@Eliezer: There’s emotion involved. I enjoy calling people’s bluffs.
Jef, if you want to argue further here, I would suggest explaining just this one phrase “functional self-similarity of agency extended from the ‘individual’ to groups”.
Eliezer, it’s clear that your suggestion isn’t friendly, and I intended not to argue, but rather, to share and participate in building better understanding. But you’ve turned it into a game which I can either play, or allow you to use it against me. So be it.
The phrase is a simple one, but stripped of context, as you’ve done here, it may indeed appear meaningless. So to explain, let’s first restore context.
Your essay, Which Parts are “Me”, highlighted some interesting and significant similarities—and differences—in our thinking. Interesting, because they match an epistemological model I held tightly and would still defend against simpler thinking, and significant, because a coherent theory of self, or rather agency, is essential to a coherent meta-ethics.
So I wrote (after trying to establish some similarity of background):
“At some point about 7 years later (about 1985) it hit me one day that I had completely given up belief in an essential “me”, while fully embracing a pragmatic “me”. It was interesting to observe myself then for the next few years; every 6 months or so I would exclaim to myself (if no one else cared to listen) that I could feel more and more pieces settling into a coherent and expanding whole. It was joyful and liberating in that everything worked just as before, but I had to accommodate one less hypothesis, and certain areas of thinking, meta-ethics in particular, became significantly more coherent and extensible. [For example, a piece of the puzzle I have yet to encounter in your writing is the functional self-similarity of agency extended from the “individual” to groups.]”
So I offered a hint, of an apparently unexplored (for you) direction of thought, which, given a coherent understanding of the functional role of agency, might benefit your further thinking on meta-ethics.
The phrase represents a simple concept, but rests on a subtle epistemic foundation which, as Mathew C pointed out, tends to bring out vigorous defenses in support of the Core Self. Further to the difficulty, an epistemic foundation cannot be conveyed, but must be created in the mind of thinker as described pretty well recently by Meltzer in a paper that “stunned” Robin Hanson, entitled Pedagogical Motives for Esoteric Writing. So, the phrase is simple, but the meaning depends on background, and along the road to acquiring that background, there is growth.
To break it down: “Functional self-similarity of agency extended from the ‘individual’ to groups.”
“Functional” indicates that I’m referring to similarity in terms of function, i.e. relations of output to input, rather than e.g. similarities of implementation, structure, or appearance. More concretely [I almost neglected to include the concrete.] I’m referring to the functional aspects of agency, in essence, action on behalf of perceived interests (an internal model of some sort) in relation to which the agent acts on its immediate environment so as to (tend to) null out any differences.
“Self-similarity” refers to some entity replicated, conserved, re-used over a range of scale. More concretely, I’m referring to patterns of agency which repeat—in functional terms, even though the implementation may be quite different in structure, substrate, or otherwise.
“Extended from the individual to groups” refers to the scale of the subject, in other words, that functional self-similarity of agency is conserved over increasing scale from the common and popularly conceived case of individual agency, extending to groups, groups of groups, and so on. More concretely, I’m referring to the essential functional similarities, in terms of agency, which are conserved when a model scales for example, from individual human acting on its interests, to a family acting on its interests, to tribe, company, non-profit, military unit, city-state, etc. especially in terms of the dynamics of its interactions with entities of similar (functional) scale, but also with regard to the internal alignments (increasing coherence) of its own nature due to selection for “what works.”
As you must realize, regularities observed over increasing scale tend to indicate and increasingly profound principle. That was the potential value I offered to you.
In my opinion, the foregoing has a direct bearing on a coherent meta-ethics, and is far from “fake”. Maybe we could work on “increasing coherence with increasing context” next?
@Eliezer: There’s emotion involved. I enjoy calling people’s bluffs.
Jef, if you want to argue further here, I would suggest explaining just this one phrase “functional self-similarity of agency extended from the ‘individual’ to groups”.
Eliezer, it’s clear that your suggestion isn’t friendly, and I intended not to argue, but rather, to share and participate in building better understanding. But you’ve turned it into a game which I can either play, or allow you to use it against me. So be it.
The phrase is a simple one, but stripped of context, as you’ve done here, it may indeed appear meaningless. So to explain, let’s first restore context.
Your essay, Which Parts are “Me”, highlighted some interesting and significant similarities—and differences—in our thinking. Interesting, because they match an epistemological model I held tightly and would still defend against simpler thinking, and significant, because a coherent theory of self, or rather agency, is essential to a coherent meta-ethics.
So I wrote (after trying to establish some similarity of background):
“At some point about 7 years later (about 1985) it hit me one day that I had completely given up belief in an essential “me”, while fully embracing a pragmatic “me”. It was interesting to observe myself then for the next few years; every 6 months or so I would exclaim to myself (if no one else cared to listen) that I could feel more and more pieces settling into a coherent and expanding whole. It was joyful and liberating in that everything worked just as before, but I had to accommodate one less hypothesis, and certain areas of thinking, meta-ethics in particular, became significantly more coherent and extensible. [For example, a piece of the puzzle I have yet to encounter in your writing is the functional self-similarity of agency extended from the “individual” to groups.]”
So I offered a hint, of an apparently unexplored (for you) direction of thought, which, given a coherent understanding of the functional role of agency, might benefit your further thinking on meta-ethics.
The phrase represents a simple concept, but rests on a subtle epistemic foundation which, as Mathew C pointed out, tends to bring out vigorous defenses in support of the Core Self. Further to the difficulty, an epistemic foundation cannot be conveyed, but must be created in the mind of thinker as described pretty well recently by Meltzer in a paper that “stunned” Robin Hanson, entitled Pedagogical Motives for Esoteric Writing. So, the phrase is simple, but the meaning depends on background, and along the road to acquiring that background, there is growth.
To break it down: “Functional self-similarity of agency extended from the ‘individual’ to groups.”
“Functional” indicates that I’m referring to similarity in terms of function, i.e. relations of output to input, rather than e.g. similarities of implementation, structure, or appearance. More concretely [I almost neglected to include the concrete.] I’m referring to the functional aspects of agency, in essence, action on behalf of perceived interests (an internal model of some sort) in relation to which the agent acts on its immediate environment so as to (tend to) null out any differences.
“Self-similarity” refers to some entity replicated, conserved, re-used over a range of scale. More concretely, I’m referring to patterns of agency which repeat—in functional terms, even though the implementation may be quite different in structure, substrate, or otherwise.
“Extended from the individual to groups” refers to the scale of the subject, in other words, that functional self-similarity of agency is conserved over increasing scale from the common and popularly conceived case of individual agency, extending to groups, groups of groups, and so on. More concretely, I’m referring to the essential functional similarities, in terms of agency, which are conserved when a model scales for example, from individual human acting on its interests, to a family acting on its interests, to tribe, company, non-profit, military unit, city-state, etc. especially in terms of the dynamics of its interactions with entities of similar (functional) scale, but also with regard to the internal alignments (increasing coherence) of its own nature due to selection for “what works.”
As you must realize, regularities observed over increasing scale tend to indicate and increasingly profound principle. That was the potential value I offered to you.
In my opinion, the foregoing has a direct bearing on a coherent meta-ethics, and is far from “fake”. Maybe we could work on “increasing coherence with increasing context” next?