less-effort-than-my-real-blog:

unknought:

less-effort-than-my-real-blog: Theory: The reason LW type people end up arguing about feminism/SocJus so much is not just because everyone is attracted like moths to a flame to any topic which is controversial, but because we’re Nerds who like thinking about complex things, and feminism debates are complex. We like taking complex concepts and taking them apart and figuring out what exactly they mean, breaking them down, and figuring out which parts of them we like and which parts we’d rather scrap. Gender is this complex system1 cluster-concept that works slightly differently for everyone so we get to tease it apart and figure out what it constitutes and introspect on how different people think about it. Then there’s the morality/ethics issues, always something we like, and the aspects of psychology, and there are also empirical things to argue about as well as just philosophical things, so we can spend time having fun ripping apart the methodology of studies. You also have kind of game theoretic stuff when you get into the “but if you put trigger warnings on things then maybe this will lead to a slippery slope and we’ll lose free speech” kind of argument, and you can talk society-design and wonder how a utopia would handle gender, and you have the meta aspects of figuring out whether tone policing is bad or shouting is worse (We REALLY like meta.) Proposal: we find something less hurty and less mindkilly, but equally complex and tricky and multifaceted, and see if we can argue about that in a more charitable, more awesome way, and we tease apart other complicated system1 concepts, and then we use the skills we learn to talk more productively about controversial stuff like gender. Specific proposal: What’s the definition of ‘art’? It can’t just be ‘pretty things’ because when people take photos of dustbins or exhibit unmade beds and call it art, that’s not pretty. But it also can’t be ‘things that convey a message’ because then this post would be art and so would your letter from your bank. It also can’t be ‘things that it took lots of human skill to create’ because most of the abstract art in the Tate Modern doesn’t seem to be about human skill. There’s this one artist I quite like who just slashes canvases with a knife (and I totally want to describe a speech I heard made about him to someone because the ideas in it were fascinating). There are paintings which are just red and blue squares scattered across a canvas. There is the exhibition of the unmade bed that sold for millions of pounds sterling. These seem to be more about trying to hint at some deeper message than about skill. Is it right that an artist was paid millions for an unmade bed exhibition just because she claimed it was art and had a deep message about the stress and clutter of modern lives? Is all of the ‘modern art’ which is about slashed canvases and big red squares completely meaningless? If so, how do you explain that we have a whole academic-museumindustrial complex devoted to training people to stand in front of red squares painted on canvases and pontificate on their meaning? I think I remember some studies suggesting that all humans in all cultures enjoyed landscape scenes because we felt safe, when we were evolving, in the kind of calm peaceful landscapes typically portrayed? I’m sure we can also dig up studies about percentage of art school graduates who get employed or something, too. There is totally an empirical thing to argue here. What’s art? I have no desire to stop arguing about feminism and social justice, but I’d love it if [whatever this community is] got more interested in aesthetics, too. I think a majority of us are utilitarians, which has a tendency to (over?)simplify a lot of philosophical arguments. To a utilitarian, good art is simply art which increases utility, either by causing pleasure in the viewer or by changing them for the better. There’s plenty of room for debate about what kind of art does this, but this is largely an empirical question, not a philosophical one. It’s also, honestly, a fairly unsatisfying and counterintuitive answer. It tells us Dan Brown is better than James Joyce, and that creating a new work which will be seen by N people is no better than increasing the audience of an existing work by N. The most obvious alternative, that a work of art has intrinsic value independent of anyone’s viewing of it, gives what seems to me to be even worse results: Do you really think that by writing a novel and burning the manuscript, you’ve made the same contribution to the world as if you’d gotten it published? There are a few possible resolutions here. One is simply to accept the counterintuitive conclusions your theory leads you to. (I don’t know, maybe they’re not counterintuitive to others.) Another is to decouple aesthetics from ethics by saying that the “good” in “good art” means something completely different from how “good” is used in most other situations, or to reject consequentialism entirely. To me, these all seem like respectable philosophical stances, but I want to discuss a different resolution: A consequentialist theory of ethics which comes much closer to capturing my intuitions about the value of good art. The theory, which I’ve been calling unique-experience utilitarianism, originates with @somnilogical​, as far as I or they are aware. They’ve described it in a number of posts which I don’t currently have time to look up, but the Cliff’s Notes version is this: If two identical copies of a person undergo identical experiences, this isn’t twice as good (or twice as bad) as one person undergoing the experience; it’s exactly as good (or bad). More generally, the more similar two people’s experiences are, the less those experiences should be “double-counted”. There’s a continuum wherein two completely identical experiences are counted as a single experience, and two completely dissimilar experiences add up linearly. The value of art, then, is that it produces new experiences. What does this tell us? The more original a piece of art, the more new experiences it produces, so we should value originality. Art that is seen by no one is worthless, but the importance of attracting additional viewers wanes as the total audience grows and the space of experiences the art can evoke begins to get saturated. We should therefore value the creation of art, rather than simply trying to produce aesthetic pleasure by promoting existing art.



I think we seem to have some different moral/aesthetic intuitions here.

For a start, I’m pretty sure art that is seen by no one is worth something. I mean, it’s not worth very much. Given the choice for a stunningly beautiful valley to exist, outside of humanity’s lightcone so we’ll never reach it, or for there to be nothing outside of our lightcone, I would choose the valley and be very mad at anyone who chose the nothingness if it was costless to choose the valley.

Would I still choose the valley if it cost resources? Say, I had to sacrifice an atom inside our lightcone in order to bring the beautiful valley into existence? Here I’m uncertain because I don’t know how efficiently a future human civilisation could use resources. Would I sacrifice a few atoms if what that meant in real terms was one or two binary bits of code? Sure. Would I cut short a human being’s life, even by a few minutes or seconds, in order to bring that valley that nobody will ever see into existence? No.

Moreover, I would prefer two identical copies of someone to experience something identical than one person experience something. Not as much as different experiences. My preference ranking is [multiple people having joyful experiences] > [two identical people having identical joyful experiences] > [one person having a joyful experience], where the middle one is not twice as good as the last one but it is better. Perhaps only slightly better. And that intuition could possibly just be influenced by a hope that the two identical people could diverge in future. But I also prefer the notion of one massive mind spanning billions of lines of code running on a computer the size of the Sun, experiencing something joyful, to the notion of a human mind experiencing something joyful, and that seems to hold even if the massive mind has many repeated sections in its code that are mostly just copies of human minds with backups. I’m not sure if I endorse this, though, and my current feeling is that this is probably an unendorsed reaction. The only reason it might be an endorsed reaction is… well, I could approach two identical minds having identical experiences and say “Hey, you guys are identical, so one of you should die because you’re basically worthless - there’s no unique experience going on - and we can use those computational resources for something else”, I’m pretty sure the person I tried to kill would fight back. And have a strong preference not to die. And I would want to respect that preference.

Also, your theory would indicate that things that are different should be valued more. Especially unique experiences are especially good. Thought experiment: There is a society of 100 humans, isolated from the art produced outside of this society. 98 of them are massive punk rock fans. 2 of them really like country music. They are all very talented musicians and produce lots of music, so there’s 70-80 punk rock albums in existence and also one country album by the country duo, and most people have listened to most of the albums (including the punk people listening to the country album and the country people listening to the punk albums). You are given the opportunity by Omega or someone to magically produce one album, no music skill required, which everyone will listen to. Do you make a punk rock album or a country album or a jazz album? (Nobody in this society is a jazz fan.)

Making yet another punk rock album to join the 70-80 already in existence seems to create less unique experience than making a second country album, and much less than making the first ever jazz album. But most of the society’s inhabitants would prefer a punk album. A punk album would make more people happy. And pushing the boundaries of punk to greater heights seems to also have more aesthetic value in another way I’m not certain of… it feels like it’s valuable to explore genres and play with conventions and build on what has come before to make new better things, more than it is to just have only the one jazz album. Artistic *progression* is valuable.

So the unique experience thing doesn’t seem to match my intuitions at all. My first two objections are weaker objections which are mainly to do with weak and not necessarily fully endorsed preferences, but my last objection is one I’m certain of. I definitely do not want to make a jazz album in this thought experiment and I don’t care how unique the experience provided would be; the people want punk and they have valid preferences that should be respected and I will give them punk. I can see an argument for making a country album based on decreasing marginal returns and how even though there’s more punk fans they’re not benefiting much from an increase in music at this point whereas the country fans would benefit hugely from a doubling of their music intake, but unique experience? It doesn’t make sense. If I were actually in this society I would ask you to please not make a jazz album.

Meta notes: Nitpicking because nitpicking is fun and it’s all I’m capable of at 3am with modafinil sharply wearing off and a headache. I have a semi formed theory of my own but that can wait for another day because 3am and oww and also it’s even worse than yours. I am super interested in this discussion and am excited to finally get to have aesthetic philosophy talk!