“our emotions arise from our models of reality. If I believe that my dead brother has been discovered alive, I will be happy”
Fallacy of the single cause. Knowledge of the physical fact of his being alive does not completely determine your response of being happy, many other things come into this, of which at least a few are non-rational. Maybe your brother is a convicted serial killer who recently escaped from detention, killed a few more people according to his old habits and is now reported to be alive only by virtue of having escaped a police hunt through the nearby forest (with officers ordered to shoot on sight). Yet still you may be happy to hear he’s alive (and here comes the usual explanation people give, the real explanation) “because he’s your brother”. This is considered to be the most important factor in your being happy in this case—“because he’s your brother”—and it encodes some non-rational baggage together with some arguably rational things (like an evolutionary preference to support the survival of your kin’s genes etc.).
The fact is that any human preference results from multiple causes and at least one of those will always be non-rational (which is to say I don’t know of even one single example where this was not the case) and will open said preference to being labelled “non-rational”.
Reason is just a tool. Before you decide what to use the tool for, you have to have non-rational preferences about which things to even try to do. For example, first you have the non-rational desire to predict the future behaviour of physical systems with high accuracy and only afterwards do you employ rational methods to achieve that (which leads to science). The only rational part is what you’re doing after you’ve established your fundamental goal. The fundamental goal itself can’t be rational insofar as it can’t be derived logically from any antecedents.
Even if your desire to predict things was based on your desire to survive and even if the desire of the individual to survive could be justified on the basis of the evolutionary goal for the species to survive, you still end up at a point where you can no longer offer any justifications. Why should your species survive and not others? Maybe you think your species has the highest capacity of ensuring the survival of life-in-general in the universe for the longest time? But even then, why should life-in-general survive? Just because. Non-rationally. :)
Good catch; reason cannot determine our end goals. Eliezer covers that a just a few essays down the road.
If I believe that my dead brother has been discovered alive, I will be happy.
This was actually a personal statement, not a general hypothetical; his brother died three years before he wrote that essay, and wasn’t a serial killer. But Eliezer would agree that death is just plain bad; that’s a terminal value that doesn’t have—or need—rational justification.
“our emotions arise from our models of reality. If I believe that my dead brother has been discovered alive, I will be happy”
Fallacy of the single cause. Knowledge of the physical fact of his being alive does not completely determine your response of being happy, many other things come into this, of which at least a few are non-rational. Maybe your brother is a convicted serial killer who recently escaped from detention, killed a few more people according to his old habits and is now reported to be alive only by virtue of having escaped a police hunt through the nearby forest (with officers ordered to shoot on sight). Yet still you may be happy to hear he’s alive (and here comes the usual explanation people give, the real explanation) “because he’s your brother”. This is considered to be the most important factor in your being happy in this case—“because he’s your brother”—and it encodes some non-rational baggage together with some arguably rational things (like an evolutionary preference to support the survival of your kin’s genes etc.).
The fact is that any human preference results from multiple causes and at least one of those will always be non-rational (which is to say I don’t know of even one single example where this was not the case) and will open said preference to being labelled “non-rational”.
Reason is just a tool. Before you decide what to use the tool for, you have to have non-rational preferences about which things to even try to do. For example, first you have the non-rational desire to predict the future behaviour of physical systems with high accuracy and only afterwards do you employ rational methods to achieve that (which leads to science). The only rational part is what you’re doing after you’ve established your fundamental goal. The fundamental goal itself can’t be rational insofar as it can’t be derived logically from any antecedents. Even if your desire to predict things was based on your desire to survive and even if the desire of the individual to survive could be justified on the basis of the evolutionary goal for the species to survive, you still end up at a point where you can no longer offer any justifications. Why should your species survive and not others? Maybe you think your species has the highest capacity of ensuring the survival of life-in-general in the universe for the longest time? But even then, why should life-in-general survive? Just because. Non-rationally. :)
Good catch; reason cannot determine our end goals. Eliezer covers that a just a few essays down the road.
This was actually a personal statement, not a general hypothetical; his brother died three years before he wrote that essay, and wasn’t a serial killer. But Eliezer would agree that death is just plain bad; that’s a terminal value that doesn’t have—or need—rational justification.