Principia Amalgamatio

There's a cognitive skill that, in retrospect, has been important to my life, but which I don't think I've ever named: It is (relative to myself) the skill of acting unlike Eliezer Yudkowsky, or averting self-consistency pressures. E.g.: On one trip to New York, when I said I'd never drunk a glass of wine, someone challenged me to drink a glass of wine at least once, in order to - I don't remember if they said this, or I thought this - make sure that I wasn't just not drinking wine because I hadn't previously drunk wine. And it seemed to me that this was a legitimate bias that was worth disposing of via this one-time cost, so I drank a glass of wine. Just to make sure that on future occasions when I decided whether or not to drink wine, I would not be deciding on the basis of there being this huge threshold to cross over of a first glass. (I haven't had another glass of wine since, but don't regret this decision.) I think the form the cognitive skill takes for me is having in mind a picture of yourself - a concept of your role, not just the way other people see you, but also the way you've always behaved in the past - and whenever there's an optimal thing to do that involves behaving unlike yourself, you feel a little extra jolt of virtuousness, a bit of pleasure and positive reinforcement. It seems conceptually related to the skills of "Being a Genre Savvy, Level 1 Intelligent Character inside your own mental landscape" and another unnamed skill of "Trying not to be That Guy you keep meeting who is stuck inside their own corner of conceptspace and can't change the mind or their subject even if the world is at stake, so you treat them as an NPC and hope maybe you'll find a use for them someday - don't let yourself become That Guy." ‪#‎cogskills‬

The belief that plants can suffer reflects a pre-scientific animism. A precondition of being a unitary subject of experience is a central nervous system. No selection pressure to evolve an energetically expensive central nervous system could exist on sessile organisms such as plants, which lack the capacity for rapid self-propelled motion. Recall we know how to switch off pain altogether in animals: nonsense mutations of the SCN9A gene cause congenital analgesia. Plants lack a SCN9A gene - or any functional analogue. Even if one believes that individual cells can support rudimentary experience, the encasement of individual plant cells within thick cellulose cell walls prevents any plausible form of phenomenal binding. By contrast, a pig, for example, is at least as sentient (and sapient) as a human prelinguistic toddler - and deserves to be treated accordingly. In practice, the only people who affect concern for plant suffering are meat-eaters who want to rationalise animal abuse. We're not dealing with pre-scientific animists arguing in good faith that plants have souls. Strictly speaking one can't literally disprove the belief that plants (or rocks or mountains etc) suffer pain. Such a conjecture is inconsistent with the scientific world-picture and reductive physicalism. But then we don't understand how creatures with central nervous systems can solve the phenomenal binding problem (cf. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu.... Critically, however, without a unitary subject it makes no sense to say there is a subject of experience who suffers - and can be worthy of moral consideration."

Fb dump pt. 2

Fb dump:

On the face of it, cheating Hume's guillotine and deriving an "ought” from an "is" is logically impossible. However, for reasons we simply don't understand, a normative aspect is built into the very nature of some first-person states, e.g. I ought-not-to-be-in-this-deadful-agony. If you are the victim of unbearable agony or despair, the badness of such states is not an "open question". Combine the normative aspect of such first-person states with the scientific world-picture, i.e. no here-and-nows are special or ontologically privileged. Insofar as suffering is bad for me, it's bad for sentient beings anywhere. Here we have the germ of a theory of universal (dis)value. In short, moral realism can't simply be dismissed out of hand.