While not everyone experiences the ‘god-shaped hole,’ it would be dense of us not to acknowledge the ubiquity of spirituality across cultures just because we feel no need for it ourselves (feel free to replace ‘us’ and ‘we’ with ‘many of the readers of this blog’). Spirituality seems to be an aesthetic imperative for much of humanity, and it will probably take a lot teasing apart to determine what aspects of it are essential to human happiness, and what parts are culturally inculcated.
LauraABJ
Karma: 613
Ok, so I am not a student of literature or religion, but I believe there are fundamental human aesthetic principles that non-materialist religious and wholistic ideas satisfy in our psychology. They try to explain things in large concepts that humans have evolved to easily grasp rather than the minutiae and logical puzzles of reality. If materialists want these memes to be given up, they will need to create equally compelling human metaphor, which is a tall order if we want everything to convey reality correctly. Compelling metaphor is frequently incorrect. My atheist-jewish husband loves to talk about the beauty of scripture and parables in the Christian bible and stands firm against my insistence that any number of novels are both better written and provide better moral guidance. I personally have a disgust reaction whenever he points out a flowery passage about morality and humanity that doesn’t make any actual sense. HOW CAN YOU BE TAKEN IN BY THAT? But unlike practicing religious people, he doesn’t ‘believe’ any of it, he’s just attracted to it aesthetically, as an idea, as a beautiful outgrowth of the human spirit. Basically, it presses all the right psychological buttons. This is not to say that materialists cannot produce equally compelling metaphors, but it may be a very difficult task, and the spiritualists have a good, I don’t know, 10,000 years on us in honing in on what appeals to our primitive psychology.
″ The negative consequences if I turn out to be wrong seem insignificant—oh no, I tried to deceive myself about my ability to feel differently than I do!”
Repression anyone? I think directly telling yourself, “I don’t feel that way, I feel this way!” can be extremely harmful, since you are ignoring important information in the original feeling. You are likely to express your original feelings in some less direct, more destructive, and of course less rational way if you do this. A stereotypical example is that of a man deciding that he should not feel angry that he did not get a promotion at work and then blowing up at his wife for not doing the dishes properly. Maybe there is nothing to actually be angry about, and screaming at his boss certainly wouldn’t accomplish anything, but ignoring the feeling as invalid is almost certain to end badly.
I think Alicorn is suggesting that if you attempt to understand why you have the feelings you do, and if these reasons don’t make sense, your feelings will likely change naturally without the need to artificially apply different ones.
We discussed a similar idea in reference to Godzilla, namely what kind of evidence we would need to believe that ‘magical’ elements existed in the world. The point you made then was that even something as outside our scientific understanding as Godzilla would be insufficient evidence to change our basic scientific world view, and that such evidence might not exist even in theory. I think this post could be easily improved by an introduction explaining this point, which you currently leave as an open question at the the end.
Monroe, NY (though he is not a Hassid!)
It’s not that they have a strict prohibition on pets, more of a general disapproval from appeal to cleanliness. I don’t know how the super-orthodox interpret the Torah on this matter.
I would find this argument much more convincing if it were supported by people who actually have children. My mother goes beserk over a smiling infant in a way I cannot begin to comprehend (I am usually afraid I will accidentally hurt them). My husband, likewise, has an instant affinity for babies and always tries to communicate and play with them. He was raised Jewish with the idea that it is unclean to have animals in the home and does not find animals particularly adorable. In our culture we are inundated with anthropomorphised images of animals in television and given stuffed toys and pets that we take care of like children. It’s not that surprising that we find animals cute when we focus so much attention on them as if they were little people. I do not know that such evaluations of ‘cuteness’ would hold cross-culturally, especially in cultures where people do kill and eat ‘cute’ animals on a regular basis.
Something like this is useful for the types of data points patients would have no reason to self-deceive over, however I worry that the general tendency for people to make their ‘data’ fit the stories they’ve written about themselves in their minds will promote superstitions. For example, a friend of mine is convinced that the aspartame in diet soda caused her rosacea/lupus. She’s sent me links to chat-rooms that have blamed aspartame for everything from diabetes to alzheimer’s, and it’s disturbing to see the kind of positive feed-back loops that are created from anecdotes in which chat members state a clear link exists between symptoms and usage. One says, “I got symptom X after drinking diet soda,” and another says, “I have symptom X, it must be from drinking diet soda!” and another says, “Thanks, after reading your comments, I stopped drinking diet soda and symptom X went away!” In spite of chat rooms dedicated to blaming diet soda for every conceivable health problem and the fall of American values, no scientific study to date has shown ANY negative side effect of aspartame even at the upper bounds of current human consumption.
Another example of hysterical positive-feedback would be the proliferation of insane allegations that the MMR vaccine causes autism. I would guess angry parents who wanted to believe MMR caused their child’s autism would plot their ‘data points’ for the onset of their child’s symptoms right after vaccination.
A site like this one may allow certain trends to rise out of the noise, but we must not forget the tendency people have to lie to themselves for a convenient story.
I think the key is that most people don’t care whether or not AGW is occurring unless they can expect it to affect them. Since changing policy will negatively affect them immediately via increased taxes, decreased manufacture, etc., it’s easier to just say they don’t believe in AGW period. If the key counter-AGW measure on the table were funding for carbon-capture research, I think many fewer people would claim that they didn’t believe in AGW.
My take on global warming is that no policy that has significant impact on the problem will be implemented until the frequency of droughts/hurricaines/floods/fires increases to obvious levels in the western world (fuck-Bengali policy is already in place, and I don’t think more famines will change that). And by obvious, I mean obvious to a layman, as in ‘when I was young we only had 1 hurricane per year, and now we have 10!’ By this time, the only option will probably be technological.
There were some fantastic links here. Thankyou!
Does anyone here know what the break-down is among cryonics advocates between believing that A) in the future cryopreserved patients will be physically rejuvinated in their bodies and B) in the future cryopreserved patients will be brain-scanned and uploaded?
I think there is a reasonable probability of effective cryopreservation and rejuvination of a mammal (at least a mouse) in the next 25 years, but I think our ability to ‘rejuvinate’ will be largely dependent on the specific cryoincs technologies developed at that time, and that it is very unlikely cryonics methods developed before that time will be acceptable for rejuvination. Realize that once an effective cryopreservation method has been developed, socially there will be much more interest in perfecting it than there will be in going back to the old technology used to freeze past generations and figuring out how we can get that to work for their sake.
Yes- but your two-boxing didn’t cause i=0, rather the million was there because i=0. I’m saying that if (D or E) = true and you get a million dollars, and you two-box, then you haven’t caused E=0. E=0 before you two boxed, or if it did not, then omega was wrong and thought D = onebox, when in fact you are a two-boxer.
No, I still don’t get why adding in the ith digit of pi clause changes Newcome’s problem at all. If omega says you’ll one-box and you two-box then omega was wrong, plain and simple. The ith digit of pi is an independent clause. I don’t see how one’s desire to make i=0 by two-boxing after already getting the million is any different than one wanting to make omega wrong by two-boxing after getting the million. If you are the type of person who, after getting the million thinks, “Gee, I want i=0! I’ll two-box!” Then omega wouldn’t have given you the million to begin with. After determining that he would not give you the million, he’d look at the ith digit of pi and either put the million in or not. You two-boxing has nothing to do with i.
I’m not clear at all what the problem is, but it seems to be symantic. It’s disturbing that this post can get 17 upvotes with almost no (2?) comments actually referring to what you’re saying- indicating that no one else here really gets the point either.
It seems you have an issue with the word ‘dependent’ and the definition that Eliezer provided. Under that definition, E (the ith digit of pi) would be dependent on C (our decision to one or two box) if we two-boxed and got a million dollars, because then we would know that E = 0, and we would not have known this if we had not two-boxed. So we can infer E from C, thus dependency. By Eliezer’s definition, which seems to be a special information-theoretical definition, I see no problem with this conclusion. The problem only seems to arise if you then take the intuitive definition of the word ‘dependent’ as meaning ‘contingent upon,’ as in ‘Breaking the egg is contingent upon my dropping it.’ Your symantic complain goes beyond newcome- by Eliezer’s definition of ‘dependent,’ the pH of water (E) is dependent upon our litmus testing it, since the result of the litmus test (C) allows us to infer the water’s actual pH. C lets us infer E, thus dependency.
Would kids these days even recognize the old 8-bit graphics?
The model you present seems to explain a lot human behavior, though I admit it might just be broad enough to explain anything (which is why I was interested to see it applied and tested). There have been comments referencing the idea that many people don’t reason or think but just do, and the world appears magical to them. Your model does seem to explain how these people can get by in the world without much need for thinking- just green-go, red-stop. If you really just meant to model yourself, that is fine, but not as interesting to me as the more general idea.
I think an important point missing from your post is that this is how many (most?) people model the world. ‘Causality’ doesn’t necessarily enter into most people’s computation of true and false. It would be nice to see this idea expanded with examples of how other people are using this model, why it gives them the opinions (output) that it does, and how we can begin to approach reasoning with people who model the world in this way.
Having a functional model of what will be approved by other people is very useful. I would hardly say that it “has nothing to do with reality.” I think much of the trauma of my own childhood would have been completely avoided if I had been able to pull that off. Alas! Pity to my 9-year-old-self trying to convince the other children they were wrong.
Pascal’s mugging...
Anyway, if you are sure you are going to hit the reset button every time, then there’s no reason to worry, since the torture will end as soon as the real copy of you hits reset. If you don’t, then the whole world is absolutely screwed (including you), so you’re a stupid bastard anyway.
Ah, so moral justifications are better justifications because they feel good to think about. Ah, happy children playing… Ah, lovers reuniting… Ah, the Magababga’s chief warrior being roasted as dinner by our chief warrior who slew him nobly in combat...
I really don’t see why we should expect ‘morality’ to extrapolate to the same mathematical axioms if we applied CEV to different subsets of the population. Sure, you can just define the word morality to include the sum total of all human brains/minds/wills/opinions, but that wouldn’t change the fact that these people, given their druthers and their own algorithms would morally disagree. Evolutionary psychology is a very fine just-so story for many things that people do, but people’s, dare I say, aesthetic sense of right and wrong is largely driven by culture and circumstance. What would you say if omega looked at the people of earth and said, “Yes, there is enough agreement on what ‘morality’ is that we need only define 80,000 separate logically consistent moral algorithms to cover everybody!”
Your examples of getting tired after sex or satisfied after eating are based on current human physiology and neurochemistry, which I think most people here are assuming will no longer confine our drives after AI/uploading. How can you be sure what you would do if you didn’t get tired?
I also disagree with the idea that ‘pleasure’ is what is central to ‘wireheading.’ (I acknowledge that I may need a new term.) I take the broader view that wireheading is getting stuck in a positive feed-back loop that excludes all other activity, and for this to occur, anything positively-reinforcing will do.* For example, let’s say Jane Doe wants to want to exercise, and so modifies her preferences. Now lets say this modification is not calibrated correctly, and so she ends up on the treadmill 24⁄7, never wanting to get off of it. Though the activity is not pleasurable, she is still stuck in the loop. Even if we would not make a mistake quite this mundane, it is not difficult to imagine similar problems occurring after a few rounds of ‘preference modification’ by free transhumans. If someone has a drive to be satisfied, then satisfied he shall be, one way or another. Simple solutions, like putting in a preference for complexity, may not be sufficient safeguards either. Imagine an entity that spends all of its time computing and tracing infinite fractiles. Pinnacle of human evolution or wirehead?
*Disclaimer: I haven’t yet defined the time parameters. For example, if the loop takes 24 hours to complete as opposed to a few seconds, is it still wireheading? What about 100 years? But I think the general idea is important to consider.
Good post, but I think what people are often seeking in the non-material is not so much an explanation of what they are, but a further connection with other people, deities, spirits, etc. In a crude sense, judeo-christian god gives people an ever-present friend that understands everything about them and always loves them. Materialism would tell them, ‘There is no God. You have found that talking to yourself makes you feel that you are unconditionally loved, but it’s all in your head.’
On a non-religious note, two lovers may feel that they have bonded such that they are communicating on another level. Which explanation seems more aesthetically pleasing: 1) Your ‘souls’ are entwined, your ‘minds’ are one, he/she really does deeply understand you such that words are no longer necessary, you are sharing the same experience. 2) You have found a trigger to an evolutionarily developed emotion that makes you feel as if you are communing. Your lover may or may not have found the same switch. You are each experiencing this in your own way in your own head. You will need to discuss to compare.
And yes, I do think that verbal and physical communication is still pretty great (I mean, that’s what we got), but there is a large attraction to believe one’s transcendent feelings really do, well, transcend, and that we are not as alone in our minds as we really are.