Robert Nozick holds that people want real experience and not the subjective one.
I used to think he is entirely mistaken. It just sounds bad. It depends on how you phrase the question + most people cannot realistically understand the question.
Now I have two more points.
1) In line with the idea that many of our intuitions are rational as general decisions rules (Gigerenzer "ecological rationality" and "simple heuristics that make us smart").
Possibly we have a strong intuition against false deals and fake stuff. The whole experience machine sounds like cheating. If taken to its logical conclusion, it is a good deal when taken seriously, but most people are following their thinking rules, yielding a strong no. Would they be able to truly comprehend it they would have liked it.
2) Goals are another fancy issue. Do we want to feel good? or do we want status, sex and food?
It sounds contradictory, but human motivation need not be defined in feeling good. Humans seem to have in fact multiple motivations, and not all of them are always compatible, nor can we say that people know how to trade off between different goals.
If the evolutionary embedded goals are specific, we can understand why people refuse the experience machine. We have in mind the embedded goal of food not of its experience.
Does it imply that it is not experience that matters? surely not. Because it is quite possible that in a sense people prefer the good experience to the real stuff.
In a sense the want to feel good has better rational justifications, and is more coherent when looking at life, than when taking the various goals themselves seriously.
[PS. goals as means: Sometimes, these goals bring the good life indirectly, as when being immersed in an "important" task makes a person happy. He must truly believe in the essentially valuableness of the goal in order to have the experience.
If goals are means for the good life, than they will tell us to refuse the experience machine, but it will be misleading. Since they are means and the experience of the machine is the very end.]
Some will say that it is not good, since we need a way to determine what people want. How will we determine preferences, wants and goals, if people are so unreliable?
The question is mis-defined. Because it is very possible that we do not have a way to ascertain what people want. Maybe people themselves do not know.
This is also not contradictory to the idea that we should use certain rules for practical purposes, because even without knowing "really" and "for sure", we may take the rules that seem best for us.
But I believe that if we want to know what people want we got to look at the variety of people actions AND related thoughts. Analyzing actions and preferences in light of what people think and know when they decide and act. This is very subtle and unreliable. Smart skeptics will say impossible. But we have a glimpse.
Showing posts with label Epistemology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Epistemology. Show all posts
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Deciding / acting, and experiencing
decisions, actions, perceptions and the experience of life.
Life has two aspects which differ on many counts.
Decision making, acting.
Experience.
Deciding needs realism. Long terms calculations. Cynicism? (you want to see clearly what will happen on every action - sentimentalism distorts realism). Rationality.
Experience is immediate, folds moment by moment. Irrational. Emotions are important.
One cannot get away avoiding rationality in decision making. You want to get your goals in actual reality. At least for practically important goals (getting your bread, shelter, healing yourself etc.).
So far no problem? We experience life as it is, and we care for our goals. But there are many contradictions.
Attention is a powerful force. When we focus on details of the world that are relevant for actions and for our goals, we may ignore other aspect of life.
Especially for the inner experiental aspects of life.
One comes to a painful trade off. Looking at the realistic technical sides of the world, may help in managing life and attending our goals, but brings a cost in the experience of life. You see the practical you may lose your experience.
It has many other experiental effects.
Deciding "should" essentially go by expected results. Ends are the only thing in mind, and everything else is instrumental. There is no heart to the decider. What is best achieving my goal.
Experience is life. "Life is what happens when we plan other things".
Problem in my view is when the decision making side gets hold on the whole person.
When the mind is full of what is "right" to do. and cares all day long about what and how to do, and so on. Then, the person has no life other than his plans and future prospects. There is no present. There is no experience (aside from the experience of stress.... - ok maybe some minor emotions too)
But not living emotionally one's plans etc. can lead to forgetting them.
I hate thinking about all these needed actions and tradeoffs. But the terrible trade-off is between caring and paying the price of caring, and not caring thereby no doing. There is no decisive claim for either (except in the extremes). But whatever you do you win and lose.
Theoretically, one can have his psych caring with less cost, in various ways. For example: Having a "to care" list but forgetting it and experiencing life without lingering worry. But until one manages to move into this psych state, he has the above trade off.
Realistic understanding of the world is considered by some as "cynical". They are right. Real life is heartless. The processes that make things happen do not have a heart. We have feelings for them. But the underlying process is inhuman. It is there.
Humanism is about feelings we have towards people and things. Realism is about how they operate.
There can be a contradiction of sorts. When you attend to the underlying process, you feel differently towards it.
I had a good friend who was using me emotionally (i.e. without giving back fairly). I am not sure I can easily analyze her actions logically and feel emotionally the same.
Realistically, avoiding analysis leads to being taken advantage of.
A pragmatic thinker (who thinks he can decide whetehr to attend to reality or not...) would say that there is an optimal trade-off point. i.e. attend to reality to some extent but no more (i.e. optimal for happiness or for some other measure)
Another approach is to change glasses. sometimes you entertain reality, for practical purposes. Sometimes you just experience it.
Reconciliation is the most interesting in my view. Not sure how realistic it is. You can see clearly the self interest of your counter-party and still feel he is human and have empathy to him. I think some of it is being approached in meditation traditions. You are supposed to be fully awake to what happens, and still have compassion to others. Even compassion to difficult persons is praised there.
These methods relate to a wiseful kind of thinking that we can plan our lives. We cannot so easily. We may have to accept the idea that we are what we are. And that we generally ought to treat the trade off s they are. i.e. there is a cost. You cannot easily eat the cake and have it.
Example. Music, novels, and movies are fun. The experience is enjoyable for many.
There is a mental cost. These medium promote bad perceptions about love and life. The rehearsal of these stupid things is bound to change your mind in a way that may have a negative effect both on your decisions in life and on your experience.
You get experience and you lose some of the quality of future decisions and experience.
If you are obsessive aobut not having mistakes in your mind, you will avoid all of these. Is the cost worth it? Probably not. Hours and hours of good experience are worth to get somehwat less smart.
There is much to think about this example. But the idea is the point. It is worth to lose some of our "wisdom" to enjoy life. I wise I had the guts to fulheartedly follow this route.
PS.
1) There are aspects of our goals where delusional progress is relevant. Whenever the goals are psychological in nature and the warm glow comes from our thinking we make progress, one may side with delusional progress and goals. But if and when the truth comes out, it can fire back (but not always)
2) Experience is composed of many parts (goal acheivement, involvement, meaning and stories, body, emotions, more).
Some are related to decision making, others to result, and otehrs are stand alone (bodily sensations, moods, ........ )
Some kinds of experience are related to thinking and perceiving. Many of these are ultimately about experience that is independent of the thoughts. When meaningful thoughts lead into a bad mood, we care usually about the bad mood rather than about the meanings themselves. One can theorize and argue more about that. At any rate, much of experience is about experience - the feeling.
PS. Interestiglly people do actually act similarly in self-enhancement. unrealistic self-enhancement is good for well-being and mood, but may harm decisions. It turns out that people actually self-enhance most of the time, but become more realistic when they near a decisions!
Life has two aspects which differ on many counts.
Decision making, acting.
Experience.
Deciding needs realism. Long terms calculations. Cynicism? (you want to see clearly what will happen on every action - sentimentalism distorts realism). Rationality.
Experience is immediate, folds moment by moment. Irrational. Emotions are important.
One cannot get away avoiding rationality in decision making. You want to get your goals in actual reality. At least for practically important goals (getting your bread, shelter, healing yourself etc.).
So far no problem? We experience life as it is, and we care for our goals. But there are many contradictions.
Attention is a powerful force. When we focus on details of the world that are relevant for actions and for our goals, we may ignore other aspect of life.
Especially for the inner experiental aspects of life.
One comes to a painful trade off. Looking at the realistic technical sides of the world, may help in managing life and attending our goals, but brings a cost in the experience of life. You see the practical you may lose your experience.
It has many other experiental effects.
Deciding "should" essentially go by expected results. Ends are the only thing in mind, and everything else is instrumental. There is no heart to the decider. What is best achieving my goal.
Experience is life. "Life is what happens when we plan other things".
Problem in my view is when the decision making side gets hold on the whole person.
When the mind is full of what is "right" to do. and cares all day long about what and how to do, and so on. Then, the person has no life other than his plans and future prospects. There is no present. There is no experience (aside from the experience of stress.... - ok maybe some minor emotions too)
But not living emotionally one's plans etc. can lead to forgetting them.
I hate thinking about all these needed actions and tradeoffs. But the terrible trade-off is between caring and paying the price of caring, and not caring thereby no doing. There is no decisive claim for either (except in the extremes). But whatever you do you win and lose.
Theoretically, one can have his psych caring with less cost, in various ways. For example: Having a "to care" list but forgetting it and experiencing life without lingering worry. But until one manages to move into this psych state, he has the above trade off.
Realistic understanding of the world is considered by some as "cynical". They are right. Real life is heartless. The processes that make things happen do not have a heart. We have feelings for them. But the underlying process is inhuman. It is there.
Humanism is about feelings we have towards people and things. Realism is about how they operate.
There can be a contradiction of sorts. When you attend to the underlying process, you feel differently towards it.
I had a good friend who was using me emotionally (i.e. without giving back fairly). I am not sure I can easily analyze her actions logically and feel emotionally the same.
Realistically, avoiding analysis leads to being taken advantage of.
A pragmatic thinker (who thinks he can decide whetehr to attend to reality or not...) would say that there is an optimal trade-off point. i.e. attend to reality to some extent but no more (i.e. optimal for happiness or for some other measure)
Another approach is to change glasses. sometimes you entertain reality, for practical purposes. Sometimes you just experience it.
Reconciliation is the most interesting in my view. Not sure how realistic it is. You can see clearly the self interest of your counter-party and still feel he is human and have empathy to him. I think some of it is being approached in meditation traditions. You are supposed to be fully awake to what happens, and still have compassion to others. Even compassion to difficult persons is praised there.
These methods relate to a wiseful kind of thinking that we can plan our lives. We cannot so easily. We may have to accept the idea that we are what we are. And that we generally ought to treat the trade off s they are. i.e. there is a cost. You cannot easily eat the cake and have it.
Example. Music, novels, and movies are fun. The experience is enjoyable for many.
There is a mental cost. These medium promote bad perceptions about love and life. The rehearsal of these stupid things is bound to change your mind in a way that may have a negative effect both on your decisions in life and on your experience.
You get experience and you lose some of the quality of future decisions and experience.
If you are obsessive aobut not having mistakes in your mind, you will avoid all of these. Is the cost worth it? Probably not. Hours and hours of good experience are worth to get somehwat less smart.
There is much to think about this example. But the idea is the point. It is worth to lose some of our "wisdom" to enjoy life. I wise I had the guts to fulheartedly follow this route.
PS.
1) There are aspects of our goals where delusional progress is relevant. Whenever the goals are psychological in nature and the warm glow comes from our thinking we make progress, one may side with delusional progress and goals. But if and when the truth comes out, it can fire back (but not always)
2) Experience is composed of many parts (goal acheivement, involvement, meaning and stories, body, emotions, more).
Some are related to decision making, others to result, and otehrs are stand alone (bodily sensations, moods, ........ )
Some kinds of experience are related to thinking and perceiving. Many of these are ultimately about experience that is independent of the thoughts. When meaningful thoughts lead into a bad mood, we care usually about the bad mood rather than about the meanings themselves. One can theorize and argue more about that. At any rate, much of experience is about experience - the feeling.
PS. Interestiglly people do actually act similarly in self-enhancement. unrealistic self-enhancement is good for well-being and mood, but may harm decisions. It turns out that people actually self-enhance most of the time, but become more realistic when they near a decisions!
Saturday, March 14, 2009
how smart are you?
We tend to judge ourselves smart when being right on something.
The trouble is that issues judgments and opinions are very diverse.
Being right on one thing is a weak evidence for being right in another.
(that aside from the strong random variable, that can make you right by pure chance)
Be careful.
PS. Similarly for mistakes, we tend to over punish ourselves for mistakes. If yo can learn from a mistake, ok. But feeling entirely stupid for a single mistake is unwarranted.
The trouble is that issues judgments and opinions are very diverse.
Being right on one thing is a weak evidence for being right in another.
(that aside from the strong random variable, that can make you right by pure chance)
Be careful.
PS. Similarly for mistakes, we tend to over punish ourselves for mistakes. If yo can learn from a mistake, ok. But feeling entirely stupid for a single mistake is unwarranted.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Ad-hoc but relevant
Some scientists and many regular folks believe that "ad-hoc" solutions are uninteresting.
In artistic terms they have a point. Art is subjective, and if someone beleives that green color is better than orange, who am I to argue?
In practice, waht coutns are results, not elegance.
A good freind of me is consulting me about his various personal and financial troubles. I am usually listening confusingly, trying to illuminate a point, suggesting what feels for me a straight-forward idea, or, at times, suggesting a trick out of my magic hat.
It happened that I helped this guy immensely. And with those simplistic half thought-out advice. Nothing spectacular. Just a compatible idea in the right time.
In many areas there is already lots of knowledge. What is needed is good application. Finding the right values for the parameters (i.e. how much anger is optimal when you are brain washed with ad-hoc theories of me, all aspects and long term dynamics factored in).
relevance is what counts. Nobody cares about how "smart" a theory is. We care about its usefulness. Ad-hoc tricking is frequently the best thing to do by far.
Humans care about what they care about, and allow elegance and fiction to take care on itself.
In artistic terms they have a point. Art is subjective, and if someone beleives that green color is better than orange, who am I to argue?
In practice, waht coutns are results, not elegance.
A good freind of me is consulting me about his various personal and financial troubles. I am usually listening confusingly, trying to illuminate a point, suggesting what feels for me a straight-forward idea, or, at times, suggesting a trick out of my magic hat.
It happened that I helped this guy immensely. And with those simplistic half thought-out advice. Nothing spectacular. Just a compatible idea in the right time.
In many areas there is already lots of knowledge. What is needed is good application. Finding the right values for the parameters (i.e. how much anger is optimal when you are brain washed with ad-hoc theories of me, all aspects and long term dynamics factored in).
relevance is what counts. Nobody cares about how "smart" a theory is. We care about its usefulness. Ad-hoc tricking is frequently the best thing to do by far.
Humans care about what they care about, and allow elegance and fiction to take care on itself.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
The block of multi-parameter optimizations
Assuming there are good ways to improve life, that almost nobody follows. Why?
People are not entirely stupid (they are, but that is a different story).
A person moves through life from choice to choice and by all kinds of circumstances and decisions he is getting a whole life put in place with various preferences, learned wisdom (which is mostly depending on his own situations), obligations, etc.
The guy may have his life truly optimized, if we are watching one parameter at a time, and asking what other levels for this specific parameter would be right. For every single thing the person looks at he finds that his current preference is about optimal.
What we perceive as a possible unrealized optimization potential that is different from what the lad does, involves usually changing several things in life together (a perception of things, priorities, and anything else that is under an individual's control).
This is a very different story. Objectively, it is much harder to optimize and even check all various combinations of changes in a system.
A person does not - and cannot - check all possible combinations to find what theoretical mix would be better than the status quo.
Then, we will have both things true.
1) Every parameter in this life is optimal. i.e. No other value state is better.
2) There are unexploited states that are better. These are made of combinations of several at once.
This brings about a very intriguing state. The better options are quite hidden because they involve complex changes. These combined changes, are states we know much less about because they are far from the status quo.
PS. Risks and rewards of changing several things together
We know less about what will happen.
You cannot understand properly what happened. If you have changed more than one thing in your life and you see changes in how you feel and function, you cannot know which change has caused the change in feeling. I had a similar situation when I changed four central things in life together and life became horrible. It was hard to truly know what part every single thing has. With less knowledge, you can manage life less effectively (assuming you manage life, you know to manage life, and that it is good that you manage your life [1])
A person learns a lot about himself throught life. Much knowledge and practical know-how, are based on his regular way of living. When life changes significantly, older habits and knowledge become less relevant, which implies a loss whihc is serious at times.
Some will say that changing makes a person younger, and maybe even makes life worthwhile living (why?).
Living vs. feeling good. Some philosophers believe that being alive is more important than feeling good. changing etc. can make a person more alive. I disagree that anything can be more important than feeling good. But the claim is relevant to the question. I am not sure what people think/act in this regard (i.e. feeling goood vs. "being alive").
People are not entirely stupid (they are, but that is a different story).
A person moves through life from choice to choice and by all kinds of circumstances and decisions he is getting a whole life put in place with various preferences, learned wisdom (which is mostly depending on his own situations), obligations, etc.
The guy may have his life truly optimized, if we are watching one parameter at a time, and asking what other levels for this specific parameter would be right. For every single thing the person looks at he finds that his current preference is about optimal.
What we perceive as a possible unrealized optimization potential that is different from what the lad does, involves usually changing several things in life together (a perception of things, priorities, and anything else that is under an individual's control).
This is a very different story. Objectively, it is much harder to optimize and even check all various combinations of changes in a system.
A person does not - and cannot - check all possible combinations to find what theoretical mix would be better than the status quo.
Then, we will have both things true.
1) Every parameter in this life is optimal. i.e. No other value state is better.
2) There are unexploited states that are better. These are made of combinations of several at once.
This brings about a very intriguing state. The better options are quite hidden because they involve complex changes. These combined changes, are states we know much less about because they are far from the status quo.
PS. Risks and rewards of changing several things together
We know less about what will happen.
You cannot understand properly what happened. If you have changed more than one thing in your life and you see changes in how you feel and function, you cannot know which change has caused the change in feeling. I had a similar situation when I changed four central things in life together and life became horrible. It was hard to truly know what part every single thing has. With less knowledge, you can manage life less effectively (assuming you manage life, you know to manage life, and that it is good that you manage your life [1])
A person learns a lot about himself throught life. Much knowledge and practical know-how, are based on his regular way of living. When life changes significantly, older habits and knowledge become less relevant, which implies a loss whihc is serious at times.
Some will say that changing makes a person younger, and maybe even makes life worthwhile living (why?).
Living vs. feeling good. Some philosophers believe that being alive is more important than feeling good. changing etc. can make a person more alive. I disagree that anything can be more important than feeling good. But the claim is relevant to the question. I am not sure what people think/act in this regard (i.e. feeling goood vs. "being alive").
[1] If you do not like this comment, it is based on more complex stuff not introduced here.
Related posts:
The illusion of suboptimality and irrationality That by looking only at better options, we get the illusion that the current state is suboptimal. We ignore the whole picture whihc contains a lot of much worse options.
Jump to achieve/change That sometimes a change is costly short term, but worth it long term.
Latent potentials That there are various unseen potential in things. You see only the realized. Unrealized potential can come by incidently or intentionaly. the true space of possibilities is much wider than what we see.
WWDNGH 5: Technical optimization and human beings That humans are not optimizing their life technically. We are - for some unknown reasons - not optimization machines.
Friday, July 25, 2008
The Metaphor of Mean-Variance
Sitting on the beach with a friend, we discussed the eternal topic of how much beauty one should look for. It is known that for the same "price" you will get either more beautiful and less smart and vice versa. Those with beauty and wits, will look for a higher quality lad than you.
Friend says that everyone looks for different kinds of beauty.
But there is a common element!
There is no contradiction. If you ask different people to rate beauty, you will find some correlation between them.
Common element + individual/deviant element.
Mean-variance is very relevant to every knowledge. All we know is partial, and depends on conditions (the correlation between the beauty in my eyes an African man is lower than between me and other Israelis, I guess. But there also there is a strong correlation! again. three quantities: common to all, more common for Israelis alone, and variable). It can go on...
Intuition can be true. However, without thinking it out, we suspect it a little. Its reliability is probabilistic (any knowledge is probabilistic. Anyone not understanding it should see a doctor). On average ("mean") it has certain chance to be right, but a good probability to be a mistake = unknown
Many controversies come about because of not understanding. Evidence to an effect does not say it is exclusive, and the same for counter examples. Many counter examples disprove just the generality of the rule, there may still be a partial generality (sometimes a generality is dependent on various conditions and other problems. Long story).
The mind does not like half truths, continuous gradients of stuff, etc.
Baumeister (the cultural animal) explains: Most decisions and actions in life are discreet. You either order the cake or not. tell the joke or.... tell first three words and see reactions.... (this is the continuous way, but most do not use it). Our mind May have a adapted to this reality.
Simplification of information is another reason. I surmise that both explanations are right.
PS. To make Nassim Taleb happy, I state that variance can be a crazy distribution/fractal/unknown/jumpy or whatever. In another sense, the idea of mean and variance above, reflects the idea of commonalities between things, while there are differences and possibly big ones. Sorry reader. It is not me complicating matters. It is reality that is opaque making our minds dizzy.
Friend says that everyone looks for different kinds of beauty.
But there is a common element!
There is no contradiction. If you ask different people to rate beauty, you will find some correlation between them.
Common element + individual/deviant element.
Mean-variance is very relevant to every knowledge. All we know is partial, and depends on conditions (the correlation between the beauty in my eyes an African man is lower than between me and other Israelis, I guess. But there also there is a strong correlation! again. three quantities: common to all, more common for Israelis alone, and variable). It can go on...
Intuition can be true. However, without thinking it out, we suspect it a little. Its reliability is probabilistic (any knowledge is probabilistic. Anyone not understanding it should see a doctor). On average ("mean") it has certain chance to be right, but a good probability to be a mistake = unknown
Many controversies come about because of not understanding. Evidence to an effect does not say it is exclusive, and the same for counter examples. Many counter examples disprove just the generality of the rule, there may still be a partial generality (sometimes a generality is dependent on various conditions and other problems. Long story).
The mind does not like half truths, continuous gradients of stuff, etc.
Baumeister (the cultural animal) explains: Most decisions and actions in life are discreet. You either order the cake or not. tell the joke or.... tell first three words and see reactions.... (this is the continuous way, but most do not use it). Our mind May have a adapted to this reality.
Simplification of information is another reason. I surmise that both explanations are right.
PS. To make Nassim Taleb happy, I state that variance can be a crazy distribution/fractal/unknown/jumpy or whatever. In another sense, the idea of mean and variance above, reflects the idea of commonalities between things, while there are differences and possibly big ones. Sorry reader. It is not me complicating matters. It is reality that is opaque making our minds dizzy.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Darwin's Epistemological insight: Unreliability of probabilities.
What are the probabilities of our existence?
OK. There could have been many "existence" so the question should be asked "what is the probability of an existence that is 'interesting'" or something like that.
Technically, we cannot calculate, because we have no knowledge about the variety of processes that could have happen.
But we may try intuitively, with some understanding of the space of possibilities, to gauge. Where are the odds going to land?
In short, I see that it feels that the probability is very low. Not 1 / 1 ^ infinite zeros. But rather 1 / 1 ^ very many zeros.
Darwin killed 99.9999% of the improbability of existence.
But I believe, that while we may (and have to) intuit about these probabilities, we should learn from this experience is how far our estimates can be from the ultimate numbers.
Before Darwin, if asked what are the odds for this world, reply would be infinitely low. Because the probabilities for all these species and their complexity and efficiency is so impossible.
One good algorithm of Darwin (gradual process of evolutionary selection) dumped the probabilities infinitely. They still seem low, but in relation to the odds we had before Darwin, the odds are infinitely more probable.
Statistically, Darwin taught us how a not thought of process can change dramatically our subjective probability assessments.
We Know that our estimates are terribly unreliable. That is, after Darwin
Epistemologically, that is Darwin's most important lesson!
OK. There could have been many "existence" so the question should be asked "what is the probability of an existence that is 'interesting'" or something like that.
Technically, we cannot calculate, because we have no knowledge about the variety of processes that could have happen.
But we may try intuitively, with some understanding of the space of possibilities, to gauge. Where are the odds going to land?
In short, I see that it feels that the probability is very low. Not 1 / 1 ^ infinite zeros. But rather 1 / 1 ^ very many zeros.
Darwin killed 99.9999% of the improbability of existence.
But I believe, that while we may (and have to) intuit about these probabilities, we should learn from this experience is how far our estimates can be from the ultimate numbers.
Before Darwin, if asked what are the odds for this world, reply would be infinitely low. Because the probabilities for all these species and their complexity and efficiency is so impossible.
One good algorithm of Darwin (gradual process of evolutionary selection) dumped the probabilities infinitely. They still seem low, but in relation to the odds we had before Darwin, the odds are infinitely more probable.
Statistically, Darwin taught us how a not thought of process can change dramatically our subjective probability assessments.
We Know that our estimates are terribly unreliable. That is, after Darwin
Epistemologically, that is Darwin's most important lesson!
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