NB: There’s something I feel sad about when I imagine what it’s like to be others, so I’m going to ramble about it a bit in shortform because I’d like to say this and possibly say it confusingly rather than not say it at all. Maybe with some pruning this babble can be made to make sense.
There’s a certain strain of thought and thinkers in the rationality community that make me feel sad when I think about what it must be like to be them: the “closed” individualists. This is as opposed to people who view personal identity as either “empty” or “open”.
Closed Individualism: You start existing when you are born, and stop when you die.
Empty Individualism: You exist as a “time-slice” or “moment of experience.”
Open Individualism: There is only one subject of experience, who is everyone.
I might summarize the positions a little differently. Closed individualism is the “naive” theory of individualism: people, agents, etc. are like islands forever separated from each other by the gulf of subjective experience that can only be crossed by sending messages in bottles to the other islands (because you can never leave the island you are on). Empty individualism says that individualism is an after the fact reification and is not a natural phenomenon but rather an illusory artifact of how we understand the world. Open individualism is a position like the thing panpsychists are often trying to backpedal from, that the Universe is experiencing itself through us.
I think other positions are possible. For example, my own thinking is that it’s more like seeing these all as partial views that are “right” from a certain frame of thinking but none on its own captures the whole thing. I might call my position something like dialectical empty individualism via comparison to dialectical monism (which I think is the right term to capture my metaphysical position, though neutral monism probably works just as well, ergo neutral empty individualism might be an alternative term).
Anyway, back to the sadness. Now to be fair I feel sad when I think about what it must be like to be anyone who holds tightly to a closed individualism perspective, rationalist or not, but I more often see the extremes of where the closed position takes one among rationalists. I’m making an inference here, but my guess is that a closed individualist view is a large part of what makes things like value drift scary, life extension a top priority, and game & decision theory feel vitally important not just to AI safety but to living life.
And I say all this having previously been a closed individualist for most of my life. And I’m not opposed to the closed individualist view: I’m working on problems in value alignment for AI, I’m signed up for cryonics, and I think better decision theory is worth having. After all, I think closed individualism is right, and not just partially right, but all right, up to the limit of not being willing to say it’s right to the exclusion of the other perspectives. I think the closed individualism view feels real to people and is accurately describing both people’s experiences of individuality and some of the phenomena that create it.
So why am I sad? In many ways, closed individualism is a view that is built on suffering. It contains within it a great loneliness for creatures like us who want desperately to connect. It says that no matter how hard we try to bridge the gap it will always remain, and many people feel that if they were given the chance to eliminate it and merge with others they wouldn’t want to because then they’d lose themselves. To be a closed individualist is to live in fear: fear of death, fear of change, fear of loss of control. To me, that’s sad, because there’s another way.
The closed individualist might object “so what, this is a teleological argument: I might not want it to be that I am isolated and suffer, but closed individualism is what the world looks like, and I can’t be hurt by what is already true, so I maintain this position is right”. But I think this is wrong, because closed individualism is “wrong” in the sense that it doesn’t tell the whole story. If you’re looking for the theory that’s the most scientifically defensible, that for sure is empty individualism, not closed individualism, but it’s also very hard to get an intuitive grasp on empty individualism that you can live with and not sometimes think of yourself as a closed individual, so this tends to leave even the person who believes empty individualism is right acting as if closed individualism is how the world works.
The way out lies through open individualism, but this is a hard one to write about. Until you’ve felt the joy of open hearted connectedness to all being with ever fiber of existence, I think you’d have a hard time taking this view seriously, and the only way to feel this and take it seriously is probably through hundreds if not thousands of hours of meditation (you can also feel it with drugs but I think it’s more likely a person would dismiss or misunderstand the feeling as just a cool thing they felt on drugs). The “I am not it but it is me” sense you get is not really possible to explain to others; you have to see it for yourself because it exists somewhere beyond distinction such that it can never be brought back to a world carved up into more than one whole.
So here we are, trapped in a world of suffering, persisted because every closed individualist suffers and generates more suffering for the whole because it is in all of us. Thus am I sad.
[upvoted for talking about something that’s difficult to model and communicate about]
Hmm. I believe (with fairly high confidence—it would take a big surprise to shift me) a combination of empty and closed. Moments of self-observed experience are standalone, and woven into a fabric of memories in a closed, un-sharable system that will (sooner than I prefer) physically degrade into non-experiencing components.
I haven’t found anyone who claims to be open AND is rational enough to convince me they’re not just misstating what they actually experience. In fact, I’d love to hear someone talk about what it means to “want” something if you’re experiencing all things simultaneously.
I’m quite sympathetic to the argument that it is what it is, and there’s no reason to be sad. But I’m also unsure whether or why my acceptance of closed-empty existence makes you sad. Presumably, if your consciousness includes me, you know I’m not particularly sad overall (I certainly experience pain and frustration, but also joy and optimistic anticipation, in a balance that seems acceptable).
But I’m also unsure whether or why my acceptance of closed-empty existence makes you sad.
Because I know the joy of grokking the openness of the “individual” and see the closed approach creating inherent suffering (via wanting for the individual) that cannot be accepted because it seems to be part of the world.
I wonder how much the “great loneliness for creatures like us” is a necessary outcome of realizing that you are an individual, and how much it is a consequence of e.g. not having the kinds of friends you want to have, i.e. something that you wouldn’t feel under the right circumstances.
From my perspective, what I miss is people similar to me, living close to me. I can find like-minded people, but they live in different countries (I met them on LW meetups). Thus, I feel more lonely than I would feel if I lived in a different city. Similarly, being extraverted and/or having greater social skills could possibly help me find similar people in my proximity, maybe. Also, sometimes I meet people who seem like they could be what I miss in my life, but they are not interested in being friends with me. Again, this is probably a numbers game; if I could meet ten or hundred times more people of that type, some of them could be interested in me.
(In other words, I wonder whether this is not yet another case of “my personal problems, interpreted as a universal experience of the humankind”.)
Yet another possible factor is the feeling of safety. The less safe I feel, the greater the desire of having allies, preferably perfect allies, preferably loyal clones of myself.
Plus the fear of death. If, in some sense, there are copies of me out there, then, in some sense, I am immortal. If I am unique, then at my death something unique (and valuable, at least to me) will disappear from this universe, forever.
My quick response is that all of these sources of loneliness can still be downstream of using closed individualism as an intuitive model. The more I am able to use the open model the more safe I feel in any situation and the more connected I feel to others no matter how similar or different they are to me. Put one way, every stranger is a cousin I haven’t met yet, but just knowing on a deep level that the world is full of cousins is reassuring.
NB: There’s something I feel sad about when I imagine what it’s like to be others, so I’m going to ramble about it a bit in shortform because I’d like to say this and possibly say it confusingly rather than not say it at all. Maybe with some pruning this babble can be made to make sense.
There’s a certain strain of thought and thinkers in the rationality community that make me feel sad when I think about what it must be like to be them: the “closed” individualists. This is as opposed to people who view personal identity as either “empty” or “open”.
I’ll let Andrés of QRI explain all too briefly:
I might summarize the positions a little differently. Closed individualism is the “naive” theory of individualism: people, agents, etc. are like islands forever separated from each other by the gulf of subjective experience that can only be crossed by sending messages in bottles to the other islands (because you can never leave the island you are on). Empty individualism says that individualism is an after the fact reification and is not a natural phenomenon but rather an illusory artifact of how we understand the world. Open individualism is a position like the thing panpsychists are often trying to backpedal from, that the Universe is experiencing itself through us.
I think other positions are possible. For example, my own thinking is that it’s more like seeing these all as partial views that are “right” from a certain frame of thinking but none on its own captures the whole thing. I might call my position something like dialectical empty individualism via comparison to dialectical monism (which I think is the right term to capture my metaphysical position, though neutral monism probably works just as well, ergo neutral empty individualism might be an alternative term).
Anyway, back to the sadness. Now to be fair I feel sad when I think about what it must be like to be anyone who holds tightly to a closed individualism perspective, rationalist or not, but I more often see the extremes of where the closed position takes one among rationalists. I’m making an inference here, but my guess is that a closed individualist view is a large part of what makes things like value drift scary, life extension a top priority, and game & decision theory feel vitally important not just to AI safety but to living life.
And I say all this having previously been a closed individualist for most of my life. And I’m not opposed to the closed individualist view: I’m working on problems in value alignment for AI, I’m signed up for cryonics, and I think better decision theory is worth having. After all, I think closed individualism is right, and not just partially right, but all right, up to the limit of not being willing to say it’s right to the exclusion of the other perspectives. I think the closed individualism view feels real to people and is accurately describing both people’s experiences of individuality and some of the phenomena that create it.
So why am I sad? In many ways, closed individualism is a view that is built on suffering. It contains within it a great loneliness for creatures like us who want desperately to connect. It says that no matter how hard we try to bridge the gap it will always remain, and many people feel that if they were given the chance to eliminate it and merge with others they wouldn’t want to because then they’d lose themselves. To be a closed individualist is to live in fear: fear of death, fear of change, fear of loss of control. To me, that’s sad, because there’s another way.
The closed individualist might object “so what, this is a teleological argument: I might not want it to be that I am isolated and suffer, but closed individualism is what the world looks like, and I can’t be hurt by what is already true, so I maintain this position is right”. But I think this is wrong, because closed individualism is “wrong” in the sense that it doesn’t tell the whole story. If you’re looking for the theory that’s the most scientifically defensible, that for sure is empty individualism, not closed individualism, but it’s also very hard to get an intuitive grasp on empty individualism that you can live with and not sometimes think of yourself as a closed individual, so this tends to leave even the person who believes empty individualism is right acting as if closed individualism is how the world works.
The way out lies through open individualism, but this is a hard one to write about. Until you’ve felt the joy of open hearted connectedness to all being with ever fiber of existence, I think you’d have a hard time taking this view seriously, and the only way to feel this and take it seriously is probably through hundreds if not thousands of hours of meditation (you can also feel it with drugs but I think it’s more likely a person would dismiss or misunderstand the feeling as just a cool thing they felt on drugs). The “I am not it but it is me” sense you get is not really possible to explain to others; you have to see it for yourself because it exists somewhere beyond distinction such that it can never be brought back to a world carved up into more than one whole.
So here we are, trapped in a world of suffering, persisted because every closed individualist suffers and generates more suffering for the whole because it is in all of us. Thus am I sad.
[upvoted for talking about something that’s difficult to model and communicate about]
Hmm. I believe (with fairly high confidence—it would take a big surprise to shift me) a combination of empty and closed. Moments of self-observed experience are standalone, and woven into a fabric of memories in a closed, un-sharable system that will (sooner than I prefer) physically degrade into non-experiencing components.
I haven’t found anyone who claims to be open AND is rational enough to convince me they’re not just misstating what they actually experience. In fact, I’d love to hear someone talk about what it means to “want” something if you’re experiencing all things simultaneously.
I’m quite sympathetic to the argument that it is what it is, and there’s no reason to be sad. But I’m also unsure whether or why my acceptance of closed-empty existence makes you sad. Presumably, if your consciousness includes me, you know I’m not particularly sad overall (I certainly experience pain and frustration, but also joy and optimistic anticipation, in a balance that seems acceptable).
Because I know the joy of grokking the openness of the “individual” and see the closed approach creating inherent suffering (via wanting for the individual) that cannot be accepted because it seems to be part of the world.
I wonder how much the “great loneliness for creatures like us” is a necessary outcome of realizing that you are an individual, and how much it is a consequence of e.g. not having the kinds of friends you want to have, i.e. something that you wouldn’t feel under the right circumstances.
From my perspective, what I miss is people similar to me, living close to me. I can find like-minded people, but they live in different countries (I met them on LW meetups). Thus, I feel more lonely than I would feel if I lived in a different city. Similarly, being extraverted and/or having greater social skills could possibly help me find similar people in my proximity, maybe. Also, sometimes I meet people who seem like they could be what I miss in my life, but they are not interested in being friends with me. Again, this is probably a numbers game; if I could meet ten or hundred times more people of that type, some of them could be interested in me.
(In other words, I wonder whether this is not yet another case of “my personal problems, interpreted as a universal experience of the humankind”.)
Yet another possible factor is the feeling of safety. The less safe I feel, the greater the desire of having allies, preferably perfect allies, preferably loyal clones of myself.
Plus the fear of death. If, in some sense, there are copies of me out there, then, in some sense, I am immortal. If I am unique, then at my death something unique (and valuable, at least to me) will disappear from this universe, forever.
My quick response is that all of these sources of loneliness can still be downstream of using closed individualism as an intuitive model. The more I am able to use the open model the more safe I feel in any situation and the more connected I feel to others no matter how similar or different they are to me. Put one way, every stranger is a cousin I haven’t met yet, but just knowing on a deep level that the world is full of cousins is reassuring.