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Article 5704 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: nlc@media.mit.edu (Nick Cassimatis)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: AI failures
Message-ID: <1992May17.082629.27776@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: 17 May 92 08:26:29 GMT
Article-I.D.: news.1992May17.082629.27776
References: <92May16.003923edt.48037@neat.cs.toronto.edu> <1992May16.125258.15430@news.media.mit.edu> <1992May16.162406.17453@news.media.mit.edu>
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In article <1992May16.162406.17453@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>In article <1992May16.125258.15430@news.media.mit.edu> nlc@media.mit.edu (Nick Cassimatis) writes:
>>
>> ... So all of the
>>harm of the circularity is bottled up into the choice of happiness
>>over misery. Now this is not a hard choice to make.  So moral
>>deliberation becomes both a scientific and technological endeavor.
>
>Sorry, but it is an *extremely* hard choice to make, because you're
>programmed to be biased in favor of pleasure, comforts, "happiness",
>etc.  As a stoic, I have to work very hard to dislike fun, etc.  I
>don;t succeed very well and, as a result a lot of my time gets wasted.
>Almost as much as most other people.

It seems clear that we are (genetically) biased to some extent, and I
would agree that life constantly demands that we put aside pleasures
from time to time.  When this is done, however, it is (at least in my
case) to attain a goal that is either itself pleasurable or a means to
pleasure.  So while I do not lead the life of what would normally be
called a hedonist, I think it could be aptly characterized as
"enlightened hedonism".  This is in the same spirit as enlightened (or
is it rational?) egotism from political theory (Locke?).  Walking a
mile in the snow to hear Beethoven's 9th is an example of something I
would call enlightened hedonism.  This sort of lifestyle demands a
certain amount of stoicism from all of us (it's curious that we often
find enjoyment in the feeling of being able to deny ourselves
enjoyment.)

While the existence of genetic programming that allows us to *deny*
pleasure is questionable, I think it is clear that there is some
amount of *cultural* programming that favors the denial of pleasure.
Much of the Judeo-Christian tradition seems to favor some asceticism.
In Plato's dialogues, Socrates often advocates not giving into our
passions.  The quest for objectivity in science requires an obvious
amount of asceticism.  There is also sexual repression, punishment of
children and criminals, and other such things that act partly as
agents of self-denial.  There are, of course, institutions that favor
self-indulgence.

At those times when it is hard to make the choice between pleasure and
misery, it is probably a symptom of the fact that we are not
completely unified beings.  "Part of us" would be pleased by something
while another part realizes that it is best to put that thing aside
for future reasons.  The hardness of the decision is perhaps
symptomatic of the struggle of these two soul-parts for control.

Has anyone ever done a study of the development of asceticism in
children?  (Results towards this end would be extremely useful for
educational and social theory -- not to mention, AI.)  Kids seem to
start out as range-of-the-moment hedonists and then gradually add on
layers of "denial" and control.  It would be interesting see this
development in light of Papert's Principle from the Society of Mind.
I know that Piaget did at least one study of moral development and
that one of his observations was that children initially say that X is
bad because they get punished for it.  But there follows a stage in
which they see X being bad as a simple truth.  This hints that
"badness" and "goodness" free themselves from punishment and gain a
certain amount of "mobility."  I may not be remembering properly, but
I think that this transition takes place at about the same time that
the transition in the conservation experiments takes place.

>You say, "health and happiness".  And we frequently see claims that
>these are correlated, so that cancer patients do better if kept happy.
>I presume that most "thinkers" see this as evidence of some inherent
>connection, but one might speculate that if these experiments are
>correct, the cause could be just one more set of sinister evolutionary
>mechanisms to weed out the seeds of "rational stoicism".

I guess I threw around that phrase rather carelessly, but I think that
it is generally easier to be happy if one is healthy.  That happiness
causes health in serious injury, but I think that in some more
instances, happiness is good for health.  eg., content people don't
get ulsers, not losing sleep over something unpleasant gives you more
REM time which has been claimed to be correlated with less
irritability.  Of course, all of these terms are at once so general
and vague to necessarily make any Yes/No resolution of this issue
unjustly gloss over many subtlties.

With the risk of putting words in your mouth, presumably that which
separates rational stoicism from irrational stoicism is that the
former is exercized to some end.  If this is so, then perhaps rational
stoicism is not very different from enlightened hedonism.


