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I'm certain this topic has been addressed many times, but I can't see how to reconcile basic morality with "it's just a calculation". Tell me I should not infli

I'm certain this topic has been addressed many times, but I can't see how to reconcile basic morality with "it's just a calculation". Tell me I should not inflict pain on sentient beings while subscribing to the belief that pain is simply one particular result of a massive mathematical calculation. It's literally just a number/matrix.

mitthrowaway2 3y ago
Perhaps you're not over-valuing pain, but under-valuing numbers. There's no reason to think that morality can't or shouldn't center around minimizing a pain metric. That would put it in line with any other trajectory-planning-under-constraints problem. Once you've done a bit of work in trajectory optimization, you start to feel the numbers come alive, and develop a visceral feeling for them. I wince when I see a car scrape to the edge of its traction limit as it rounds a corner at high speed. Nature itself plans trajectories to minimize action, the integral of a Lagrangian: it's literally just a number, but it decides the motion of molecules and galaxies. What's wrong with a moral system based around minimizing a pain integral, subject to constraints? Still just a number. But one that can easily take an important position in our decision-making, and find a deep-seated place in our minds as well. Of course, we probably ended up with morals in the first place as a distillation of game-theoretic heuristics, which helped us trust and cooperate with each other, which would have been an evolutionary benefit. But as with anything else, we're accountable to the drives that evolution left us with, not evolution's reasons for putting them there. The morals are in our minds, not in nature, but either way it's numbers all the way down.
- N0b8ez 3y ago
  Consider whether we should define electrons to be "positive" or "negative": there isn't any fact of the matter, it's merely a convention. But it doesn't seem like experiencing pain works this way: pain feels a particular way. If pain is just a mathematical entity, there shouldn't be any particular way that it feels, since it's just a symbol. Maybe we're deeply wrong about our intuitions, and actually no conscious experience is happening in the brain at all, despite the brain having an incorrect model about itself which predicts this (and causes it to make utterances claiming that it has experiences). That's the school of thought known as eliminitivism. Under this view, all suffering is a myth, in the same way that luckiness and angels are.
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    Sign conventions are not arbitrary in trajectory planning, though. You'll get very different results if you solve for a robot trajectory that moves from A to B while minimizing motor energy consumption, than if you solve for maximum energy consumption. You'll notice the difference - it's a mistake you'll only make once! If we have some internal decision-making process that pushes us to make decisions that minimize a pain metric, the sign we attach to the "pain" number will make a very big difference, both in internal state and resultant observed behaviour.
llamaimperative 3y ago
It shouldn't be that hard: you don't like suffering, right? There you go! Those numbers/matrices are bad because they feel bad.
- gosub100 3y ago
  so all thats necessary for someone to inflict pain is to claim they personally enjoy it?
  - llamaimperative 3y ago
    No, they need to convince a large portion of society that it's good enough to allow. So far the arc of human history has shown this to be a difficult argument to make at scale and at length.
    - gosub100 3y ago
      but "they" don't exist to the agent inflicting pain. "they" are just a number, by definition. Just the result of a calculation... Edit: or if you dont like that explanation, why should a consensus of a calculation have any more merit than an individual calculation?
      - llamaimperative 3y ago
        Well no, the agent's model of the other person is just data, but this model is so convincing that most people don't perceive it as such and they're thoroughly convinced of the realness of the other person. Consensus matters because if people around you disagree with you they will kill you or put you in prison. At rock bottom this is how all laws and ethical norms are created.
quonn 3y ago
And it isn‘t just a number. A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something. It would be honest to admit that we don‘t know why consciousness subjectively feels like anything. Pointing to complexity or integrated information doesn‘t explain this at all. It‘s easy to imagine a complex process that doesn‘t have a subjective experience.
- gosub100 3y ago
  > A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something. so it's not "just a calculation"? I am NOT trying to make a joke/reference to Clinton, but I think in these philosophical conversations, we have to step back even further and question what our definition of "is" is. Again, I'm a CS grad who has never taken philosophy, so I'm sure this has been explored to death by people who own this field. But there's absolutely a point in philosophy where you can't even rely on "what is true": slamming my fingers in the doorway IS painful (to me), but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe. Just as Einstein proved, two observers can experience different realities, fundamentally, two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door).
  - haswell 3y ago
    > but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe What do you mean by "just a calculation" here, and how does everyone else's experience of pain apply? You seem to be implying that for everyone who is not the 1st person subjective experiencer of pain, the only possible representation of that pain is some form of "calculation". You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right? Sure, you could choose to use some process of calculation as one way to measure pain, but this isn't the only way to conceptualize it, nor is it the only way that people experience it. e.g. mirror neurons are interesting to consider. We have in our brains these neurons dedicated to experiencing what we observe others experiencing. We cringe when we see someone suddenly become involved in a painful accident. We recoil when we see something horrific. The nature of what the observer experiences is almost certainly very different than what the person in pain is experiencing, but there's a shared experience for those in proximity. Whatever pain is or isn't, the fact that its effects can be localized to a single person and the fact that it may be calculable in some way seem unrelated to each other. > two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door) You hurting your finger in the door and me not feeling the exact thing you experienced are independent facts about the state of the world when the door slamming occurred. Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.

mitthrowaway2 3y ago

Perhaps you're not over-valuing pain, but under-valuing numbers. There's no reason to think that morality can't or shouldn't center around minimizing a pain metric. That would put it in line with any other trajectory-planning-under-constraints problem. Once you've done a bit of work in trajectory optimization, you start to feel the numbers come alive, and develop a visceral feeling for them. I wince when I see a car scrape to the edge of its traction limit as it rounds a corner at high speed. Nature itself plans trajectories to minimize action, the integral of a Lagrangian: it's literally just a number, but it decides the motion of molecules and galaxies. What's wrong with a moral system based around minimizing a pain integral, subject to constraints? Still just a number. But one that can easily take an important position in our decision-making, and find a deep-seated place in our minds as well. Of course, we probably ended up with morals in the first place as a distillation of game-theoretic heuristics, which helped us trust and cooperate with each other, which would have been an evolutionary benefit. But as with anything else, we're accountable to the drives that evolution left us with, not evolution's reasons for putting them there. The morals are in our minds, not in nature, but either way it's numbers all the way down.

N0b8ez 3y ago
Consider whether we should define electrons to be "positive" or "negative": there isn't any fact of the matter, it's merely a convention. But it doesn't seem like experiencing pain works this way: pain feels a particular way. If pain is just a mathematical entity, there shouldn't be any particular way that it feels, since it's just a symbol. Maybe we're deeply wrong about our intuitions, and actually no conscious experience is happening in the brain at all, despite the brain having an incorrect model about itself which predicts this (and causes it to make utterances claiming that it has experiences). That's the school of thought known as eliminitivism. Under this view, all suffering is a myth, in the same way that luckiness and angels are.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  Sign conventions are not arbitrary in trajectory planning, though. You'll get very different results if you solve for a robot trajectory that moves from A to B while minimizing motor energy consumption, than if you solve for maximum energy consumption. You'll notice the difference - it's a mistake you'll only make once! If we have some internal decision-making process that pushes us to make decisions that minimize a pain metric, the sign we attach to the "pain" number will make a very big difference, both in internal state and resultant observed behaviour.

llamaimperative 3y ago

It shouldn't be that hard: you don't like suffering, right? There you go! Those numbers/matrices are bad because they feel bad.

gosub100 3y ago
so all thats necessary for someone to inflict pain is to claim they personally enjoy it?
- llamaimperative 3y ago
  No, they need to convince a large portion of society that it's good enough to allow. So far the arc of human history has shown this to be a difficult argument to make at scale and at length.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    but "they" don't exist to the agent inflicting pain. "they" are just a number, by definition. Just the result of a calculation... Edit: or if you dont like that explanation, why should a consensus of a calculation have any more merit than an individual calculation?
    - llamaimperative 3y ago
      Well no, the agent's model of the other person is just data, but this model is so convincing that most people don't perceive it as such and they're thoroughly convinced of the realness of the other person. Consensus matters because if people around you disagree with you they will kill you or put you in prison. At rock bottom this is how all laws and ethical norms are created.

quonn 3y ago

And it isn‘t just a number. A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something. It would be honest to admit that we don‘t know why consciousness subjectively feels like anything. Pointing to complexity or integrated information doesn‘t explain this at all. It‘s easy to imagine a complex process that doesn‘t have a subjective experience.

gosub100 3y ago
> A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something. so it's not "just a calculation"? I am NOT trying to make a joke/reference to Clinton, but I think in these philosophical conversations, we have to step back even further and question what our definition of "is" is. Again, I'm a CS grad who has never taken philosophy, so I'm sure this has been explored to death by people who own this field. But there's absolutely a point in philosophy where you can't even rely on "what is true": slamming my fingers in the doorway IS painful (to me), but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe. Just as Einstein proved, two observers can experience different realities, fundamentally, two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door).
- haswell 3y ago
  > but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe What do you mean by "just a calculation" here, and how does everyone else's experience of pain apply? You seem to be implying that for everyone who is not the 1st person subjective experiencer of pain, the only possible representation of that pain is some form of "calculation". You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right? Sure, you could choose to use some process of calculation as one way to measure pain, but this isn't the only way to conceptualize it, nor is it the only way that people experience it. e.g. mirror neurons are interesting to consider. We have in our brains these neurons dedicated to experiencing what we observe others experiencing. We cringe when we see someone suddenly become involved in a painful accident. We recoil when we see something horrific. The nature of what the observer experiences is almost certainly very different than what the person in pain is experiencing, but there's a shared experience for those in proximity. Whatever pain is or isn't, the fact that its effects can be localized to a single person and the fact that it may be calculable in some way seem unrelated to each other. > two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door) You hurting your finger in the door and me not feeling the exact thing you experienced are independent facts about the state of the world when the door slamming occurred. Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.