u/Can_i_be_certain

This will be another long post.

Its been about 11 years scince i have discovered this all of these philosophies, and while thats a mere-nano second in regards to time, in the on and off time i reflect on the world and on the nature of depression, its function, there too it shows me it teaches us and tries to solve stuff, but ultimatley can leave us with more questions than answers.

I have undergone another existensial crisis within the last week (camus-the absurd) which has lead me back here but in trying to turn it into something productive i typed this up after some serious reflections for 3 days.

Some of this discusses pessimism in general and there are statements which are of contention in philosophy (what isnt?) such as free will and identity and psychological theories. And how some of the related literature around this philosophy can probably bring about suicide (if that is bad is not easy to answer, but the depression aspect is pretty self evidently bad)

I would basically say that my intuitions and personal expierence are very much of the opinion that there is alot more 'suffering' than pleasure or goodness, however we define that using words for such a broad concept is hard, but people like benatar make it pretty clear in his explanation of human life, and incredibly intelligent people like Brian Tomasik point out the scale and issues. But there is no free will (determinism), and there isnt much chance of anything changing

What i've seen and felt though is that human beings are not free to do much in thier lives, we are constrained by our ignorance, lack of intelligence, self deception, social contraints. And ultimately by our nature, reading Schopenhauer then comparing it to current nueroscience and psychology just shows us how 'not free', so much of our emotional attitudes, temperaments, likes and dislikes ect is constrained by our social circles and genetics, and upbringing, aswell as our sense of justice and morality.

If we violate this then extreme depression and existensial crisis will most likely be the result.

I believe both these conditions can be ranked as a pretty high scale in regards to whats bad for humans.

All of this isnt a choice. Its litterly being an ape in a tribe. We are free to discuss radically complex topics here and in the EA forums or Lesswrong ect, but they are thier own mini societies or social circles, you log off then go to your job whatever and all of this is what we discuss irrelevant to people out there...ie the philosophy subreddits and EA is a very fringe online society with little connection to the world at large.

Most people will never discover this philosophy because most peoples dont really think about philosophy and if they did discover it. Due to biases such as cognitive dissonance, disgust, and the sheere mismatch between thier perceived life and goals and what we propose is ljkely going to happen, they will steer away from it (depression), this is not a bug, we are designed for it.

The depression or discomfort it would cause would result on most of them to not give it consideration, in the same way people rationalise away 3rd world suffering or eating meat, not helping others, because ultimatley people are not free to choose thier emotional responses. They litterly feel them and neural mechanism try and equalise the discomfort or they pursuit a path away from it.

Those mechanisms are in peoples cognition for good survival reasons to protect them from depression and being socially outcast ect which is depression one of the main reasons depression manifests once again.

EA and most philosophical subjects, be it - ethics, free will, thinking about what they even are, are at odds with people psychology or coping mechanisms this isnt thier choice its just people have grown and adapted to a environment.

I saw a good thread once about 'how a lay person without studiying EA and knowing about congition sentience could be an altruist?'

And the response was they should give to to givewell.

The issue there is you are expecting someone to blindly pledge a large part of thier money to something then, they will want to want to know what it all means. I think this isnt an EA problem just a psychology problem.

If positive disintergation theory is true, i disintegrated into this around 12 years ago, then managed to beat the extreme depression by 'not really thinking about it' so i comitted philosophical suicide. Life has still been uncomfortable but not a double uncomfort of trying to live then trying to figure out ethics and whats best. I i recently disintergrated again due to extreme boredom and depression. This i believe was caused by a lack of certain neurotransmitters because i haven't been engaging in activities which stop humans thinking about this.

I dont see these philosophy ever gaining much popularity not because its wrong but because it causes depression and it will always be fringe because its at odds with our psychology.

Not that i believe any moral theory can be correct but if we want people to come to our side and focus on decreasing suffering rather than trying to increase 'happiness' then we need to publish a way which works without turning people off - we are primates that need certain needs met. This philosophy really highlights how intertwined suffering and human existence is...

Frame work need to be laid out on what to do, for basically anyone one stumbles upon these ideas if they want to somehow navigate this life without constant doubt.

But it becomes incredibly wierd and hard, because when we engage in certain activities we are more suseptible to do things which we would later reflect on as wrong. I think this philosophy and the related literature points out the bads but currently there is only a few EA charities given as practical advise on how to 'help' them which my intuitions always feel is a like it isnt a bad thing but it doesnt give people like me closure (if there was any).

The choice i think we have, is you ethier comit philosophical suicide, try and 'reintegrate' under dabrowskis theory or use one of Zapffes techniques. in which case the thoughts will go away and mood may improve. But later down the line guilt will come back onto to punish us for pursuing our own happiness rather than weeping for the world.

Or you spend alot more time alone, shirking off social ties, which you will suffer for, and limiting your distractions, but trying to maintain yourself in a 'healthy' way, and continue to study and try find answers if there are any, till you get bored, in which case the will will look something else.

Coming back to reading about this after many years due to (philosophical suicide) camus, i'll explain in another post.

TL DR ; Brain size and amount of neurons firing for pain is the bone of contention just because more are firing doesnt mean the expierence is weaker, maybe. Hopefully not.

Im not great at writing essays so some of this may seem longwinded or messy.

I did see a few years back some ground has been made in regards to what if any moral considerations made for fish and invertebrates espeically in EA forum, there is now a suspected sentience table and another chart with various behaviour listed from speices for C.elegans (nematode) to Octopus to Pigs ect.

Also reading other works from philsopher its understandable we intuitively empathise Pigs to suffer but its very intuitivly hard to empathise with say cockroaches and this is where it can ethier get simple or hard.

Tomasik mentions thats small brains might be more efficent and lack redundancy, and for example alot of our brain isn't just there for feeling pain or pleasure, we have huge parts dedicated for language and planning ect.

In the same way a spiders brain or a roaches brain has parts to process input stimuli such has antennae, in this regard i think there is the strong possibility they have qualia.

As i look at this screen im concious of it, in my occipital lobe neurons are rendering the image and i have visual qualia (through some mechanism) (hard problem of consciousness)

However in the fame in the brain model of consciousness basically what wins is whatever circuit is firing the most im the brain. (im not consious stomach if im not hungry)

i see no reason why a spider wouldnt have some qualia for its sensory inputs.

In the same way if you turn off the lights in the room your are visually not aware of as much but you are still aware of light and patterns on your eyelids because the neurons are still firing. If however you only close one eye (notice how you cant really focus on whats going on under the other eyelid? Because the other eyes neurons are dominating the neural firing...

Now this doesnt tell us much about the richness of expierences more that if something has the hardware for it it can sense it so long as there are enough neurons firing for the fame in brain model.

But this is where i try and link and think about valence.

If i lose an close and eye or lose sense of smell im less aware of my environment but i do not suffer negative emotions in the immediate moment because of it. (not being able to read would cause boredom and life issues but thats seperate emotions)

I think a spider has a few systems maybe hunger and vibration sensing but if all of these are satiated the brain activity must be low?

However when it needs to get away from something or it senses a bug then some sort of motivational mechanism fires and we would call these pleasure and pain, but im not sure how we figure out how strong (valenced) these expierences are. Which is how we are trying to work out the moral relevance of pain and pleasure.

You might say why focus on insects? Use us as an example, but atm im very focused on insects because im trying to figure out if simple brains can even have strong expirences.

But lets focus on us, and feel free to leave thoughts on this espeically, we only say expierences are bad in the sense that the qualia we had is something we would rather not expirence again. But scince qualia is ineffible there isnt an easy way to convey the strongness or weakness of an expierence.

We just appeal to scenarios like being slightly hungry and majorly hungry.

I think what makes being majorly hungry is the despair and anger an emotions (reinforcement) in what makes the expierences bad. Ie you feel pain in your stomach the pain reaches a certain threshold then 'negative' emotion start and get progressively stronger till its resolved.

All of this is very obvious to people whom have studied this before and Brian Tomasik whom i read about alot of this from.

But without us being able to quantify qualia such as emotional expierences (ineffible) without just using a 1 - 10 as an example for use who is able to verbally communicate it.

We use behaviour as our next litmus and as i said above the spider runs away fast as example it may seem like it was in pain. But it doesnt tell us about the qualia valence of the expierence (if it had one).

I think the only way we can find the best eveidence is through neuroscience and brain scanning the spider. But the issue is just because less neurons are firing for negative stimuli because it overall has less neurons for that doesnt nessacily means that its feeling less (which is very worrying).

Thats all it has, so if its current awareness is to 'flee negative stimuli' its awareness is probably soley that as most lf the neurons will be firing for that.

Im just struggling on the problem of other minds in regards to how we could quantifiable measure its expierences given it cant communicate.

But again i try below to figure something out.

We have less receptors fors smells than dogs, and dogs seem to like smelling things (have a strong motivation to do it more than us). Im imagining there pleasure and reward circuits are more wired for this than ours(im not saying we dont find smells pleasurable or unpleasant).

But it seems dogs like to smell things, even stuff we dont.

Because they more scent neurons genrally we believe dogs are more sensitive and can smell more as in they have more qualia than we do in regards to smells.

But the things is how do we link this to pleasure and pain. We can see motivations. But you might say scan the reward centers of a dogs brain, and it may show us for some smells more neurons fire for pleasure than others.

But this where it becomes worrying again. Because lets say humans and dogs have 10 million of neurons dedicated to 'pain' (not an accurate figure) out of the 86 billion it has lets say the dog feels terrible negative stimuli and nearly 90% fire. They get fame and get concious awareness or suffering

A spider has 1000 (unknown) dedicated to pain, out of the 100k it has, it feels negative stimuli and all 1000 fire, thats alot more neurons proportional to brain size firing so we could assume it feels alot more terrible than the dog?

You may think that this wrong headed.

But just because both models got major fame for firing and the spider had more fame realtive to how many neurons it has it was valenced stronger?

The counter argument may be that overall strongess of qualia is down to how much fame it gets in the brain and how many there are to fire. But its hard to quantify the badness...