Reverse Experience Machine

Everyone remember the Experience Machine? It is used as a rebuttal of pure-hedonism in value theory, or to evaluate the pleasure principle as a primary drive in a person. The weak form (what minimum conditions must be met to plug in) is becoming increasingly interesting to me. It shows what values you hold to be important, other than pleasure and reality.

I have been thinking a lot about inverses lately, and when you invert the Experience Machine, you get a rebuttal of pure-truthism. In its' weaker form, you get to see how people gamble as well ^.~

The Reverse Experience Machine (weak form):

1. You are given indisputable proof that you are living in a simulated reality
• Yes, sort of like "The Matrix"
2. Everyone else is a computer simulation, including all the people you know
3. You have always lived in this virtual reality
4. You can get "unplugged" and live in reality, but you can never plug back in if you do
5. You are not told what unplugged reality is like

So far, many people seem willing to take this chance. You might wake up burning to death, you could wake up as a church mouse, or you could wake up in a fantastic utopia. You don't know, you'd just have to risk it.

Several questions are raised by the weak formulation:

• Do you value your lived experiences as authentic?
• Could continue to do so?
• Do you value all that you have invested in the virtual reality?
• Relationships
• Education
• Way of life
• To what degree is actual reality valued?
• This directly correlates to the probability that someone would unplug
• How motivated are you by curiosity? (yes, this one is common)
• How much of a gambler are you?
• 49.999% chance it's better, 49.999% chance it's worse, 0.002% chance it's the same

The Reverse Experience Machine (strong form):

1. You are given indisputable proof that you are living in a simulated reality
• Yes, sort of like "The Matrix"
2. Everyone else is a computer simulation, including all the people you know
3. You have always lived in this virtual reality
4. You can get "unplugged" and live in reality, but you can never plug back in if you do
5. You are given indisputable proof that unplugged reality is dystopian

Most people probably use mixed values and strategies, so the weak forms of the thought experiment actually tell you more about an individual, whereas the strong forms are clear enough to make a point.

The bias that both of these reveal about the original and reverse Experience Machine is that people many simply choose what is familiar. You're already used to the reality/unreality that you know, and "if it's not broken, don't fix it."

I'm interested in what people would do in both formulations of the Reverse Experience Machine. Please tell me what you'd do in the comments section if you are so inclined!

Checksum Values

One argument that keeps coming up against me in conversation against my line of thought is that we have some biological imperative. To address this, I'm going to respond directly to hundun's comments on one of my posts.

The argument summarizes thus:

• The mammalian brain is imperfect due to the lack of refinement form evolution
• Our minds are "like a crapware-saddled virus-ridden Vista-running laptop brought back in time to 1973"
• Human cognition is fundamentally irrational
• Biological drives (survival, reproduction, etc) constitute our basic impulses
• The human mind is not unified
• We are no different from other mammals

Okay, great, I agree with all of this except for the irrational part (to some degree). But I would argue that this model is incomplete. While I am a determinist, I still think that we have the illusion of free will (the experience of the processors chugging away). We have biological drives, but we also effectively (though not actually) have choice. In the words of Sartre, "[people] are condemned to be free." I can choose to rebel against all of my biological drives, stop eating, isolate myself, or commit suicide. I can die for a cause, or make huge sacrifices for the sake of an idea.

Yes, we absolutely have irrational biological drives, but we also have a rational cogito. Our mind is divided, hence why we can feel so divided. The pull of all these parts determines action, as if on a voting system. Your Freudian superego was installed (experimentally and by accident via evolution) to make you a social animal, but went haywire and now you can possess values that are counterproductive to evolutionary reproduction.

You do have choices over your biological drives. You can madly lust after someone, yet never act on your desire, even if given the opportunity to get away with it. Yet another person would take advantage of the situation. Why is that? The cogito portion of the democracy that is your mind can have a pretty strong say in your actions. Often these cogito functions are programmed by the indoctrination of children by their caregivers. This tends to lend itself to the realm of ethics on a social scale. However, as individuals, how can we justify wanting this or that, or valuing what we've learned through authority. Taking authority at face-value can be a very dangerous thing.

My existential crisis was born out of a number of factors that led me to recognize the value nihilism of nature: that existence precedes essence. My body gives me biological rewards by making me feel pleasure when I do certain things that I am programmed biologically to do. But is feeling good the point? Are we mere slaves to our passions? Clearly not, or at least not all of us.

Values essentially sweep through as a diagnostic of our actions. "Is this right?" is what our drives are always asking. It performs a checksum on each part of our being. But when you turn the diagnostic against itself, it can't checksum because it has nothing to check against. All the other people have different values. Our OS was installed without the ability to check if our diagnostic tool is functioning, and everyone is running different plug-ins, so we can't compare to each other.

I think there's a good chance that Douglas Adams was right, and the checksum is 42.

Can't Handle the Truth

Disclaimer

This post deals with a fine detail about truth, which I feel has significant implications for the theory of values that I am assembling here. Some may find it massively redundant.

Preamble

Playing a card game with some friends the other say, I brought up the example of the Experience Machine thought experiment. It was well received, and the votes added up thus: 2 would absolutely not plug into the machine under any circumstances (including myself), 2 were unsure, and 1 would definitely do it. The interesting thing about one of the two that were unsure was that she would given specific conditioner about incorporating real people into the scenario with you. We have termed this "multiplayer." It seems that asking people what minimum conditions would have to be met in order to plug in is actually a fascinating way to explore what a person values.

This lead me to question why I value truth so strongly. Is it reasonable? My intro to philosophy textbook states that "the philosopher's faith is that Truth is good and worth pursuing for its own sake." That's one heck of an assumption. It is, of course, a useful assumption if you're a philosopher, because without it, what are you doing? But that is little solace, because a priest assumes the existence of god to justify their lines of thought too.

In my various searches for a basis for values, I have actually had to overturn most of what I based by identity on. I'm dismantling, but hoping for reconstitution through rigorous application of - and deduction from - the most certain axioms: the a priori. Kant tried the very same thing, but I don't think that he dug nearly deep enough, and I find many of his axioms to be unsatisfying. Nietzsche refuted (many times) many of Kant's assumptions. The existentialists tried to find a solution, but ultimately deferred the question. They all also toss around this concept of "truth" as if it were an assumption as mentioned above.

I can't seem to find anything online written on the ontology of truth. There is quite a lot on theories of truth (which do touch on my question), but I'm looking at it from a more fundamental level. What is the ontology of truth, and to what degree should we pursue it? Is it worth sacrificing happiness as in not entering the Experience Machine?

Definition Derivation

It is reasonable to say that existence must true. But which is prior? Truth must exist, and existence (material or ideal) must be true. But that is contradictory, as something cannot precede its' own ground.

The negative of existence is nothingness. Both are true. However there cannot be an untruth in an objective reality (material or ideal). Untruth does not correspond to either existence or nothingness, as both are true, and the objective world is thus always true. Untruths can only be expressed through language as lies, and are thus only part of the mind and language. Art does not constitute untruth because a work of art is a true thing in itself, even if it "uses lies to be the truth." And even lies have an element of truth to them, as it is true that they do not express the truth.

Truth is inescapable. So where is it? We can only look at it through other things, never directly. It's always in the corner of your eye, but you can't see it directly. Truth seems to function linguistically as a way of asserting that something exists or not. It is a function of the mind to compare our understanding (an idea image) to the external reality (original image).

It is a function in the mathematical sense f(x), where we compare x to the array of reality (existence and nothingness), and return a true if x is a subset of the array, and return false if it does not. I suppose it would return a partial truth if some of the elements of x correspond to the reality array. I will call this truth-as-operation or the Truth Function. It also falls under the correspondence theory of truth.

Truth-as-Operation

f(x): iff image(x) ⊆ [[being] ∪ [nothingness]] = true;

The Truth Function is deeply troubling to me as opposed to truth as a fundamental ontological category. Truth does not exist independently, it is merely a property of ideas. If truth were a fundamental ontological category, it could be used as a part of the basis of an a priori value theory. It cannot be used as a justification of valuing reality, because it relies on a valuing of the reality-image. It is yet another evaluative tool that requires a ground. To value truth requires valuing reality for its' own sake, unless supported by some other morality hereto unknown to me. To say that you value reality because it is true is a tautology, or even possibly absurd. You're really saying "I value what is real because I have this way of comparing my ideas to it." It's like saying that you like the Mona Lisa because you can buy a print and compare it to the original in the Louvre.

That's not to say that this operation isn't extremely useful. The usefulness of our senses - and in fact our very survival - is dependant on the Truth Function (or so we are led to believe). This is debatable on skeptical grounds, but that is a conversation that I do not have space for here.

It's quite amazing how many terms are truth-as-operations. Words such as "because," "therefore" or anything else dealing with justification including causality are all the Truth Function. All of rationalism relies on it. What is our justification for justifying something? Remarkably, we can actually ask this question because truth is not an ontological category, but a function, and can chain: f(f(x)) AKA (f o f)(x).

The expression f(f) of course does not return anything as the function does not exist independently of of an analytical subject, so truth-in-itself does not exist, which is counterintuitive to our way of thinking. We cannot justify justification unless applied to a subject.

Functionally this requires some adjustment in language and thought. To say that "it is true that I think therefore I am" is a tautology because a self-evident statement is an expression of direct reality, and contains collapsed truth in its' self-evidency. Evidence is truth-as-operation, so the requirement is already met within the statement itself. Things that we know with certainty (a priori) do not need to be run through the Truth Function for this reason.

Rationality Bias

This entire endeavour of trying to find justification for values assumes that one should find values that are rational. Schrödinger Imperative demands that we resolve this crisis, so that is not called into question. But need it being found on a rational basis? Why do I value certainty in values? How do you justify rationality over irrationality? The Truth Function is a tool that I can use here, but should I? How do I evaluate if a Truth Function is worth using? I may need to accept it for reasons of coherence.

Outline:

1. "Truth" is an evaluative tool

• Compares an idea to reality
• Truth is a property of ideas
• Is not a fundamental ontological category
• Being and nothingness are independent of truth
• Truth is dependant on ideas and existence and nothingness as it is a function
• Truth is not a candidate for a ground for values
• One can only value reality, not truth
• Self-evident statements contain truth already

The Schrödinger Imperative

I will be including outlines of the ideas covered at the end of every (philosophical) post in order to make review of the core ideas presented quick, and to remove some of the bias I could create with rhetorical [self-]deception by presenting it in a bare bones, skeleton form.

It's official: I'm trapped. We all are.

For some reason, I am here. I exist, I think, I have awareness, I make choices. I did not decide to be here. How could I? I didn't choose to have choice. But I do. The fact that I think gives my agency. This is also not a choice. It's there, and I use it all the time. To stop having agency would require killing myself (unless I'm missing something), but doing so requires agency too. It would be an act of agency. I cannot simply "turn agency off."

All choices that I make are done on the basis of some justification. If I do something "random," I've really just chosen to do something unexpected. There is no random. I am a machine. The gears and cogs all turn and chug away, and I do things on a basis no different from a wind-up toy. Okay, I'm a pretty complex wind-up toy, but a machine never the less. I agree with Laplace when he said:

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of the past and the cause of the future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes"

Perhaps this is what some people mean by "fate." You cannot escape it. With enough understanding of the parts involved, you could predict every little action. I've held for some time that free will is an illusion. Granted, it's an illusion that is necessary for the way we function... but it is still an illusion.

Part of this machinery that constitutes us is (in a virtual sense) the act of evaluation. We take input, evaluate it, and output an action (thought, idea, motion, belief, and so on). But we have this little problem. On what basis do we evaluate? It's quite simple to evaluate things as being bigger or smaller than each other. On a more complex level, it is just as easy to compare things to a prototypical "image" of something, or to say that something is closer or further away from an ideal. But to say that something is better than another, such as that it is better to live or better to get out of bed in the morning (or their inverses), you need to evaluate them on the basis of a personal beliefs called values.

In some sense, you are still comparing things to some "image", it is just an image of value. Where did you get this image? On what basis do you evaluate these images against each other? There needs to be an underlying image, and an image for that image, and so as you spin out ad infinitum (and really: ad absurdum.) You need a basis that is justified somehow. We have a priori truths. These seem to be the only way to go as far as I can tell.

So in order for a person to evaluate any input, they need a set of beliefs called values. Without values, you cannot evaluate, you cannot make decisions, you in effect cannot think (as thinking requires constant choice and evaluation), and then the major premise "I think therefore I am" falls apart. And then what are you? You are inert matter, devoid of thought and life.

But you do not have a choice about that. You do think. Anything that you do now requires choice, and everything that goes with it. If you do, or do not do, anything, you are still in the same trap. It does not require judgement to discern then that resolving this crisis is nothing short of imperative.

Outline:

1. I exist
• I think therefore I am 
2. Thinking is an action
• This is agency
• I cannot "turn off" my agency
• If I did I would have no justification for #1
• The only conceivable way is suicide
• It takes agency to "turn off" agency
• It is a choice (see #3 and #4)
3. Actions all involve choice (do this or not to do this), despite how conscious of a process this is
4. Choices require evaluation
• Evaluation is dependent on values
• One must resolve value nihilism in order to make choices
5. It is imperative that my existential crisis be resolved
• I cannot change #1 without resolving this crisis
• There is no way out
• It is an imperative in order for #1 to hold true

The Value of Value (or "cogito ergo efficio")

Why am I looking for value? I am looking for it, after all. It may be a modified concept of "value," but it seems that I must value something! So why do I value value?

"I think not!"

The simple answer is that I am fighting off Schrödinger's zombie. I have agency for some reason that is beyond me, but I do not have the tools with which to use it. For some reason I have arrived where I am now, able to think and be self aware. I am not only able to make decisions, but I must make decisions and that requires evaluating all sorts of things. From the point at which I now sit, I have a certain lifeless, momentum of being existentially undead.

Without a foundation for value, my options are all as trivial as to turn right or turn left along an unending series of forks in the road, past unmarked signs leading to something (or nothing). This is the Void.

To be without value is to be robbed of agency. It is not possible to voluntarily do this, as that would require choice, and thus agency, and thus value. It seems that value is an imperative for anything that is self aware. As soon as cogito ergo sum, then cogito ergo efficio.

Unfounded Rationality Found

I have hereto rejected the transcendent in favour of the imminent as the basis for [my understanding and/or belief in] reality, and for what can form a ground of value. The transcendent often suffers from the fact that it cannot be measured scientifically, and thus could be a trick of the mind... poor biological programming if you will. Certainly not a solid foundation for universal truths.

That is not to say that the transcendent is not a type of truth, it's just that it's a subjective truth, and thus "true" in the same sense as experiencing things that may not be there. It is true to say that one experiences something, but truths that are not self evident are really only beliefs. I cannot find the transcendent in rational a priori reasoning. It can only be verified  by some people in some a posteriori ways. Thus, the transcendent is hardly a solid foundation from which to build the foundation of one's reality. Or perhaps that is some shortcoming in the scope of reason, as "reason" has broadened over the centuries. Or perhaps I am deficient in some way.

Why do I use rational judgement? Won't the only thing I find with this method be things that fit within its scope, namely rationality and logic? At the surface it seems most plausible that it is because I live in reality (whether I perceive it accurately or not), and so logic shows truths which reveal indisputable parts reality to me. It's a practical tool. But why value practicality? In fact, practicality has built within it the concept of value hierarchy and assumptions about what is "good." So I have the "defining function defining itself again" problem again.

I'll break down my conditions for success:

1. It must define a ground for value, or provide another paradigm to justify agency (I will write a post on this in a few days)
2. The end result must be one that I understand
3. I can understand in a variety of ways, but the most reliable is intellectual because it has the capacity to be coherent and irrefutable

It then follows that rational thought is the most reliable way to approach this issue, though it is not necessarily what will bring the correct answer. It just has the highest likelihood of success based on the conditions outlined above.

Schrödinger's Ethic

Nihilism is a funny thing. Simply put, life has no inherent meaning. But that fact in itself has no inherent meaning if it is to be true. So when people are upset by the lack of inherent meaning in the world, they should just as easily be happy about it. It's no justification to go kill yourself. It's no justification to keep living either. You just remain a ghost. I sometimes feel like Schrödinger's cat, simultaneously alive and dead, living in contradiction. Yay for cognitive dissonance.

I continue live my life as I otherwise would, as a way to hedge my bets. If I find a good reason to live, I'll want to have a job and an eduction. If I find reason to die, then I have nothing anyway. It's as close to win-win as you can get in this situation, it just means that I have to put in effort and invest in the possibility that I will find justification for living.

Zen and the Art of Robot Maintenance

Pirsig says in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that a good test of whether or not something exists is to do a thought experiment in which the thing in question is removed from the world, and to see how that version of the world compares to reality. He finds that by removing value (he calls it "quality"), you lose art (what makes one paining better than another, or better than a blank wall?), interesting food, most professions, and so on, and are only left with some philosophy and pure mathematics.

I would extend this further and say that without hierarchal value (or "quality"), society would cease to function as it currently does and we would be reduced to a animalistic... no, we'd live a robotic, mechanical state of being, as simple machines. We would lose our ability to evaluate the things around us. We would lose the essence of what it is that makes us human. We'd also lose all motivation aside of our basic urges (biologic programming.)

Value exists entirely in the human mind. It is an effect of consciousness. No consciousness means no value judgements. Consciousness at least has an a priori basis. And thus so does existence. And so does truth (which is another term for reality). Is value simply an adaptable programming that we've evolved along the way? If so, then it reduces to evolution and biology. But in that case it has it become so maladaptive that people are willing to die for their values and thus remove themselves from the gene pool, which seems counter-productive. Or they make aesthetic judgements about art that often have nothing to do with finding a mate. So then it would be one of those strange quirks that evolve because it is evolutionarily neutral. It neither works to our advantage or disadvantage evolutionarily.

My hope is to find an a priori basis for value. Perhaps truth could work, but I'm not sure yet. Truth is another way of referring to reality, which I exist in. I know that exist because I think, right? But is it better to be in reality, or to be profoundly schizophrenic?

The problem is assumption

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!