Here’s something possibly relevant I wrote in a draft of this post that I ended up cutting out, because people seemed to keep getting confused about what I was trying to say. I’m including this in the hopes that it will clarify rather than further confuse, but I will warn in advance that the latter may happen instead...
The Goodness of Reality hypothesis is closely related to the Buddhist claim of non-self, which says that any fixed and unchanging sense of self we identify with is illusory; I partially interpret “illusory” to mean “causally downstream of a trapped prior”. One corollary of non-self is that it’s erroneous for us to model ourselves as a discrete entity with fixed and unchanging terminal values, because this entity would be a fixed and unchanging self. This means that anyone employing reasoning of the form “well, it makes sense for me to feel tanha toward X, because my terminal values imply that X is bad!” is basing their reasoning on the faulty premise that they actually have terminal values in the first place, as opposed to active blind spots masquerading as terminal values.
terminal values in the first place, as opposed to active blind spots masquerading as terminal values.
Can’t one’s terminal values be exactly (mechanistically implemented as) active blind spots?
I predict that you would say something like “The difference is that active blind spots can be removed/healed/refactored ‘just’ by (some kind of) learning, so they’re not unchanging as one’s terminal values would be assumed to be.”?
Here’s something possibly relevant I wrote in a draft of this post that I ended up cutting out, because people seemed to keep getting confused about what I was trying to say. I’m including this in the hopes that it will clarify rather than further confuse, but I will warn in advance that the latter may happen instead...
Can’t one’s terminal values be exactly (mechanistically implemented as) active blind spots?
I predict that you would say something like “The difference is that active blind spots can be removed/healed/refactored ‘just’ by (some kind of) learning, so they’re not unchanging as one’s terminal values would be assumed to be.”?