I'm in the midst of an existential crisis. I have been for years, and I keep distracting myself away from it, but it keeps returning, and it keeps getting stronger each time. This time I've decided to face it and actually do the heavy lifting in hopes that I can find some basis for my life.
The Polish psychologist Dąbrowski came up with a theory to help explain the stages and outcomes of such dilemmas. Like myself, he felt that existential crisis could be a constructed as a positive thing: as a way of personal development. He calls this "Positive Disintegration." I sure hope that his theory is right, or else I'm on my way to the madhouse >.> I've been getting distracted these past few years, and collapsing back to Dąbrowski's "Level 1", but I keep popping back up to "Level 2" as if by some internal need.
The core of my dilemma is that I cannot find any basis for meaning in my life that is sufficiently solid. I'll start with the fact that I'm a staunch atheist, so a nonexistent god can't give me meaning. Most people build their meaning on a foundation that really is just a pile of assumptions hanging midair with no ground, and most people absolutely refuse to question it. I can understand why. Life is comfortable for them. They typically have no motivation to look further.
Let's take an example: "it's better to be happy than unhappy." This reduces down to the pleasure principle, and that in pure form leads to hedonism, which most people would disagree with being ideal. Furthermore, the pleasure principle is nothing but happy chemicals running through your brain. Why not take ecstasy all day? Most people would argue that this is because it's not "real" happiness, by which they mean it wasn't earned. But there are plenty of situations of people enjoying things that they haven't earned, and it also looks at happiness as a form of fixed commodity, which it clearly is not because you can often become happier by changing your perspective on something. Plus, what about a sociopath that finds joy in causing suffering in others?
Ethics in themselves make sense to me: they are what produces a functioning society. But why do we want a functioning society? To improve the quality of life? Why is that better? Is life somehow innately better than non-living things?
Meaning reduces down to value, which is by its nature hierarchal. So what do we value? And further, why do we value the things that we value? Why do we value life over death? The problem in this analysis is that you cannot place value before itself. You are applying the function "value hierarchy" to itself, and thus altering the function that is acting on itself in an infinite loop. The school of analytic philosophy puts it another way: you cannot ask "what is the meaning of existence" because that places put meaning before existence, but meaning has to exists too, so existence is actually prior to meaning!
Answers to "Why not take ecstasy all day"
ReplyDelete- Because the side-effects (dehydration) will make you unhappy, paranoid and possibly dead
- Because your brain will run out of serotonin and then you will be on drugs and feeling shitty
- Because you might be in a state where you cannot act for the greater good
- Because you will run out of cash and be without ecstasy and rent
- Because it contradicts the protestant work-ethic
- Because of the stigma surrounding drug use
I think these reasons underlie most people's contrary reactions. Were it otherwise, I bet their reactions would be different; they would see nothing wrong with it.
If there were something I could do so that I could live at a higher mean state of happy sans side-effects and remain productive unto others without the stigma for choosing it being life-destroying, I would probably do it. I see no reason why my base happiness level is intrinsically valuable by virtue of being bio-orthodox.
And if this thing were a drug, I would call it "estrogen."
Of course, it is the last two "becauses," with their roots in the intersection of religion and class, that make any radical form of happiness, be it ecstacy, estrogen, meditation, art or peace seem "unnatural," "false," "blasphemous," or "evil."
ReplyDeleteHi humdrum!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reply!
When you mention that "you would be in a state where you cannot contribute to the greater good", which is based on a value assumption, not the pleasure principle. Ecstasy would give you more pleasure without the sacrifices that come with adding to the "greater good."
Yes, the last two becauses make a number of assumptions. I then ask, why value the protestant work-ethic? Why devalue drug use? Work ethic has in it the word "ethic", and all ethics assume values. Where did you get these values? Why value that source of knowledge? Class also falls within society, and social codes are ethics, so the same question occurs.
Yeah... I thought someone might poke a hole in the ecstasy example because of the real-world implications of what that stuff does to you in the long term ^^; I was trying to get a tangible out of a thought experiment, so I guess back to the thought experiment:
Robert Nozick uses the thought experiment that there is a utopian device ("The Experience Machine") that could give us whatever desirable or pleasurable experiences that we could possibly want. Hypothetical superneuropsychologists have figured out a way to stimulate a person's brain to induce pleasurable experiences. We would not be able to tell that these experiences were not real.
He asks us, if we were given the choice, would we choose the machine over real life? If pleasure is the goal, that people would accept without hesitation. However, they typically don't. Most people would choose a real life over a false one. Why is this?
Also, if we're talking about long-term happiness, then synthetic estrogen (for example) greatly increases the risk of breast cancer (at least in people over 40, no studies on young people). So why should doctors prescribe HRT when it will cause suffering down the road, just as ecstasy will gives short-term benefits and long-term pain. It comes down to a question of degree and values. Some people (me) cannot live without HRT, but most people can live without ecstasy. But some people value "natural" bodies too, and would evaluate HRT and ecstasy as the same evil.
Can you explain what you mean by "the pleasure principle?" Do you mean making decisions out of self-interest, or maximizing the hypothetical hedon count AKA "the greater good?"
ReplyDeleteThe former would recommend dropping the joy pill, the latter would not unless the joy pill could be equally distributed and sustainable, or the person taking the pill were not useful to the greater good when not high.
I would hesitate to look for the value of the real over the false based on this thought experiment. It's two steps removed from reality insofar as it's (1) self-reporting about a (2) hypothetical machine. WOW, acting in drama, watching drama, reading novels, board games and other forms of fiction are all "false" representations of reality. But once people start them, they tend to keep going. If you asked someone who had never tried any of these things, they might report that they would have no interest in them, but their later behaviour woudl contradict this claim. So maybe the experience machine would be a lot more popular in practice than in theory. And if it existed, people would tend to over-report or under-report their use of it depending on whether society approved of its use or disapproved of its use.
Why devalue drug-use? I'm still not sure. Possibilities:
- it proves a substitute good to common luxuries, thus undercutting common luxuries, angering the providers of these luxuries, while decreasing the aggregate demand for cash, leading people to want to work less
- creates expensive medical problems
- provokes irrational behaviour that puts others at risk (drunken fights, PCP, driving while stoned)
- causes changes in cognitive function that depresses one's ability to perform skilled labour
- provides ecstatic experiences that rival state-sanctioned religion
- stands as a symbol of foreign contamination (hashish, cannabis, opium)
- fosters addiction to the point where money is spent on drugs rather than household care (drinking away the kids's college money)
- puts people in a reflective state where they reject social norms ("I'm quitting my job as a teller to move into a tent and teach breath-work")
Hi hundun,
ReplyDeleteBy "pleasure principle" I mean more than (or perhaps less than?) self interest. By pleasure principle I mean things that cause the release of serotonin or other happy-feeling chemicals into your brain. Sex is one example for many people. Drugs are another way.
I certainly do not mean acting out of responsibility to the greater good, because that often requires that you suffer to attain it. Now, I think I see what you're saying: people do things that on the surface look selfless, but they do that to make themselves feel good about themselves (morally superior for example). But this requires them to value something else first… it provides motivation, but does not account for their valves themselves.
Yes, the list you have are all false representations of reality, and many of them work with (though not purely by) the pleasure principle. The difference here is that they are temporary. You can go back to your real life after.
Let's get into a more specific variety of the hypothetical Experience Machine:
1) Once you get plugged in, you cannot ever be unplugged.
2) The machine induces in you an extremely vivid false virtual-reality.
3) In this pseudo reality, everything is just AWESOME in every way. Everything goes your way, you never stub your toe (unless you're into that), there are no wars (unless you really, really like war), drugs lack their negative side-effects, and everything is pleasant and suited to your tastes all the time.
4) You are totally unaware that this false virtual-reality is not true reality.
Basically, it's Vanilla Sky if the dream didn't become a nightmare in the film due to some glitch.
The essential question is then whether or not someone would knowingly attach yourself to this machine (and then lose memory of ever doing so) if it were permanent. You would make no contributions to the real world, you would be cut out and placed in imaginary bliss land on your own with your imaginary friends.
If it was all just the pleasure principle, then *everyone* would jump at the chance without hesitation. But they value more than sheer animalistic pleasure, do they not? They worry about what other people think about them, hence the reporting bias you mention. Some may even value things like adding to society or creating social change in places or ways that will not directly impact them. They could get more pleasure by having sex all day with their partner, video taping it and selling it online to make money to sustain them financially. They wouldn't have to suffer at all.
But most people seem to value other things.
Also in response to hundun, I feel that this is what they're getting at (and I'm getting at too), but I want to make it explicit for others.
ReplyDeleteOn devaluing drug use (in the order that they appear in hundun's post):
1) Why do we value people wanting to work?
2) Why value money over happiness?
3) Why values others?
4) See #7
5) Why value what is "natural"?
6) See #2 and #3
7) Why value social norms?
Analysis: #4 and #6 have already been reduced out. #1, #2, #3 and #7 all reduce to valuing the continuation of society ("The System"):
#1: Work ideally provides for the tasks needed for a society to function and progress economically and in standard of living.
#2: Forces people to do #1
#3: Social cohesion is needed so that people will not act solely out of self-interest, and thus will follow rules (ethics and morality) that keep The System functioning
#7: To ensure that status quo once some sort of social equilibrium has been reached
The complicated of these is #5, which probably has a number of reasons, from fear of the unknown (valuing safety and the status quo), to social norms (natural is the easiest norm to instate).
These all really just ask why we care about "The System".
…and I guess that's part of why I'm having an existential crisis.
I did not mean to imply that "people do things that on the surface look selfless, but they do that to make themselves feel good about themselves"
ReplyDeleteOften, people do things that are not in their own self-interest. Heinlein gave the example of multiple adults drowning while trying to save a probably-dead child.
One could posit that they have selfish reasons for doing so, but this often leads to arguments that are either unsubstantiated or unsubstantiatable, meaning that the "pleasure principle" as the sole source of human motivation is an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
If the machine was sufficiently perfect, then people would genuinely enjoy it more than reality, no matter the consequences - no matter who they abandoned or what the outside world thought of them.
But if people stayed disconnected for whatever reason - then this would indicate that there are motivations beyond subjective pleasure.
In #5, when I said foreign contamination, I didn't mean foreign as in "not of the human body," I meant geographically foreign; the racialized other. The dominant American culture panicked around pot in part because it saw it as a Black drug. Britain saw opium as Oriental (i.e. belonging to sedentary non-white sedentary Eurasian societies East of Jerusalem).
ReplyDeleteExistential crises are a bitch. Near as I can tell, logic breaks down past a certain point and fails to ground assumptions.
ReplyDeleteIn my case, it just passed in time, like grief.
Maybe this is part of grasping the way out? The grief cycle (denial/anger/bargaining/despair/acceptance) is not logical; it rests upon no proofs, but it progresses and resolves.
Maybe existential crises are akin to this - things that simply resolve over time. Processing and logic help, but part of the angst you may feel now is grief - grief for a solid, (seemingly) logical, rational, justifiable worldview.
One of the ways in which you and I may tackle problems differently, and something that helped me out of an existential crisis is that I see my human cognition as fundamentally irrational.
ReplyDeleteThe reptile brain is a mostly-functional mess; a conglomeration of neurons necessary to coordinte relatively large multicellulars. It's like a simple electronic chip.
The mammalian brain is a cutting edge experiment, prone to all kinds of weird failings. It's biggest strength is its lack of competition from other taxa. It's like an early home desktop. Highly fallible, but kinda cool.
The human brain is a clusterfuck. Our biggest evolutionary kick was that our only intellectual rivals were other humans. It's kluge after kludge, bias after bias, intuition, predjudice, insight, madness, compulsion, compassion and self-destruction in a few pounds of squishy. When we ask why we do things, we need to remember that our brain is a cutting-edge prototype with no rivals. It's like a crapware-saddled virus-ridden Vista-running laptop brought back in time to 1973. It's an unreliable piece of shit, but it's still waaaay better than every other computer out there.
Anyway, it's this jury-rigged mass of meat that forms almost all of our impressions and makes almost all of our decisions. There's no logic at the bottom of it, just layers upon layers of evolutionary guesses that never got properly beta'd.
Nonetheless, it's capable of amazing feats, like spaceflight, medicare, and calculus. But it still feels and reacts like an overclocked baboon. And this is the core of human nature. It's the basic material that culture has to work with. Most human systems are attempts to control and domesticate this primate brain just like you'd train any other social mammal.
We work so we have money and we fit in. We want to fit either because we get things from it which we are wired to value, or because we value being part of a group because solo monkeys got eaten, went hungry, or just never made monkey babies. We want money because money means food means survival, or because money means pleasurable stimuli, or because money means status and we want status because, evolutionarily speaking, it increased your chances of getting laid and your children surviving or, for us queers, your relatives getting laid for knowing someone famous and their children surviving because they have an aunt who can get food for them.
I don't compare myself to a computer or Spock, I compare myself to dogs, whales or pigs. Most social mammals have pretty similar values all things considered. And when I do this, the world makes more sense, some of the angst falls away, and whole new philosophical and political options open up.
I have a feeling that any of us who choose to live rather than not live base that decision at least partially on tautology -- such as, I privilege life over non-life simply because I like being alive. And I imagine my preference for a society that functions, and hopefully thrives, over chaos is simply a Real Strong Feeling that it's somehow better.
ReplyDeleteOne quibble: happiness and pleasure are not the same thing!
Hi Veronica,
ReplyDeleteYes, I absolutely agree that happiness and pleasure are not the same thing. Or perhaps more clearly: pleasure and wellbeing are not the same thing. Pain is needed for healthy growth as much as pleasure. ^^
Well. Gosh.
ReplyDeleteExpede, I've been refraining from commenting much on your posts, because I keep feeling as though I have too much to say, and I'd rather take you for coffee sometime than respond with just a paragraph or two. This hasn't really been my most productive decision; a month later I could surely have assembled a few thousand words by commenting here and there. But here I am in a breakfast café overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and perhaps I have time for an essay or two.
So.
The human brain may be precisely hundun's virus-ridden Vista laptop, but the human mind is a complex waveform. It's not dependent on the precise atoms in one's brain, because atoms are by nature indistinguishable. And once you've removed a dependence on the underlying substrate—at any level—all of the higher-level substrates can be synthesized on any artificial platform.
We don't currently understand the full nature of this waveform. We haven't yet been able to synthesize it on any other substrate. We're not entirely sure what it's a waveform of: reality doesn't tend to compartmentalize its physical forces; a superposition of the brain's chemical signals, electrical impulses, and even pressure waves is probably necessary for our minds without being nearly sufficient. But if the specific individual particles are not required, then it's possible to construct a complete abstract description.
This description isn't going to be static over time, any more than it's static over any other dimenison in mind-phase-space. If φ were constant over any dimension Φ, it would factor out of the expression. It will interact with its inputs; a given temporal cross-section of your mind will become a different physical being if given different inputs. Your physical brain structures are subtly different already because I just misspelled "dimension." Any other brain structure, any other mind waveform, is now counterfactual: and whether you think it has any real basis depends on a number of factors:
* Do you believe in free will?
* In an infinite universe, any quantum state with a well-defined history is possible. Do you believe the universe is so physically large that, statistically, it probably contains a mind identical to your own, in a context whose next input will differ?
* Any abstract object, including a complete description of your mind, is representable by a single (very large) number. Do you believe that mathematical objects exist even if they have never been instantiated in the physical universe?
Any given number—effectively, any piece of software—incorporates all of its own possible states. But it doesn't really incorporate the states which will never appear. The second half of "If (false) then echo ('Hello world!')" will never execute, and a good compiler will just drop it from the final executable. The only exception is if the source code is self-modifying, but really that's just another way of extending the program's phase space, grabbing a bit more of what used to be called hardware and implicating it as software instead. The fact that our minds can modify our brains really means only that our brains are software too, running on a platform of physical law. They're a virtual machine, not a formal hardware environment.
ReplyDeleteSo hypothesize an abstract expression without any hardware to run on, including pencil and paper. Can it possibly be aware of its own existence? Can it possibly be said to exist at all (this is really my third question above)? Or is some form of hardware necessary: must it have some form of physical implementation in order to exist? It's not much of a leap from here to the Axiom of Choice, and if I knew more about set theory I wouldn't be surprised to learn that I've just stated one of its many equivalents.
I read a remarkable mathematical paper once in which the Axiom of Choice was proven equivalent to the existence of a god. (Let me stress that the paper said nothing about uniqueness, let alone personality.) This doesn't, for me, particularly strengthen the likelihood that the Axiom of Choice is true.
So personally I'm not sure such an expression can be said to exist. Their category certainly exists, for I've just described it, but the expressions themselves do not.
If this is true, then our minds need some sort of hardware implementation if we're to continue existing.
And continued existence is pretty fundamental. Any value other than continued existence—be it pleasure, social change, filling the universe with paperclips, whatever—requires existence first. You'd only end your life in service of a greater principle if by the process of dying, which is an existential act, you perceived a greater value than by continuing to exist. That requires a pretty strong sense—not necessarily an accurate sense, but certainly a strong one—of what your values are, and of how they operate. If you're having a crisis of values, then none of them can be strong enough to justify ending your existence.
(A digression: Someone who suicides because they're depressed is acting to maximize the value of pleasure: they perceive a net negative value in continuing to exist, so they die. Someone who suicides because they cannot find value, however, is acting to maximize the value of having values. This contradicts their own basis for suicide, and proves their actions inconsistent. Such a person would do better by converting to a didactic religion than by dying.)
ReplyDeleteIf you believe that value does not exist at all, then looking for it is a fool's game. If you believe that it exists but you can't yet describe or find it, then you're intrinsically valuing your own continued existence.
If you believe that your existence will endure as an abstract mathematical expression without any hardware implementation, then there's no reason to value your physical body. You can end that, and proceed directly to wherever souls (and other unnamed numbers) hang out when they're not part of the universe.
If you believe that your existence requires hardware, then it behooves you to value the preservation and safety of your physical body: or at least the parts of it which house your mind. This in turn should lead you to value information about the physical world which your body inhabits.
And that, in my own opinion, explains why most people—including me—would turn down the chance to experience a fictional but wonderful universe in the Experience Machine. Whatever inputs my mind would experience, my body would still exist, and if I cannot tell what's happening around me in the real world, I cannot protect my own existence…which means that I can maximize neither future pleasure nor future any-other-value.
The astute will notice that I have just derived the Third Law of Robotics. They may also observe that I have made no reference to the First or Second.