Contextual Self

Aella writes about how contextual pride is. Her primary focus is on pride, but shame comes up, as well. A quick refresher of the concept—this is not a summary, and you will lose information if you use only this description: Pride is a sense of relative superiority to a relevant context.

Morality gets contextualized a lot too. In that case I believe it is a problem, if only because the context keeps changing, and the way we approach morality isn’t very good.

Identity is a type of context.

Context, in the sense I am using it here, is an implicit comparison between yourself and an external measure; archetypes are a type of context, for example. We tend to define ourselves considerably by what is, in fact, merely the context for our existence. A substantial portion of complaints in society come down to being contextualized in a manner the complainant finds unacceptable, or for others establishing a context which the complainant doesn’t regard as reasonable.

I’m more interested in the way people compare themselves. As the article on morality may suggest, I am opposed to this form of contextualization; the arguments I’ll advance here are going to be more general, however, because I think morality is sufficiently specific as to require specific arguments.

Social Status in a Decreasingly Contextual Society

One of the characteristics of the “Loser” subgroup in Rao’s The Gervais Principle is that they find things they are good at, relative to their local context, to root their pride in. This works better on television than it generally works in real life; the guitarists I know all think they’re crap, because there’s a guy on YouTube who is way better than they are.

The internet has expanded our local context—which, given the nature of context, has meant that it has eliminated a lot of context; it’s easier to find a group of people like you, who have your interests, but a side effect of this, which I think hasn’t gotten much attention yet, is that it has become increasingly difficult to feel like you’re good at the things you have an interest in.

Context, in the sense I describe it here, is increasingly bad for you, as a person, in a society in which context is increasingly universal. It fundamentally changes the game you are playing. I can, at this moment, message people are are better than me, at anything I choose. I can talk to somebody who is better at math; better at programming; better at social perspective; better at literally anything at all than myself, with only a little bit of effort.

Now, it’s easy for me to say “Stop comparing yourself to the people around you.” It’s hard to actually implement this in practice. Social status is rooted in exactly this behavior. However, your mental algorithms for social status weren’t evolved in a global society with social bubbles filtered by self-selection based on personal interest.

There’s a question: Who am I? Ask yourself that, and see if you can answer it without reference to what you are not. Everything is part of the context. Nothing is also part of the context. See if you can answer it without reference to things that aren’t part of yourself.

Contextual Morality as Part of the Contextual Self

“I never realized this consciously before now, but you have to be independent-minded to be good. Otherwise you’ll be drawn into doing bad things out of conformism.”—Paul Graham, HT.

Paul Graham’s thoughts apparently parallel and in most cases predate my own in a number of ways.

What does it mean to be a good person, contextually? It means that people in your context would broadly agree that you are a good person—nothing more, nothing less.

Likewise, a bad person.

Are you a good person? Are you a bad person? What contextual frame are you using to establish this? Notice the subtle distinction between the way the post on contextual morality used the word “context”, and the way it is being used here; I am going to say straight out that the ambiguity here is deliberate.

Context isn’t just the idea that you only aren’t stealing food because you aren’t hungry enough, it’s also the idea that stealing food because you are hungry is okay. Your hunger-state is contextual, and dependent on your interecations with your environment; the code of ethics you use to evaluate goodness and badness is equally contextual, and equally dependent upon your environment.

In fact, even the idea that you can be a “good person” or a “bad person” are themselves part of the context; the idea that there are things that are “good” or “bad” are part of the context. (Addition is also part of the context. That a thing is part of the context should not be taken as a claim that it is useless.)

Consider again a question: Who am I? Ask yourself that, and see if you can answer it without reference to notions of morality.

Identity as Part of the Context

If you’re a long reader of Less Wrong, you already know everything I have to say here. Theoretically I should be connecting this to the idea of context, but this feels a bit, internally to me, like arguing that blue is a color.

So, let’s begin with an assertion: Somebody had to invent the idea that people are gay. This is not to say that people weren’t gay before somebody invented the idea, any more than to say that gravity didn’t exist before Newton; however, all concepts had to be invented, and somebody existed before those concepts existed.

I’d argue that the idea of “being gay” in the modern sense was probably invented around a century ago, about thirty years after psychology started to consider the question of homosexual behavior, and really only entered into mainstream awareness around fifty years ago.

Or maybe it was invented five thousand years ago. It doesn’t actually matter; what matters is to notice that, prior to the concept, something could not be part of one’s identity, and after the concept, something could be.

Notice the same is true of every logical component of identity; notice, then, that identity in its entirety is part of the context. You must first invent the concept of a thing you might not be, in order to be able to have the concept of identity. The “might not be” part is important; “I am X” can only be part of your identity if you could in a coherent way not-be-X. In order to see what we think we could be, see how much effort us featherless bipeds must expend in order to define ourselves.

The growth of identity isn’t a social cancer on our society; it is a natural product of our conception of what else we could have been.

But, let us ask ourselves, nonetheless, that question: Who am I? And this time try to exclude those concepts that must have been invented, for although they might have been in some sense truth before their invention, they could not be part of your answer had you lived before their invention.

Who am I?

Maybe you are aware of a wordless—roar isn’t quite the right word, but is somehow appropriate, at least for myself—response to this question. Maybe not; maybe, at this point, you begin to notice something: There’s not a lot left to answer the question with, and most of the things you cared about were left somewhere above; maybe it was parenthood, maybe it was charity, maybe it was passion.

This is fine; we’re contextual beings.

Yet somehow many of us long to be out of context. Yes, I could link to many different things there. My model of people has a few people upset at my cowardice; yet they don’t all agree on what I should have linked there.

There’s a particular kind of person who will think now I describe a kind of nihilism, in the same way that people find determinism to imply a form of moral nihilism. And on the contrary—we are contextual beings. It is the context which gives meaning to anything. Your context is the universe within you.