I am glad you are ok. I do not want to undermine whatever it is that keeps you by-and-large mentally healthy, especially as you contribute to the communal survival effort, and, ya know, be my spouse and all.
Also, I think it would probably be wrong not to tell you that the presumably shallow and probably somewhat inaccurate version of this that I heard while reading struck me as pretty self deceptive. Or at least, not sufficiently anti-self-deceptive for it to sit right with me.
It may take me awhile to pin down exactly what is not sitting right with me, and how exactly it is sitting instead. But I think most of it is concentrated in “Victory Conditions” and in “The Plan”, and a maybe some of it is also in “Sculptors and Sculptures”.
I think the heart of my objection may be exactly what I wrote about in 2016, quite unclearly and at length I’m sorry to say, in an essay called “When Your Left Arm Becomes A Chicken”. How relevant this essay is depends a lot on what exactly it means to you to “change your victory condition”. But when I hear “victory condition”, it sounds an awful lot like the Kierkegaardian thought experiment thingy I talk about in the essay, the part about unrequited love for the princess.
I think that I don’t quite have enough to go about answering you, yet; I do not quite yet understand the thing you’re hearing, so I can’t start figuring out whether it is indeed what I am actually saying.
Can I beg you for six more paragraphs of ramble or something?
Yes of course, and I certainly didn’t mean to leave you with just that one comment. I really mean to say “I think something is wrong here. More to come as I figure it out.” But also it may take me a while before I’m ready for the next installment.
Some possible snippets/trailheads, or at least meandering clarifications:
the worlds in which Gao stops valuing things that prove difficult to attain seem sadder to me
Me, too. I am a big believer in valuing things separate from their attainability; I sort of solve this one internally by valuing approximately everything according to how Awesome I think it is, and then sorting them on a priority list in a manner that includes weighting-by-possibility.
But like. I think I do not fail to notice, or continue to believe, that the hard-to-get things are nevertheless good; one simple toy example is that I extremely value being able to live in my physical twelve-year-old body again, except possibly with adamantium bones and telekinesis as well.
The Knight of Faith will have a bad problem if he wants to make accurate predictions about the world, since his epistemology is about as broken as I know how to make a thing.
I share your (and presumably Kierkegorr’s EDIT: I have been informed that Kierkegorr was a Christian and big into the Knight of Faith) unease/distaste for this option.
The first man, recognizing his value cannot be satisfied, abandons his love for the princess. “Such a love is foolishness,” he says. “The rich brewer’s widow is a match fully as good and respectable.” He stops valuing the love of the princess, and goes looking for a more easily satisfied value.
In my own personal tongue, this is called “the opposite of Aliveness,” or perhaps “becoming dead.” It is almost precisely the thing that my entire life philosophy centers on not doing (and I note that, for a literal majority of the people that I interact with for more than thirty minutes, an injection-by-osmosis of my degree of not-this causes them some kind of “oh shit u right” recognition that ultimately leads to a small local improvement in their life by way of rejiggering their priorities to reprioritize aliveness).
By my reading, the Zhuangzi prescribes either constantly adjusting your values so that they’re always perfectly satisfied by the current state of the world, or not having any values at all, thereby achieving a similar outcome...It’s sort of like wireheading, but it sidesteps the problem wherein your values might involve states of the world instead of just experiences.
Once you factor the Aliveness thing out of my values, the majority of what’s left is centered on not-this. Like, this is where my sense of revulsion at most people’s accepting-the-gaslighting-around-puberty comes from; if the Mule converts me to loving the Mule I acknowledge that I will love the Mule but I think that I should still be quite upset about how I came to love the Mule, and will not feel fondness about that unless the Mule hardwired that, too.
(To put this another way: I do not want to be “down” with my left arm becoming a rooster; if my left arm becomes a rooster I want to find a way to achieve some kind of contentment anyway but Being Mad About My Left Arm Being A Rooster is a feeling that I defend with all my TDT might and Someday Doing Something About Both The Rooster-Arm And, Separately, Whatever Caused It goes on The List, possibly under the preexisting subheading God Really Needs To Be Killed For Its Crimes.)
Imagine you have exactly one value
I have a hard time. Like, I have an easy time doing it for the sake of a thought experiment, but I have a hard time doing it for realsies.
Perhaps this is an important piece of the puzzle—the capacity to shift values around in response; the always-having-a-thing-to-do-on-a-rainy-day nature.
I strive to wield the power of despair without having to be depressed. I would like to be able to believe that I am doomed when I am doomed, else I’ll resist believing that I am in danger when doing so would let me prevent harm.
Also, I strive not to believe contradictions, or to rationalize, or to play other strange games with myself that let conflicting beliefs hide in separate corners of my mind.
Also also, I don’t want to be down with my left arm becoming a chicken, or with an asteroid destroying the Earth.
Yes, yes, and yes.
You know, I think I’m actually just wrong here, and people should be Potential Knights of Infinite Resignation.
I think I come at this from a slightly different angle, and I think it has to do with my sculptor-sculpture distinction. I think there’s a difference between values and meta-values and meta-meta-values (or something), and that when I discover that a particular instantiation of a meta-value into a concrete value is unpossible, I respond by seeking a new way to instantiate that meta-value.
And I think this is perhaps a critical piece of the puzzle and belongs in the essay somewhere.
I think part of the problem here is that there seems, at first glance, to be a fundamental tension between the ideas that
it’s good to keep track of the difference between good and bad things, and also
it’s good to stop being upset about bad things if doing so isn’t instrumentally useful.
And, like, I’m aware that the second bullet point is phrased somewhat strawmannishly; I did that to emphasize the extent to which, in my native mental ontology, [something-like-the-strawmannish-version] is what it translates to. And even now, typing this, I can’t for the life of me come up with a version that both (1) maintains the intuitive force present in the current version, and (2) sounds less like a strawman.
It seems like, retaining the ability to be upset about bad things is part of what it means to understand the difference between bad things and good things? Like, the reason you’re upset is that it’s bad; that’s part of what it means for something to be bad: that you recognize it and have a justifiable internal reaction to it.
(Flagging that I don’t necessarily think you disagree with this; in particular, it seems like it rhymes pretty strongly with what you said about wanting to defend Being Mad About My Left Arm Being A Rooster.)
Even so, I don’t yet understand how to reconcile the two. This affects me less than it might someone else with this particular intellectual conundrum, since for me it really is mostly intellectual: my brain pretty much does the “acceptance” thing by default, to the point where I often find it difficult to remain upset about things I’d reflectively endorse being upset about. And to the extent that the thing my brain is doing protects me instrumentally from mental health issues such as depression, I (selfishly) want it to keep doing that (even as I for other reasons might sometimes wish the opposite).
But of course, none of that is the same as having a philosophical justification for it, which (again) I don’t have!
I am glad you are ok. I do not want to undermine whatever it is that keeps you by-and-large mentally healthy, especially as you contribute to the communal survival effort, and, ya know, be my spouse and all.
Also, I think it would probably be wrong not to tell you that the presumably shallow and probably somewhat inaccurate version of this that I heard while reading struck me as pretty self deceptive. Or at least, not sufficiently anti-self-deceptive for it to sit right with me.
It may take me awhile to pin down exactly what is not sitting right with me, and how exactly it is sitting instead. But I think most of it is concentrated in “Victory Conditions” and in “The Plan”, and a maybe some of it is also in “Sculptors and Sculptures”.
I think the heart of my objection may be exactly what I wrote about in 2016, quite unclearly and at length I’m sorry to say, in an essay called “When Your Left Arm Becomes A Chicken”. How relevant this essay is depends a lot on what exactly it means to you to “change your victory condition”. But when I hear “victory condition”, it sounds an awful lot like the Kierkegaardian thought experiment thingy I talk about in the essay, the part about unrequited love for the princess.
I think that I don’t quite have enough to go about answering you, yet; I do not quite yet understand the thing you’re hearing, so I can’t start figuring out whether it is indeed what I am actually saying.
Can I beg you for six more paragraphs of ramble or something?
Yes of course, and I certainly didn’t mean to leave you with just that one comment. I really mean to say “I think something is wrong here. More to come as I figure it out.” But also it may take me a while before I’m ready for the next installment.
Some possible snippets/trailheads, or at least meandering clarifications:
Me, too. I am a big believer in valuing things separate from their attainability; I sort of solve this one internally by valuing approximately everything according to how Awesome I think it is, and then sorting them on a priority list in a manner that includes weighting-by-possibility.
But like. I think I do not fail to notice, or continue to believe, that the hard-to-get things are nevertheless good; one simple toy example is that I extremely value being able to live in my physical twelve-year-old body again, except possibly with adamantium bones and telekinesis as well.
I share your (and
presumably Kierkegorr’sEDIT: I have been informed that Kierkegorr was a Christian and big into the Knight of Faith) unease/distaste for this option.In my own personal tongue, this is called “the opposite of Aliveness,” or perhaps “becoming dead.” It is almost precisely the thing that my entire life philosophy centers on not doing (and I note that, for a literal majority of the people that I interact with for more than thirty minutes, an injection-by-osmosis of my degree of not-this causes them some kind of “oh shit u right” recognition that ultimately leads to a small local improvement in their life by way of rejiggering their priorities to reprioritize aliveness).
Once you factor the Aliveness thing out of my values, the majority of what’s left is centered on not-this. Like, this is where my sense of revulsion at most people’s accepting-the-gaslighting-around-puberty comes from; if the Mule converts me to loving the Mule I acknowledge that I will love the Mule but I think that I should still be quite upset about how I came to love the Mule, and will not feel fondness about that unless the Mule hardwired that, too.
(To put this another way: I do not want to be “down” with my left arm becoming a rooster; if my left arm becomes a rooster I want to find a way to achieve some kind of contentment anyway but Being Mad About My Left Arm Being A Rooster is a feeling that I defend with all my TDT might and Someday Doing Something About Both The Rooster-Arm And, Separately, Whatever Caused It goes on The List, possibly under the preexisting subheading God Really Needs To Be Killed For Its Crimes.)
I have a hard time. Like, I have an easy time doing it for the sake of a thought experiment, but I have a hard time doing it for realsies.
Perhaps this is an important piece of the puzzle—the capacity to shift values around in response; the always-having-a-thing-to-do-on-a-rainy-day nature.
Yes, yes, and yes.
I think I come at this from a slightly different angle, and I think it has to do with my sculptor-sculpture distinction. I think there’s a difference between values and meta-values and meta-meta-values (or something), and that when I discover that a particular instantiation of a meta-value into a concrete value is unpossible, I respond by seeking a new way to instantiate that meta-value.
And I think this is perhaps a critical piece of the puzzle and belongs in the essay somewhere.
I think part of the problem here is that there seems, at first glance, to be a fundamental tension between the ideas that
it’s good to keep track of the difference between good and bad things, and also
it’s good to stop being upset about bad things if doing so isn’t instrumentally useful.
And, like, I’m aware that the second bullet point is phrased somewhat strawmannishly; I did that to emphasize the extent to which, in my native mental ontology, [something-like-the-strawmannish-version] is what it translates to. And even now, typing this, I can’t for the life of me come up with a version that both (1) maintains the intuitive force present in the current version, and (2) sounds less like a strawman.
It seems like, retaining the ability to be upset about bad things is part of what it means to understand the difference between bad things and good things? Like, the reason you’re upset is that it’s bad; that’s part of what it means for something to be bad: that you recognize it and have a justifiable internal reaction to it.
(Flagging that I don’t necessarily think you disagree with this; in particular, it seems like it rhymes pretty strongly with what you said about wanting to defend Being Mad About My Left Arm Being A Rooster.)
Even so, I don’t yet understand how to reconcile the two. This affects me less than it might someone else with this particular intellectual conundrum, since for me it really is mostly intellectual: my brain pretty much does the “acceptance” thing by default, to the point where I often find it difficult to remain upset about things I’d reflectively endorse being upset about. And to the extent that the thing my brain is doing protects me instrumentally from mental health issues such as depression, I (selfishly) want it to keep doing that (even as I for other reasons might sometimes wish the opposite).
But of course, none of that is the same as having a philosophical justification for it, which (again) I don’t have!
I believe I am able to “be upset” about bad things in a way that doesn’t require suffering or any ongoing detriment to my life.