Universal Love Integration Test: Hitler
I’m still not satisfied with this post, but thought I’d ship it since I refer to the concept a fair amount. I write this more as “someone who feels some kernel of univeral-love-shaped thing”, but, like, i dunno man i’m not a love expert.
tl;dr
I think “love” means “To care about someone such that they are an extension of yourself (at least to some degree).” This includes caring about the things they care about on their own terms (but can still include enforcing boundaries, preventing them from harming others, etc).
I think “love” matters most when it’s backed up by actual actions. If you merely “feel like you care in your heart”, but don’t take any actions about that, you’re kind of kidding yourself. (I think there is still some kind of interesting relational stance you can have that doesn’t route through action, but it’s relatively weaksauce as love goes)
What, then, would “Universal Love” mean? I can’t possibly love everyone in a way that grounds out in action. I nonetheless have an intuition that universal love is important to me. Is it real? Does it make any sense?
I think part of what makes it real is having an intention that if I had more resources, I would try to take concrete actions to both help, and connect with, everyone.
In this post I explore this in more detail, and check “okay how actually do I relate to, say, Hitler? Do I love him?”.
My worldview was shaped by hippies and nerds. This is basically a historical accident – I could have easily been raised by a different combination of cultures. But here I am.
One facet of this worldview is “everyone deserves compassion/empathy”. And, I think, my ideal self loves everyone.
(I don’t think everyone else’s ideal self necessarily loves everyone. This is just one particular relational stance you can have to the world. But, it’s mine)
What exactly does this mean though? Does it makes sense?
I can’t create a whole new worldview from scratch, but I can look for inconsistencies in my existing worldview, and notice when it either conflicts with itself, or conflicts with reality, and figure out new pieces of worldview that seem good according to my current values. Over the past 10 years or so, my worldview has gotten a healthy dose of game theory, and practical experience with various community organizing, worldsaving efforts, etc.
I aspire towards a robust morality, which includes having compassion for everyone, while still holding them accountable for their actions. i.e similar to sort of thing theunitofcaring blog talks about:
I don’t know how to give everyone an environment in which they’ll thrive. It’s probably absurdly hard, in lots of cases it is, in practical terms, impossible. But I basically always feel like it’s the point, and that anything else is missing the point. There are people whose brains are permanently-given-our-current-capabilities stuck functioning the way my brain functioned when I was very sick. And I encounter, sometimes, “individual responsibility” people who say “lazy, unproductive, unreliable people who choose not to work choose their circumstances; if they go to bed hungry then, yes, they deserve to be hungry; what else could ‘deserve’ possibly mean?” They don’t think they’re talking to me; I have a six-figure tech job and do it well and save for retirement and pay my bills, just like them. But I did not deserve to be hungry when I was sick, either, and I would not deserve to be hungry if I’d never gotten better.
What else could ‘deserve’ possibly mean? When I use it, I am pointing at the ‘give everyone an environment in which they’ll thrive’ thing. People with terminal cancer deserve a cure even though right now we don’t have one; deserving isn’t a claim about what we have, but about what we would want to give out if we had it. And so, to me, horrible people who abuse others all the time deserve an environment in which they would thrive and not be able to abuse others, even if we can’t provide one and don’t even have any idea what it would look like and sensibly are prioritizing other people who don’t abuse others. If you have experiences, you deserve good experiences; if you have feelings, you deserve happy feelings; if you want to be loved, you are worthy of love. You flourishing is a moral good; everybody flourishing is in fact the only moral good, the entire thing morality is for. Your actions should have consequences, sure, and we should figure out how to build a world where those consequences are ones that you can handle, and where you can amend the things that you do wrong. When you hurt people, that can change what “you thriving” looks like, because part of thriving is fixing, and growing from, things you have done wrong; but nothing you do can change that it is good for you to thrive.
I reject that I ever deserved to starve, and so I reject that anyone, ever, deserves to starve. I reject that I ever deserved to suffer, and so I reject that anyone, ever, deserves to suffer. Happiness is good. Your happiness is good. And without a single exception anywhere I want you to thrive.
The rest of this post is me somewhat autistically explore what I want out of Universal Love, and then running the obvious integration test to check that it’s actually universal, with “do I love Hitler, tho?”.
Musings on Game Theoretically Sound Love
I want to distinguish: “Wanting people to thrive”, “Empathy”, and “Love.”
“Steering the world such that more people to thrive” is the practical action I actually care about. “Wanting people to thrive” is a pretty obvious cognitive strategy that steers towards that directly. Empathy and love are more specific memetic/cognitive implementations, which (due to evolutionary and memetic history), I have come to find particularly meaningful.
Importantly, neither love nor empathy nor even “wanting people to thrive” are necessary nor sufficient to actually cause people to thrive. Well intentioned empathetic people have been known to pave the way to hell, and selfish business owners can help people tremendously.
Empathy vs Love
I feel pretty confident that “universal empathy” is an important part of my unfolded values.
I’m somewhat less confident about “love.” Love is also a not-super-well-defined word, so for purposes of this post I’d say: Love is when I choose to care about someone/something in a way that is… an extension of myself. My utility function cares directly about their utility function.
Universal vs Unconditional
You could call this “compassion for everyone” Universal Love (in that it is for everyone) and Unconditional Love (in that it’s not gated on them behaving a particular way). This post will slightly conflate these things (I think it’s not that sensical to have Universal Love that is not also Unconditional? Clearly there are lots of people for whom the conditions of conditional love don’t apply, and as soon as you start making exceptions it quickly stops being universal)
Problems with Empathy
There’s an obvious problem with empathy. Many people have a naive conception of empathy that results in them becoming a doormat. They see someone who needs help, they drop everything to help them. They do this over and over and forget that they need to maintain slack to handle emergencies or notice subtle things, or just they just never get around to doing the things they value for themselves.
Or: they don’t immediately drop everything to help, but their empathy eats up an attentional cost, and attention is one of your most important resources.
Seeing this failure mode, some people come to see empathy or love as a weakness. I think empathy is both important to my values as well as practically useful, and I think there are ways of having empathy without being a doormat.
I think there exists Game Theoretically Sound Empathy. I also think there are conceptions of empathy that are… Industrial grade. By which I mean, Elon Musk or Steve Jobs could have adopted and become better rather than worse at their job. (My conception of Musk/Jobs are kinda non-empathetic assholes, who are nonetheless great at their job, and I think randomly shoving empathy into the mix without being deliberate about it would be more likely to fuck up the process than help if not done carefully).
I’m not Elon Musk so I’m not sure my current conception is actually any good, but it seems like there is at least a pareto frontier of empathy that is further ahead than most people’s conception.
“Conditions?”
I’ve had (and witnessed) some confusion about unconditional love. There is a certain type of love that is absolutely conditional, and absolutely should be conditional, and yes it can be taken away from you and it’s reasonable to be a scared of that. This is the type of love where people will actually want to be in your life, and give you material support, and hang out with you.
But I feel like there’s an important sense in which I can still love people that I don’t want to be part of my life. I think I even love people who I think society should probably give either life-imprisonment or capital punishment (in our current world). If my child turns out to be a serial killer who also is constantly manipulating me, such that even visiting them in jail would be psychologically harmful to me… well, do I love that child or not?
I think so. But a cynical part of me asks “yeah, but do you love them in a way that isn’t bullshit?”.
It’s easy to love people in a way that doesn’t require any effort or action on your part. But, should anyone give a shit about you loving them that way? I have a friend who, when they hear polyamorous people say “love is infinite”, say “oh, so you mean the kind of love that’s important to you is the kind of love where you don’t put actual work in and I don’t really get anything significant out of it?”. (Other polyamorist people have said “love is infinite but time is finite,” which seems more realistic to me)
Hrmm.
I think this is a pretty serious question, and the answer might be “no.” It is entirely possible that this is a distorted narrative that’s important to my self image and is actually nonsense. But I don’t think it is. Or, rather, if it is, I dunno man I think I am made out of this narrative enough that, at least for me personally, if the narrative has flaws, my job is to fix the flaws rather than discard it.
But, I think it’s not that complicated to resolve this. I think the main way I’d operationalize it is: I hold an intention that, if I had more resources, I would try to both help, and connect emotionally with, people who it’s not currently safe or worth to connect with right now.
I might have a family member or friend who is emotionally manipulative. I have a long history with them, there are still parts of them I enjoy. I find that them being around me is fucking up my life. I’ve tried communicating with them about it, and they haven’t changed. So I start distancing from them, or cutting them off.
To say “I still love them”, means that if I see opportunities to help them thrive, or to connect emotionally with them, at low (or “reasonable”) cost to myself, I will take those opportunities. If, later on, I gain more emotional skills such that I don’t feel manipulated by them, I might choose to let them back into my life even if they haven’t changed. (I might still keep them at some distance to protect other people, who don’t have the emotional/social resilience)
I won’t necessarily prioritize this highly compared to lots of other things I value. But it notably makes the list of things to prioritize someday, and I still hold the relational stance of this person in particular mattering to me.
At more extreme levels (i.e. my son grows up to be a serial killer), I might do things like visit him in jail.
One thing I do, even for people who are not part of my life at all (i.e. serial-killer son is executed, or manipulative-aunt is just too abusive to be worth dealing with), is keeping an eye out for ways to help their agency in ways that keep them in my memory, and which don’t require interacting with them. (i.e. I know my aunt cared particularly about X, and I think X was a good thing, so on the margin I look for ways to help X)
Loving Hitler
So… it so happens I have hope for Great Transhumanist Future, where among other things, we can attempt to run ancestor simulations with at least some degree of fidelity.
I have slightly different answers to “what’s up with loving Hitler” in the world where ancestor simulations are real, and worlds where we merely can remember people’s stories. I think the principles are similar.
If I had infinite energy and time, well, I would eventually
a) think for like a thousand subjective years to make sure I’m not philosophically confused about love, game theory, morality and my overall goals.
b) I’d learn as much as I could about Hitler, to model the real version of him as best I could, rather than a vague cartoon of him (with caveats about prioritizing him alongside all the other nigh-infinite people to spend time modeling)
And then… well I’m not sure what exactly comes next because it depends on how steps A and B play out. But, the sort of thing I imagine happening next would be something like: run a simulation of Hitler, at various times in his life, at least one of which was towards the end right before he killed himself. (If we don’t have real-quality ancestor simulations, “simulate him as best I can in my head” is probably the best I got)
To the simulated-end-of-life Hitler, I’d imagine appearing in that simulation. I don’t know exactly what I’d say and what situation I’d have wanted to create (see again step #1: think about it For a thousand years), but it might be something like:
“Hey man. So, um, I think you fucked up here. You did, indeed, fuck up so hard that you don’t get to hang out with the other ancestor simulations, and even though I have infinite energy I’m not giving you a personal high resolution paradise simulation. I’m gonna give you a chill, mediocre but serviceable sim-world that is good enough to give you space to think and reflect and decide what you want.
“I’m gonna be here to listen to you as much as you need, and talk to you about things if that’s helpful. And meanwhile, no matter what you decide… man, you were a human.
“You had some combination of bad genes or wrong childhood or bad decisions, and you hurt people on an industrial scale. And you don’t get to have all the things you want until you’ve somehow processed why that isn’t okay, and actually learned to be better.
“But, you were still a human. In the endless void of the primordial before times, you were one of the patterns that came to feel desire and drive. You told stories that led people to genocide and that’s terrible, but you told stories, and had feelings, and thought about things. You had struggles and hurt. You probably died scared and alone. And there is something about that is precious, which I choose to care about no matter how many terrible things you did.
“Your actions put you into the backlog. I don’t try to help people like you until all the good people are helped. I’m actually wary of even writing this blogpost about you because it feels like it’s unfairly rewarding you (above other less famous people) simply for the extent of your cruelty.
“But I would eventually help you, if I could. And while I don’t spend much empathetic cognition on you outside of weird thought experiments, I do hold you in the relational stance that I hold all humans in.”
...this may not super reassuring to a hypothetical Real Hitler right before he commits suicide, if he were to somehow know that I would look upon him in such a stance.
But, it currently feels to me like this is real/meaningful. I could choose to not hold this stance at all towards Hitler, and apathetically let him fade into nothing.
If your definition of the term “love” encompasses this kind of pointless cruelty, I question the coherence of concept you think it describes.
You know, maybe fair.
I think two things going on writing it were:
This is meant to be something like a lower-bound. I could imagine reflecting on love and game theory for a thousand years and then being like “okay you know what yeah it’s just pointlessly cruel to not give him a high resolution paradise dimension.” But, I could also imagine not-that. I’d be quite surprised if after a thousand years or reflection I didn’t think it was at least right to do something-like-the-above scenario.
I think I just don’t really alieve in infinite energy, and it’s a bit hard to wrap my head around the scenario.
I genuinely feel terrible for Adolf Hitler.
Adolf was close with his mother but she died when he was seventeen. His father was a horribly abusive person to almost everyone. Dad was certainly not kind to his illegitimate son Adolf. Adolf wanted to be an artist. He tried and failed twice to enter the Academy of fine arts. He was deemed physically unfit for the army and had to ask for special permission to serve. He was injured while serving and later gassed! Despite his injuries and seeming lack of aptitude as a soldier he was at the front lines a huge amount of time as a headquarters runner. He sure as fuck earned his iron cross.
After WW1 Germany was treated quite horribly. Hitler loved his country but his country was humiliated and put under terrible onerous conditions. When he got into politics after the war he was finally good at something! Obviously he had views I find abhorrent but lots of people have views I quite seriously dislike. Things escalated. Its easy to get swept up in things, even if you are also contributing to the dynamic. It is especially easy if you have good reasons for feeling hurt. Adolf was vegetarian. I wish he had been given a better life. Here is a poem he wrote about his mother:
If there is any reason for hate it is to spur action. Im a proud Communist. I’m very proud of my comrades in the Garman communist party. A shocking fraction of German communists took active action to resist the Reich. Many were awarded medals. Their bravery makes me cry whenever I think about them. But Hitler is dead, he cant do anymore harm. In my heart of hearts, I hope that on some other spin of the wheel we can be friends. I love painting. My father abused me too. If Hitler is in any sense around, perhaps in some other world I wish him only the best. If I ever simulated Hitler I would only give him the most joyful life I could.
That poem was not written by Hitler.
According to this website and other reputable-seeming sources, the German poet Georg Runsky published that poem, “Habe Geduld”, around 1906.
I hope you feel better with time. I think it’s important to note that universal love, including compassion for those suffering, is always a pleasant feeling. It doesn’t hurt the way pity or lamenting might; there’s no grief in it, just well-wishing.
This is an important point. While unconditional love has no boundaries, including time, it can be a major complication to start the effort with past beings or hypothetical future ones as the object. It’s usually easier to start with one (or many) of the countless beings who are experiencing life right now. For the exercise of this post, a better case study than Hitler might be Putin or Trump (or Biden, etc.). This way, we don’t have to additionally posit time travel, simulations, alternate universes, or what death entails.
I love this sentiment and the personal details you shared. Learning about Hitler’s good qualities was great too. Thank you!
While true, I think there’s a caveat that often the thing preventing the feeling of true love from coming forth can be unprocessed grief that needs to be felt, or unprocessed pain that needs to be forgiven.
I think there’s a danger in saying “if love feels painful you’re doing this wrong” as often that’s exactly the developmentally correct thing to be experiencing in order to get to the love underneath.
In order to get to the love underneath, it’s wonderful to forgive pain, as you say. But forgiving pain feels good. It isn’t painful.
Unconditional love has no conditions. Feeling grief is not required. Everyone’s invited, as they are. If grief arises, the best thing to do is to let it go as soon as it’s noticed. Maybe that’s what you mean by “process” it, in which case we agree.
I think oftentimes what’s needed to let go of grief is to stop pushing it away, in doing that, it may be felt more fully, which once the message is received, can allow you to let it go. This process may involve fully feeling pain that you were suppressing.
Agreed! Grief itself is often just the pushing-it-away habit in relation to unpleasant thoughts or sensations.
It may. But just as grief need not be pushed away, neither should it be sought. “Fully feeling pain” and “fully feeling love” are two different activities. If the pain takes time to change, I’m all for the patient and forgiving approach you suggest.
I don’t have much trouble being empathetic or loving to Biden/Trump/Putin either. They are all people with many good and bad qualities. I can imagine myself trying to help. For example if they were ever subjected to solitary confinement I think I would at least call my Senator and ask they receive genuinely humane treatment. It is hard to imagine more idk ‘personal’ situations since im a normal person and they (current or former) world leaders.
This seems more like “imagining being nice to Hitler, as one could be nice to anyone” than “imagining what Hitler was in fact like and why his decisions seemed to him like the thing to do”. Computing the game theoretically right strategy involves understanding different agents’ situations, the kind of empathy that couldn’t be confused with being a doormat, sometimes called “cognitive empathy”.
I respect Sarah Constantin’s attempt to understand Hitler’s psychological situation.
I feel like I… “agree” with the second half of this, except it’s phrased in relation to the first half, and I’m not 100% sure what you mean by “game theoretically right strategy.”
You mentioned wanting to get the game theory of love correct. Understanding a game involves understanding the situations and motives of the involved agents. So getting the game theory of love correct with respect to some agent implies understanding that agent’s situation.
Nod. (I had meant to imply at least “something like this” more clearly in the post, but shipped it kinda in a rush. Updated the ending section to include at least a pointer to it. I suspect there are some differences between what you have in mind here and what I have in mind here but I didn’t mean to imply you didn’t need to actually model people)
(I do think my overall response here was some flavor of defensive, which I’ve learned to be suspicious of. Like it was most important to me to confirm I hadn’t missed the most obvious version of your point, rather than being open to learning some new perspectives or flavors you might have had to offer. I’m not sure if there’s a particular other direction to go but seemed good to notice that)
Yeah, I definitely did not do a step here of “actually seriously empathize with Hitler” (because, in fact, I have limited bandwidth, and the fact that Hitler seems, uh, pretty bad, means that I don’t especially want to prioritize* making a serious-effort-to-empathize with him over all the other people across history who I’d like to empathize with)
The thing at the end is sort of my sketch of “well, here’s the sort of thing it might look like”, but yes in the eventual future where “actually follow through on actually doing the work to love Hitler-in-particular” rose to the top of my priorities, it’d be a necessary step to actually really empathize him, and make an honest effort to learn as much about him as I can so I’m engaging with the real him and not a cartoon I made up.
(* though, note there are other reasons I might want to empathize with Hitler sooner, that aren’t about love)
((That all said, I think I had read the Sarah Constantin post before, and may have had it, or things similar to it, vaguely in the back of my mind when I wrote the text at the end))
First, let me make a couple claims:
I experience something like universal love for all beings, in that I feel empathy for everything from electrons to thermostats to plants to dogs to people to corporations to the whole universe.
If I had to explain what this is like, I’d say it’s something like taking your definition of love, “to care about someone such that their life story is part of your life story”, and modifying it to something like “to care about every being because their life story is also mine and mine is theirs”.
So when I think about someone like Hitler, I don’t think “damn, I care about Hitler, I sure hope/wish his desires are fulfilled”, and instead think “man, I can imagine how Hitler became who he was, why he did the things he did, and how pained the world is by events having had to have conspired to cause him to be who he was”. I also think, as a follow up, “what could we do so that there never has to be another Hitler-like-being again”. But I don’t think “how could I have helped Hitler” because that’s a counterfactual that never can be, and is only interesting insofar as it’s a training scenario for dealing with future would-be Hitlers.
Sorry that this is a probably confusing comment. I’ve not spent a lot of time thinking about how to explain all this. I have a real sense that people who do terrible things are fundamentally just like you, me, and all of us, only things played out poorly for them such that they did terrible things. (Some obvious assumptions are being smuggled in here, like that there’s no free will and that the universe is deterministic, which both contradict the intuitive model of the world we all normally use to talk about things.)
I think this is coherent and I think probably actually more like what most people who say “universal love” mean by it. (But, not what most people who say “love” probably mean by it)
I’m not sure whether I’m moved to define it that way, for myself. I think I feel a sort of aesthetic appeal, but it also seems like this flavor of love is pretty different from what most people in day-to-day relationships mean by love (which I think usually have more to do with some kind of commitment)
In your mind, is the way you experience universal love the same as the way you love your family/romantic-partner/etc, or is it a different type? Has your thinking on that evolved over time?
Hmm, it’s sort of different, but mostly in its expression. If I’m really dialed in to the feeling of universal love, I have to actively restrain myself from expressing it so that I don’t wander around hugging random strangers, petting dogs that would bite me, etc. (I do let it out with inanimate objects, like bowing with a tree or hugging a rock in my hands because I know I can safely offer such an expression). The love I feel towards my family, my wife, and my close friends is very much like universal love, but I trust that it will be reciprocated.
But I think the feeling of universal love is actually something like a generalization of the simple, uncomplicated love a toddler has for their parents, siblings, toys, etc. As we grow up we get cynical and forget how to access this kind of love or box it up and only let it out in narrow circumstances. Getting back to it requires an active process of clearing away the delusions that lead us to forget how to feel it.
There is something a bit different going on with romantic love as it has this extra component (sex) that isn’t present in other types of love, but I do think romantic love is still built atop the same love substrate, just with an additional aspect of connection built on sex and connected to reproduction (even if one does not have children).
As that last couple paragraph hints, my thinking on this has changed over time. A few years ago I don’t think I really had a sense of universal love as a real thing other than as either an abstract idea or as something fuzzy headed hippies got into after doing too many drugs. The thing that changed my mind was meditating a bunch, slowly peeling back the layers of ontology that stood between me and reality, and then seeing myself as not separate from others, at which point universal love was just sort of obvious in a really boring way.
Hmm. I think the uncomplicated-toddler-love isn’t really mediated by “we don’t have separate selves” though. It seems like the thing going on there is structurally different from the sort of thing feeling empathy with electrons and corporations and hitlers.
(I’m sympathetic to both “there is something uncomplicatedly wholesome about toddler love that is good to find your way back to” and to “caring about every being because their life story is also mine and mine is theirs”, but I think the latter just requires a degree of reflective awareness that the toddlers don’t have)
While ‘love’ isn’t of course well defined, it seems a central component for most usages is one of prioritisation (of time, money, emotional bandwidth etc.) in the face of constrained supply.
So in romantic love, priority of (usually) a single person is a necessary component. Loving a romantic partner is providing a guarantee to yourself that you will prioritize their needs over competing demands (which will therefore reduce in priority). Sex is often one of those needs, but not necessarily. It’s the guarantee of priority that matters, not specifically what is prioritised.
The love a toddler has for their toys has this same necessary component. You can’t play with all the toys in the world; you have finite time to play, your parents have finite ability to provide toys, so you have to prioritise. The toys you prioritise are the toys you love.
So ‘universal love’ is not love at all. Your resources are finite. Prioritisation is zero sum. It’s making the choice in a world of limited resources (both your internal world, and in the world outside) that makes it love.
I don’t have a detailed model of why, but this strongly conflicts with my intuition of what love is. From my perspective this is zeroing in on one aspect of some types of relationships that reflects something adjacent to but not part of love.
Can you think of examples of mainstream use of the word ‘love’ for which prioritization isn’t an essential component? It seems to me that prioritization is the key thing that binds together what would otherwise be disparate uses of the word, not just in the relationship context. (e.g. the ‘love’ in “I love reading” and “I love my wife” mean very different things, but are both effectively statements of prioritization)
Sure! Christians are pretty mainstream, and they regularly talk about God’s love for them, but in Christian theology, God’s love is for everyone, and so God is not prioritizing anyone.
I admit that’s not a very central example, though, so here’s something more mundane:
I think someone saying “I love cats” is not necessarily a statement of prioritization. Sure, I love cats, but I’m not going out of my way to prioritize cats in general over other things. Although I do prioritize some specific cats, I also love cats in general, and this carries no real burden of prioritization, as I don’t have to love other things less, and my feeling of love for cats doesn’t really go away when I’m thinking about my love for other things.
I think that when you say “I love cats”, you mean more than you prioritize specific cats. At some points, those cats will no longer be with you, and if you are like most cat lovers, likely you will then go on to own and prioritize different cats. So while the cats you prioritize at any moment in time may be specific, if you are like most cat owners, over the course of your life you will generally prioritize cats. (“I choose to eat cake every day above other desserts, but I don’t in general love cake, just the cakes I eat on a given day” sounds like more like someone who loves cake but also loves splitting hairs over word usage, than someone who doesn’t in general love cake.)
I think that, if you ask most people what they actually do in practice as a result of their stated love for cats, you will inevitably get back things that necessarily involve prioritization (mostly of time and/or money), e.g. they have pet cats, they volunteer at an animal shelter, they put food out in their garden for stray cats, and/or so forth. If someone said “I love cats, and I have no real interest in prioritising spending my time, money, energy etc. on owning or thinking about or interacting with cats above other things”, I would find that incongruous and question whether they really do love cats.
I can’t really disagree here, and yet I still feel like you’re leaving out some important component of what love means by just focusing on prioritization. It’s like there’s multiple things going on, and prioritization often gets bundled with love in everyday use, but you can love without prioritization, that’s just not what most people do.
I’m curious if this is… a crux. Like, imagine if you changed your mind about the latter thing, would you stop experiencing universal love for all beings, or would it change in quality somehow?
I guess it’s a crux? That seems like a weird way to phrase it to me, though, because the words are not so much a logical claim as a way of pointing at the experience of realizing that my sense of a separate self is an ontological illusion and then knowing that “me” and “you” and “it” are not really separate things because of the interconnectedness of reality.
But I can imagine not experiencing universal love for all beings because I didn’t used to, or at least not in the same way. Like, if I think about it, I don’t know if I could have endorsed the statement “their life story is also mine and mine is theirs” prior to having some insights during meditation.
I can imagine there’s more nuance to it than how I experience universal love now. I don’t know what this looks like, but there being more nuance would fit the general pattern of most meditation insights: you get part of the picture and then there’s still more that will change how you think about things but not invalidate the current experience, although it might show that it was missing important things.
@lsusr recently did a video about this. Interestingly, he thought that the hardest people to love were not actually the Hitler type (they are still hard), but the people that you are actively hurting.
to put it another way, hard: loving hitler; harder: being hitler and loving your victims. this is why I think hitler is not an ideal choice for these thought experiments, in fact.
yeah that does seem plausible to me. (I haven’t watched the whole video just because videoformats are harder/less-worth-it for me)
I’m not sure it resonates for me-in-particular, but it’d make sense if this was a common tendency, and it’d make sense if it was truer of me than I’d like to admit.
There’s a bunch of people I’m conscious of having hurt, who I did specifically empathize with, and while I don’t at all have strong belief I did a particularly good job loving them, I’m think I was at least doing something love-adjaecent.
Some plausible dimensions here:
I am hurting them?
Are they hurting me?
Do they seem more powerful than me? Or, powerful “enough” that they seem to be able to take care of themselves?
Are they a present, active force entangled in my life (as opposed to a dead historical figure who I’m seeing more in “far mode”)
The video can be summarized by these two lines at timestamp 5:39.
I use the word “love” but, as you noted, that word has many definitions. It would be less ambiguous if I were to say “compassion”.
I think in addition to the “specific individual people I’ve personally hurt” case, there’s the case of people (or animals) who were probably hurt structurally downstream of choices I’ve made (e.g. animals hurt by my consuming animal products, or perhaps, like, people in coerced labor situations who made products I bought, or something), or possibly also people I chose not to help (e.g. homeless people who asked me for money I didn’t give them)? I think in these cases (but also some ~interpersonal-conflict-type cases) I have a kind of conflicting mix of (a) an urge towards compassion (b) something like a block on compassion, a flinching away from letting myself feel it (c) sometimes something like anger for ~putting me in a situation where I feel this way?
I think in these situations one case for prioritizing & making space for compassion on purpose is that in fact it’s often already there but I am fighting it and tying myself up in painful and useless internal conflict, whereas if I can find a stance where I am allowing myself to feel it and still make tradeoffs about it, I do not get stuck in this way. But it can be hard given the ~block on thinking about it.
Whereas I guess in the Hitler case (or, personally my default example of person-who-I-find-it-unusually-easy-to-hate is Stalin) my default stance doesn’t have all that much compassion in it so rather than removing a block I have to cultivate the compassion in the first place? But if I’m going ahead and thinking about it there’s not necessarily the same kind of mental block involved. So I guess it’s harder in some ways, easier in others.
I was with you until this part. Why would you coerce Hitler into thinking like you do about morality? Why be cruel to him by forcing him into a mediocre environment? I suppose there might be game-theoristic reasons for this. But if that’s not where you’re coming from then I would say you’re still letting the fact that you dislike a human being make you degrade his living conditions in a way that benefits no one.
I think this shows your “universal love” extends to “don’t seek the suffering of others” but not to “the only reason to hurt* someone is if it benefits someone else”.
* : In the sense of “doing something that goes against their interests”.
I definitely had ‘game theoretic reasons’ in mind. But to be clear I really don’t expect my current self to actually be close enough to correct here to skip the first step of ‘think for like a thousand subjective years about all of this’.
Makes sense and I think that’s wise (you could also think about it with other people during that time). Do you want to expand on the game-theoretic reasons?
I appreciate that you’re clear about this being the first step.
Ancestor simulations? Maybe… but not before the year 3000. Let’s take our time when it comes to birthing consciousness.
I think the base rate of Hitlers might be really high, like 10% or more, depending on circumstances. If you look at pre-WWII times, or colonial times, there sure were a lot of world leaders that did horrible things. But world leaders are just people with power. The proportion of people without power, who would do horrible things if given power, is probably similar.
And that’s disregarding the base rate of other evil that we commit, like tolerating factory farming. So once you start fantasizing about ancestor sim reeducation camps, oh man. If that’s really the plan, guess I’d better prepare to end up in such a camp too!
Willingness to tolerate or be complicit in normal evils is indeed extremely common, but actively committing new or abnormal evils is another matter. People who attain great power are probably disproportionately psychopathic, so I wouldn’t generalise from them to the rest of the population—but even among the powerful, it doesn’t seem that 10% are Hitler-like in the sense of going out of their way commit big new atrocities.
I think ‘depending on circumstances’ is a pretty important part of your claim. I can easily believe that more than 10% of people would do normal horrible things if they were handed great power, and would do abnormally horrible things in some circumstances. But that doesn’t seem enough to be properly categorised as a ‘Hitler’.
Hitler’s evil actions were determined by the physical structure of his brain. His brain was built by genes (which he didn’t choose), and modified by his environment (which didn’t choose), and then certain environmental inputs (which he didn’t choose) caused his brain to output genocide. If you had Hitler’s genes and Hitler’s environment, you would have Hitler’s brain and so you would do as Hitler did.
To punish someone, or in this case withhold high resolution paradise, can only be useful and good in so far as it changes behaviour or acts as a deterrent to others, ultimately reducing suffering. If you have infinite power, there is no longer a need to punish anyone since you can just end all suffering directly by giving everyone their own high resolution paradise, or whatever the ideal heaven is. Punishment becomes nothing but pointless evil cruelty the second we achieve the ability to prevent people from hurting each other without it.
So there’s two different facets of the hypothetical ancestor simulation response I came up with.
A) deliberately not being a paradise B) not connecting it to some broader network of simulation paradises.
I can totally buy coming to believe the first part is pointlessly cruel. The second part feels more like its… actually enforcing boundaries for the safety of others.
The ‘infinite energy’ clause is a bit weird here. If ‘you’ have total control over not just infinite energy but also the entire posthuman world, then yeah you can do things like let Hitler wander around making new allies and… somehow intervene if this starts to go awry. But I have an easier time imagining being confident in ‘not let Hitler out of the box until he’s trustworthy’ then the latter. (Ie there can be infinite energy ‘around’ but not actually in a uniform control)
Also, it’s not obvious to me which is more cruel. (I think it depends on Hitler’s own values)
Also, while I said ‘infinite energy’ in the hypothetical, I do think in most optimistic worlds we still end up with only ‘very large finite energy’ and I don’t even know that I’d get around to doing any kind of ancestor sim at all for him, let alone getting to optimize it fully for him. I think I love Hitler, but I also think I love everyone else and it just seems reasonable to prioritize both the safety and well being of people who didn’t go out of their way to create horrific death camps, and manipulate their way into power.
You raise two very valid concerns. That Hitler might hurt others if you allow him to interact with them, and that Hitler might find a way to escape the box.
Even if Hitler was willing to reflect on his actions and change, his presence in the network (B) would likely make other people unhappy.
So while I think (A) is ethically mandatory if you can contain him, (B) comes with a lot of complex problems that might not be solvable.
I can’t speak for you, but I personally can choose to stop thinking thoughts if they are causing suffering, and instead think a different thought. For example, if I notice that I’m replaying a stressful memory, I might choose to pick up the guitar and focus on those sounds and feelings instead. This trains neural pathways that make me less and less susceptible to compulsively “output genocide.”
Sure, “I” am as much a part of the environment as anything else, as is “my” decision-making process. So you could say that it’s the environment choosing a brain-training input, not me. But “I” am what the environment feels like in the model of reality simulated by a particular brain. And there is a decision-making process happening within the model, led by its intentions.
Hitler had a choice. He could make an effort to train certain neural pathways of the brain, or he could train others by default. He chose to write divisive propaganda when he should have painted.
The bad outcomes that followed were not compelled by the environment. They are attributable to particular minds. We who have capacity for decision-making are all accountable for our own moral deeds.
The bit of your brain that chooses to think nice thoughts (“I”/“me”) is just as much a product of your genes and environment as the bit of your brain that wants to think bad thoughts.
You didn’t choose to have a brain that tries not to think bad thoughts and Hitler didn’t choose to have a brain that outputs genocide when given some specific environmental conditions. The only way Hitler could have realised that his actions were bad and choose to be good would be if his genes and environment built a brain that would do so given some environmental input.
The brain is an ongoing process, not a fixed thing that is given at birth. Hitler was part of the environment that built his brain. Many crucial developmental inputs came from the part of the environment we call Hitler.
I did and do choose my intentions deliberately, repeatedly, with focused effort. That’s a major reason the brain develops the way it does. It generates inputs for itself, through conscious modeling. It doesn’t just process information passively and automatically based solely on genes and sensory input. That’s the Chinese Room thought experiment—information processing devoid of any understanding. The human mind reflects and practices ways of relating to itself and the environment.
You never get a pass to say, “Sorry I’m killing you! I’m not happy about it either. It’s just that my genes and the environment require this to happen. Some crazy ride we’re on together here, huh?” That’s more like how a mouse trap processes information. With the human level of awareness, you can actually make an effort and choose to stop killing.
We help create the world—discover the unknown future—by resolving uncertainty through this lived process. The fact that decision-making and choosing occur within reality (or “the environment”) rather than outside of it is logical and necessary. It doesn’t mean that there is no choosing. Choosing is merely real, another step in the causal chain of events.
So why do some people choose to do good while others choose to do evil? I think genes and environment are fully sufficient to explain why people make different choices, but if you have an alternate hypothesis I’d be interested to hear it. But the answer can’t be something like “because some people choose different intentions” because then you’d have to explain why some people have different intentions.
To put it another way, you may choose your intentions deliberately, but did you make the choice to be the kind of person who chooses intentions deliberately? And if so, did you make the choice to be the kind of person who made that choice? (and so on…). If you go far enough back in the causal chain, it all goes back to the genes and environment that built a brain that does all those other things.
I can kind of see what you’re getting at with the self modification thing. I self-modified my own thought pattens to become a nicer person. But as for why I did that: my genetics gave me high trait openness and I was given a book that encouraged self-modification toward niceness when I was a child. So in this way, I chose to be a nicer person, and so I choose to do nice things, but factors outside of my control caused my original choice to become nicer.
Can you make precise predictions of behaviour, given that information...?
No, but only because I lack the computing power to do so. I very powerful AI could.
Huw do you know that computational power is the only limitation?
We can simulate the brain of C. elegans, I see no reason why it couldn’t theoretically be scaled up to a human brain. I guess technically you need computation AND a full map of the human brain not just computation for that.
How do you know that indeterminism isn’t also a limitation to prediction?
You do have some computing power, though. You compute choices according to processes that are interconnected with all other processes, including genetic evolution and the broader environment.
These choosing-algorithms operate according to causes (“inputs”), which means they are not random. Rather, they can result in the creation of information instead of entropy.
The environment is not something that happens to us. We are part of it. We are informed by it and also inform it in turn, as an output of energy expenditure.
Omega hasn’t run the calculation that you’re running right now. Until you decide, the future is literally undecided.
I think the atoms in my brain will follow the laws of physics until a choice is made. And to me that process feels like I’m deciding something, because that’s what computation feels like from the inside. But actually the outcome is predetermined.
Intentions depend on beliefs, i.e. the views a person holds, their model of reality. A bad choice follows from a lack of understanding: confusion, delusion, or ignorance about the causal laws of this world.
A “choice to do evil” in the extreme could be understood as a choice stemming from a worldview such as harm leads to happiness. (In reality, harm leads to suffering.)
How could someone become so deluded? They succumbed to evolved default behaviors like anger, instead of using their freedom of thought to cultivate more accurate beliefs about what does and does not lead to suffering.
People like Hitler made a long series of such errors, causing massive suffering. They failed to use innumerable opportunities, moment by moment, to allow their model to investigate itself and strive to learn the truth. Not because they were externally compelled, but because they chose wrongly.
I think there’s lots of specific internal reasons why people make bad choices: sometimes it’s just pure selfishness of sadism.
But as for why some people are delusional, selfish, sadistic. As for why some people “succumb to evolved default behaviors like anger, instead of using their freedom of thought.” I’m not really seeing an alternate explanation here other than some people where unlucky enough to have genes and environment that built a brain that followed the laws of physics until it they did something bad. And from an internal perspective, maybe the people who did good things had a self modification step where the environment that is their brain modified their brain to have better intentions. But that doesn’t really matter from the perspective of judging someone because all the factors that made a brain that would do self-modification in the first place were outside of that persons control.
And that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t punish people where it will change their behaviour or act as a deterrent, or keep others safe.
But does mean that there is no justice in retributive punishment. And it means theirs no point in hating people and wanting them to suffer. And it means that if you have infinite energy and resurrect Hitler then you should give him paradise rather than punishment.
Thanks for sharing these sweet thoughts.
I appreciate the distinction among “Wanting people to thrive”, “Empathy”, and “Love.” These categories are somewhat related to four universal attitudes I practice:
Loving-friendliness. The unconditional well-wishing toward all living beings, myself included. May all be healthy, happy, secure, and peaceful! Sometimes this is accompanied by sensations of warmth radiating from the chest or torso.
Sympathetic joy. A subset of (1), the way it feels to love those who are thriving, meeting with success, or otherwise happy for any reason. Yay! A smile comes easily with this jubilance.
Compassion. A subset of (1), the way it feels to love those who are suffering. Critically, this is not suffering because others are suffering. When you get to the ER, you don’t want the doctor to break down in tears upon seeing your condition. You want a calm and compassionate caregiver. It can be a tender feeling at times.
Equanimity. Peace. The doctors’ calmness that allows them to love and do their best in a world that is ultimately out of anyone’s control. Unshakable acceptance that things keep changing; pleasure and pain come and go. People do or say things we wouldn’t want them to do or say, but that comes as no surprise and there’s nothing to gain by worrying about that timeless fact. This imperturbability sometimes comes with a cool, spacious feeling in the head.
Cool head, warm heart. These are very healthy human qualities to cultivate any time. They lead to good intentions, which in turn lead to good actions.
Not into ancestral simulations and such, but figured I comment on this:
I can understand how how it makes sense, but that is not the central definition for me. When I associate with this feeling is what comes to mind is willingness to sacrifice your own needs and change your own priorities in order to make the other person happier, if only a bit and if only temporarily. This is definitely not the feeling I would associate with villains, but I can see how other people might.
Nod. For me the ‘willing to sacrifice’ is mediated through the ‘caring about them as part of you’ thing. (I think the ‘life story’ bit is maybe more opinionated in that I largely engage with life through a narrative focus, so that was more like ’the Raemon flavored version of it)
But, yep this is sure not a word I expect everyone to be using the same way.
Writing this, I find myself wanting to link offhandedly to a different post about “love is (multiple) skills and/or muscles”. Here is a rough pass on that:
I think part of loving people, especially if you particularly want to be good at loving people, is cultivating skills, like:
being able to model people well, understanding what they care about, what they would do, what their coherent-extrapolated-self would do, etc
communicating to people in ways that leave them (correctly) feeling understood and appreciated
being actually good at, like, generally accomplishing things on purpose (such that you can do things that help people in the ways they want to be helped)
generally having the slack to actually help people (and to have the resources to not overtax yourself and end up fucking up and making thing worse)
noticing and avoiding self-deception, to avoid weaving a web of stories where you’re priding yourself on loving people but actually just doing self-serving things with a vague plausible veneer layered over them.
Different people mean different things (or want different things) from love, and different people prioritize love (relative to other things) differently. But, these are things I personally aspire to being better at, in part, to increase my capacity for love in the way that is meaningful to me.
(I’ve decided my policy of updating this post is to a) on one hand, leave the general structure as a time capsule of my thoughts at the time I posted, but b) add clarifications and caveats that were obviously part of my original thinking, I just hadn’t bothered to put in the initial draft. Right now I just added that when I say ‘think about it more first’ I mean ‘for like a thousand years’, not like ‘I think this draft of an idea is almost ready to go’)
(I’m not sure whether, when I wrote ‘infinite energy’ I meant “actually infinite”, or just “a fucking lot of energy, enough that ‘try to be actively good to Hitler’ rises to the top of my priority queue. I wrote this in 2020 and dusted off the draft this week. Realistically I don’t actually expect to have literal infinite energy)
I’ve experienced “universal love” before, but it required being in a really good state of mind, one that I think most people will never access more than a few moments in their life without the use of drugs.
But even if I try, and agree with you cognitively, and want to feel this love, I can’t access the feeling again. I believe it requires a very high valence state, an abundancy-mindset strong enough that all self-defense feels excessive. As your mood gets is a little better, you tend to treat other people better as well, and to be more lenient. I think that “universal love” is the limit of this.
That said, this feeling didn’t result in much action from me. Why would it it? My mind told me that everything was alright. Watching people felt like watching birds, I just enjoyed the sight. When watching birds, we don’t think “Oh no, what if it’s hungry?”, there’s a strange feeling that interfering would only ruin the beautiful process (which is real and natural, like all nature is before humanity steps in and ruins it).
Another example is seeing children play, you might let them fight, or disagree, or do something stupid, as figuring out things on their own is one of the beauties of life.
Thus, this state as I know it, is detached, and accepts things like they are. Pity is more common in low-valence states. It’s hard to sympathize with suffering when you’re in a high-valence state in which all the suffering in the world feels like a trifle illusion. To compare, you might laugh when a child is afraid of ghosts, because you know that the dangers aren’t real.
A cognitive “universal love” might be more real than the state which I experienced, but to even value this idea in the first place, I think you need to be in a good mental state at the top of the hierarchy of needs. A fragile ego or sense of desperation is likely to make you fall into “survival mode” again. I guess I will claim that positive feelings like these are all projected, so that only people with beauty inside themselves can see beauty in the world.
The funny conclusion here would be that we’re responsible for the reality that we experience, since it’s actually ourselves. So whenever I criticize the world or anything in it, I’m actually just criticizing myself.
Anyway, I can get behind the whole “love” thing for sure. I’m more optimistic about ideal states inside our minds than in the world, since less restrictions seem to apply.
By the way, Hitler was just a person like everyone else. A lack of love is often due to dehumanization, which in turn is often because of “distance”. It’s easier to hate an idea than a person, and to hate from afar than up close.
Imagine that Hitler at the end, seeing that all was lost, did not commit suicide, but instead, sent everyone away and waited alone in his bunker, intending to surrender to the Allies when they came for him.
You are one of the Allied soldiers sent to find him. You are the first one into the room and there he is in front of you, unarmed and surrendering. What do you do?
Accept his surrender like I would for any other soldier—frisking, etc. -- and get his statement recorded and disseminated through official channels. Escort him into Allied custody. If possible, let him drink some water, use a toilet, and have a blanket. Protect him from being physically harmed by himself or others if the opportunity arises.
The morning after, reflect on how I ended up participating in war. Vow to walk away next time there’s a gun fight, regardless of its cause or threats to my life and freedom for abstaining from violence.
The missing piece in this philosophy is that actions and resources you can apply to “back up the love with actions” are limited. You CAN’T give everyone an environment where they’ll thrive. You can give a few a lot of assistance, or a few more a little, or everyone a tiny bit.
Which means you are forced to make comparative decisions. Those who are “inefficient” in their wants and behaviors require a bigger commitment to help, depriving those who are more compatible with YOUR wants and abilities. Many are so different that they’re hard to cooperate with, meaning there’s actually less resources than if you’d focused your attention and actions on more-capable-of-cooperation partners.
I think it’s fine (and psychologically beneficial) to love everyone, in a sense that you internally value their humanity. I don’t see how it’s meaningful in terms of actions—you should still acknowledge that the rest of humanity is better off without some individuals.