I really think that you should be less dismissive of the possibility that some people really are trying to form their beliefs in order to act on the world, rather than on other people.
some people really are trying to form their beliefs in order to act on the world, rather than on other people.
In which case, their desire to act on the world is typically because of a need to influence other people by way of their world-acting-on.
Or are you talking about people whose autism is so severe that they’ve never formed a bond with any other human being, including their parents?
If that’s not who you’re talking about, you should probably reconsider.
Barring such extreme cases, people generally learned to do whatever they do—including any desire to “act on the world”—as a consequence of their interactions (or lack thereof, in some cases) with other people.
As children, we tend to choose our values based on our attempts to get love and/or attention from our parents, and those early decisions tend to shape later ones. I got rewarded with attention for being the “smart one” in my family, which led me to value learning and knowledge.
For most of my life, I assumed that this valuing was independent of any such early circumstances. Instead, I merely felt like it was the right thing to value knowledge, to seek the truth, etc., and that people who didn’t value these things were not as worthy of respect or attention.
And all the while, I never realized that this was just a lens I viewed the world through… a lens that I put on to better manipulate my parents when I was about 2 or 3 years old.
Now, you might say, “hey, what difference does it make how you get your values, as long as you ended up with good ones?” Unfortunately, it makes quite a bit of difference.
For example, my particular way of learning that value led to me:
being dismissive and impatient with people
assuming I was (and ought to be) the smartest person in any given room (and thus becoming upset or even depressed when I was not), and
valuing the “knowing” of things and knowing the “right” (respectable, reward-worthy) ways of doing things, in preference to actually doing things...
And that’s just a few of particularly awful side-effects I wound up with, off the top of my head.
Now, I’ve been able to shed these issues to some degree recently, but that’s not the same thing as undoing or avoiding the damage in the first place. And if I’d been any more dismissive of the idea that my underlying motives weren’t based on influencing people, there’s no way I’d have spotted the problems!
IOW, I think it’s delusional near-insanity to assume that your value system is not rooted in these types of covert and implicit motivations. Even if you claim to have hardware differences between yourself and other humans, it’s still not a safe assumption to make without actually checking the sources of your values and beliefs.
IOW, believing you’re not human won’t make it so. Litany of Tarski: if my motivations are impure, then I want to know that they are impure.
You seem to be confusing the causes of people’s preferences with their preferences. The fact that we want sugar because of evolution doesn’t mean that we don’t really want sugar.
Also, I’m not at all sure of what exactly you mean by ‘a bond’.
Also, not everyone needs to do anything to get adequate love and attention. Some people do in fact grow up as only children in large families or otherwise unconditionally attended to.
I do actually think there are some important hardware differences between myself and most people, but they aren’t nearly as important as the above as responses to your point. Related, I don’t think I want to not be human (though I have a strong desire to somehow blend characteristics of adult and immature humans which may not be compatible). If anything, that’s what UFAI enthusiasts want. I also don’t think I believe in purity, to a fairly anomalous degree, though that’s probably less relevant.
You seem to be confusing the causes of people’s preferences with their preferences. The fact that we want sugar because of evolution doesn’t mean that we don’t really want sugar.
That depends on your definition of “want”. My point is that the causes of preferences can’t really be untangled from the preferences, because they have causal influence over how you will attempt to fulfill them, and most of that influence is subconscious or completely unconscious.
IOW, I’m focusing on the link between the cause of preferences, and how you end up behaving, thereby bypassing the difficult problem of pinning down an adequate definition of “want”. ;-)
Also, not everyone needs to do anything to get adequate love and attention. Some people do in fact grow up as only children in large families or otherwise unconditionally attended to.
And those people still get their values shaped by that attention, just differently. So I’m not clear on what you’re getting at there.
My girlfriend was a philosophy/english major and I was an engineering major. I was studying some mathy stuff and she brought up that she feels bad for not being able to discuss this particular interest with me. I told her that’s fine. I’m getting lots out of this study as it is, and that she and I have good conversations about other things.
Her response: “why would you want to learn something, if you’re not going to talk about it?”. I’m perfectly okay with the idea that I can’t talk about math to impress someone. I’ll be able to use the knowledge to impact the physical world in useful ways.
Of course, on a higher level, my goal in learning this math is still based on impressing people, but it’s for impressing them with physical results (or to help me raise my status, which will ultimately impress people) as opposed to having an impressive conversation.
I really think that you should be less dismissive of the possibility that some people really are trying to form their beliefs in order to act on the world, rather than on other people.
In which case, their desire to act on the world is typically because of a need to influence other people by way of their world-acting-on.
Or are you talking about people whose autism is so severe that they’ve never formed a bond with any other human being, including their parents?
If that’s not who you’re talking about, you should probably reconsider.
Barring such extreme cases, people generally learned to do whatever they do—including any desire to “act on the world”—as a consequence of their interactions (or lack thereof, in some cases) with other people.
As children, we tend to choose our values based on our attempts to get love and/or attention from our parents, and those early decisions tend to shape later ones. I got rewarded with attention for being the “smart one” in my family, which led me to value learning and knowledge.
For most of my life, I assumed that this valuing was independent of any such early circumstances. Instead, I merely felt like it was the right thing to value knowledge, to seek the truth, etc., and that people who didn’t value these things were not as worthy of respect or attention.
And all the while, I never realized that this was just a lens I viewed the world through… a lens that I put on to better manipulate my parents when I was about 2 or 3 years old.
Now, you might say, “hey, what difference does it make how you get your values, as long as you ended up with good ones?” Unfortunately, it makes quite a bit of difference.
For example, my particular way of learning that value led to me:
being dismissive and impatient with people
assuming I was (and ought to be) the smartest person in any given room (and thus becoming upset or even depressed when I was not), and
valuing the “knowing” of things and knowing the “right” (respectable, reward-worthy) ways of doing things, in preference to actually doing things...
And that’s just a few of particularly awful side-effects I wound up with, off the top of my head.
Now, I’ve been able to shed these issues to some degree recently, but that’s not the same thing as undoing or avoiding the damage in the first place. And if I’d been any more dismissive of the idea that my underlying motives weren’t based on influencing people, there’s no way I’d have spotted the problems!
IOW, I think it’s delusional near-insanity to assume that your value system is not rooted in these types of covert and implicit motivations. Even if you claim to have hardware differences between yourself and other humans, it’s still not a safe assumption to make without actually checking the sources of your values and beliefs.
IOW, believing you’re not human won’t make it so. Litany of Tarski: if my motivations are impure, then I want to know that they are impure.
You seem to be confusing the causes of people’s preferences with their preferences. The fact that we want sugar because of evolution doesn’t mean that we don’t really want sugar.
Also, I’m not at all sure of what exactly you mean by ‘a bond’.
Also, not everyone needs to do anything to get adequate love and attention. Some people do in fact grow up as only children in large families or otherwise unconditionally attended to.
I do actually think there are some important hardware differences between myself and most people, but they aren’t nearly as important as the above as responses to your point. Related, I don’t think I want to not be human (though I have a strong desire to somehow blend characteristics of adult and immature humans which may not be compatible). If anything, that’s what UFAI enthusiasts want. I also don’t think I believe in purity, to a fairly anomalous degree, though that’s probably less relevant.
That depends on your definition of “want”. My point is that the causes of preferences can’t really be untangled from the preferences, because they have causal influence over how you will attempt to fulfill them, and most of that influence is subconscious or completely unconscious.
IOW, I’m focusing on the link between the cause of preferences, and how you end up behaving, thereby bypassing the difficult problem of pinning down an adequate definition of “want”. ;-)
And those people still get their values shaped by that attention, just differently. So I’m not clear on what you’re getting at there.
My girlfriend was a philosophy/english major and I was an engineering major. I was studying some mathy stuff and she brought up that she feels bad for not being able to discuss this particular interest with me. I told her that’s fine. I’m getting lots out of this study as it is, and that she and I have good conversations about other things.
Her response: “why would you want to learn something, if you’re not going to talk about it?”. I’m perfectly okay with the idea that I can’t talk about math to impress someone. I’ll be able to use the knowledge to impact the physical world in useful ways.
Of course, on a higher level, my goal in learning this math is still based on impressing people, but it’s for impressing them with physical results (or to help me raise my status, which will ultimately impress people) as opposed to having an impressive conversation.