> In fact, having depression is generally much worse than having diabetes
As a T1 diabetic, the fun part is that diabetes is highly correlated with depression. So it's very common for depression to follow diabetes. Sucks to have to deal with both. It's a vicious cycle, because depression makes it harder to manage your diabetes, and poorly managed diabetes is correlated with more severe depression symptoms.
Not exactly an "either or" problem. I'd rather just have depression, because at least there would be hope for treatment and remission. My diabetes will never be cured.
As a fellow T1 diabetic, I fully agree. I'd much rather have no diabetes and full-fat depression (assuming both conditions can be properly medicated) than the other way round - and I already have low-fat depression thanks to decades of untreated ADHD. A hypoglycemic "attack" can kill silently in the middle of the night. And trust me, I have way more frequent "suicidal" thoughts than hypos on an average day (quotes because I know I'm not going to follow through). Of course this isn't meant to be a pity party of who has it worse, this is more of a note to the author/readers.
(Fortunately my ADHD diagnosis + medication seems to be helping a good bit.)
Hugs to you. T1 diabetes is so awful and hard. The daily burden is something non diabetics just can never fully understand. It's something that's with you always. We understand the burden of living on the knife's edge of life and death better than almost anyone.
> If you’re smart, people say, you should work toward a good future, sacrificing fun and pleasure in the present.
Yeah, this is the conventional wisdom, but that doesn't make it right. Life is a tricky beast. You can do "all the right things" - and many of us do - and still have suboptimal outcomes.
Furthermore, thinking about the future is a luxury of leisure. That is, day to day, when the vast majority of your energy is focused on survival, the future is not a priority. It is literally the least of your worries. The future can't feed you, etc. Agreed, that's a cycle that is self-defeating. But breaking out of such a defensive shell is counter to how we're wired. Possible? Yes but extremely difficult under persistent pressure and immediate real life stress.
Even in the First World there are plenty living a defensive lifestyle. The future? That's someone else's.
From what I know about the brain, it is more of a prediction machine than anything else, based on prior input. It seems reasonable for the majority to be unconcerned with what cannot be reasonably predicted, and as the article states, for artists to imagine possible futures on our behalf.
My guess is that filtering is downstream of prediction, because filtering is making a prediction about which input will be useful, then acting on that prediction.
I think the Predictive Processing model would describe it as each layer only signaling “surprisal” to the layer above when the input diverges from the prediction. You could call this filtering if you like, or just an efficient delta representation.
The impossible as opposed to the merely not plausible, isn't really alluring for art, as it's neither a depiction of what's there (art as mirror), nor a warning (artist as Cassandra or sensitive guard), and not even a call to arms (art as politics, utopia).
In other words, it doesn't relate to the artist and us. It only relates when there's a thread that connects what's imagined to where we are, where we might be, or where we want to go.
>Obviously false statement, given the genre of fiction.
Obviously we are aware of the genre of fiction. Or science fiction for that matter. Or superhero comics, or supernatural stories, and so on. So my point wasn't that e.g. vampire fiction doesn't exist or isn't interesting to writers and reader.
But nothing in the genre of fiction is really about the impossible. That is just metaphor and plot device for what was, is, or can be.
If there's a superhero with laser eyes and super-strength, it's not about the superhero, but about the idea of heroism, the responsibility of power, the connections with people, the repercusions of actions, and so on. It's the connection with the existing and the possible that makes it interesting.
Art is background. Without background Romeo and Juliet is just "love could be a strong feeling", and Back to the Future is "time travel has an unsolved grandfather paradox".
You got it backwards here. The heart of the art is in the intra-personal conflicts and human aspect observations, and the skeleton is the plot.
The background is just (literally) a backdrop. Which is why you can set Romeo and Juliet in 20th century America, or Antigone in space - as many have done, and the heart of the work is still there just fine.
> The heart of the art is in the intra-personal conflicts and human aspect observations, and the skeleton is the plot.
Precisely what makes it art is the background though.
> The background is just (literally) a backdrop. Which is why you can set Romeo and Juliet in 20th century America, or Antigone in space - as many have done, and the heart of the work is still there just fine.
>Precisely what makes it art is the background though.
No, that's just the decoration on the dish that is art. The nutritional value and the test is in the core. The artisty is in the expression and observation and relatedness, not in the the backdrop.
The way I see it, this whole article seems to reframe the age old debate between utilitarians and deontologists (moralists) He tries to bridge the two philosophies by suggesting a more vivid imagination of the future consequences increases the present utility. Then you will do what you ought to do, not just out of duty, but also out of a better appreciation of how to maximize future utility for others.
But in the end, such an approach is a bit unsatisfying. Like the trolley problem, such a framing of consequences in purely utilitarian terms comes out ultimately to be value judgement on the threshold of utility that would cause you to act. A value judgement is subjective, and how do you make the subjective decision? Utilitarian or deontology?
Do I have a solution? Absolutely not. Just pointing out this just a reframing of an old dilemma.
"Lee and his colleagues confirmed this by looking at people’s brain activity with an fMRI when they’re making decisions about the future. They used a brain decoder to detect a “neural signature of the vividness of prospective thought”
What twaddle. fMRI will tell you quite a bit about blood flow etc. but "brain decoder" is bullshit. It's like taking a thermal image of the primary PCB and saying you've just backed all of the operating system and secondary code out of the image.
The author will continue to push the button, write down the number and have a career, but imagine the future harm they're doing by furthering such an appallingly fraudulent approach.
I've seen people make that analogy before and I do think it has merit. As far as I'm aware it's pretty much the standard approach in neuroscience though and not special to these authors
While I can appreciate to have a good income and always had good paying jobs, I was never really interested in making a career and becoming filthy rich. Possibly because I can not imagine myself in this situation.
On the other hand I was always better then others on making long term strategic plans.
Sure. I have aphantasia too. I cannot, for the life of me, picture or accurately describe my mother's, wife's, or child's face from memory. They're as abstract as a random actor's face to me in those ways. I know details about them, but it's like remembering a list of items, not describing a picture I'm looking at. I can recognize them faster than others, but good luck getting a police sketch of them from me.
What I do have are notions and feelings about things when I think about them. If you ask me my favorite foods, I have to sit and remember how I feel about various foods like some kind of rolodex (though over time I'll remember the items from repetition, any such rankings are like this). I don't know how to compare the "vividness" of such things beyond notions of "that seems familiar" or "I don't remember ever encountering that", so this article doesn't really feel like it's about me at all. Of course, I'm also one of the most patient people around, so maybe it's just that the difference between "2x later" and "1x now" is close enough for me to wait in more instances than most since they're both just evocations of feelings and notions rather than things I can literally visualize and compare like some mental "spot the differences" puzzle.
Why are you sick of it? Some people can't 'imagine' at all.
The clue is in the name. Just because you can conceptualise without images doesn't mean you can imagine. Imagination without images is not imagination by definition. Its totally what aphantasia is.
There's no picture, there's just an abstracted idea.
I've just spent the last 30min-1h looking this up. I think I might have a form of this... Mostly, I can't really picture stuff. I thought that was just everyone.
Behold, one of the most dangerous and toxic forms of stupid: the LABCOAT-FLASHER. Do not fall for the verbal trickeries and hypotheticals - they are the syntactic sugar masking various POISONS:
1) There is no “you” that is meaningfully apart from “your brain”. This trickery is meant to dissociate you from your body and backdoor sneak-in the labcoat-flasher as a co-conspiritor against yourself. It is every bit as gaslighting as a mom saying “why your hands don’t want to clean your room”.
2) Crystal ball, aka “if you knew you wouldn’t get caught” or “if you knew a child would get harmed”. These are always bad faith, 100% or the time, no exceptions. Nobody has ever experienced a crystal ball like this. NO GOD, of ANY faith, has ever made guarantees like this. The only thing this trickery is meant to serve is for the labcoat-flasher to control the imaginary future via the imaginary crystal ball and PROSECUTE YOU NOW for transgressions in his imagination. This is the girlfriend mad you for cheating on her in her dream and demanding you grovel at her feet for an apology.
3) This one is harder, because it sounds good, but it is worth making explicit because it is used against you as a form of control: human egalitarianism. See, nobody actually believes this, not in the here and now among the living 7 billion humans let alone all the imaginary descendents for centuries to come. A true and complete belief in this would make you a LITERAL SLAVE, spending every second and every disposable income on sponsoring the mass of humanity unrelated to you. The labcoat-flasher himself doesn’t believe this either, but he hopes you won’t focus on him - no, he will start with your well-meaning and generous (if ultimately strictly-speaking untrue) belief that all humans should be equal and will take your benevolence, stretch it “to its logical conclusion” far beyond it was ever meant to go, wrap it up around your throat and CHOKE you with it. This is the girlfriend demanding you take a second job to buy her the $100,000 crocodile skin Hermes Birkin purse she wants because that is her love language and you said you cared about her- or do you not love her?
Mendacious to its core, this kind of manipulative gaslighting rhetoric they boldly call “research” is the parochial pastime of labcoat-flashers like this Sangil “Arthur” Lee. It is a step in their vain chase for tenure or funding or some Young Researcher Award (TM). It never did and it never will have anything to do with reality or truth or any honest pursuit of such.
The premise of the article is a bit more simple: things we can imagine more clearly, have more meaning to us.
It's very simply articulated using concept of 'describing' vs. 'seeing' vs. 'doing'.
It's hard for us to empathize with soldiers fighting wars, or refugees fleeing them - but when someone shows us pictures, or better yet, tells us their authentic story, it becomes visceral, and therefore we give legitimacy to the situation.
Indeed, that was a strange diatribe that seems to go way beyond the content of the article (which does flirt with some neurobabble and dubious philosophy here and there, I opine, but I see nothing that would merit the terror-laden response of the OP). If we focus on the central claim concerning imagination and discard the rest, we can still have an interesting discussion. Worth mentioning is John Henry Newman's "A Grammar of Assent"[0] which begins precisely with a discussion of what he called notional and real assent which relate how we assent to propositions with what you might call the associated "vividness" of experience.
Wow, for a diatribe on bad-faith, this is precisely that.
e.g. You say the labcoat-flasher doesn't really believe in egalitarianism either... People profess desires to be a certain way (sometimes 'moral' sometimes not) despite not being that way, but we don't call that "fake"; humans are complex, and the point of adopting any higher-order principle (again, whether 'moral' or not) is that your actions start... pointing in that direction more. Incrementally so, not absolutely.
Truly, every sentence you wrote could be similarly torn apart, but it's not worth my time.
I need to hear a restatement of 3) that doesn't rely on the word "equal" or "egalitarian" without defining them in the context of the argument you're making.
What does it mean to say that everyone is or isn't "equal?" Are you trying to say that people are distinct (i.e. there is more than one person)? Are you trying to say that people aren't the same height, and there are others insisting that they are? What are you saying?
Right, I can think my child is abstractly ‘equal’ to another person’s child but also not feel as much ownership for their well being.
I think what the commenter is saying is similar to a reductio ad absurdum of what it would be like if every child was of equal direct importance and priority to you. It, however, doesn’t address what would happen if everyone in a community voluntarily had this concern nominally and therefore could allocate responsibility across many.
I have no idea of what the commenter is actually trying to say, which is why I asked. I have to admit that usually when I hear people make statements like that, they're being deceptive in a couple of ways.
Sometimes, when people claim a logical implication (if A then B), and people object to them by saying that A doesn't imply B, they will 1) follow with a claim that the objector is claiming that nothing can imply anything else, or 2) follow with a claim that "A doesn't imply B" is equivalent to saying "B doesn't exist."
In these ways, a claim of "all birds fly" responds to a counter-claim of "not all birds fly" with: "so you're saying that there are no birds that fly, then" or even worse "so you're saying that nothing can fly, then." I've even seen "so you're saying that everything except birds can fly, then."
So I have no idea where it is going, but precision in the definitions of "equal" or "egalitarian" used in this context would help me to understand.
Putting the OP's comment aside, what is this abstract "equality"? We seem to be quite confident in announcing this proposition and affirming it in the public square, but how many people can actually tell you what this equality concerns? (Mind you, I am NOT claiming there is no sense in which human persons may be said to be equal. I am merely raising the issue that many people don't seem to know despite the confident assertions to the contrary and that lots of weird political hay has been made claiming some nebulous kind of "equality" that resists any kind of examination or analysis.)
> lots of weird political hay has been made claiming some nebulous kind of "equality" that resists any kind of examination or analysis.
The resistance to analysis is often because they use it polymorphically. It will mean one thing in one sentence, a totally different thing in the next, and this will not be acknowledged in any way.
I'm not an arguer about what words mean, for me it's enough that people tell me what they mean by the word so we can have an effective discussion. But the word has to mean something and its definition cannot change within the same context.
I'm not playing dumb. And I'm also surprised that you're so confident that what they meant by equality is "equal skill levels at a particular task." If that's what they meant, there's literally nobody who believes either that everyone is equal at every task, or that everyone is equal at any task. That would be a dumb strawman.
So are you playing dumb, or is that really what you think they meant?
Egalitarianism is such a weak position that there’s no need to strawman it.
And yes literally nobody except children and fools truly believes that people are equal in any material sense. Evidence suggests to me that you are neither a child nor a fool.
Indeed the egalitarian position is so transparently weak that even its erstwhile proponents have abandoned it in favor of “equity,” whatever that means.
People can't even be considerate of others who exist, let alone those who are yet to be. Should a 15 year old bear the weight of their future offspring when deciding to sneak out of the house to drink with friends?
It's impossible to know the totality of outcomes associated with an action and the author's examples are pretty simplistic. What if that glass you dropped and shattered becomes a tool of survival for a person lost in the woods?
Another set of "philosophical muggings" that use the same trick and drive me nuts that people just accept them are trolley problems.
"Why shouldn't the surgeon kill a healthy person to save 5 others with his organs?". Duh, because the surgeon doesn't know what's going to happen and there's a high chance he's going to end up with 6 corpses, plus his own when anybody fins out. "No, you don't understand, it's a Gedankenexperiment, we're assuming it works out". That's the mugging, that's the con, you just gave them clarivoyance and from there you can be sold any bridge of their choice.
Never accept crystal balls. There are no paradoxes, just realities people don't like.
> Why shouldn't the surgeon kill a healthy person to save 5 others with his organs?". Duh, because the surgeon doesn't know what's going to happen and there's a high chance he's going to end up with 6 corpses, plus his own when anybody fins out.
You really think it’s this, and not that the surgeon doesn’t want to kill people?
Well there you go, I'm glad you don't need convincing that "killing" and "letting people die by not giving them fresh organs" are not the same thing at all.
I think the bigger problem with #3 is not that nobody buys the equality claim, but that we accept the premise.
If all humans were equal, there would be only one human. That's how equality works
The underlying claim is actually that all humans are of equal value. Yet there's no clear way to map humanity onto the number line. No generally accepted evaluation function. Egalitarianism declares such a function and then leaves it lying around for oppressors to define.
This makes us weak against attacks where we're pitted against each other under the oversight of some master and we accept the deal because it makes our type of people more valuable than some boogeyman-type of person. This works because once we accept that there is an evaluation function, as you say, nobody buys that it maps us all to the same point.
1) There's also your body, in the arms and legs and torso sense, which is you, but it's not your brain. There's also your non conscious part (whether you want to include a Freud style subconscious, or autonomous functioning parts that reach a decision way before it has registered as a conscious though) which is your brain, but not exactly "you" as you think of you. Plus all kind of body-produced chemicals and hormones that influence you, despite not being "your brain" - they're still you, since you can't ever separate the two (the thoughts and behavior you have on them versus what you'd have without them. There is no second you to have a test, do a diff, and be able to tell exactly which behavior/thoughts come e.g. from an excess of those chemicals (e.g. due to exposure or diet or some condition in your body) and which from your regular brain without such influence.
2) "Nobody has ever experienced a crystal ball like this" Irellevant, as many do act at many points in life as such beliefs are 100% certainty (a plotting killer believing they will get away with it, for an extreme example). Doesn't matter whether they have a "crystal ball" guarantee of outcome X: their thinking making them see the future as having the same outcome X is enough.
As for (3) I sorta agree.
"MacAskill and others are concerned about what the discount rate should be because it is important for the decisions we make about the world—how much should we care about people who have not been born yet? One might be tempted to think that science could resolve this issue, but alas, it cannot."
Of course it cannot. It's an ethical decision, which rests on personal ethics (not totally unlike personal taste), which are influenced by cultural (society's) ethics.
If we want to think "rationally" about it, it would be based on "what kind of outcome we want for those future persons and how we can best achieve it". But even the choice of outcome would rest on ethics and cultural preferences - or something also non-rational like evolutionary urges.
1) It sounds from what you write that you agree, even if reluctantly so, because "there is no diff". For completeness sake, I want to clarify that I believe in something far stronger than your reluctant resignation: that the whole conscious/subconscious separation, the body/head/hormone separation, that these are all artificial and wrong categorizations. There is one you, the whole you, no part meaningfully separable from the other, not "diff"able, because the hormones are not some external force acting on The Real You (TM) but a physical manifestation of The One You (TM). If you manipulate body/head/hormones, you literally change The One You, to varying degrees depending on the intervention, obviously.
2) I disagree on 2 counts.
a) Thinking you'll get away with something is categorically different from knowing it. Nobody ever experiences this sort of assuredness and we cannot extrapolate our behavior under volatility to conditions of certainty. The closest we come to it are the most meaningless actions (like me reaching for a water bottle, "knowing" that I will touch it and lift it up), but no meaningfully large action, and certainly not a single one that involves other conscious beings is ever experienced as certain.
b) Humans are not fundamentally probability-modeling animals. When your bottle slips and shatters on the hiking trail, nobody - not a single human soul - runs Monte Carlo simulations on where those shards might end up and what that might mean for the future of humanity and "solves back" the right action. It is a complete category error to model human actions as such. Probability estimates have their (limited) place in (rare) human decisions, but even then it is not an exact fit.
This whole crystal-ball exercise is at best a lazy attempt by Lee, because it is easy and convenient to talk about the robo-human caricatures of his imagination. He is basically shaking his fist ADMONISHING YOU to behave more like the simplified easily-quantified caricatures so he can study you easier get his MacArthur Genius Grant goddammit.
>a) Thinking you'll get away with something is categorically different from knowing it. Nobody ever experiences this sort of assuredness
That's not really important at the personal behavior level (the thing we're discussing, and which the article addresses) though, but more of a pedantic dictinction, isn't it?
We can't even be sure that we'll not die from a sudden heart attack in the next 10 minutes, but we nonetheless act and plan as if we have a 100% certainty that we wont, and we even feel that way (that is, we don't feel as this is an "open thing", we thing we'll live just fine - except those of us who have a related phobia and anxiety).
>When your bottle slips and shatters on the hiking trail, nobody - not a single human soul - runs Monte Carlo simulations on where those shards might end up and what that might mean for the future of humanity and "solves back" the right action.
I'd say most humans will worry about somebody stepping on the glass on a public trail (or even less pressing concerns, like the impact of the litter on the environment, the possibility of the sun starting a fire through the shards, and so on) and will try to pick those shards. Heck, many will feel guilt if they don't.
Whether they run Monte Carlo simulations or just use some conscious rational logic to deduce the possible issue, is not really important to the question, is it?
So, the question would remain, why do we care for the possibility in the future of someone we don't even know stepping on the shards in 1 day or 1 year or 5 years, but not for other consequences of our actions far further in the future?
I'd say the real answer is because they're too dispersed (based on many levels of n-th order effects and cascading consequences) and too remote (1-2 generations in the future is beyond a reasonable horizon for most people).
You drop a bottle on a biking trail. Do you clean it up?
I mean, you likely won't get caught or in trouble if you don't, but you're apt to cause other humans harm by increasing the risk they'll get a flat tire.
You drop a bottle off the edge of a cliff. Do you clean it up?
Most people would not, the time and risk of getting to where the bottle is, is high versus the risk of someone being hurt by it.
I believe you've discounted a huge amount of the probability and calculation our minds do in a subconscious manner. Try to catch a ball in zero gravity for a lesson in our built in assumptions.
The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing.
To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you or kill you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.
A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it.
The Shopping Cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad member of society.
> There is one you, the whole you, no part meaningfully separable from the other, not "diff"able, because the hormones are not some external force acting on The Real You (TM) but a physical manifestation of The One You (TM). If you manipulate body/head/hormones, you literally change The One You, to varying degrees depending on the intervention, obviously.
Incidentally this is exactly Catholic teaching on the human person.
In fact I find it striking how in line with traditional Christian philosophy your judgments are. For example the need for a supernaturally provided moral code that’s comprehensible to us follows from the reality that the human intellect truly is incapable of conceiving the possibility infinite higher order consequences of our actions. Thankfully we have some basic heuristics like don’t kill people for no reason that help us out there.
Edit: child has lost the plot. The point is the limitations of the intellect create a need for a moral science.
My brain isn’t into the future because of climate change, the threat of WWIII/nuclear war, The Economy, possible future pandemics like the one of 2020, and not being able to retire until I’m 70. But please do Gee Wiz me all you want about logical fallacies, nautil dot us.
Willful ignorance explains methane with climate change, the opiod epidemic and even inferior calories and the correlation to obesity (high fructose corn syrup in beverages or where it does not belong for example).
Many 21st century innovations replace/supersede/override/make moribund and verify why hypothesis, theory and fact was agreed to, just as they have done in centuries past.
Working with incorrect data has all kinds of random effects. The lead in fuels could have lowered IQ enough for the brain to not even be in the present :p
As a T1 diabetic, the fun part is that diabetes is highly correlated with depression. So it's very common for depression to follow diabetes. Sucks to have to deal with both. It's a vicious cycle, because depression makes it harder to manage your diabetes, and poorly managed diabetes is correlated with more severe depression symptoms.
Not exactly an "either or" problem. I'd rather just have depression, because at least there would be hope for treatment and remission. My diabetes will never be cured.