Some people say that any life where the sentient does not commit suicide is worth living (because the sentient considers the life better than death; which entails no experience).

Suicide being a 0 utility point seems problematic to me for several reasons,

1. Many people think that death does not entail no experience, I am not suggesting that they are correct, but this may impact on peoples decisions about living and dying. For example (as far as I know) where I live there used to be a tradition among Christians that people who committed suicide were not allowed to be buried in a regular grave yard and were considered not to have gone to heaven. I can imagine that if people believed this they might be reluctant to commit suicide.

2. Understanding of suicide. Some non-human animals are sometimes compared in their understanding of certain things to human babies. It certainly doesn’t seem certain to me that human babies would understand the concepts of death or suicide or what not being alive is like and so perhaps maybe neither would some non-human animals. Also, reports of non-human animals committing suicide seem to tend to be animals that are usually considered “smart”, however maybe this is because we tend to spend more time looking at lions and dolphins and the like than other animals?

Although;

David Harmon wrote:In any case, as per a recent mailing from the Gorilla Foundation, their Koko understands the permanence (and gravity) of death perfectly well -- her first cat got into the road and was hit by a car.
Even dogs and cats can understand that death is permanent ... the key point there is they need to know that their former companion is in fact dead, not just absent!. Over on Making Light a couple of pet owners have mentioned making sure the other pets were present for a euthanization. More interesting, one commenter couldn't manage to actually bring the other pets (too many, IIRC), but she brought a towel or the like for the euthanized pet to lie on during the process. Upon smelling the blanket, the surviving pets seemed to get the news immediately, and made no attempt to look for their missing friend.

from http://scientopia.org/blogs/thisscienti ... e-someday/ - in comments (the video there is a joke btw, just in case anyone didnt watch it but thought it was true)

But thats a friends death, maybe a different understanding to your own death?

And do they really understand? Or just that the other animal cant move/exhibit behaviour anymore? What do they understand from it? Whats to say our understanding is better than theirs?

3. I think maybe people commit suicide when they do not WANT to keep living, which is different from (though probably is very often influenced by) DISLIKING living

I like chips. But I don’t always eat them because apparently they’re not very good for me.

So I like chips, but I don’t always want chips.

We can want things for all kinds of reasons, ethical reasons, etc, that have nothing to do with what we like. Someone could live a life that is below 0 utility (has more disliked experiences than liked experiences in it, weighted by intensity) but could still WANT to keep living due to not wanting to go to hell, wanting to continue to be able to do ethical work, etc

Perhaps a wild animal could live a life with much more disliked experiences than liked ones but continues living because of evolutionary motivations that make them want to keep living?

Arepo wrote:I also don’t buy the idea that not committing suicide demonstrates positive utility. (The expectation of) positive utility is just one of various tools our genes use to keep us in line, whereas if we commit suicide it means that *all* their tools have failed. In other words, we’re heavily biased against doing so for evolutionary reasons.

RyanCarey wrote:When we discuss death, the car next to us is playing noise that is very loud and that does not reinforce our signal. Evolution presents inredible biases. It tells us that we don't want to die. It tells us that we should value making new life. It tells us that we don't want our tribe to die, nor be in a society in which people die regularly. We struggle with these ulterior motives. First, we need to acknowledge that they are there. We need to acknowledge that there are forces swaying us towards this pro-life stance. Second, we need to concentrate on the signal. And I think it tells us, like it always does, that wellbeing is what has been directly observed to be a good.

We don’t know what being dead is like so how can we know if we like being alive or dead more? We can not WANT to be dead, but we cannot know that we would dislike/like it more than living.

Alan Dawrst wrote:There are lots of cases where the brain clearly doesn't maximize long-term selfish welfare (e.g., sharing a needle with the other 50 prisoners in your group, with extremely high chances of getting some disease). Certain systems just switch on at certain times and suppress other systems.

So instead of being above 0 utility if one wants to keep living maybe this would be a better way;

Jesper Östman wrote:One useful way of thinking about where to draw the line for utility 0 is Tännsjö's test. When having a total experience at a certain time, ask yourself if you'd prefer being unconscious at that time or not (everything else equal).

(could someone link me to where Tännsjö says this please?)

So anyway is all this basically the preferential utilitarian o utility point (suicide) Vs. the hedonistic one (Tännsjö's test) ?

Just happened to come across this in an unrelated way http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQCOHUXm ... ture=share

Wonderful post, Ruairi!

Ruairi wrote:Many people think that death does not entail no experience, I am not suggesting that they are correct, but this may impact on peoples decisions about living and dying. For example (as far as I know) where I live there used to be a tradition among Christians that people who committed suicide were not allowed to be buried in a regular grave yard and were considered not to have gone to heaven.

Yes.

To die to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. [...]
Who would Fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveller returns, Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all

Ruairi wrote:It certainly doesn’t seem certain to me that human babies would understand the concepts of death or suicide or what not being alive is like and so perhaps maybe neither would some non-human animals.

Exactly. I made six points about why it's problematic to infer that animal lives are worth living on the whole based on the fact that they don't kill themselves.

Ruairi wrote:Also, reports of non-human animals committing suicide seem to tend to be animals that are usually considered “smart”

And it's those big, smart, top-of-the-food chain animals that are most likely to have lives worth living in the first place.

It's plausible that gorillas and maybe cats/dogs understand death. At least elephants seem to.

Ruairi wrote:But thats a friends death, maybe a different understanding to your own death?

Could be. After all, animals might have as hard of a time conceiving of their own cessation of consciousness as some people do. Like the Christians you mentioned, maybe they don't know that death would make things any better.

Ruairi wrote:We can want things for all kinds of reasons, ethical reasons, etc, that have nothing to do with what we like. Someone could live a life that is below 0 utility (has more disliked experiences than liked experiences in it, weighted by intensity) but could still WANT to keep living [...]

Perhaps a wild animal could live a life with much more disliked experiences than liked ones but continues living because of evolutionary motivations that make them want to keep living?

Yes. As we've discussed many times, wanting and liking are different things. In addition, here's what I said in point #4 of the six points linked above:

I think animals have a "will to live" that's partly separate from their hedonic well-being. However, I happen to care about their hedonic well-being rather than their will to live. Animals' behaviors are an integration of a huge number of signals and brain systems, so it's not surprising that some of these systems can act contrary to the hedonic-welfare-maximization systems.

Ruairi wrote:(could someone link me to where Tännsjö says this please?)

I don't know the reference, but I totally agree with that definition of the zero point. It's the one I've used intuitively since I ever started thinking about utilitarianism.

I still prefer my test to Tannsjo's, which introduces intuitive confusions about the nature of unconsciousness etc. Mine is just take a near-null experience X, compare it to a obviously positive experience y, and ask if there's any sufficiently high amount of x that you'd trade in instead of having y. If not then the experience is neutral or negative.

This doesn't strictly let you isolate 0 experiences, but just as the probability of a random real number between 0 and 1 actually being 0 or 1 is 0, so I don't think any waking experience is likely to be 0 in practice. (I also have a view, never fully developed, that what we think of as emotion and what we think of as consciousness are both the same phenomenon, in which case one couldn't have a mental state of 0 utility, though one could theoretically have several parts of the brain experiencing +ive utility and several experiencing -ive such that they sum to 0)

Ruairi wrote:3. I think maybe people commit suicide when they do not WANT to keep living, which is different from (though probably is very often influenced by) DISLIKING living

"do not WANT to keep living" can take different forms: lacking a positive interest in living or wanting to stop living to stop the pain. I'm not sure if you ever knew anybody who committed suicide, but from what I know, people who are contemplating suicide (or do it) are experiencing an enduring hardship that they believe that they cannot overcome. Suicide is also correlated with things like drug and alcohol abuse combined with financial problems; abuse; paranoid delusions and the belief that one cannot escape people or demons or follow them everywhere; newly convicted felons who see prison life as unbareable; or other mental illness that causes somebody to experience high anxiety, fear, or invasive thoughts that torment somebody. If we take examples of this type, then suicide is thought to be a way to stop the pain that cannot be stopped any other way (at least from the perspective of the person who is contemplating suicide).

Thanks for the replies!:)

Arepo wrote:Mine is just take a near-null experience X, compare it to a obviously positive experience y, and ask if there's any sufficiently high amount of x that you'd trade in instead of having y. If not then the experience is neutral or negative.

cool! How do you define "a near-null experience X" ?

@rehoot, Sorry i certainly didn't mean to say anything like "people who commit suicide arn't actually unhappy", I'm sure dis-liking and un-wanting go together a very (huge) large amount of the time. Is this what you were saying?

EDIT: jeez I posted and forgot what I was going to ask in the first place...

So how do we evaluate when a sentient is above or beolow 0 ? Can you trust a persons self reporting? And what do you do as regards non human animals?

I personally calibrate zero-utility either by imagining that I had a dynamic voluntary p-zombie switch and asking myself whether and how long I would switch it on.

Or by using the following thought experiment:

I'm on a ship to Alpha Centauri. The journey is long, so I'll be in cryosleep. The machine has the option for me to be unconscious. Alternatively, it can give me subjective experiences, however only a pre-programmed set of experiences S (in an identical loop, if necessary, including memory reset).

To calibrate the utility of a given set of experiences against zero, I use that set as S in the thought experiment and then decide for or against the loop.

I still prefer my test to Tannsjo's, which introduces intuitive confusions about the nature of unconsciousness etc.

Not clear to me what confusions those would be, other than that I doubt a p-zombie mode could actually exist.

Can you trust a persons self reporting?

Not unconditionally. Especially well-established retrospective biases should be considered when people report retrospectively. I remember a study (I don't have the citation, it was reported on a TV show about neuroscience) that indicated people tend to evaluate an experience by averaging the peak and the end of the intensity distribution. In other words, if you spend an afternoon in an amusement park and report your entertainment level retrospectively, you will likely average the highest (most saliently memorable) happiness moment and how you felt before you left. This can be in contrast to the affective aggregate of moment-to-moment experiences.

And what do you do as regards non human animals?

Observe momentary behavioral clues, vocalizations, biomarkers such as stress hormone levels, secondary well-being indicators such as tissue damage or nutritional status, and avoid anthropomorphic projections.

From another recent thread:

wishful thinking
rosy retrospection
optimism bias
depressive realism

I don't claim that these dominate people's assessments, and there are probably biases that cause people to overestimate suffering as well. But these should be given some weight.

Ruairi wrote:cool! How do you define "a near-null experience X" ?

I don't really - this is primarily a practical approach, so you just apply it to situations whose net utility you don't have an immediate grasp on.

You can also whittle it down indefinitely to approach 0 - if this comfy chair was marginally more rigid, or the wall I'm gazing at slightly more faded, would my answer change?

I personally calibrate zero-utility either by imagining that I had a dynamic voluntary p-zombie switch and asking myself whether and how long I would switch it on.

The problem with that sort of thing is that due to time discounting, you'll end up only saying if you value that experience more than average. Basically, the fact that you'll die eventually is far enough away that you don't think about it, so it seems like you're trading a certain amount of time of ordinary experience with the one you're considering.

DanielLC wrote:The problem with that sort of thing is that due to time discounting, you'll end up only saying if you value that experience more than average. Basically, the fact that you'll die eventually is far enough away that you don't think about it, so it seems like you're trading a certain amount of time of ordinary experience with the one you're considering.

No, i try to keep an awareness that the total amount of experience is reduced by the exact amount I skip. I intuitively try to evaluate the experience in and by itself, not just whether I look forward to something that comes later. Maybe this is easier for me than for other people, because I have more experience reflecting this and I don't look forward to particularly salient peak experiences that often (I don't care if tomorrow is Christmas, because I don't care that much more about Christmas than I care about average days)

Ruairi asked me about my 0 utility point in the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute thread. I'm responding here.

First, I view utility as a subjective, experiential phenomena, roughly analogous to hedonistic utility, though I wouldn't use the word hedonism because it strikes me as referring to too simplistic of a cognitive phenomenon.

Regarding a 0 point, for me the key detail is that non-existence (or, more precisely, non-sentience) holds 0 value. Positive value is thus better than non-sentience, negative value is worse than non-sentience, and 0 value includes states of sentience which are of equal value to non-sentience.

Given my view of utility, what matters to me is whether something feels better or worse than non-sentience. It is not important to me whether or not the individual in question wants or prefers to remain sentient. (Recall Bentham, "can it suffer?") Some individuals may have the capacity to feel but lack the capacity to want or prefer. Indeed, I suspect that this holds for many animals, perhaps including insects.

Note that the above refers to instantaneous utility. For total utility, I just add up the values at different points in time - basic total utilitarianism. An individual's life can have net 0 utility while having moments of positive and negative utility, as long as the lifetime integral is zero.

Finally, questions of afterlife do not factor centrally to my thinking here. I doubt that afterlife exists, though I cannot rule it out. If afterlife does exist, then I would evaluate it by the same terms, i.e. in terms of how it feels.