I’m a classically trained pianist. Music practice involves at least four kinds of pain:
Loneliness
Frustration
Physical pain
Monotony
I perceive none of these to add meaning to music practice. In fact, it was loneliness, frustration, and monotony that caused my music practice to be slowly drained of its meaning and led me ultimately to stop playing, even though I highly valued my achievements as a classical pianist and music teacher. If there’d been an issue with physical pain, that would have been even worse.
I think what pain can do is add flavor to a story. And we use stories as a way to convey meaning. But in that context, the pain is usually illustrating the pleasures of the experience or of the positive achievement. In the context of my piano career, I was never able to use these forms of pain as a contrast to the pleasures of practice and performance. My performance anxiety was too intense, and so it also was not a source of pleasure.
By contrast, I herded sheep on the Navajo reservation for a month in the middle of winter. That experience generated many stories. Most of them revolve around a source of pain, or a mistake. But that pain or mistake serves to highlight an achievement.
That achievement could be the simple fact of making it through that month while providing a useful service to my host. Or moments of success within it: getting the sheep to drink from the hole I cut in the icy lake, busting a tunnel through the drifts with my body so they could get home, finding a mother sheep that had gotten lost when she was giving birth, not getting cannibalized by a Skinwalker.
Those make for good stories, but there is pleasure in telling those stories. I also have many stories from my life that are painful to tell. Telling them makes me feel drained of meaning.
So I believe that storytelling has the ability to create pleasure out of painful or difficult memories. That is why it feels meaningful: it is pleasurable to tell stories. And being a good storyteller can come with many rewards. The net effect of a painful experience can be positive in the long run if it lends itself to a lot of good storytelling.
Where do values enter the picture?
I think it’s because “values” is a term for the types of stories that give us pleasure. My community gets pleasure out of the stories about my time on the Navajo reservation. They also feel pleasure in my story about getting chased by a bear. I know which of my friends will feel pleasure in my stories from Burning Man, and who will find them uncomfortable.
So once again, “values” is a gloss for the pleasure we take in certain types of stories. Meaning comes from pleasure; it appears to come from values because values also come from pleasure. Meaning can come from pain only indirectly. Pain can generate stories, which generate pleasure in the telling.
“values” is a term for the types of stories that give us pleasure.
It really depends on what you mean by “pleasure”. If pleasure is just “things you want”, then almost tautologically meaning comes from pleasure, since you want meaning.
If instead, pleasure is a particular phenomological feeling similar to feeling happy or content, I think that many of us actually WANT the meaning that comes from living our values, and it also happens to give us pleasure. I think that there are also people that just WANT the pleasure, and if they could get it while ignoring their values, they would.
I call this the”Heaven/Enlightenment” dichotomy, and I think it’s a frequent misunderstanding.
I’ve seen some people say “all we care about is feeling good, and people who think they care about the outside world are confused.” I’ve also seen people say “All we care about is meeting our values, and people who think it’s about feeling good are confused.”
Personally, I think that people are more towards one side of the spectrum or the other along different dimensions, and I’m inclined to believe both sides about their own experience.
I think we can consider pleasure, along with altruism, consistency, rationality, fitting the categorical imperative, and so forth as moral goods.
People have different preferences for how they trade off one against the other when they’re in conflict. But they of course prefer them not to be in conflict.
What I’m interested is not what weights people assign to these values—I agree with you that they are diverse—but on what causes people to adopt any set of preferences at all.
My hypothesis is that it’s pleasure. Or more specifically, whatever moral argument most effectively hijacks an individual person’s psychological reward system.
So if you wanted to understand why another person considers some strange action or belief to be moral, you’d need to understand why the belief system that they hold gives them pleasure.
Some predictions from that hypothesis:
People who find a complex moral argument unpleasant to think about won’t adopt it.
People who find a moral community pleasant to be in will adopt its values.
A moral argument might be very pleasant to understand, rehearse, and think about, and unpleasant to abandon. It might also be unpleasant in the actions it motivates its subscriber to undertake. It will continue to exist in their mind if the balance of pleasure in belief to displeasure in action is favorable.
Deprogramming somebody from a belief system you find abhorrent is best done by giving them alternative sources of “moral pleasure.” Examples of this include the ways people have deprogrammed people from cults and the KKK, by including them in their social gatherings, including Jewish religious dinners, and making them feel welcome. Eventually, the pleasure of adopting the moral system of that shared community displaces whatever pleasure they were deriving from their former belief system.
Paying somebody in money and status to uphold a given belief system is a great way to keep them doing it, no matter how silly it is.
If you want people do do more of a painful but necessary action X, helping them feel compensating forms of moral pleasure is a good way to go about it. Effective Altruism is a great example. By helping people understand how effective donations or direct work can save lives, they give people a feeling of heroism. Its failure mode is making people feel like the demands are impossible, and the displeasure of that disappointment is a primary issue in that community.
Another good way to encourage more of a painful but necessary action X is to teach people how to shape it into a good story that they and others will appreciate in the telling. Hence the story-fication of charity.
Many people don’t give to charity because their community disparages it as “do-gooderism,” as futile, as bragging, or as a tasteless display of wealth and privilege. If you want people to give more to charity, you have to give people a way of being able to enjoy talking about their charitable contributions. One solution is to form a community in which that’s openly accepted and appreciated. Like EA.
Likewise for the rationality community. If you want people to do more good epistemology outside of academia, give them an outlet where that’ll be appreciated and an axis from where it can be spread.
My hypothesis is that it’s pleasure. Or more specifically, whatever moral argument most effectively hijacks an individual person’s psychological reward system.
This just kicks the can down the road on you defining pleasure, all of my points still apply
If instead, pleasure is a particular phenomological feeling similar to feeling happy or content, I think that many of us actually WANT the meaning that comes from living our values, and it also happens to give us pleasure.
That is, I think it’s possible to say that pleasure kicks in around values that we really want, rather than vice versa.
I’m a classically trained pianist. Music practice involves at least four kinds of pain:
Loneliness
Frustration
Physical pain
Monotony
I perceive none of these to add meaning to music practice. In fact, it was loneliness, frustration, and monotony that caused my music practice to be slowly drained of its meaning and led me ultimately to stop playing, even though I highly valued my achievements as a classical pianist and music teacher. If there’d been an issue with physical pain, that would have been even worse.
I think what pain can do is add flavor to a story. And we use stories as a way to convey meaning. But in that context, the pain is usually illustrating the pleasures of the experience or of the positive achievement. In the context of my piano career, I was never able to use these forms of pain as a contrast to the pleasures of practice and performance. My performance anxiety was too intense, and so it also was not a source of pleasure.
By contrast, I herded sheep on the Navajo reservation for a month in the middle of winter. That experience generated many stories. Most of them revolve around a source of pain, or a mistake. But that pain or mistake serves to highlight an achievement.
That achievement could be the simple fact of making it through that month while providing a useful service to my host. Or moments of success within it: getting the sheep to drink from the hole I cut in the icy lake, busting a tunnel through the drifts with my body so they could get home, finding a mother sheep that had gotten lost when she was giving birth, not getting cannibalized by a Skinwalker.
Those make for good stories, but there is pleasure in telling those stories. I also have many stories from my life that are painful to tell. Telling them makes me feel drained of meaning.
So I believe that storytelling has the ability to create pleasure out of painful or difficult memories. That is why it feels meaningful: it is pleasurable to tell stories. And being a good storyteller can come with many rewards. The net effect of a painful experience can be positive in the long run if it lends itself to a lot of good storytelling.
Where do values enter the picture?
I think it’s because “values” is a term for the types of stories that give us pleasure. My community gets pleasure out of the stories about my time on the Navajo reservation. They also feel pleasure in my story about getting chased by a bear. I know which of my friends will feel pleasure in my stories from Burning Man, and who will find them uncomfortable.
So once again, “values” is a gloss for the pleasure we take in certain types of stories. Meaning comes from pleasure; it appears to come from values because values also come from pleasure. Meaning can come from pain only indirectly. Pain can generate stories, which generate pleasure in the telling.
It really depends on what you mean by “pleasure”. If pleasure is just “things you want”, then almost tautologically meaning comes from pleasure, since you want meaning.
If instead, pleasure is a particular phenomological feeling similar to feeling happy or content, I think that many of us actually WANT the meaning that comes from living our values, and it also happens to give us pleasure. I think that there are also people that just WANT the pleasure, and if they could get it while ignoring their values, they would.
I call this the”Heaven/Enlightenment” dichotomy, and I think it’s a frequent misunderstanding.
I’ve seen some people say “all we care about is feeling good, and people who think they care about the outside world are confused.” I’ve also seen people say “All we care about is meeting our values, and people who think it’s about feeling good are confused.”
Personally, I think that people are more towards one side of the spectrum or the other along different dimensions, and I’m inclined to believe both sides about their own experience.
I think we can consider pleasure, along with altruism, consistency, rationality, fitting the categorical imperative, and so forth as moral goods.
People have different preferences for how they trade off one against the other when they’re in conflict. But they of course prefer them not to be in conflict.
What I’m interested is not what weights people assign to these values—I agree with you that they are diverse—but on what causes people to adopt any set of preferences at all.
My hypothesis is that it’s pleasure. Or more specifically, whatever moral argument most effectively hijacks an individual person’s psychological reward system.
So if you wanted to understand why another person considers some strange action or belief to be moral, you’d need to understand why the belief system that they hold gives them pleasure.
Some predictions from that hypothesis:
People who find a complex moral argument unpleasant to think about won’t adopt it.
People who find a moral community pleasant to be in will adopt its values.
A moral argument might be very pleasant to understand, rehearse, and think about, and unpleasant to abandon. It might also be unpleasant in the actions it motivates its subscriber to undertake. It will continue to exist in their mind if the balance of pleasure in belief to displeasure in action is favorable.
Deprogramming somebody from a belief system you find abhorrent is best done by giving them alternative sources of “moral pleasure.” Examples of this include the ways people have deprogrammed people from cults and the KKK, by including them in their social gatherings, including Jewish religious dinners, and making them feel welcome. Eventually, the pleasure of adopting the moral system of that shared community displaces whatever pleasure they were deriving from their former belief system.
Paying somebody in money and status to uphold a given belief system is a great way to keep them doing it, no matter how silly it is.
If you want people do do more of a painful but necessary action X, helping them feel compensating forms of moral pleasure is a good way to go about it. Effective Altruism is a great example. By helping people understand how effective donations or direct work can save lives, they give people a feeling of heroism. Its failure mode is making people feel like the demands are impossible, and the displeasure of that disappointment is a primary issue in that community.
Another good way to encourage more of a painful but necessary action X is to teach people how to shape it into a good story that they and others will appreciate in the telling. Hence the story-fication of charity.
Many people don’t give to charity because their community disparages it as “do-gooderism,” as futile, as bragging, or as a tasteless display of wealth and privilege. If you want people to give more to charity, you have to give people a way of being able to enjoy talking about their charitable contributions. One solution is to form a community in which that’s openly accepted and appreciated. Like EA.
Likewise for the rationality community. If you want people to do more good epistemology outside of academia, give them an outlet where that’ll be appreciated and an axis from where it can be spread.
This just kicks the can down the road on you defining pleasure, all of my points still apply
That is, I think it’s possible to say that pleasure kicks in around values that we really want, rather than vice versa.