Moral intuitions as abstract, anthropocentric absolutes

From this post:

Labeling an abstract action (“Nuking the world…”) as “wrong” is both anthropocentric and kind of akin to Plato’s position that abstractions can exist as universals independent of their mental counterparts.

1. Is it “wrong” for the sun to go supernova and incinerate us? Surely, accountability is secondary to the importance of repairing the universe. Why make a distinction between a human causing suffering and an inanimate object causing suffering other than to insinuate that the human must necessarily be subjected to some kind of arbitrarily quantified punishment?

There is no mathematical theorem which demonstrates that nuking the world necessitates fifty years in prison instead of twenty, but we can do simple math to determine whether preventing the event will also prevent an increase in negative value -- and that’s what matters, regardless of our intuitions or the ultimate fate of the perpetrator(s).

2. There is no such thing as “nuking the world” aside from as a conceptual abstraction useful for model-building. A specific nuclear event, however, can exist: It has a context and environmental variables that have been assigned values. Without these variables, we are shunning practical reality in favor of abstract absolutism -- a primary cause of bloviation and much ado about nothing.

One more utilitarian post for the road

Premise 1: An action was taken.

1. The action was imposed on a sentient being.

2. Therefore, the action was bad.

This conclusion is false. Not all bad actions are imposed on other sentient beings; some only affect the self. In this sense, they may not be "immoral," but they are nevertheless foolish. Likewise, not all imposed actions are bad, for reasons stated below.

Premise 2: An action was taken.

1. The action caused harm -- regardless of whether it violated a sentient being's will.

2. Therefore, the action was bad.

This conclusion is also false. Harm is inherently bad, but causing harm is not, for some harm leads to a reduction of harm overall.

Premise 3: An action was taken.

1. The action was imposed on a sentient being, and/or...

2. ...the action caused harm beyond being a mere violation of the being's will.

3. The action prevented a much worse kind of harm from emerging elsewhere.

4. Therefore, the action was good.

This conclusion is true.

Sometimes, you need to kill the killer, lest he continue with his deeds uninterrupted. 

To reiterate: Pleasure is relief

Pleasure results from the termination of a negative state of experience; it is a form of relief.

Remember: It really isn't your "choice" to enjoy what you enjoy about life. If you were to cease all enjoyable activities for even a few days, you'd be dead -- and after a horrific episode of torment and horror at that. We are punished by our central nervous systems for not chasing objects of desire.

The titular maxim is best exemplified in the case of itching. Itching, while not the worst form of suffering imaginable, is nevertheless a negative/unpleasant sensation born from the body's desire to rid itself of some perceived threat to its attempts to stave off systemic decay. People do not enjoying itching; they would rather rid themselves of an itch than allow it to continue unhindered. Ever try ignoring an itch in a hard-to-reach spot on your body? It's incredibly difficult, because itches are meant to be distracting; they're meant to shift your brain's focus from the other negatives you're constantly running from to a fairly immediate -- if usually innocuous -- one.

Ignoring an itch produces a fairly large amount of discomfort and cognitive distraction; it is an undesirable thing. If you ignore an itch, prepare to have your concentration greatly diminished in favor of absurd, obsessive thoughts regarding something silly.

Scratching an itch, on the other hand, feels pleasurable; we sometimes even sigh with satisfaction upon scratching a particularly distracting and uncomfortable itch. Scratching itches is perceived by our brains as a good thing.

Now, after scratching an itch, try scratching where the itch used to be. You'll be using the same fingernails, the same amount of pressure. Why doesn't it feel pleasurable anymore? It's the same skin, composed of the same chemicals. Where did the pleasant scratching sensation disappear to?

The answer is that you needed the bad feeling in order to receive the good one; you needed something negative to be relieved from. You can't just decide on a whim to start scratching all over yourself and expect to enter a state of ecstasy.

Revisiting a great meme: "Life is a gamble"

Pleasure cannot justify suffering in any instance -- not even in instances where the pleasure experienced greatly dwarfs the negative state of desire experienced prior. Here's why:

Think of life as a six-sided die. The five greatest things about life that you can imagine occupy five of the six sides -- perhaps intense orgasms, spiritual fulfillment, growing old with a significant other, having ten trillion dollars, and access to an endless supply of great music (these definitely wouldn't be my choices; they're just examples). The sixth side is occupied by a fifteen-year battle with AIDS -- vomiting, loss of control over bowels and all.

Would you roll the die? If not, congratulations; if presented the choice to be born or to remain in your state of nonexistence, you'd choose to remain in your state of nonexistence. In other words: You wouldn't choose life.

We don't all get AIDS, you say. Well...

1. "We" don't exist as discrete selves in the first place. I remember things that happened to a ten-year-old kid, which gives me the impression that the kid was me, but he wasn't; he lacked my ideals, conceptions, desires, hormones, and even most (if not all) of my atoms. Therefore, that ten-year-old kid is no more "me" than anyone else to have ever lived -- yet all sentient organisms utilize the same chemical compounds and electrical signals in order to experience pain and pleasure, making them chemically equivalent. Clearly, then, there is no need for "me" to experience the worst parts of life: the universe experiences them, and that's bad enough.

2. It's very probable that we will all die -- most of us from cancer, possibly while in a tremendous amount of pain for a prolonged period of time.

The worst that life has to offer might not ever get inflicted upon you, but every day, we roll the die, and every day, many, many people roll the bad side. If you wouldn't want to live through it, then how can you justify its existence?

I ask again, and hope that you leave a comment with your answer: Would you roll the die?

Brains are the source of suffering

If the universe were a closed system composed of nothing but temporally "closed" subsystems, then the eventual entropic decay of each "isolated" system -- and of the universe itself -- would be inevitable. However, for some currently unknown reason, at some point in the past, a process called life emerged on at least one planet in the universe, effectively breaking the previously prevailing chain of tendency toward system disorder. Once this event took place, it became possible for systems that were more or less closed in the traditionally understood, macroscopic sense to -- almost contradictorily -- remain open -- by seeking out energy actively rather than passively.

Of course, to prevent integration with competing systems and other environmental parameters, these new systems also had to remain partially closed -- at least in the sense of putting defense and regulatory mechanisms in place. This kept the systems well-defined, with physical barriers and spatial limitations, while still allowing them enough openness to acquire the energy necessary for their perpetuation.

So what did this opening of otherwise self-contained, self-regulating systems accomplish? For starters, it introduced homeostasis into the environment. This was initially a radical, if meaningless, departure from the way in which energy had been transferred from one location to another in the past. After the fact of life's emergence, though, it turned out that the "mostly closed" systems, or organisms, were nevertheless quite susceptible to the various forces of the universe, and thus, entropy. Mobility and a binary attraction-repulsion system enabled them to disperse energy in an entirely new way, but other physical agents were still quite persistent in their vying for physical space, and were occasionally successful at bringing about states of maximum disorder among some living organisms; this eventually culminated in what we call death.

The organic instructions to resist disorder were mutually persistent, however; as time went on, organisms managed to find, by happenstance, new ways to perpetuate themselves -- even with both living and non-living "space competitors" vying for the same resources. Finally, a few billion years into this routine, one motivation mechanism of incredible efficacy arose -- sentience.

But why does it matter? What was sentience effective at?

Well, as it would turn out, the goal of sentience was not to help organisms "enjoy" their processes; rather, it was to stop organisms from decaying, as it had been with all previous biological mechanisms.

In short, this meant that neural nets would go on to continually birth, over and over again in successive generations, increasingly complex incentives for organisms to avoid behaviors and parameters conducive to their own destruction. At some point during all of this, fully robust brains emerged, and with them, not the capacity to feel pain, but pain itself. To put it succinctly, brains did not attempt to manage pain to the benefit of organisms; they attempted to manage disorder to the benefit of nothing, using the pain that they created entirely on their own as a motivator. We sneeze a lot when sick not because viruses convert themselves into mucus as they multiply, but because, to prevent the body from being destroyed, the immune system must produce mucus. We experience pain not because external agents are inherently painful, but because brains are painful while attempting to prevent disorder.

If you're not following along, again, "disorder" in this context refers to that lack of physical work that causes closed systems to literally "freeze," having no more energy to convert from one state to another; everything has been evenly distributed, and each piece is incapable of transferring energy to any other, or has itself decayed.

Is there anything wrong with decay, though? When two weather patterns collide and eventually disperse their energy content, leaving no further work to be done, is this a bad result? Is it something to be avoided, or even stopped at all costs? It doesn't appear to be, based on anything that we've ever observed; furthermore, without any good reason to invest in the god hypothesis, the agenda of brains (and of central nervous sytems as wholes) must be questioned, for the alternative to the god hypothesis is that the universe -- and thus, all constituents, including central nervous systems and other organic systems -- emerged.

This, if true, essentially means that no intelligent or coherent reason for the existence of life was considered beforehand by a rational entity in some planning stage. In the absence of any good reason to take the notion of a planning stage seriously, or the notion of there being a valid goal in preventing the decay of material systems, we more or less have to conclude that the brain's ability to create sensations in reaction to stimuli is not only unintelligent, but downright nasty.

So, to reiterate: Nothing capable of being received by a brain as sensory input is possessed of some innate unpleasantness; the brain, as part of the central nervous system, is chiefly interested in preventing the genotype, as an energy-dependent process, from decaying; to this end, the brain creates unpleasantness as a reaction to the "efforts" of external agents to bring about disorder in the system; however, there isn't any intelligent reason to believe that entropy is something to be stopped, making the brain's extremely painful efforts to stop it really unnecessary and unintelligent; additionally, every brain has failed or will probably fail in its efforts, and over 99% of them no longer exist.

Pain is bad, but is termination of life? If we were completely incapable of feeling anything, but, unlike bacteria, still possessed language, would we really mind dying? Are shark teeth bad because they can damage our organs, or because they hurt? Would you mind a lion ripping your guts out if it didn't hurt or cause intense fear, and if not, why is that a bad thing? If the AIDS virus were the only entity in the universe capable of replication, it would no longer be a terrible virus, for what do rocks care if they "get AIDS"? Brains create pain to preempt decay; get rid of all the brains and you could have a universe composed of nothing but AIDS -- with no problems whatsoever, anywhere.

The next time that you try to avoid a horribly painful situation, remember that it's not the world that you should be fearing -- it's your brain and its childish insistence on resisting entropy. Bullets, kidney stones, births, panic attacks? Bone cancer? They're okay in themselves. Really, the only thing that's actually capable of hurting you is that pink thing in your skull.

Negative experiences falsely perceived as positive

No explanation necessary. Here we go...

1. When you're hungry, you don't want to enjoy a delicious meal; you want to not slowly starve to death as your stomach eats itself, causing intense bloating and pain.

2. When you're thirsty, you don't want to enjoy a refreshing glass of water; you want to not die of dehydration.

3. When you feel like going on vacation, you don't want to enjoy a nice day at the beach; you want to not work anymore, or stop doing the activities that have thus exhausted you.

4. When you're tired, you don't want to enjoy a refreshing night of sleep; you want to not feel run-down and mentally impaired.

5. When you're in love with someone, you don't want to enjoy his or her company; you want to not be lonely, consumed by excessive solitude and feelings of inadequacy.

6. When you become interested in getting a hobby, you don't want to have something to do; you want to not be plagued by boredom and restlessness.

7. When you're cold, you don't want to put on a coat in order to feel the pleasing sensation of warmth; you want to not feel the uncomfortable sensation of coldness.

8. When thinking about watching a thought-provoking film, you don't want to have an entertaining and potentially enlightening experience; you want to not do everything else, because your psychological disposition has declared it all of less interest than watching the film at that exact moment.

9. When considering doing drugs, you don't want to get high; you want to not have to put up with the horrors of the world around you.

10. When desirous of a college degree, you don't want to pursue an education; you want to not be ignorant relative to your peers so that you may better socialize with and work alongside them, or get hired by an employer offering a higher salary.

You can't have good experiences without first feeling bad. If you let any of the above go, in their most extreme of manifestations, without attempting to take care of them, nature will punish you with: starvation, dehydration, work-induced stress, sleep deprivation (hallucinations, extreme exhaustion, panic attacks, depression, anxiety), intense loneliness, low self-esteem, poor social development, extreme boredom, general restlessness and aimlessness, frost bite, asthma attacks, general breathing problems, lost appendages, ignorance, relative poverty, and homelessness.

Suffering sucks -- "objectively," Part II

Readers of this blog may already be familiar with Karl Popper's negative utilitarianism ("negativism"), and hopefully see some merit in the idea that, no matter how slight the discomfort, all desires are the result of deprivation. You can't enjoy life without first being unsatisfied with it; otherwise, you'd never be motivated to pursue that which you enjoy. Therefore, the elimination of negative sensation -- whether that means eliminating a biological drive, reducing the amount of time it takes to fulfill a desire, lowering the intensity of some form of discomfort, or eliminating a hurdle in the way of the temporary satisfying of a desire -- is a worthwhile pursuit. So far, so good.

But I'd like to append another term to this form of utilitarianism: pragmatism. Negative utilitarianism is still essentially a moral pursuit, which means that it is a subset of the overarching pursuit of logical outcomes in all contexts. This is fine, but how will the reduction and elimination of negative sensation work? How will we carry out tasks to this end? What will our tools be? How will we make decisions in scenarios where relative differences exist among competing potential actions? Pragmatic utilitarianism answers these questions, because, while utilitarianism addresses how functional or useful an idea is with respect to a value standard, pragmatism addresses whether the idea works at all, in any context -- and therefore, whether it is worth acting upon.

Moral utilitarianism: "What is the utility of this action? Will it be useful to the end of improving what we value?"

Negative utilitarianism: "What is the utility of this action? Will it be useful to the end of eliminating what we negatively value?"

Pragmatic utilitarianism: "Why do we value what we value, and what can we use in order to act to the end of maximizing and minimizing the interacting outputs? How can we test these potential actions for viability and workability? Once we've figured that out, what is the utility of the actions? Will they be useful to the end of eliminating what we negatively value?"

How this works: by employing qualitative analysis, or a kind of scrutiny pertaining to abstract qualities as found within finite physical objects, to the practical decision-making process in an effort to alter both quantities and qualities in an environment.

Where two or more qualities are the same but one is greater or less in quantity, a relative decision must be made; where two or more qualities are different, the quality which is most likely to yield the result of the highest value must be selected. The underlying principle of this practice is opportunity cost, a method for making decisions based on what, if anything, of value will be lost upon acting. After all, when making decisions, we necessarily exclude every action other than the one opted for, so it's essential that we understand what it is that we lose by gaining what we do from taking a particular action. The act of not acting, as implied by the wording of this sentence, is itself an action -- a kind of meta-action, to be specific, taken after assessing whether to act toward acting or "not acting." "Meta-decision" would be another term for this (deciding whether to decide).

Before refraining from making a decision in a situation, always be sure to ask yourself, "Am I sure that I'm unsure?"