[coldtea]

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.

[club_tropical]

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.

[coldtea]

>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).

[pixl97]

2b)

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.

[User23]

Why does nearly everyone return shopping carts?

[pixl97]

I see you subscribe to 4chan shopping cart theory

____

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.

[User23]

> 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.

[avgcorrection]

> In fact I find it striking how in line with traditional Christian philosophy your judgments are.

I find it not surprising that someone would latch onto a description of non-duality as something curiously “in line” with a particular religion.