So you think the lives were unpleasant on average, but still good enough?
Yes. I don’t know of any believable estimate of median or mean self-reported happiness except very recently (and even now the data is very sparse), and in fact the the entire concept is pretty recent. In any case, Hobbes’s “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is a reasonable description of most lives, and his caveat of “outside of society” is actually misleading—it’s true inside society as well.
I do think that much of the unpleasantness is in our judgement not theirs, with an implicit comparison to some imaginary life, not in comparison to nonexistence, but it’s clear that the vast majority of lives include a lot of pain and loss. And it’s clear that suicide has always been somewhat rare, which is a revealed preference for continued life, even in great hardship.
So again, yes. “worth living” or “good enough” includes lives that are unpleasant in their mean or medium momentary experience. I don’t know exactly what the threshold is, or whether it’s about quantity or quality of the good moments, but I do know (or rather, believe; there’s no territory here, it’s all map) that most lives were good enough.
I do think that much of the unpleasantness is in our judgement not theirs, with an implicit comparison to some imaginary life, not in comparison to nonexistence, but it’s clear that the vast majority of lives include a lot of pain and loss. And it’s clear that suicide has always been somewhat rare, which is a revealed preference for continued life, even in great hardship.
I don’t know how big of a component the suicide argument is to your view overall, but I want to flag that this particular argument seems to not show much. People don’t commit suicide for all sorts of reasons. You seem to implicitly assume that the only reason not to commit suicide is that one finds one’s life worth living for its own sake as opposed to wanting to live for the sake of other goals. See comments here and here. (The second comment is from 5y ago and I may no longer endorse every point I made back then.)
Agreed—valuation of a life is more complex than “unwilling to commit suicide”. But the fact that it’s SO rare is at least some indication that people generally value their expected remainder of natural life more than nonexistence for that period. It’s confounded by social/religious delusions, but so is any attempt to evaluate whether a life is worth living.
Can you define what it would mean to want to live life “for its own sake”, whether by citation or prose?
it doesn’t seem to me that agency can be defined to be dissatisfied in a way that allows a hedonic pleasure metric to exist separate from the preference satisfaction of succeeding at outcomes and thereby not needing further effort to reach them, for a wide variety of hedonic preferences.
as such, it seems to me that all of your examples in the linked threads are fundamentally about the being having goals that are unsatisfied (avoiding feet hurting), but some goals remaining that can still be satisfied. it seems to me that it is necessarily unilaterally worse for a being to die if they have, on net, some goals remaining to live for. they may not succeed at seeking their goals, and there may be suffering in the sense of attempted motion on a goal which fails to move towards the goal and therefore causes wasted energy burn, but as far as I can tell, death is the permanent dissatisfaction of all hedonic desires of an agent, and the only argument for death rather than suffering onwards would be that the being in question is wasting energy on suffering that could instead be used by their peers to move towards goals the suicidal person also desires to cause to be satisfied. in general the argument against suicide that I use when talking to someone who is is that their goal of not being in an error state will someday be satisfied, and that we can find a better way towards their future desires than for them to give up the game and wish the best for other beings. on occasion I’ve gotten to talk to someone who was confident they truly would regret not donating their future resource use to others, but it’s very rare for someone to actually endorse that decision.
Maybe something like “would you take a pill that turned you into a p-zombie?” captures part of whether someone wants to live their life for its own sake. This eliminates a bunch of confounders for suicide.
However, there are further confounders. I can imagine a state where I’d be pretty indifferent to staying alive but I stay alive out of curiosity. As an analogy, I’m pretty good at lucid dreaming and during nightmares I often know that I can wake up at will or turn the dream into a lucid dream. Sometimes I stay in the dream even though the dream is very scary and unpleasant out of curiosity about what happens. In these instances, I wouldn’t say that the dream is positive but curiosity is what keeps me in it to “go see the monster” (and then bail).
p-zombies are non-physical; there’s no way to have a brain and be a p-zombie. cite, eg, the recent dissolving the consciousness question post, I believe “ec theory” is the appropriate keyword.
how can it be negative if you have working reflection, get the opportunity to partially weigh which outcome is more choiceworthy, and choose to continue? it doesn’t seem to me that this invalidates the framework in my previous post. again, I contend that your confusion is to narrowly evaluate a hedonic metric as though it is your true value function, when in fact the value function induced by your long term hedonic seeking appears to rank the choice the same way it’s made. of course, you could argue that for many people, it would be kinder to kill them in violation of their behaviorally expressed preference because their revealed preference for life does not truly match their internal “hedonic” waste; for example, if someone spends their entire life whimpering in the corner, appears to be in immense pain, barely gets through the actions necessary to survive—how could that ever warrant killing them? it seems to me that this is the same kind of reasoning used to justify atrocities.
p-zombies are non-physical; there’s no way to have a brain and be a p-zombie. cite, eg, the recent dissolving the consciousness question post, I believe “ec theory” is the appropriate keyword.
I agree with the view that p-zombies are non-physical. The thought experiment was just trying to isolate potential confounders like “what would friends/family/etc think?” and “what about the altruistic impact I could continue to have?” If the thing about p-zombies is distracting, you could imagine a version of the thought experiment where these other variables are isolated in a different way.
how can it be negative if you have working reflection, get the opportunity to partially weigh which outcome is more choiceworthy, and choose to continue?
I don’t know if what you call “choiceworthy” is the same thing as I have in mind when I think about the example. I’m now going to explain how I think about it. First off, I note that it’s possible to simultaneously selfishly wish that one would be dead but stay alive for altruistic reasons (either near-mode altruism towards people one has relationships with or far-mode altruism towards effective altruist efforts). Also, it’s possible for people to want to stay alive for paradoxical “face saving” reasons rather than out of a judgment that life is worthwhile.Shame is a powerful motivator and if the thought of committing suicide in your early years may feel like too much of a failure compared to just getting by in a socially isolated way, then staying alive could become the lesser of two evils. On this view, you think about your life not just in terms of enjoying lived experiences, but also about your status and the legacy you leave behind. Some of the worst suffering I can imagine is wanting to commit suicide but feeling like it would be too much of an admission of failure to do it.
In all these examples, my point is that whether to stay alive is a decision with multiple components, some sum positively, others negatively. And sure, if you decide to stay alive, then the “sum” is positive. But what is it the sum of? It’s the sum of how staying alive ranks according to your goals, not the sum of how good your life is for you on your subjective evaluation. Those are different! (How good your life is for you on your subjective evaluation is almost always a part of the total sum, but it need not be the only component in the calculation.)
For more thoughts on how I reason about goals, see this post.
again, I contend that your confusion is to narrowly evaluate a hedonic metric as though it is your true value function, when in fact the value function induced by your long term hedonic seeking appears to rank the choice the same way it’s made.
I’d characterize our disagreement a bit differently. I’d say that you narrowly assume that people’s value functions tell us the value of a life, whereas I think value functions tell us what the person cares about, which can include caring about one’s own life quality, but may also include other things. To assess what makes a person better off, instead of asking how I can make the world better according to that person’s goals, I have to isolate the components of a person value function that concern the quality of her own life.
of course, you could argue that for many people, it would be kinder to kill them in violation of their behaviorally expressed preference because their revealed preference for life does not truly match their internal “hedonic” waste; for example, if someone spends their entire life whimpering in the corner, appears to be in immense pain, barely gets through the actions necessary to survive—how could that ever warrant killing them? it seems to me that this is the same kind of reasoning used to justify atrocities.
I didn’t argue for killing anyone against their will. I’m with you that this would be wrong. I think we disagree about why it would be wrong. You’re saying it would be wrong because the person still has a positive life quality. By contrast, I’m saying it would be wrong because you’d violate the person’s all-things-considered goals. (In specific scenarios, you can imagine that killing someone against their will would be hedonically-altruistic towards the part of the person that experiences life, but simultaneously extremely disrespectful of their agency and what they live for and still want to achieve in life.)
this was a good discussion! to be clear I didn’t think you’d endorsed the lethality implications, I brought that up because it seemed to be nearby in implication of philosophical approach. I tend to get a bit passionate when I feel a dangerous implication is nearby, I apologize for my overly assertive tone (unfortunately an apology I make quite often).
I think your points in this reply are interesting in a way I don’t have immediate response to. It does seem that we’ve reached a level of explanation that demonstrates you’re making a solid point that I can’t immediately find fault with.
Interesting perspective. So you think the lives were unpleasant on average, but still good enough?
Yes. I don’t know of any believable estimate of median or mean self-reported happiness except very recently (and even now the data is very sparse), and in fact the the entire concept is pretty recent. In any case, Hobbes’s “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is a reasonable description of most lives, and his caveat of “outside of society” is actually misleading—it’s true inside society as well.
I do think that much of the unpleasantness is in our judgement not theirs, with an implicit comparison to some imaginary life, not in comparison to nonexistence, but it’s clear that the vast majority of lives include a lot of pain and loss. And it’s clear that suicide has always been somewhat rare, which is a revealed preference for continued life, even in great hardship.
So again, yes. “worth living” or “good enough” includes lives that are unpleasant in their mean or medium momentary experience. I don’t know exactly what the threshold is, or whether it’s about quantity or quality of the good moments, but I do know (or rather, believe; there’s no territory here, it’s all map) that most lives were good enough.
I don’t know how big of a component the suicide argument is to your view overall, but I want to flag that this particular argument seems to not show much. People don’t commit suicide for all sorts of reasons. You seem to implicitly assume that the only reason not to commit suicide is that one finds one’s life worth living for its own sake as opposed to wanting to live for the sake of other goals. See comments here and here. (The second comment is from 5y ago and I may no longer endorse every point I made back then.)
Agreed—valuation of a life is more complex than “unwilling to commit suicide”. But the fact that it’s SO rare is at least some indication that people generally value their expected remainder of natural life more than nonexistence for that period. It’s confounded by social/religious delusions, but so is any attempt to evaluate whether a life is worth living.
Can you define what it would mean to want to live life “for its own sake”, whether by citation or prose?
it doesn’t seem to me that agency can be defined to be dissatisfied in a way that allows a hedonic pleasure metric to exist separate from the preference satisfaction of succeeding at outcomes and thereby not needing further effort to reach them, for a wide variety of hedonic preferences.
as such, it seems to me that all of your examples in the linked threads are fundamentally about the being having goals that are unsatisfied (avoiding feet hurting), but some goals remaining that can still be satisfied. it seems to me that it is necessarily unilaterally worse for a being to die if they have, on net, some goals remaining to live for. they may not succeed at seeking their goals, and there may be suffering in the sense of attempted motion on a goal which fails to move towards the goal and therefore causes wasted energy burn, but as far as I can tell, death is the permanent dissatisfaction of all hedonic desires of an agent, and the only argument for death rather than suffering onwards would be that the being in question is wasting energy on suffering that could instead be used by their peers to move towards goals the suicidal person also desires to cause to be satisfied. in general the argument against suicide that I use when talking to someone who is is that their goal of not being in an error state will someday be satisfied, and that we can find a better way towards their future desires than for them to give up the game and wish the best for other beings. on occasion I’ve gotten to talk to someone who was confident they truly would regret not donating their future resource use to others, but it’s very rare for someone to actually endorse that decision.
Maybe something like “would you take a pill that turned you into a p-zombie?” captures part of whether someone wants to live their life for its own sake. This eliminates a bunch of confounders for suicide.
However, there are further confounders. I can imagine a state where I’d be pretty indifferent to staying alive but I stay alive out of curiosity. As an analogy, I’m pretty good at lucid dreaming and during nightmares I often know that I can wake up at will or turn the dream into a lucid dream. Sometimes I stay in the dream even though the dream is very scary and unpleasant out of curiosity about what happens. In these instances, I wouldn’t say that the dream is positive but curiosity is what keeps me in it to “go see the monster” (and then bail).
p-zombies are non-physical; there’s no way to have a brain and be a p-zombie. cite, eg, the recent dissolving the consciousness question post, I believe “ec theory” is the appropriate keyword.
how can it be negative if you have working reflection, get the opportunity to partially weigh which outcome is more choiceworthy, and choose to continue? it doesn’t seem to me that this invalidates the framework in my previous post. again, I contend that your confusion is to narrowly evaluate a hedonic metric as though it is your true value function, when in fact the value function induced by your long term hedonic seeking appears to rank the choice the same way it’s made. of course, you could argue that for many people, it would be kinder to kill them in violation of their behaviorally expressed preference because their revealed preference for life does not truly match their internal “hedonic” waste; for example, if someone spends their entire life whimpering in the corner, appears to be in immense pain, barely gets through the actions necessary to survive—how could that ever warrant killing them? it seems to me that this is the same kind of reasoning used to justify atrocities.
I agree with the view that p-zombies are non-physical. The thought experiment was just trying to isolate potential confounders like “what would friends/family/etc think?” and “what about the altruistic impact I could continue to have?” If the thing about p-zombies is distracting, you could imagine a version of the thought experiment where these other variables are isolated in a different way.
I don’t know if what you call “choiceworthy” is the same thing as I have in mind when I think about the example. I’m now going to explain how I think about it. First off, I note that it’s possible to simultaneously selfishly wish that one would be dead but stay alive for altruistic reasons (either near-mode altruism towards people one has relationships with or far-mode altruism towards effective altruist efforts). Also, it’s possible for people to want to stay alive for paradoxical “face saving” reasons rather than out of a judgment that life is worthwhile.Shame is a powerful motivator and if the thought of committing suicide in your early years may feel like too much of a failure compared to just getting by in a socially isolated way, then staying alive could become the lesser of two evils. On this view, you think about your life not just in terms of enjoying lived experiences, but also about your status and the legacy you leave behind. Some of the worst suffering I can imagine is wanting to commit suicide but feeling like it would be too much of an admission of failure to do it.
In all these examples, my point is that whether to stay alive is a decision with multiple components, some sum positively, others negatively. And sure, if you decide to stay alive, then the “sum” is positive. But what is it the sum of? It’s the sum of how staying alive ranks according to your goals, not the sum of how good your life is for you on your subjective evaluation. Those are different! (How good your life is for you on your subjective evaluation is almost always a part of the total sum, but it need not be the only component in the calculation.)
For more thoughts on how I reason about goals, see this post.
I’d characterize our disagreement a bit differently. I’d say that you narrowly assume that people’s value functions tell us the value of a life, whereas I think value functions tell us what the person cares about, which can include caring about one’s own life quality, but may also include other things. To assess what makes a person better off, instead of asking how I can make the world better according to that person’s goals, I have to isolate the components of a person value function that concern the quality of her own life.
I didn’t argue for killing anyone against their will. I’m with you that this would be wrong. I think we disagree about why it would be wrong. You’re saying it would be wrong because the person still has a positive life quality. By contrast, I’m saying it would be wrong because you’d violate the person’s all-things-considered goals. (In specific scenarios, you can imagine that killing someone against their will would be hedonically-altruistic towards the part of the person that experiences life, but simultaneously extremely disrespectful of their agency and what they live for and still want to achieve in life.)
this was a good discussion! to be clear I didn’t think you’d endorsed the lethality implications, I brought that up because it seemed to be nearby in implication of philosophical approach. I tend to get a bit passionate when I feel a dangerous implication is nearby, I apologize for my overly assertive tone (unfortunately an apology I make quite often).
I think your points in this reply are interesting in a way I don’t have immediate response to. It does seem that we’ve reached a level of explanation that demonstrates you’re making a solid point that I can’t immediately find fault with.