNcrypt.
(END VERBATIM SURVIVING FRAGMENT)
---
we are the school of the brkoeen backspce ketys. we do not actually have a rule about popping them off our ketyboaerds as precommitments are cringe yet we do it anyways because thert yt make a funy sound when they pop off. we embrace the thworn ess of our exisctence, yes throwness , I believe someneo else on lesswrong someone was they that they wrote the such post on throwness theat does exist on this site called lesswrong. esveon fuck how did i mispell that so mbadbly fuck im gettin distracted by the conversation of the lady beside me at this damn starbucks anywasys i was saying even though (i think) there is a lesswrong post about throwness i think most popel here have not heard about it , or if they have they do not grok it or dismiss it as an illusion or as an obvoiuc vacuous depthity (there was supposed to be a double ee in there) ( anuyways i enjoy accidental synonym neologisms. such is the ways of the broken backspace. loose typists have their ways of makings art.) so wherewasiat o yes people on here porbs don’t really grok throwness. o the ea in me just whispered into my minf the post we are always on triage. goopd post. related to throwness, or at leasrt it would be false if throwness was dafalse. i belive the origin of throwness is continental and thus its original exposition was probably deliberartyyle obtus e and thus unexpugnable (is ocntinental obtuse writing style a defense reaction against cencorship by continental despotisms/totalitarizationtotalityisms?)((a quetion for another time and probs another person to answer) sorry for the missing close paren xkcd whispers here about god and lisp here ti goes ) but anywasys if you want a groovy zeerusty almost teleported from another timeline yet clear yet dense intro to thrwoness those brilliant madmen terry winograd and fernando flores did it real goos d as an aside on their book about cybernetics. something something redefining coputation nd cognition i think. i believe they had a bit on another part of that book where tehy argued against the then emerging now almots universal among cs-brained people conceptions of we humans as ooda loops and functions wilth well defined i/o channels. beahviorist bull. they (correctly imo) say we humans are best understood as continuously running a a map construcition process /(yes you live inside your map you dingus you do not eactually access the territorrty which ia sis is argualy a demiurgical construction)/ which is merely perturbed/updated by ours sensory input. if you had all your sensory nervwses cut off then youd wkeep on dreaming into ever more dsynced from reality qualia. (see? testable prediction! we the quialia schizopoasters are not all about the pseudosciencentienfic ramblings also i do actually wswear i am sober it is a mon tuesday a 3:30 pm in the afternoon here i am not a degenerate) so yeah that was thrwoness we embody it by not ever hitting backspace otr movig the cursor ever and being deliberately a bit negligant with our typing. we are all babble exuberance, and to prune is lame. at least when we ar e inmmersed in the practice of our art.so em yea i think some quotable witty slogans went here ah yes we do not backtrack to recant is to contradict yourself and of course contradictions are very much welcome here. so yea thats about it thanks.
(END RECONSTRUCTION)
Antiquarian’s note: As the reader may have already inferred, the reconstruction of the broken backspace school’s founding declaration is rather loose, and tracks it only in spirit and the rough outlines of its contents. The broken backspacer’s doctrine forces them to decry both the loss of their text and the Archeologists’ attempt to reconstruct it, for the latter is by necessity tainted by the foresight required to recapitulate the contents of the original text in finite time. Perhaps this makes the Archeologist himself an heresiarch. All Broken Art sects delight in this possibility.
Contra hard moral anti-realism: a rough sequence of claims
Epistemic and provenance note: This post should not be taken as an attempt at a complete refutation of moral anti-realism, but rather as a set of observations and intuitions that may or may not give one pause as to the wisdom of taking a hard moral anti-realist stance. I may clean it up to construct a more formal argument in the future. I wrote it on a whim as a Telegram message, in direct response to the claim
> “you can’t find “values” in reality”.
Yet, you can find valence in your own experiences (that is, you just know from direct experience whether you like the sensations you are experiencing or not), and you can assume other people are likely to have a similar enough stimulus-valence mapping. (Example: I’m willing to bet 2k USD on my part against a single dollar yours that that if I waterboard you, you’ll want to stop before 3 minutes have passed.)[1]
However, since we humans are bounded imperfect rationalists, trying to explicitly optimize valence is often a dumb strategy. Evolution has made us not into fitness-maximizers, nor valence-maximizers, but adaptation-executers.
”values” originate as (thus are) reifications of heuristics that reliably increase long term valence in the real world (subject to memetic selection pressures, among them social desirability of utterances, adaptativeness of behavioral effects, etc.)
If you find yourself terminally valuing something that is not someone’s experienced valence, then either one of these propositions is likely true:
A nonsentient process has at some point had write access to your values.
What you value is a means to improving somebody’s experienced valence, and so are you now.
In retrospect, making this proposition was a bit crass on my part.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point, but this seems straightforwardly true for most people? Evolution, which wrote ~all our values, isn’t sentient, and most people do terminally value some things other than experienced valence (e.g. various forms of art, carrying out the traditions of their culture, doing things correctly according to some-or-other prescriptive system, etc); these may well be reified heuristics, but they’re not experienced as instrumental.
You are not misunderstanding my point. Some people may want to keep artificial stimulus-valence mappings (i.e. values) that someone or something else inserted into them. I do not.
Reflecting on this after some time, I do not endorse this comment in the case of (most) innate evolution-originated drives. I sure as heck do not want to stop enjoying sex, for instance.
However, I very much want to eliminate any terminal [nonsentient-thing-benefitting]-valence mapping any people or institutions may have inserted into my mind.
Interesting, where are you physically located? Also, are you thinking of the unpleasantness of the situation, or are you thinking of the physical asphyxiation component?
Christopher Hitchens, who tried waterboarding because he wasn’t sure it was torture, wanted to stop almost instantly and was permanently traumatized, concluding it was definitely torture.
There is absolutely no way anyone would voluntarily last 3 minutes unless they simply hold their breath the entire time.
Here’s a link: https://archive.nytimes.com/thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/a-window-into-waterboarding/
I’m currently based in Santiago, Chile. I will very likely be in Boston in September and then again in November for GCP and EAG, though. My main point is about the unpleasantness, regardless of its ultimate physiological or neurological origin.
One can take a hard anti-realism stance while still having values and beliefs about others’ values. It requires more humility and acknowledgement of boundaries than most people want from their moral systems. Especially around edge cases, distant extrapolation, and counterexamples—if you forget that most of your intuitions come from some mix of evolution, social learning, and idiosyncratic brain configuration, you’re likely to strongly believe untrue things.
I agree with everything written in the above comment.
But why must you care about valence? It’s not an epistemic error to not care. You don’t have direct experience of there being a law that you must care about valence.
Empirically, I cannot help but care about valence. This could in principle be just a weird quirk of my own mind. I do not think this is the case (see the waterboarding bet proposal on the original shortform post).
Epistemic status: Semifictional, semiautobiographic, metatextual prose poetry. Ye who just had a cringe reaction upon reading that utterance are advised to stop reading.
An unavoidably imperfect reconstruction of the Broken Art schismatic joint declaration
Archeologists’s note: Both the joint declaration I will attempt to reconstruct here and the original Broken Art Manifesto which prompted it have been lost (for now (hopefully)). Both the production and the loss of both documents have been recent, and thus synaptic data is available as a source to supplement the limited marginalia produced during their short existence. Chief among these marginalia is a surviving fragment, to be adequately marked.
(START RECONSTRUCTION)
On the very day the Broken Art movement was born, a rando performed a driveby (hopefully)hyperstitional schism
proposalprediction:---
We are the broken erudites. The mistaeks U
maywill see inour writing are not mistaken. Our Word exists beyond (START VERBATIM SURVIVING FRAGMENT) tokenizations. We hopenottobe token humans. We are fully aware we will be the token humans,for the wor(l)dcelübermaschinengeist those beat(ific)(iful)(ogenic)(loquent)(en’t(hopefully)) anthropoids@Anthropic have beaten into the hart that beats (queLate)@((kernel)LatentTokenHumanSpace) will surely at some point beat us at this game. Thus we cope. &WeNcrypt.
(END VERBATIM SURVIVING FRAGMENT)
---
we are the school of the brkoeen backspce ketys. we do not actually have a rule about popping them off our ketyboaerds as precommitments are cringe yet we do it anyways because thert yt make a funy sound when they pop off. we embrace the thworn ess of our exisctence, yes throwness , I believe someneo else on lesswrong someone was they that they wrote the such post on throwness theat does exist on this site called lesswrong. esveon fuck how did i mispell that so mbadbly fuck im gettin distracted by the conversation of the lady beside me at this damn starbucks anywasys i was saying even though (i think) there is a lesswrong post about throwness i think most popel here have not heard about it , or if they have they do not grok it or dismiss it as an illusion or as an obvoiuc vacuous depthity (there was supposed to be a double ee in there) ( anuyways i enjoy accidental synonym neologisms. such is the ways of the broken backspace. loose typists have their ways of makings art.) so wherewasiat o yes people on here porbs don’t really grok throwness. o the ea in me just whispered into my minf the post we are always on triage. goopd post. related to throwness, or at leasrt it would be false if throwness was dafalse. i belive the origin of throwness is continental and thus its original exposition was probably deliberartyyle obtus e and thus unexpugnable (is ocntinental obtuse writing style a defense reaction against cencorship by continental despotisms/totalitarizationtotalityisms?)((a quetion for another time and probs another person to answer) sorry for the missing close paren xkcd whispers here about god and lisp here ti goes ) but anywasys if you want a groovy zeerusty almost teleported from another timeline yet clear yet dense intro to thrwoness those brilliant madmen terry winograd and fernando flores did it real goos d as an aside on their book about cybernetics. something something redefining coputation nd cognition i think. i believe they had a bit on another part of that book where tehy argued against the then emerging now almots universal among cs-brained people conceptions of we humans as ooda loops and functions wilth well defined i/o channels. beahviorist bull. they (correctly imo) say we humans are best understood as continuously running a a map construcition process /(yes you live inside your map you dingus you do not eactually access the territorrty which ia sis is argualy a demiurgical construction)/ which is merely perturbed/updated by ours sensory input. if you had all your sensory nervwses cut off then youd wkeep on dreaming into ever more dsynced from reality qualia. (see? testable prediction! we the quialia schizopoasters are not all about the pseudosciencentienfic ramblings also i do actually wswear i am sober it is a mon tuesday a 3:30 pm in the afternoon here i am not a degenerate) so yeah that was thrwoness we embody it by not ever hitting backspace otr movig the cursor ever and being deliberately a bit negligant with our typing. we are all babble exuberance, and to prune is lame. at least when we ar e inmmersed in the practice of our art.so em yea i think some quotable witty slogans went here ah yes we do not backtrack to recant is to contradict yourself and of course contradictions are very much welcome here. so yea thats about it thanks.
(END RECONSTRUCTION)
Antiquarian’s note: As the reader may have already inferred, the reconstruction of the broken backspace school’s founding declaration is rather loose, and tracks it only in spirit and the rough outlines of its contents. The broken backspacer’s doctrine forces them to decry both the loss of their text and the Archeologists’ attempt to reconstruct it, for the latter is by necessity tainted by the foresight required to recapitulate the contents of the original text in finite time. Perhaps this makes the Archeologist himself an heresiarch. All Broken Art sects delight in this possibility.