Now I am confused. Do you care about animal ethics as part of your commitment to effective altruism? If so, how can you do that without reasoning about it? Or do you just ignore the animals?
SpectrumDT
Karma: 120
Thanks for the response.
I suppose you do not have any interest in effective altruism either?
Thanks for the response.
You make it sound as though enjoyment and suffering are just arbitrary and unimportant shorthands to describe certain mechanistic processes.
From that perspective, how do you reason about animal ethics? For that matter, why does any ethics matter at all?
I do not think I communicated my point properly. Let me try again:
Showing compassion is not free. It has a cost. To show compassion for someone you might need to take action to help them, or refrain from taking some action that might harm them.
How much effort do you spend on showing compassion for a human being?
How much effort do you spend on showing compassion for an earthworm?
How much effort do you spend on showing compassion for a plant?
How much effort do you spend on showing compassion for an NPC in a video game?
I don’t know about you, but I am willing to expend a decent amount of effort into compassion for a human. Less for an earthworm, but still some, because I suspect the earthworm can experience joy and suffering. Even less for a plant, because I suspect that it probably cannot experience anything. And I put close to zero effort into compassion for an NPC in a video game, because I am fairly convinced that the NPC cannot experience anything (if I show the NPC compassion, it is for my own sake, not theirs).
But I might be wrong. If a philosophical argument could convince me that any of these things experience more or less than I thought they did, I would adjust my priorities accordingly.
I have another question: It seems to me that philosophy of mind is valuable for ethical reasons because it attempts to figure out which things have minds that can experience enjoyment and suffering, which has implications for how we should act. Do you disagree?
Thanks. What is PNSE? “Persistent non-symbolic experience”?
Good question!
I have gained a lot of emotion handling skill. This lets me be calmer and kinder to my wife and my son and other people. It also means I suffer less because I can more easily detect negative thoughts and feelings and (to some extent) disengage from them rather than feed them.
I am also slowly getting better at actively cultivating positive/happy/pleasant mind states.
Neat! Thanks!
I speak not from experience here, but according to my limited understanding, the idea is that most or all ideas of the “self” are more-or-less arbitrary abstractions like the Ship of Theseus.
Via western philosophy of mind you can gain some understanding of this idea and convince yourself that it is probably true, but via meditation AFAIU it becomes possible to observe this directly in your own mind.
The benefits of “transcending” the concept of self, I believe, is that you suffer less and become happier.
Thanks!
Good points. Thanks!
E.g., I expect someone from Camp 1 to have a much harder time “vibing”.
Could I ask you to please elaborate on what you mean by this?
May I ask you some questions about your Camp #1 intutions (since I have pretty strong Camp #2 intuitions)?
As I see it, the really interesting qualia are not things like redness. The really interesting qualia are the ability to experience enjoyment and suffering.
I hope it is obvious that there exist some things that are able to suffer and enjoy—for example, humans. (And there probably exist other things which cannot.) Likewise, there exist things which can process information and act on it by moving their bodies and manipulating their environment. (This includes most-if-not-all animals as well as many machines.)
What is the relationship between the ability to process information and the abilities to suffer and enjoy?
That is of course a broad and vague question, so let me ask a more specific one.
Humans are able to enjoy eating food and resting. It is reasonable to surmise that some animals likewise enjoy eating and resting (perhaps even all animals).
Now consider a lawn mower robot which is programmed to notice when its battery is running low and return to its charging station to “eat and rest”. Does the robot enjoy charging? Why or why not?
The true test of a saint is this—if doing the right thing would lead to lifelong misery for you and your family, would you still do it?
This seems to be based on a false dichotomy: “Either I genuinely want to do good AT ANY AND ALL COSTS, or all my attempts to do good are insincere.”
I would argue that there are other possibilities besides those two. A person can genuinely desire to do good because he truly likes to do good, but he has other likes and goals as well and will sometimes sacrifice one goal for the other.
As far as I can tell, you do not really argue why you think platitudes contain valuable wisdom. You only have one example, and that one is super-vague.
For me this post would be much better if you added several examples that show in more detail why the platitude is valuable.
I have heard a number of people saying that they don’t want to give money to charity because they don’t trust the charities spend the money well.
I’d feel much more comfortable with someone not in control over their own utility function than someone that is in control, based on the people I have encountered in life so far.
May I ask what kind of experiences you base this on?
Evidently you think your niece is worth more than half a sandwich.
I do personally feel that there is some emotional core to love, so I’m sympathetic to the “it’s a specific emotion” definition.
The definition of love as an emotion seems wrong to me, because emotions are short-lived. Intuitively, we think of statements like “I love my son” as being true all the time. But I do not experience an emotion of “love” towards him all the time. When I am away from him, hours can pass where I do not think of him at all, and when I am with him I sometimes feel an emotion of annoyance rather than “love”.
So this kind of definition does not seem to match how people use the concept.
This seems like a “No True Scotsman” statement to me. Your whole thesis here—that malicious actors would use social media and big data to manipulate people en masse—is clearly a “conspiracy theory”.
But of course when you say that conspiracy theorists are clowns, you don’t mean that. You mean the clownish kind of conspiracy theorist...