I think the missing piece in the “why do I attack other person with this thing I’m disgusted by in me” is that when we have learned to judge a thing, we tend to judge others and ourselves both. The existence of a “should” or “ought” like that is a pseudo-moral concept backed by disgust, disapproval, anger, etc. and is usually symmetrically applied to one’s self or others.
The trick to getting rid of them lies in understanding that the mental rule for what to be angry, disgusted or disapproving of has no impact on your desire or ability to obtain the underlying value. The brain tells us “if I give up this morally righteous rule, then I will be no better than those ignorant heathen slobs (or whatever) and I won’t actually do (important thing)”.
But in reality, the importance of the thing won’t change if you give up using the brain’s moral enforcement machinery. In fact, most of the time we get better at pursuing the underlying value, because we will be able to make intelligent trade-offs that are being banned by the moral enforcement machinery as taboo trade-offs. (For example, the rather obvious trade of allowing people to have their own values regarding endurance while still valuing it highly for one’s self.)
But so long as the moral machinery remains activated, it’s hard to even think clearly about your options, let alone take any of them that aren’t about judging, punishing, etc. The moral machine is highly motivating, but mainly towards actions that can be taken zealously and self-righteously (or at least pityingly of your inferiors).
I have some strong disagreements with what you say, but I recognize that it may be true for some people. It feels like you’re trying to universalize your own opinion / experiences.
It’s based on empirical experiments of helping people deactivate the machinery in question. Those experiments in turn were motivated by the existence of multiple sources suggesting similar ideas, including popular books, so it’s unlikely that I an universalizing from even an unusually small group, and definitely not just myself.
Anyway, since I said rather a lot of different things, I’ll note that I’m curious what your disagreements are, specifically, rather than attempt to guess which particular part(s) you disagree with, and why.
The moral machinery is just an manifestation of social hierarchy and societal structure that took civilizations thousands of years to distill into its current form. You can point to the perpetual process at any given time in history and study what came before and what happened after. As individuals, we make up the atomic elements of such hierarchy, so for us personally it’s merely a exercise in understanding the underlying fundamental concepts behind the allegory of the cave.
I don’t understand. These statements don’t seem to be much related to each other, nor do any of them seem in any way related to the post they are replying to. I notice that I am (very) confused, especially since the “moral enforcement machinery” I refer to can be observed in animals without language, and so is not exclusive even to language-using humans, let alone civilization.
(Let alone the whole allegory of the cave thing, which is part of Plato’s notion of forms, which in the LW canon are explicitly understood to be an inversion of reality: we observe the jagged imperfect real world and extrapolate in our minds the “perfect” forms as a means of abstraction and data compression. This is the exact opposite of the situation in Plato’s cave.)
Animals have civilizations, they are mostly limited to regional ecosystems. We just don’t deal with animal civilizations on the same level as human-exclusive civilization concept.
The allegory is a story with many different points presented. I should’ve explained the aspect I was talking about. I was referring to the overall relationship between the different elements: the cave, outside the cave, the people inside the cave and the stuff they were doing inside the cave. The outside is the larger set, the cave is a subset, and the people are the individual elements, or leaf nodes. The sets themselves don’t interact directly with the leaf nodes, but they determine the relationships that leaf nodes form by just the set of leaf nodes themselves. They would have their own relationship graph. You have 3 different types of scenarios where the relationship between the sets significantly changes the relationships of the leaf nodes. 1. all leaf nodes exist within the smaller set. 2 Some leaf nodes are inside the smaller set and some outside, which breaks down to whether outside leaf nodes also form sets of their own. 3. All leaf nodes are outside of the smaller set (i.e. in the allegory, that’s when the cave people went outside, which marks the end of the allegory). You can think of these 3 different scenarios as separate, or you can think of them as one snapshot of a temporal progression. This pattern can be imposed on human civilization to explain the relationships within it.
Sorry, I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with the comment you originally replied to (which is about the behavior of individual brains), or even the post in general.
I probably misunderstood your comment and the original post too. Sorry about that. I find most of the stuff on this site pretty confusing. I was trying to talk about specific things that you guys have mentioned, but it probably is out of context.
I’m with you except the word “just” in the first sentence; I think the social stuff explains a lot of the moral machinery but I would be surprised if it explained it all.
I wouldn’t say that it explains the moral machinery. It’s more of an observation science than an inferential or inductive/deductive process. The “just” is denoting the subset nature of moral machinery existing within the overarching concept of human civilization and development. The allegory of the cave concept is also a paradigm from which you can think about the set theory perspective of human civilization.
I think the missing piece in the “why do I attack other person with this thing I’m disgusted by in me” is that when we have learned to judge a thing, we tend to judge others and ourselves both. The existence of a “should” or “ought” like that is a pseudo-moral concept backed by disgust, disapproval, anger, etc. and is usually symmetrically applied to one’s self or others.
The trick to getting rid of them lies in understanding that the mental rule for what to be angry, disgusted or disapproving of has no impact on your desire or ability to obtain the underlying value. The brain tells us “if I give up this morally righteous rule, then I will be no better than those ignorant heathen slobs (or whatever) and I won’t actually do (important thing)”.
But in reality, the importance of the thing won’t change if you give up using the brain’s moral enforcement machinery. In fact, most of the time we get better at pursuing the underlying value, because we will be able to make intelligent trade-offs that are being banned by the moral enforcement machinery as taboo trade-offs. (For example, the rather obvious trade of allowing people to have their own values regarding endurance while still valuing it highly for one’s self.)
But so long as the moral machinery remains activated, it’s hard to even think clearly about your options, let alone take any of them that aren’t about judging, punishing, etc. The moral machine is highly motivating, but mainly towards actions that can be taken zealously and self-righteously (or at least pityingly of your inferiors).
This feels like opinion stated as fact.
I have some strong disagreements with what you say, but I recognize that it may be true for some people. It feels like you’re trying to universalize your own opinion / experiences.
It’s based on empirical experiments of helping people deactivate the machinery in question. Those experiments in turn were motivated by the existence of multiple sources suggesting similar ideas, including popular books, so it’s unlikely that I an universalizing from even an unusually small group, and definitely not just myself.
Anyway, since I said rather a lot of different things, I’ll note that I’m curious what your disagreements are, specifically, rather than attempt to guess which particular part(s) you disagree with, and why.
The moral machinery is just an manifestation of social hierarchy and societal structure that took civilizations thousands of years to distill into its current form. You can point to the perpetual process at any given time in history and study what came before and what happened after. As individuals, we make up the atomic elements of such hierarchy, so for us personally it’s merely a exercise in understanding the underlying fundamental concepts behind the allegory of the cave.
I don’t understand. These statements don’t seem to be much related to each other, nor do any of them seem in any way related to the post they are replying to. I notice that I am (very) confused, especially since the “moral enforcement machinery” I refer to can be observed in animals without language, and so is not exclusive even to language-using humans, let alone civilization.
(Let alone the whole allegory of the cave thing, which is part of Plato’s notion of forms, which in the LW canon are explicitly understood to be an inversion of reality: we observe the jagged imperfect real world and extrapolate in our minds the “perfect” forms as a means of abstraction and data compression. This is the exact opposite of the situation in Plato’s cave.)
Animals have civilizations, they are mostly limited to regional ecosystems. We just don’t deal with animal civilizations on the same level as human-exclusive civilization concept.
The allegory is a story with many different points presented. I should’ve explained the aspect I was talking about. I was referring to the overall relationship between the different elements: the cave, outside the cave, the people inside the cave and the stuff they were doing inside the cave. The outside is the larger set, the cave is a subset, and the people are the individual elements, or leaf nodes. The sets themselves don’t interact directly with the leaf nodes, but they determine the relationships that leaf nodes form by just the set of leaf nodes themselves. They would have their own relationship graph. You have 3 different types of scenarios where the relationship between the sets significantly changes the relationships of the leaf nodes. 1. all leaf nodes exist within the smaller set. 2 Some leaf nodes are inside the smaller set and some outside, which breaks down to whether outside leaf nodes also form sets of their own. 3. All leaf nodes are outside of the smaller set (i.e. in the allegory, that’s when the cave people went outside, which marks the end of the allegory). You can think of these 3 different scenarios as separate, or you can think of them as one snapshot of a temporal progression. This pattern can be imposed on human civilization to explain the relationships within it.
Sorry, I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with the comment you originally replied to (which is about the behavior of individual brains), or even the post in general.
I probably misunderstood your comment and the original post too. Sorry about that. I find most of the stuff on this site pretty confusing. I was trying to talk about specific things that you guys have mentioned, but it probably is out of context.
I’m with you except the word “just” in the first sentence; I think the social stuff explains a lot of the moral machinery but I would be surprised if it explained it all.
I wouldn’t say that it explains the moral machinery. It’s more of an observation science than an inferential or inductive/deductive process. The “just” is denoting the subset nature of moral machinery existing within the overarching concept of human civilization and development. The allegory of the cave concept is also a paradigm from which you can think about the set theory perspective of human civilization.