The Interface Theory of Perception by Donald D. Hoffman

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A goal of perception is to estimate true properties of the world. A goal of categorization is to classify its structure. Aeons of evolution have shaped our senses to this end. These three assumptions motivate much work on human perception. I here argue, on evolutionary grounds, that all three are false. Instead, our perceptions constitute a species-specific user interface
that guides behavior in a niche. Just as the icons of a PC’s interface hide the complexity of the computer, so our perceptions usefully hide the complexity of the world, and guide adaptive behavior. This interface theory of perception offers a framework, motivated by evolution, to guide research in object categorization. This framework informs a new class of evolutionary
games, called interface games, in which pithy perceptions often drive true perceptions to extinction…

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Does every experience have some negative valence?

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Roger Thisdell holds that every experience has some negative valence and that there are no experiences with a positive hedonic level.

There is a point where you deconstruct perception to basic experiences by not feeding certain mental processes with your attention, they fade out. If I’m not paying attention to thought, the experience and comprehension of concepts and language fade out of experience. You can get to states of mind where there is no high-level conceptual thinking going on. It’s just vague pressures, releases, and contortions. You can have experiences of just vast airy space. For instance, the sense of the body schema, that you have a unified body, can vanish when you haven’t been paying attention to it for a long time and you’ve kept your eyes closed, so you are not updating the perception of the body with new visual stimuli. The body schema as a model falls out of the mind. But you still have awareness of gaseous somatic sensations and in all that there is a subtle contraction. Yeah, I’m saying that. It comes with a disturbance from an ultimate peace of that which is before/beyond concept and phenomenological representation.

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Some would say: “Of course, there are pleasant experiences. There can be more intense pleasures. And you can go upwards on the hedonic scale. You can feel better and better. And below all that, you can feel neutral: neither pain nor pleasure; neither unpleasantness nor pleasantness. Below that, you can feel bad, feel minor disturbances, feel horrible, and so on.” So if we have different degrees of disturbances and suffering, then my question is whether there are experiences that are above undisturbedness; the absence of negative valence. I guess, based on your videos and writings, that you would say no; that there are no such experiences.

Yeah. I think “no”. I think there is a way in which suffering and pleasure don’t exist at the same level of abstraction. Pleasure is at a more abstract layer. The label “pleasure” comes from an assessment after the fact of an experience. Once there was a build-up of pressure and then a release, there is a judgment “I am glad for the release”, but it was just the contractive pressure that you wanted to go away. Now it’s gone so you make the comparative judgment after the fact: “That was a good thing that happened”. But had the pressure never built up, had the contraction never been binding and causing you suffering, then you can’t even begin to make that assessment that it was something good to do.

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Against Wishful Thinking by Brian Tomasik

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Some people hold more hopeful beliefs about the world and the future than are justified. These include the feeling that life for wild animals isn’t so bad and the expectation that humanity’s future will reduce more suffering than it creates. By feeding these dreams, optimistic visions of suffering reduction, while noble, may in fact cause net harm. We should explore ways of increasing empathy that also expose the true extent of suffering in the world, e.g., information about factory farming, brutality in nature, and unfathomable amounts of suffering that may result from space colonization.

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The big lie

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People wonder about the cause of poverty when scarcity is the natural state of things. Why is scarcity the natural state of things? Because we are “designed” (metaphorically) to survive and reproduce our genes as much as possible. Not to discover reality. Not to enjoy. This is why evolution has selected in us the fear of death and the belief that life is always worth living. We are “programmed” to make our life as long as possible, at any cost. Evolution has designed us (metaphorically) to believe that life is worth living and is more important than avoiding suffering. We are ‘designed’ to survive, not to enjoy.

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The “Eternal-Playlist” thought experiment

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Privileged beings (students) of the privileged species (human) at privileged time (XXI c.) and privileged space (Germany) ranked only 30% of the recent experiences as “worth living”.

The “Eternal-Playlist” thought experiment, by Thomas Metzinger:

“At Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, we began a first series of small pilot studies with a group of advanced philosophy students. We chose a signal-contingent, externally cued form of experience sampling. One tech-savvy student programmed an SMS server in such a way that, for seven days, it sent ten signals a day at random points in time to the participants, whose cell phones would then briefly vibrate. The participants’ task was to decide whether the last moment before the conscious experience of the vibration was a moment they would take with them into life after death. For many, the result was surprising: the number of positive conscious moments per week varied between 0 and 36, with an average of 11.8 or almost 31 per cent of the phenomenological samples, while at 69 per cent a little more than two thirds of the moments were spontaneously ranked as not worth reliving. If you are cued externally, it seems, less than a third of such experiential samples would have a chance of entering your very own “eternal playlist”.
[…]
in a second study we dropped the afterlife assumption and the “eternity condition”, replacing them with the following question: “Would you like to relive the very last conscious moment in this life?” Interestingly, under this condition only a little over 28 per cent of life moments were ranked as positive, while just below 72 per cent were considered not worth reliving

Source:
https://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophieengl/files/2013/07/Metzinger_Suffering_2017.pdf

The Sad Truth About Happiness Scales: Empirical Results

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“We replicate nine key results from the happiness literature: the Easterlin Paradox, the ‘U-shaped’ relation between happiness and age, the happiness trade-off between inflation and unemployment, cross-country comparisons of happiness, the impact of the Moving to Opportunity program on happiness, the impact of marriage and children on happiness, the ‘paradox’ of declining female happiness, and the effect of disability on happiness. We show that none of the findings can be obtained relying only on nonparametric identification. The findings in the literature are highly dependent on one’s beliefs about the underlying distribution of happiness in society, or the social welfare function one chooses to adopt. Furthermore, any conclusions reached from these parametric approaches rely on the assumption that all individuals report their happiness in the same way. When the data permit, we test for equal reporting functions, conditional on the existence of a common cardinalization from the normal family. We reject this assumption in all cases in which we test it.”

Source: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24853

A compass that is perpetually “stuck on South”

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“If someone offered you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that is perpetually stuck on north is worthless.” —Professor Daniel Gilbert. Department of Psychology, Harvard University

“Many millions of people in the contemporary world have a compass that is perpetually “stuck on South”. They are always unhappy and discontented. They endure chronic pain and/or depression. Some victims of severe anhedonia can’t even imagine what it’s like to be happy. A minor blessing is that not all of their days are quite as terrible as others. So in one sense, their emotional compass can point North as well as South: a motivational system of sorts still functions. But the whole of their lives is spent in an Antarctic wasteland of misery and despair.

At the other extreme, a small minority of people are blessed with a compass that seems perpetually “stuck on North”. In pathological cases, they may be manic. But sometimes they are in varying degrees just “hyperthymic” i.e. the hedonic set-point around which their lives oscillate is unusually high compared to the Darwinian norm. Hyperthymic well-being is chronic; yet it’s not uniform. Thus some days of hyperthymic life are even more wonderful than others; pursuing their favourite activities makes hyperthymics even happier than otherwise. So again, the hyperthymic emotional compass is bidirectional: its scale is different, but it works. The relevant contrast here lies in the way hyperthymics are animated by information-signalling gradients of well-being, whereas dysthymics, depressives and victims of chronic pain spend their lives struggling to minimise ill-being. Either way, affective gradients rule.” —David Pearce

Source: https://www.gradients.com/

Ideology of Reproduction versus Non-Suffering and conservatism vs progressivism

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“While every sensitive being fundamentally wishes to avoid suffering and experience happiness, curiously, human societies have almost never made non-suffering and happiness their founding values. Why? The ideology of reproduction has existed for 100,000 years, while the belief that the spirit survives the death of the body appears. We must reproduce so that a progeny can take care of our spirit after our death. The supreme value is reproduction, and therefore life. The strength of this discourse is such that the ideology of reproduction, which has forged most of our laws, has finally imposed itself through unconscious internalization, even today. To come out of it, to deconstruct this ideology is a condition for the flourishing of the values of non-suffering and happiness that appeared much later, only 2500 years ago, in India and Greece.”

From the Jean-Christophe Lurenbaum’s book: “Is “Being Born” in the Best Interest of the Child? – Ideology of Reproduction versus Non-Suffering”

“A key to understanding what is behind conservatism and progressivism is that the former is pro-life or for “reproduction” in the broad sense, whilst the latter is for suffering-alleviation” — Robert Daoust

 

The case of Dax Cowart

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“I was burned so severely and in so much pain that I did not want to live even in the early moments following the explosion. A man who heard my shouts for help came running down the road, I asked him for a gun. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Can’t you see I am a dead man? I am going to die anyway. I need to put myself out of this misery.’ In a very kind and compassionate caring way, he said, ‘I can’t do that.'”

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“We might give more weight to the judgments of those who have already been tortured, since their evaluations of the experiences are presumably more accurate. Unfortunately, here too people may forget the severity of their past suffering. This empathy gap often happens to me when I think back on my own past experiences of intense suffering, unable to conjure up feelings of how awful I felt at the time.” (Brian Tomasik)

“Sometimes people who suffer enormously do look back and judge that their suffering wasn’t worth it. Consider the case of Dax Cowart, who suffered so badly that he wished he had been killed, even in retrospect.”

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