I don’t know how much credence to give the psychological theory of the “Big 5” personality traits, but out of curiosity I did some self-assessments using certain instruments available for all the world online (such as this one and this one) and some consistent results came back which (1) might explain a lot about my life and (2) raise reasons for skepticism about some of the theses I argue for here at pyrosophy.

Here’s what comes back from the instruments in personality terms. I have high openness to experience and moderately high conscientiousness, but also unusually high neuroticism and unusually low extraversion and agreeableness.

A large part of human happiness comes from the affection and validation of others. Someone with a personality such as the one I have isn’t likely to have a life of great success at that. I’m not that likely to meet as many people because the social situations in which people meet each other (like parties, say) are situations in which I am likely to feel uncomfortable (as in fact, I often do). Chalk that up to low extraversion. If I do meet people, they’re likely to see me as not very nice — thanks, low agreeableness — and when things go badly in relationships with others, as they inevitably will for everyone and which seem especially prone to for the disagreeable introvert, I am likely to feel the hurt particularly keenly and brood on it for a long time thereafter, like a good neurotic.

A person such as myself will just not have a very good time of it in the world, except perhaps under very narrow and rare conditions. And I haven’t been that lucky, not that I expect to be, or think I’m entitled to be. No other people, whether individually or collectively, can be reasonably thought to be under any obligation to make up to me for what nature made me. Sure, it would have been better never to have been brought into existence, but it is too late for that.

Is it a small wonder, then, that I have a rather negative estimate of the extent to which life is mostly suffering? I have my own life to look at, and it seems that way to me, even though I am keenly aware that I have had many advantages in life which others have not. And, painful as it is to admit, it’s probably not much of a surprise that I would come to a pessimistic, perhaps even bitter, conclusion there is little enduring happiness to be found in the pursuit of romantic attachments. Perhaps also my personality might help explain why some of the best aspects of relationships I have had, romantic relationships included, have been epistolary in nature. It is far easier to overcome the negativity of one’s personality when one can choose one’s words in the leisure of letter writing, than when one must present one’s face and have one’s immediate reactions to things read thereupon. (An argument for masks!)

From one perspective, I am biased in my assessment of life. Though from another, I might be more accurate, because thanks to my low expectations of and distrust of people, I am disinclined to play go-along-to-get-along with the culture’s general optimism. Nonetheless, honesty compels me to admit the bias. The view that life is on balance suffering is a sort of factual judgment, albeit about a set of counterfactual situations, that is, judgments about choices that most people would make if they were offered them and if they were clear-headed and rational. My judgment could be wrong, and improperly colored by what sort of person I am.

The personality I have might also explain why it is that I am willing to make some of the eccentric value judgments I make. I have written before that if there were a certain kind of Experience Machine I would quite willingly plug myself in. And why is that? Well, in part because the Experience Machine can’t really scare me. From childhood I was the person I am now, and being highly open to experience but not likely to get the good kinds of experience from my peers (ahem) I spent a lot of time in books and, when they became available, other media as well. These were a source of pleasure — or at least palliation — that could not come from other areas of life. So why not improve on them?

As a moral skeptic I actually don’t think that the judgments of value can be right or wrong in the same way factual propositions are. Instead I end up with a view, one perhaps familiar to readers of Nietzsche, that your value judgments end up being a matter of one’s type, of durable features of yourself that you can’t really change much, any more than your height or your blood type.

And my lousy personality also doubtless explains a lot of what it is that I do going forward, which will be the subject for future posts here.

This is attributed by Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (circa 3rd Century CE) to the great Cynic, Diogenes of Sinope. Caught in an act of public indecency, Diogenes is reported to have responded.

εἴθε ἦν, καὶ τὴν κοιλίαν παρατριψάμενον τοῦ λιμοῦ παύσασθαι·

“If only it were so easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly.”

Walking to work today I spotted the following ad copy on top of a cab on Park Avenue. The product being touted was a brand of vodka.

Market volatility? Try some liquidity.

It strikes me that one upon a time it was thought to be in bad taste for a liquor advertisement to explicitly promote drinking away one’s woes, financial or otherwise. But I guess hard times are being anticipated.

“There are no objective values.” That is the proclamation with which J.L. Mackie (1917-1981) opened his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). The notion of what it would mean for there to be “objective values” is more than a little slippery, but one interpretation would be something like this: if there are objective values, there over some domain of important decisions, then there is a right way to decide, and someone will decide that way unless vis rationality is somehow deficient. The notion of objective values is is a seductive thought for anyone who has a way they want the social world ordered: my way is not just my preference, for the universe and reason are on my side!

Extrapolative reflection on a thought experiment offered by my one-time teacher Robert Nozick (1938-2002) gives me a small argument in favor of thinking that Mackie was right.

The experience machine is part of a thought experiment in Robert Nozick’s famous 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (pp. 42-3).

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you an experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. Al the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences? If you are worried about missing out on desirable experiences, we can suppose that business enterprises have researched thoroughly the lies of ma others. You can pick and choose from their large library or smorgasboard of such experiences, selecting your life’s experiences for, say, the next two years. After two years have passed, you will have ten minutes or ten hours our of the tank, to select the experiences of your next Of course, while in the tank, you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all actually happening. Other can plug in to have the experiences they want, so there’s no need to stay unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as who would service the machines if everyone plugs in.) Would you plug in?

And Nozick thinks that the answer to this question is that of course you wouldn’t. He thinks that three objections are salient: (1) We want to actually do certain things rather than just have the experience of doing them, (2) we want to be a certain kind of person and there is no such things as being any kind of person if all you are having is pre-programmed experiences and (3) plugging into the machine limits us to a kind of only “man-made reality.” Nozick concludes that his though experiment shows us that we must care about things other than our experiences. Plugging into the machine for life would be “a kind of suicide” and therefore something to be avoided. (Actually, it would be a kind of bioexodos, but let that slide for now.) If Nozick is right about that, we might conclude, inter alia, that theories of value that reduce all value to tates of mind (like hedonism) must necessarily be false.

Now there is a slight problem, perhaps, with Nozick’s thought experiment, in that if you’re really a hedonist, you shouldn’t seek out those experiences you most want so much as those experiences what you would most enjoy, the two classes of experiences not being necessarily the same unless you have some sort of omniscience with respect to those very experiences and your plausible reaction to them. But we can fix this minor problem with an emendation to Nozick’s experiment. In place of being handed a menu of experiences to chose from and then experience, you would be given only the knowledge that the experiences you have will be the ones you would happen to find optimally enjoyable. (What they might be might turn out to be something of a surprise, even to you!) Call this improved version of the Experience Machine the Hedonic Machine. Its origins are a little harder to specify than those of the Experience Machine, but that would hardly make them unimaginable. Perhaps Eliezer Yudkowsky and his ever-clever friends will finally manage to produce a Friendly Superhuman Artificial Intelligence that will in turn build us a Hedonic Machine.

The Hedonic Machine so conceived wouldn’t be vulnerable to Nozick’s third complaint because, being the product of superhuman rather than merely human intelligence the experiences it might provide would transcend those conceived-of or conceivable-of by humans. But it might still be objectionable on the first two grounds that Nozick cites. What one might experience in the Hedonic Machine still wouldn’t be “real” if you were plugged into it you wouldn’t be “really like” anything. (You might be having the experience fighting and slaying terrible monsters in the machine, but that wouldn’t make you “really” tough or courageous or whatever.) Probably most people would be Non-Plugger-Inners.

But you know what? If I had such a machine available (and so did everyone else) I would plug right in for the rest of my life. I would be a Plugger-Inner, and I’m sure at least a few other people would be as well.

Does the existence of both Non-Plugger-Inners and Plugger-Inners represent a threat to the notion of objective values? On one possible view would be that it doesn’t. After all, even the most thoroughgoing moral realist doesn’t think there’s a right answer about everything. Some people (myself included) like to eat raw oysters. Others are repelled at the thought of eating them. But no one thinks there’s an objective to-be-eatenness or to-be-avoidedness property about raw oysters that determines the right answer of to eat or not to eat. Surely some areas objective values do not reach.

The analogy does not plausibly extended to the Hedonic Machine case. Here we are speaking of a case that matters crucially to how a decisionmaker will spend the rest of vis life. The Non-Plugger-Inner (if a moral realist) thinks the Plugger-Inner is making a horrifying mistake, “a kind of suicide.” And imagine the greater horror at the suggestion that people should be compelled, (for their own, vastly greater, good) to be plugged into Hedonic Machines. Reversing the matter, a Plugger-Inner (if a moral realist) would think that the Non-Plugger-Inner is making a horrible mistake, living out a life in the vale of tears that is earthly existence, as opposed to the paradise of an existence in the Hedonic Machine. And imagine the reciprocal horror at the thought that perhaps the Hedonic Machine might be outlawed for the supposed greater good of the would-be Plugger-Inners who might be otherwise tempted to “a kind of suicide.” (Much like the rationale used to outlaw the use of many psychoactive drugs in contemporary life, by the way). The issues reached by the Hedonic Machine are too important, too global, just to be treated as matters of taste. If you think you believe in objective values but don’t think the domain of objective values reaches the choice of whether to plug into the Hedonic Machine or not, then you’re pretty much in Mackie’s camp already. Any scheme of objective values, in order not to be trivial, would have to reach the problem posed by the Hedonic Machine.

But now here’s a problem, an illustration of a general problem faced by people who think there are objective values. If there are objective values, then we must, at a minimum, be able to identify some defect of rationality in either the Plugger-Inner or the Non-Plugger-Inner. Because if a non-trivial scheme of objective values somehow obtains, then they can’t both be right.

But I have thought about this matter for rather a long time. I certainly don’t find any defect of rationality in myself. And interestingly, although I am out of sympathy with them, I don’t find one in the Non-Plugger-Inners either. And that fact may go a long way to showing why I find myself in Mackie’s camp.

What would make you better off? A naive answer to the question might be “getting what you want,” but anyone with much life experience knows that this can’t be right just by itself. We have all had the experience of getting what we wanted and finding then that getting it didn’t leave us with much of a sense of well-being. (A fortunate but probably smaller group among us have had the occasional experience of getting something we didn’t want and being pleasantly surprised about how it did make us happy.)

A better answer to the question of what would make you better off would be “getting what you would want if you were fully informed about what getting different things would be like.” That answer is a good deal more respectable; it at once recognizes the value of knowledge in making decisions while at the same time leaving breathing room for individuality. After all, we are clearly not all constituted so as to want the same things.

There is a tiny problem, though. Nothing is going to just hand you what it is that you would want if you were fully informed about what it would be like to get the things you would want under conditions of full information. (And indeed, many people would not want to be just handed such things. They would like to deliberatively choose them, actively pursue them, vigorously strive after them, virtuously work for them, etc. Or at least, so they say…) So they would have to possess, inside their own heads, the knowledge of what would be like to have different things. So you can’t win without that knowledge; the less you have of it the more you’ll blunder stupidly after one object and then another, likely disappointed in most.

But if they actually do have such knowledge in their heads, what a sorrow life would be, at least as long as life were finite, for everything that one chose, one would have to be aware of a vast number of things not chosen and foregone, many, many of which would also be good. For everything you chose, there would be a great and oppressive sense of opportunity cost,” as the economists put it. For everything gained you would know of a thousand things that you lost. And we mourn the loss of things we know well.

So you can’t win with knowledge either. What a melancholy conclusion!

Reflect:  we are told that knowledge is good and thatwe are made better off by being better informed.  These maxims are so deeply embedded in our culture as to seem self-evident.  To question them is to invite ridicule.  And…

I am sure all of you readers have heard about Malala Yousufzai, a 14-year old girl from the Swat Valley in Pakistan.  She was a activist on behalf of girls’ education in a part of the world infested with hateful religious obscuratinists militantly opposed to that sort of thing.  She was recently shot in the head by a member of the Taliban for what she was, and that’s something deeply sickening (though not, I submit, terribly surprising to those of us with much historical consciousness about the ways religion deals with dissenters).

As of the writing of this post, Malala has not died of her wounds and has been flown to a specialized facility in the United Kingdom for treatment.  The doctors caring for her have some guarded optimism about the possibility of her making a recover.  From an Associated Press story:

Despite the early optimism, the full extent of Malala’s brain injuries has not been made public and outside experts cautioned it is extremely unlikely that a full recovery of all her brain’s functions can be made. Instead, they could only hope that the bullet took a “lucky path” – going through a more “silent,” or less active – part of the brain.

“You don’t have a bullet go through your brain and have a full recovery,” said Dr. Jonathan Fellus, chief scientific officer at the New Jersey-based International Brain Research Foundation.

Among things the story goes on to discuss are various advantages Malala has, due to her young age, at making a recovery. In one of them, a rather interesting admission slips out:

There’s also a psychological aspect to why youngsters have a better shot at recovery. While injured adults often mourn the loss of what they had, teens don’t know what they are missing.

So apparently knowledge of what we might be but cannot be and what it is really like to have capacities we lack are source of suffering. So there is a kind of knowledge — and not a trivial kind of knowledge, either — that seems to be bad for us. There is something important and intimate we might be better off being less informed about.

Small wonder that aging, which is largely the loss of capacities the experience of having which we can access through memory is such a miserable process.

And how grim that this ugly fact about (one kind of) knowledge should poke through the story of a heroine who has suffered precisely for the sake of allowing knowledge to spread.

Update 20121022. Found this evening:

Proximate source Book Porn.

A story in today’s Wall Street Journal caught my eye: “Prescription for Addiction.” The money graf corroborates a story we have seen here before.

The U.S. spends about $15 billion a year fighting illegal drugs, often on foreign soil. But America’s deadliest drug epidemic begins and ends at home. More than 15,000 Americans now die annually after overdosing on prescription painkillers called opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—more than from heroin, cocaine and all other illegal drugs combined.

One wonders how many of these deaths are really accidents.

A useful neologism for me, anyway, is bioexodos. Formed from the Greek roots βίος (“life”) and ἔξοδος (“departure, marching out”) it means any action undertaken to put an end to one’s current existence, which might or might not lead to a possible future existence that is not so filled with suffering as this one. As such it could include such undertakings as

1. Suicide;
2. Something short of outright suicide, but perhaps placing oneself in a situation where death is highly likely, perhaps with the intent of somehow benefiting others directly or indirectly through one’s own extinction;
3. Putting oneself into cryonic or some other form of (putative?) preservation of one’s personhood not after one’s legal death but when one is still alive, probably with conditional instructions that one is only to be revived if the world has changed in significant ways such that whatever existence one might have after revival will not include so much suffering;
4. Participation in some sort of very dangerous scientific undertaking which is likely to result in one’s death but, in the unlikely event that it succeeds, will fundamentally transform one into a different kind of being that does not suffer so much.

Bioexodos is thus a complex concept. I wonder if people who contemplate it will be treated with any more decency than people who just contemplate suicide.

In a footnote, it appears that one of the dictionary definitions of ἔξοδος is “the end of a tragedy.” How very fitting!

My tumblr habit is getting a bit out of control, but at least it affords me an opportunity to illustrate my most post but this with fun animated gifs.

Source the tumblr Nudity and Nerdery, here reblogging Tech Sergeant Jenn.