Monthly Archives: January 2010

Who are you?

Posted on January 31, 2010 | 18 comments

There are two things that people debate with regards to continuation of personhood. One is whether edge cases to our intuitions of what ‘me’ refers to are really me. For instance if a simulation of me is run on a computer, is it me? If it is definitely conscious? What if the fleshy bloody one is still alive? What if I’m copied atom for atom?

The other question is whether there is some kind of thread that holds together me at one point and some particular next me. This needn’t be an actual entity, but just there being a correct answer to the question of who the current you becomes. The opposite is a bullet that Eliezer Yudkowsky does not bite:

…to reject the idea of the personal future – … that there’s any meaningful sense in which I can anticipate being myself in five seconds, rather than Britney Spears. In five seconds there will be an Eliezer Yudkowsky, and there will be a Britney Spears, but it is meaningless to speak of the currentEliezer “continuing on” as Eliezer+5 rather than Britney+5; these are simply three different people we are talking about.

The two questions are closely related. If there’s such a thread, the first question is just about where it goes. If there’s not, the first question is often thought meaningless.

I see no reason to suppose there is such a thread. Which lump of flesh is you is a matter of definition choice as open as that of which lumps of material you want to call the same mountain. But this doesn’t mean we should give up labeling mountains at all. Let me explain.

Why would one think there is a thread holding us together? Here are the reasons I can think of:

1. It feels like there is.

2. We remember it always happened that way in the past. There was a me who wondered if I might just as well experience being Britney next, then later there was a me looking back thinking ‘nope, still Katja’ or some such thing.

3. We expect the me looking back is singular even if you were copied. You wouldn’t feel like two people suddenly. So you would feel like one or the other.

4. Consciousness seems like a dimensionless thing, so it’s hard to imagine it branching, as if it could be closer or further from another consciousness. As far as our intuitions go, even if two consciousnesses are identical they might be in a way infinitely distant. What happens at that moment between there being one and there being two? Do they half overlap somehow?

1 is explained quite well by 2. 2 and 3 should be expected whether there is any answer to which future person is you or not. All the future yous look back and remember uncertainty, and currently see only themselves. After many such experiences, they all learn to expect to be only one person later on. 4 isn’t too hard to think of plausible answers to; for instance, perhaps one moment there is one consciousness and the next there are two very similar.

Eliezer goes on to describes some more counterintuitive aspects:

…I strive for altruism, but I’m not sure I can believe that subjective selfishness – caring about your own future experiences – is an incoherent utility function; that we are forced to be Buddhists who dare not cheat a neighbor, not because we are kind, but because we anticipate experiencing their consequences just as much as we anticipate experiencing our own. I don’t think that, if I were really selfish, I could jump off a cliff knowing smugly that a different person would experience the consequence of hitting the ground.

These things are all explained by the fact that your genes continue with your physical body, and they design your notions of selfishness (Eliezer disagrees that this settles the question). If humans had always swapped their genes every day somehow, we would care about our one day selves and treat the physical creature that continued as another person.

If we disregard the idea of a thread, must every instantaneous person just as well be considered a separate, or equally good continuation, of you? It might be tempting to think of yourself randomly becoming Britney the next moment, but when in Britney only having her memories, so feeling as if nothing has changed. This relies on there being a you distinct from your physical self, which has another thread, but a wildly flailing one. So dismiss this thread too, and you have just lots of separate momentary people.

Imagine I have a book. One day I discover the pages aren’t held together by metaphysical sticky tape. They have an order, but page 10 could just as well precede page 11 in any book. Sure, page 11 in most books connects to page 10 via the story making more sense, but sense is a continuous and subjective variable. Pages from this book are also physically closer to each other than to what I would like to think of as other books, because they are bound together. If I tore them apart though, I’d like to think that there was still a true page 11 for my page 10. Shouldn’t there be some higher determinant of which pages are truly the same book? Lets say I accept there is not. Then must I say that all writing is part of my book? That may sound appealingly deep, but labeling according to ordinary physical boundaries is actually pretty useful.

The same goes for yourself. That one person will remember being you and act pretty similar and the rest won’t distinguishes them interestingly enough to be worth a label. Why must it distinguish some metaphysically distinct unity? With other concepts, which clusters of characteristics we choose to designate an entity or kind is a matter of choice. Why would there be a single true way to choose a cluster of things for you to identify with any more than there is a true way to decide which pages are part of the same story?

I’ve had various arguments about this recently, however I remain puzzled about what others’ views are. I’m not sure that anyone disagrees about the physical facts, and I don’t think most of the people who disagree are dualists. However many people insist that if a certain thing happens, such as their brain is replaced by a computer, they cease to exist, and believe others should agree that this is the true point of no longer existing, not an arbitrary definition choice. This all seems inconsistent. Can someone explain to me?

Added: it’s interesting that the same problem isn’t brought up in spatial dimensions – the feeling of your hand isn’t taken to be connected to the feeling of the rest of you through anything more complicated than nerves carrying info. This doesn’t make it just as well anyone else’s arm. If you had a robotic arm, whether you called it part of you or not seems a simple definitional matter.

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More stuff

Posted on January 15, 2010 | 2 comments

A few more bits I liked in The Stuff of Thought:

Hypernyms elevate

Labeling someone with a small aspect of what they are – a trait or part –  undignifies them. Calling someone a cripple, the blonde, a suit, isn’t nice. The opposite works too often – things sound more dignified if you label them with a larger category than usual. Driving machines and dental cleaning systems sound more pretentious than cars and toothbrushes.

Lots of our phrases rest on the same conceptual metaphors

Though we don’t have a specific saying that ‘up is like good and down is like bad’, it’s easy to see that we equate these things  from our endless sayings that spring from this metaphor. Feeling high, spirits soaring, hitting rock bottom, a downturn, pick me up, low mood, low character, low blow, feeling down, over the moon, I’m above you. I can make up new phrases using the same metaphor and you will know what I mean without apparently thinking about it. These things suggest that the connection between goodness and upness is still active in our minds; these things aren’t idioms.

Intuitions that phrases like ‘pin the wall with posters’ are wrong follow simple rules that we are introspectively oblivious to.

You can say ‘splatter paint on the wall’ or ‘splatter the wall with paint’. You can say ‘pin posters on the wall’. This seems analogous to ‘splatter paint on the wall’, so why don’t we use the same alternative form with that?

The answer is that the first form implies that you were changing the paint or the poster by putting it on the wall, whereas the second form implies that you were changing the wall by putting paint or a poster on it. Painting a wall changes the nature of the wall in our eyes, while pinning posters on it doesn’t.

This explanation holds across the many other examples of this pattern, and similar explanations hold for others. You photograph a wall with your camera, but don’t photograph your camera at the wall. You fling a cat into a room, but you don’t fling a room with a cat. You can load hay into a cart or load a cart with hay.

Some situations it makes sense to frame in a different way and others not. Other conceptual differences that matter with verbs for instance include whether the action was purposeful or accidental, physically direct, took time or was instantaneous, and whether it happened to a person.

Working out why some things sound wrong was a tricky puzzle for the conscious minds of linguists, though the whole time they could say that ‘pour a cup with water’ sounded wrong.

Intuitive causality is different to philosophically reputable conceptions

It’s been suggested that causality is just what we call things we see happen together a lot, or actions that go together across close counterfactual worlds we imagine, or pretty confusing.

Our mental picture of causality seems to be much simpler. It looks like one object with an inherent tendency to move or stay still, and another object standing in its way or pushing it. We have no trouble knowing which counterfactual to compare situations to because inherent in the idea is that the first object had a tendency to do something.

The evidence for this is apparently in the various words we use, for instance which features they bother to differentiate. For instance the difference between forcing something and allowing something is whether the causal agent is pushing the other agent, or not getting in the way of its inherent movement. If our minds were different we may not care about this distinction; in both cases the causer can decide whether the thing should happen, and chooses yes.

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Why are obvious meanings veiled?

Posted on January 13, 2010 | 12 comments

Why do people use veiled language even when both parties likely know the real message? For instance if a boy asks a girl up for coffee after a date, nobody is likely to miss the cliched connotation, so why not be direct?  The same question goes for many other threats, bribes, requests and propositions. Where meaning is reasonably ambiguous, plausible deniability seems a good explanation. However in many cases denial wouldn’t be that plausible and would make you look fairly silly anyway.

In The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker offers six possible explanations for these cases, the last of which I found particularly interesting: People are not embarrassed nearly as much by everyone knowing their failings as long as they aren’t common knowledge (everyone knows that everyone knows etc). Pinker suggests veiled language can offer enough uncertainty that while the other party knows they are very likely being offered sex for instance (which is all you need them to know), they are still unsure of whether you know that they know this, and so on. Plausible deniability of common knowledge means if they decline you, you can carry on with yours pride intact more easily, because status is about what everyone thinks everyone thinks etc your status is, and that hasn’t changed.

This has some problems. Does any vagueness preclude mutual knowledge? We don’t act as though it does; there is always some uncertainty. Plus we take many private observations into account in judging others’ status, though you could argue that this is to judge how they are usually judged, so any aspect of a person you believe others haven’t mostly seen should not inform you on their status. Pinker suggests that a larger gap between the level of vagueness that precludes mutual knowledge and that which allows plausible deniability is helped by people attributing their comprehension of veiled suggestions to their own wonderful social intuition, which makes them less sure that the other knows what they understood.

But veiled comments often seem to allow no more uncertainty than explicit ones. For instance, ‘it would be great if you would do the washing up’ is about as obvious as ‘do the washing up’, but somehow more polite because you are informing not commanding, though the listener arguably has less choice because angrily proclaiming that they are not your slave is off the table. Perhaps such phrases are idioms now, and when they were alive it really was less obvious what commenting on the wonderfulness of clean dishes implied. It seems unlikely.

Some other explanations from Pinker (I omit one because I didn’t understand it enough to paraphrase at the time and don’t remember it now):

The token bow: indirection tells the listener that the speaker has made an effort to spare her feelings or status. e.g. requests made in forms other than imperative statements are designed to show you don’t presume you may command the person. I’m not sure how this would explain the coffee offer above. Perhaps in the existing relationship asking for sex would be disrespectful, so the suggestion to continue the gradual shift into one anothers’ pants is couched as something respectful in the current relationship?

Don’t talk at all, show me: most veiled suggestions are a request to alter the terms of the relationship, and in most cases people don’t speak directly about the terms of relationships. This is just part of that puzzle. This explanation doesn’t explain threats or bribes well I think. By the time you are talking idly about accidents that might happen, awkwardness about discussing a relationship outright is the least of anyone’s worries. Also we aren’t squeamish about discussing business arrangements, which is what a bribe is.

The virtual audience: even if nobody is watching, the situation can be more easily transmitted verbally if the proposition is explicitly verbal. If the intent is conveyed by a mixture of subtler signals, such as tone, gestures and the rest of the interaction, it will be harder to persuade others later that that the meaning really was what you say it was, even if in context it was obvious. This doesn’t seem plausible for many cases. If I tell you that someone discreetly proffered a fifty dollar note and wondered aloud how soon their request might be dealt with, you – and any jury – should interpret that just fine.

Preserving the spell: some part of the other person enjoys and maintains the pleasant illusion of whatever kind of relationship is overtly demonstrated by the words used. Pinker gives the example of a wealthy donor to a university, who is essentially buying naming rights and prestige, but everyone enjoys it more if you have fancy dinners together and pretend that the university is hoping for their ‘leadership’. This doesn’t explain why some transactions are made with a pretense and some aren’t. If I buy an apartment building we don’t all sit down at a fancy dinner together and pretend that I am a great hero offering leadership to the tenants. Perhaps the difference is that if a donation is a purchase, part of the purchased package is a reputation for virtue. However outsiders aimed at mostly don’t see what the transaction looks like. For other cases this also doesn’t seem to explain. While one may want to preserve the feeling that one is not being threatened, why should the threatening one care? And seducing someone relies on the hope of ending air of platonic aquaintence.

Another explanation occurs to me, but I haven’t thought much about whether it’s applicable anywhere. Perhaps once veiled language is used for plausible deniability in many cases, there become other cases where the appearance of trying to have plausible deniability is useful even if you don’t actually want it. In those cases you might use veiled language to imply you are trying, but be less subtle so as not to succeed. For instance once most men use veiled come ons, for you to suggest anything explicitly to a girl would show you have no fear of rejection. She mightn’t like being thought either so predictable or of such low value, so it is better to show respect by protecting yourself from rejection.

None of these explanations seem adequate, but I don’t have a good enough list of examples to consider the question well.

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Why does failed indulgence cause guilt?

Posted on January 11, 2010 | 3 comments

When luxurious products disappoint, people feel more guilty than when utilitarian products do:

The primary insights this research provides are as follows: (1) a negative experience with the choice of a product with superior utilitarian and inferior hedonic benefits (e.g., a highly functional cell phone with poor attractiveness) over a product with superior hedonic and inferior utilitarian benefits evokes feelings of sadness, disappointment, and anger, (2) a negative experience with the choice of a product with superior hedonic and inferior utilitarian benefits (e.g., a highly attractive cell phone with poor functionality) over a product with superior utilitarian and inferior hedonic benefits evokes feelings of guilt and anxiety.

This is interesting because the failure of the product to satisfy isn’t caused by the indulgence of the buyer’s decision to buy it. Yet it’s as thoug the blame goes to the last decision the buyer made, and the problem with that decision is taken to be whatever felt bad about it at the time, however unrelated to the failure at hand. Or does the disappointment seem like punishment somehow for the original greed?

How general is this pattern? I think I feel more guilty when my less admirable intentions fail. Can you think of examples or counterexamples?

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Intergenerational inequality

Posted on January 8, 2010 | 9 comments

These are common views, held together often:

  • Modern people are more wasteful of natural resources than their ancestors
  • Technology won’t save us from this gluttony, all we can do is control ourselves
  • Humanity should minimize population as well as personal consumption now to preserve natural resources for future generations

    • .

    However if people are following a trend of using natural resources less efficiently, and this won’t be changed by future technology, current people seem likely use natural resources more efficiently than the next few generations. If this is true and the purpose is human wellbeing (as concern for future generations suggests), shouldn’t we try to have a larger population early on, at the expense of having a smaller one later?

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