This is essentially sacrificing emotional epistemic rationality for emotional instrumental rationality.
One thing that you’re overlooking here is that the kind of self-modification Dan is talking about can’t be done unless you actually have strong epistemic rationality with respect to your emotions—strong enough to understand the judgment by which you arrived at the emotions in the first place.
If you were perfect, you could entirely disjoin the emotional state you wished to feel from the emotional valuation you wished to decide with—making one conscious and keeping the other deep inside your head.
This is a misunderstanding of how emotions work. Our emotions are not synonymous with our values, nor directly derived from them. If they were, we would all be rational, all the time!
Emotions are cached responses to situationally-salient values. Example: I don’t like exercising, but it produces another result I want later. The not-liking-exercise emotion is not actually fulfilling my values: it would be more useful—and more epistemically accurate—for me to experience an emotion in relation to exercise that gives greater weight to my longer-term values. Which of these emotions is epistemically correct?
If our brains actually used our real values in their entirety to arrive at decisions, it’d take too bloody long. So we use cached evaluations based on immediate information… which means our emotions are automatically and systematically biased against our long-term best interests, unless we consciously correct what’s in our caches on an ongoing basis.
So, there is no conflict here between the epistemic and instrumental: removing unnecessary negative emotion is simply correcting systemic biases of the underlying machinery to reflect our true values and desired outcomes, rather than overweighting what is easy to visualize or unconsciously learn.
Our emotions are not synonymous with our values, nor directly derived from them. If they were, we would all be rational, all the time!
You have misunderstood my entire point. I know that emotions don’t naturally reflect values. The argument was over whether achieving your values requires you to change your emotions to reflect them, or if you can be equally motivated by values alone.
From the original post:
...you are horrified by the huge amounts of suffering. You have shut up and calculated, and the calculation output that you should feel 3^^^3 times as bad as over a stubbed toe. And a stubbed toe can be pretty bad.
In other words, you have decided that your emotions need to be realigned to reflect (what your value system says about) the state of the world. DanArmak argued that this is false. I argued that it is generally true.
In other words, you have decided that your emotions need to be realigned to reflect (what your value system says about) the state of the world. DanArmak argued that this is false. I argued that it is generally true.
Dan is in error, insofar as his argument implied that one should have one’s emotions conflict with one’s true values.
You, however are in error insofar as your arguments praise feeling bad as a path to doing good.
I agree with you that your emotions should reflect your values. OTOH, I agree with Dan that the optimal choice of emotion to reflect one’s values will rarely be feeling bad, unless there is some sort of social goal involved (such as bonding with a group through a shared experience of grief or outrage).
One thing that you’re overlooking here is that the kind of self-modification Dan is talking about can’t be done unless you actually have strong epistemic rationality with respect to your emotions—strong enough to understand the judgment by which you arrived at the emotions in the first place.
This is a misunderstanding of how emotions work. Our emotions are not synonymous with our values, nor directly derived from them. If they were, we would all be rational, all the time!
Emotions are cached responses to situationally-salient values. Example: I don’t like exercising, but it produces another result I want later. The not-liking-exercise emotion is not actually fulfilling my values: it would be more useful—and more epistemically accurate—for me to experience an emotion in relation to exercise that gives greater weight to my longer-term values. Which of these emotions is epistemically correct?
If our brains actually used our real values in their entirety to arrive at decisions, it’d take too bloody long. So we use cached evaluations based on immediate information… which means our emotions are automatically and systematically biased against our long-term best interests, unless we consciously correct what’s in our caches on an ongoing basis.
So, there is no conflict here between the epistemic and instrumental: removing unnecessary negative emotion is simply correcting systemic biases of the underlying machinery to reflect our true values and desired outcomes, rather than overweighting what is easy to visualize or unconsciously learn.
You have misunderstood my entire point. I know that emotions don’t naturally reflect values. The argument was over whether achieving your values requires you to change your emotions to reflect them, or if you can be equally motivated by values alone.
From the original post:
In other words, you have decided that your emotions need to be realigned to reflect (what your value system says about) the state of the world. DanArmak argued that this is false. I argued that it is generally true.
Dan is in error, insofar as his argument implied that one should have one’s emotions conflict with one’s true values.
You, however are in error insofar as your arguments praise feeling bad as a path to doing good.
I agree with you that your emotions should reflect your values. OTOH, I agree with Dan that the optimal choice of emotion to reflect one’s values will rarely be feeling bad, unless there is some sort of social goal involved (such as bonding with a group through a shared experience of grief or outrage).