X-Message-Number: 2765
From: 
Date: Wed, 18 May 94 22:14:12 EDT
Subject: CRYONICS philosophy

                              THE NATURAL HISTORY OF VALUES

                                   By R.C.W. Ettinger

(Following is a draft of a possible piece for THE IMMORTALIST next month. I
would especially like to know if Thomas Donaldson and others find the
exposition clear, or where it may be obscure.)

THE PRIMARY TASK OF PHIOSOPHY is to tell us how to live--what we ought
to do, how to make our choices, how to build a world view and devise life
plans. These questions depend (among other things) on our values.

VALUES are the things or qualities or ideals that we want or deem worthy
of esteem. Since goals derive from wants, our life strategies are
(or should be) based on our values. But is there any rational, rigorous,
scientific method of ascertaining what our values ought to be, and thus
deriving a scientific life strategy?

Most of the greatest minds--and all of the lesser ones--have thought not.
Of the most prominent scientists and philosophers of recent times, I am
not aware of any that have said "Yes--science and logic can tell us what
we ought to want, and how to maximize the probability of achieving it."
Instead, they seem to believe that values are either arbitrary or God-given
(any difference?).

My position--and I see it as just a truism--is that only science and logic
(if anything) can tell us the proper goals of life and ways to reach or
approach them. 

"BEINGS" (I suggest) are living organisms (conceivably also inorganic
systems) with feeling.  If the subjective condition is absent, a system--
no matter how intelligent--does not qualify as a "being." A "person" is
either any being, or else a being with some minimal degree of intelligence.

THE "SELF-CIRCUIT" is my term for that portion or aspect of the brain
(or its functions) that consitutes or allows feeling and subjectivity.
It is therefore the ground of being. 

Note: The existence of the self-circuit is not a matter of conjecture;
it must exist, by definition.  It is also reasonably clear that it must
possess some degree of homeostasis and a lot of feedback.  Possibly it
is localized in the brain or its functions, but more likely distributed. 

Most of the brain is generic--not specific to the individual--and not
directly related to the self-circuit. Much is house-keeping (vasculature,
glial cells,  etc.). Much is computational, including memory.

CONSCIOUSNESS is (or at least involves) the integration of feeling and
computing. Raw feeling (subjective impressions) might be considered a type
of consciousness, but "awareness" in the usual sense must involve more
than that; higher levels of consciousness must involve exchanges between
the self-circuit and the perceptual/computational parts of the brain. 

EVOLUTION clearly played an important part in the development of the
self-circuit--even though it is possible that organisms can exist without
it, and perhaps some or many lower organisms do exist without it.

The central point is that the self-circuit has feeling, and its goal
(or the goal of the system of which the self-circuit is the center)
is attainment or maintenance of feel-good and avoidance or dicontinuance
of feel-bad.

At the most primitive level, it seems probable that the earliest kinds
of feel-good involved feeding, copulation, avoidance of unpleasant
environments and danger signals, etc. Perhaps also included, at some
relatively early stage, was something corresponding to Maslow's "self
actualization"--i.e., exercise of function and potential, flexing of
muscles and neurons, so to speak.

As evolution progressed, secondary or derivative or "cerebral" satisfactions
became more important. For communities to survive and prevail, self-sacrifice
acquired evolutionary value, and therefore it began to feel good. Today,
derivative values usually dominate. Most people, most of the time, have
many things they would rather do than eat or copulate, for example.
Indoctrinated beliefs or memes, or mere habits, can take precedence over
self preservation.

POTENTIAL CONFLICT among drives or instincts, or among different kinds of
feel-good/feel-bad, always existed. It was often uncertain, at a particular
moment or in a particular situation, whether (say) it was more important
to drink or to avoid danger at the water hole. 

Consequently, conflicting or potentially conflicting drives or wants always
coexisted in uneasy and ever-shifting compromises (Lorenz' "Parliament of
Instincts").

THE GOAL OF LIFE (from the standpoint of the individual organism) can only
be one thing (it seems to me) and that is to FEEL GOOD. But since there are
many kinds of feel-good (or seem to be at the conscious level in humans),
and since apparently our present actions can only affect the future and not
the past or present, we must try to calculate present decisions and actions
so as to maximize our individual feel-good over future time. 

LEVELS AND FEEDBACKS: Actually calculating the future effects of present
potential actions is at best extremely complex and subtle. At worst it is
impossible to do it with rigor, since there are too many unkowns. 

For example, there are tenuous suggestions in modern physics that
"individuals" may be connected; that causal loops in spacetime may exist;
and there are unresolved "philosophical" questions involving continuity.
We are not close to establishing, with any rigor, the criteria of identity
or survival. 

The main problems with philosophy (and sometimes with science) involve
language and implicit assumptions. I try to make all my assumptions explicit.
Our problem (to develop a philosophy of life as nearly rigorous as possible)
cannot be solved instantly and for all time, since we lack crucial
information about physics and about the biology of the brain (especially
the self-circuit).  Hence we must begin (as scientists typically do) by
using a simplified, plausible model and leaving until later some of the
complications and unknowns. 

We proceed by successive iteration, beginning with relatively simple,
nearly-certain assumptions, then cautiously trying to improve the model
by dealing with more subtle questions and new hypotheses about physics
and biology.

LEVEL ONE: We start with the assumption that there is one person per brain,
and that the continuers of that brain down the time-line constitute the
future person; and that what we want-- or ought to want--is to maximize
the satisfaction of our future self (selves?) over time. This seems to
allow at least two immediate useful conclusions:

1. In all circumstances but one, the highest priority is to survive--since
only by survival can one maximize future feel-good. The exception would be
a valid calculation that continued life would entail a preponderance of
future pain over pleasure, or dissatisfaction over satisfaction. I don't
believe any such valid calculation can ever be made in present circumstances,
so survival is (or should be, in practice) the number one priority of any
individual.

2. Since we want to maximize future satisfaction, we need to ask ourselves
not just what the current self wants now, but what the future selves (that
we hope to become) are likely to want and need; and we must work toward that,
even at sacrifice of immediate impulses.

This will be an extremely unwelcome conclusion to most people. Instead of
absorbing "values" from your culture and feeling virtuous when you honor
those, you (with your advisers) are now compelled to make difficult,
abstruse calculations and act upon them. "Right" is not an absolute
that a respected authority reveals to you, but a hazy, shifting result of
a conditional calculation, interacting with your intuition--an intuition
that is continually being reviewed and updated. 

This is not the same as the vulgar "moral relativity" of recent decades,
which was usually just brainless self-indulglence. The new morality will
often be different than the old, but not easier--usually much harder,
in fact, more demanding. 

3. We immediately extract the propinquity principle: other things equal,
that should be considered more important which is closer in time and space.
Since the more distant future is much more difficult to see clearly, and
we may not live that long anyway, we must give more weight to tomorrow than
to the next century. (Again we emphasize, other things equal.)

4. We see hints of research projects. To achieve any kind of rigor in
developing hierarchies of wants and values, we need to know the physiology
of the self circuit. Is there just one basic kind of feel-good/feel-bad,
or several? If several, which should take priority in various circumstances?
Is it possible/desirable to edit some of them out of ourselves? Would such
editing leave us "different people" in unacceptable ways?

What is the relation between basic and derivative kinds of feel-good?
Between "physical" and "cerebral" pleasures/pains? How can we know when
we are truly serving ourselves and when we are victims of delusion, error,
or habit? Clearly, some people are deluded when they feel good in honoring
the self-sacrificial values of an insane ideology. On the other hand,
many find exquisite pleasure in music or intellectual activities of certain
kinds; how valid are these, and are there other routes to the same feelings?

BEGINNINGS: All the above is just introductory, scratching the surface--
although I think it contains important ideas which are not in general
circulation. Much more needs to be spelled out. Even some of the simplest,
most self-evident ideas are foreign to the culturally imposed ideas of most
people, and they can be convinced (if at all) only by the most laborious
investigation of many details and many examples.

My two-book exposition of cryonics and immortalism (with many supplements
by others) was not enough--over a period of more than thirty years--to
convince many people of the validity of these ideas. My attempted derivation
of the most rigorous possible philosophy, book-length in progress, is even
less likely to be quickly convincing. But it may be useful, and it feels good.

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=2765