#the first value judgment

[mentalisttraceur]

In "the first value judgement" post, I said that the only justified irregularity was valuing yourself differently - because it parallels the difference between your direct experience of yourself and your indirect inference of others.

This is actually very wrong in a subtle way. In truth, no choice of mind valuing is truly arbitrary - for any given life experience, one choice is the empirically justified one, but which choice that is depends on your exact life experience so far.

Consider a human infant, whose interactions so far have mostly been with its mother. Will this child experience the mind of a stranger the same way it experiences the mind of its mother?

Not at first. Early on in its life, the child has vastly more empirical mind interferometry evidence for the mother. When the child first begins to develop theory of mind, perhaps the evidence available to it so far suggests neither

"minds (of which I am one)", nor

"me, and other minds (which are a different kind of thing than me)",

but something more like "me, other complex deep minds (like mother), simple flat minds (like strangers)". Because it might not need the same rich complexity of cognition and experience to explain what little it has seen of strangers so far.

[mentalisttraceur]

My posts for the last couple days are getting exhausting and insufferable to me, in a way.

There's only so much time I want to spend down in the weeds of philosophizing.

I am interested in finding and justifying the best ideas I can, not navel gazing for the sake of it.

This isn't navel gazing, but it's close enough to be a little bothersome.

In a way that's part of what made me think I was in the wrong direction, the best ideas are never like this, they don't get bogged down like attempts to answer "the first value judgement" question as posed was starting to.

And the "root value in cognition, not whole minds!" nascent potential epiphany seems so promising in large part because it seems to have perfectly resolved that.

[mentalisttraceur]

Despite this prior post about no choice for the first value judgment being truly arbitrary, I believe that this nuance is perhaps not very interesting.

I think many months ago I said that any choice other than valuing other minds as much as your own is arbitrary. This presupposes that you have already gone through the process of deciding that other minds are probably like you in ways that ethically matter just as much. I think simply assuming this is a cop-out.

It feels like less of a cop-out to say that those three are less arbitrary than the rest, because that way I am not leaving implied but unjustified equating yourself with others.

The insight that some experience streams might reasonably empirically suggest greater diversity of mind types among humans feels... like maybe letting the philosophical view get too tainted by the developmental psychology view? However, I think it is very important, because it kicked off the contemplation that led me here:

I think the right answer cannot be found so long as we are trying to think about minds.

I am starting to think that building ethics on top of the idea of minds is maybe actually wrong. "Minds" are a big picture interpretation, a summation. In truth, what exists, and what philosophically follows directly out of mind interferometry is not "other minds exist" - it's "other cognition exists".

I intuit that if we follow this path, we might have a much sounder and much simpler justification of ethics that happens to treat other minds well, without ever needing to even define minds as a precondition to ethics, let alone wrangle with "the first value judgment" as I initially presented it.

[mentalisttraceur]

So I said in my last post that the first value judgment is the first genuinely new question of ethics in the "from first principles" progression, after "what are the most justified axioms?", "how do we get the most justified logic rules?", and "how do we know other minds exist and what happens in them?"

Why do I think this?

Well, until you have a clear notion of other minds, you are doing solipsistic ethics - ethics where there are no other minds but you.

This strikes me as just an optimization problem: finding the most correct and efficient algorithms and heuristics for deciding based on the values we already have - starting with the pleasure/preference inherent in our raw experiences.

We can develop a lot of new value judgments in a sense - we don't need to grapple with other minds to discover new experiential pleasures and pains, to change our preferences as we learn from experience, or to start deriving virtues, duties, and deserts. But this is already handled by what we established in "from first principles".

It's when we come to the problem of other minds that we face a qualitatively new question, a new dimension of value judgment: self versus other.

[mentalisttraceur]

"The first value judgment" isn't really the first value judgement.

The real first value judgements that you have are built into your raw experiences - the relative positivity or negativity of those experiences. But those you don't really make. Those are built into you, into your experience stream, you have no choice about them.

The real first value judgements that you make are probably before you even separate the self and other. We can develop ethical value judgments - ideas of how we ought to act - long before we start getting good at mind interferometry and developing a full theory of mind.

So really, it's not actually "first" in any essential sense. I am almost arbitrarily positioning it as the first. Only almost, because I think it is the first genuinely new question of ethics in the "from first principles" progression, after "what are our axioms?", "how do we get logic that we know is actually correct?", and "how do we know other minds exist and what happens in them?"

[mentalisttraceur]

I think there are a lot of people for each option of the first value judgment who have a strong intuition that their option is the obviously correct one.

I am unsure about their ratios. I suspect some are less commonly intuitive than others. But I think in absolute terms, it is a lot of people for each one.

[mentalisttraceur]

The First Value Judgment

When we come to the end of the "from first principles" post, there are basically three options that are less arbitrary than all others for the very first ethics value judgment that we must make:

value all minds equally,

value yourself above all, and all other minds equally less, or

value yourself below all, and all other minds equally more.

I trust that it's obvious why every other option is arbitrary. You can value some other minds more than others for derived reasons easily enough, but as a starting point? How do you justify one choice over another for which minds get more weight than others?

The above three do not need to justify additional irregularity axiomatically. The only irregularity - valuing yourself differently - parallels the empirical difference between your direct experience of yourself and your indirect inference of others.

Which is the correct choice of the three? Why? Could they actually lead to the same answers?