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To me it rings true from first principles that involving others in your life leads to higher satisfaction. If we assume as true that consciousness/self-awarene

To me it rings true from first principles that involving others in your life leads to higher satisfaction. If we assume as true that consciousness/self-awareness requires others to arise in the first place—that your own model of yourself is an outcome of modelling those around you (since that implies modelling their model of you)—then it seems not such a big leap to assume that taking others out of your life, becoming a leaf node in the network so to speak, would lead to various negative effects. Unfortunately, this is exactly what seems to happen to many people after a certain age threshold. As we become more self-sufficient, contacts become harder to initiate and sustain. Helping others, however, is increasingly more of an option as you gain age. Addendum: the above reasoning doesn’t directly address impersonal ways to help (e.g., through donations).

marginalia_nu 4y ago
> If we assume as true that consciousness/self-awareness requires others to arise in the first place—that your own model of yourself is an outcome of modelling those around you (since that implies modelling their model of you)—then it seems not such a big leap to assume that taking others out of your life, becoming a leaf node in the network so to speak, would lead to various negative effects. I think this assumption needs further justification given that I'm conscious and self-aware even when I'm isolated from others, and there are autistic children lacking theory-of-mind while ostensibly being conscious and self-aware. I don't see an obvious link between these things.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  If you reject the assumption that self-awareness is inherently social, then feel free to disagree. I guess I’m not actually arguing from first principles and we can’t properly get to the bottom of it here. > there are autistic children lacking theory-of-mind while ostensibly being conscious and self-aware I can’t speak for that. I don’t think this is a great example because they still exist in social context. > I'm conscious and self-aware even when I'm isolated from others We still exist over time, not discretely—if you are isolated, it doesn’t mean you lose consciousness immediately. However, I suspect that after a prolonged isolation from human contact (which would be a highly unethical experiment, of course) you’d likely exhibit behaviour consistent with waning self-awareness; and I would doubt that a human that is somehow (this is even more unethical) brought up in utter and total isolation could be considered conscious in any human sense of the word.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

> If we assume as true that consciousness/self-awareness requires others to arise in the first place—that your own model of yourself is an outcome of modelling those around you (since that implies modelling their model of you)—then it seems not such a big leap to assume that taking others out of your life, becoming a leaf node in the network so to speak, would lead to various negative effects. I think this assumption needs further justification given that I'm conscious and self-aware even when I'm isolated from others, and there are autistic children lacking theory-of-mind while ostensibly being conscious and self-aware. I don't see an obvious link between these things.

strogonoff 4y ago
If you reject the assumption that self-awareness is inherently social, then feel free to disagree. I guess I’m not actually arguing from first principles and we can’t properly get to the bottom of it here. > there are autistic children lacking theory-of-mind while ostensibly being conscious and self-aware I can’t speak for that. I don’t think this is a great example because they still exist in social context. > I'm conscious and self-aware even when I'm isolated from others We still exist over time, not discretely—if you are isolated, it doesn’t mean you lose consciousness immediately. However, I suspect that after a prolonged isolation from human contact (which would be a highly unethical experiment, of course) you’d likely exhibit behaviour consistent with waning self-awareness; and I would doubt that a human that is somehow (this is even more unethical) brought up in utter and total isolation could be considered conscious in any human sense of the word.