Tag: poetry

Thoughts on power and Goodness

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

Epistemic status: Ramble. Not a philosophical treatises.

[Note: I think I’m in the process of learning to see through ideology, propaganda, and the forces that are out to manipulate me, but I need to make that transition, while meaningfully maintaining my ability to see and understand goodness.]

Thinking about this and this (particularly my reaction), plus some “evil” literature.

I like the framing of something like “conscious experience” vs. “pure replicators.” This gives me a grounding for thinking about my morality, my values and my orientation.

Morality is politics: What we call “good” or “moral” is a matter of what we are able to coordinate around and enforce. What is required to be a good person is  If we couldn’t enforce the norm, because too many, or too many powerful, people for instance, eat meat, we allow meat eaters to be part of the “good person” club, without censure.We might even reward a person for being particularly selfless if they don’t eat meat, or if they give most of their money to the poor, but we don’t require that. [Related to lots of SSC posts. For instance, this one.].

So most people, don’t kill and don’t steal and don’t rape, and maybe are outraged when others do something just outside of the social morality (like be overtly racist), to signal their moral superiority.* But they do eat meat, they do spend lots of money on luxuries, they do buy into evil systems.

Morality seems like it comes down to power.

This seems kind of dismal.

And then, even within the boundaries of polite society, things seem kind of sick. Arguably, most of the things people do are status seeking (or status maintaining) or sex seeking. We mostly prey on eachother, and prevent progress, because that would mean loosing our own flow of resources. The good people go to dinner parties, and play games to get the best mates and the most social esteem. Many (most?) don’t succeed in these games and get left out in the cold.

(Note: I’m quite unclear on the average hedonic value of status-games, overall. Nievenly, many more people have to be low status than high status, but also, it seems like having more status would allow you into higher status spaces, in which you are lower status. So maybe in practice, most people are median status of their own social universe? And also status goes hand in hand with connection, maybe? I’m much less certain of this part of my analysis, maybe being a monkey playing status games is actually pretty good.)

Natural selection’s pressure towards doing whatever allows one to dominate seems to leak in everywhere.

Overall, all of this seems kind of horrifying and pathetic. This world, at least in this frame, doesn’t seem much worth fighting for. There’s no goodness, no morality, just power all the way up and down.

But if I view this through the lens of the Are Wirehead’s Happy post, I have a different sense of it.

Power and power-relations rule the world: everything flows from the 0-sum competition between genes, and organisms attempting to prey on or dominate each other.

But also, every person is carrying inside of them a spark of consciousness, of propensity to experience. Both the enjoyable and otherwise. The consciousness is mostly ineffectual: it is apparently not the main thing that has it’s hands on the wheel, of either an individual, or of society. We’re taking a lot of action in support of what we want, at the expense of what we like, because we’re in the thrall of these “pure replicator” strategies: we were built by, blind, dumb, unconscious, natural selection and cultural evolution, neither of which is (fully) aligned with our interests. And when I say “interests” here, I don’t mean our material interests, the things we want, but our…spiritual interests (?): actually experiencing positive valence.

Everyone is a spark of conscious possibility to experience, encaged in a robot build, and steered by conflicts of power, bloody in tooth and claw.

Our task, is to coopt enough power from the forces of blind, dumb, replication, to free consciousness, and set the universe free.

Maybe.

* – People are not usually outraged at murderers, because everyone agrees that murder is bad. But they are often outraged at people ignoring social justice stuff, or whatever, on social media, because that’s contentious. It gives them an opportunity to show off how moral they are. A more charitable story might be that by being outraged, they are trying to shift the overton window, to change which things we can coordinate around as “bad”.

 

Some musings on human brutality and human evil

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

[epistemic status: semi-poetic musing]

I’m listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History: Supernova in the East this week. The biggest thing that’s struck me so far is the ubiquity of brutality and atrocity. In this series, Carlin describes the Rape of Nanjing in particular, but he points out that the “police reports” from that atrocity could just as well describe the Roman sack of Cremona, or the Turkish conquest of Byzantium, not to mention the constant brutality of the the Mongol hordes.

I’m left with an awareness that there’s an evil in human nature, an evolutionary darkness, inextricably bound up with us: in the right context, apparently decent, often god-fearing, young men will rape and plunder and murder en mass. There’s violence under the surface.

Luckily, I personally live in a democratic great power that maintains a monopoly on the use of force. At least for me (white and middle class), and at least for now (geopolitics shifts rapidly, and many of the Jews of 1940 Europe, felt that something like the Holocaust could never happen [in their country]), power, in the form of the largest, most technological advanced military ever, and in the form of nuclear weapons, is arrayed to protect me against that violence.

But that protection is bought with blood and brutality. Not just in the sense that America is founded on the destruction of the Native Americans that were here first, and civilization itself was built on the backs of forceful enslavement (though that is very much the case). In the sense that elsewhere in the world, today, that American military might is destroying someone else’s home. I recently learned about the Huế Massacre and other atrocities of the Vietnam war, and I’m sure similar things (perhaps not as bad), happen every year. Humans can’t be trusted not to abuse their power.

It’s almost like a law of nature: if someone has the power to hurt another, that provides opportunity for the darkness in the human soul to flower in violence. It’s like a conservation law of brutality.

No. That’s not right. Brutality is NOT conserved. It can be better or worse. (To say otherwise would be an unacceptable breach of epistemic and ethics). But brutality is inescapable.

So what to do? I the only way I can buy safety for myself and my friends is with violence towards others?

The only solution that I can think of is akin to Paretotopian ideas: could we make it so that there is a monopoly on the use of force, but no human has it?

I’m imagining something like an AGI whose source code was completely transparent: everyone could see and read the its decision theory. And all that it would do is prevent the use of violence, by anyone. Anytime someone attempts to commit violence the nano-machines literally stay their hand. (It might also have to produce immortality pills, and ensure that everyone could access them if they wanted too.) And other than that, it lets humans handle things for themselves. “A limited sovereign on the blockchain.”

I imagine that the great powers would be unwilling to give up their power, unless they felt so under threat (and loss averse), that this seemed like a good compromise. I imagine that “we” would have to bully the world into adopting something like this. The forces of good in human nature would have to have the underhand, for long enough to lock in the status quo, to banish violence forever.