Today I remembered that time in class when you said that every parent must confront the fact that they are creating a conscious being who will inevitably suffer and die. At the time, I only appreciated it in the context of my anti-natalist tendencies. But today, I realized your decision had broader significance: does one choose to take action, despite the consequences? Or does one attempt to refrain from participating in causality so as to avoid as much negative fallout as possible (even at the expense of potential positive results)? I am a don’t-doer. This was fine when I was planning to kill myself. The action to end all actions. However, I have (FIRMLY) changed my mind. Now I am a half-assed don’t-doer, because you can’t live without acting. Without destroying. I try. It isn’t going well. The inactions I choose have unbearable consequences. I’ve grown rather desperate about it. I’m constantly uncertain; every option seems wrong. But I need to do something. So I wanted to ask you how you decide, because it seemed like you might understand.

I sent this email to an old literature professor of mine when I was studying computer science at college. I ended up dropping out (again), and getting a(nother) therapist, so that I could talk about how hard it is to do homework when I might accidentally learn enough to make an artificial intelligence that destroys the universe. Whereas if I killed myself instead, I could prevent that risk.

This happened nearly three years ago, and I’m still grappling with versions of these issues. I want to say a bunch of awful things about myself right now, but I think that pattern of behavior is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I’m going to admit that I’ve learned a lot in the past three years, and try to share some of that knowledge in my continued efforts to move forward.

Part of the issue inciting the above thought process was having a poor enough technical foundation that I could take Eliezer Yudkowsky‘s spoken philosophy behind MIRI at face value. (Plenty more on that in future posts). But it was mostly just textbook avoidance. I was weaving an etiological fairytale to justify dropping out again. And that fairytale had some glaring plot holes:

1) Not wanting to do your homework because you might accidentally make an evil self-improving AGI is a bit like not wanting to lift weights because you might accidentally get way too jacked. If you have any experience being physically active, or at least have a cursory knowledge of exercise physiology, then you aren’t afraid lifting some weights will make you too muscley; you’re afraid you’re susceptible to the mental illness that makes body builders take their hobby way past the threshold of aesthetic and health benefits. I know I’m susceptible, because it had already happened to me. Except sadly, instead of getting super jacked, I went on a visit to the old country with my mother and became anorexic instead.

2) If I truly believed my own explanation for not doing my homework, I would have killed myself instead of getting a therapist. The harm to my family would be negligible in comparison to the harm to humanity I would purportedly have been preventing. The fact that I believed a therapist could have, and should have, talked me out of not going to school and doing my computer science homework, meant I that knew I was being irrational. I wanted a third option. By dropping out, I was hurting myself and people close to me for reasons that I knew were farcical, and I wanted to stop.

Accidentally making an evil AGI is grandiose, no doubt. But the truth underneath my intricately justified predicament was that I felt wrenching guilt every time I ate some food. Why? Because making an omelet means breaking some eggs. And that felt unbearable. The very idea of breaking more eggs, even in service of my perceived greater good, felt unbearable.

I knew it didn’t make sense, but I couldn’t articulate why.

Creative Destruction

All existence is 0-sum and adversarial to some extent. For a set of atoms to have one configuration means that they cannot have another configuration. And time marches on: sets of atoms cannot stay in the same configurations forever. Change is inevitable. Life and death are inseparable. But as living beings, isn’t it natural to view death as the ultimate evil, to be held at bay with all our might? As beings who care about more than just our own lives, how can we reconcile this with the requirement that we kill to live, even killing the cells in our own body that resist apoptosis and grow cancerous so that the whole organism can live longer?

While I still appreciate Yudkowsky as a blogger (*Edit 2019: if not as a person — “appreciate” does NOT mean endorse, and we now have conclusive evidence he’s succumbed to his cult of personality like most men in his position through history) I now mostly disagree with their conclusions about life, death, and consciousness. But about a year and a half ago, I discovered the blog of another old windbag named Venkatesh Rao. His philosophy of mediocrity made a fascinating counterpoint to Yudkowsky’s idealistic utilitarianism. One theme Rao won’t shut up about is creative destruction: change for the sake of change. His PhD Thesis in aerospace engineering, Team Formation and Breakup in Multi-Agent Systems (2004), begins with these quotes:

“Creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”

~ Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

From the heart of all matter Comes the anguished cry

Wake, wake great Siva,

Our body grows weary

Of its law-fixed path,

Give us new form.

Sing our destruction

That we gain new life

~ Rabindranath Tagore

[How] could you wish to become new unless you first become ashes!

~ Friedrich Nietzche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra

These quotes speak to me. You are always dying before you are dead. You cannot be the same person you were a day ago or even a moment ago. To be alive is to be the ship of Theseus incarnate. To try to hold onto the past is to become a ghost, acting out a pale imitation of a previous life.

Trying to minimize my participation in causality didn’t work. I ended up becoming more and more destructive. I was terrified to try to create anything, but I kept destroying. I was breaking eggs without making any omelets.

My view of myself was, at best, as a creature that turned food into poop. Resources into waste. But the whole point of an omelet is that it, too, gets eaten and destroyed. Everything gets eaten. And gardeners know that poop is a wonderful resource — for plants. So much so that good, finished compost is called black gold. There’s even a brand named after the idea.

Even the poopy part of death is essential to life. What’s gross to the grocer is gold to the gardener.

I spent a lot of my life feeling like a useless pile of shit, so I developed an identity around inherently being a creator of waste instead of resources. But it wasn’t because I could only destroy. Pure destruction is biologically incoherent. Even a forest fire creates room for new life to flourish.

The problem was that I felt redundant. The things I was creating in school didn’t feel creative, even if they technically added legible bits to the atoms I manipulated. They still felt purely consumptive: like I was turning blank paper, fresh with possibilities, into trash. But at the time I didn’t have a concept for that.

Productive Consumption

Let me back up and try to explain the feeling of redundancy. In school I felt like I was creating piles and piles of extra resources that nobody needed. So the piles just… sat there. They putrefied. Like apples decomposing in barrels because nobody needs to eat them. Occasionally I tried to recycle my old fill-in-the-blank fruit-of-the-tree-of-knowledge, instead of just throwing it away. But my mom yelled at me for making extra work for her, so I stopped.

And it made me angry. Why did people keep telling me to grow all these apples if the plan is just to put them in barrels and let them rot? Shouldn’t I be growing produce that people need to eat?

I got very, very confused about life, and came up with legions of mostly-wrong hypotheses about what was going on. I spent a great deal of time trying to see the value in letting apples rot in barrels, and hated myself because I couldn’t figure it out. I grew to despise the part of me that cared about the putrefaction. My fellow apple growers seemed happy enough, so what was wrong with me? My resistance, my attempts to take personal responsibility for the consequences of my actions, seemed to have such terrible results. Upsetting the flow created unintended consequences. Going against the patterns I was given created its own destruction. Because these were novel problems, they felt even worse than the putrefaction problem that surrounded me.

On top of that, I started developing social problems because I was being too different from everyone else. And I became very lonely. As an autist, I didn’t notice that people didn’t like me because I thought they were evil; nor did I notice that I was trying to make up for lack of belonging with the cultivation of prestige. Moreover, I confused my pursuit of prestige with my pursuit of growing produce people need to eat, intertwingling them into an illegible mess.

In high school, I was just trying to break the girls’ pole vault record, but accidentally becoming anorexic and dropping out; by the time I decided to study computer science, I had simply deepened my philosophical sophistication to the point where I was trying to make a benevolent AGI, but accidentally developing crippling anxiety and dropping out.

I’m oversimplifying the story, but all stories are simplifications.

While I had many motivations for my actions, under reflective equilibrium I still believe one primary motivation was to do the right thing. (Or at least to “do the right thing“.) But since I kept losing my literalist religious beliefs as they collapsed under contradiction, I didn’t know what doing the right thing meant. How can it be right to live if life causes death?

A key insight I picked up in the pursuit of that aim was the notion of marginal utility, courtesy of 80000 Hours. It validated my instinctive feelings of redundancy in school, and lead me to believe I would continue to face those feelings in the workplace. For example, if I became a professional healer like my mom wanted, my main expected effect would be to take a job away from another person who would almost certainly be able to heal people equally well. And that would mean I was selfish, because I was prioritizing my personal desire to be a healer above the maximization of utility.

To avoid such guilt-inducing pitfalls, I wanted to create something new that made wrong things right. Creating more of something that already exists is only helpful up to a point, and then it becomes counterproductive. But new things become old; if you can, it seems better to create something that can renew itself. Even when you, the creator, are no longer around to add insights from the anti-inductive market into which your creation is embedded.

That’s why I spiralled into the singularitarian memeplex. That, and the grandiosity of it. I chose pole vaulting as my prestige specialization for the same reason. While I’ve left utilitarianism behind me, the maximization instinct runs deep.

Anyway, my proxy for knowing whether I was maximizing the right thing was the reactions of other sentient creatures. But caring about the reactions of some creatures more than others didn’t make sense, even if I might selfishly value some creatures more than others. At root, I didn’t see why the opinions of my teachers should matter more than the opinions of the chickens my teachers ate, or the insects paralyzed by poisons sprayed on the apples they ate. And I became a panpsychist, because it didn’t make sense that if matter is all the same, that it would need a face to feel things. My own consciousness may feel like it’s inside my face, but there are probably lots of consciousnesses that all feel like me inside my face.

Panpsychism lead me to the philosophy of Brian Tomasik, a negative utilitarian and effective altruist for whom I have deep respect. His latest research into composting applied pressure to my thinking on these issues:

Disposing of food scraps is a daily activity for most of us. Different methods of food-waste disposal create different amounts of invertebrate suffering. I tentatively suggest the following ranking for how to eliminate food waste, as viewed from the perspective of reducing the number of invertebrates created: 1. (best) Waste less food to begin with(?) 2. Throw out food in airtight bags/containers that will go to an incinerator (if that’s how your trash is disposed of) 3. (tied for third place; don’t know enough to rank among them) Throw out food in airtight bags/containers that will be landfilled

My experimental proposal for invertebrate-free aerobic composting. (I haven’t yet verified if this method is in fact invertebrate-free. Also note that most regular composting methods are sadly far from invertebrate-free.) 4. Sink garbage disposal unit (such as InSinkErator units) 5. Disposal in a composting collection bin from which the food scraps will be sent to a large-scale composting facility 6. Home compost pile, home compost barrel, etc. 7. (worst) Worm-bin composting ~ https://reducing-suffering.org/food-waste/

From a panpsychist perspective, “number of vertebrates created” is already a broken proxy for the reduction of suffering. But regardless of your metaphysics, Tomasik’s approach raises a most interesting question: might it possibly be better to try to prevent atoms from arranging themselves into increasingly complex autopoietic units through the focused application of heat, than to foster environments that support their growing complexity and transformation?

I began this post with my literature professor’s insight that creating a life is creating something that will inevitably suffer and die. To antinatalists and negative utilitarians, this feels like a great evil for which we must take responsibility.

As I hope I’ve made clear, I have great respect for this position. Just because I am not in pain or at risk of dying right now, it doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten that death and suffering are evil.

But now I’m arriving at a rather different perspective on these evils. It came to me through the application of figuratively grasped non-equilibrium thermodynamics concepts to the ethics of trash incinerators, as mediated by the amoral business advice and theurgical acumen of the above-mentioned Venkatesh Rao.

My new position is that to consume productively, you must be producing something new. And you probably can’t create new things by creating simpler things.

(Not) being (completely) evil

In utilitarianism, killing something so you can eat it is justified by the greater good of what you can accomplish with the energy and health the food gives you. The evil of killing cancels out. A similar controversial idea is ethical discounting.

But I think it makes more sense to admit that eating is a little bit evil. It’s slightly evil. That’s a part of life.

I still have really bad clinical perfectionism, so I’m going to wrap this up prematurely instead of letting it balloon into something unfinishable. I hope you’ll forgive me. But even if you don’t, I expect I’ll get around to part twos eventually. As the morally questionable Jeff Bezos likes to say: Gradatim Ferociter!