Welcome to LessWrong, and thanks for posting!

Regarding the evolution of emotions, consider this:

Imagine a group of life forms of the same species who compete for resources. Lets say that either they are fairly even in power level, and thus it is superior for them to cooperate with each other and divide resources fairly to avoid wasting energy fighting. Alternately, some (alphas) are superior in power level, but the game theoretically optimal outcome is for the more dominant to take a larger share of resources, but still allow the others to have some. (This is superior for them to fighting to the death to try to get everything).

If life forms cannot communicate with each other, then they suffer from a prisoner's dilemma problem. They would like to cooperate in the prisoners dilemma, but without the ability to signal to each other, they cannot be sure the other will not defect. Thus they end up defecting against each other.

We can thus see that if the life forms evolved methods of signalling to each other, it would improve their chances of survival. Thus, complex life forms develop ways of signalling to each other. We can see many, many examples of this throughout a broad range of life.

The life forms also need to be able to mentally model each other now to predict each other's actions. Thus they develop empathy (the ability to model each other), and emotions, which are related to signalling. If each of the members of the species have similar emotions, that is , they react in similar ways to a given situation, and they have developed ways of expressing these emotions to each other, then it greatly improves the abilities of the life forms to model each other correctly. For example, if one life form then tries to gain an unfair distribution of resources (defecting in the prisoners dilemma problem), the other will display the emotional response of anger. They are signalling 'you cannot defect against me in such an unfair way. Because you are attempting to do so, I will fight you'.

Because the emotional responses occur automatically, they act similar to a precommitment. Essentially, the life form having the emotional response has been preprogrammed to have this response to the situation. This is a precommitment to a course of action, which can help the life form to achieve a better game-theoretic result.

(For example, if we are playing 'chicken', driving our cars toward each other on a road, the best strategy for me to win the game is to visibly precommit to not swerving no matter what. Thus, the optimal strategy would be to remove my steering wheel and throw it out of the car in a way that you can see. Since you now know that I CANNOT turn, you must turn to avoid crashing, and I win the game. This shows how a strong precommitment can be an advantage).

If we think of emotions as precommitments in this way, we can see that they can give us an advantage in our prisoner's dilemma problem. The opponent then knows that they cannot defect against us too much, or else we will become angry and will fight, even though this gives a worse outcome for us as well, it is an emotional response and thus we will do it automatically.

We can see that emotions are thus an aid to fitness, and life forms that evolve them will have a genetic advantage.

Now imagine that the problems that the life forms need to signal about become much more complex. Rather than just signalling about food or mates, for example, they need to signal about group dynamics, concepts like loyalty to a tribe, their commitment to care for young, etc.

Under these circumstances, we can see the need to develop a much greater range of emotions to deal with various situations. We need to display more than just anger over an unequal distribution, or fear, or so on. We also need to have emotional responses of love, loyalty, and so on, and be able to demonstrate/signal these to each other.

This is my understanding of how emotions should evolve among complex life forms that are at least remotely close to humans. Perhaps for extremely different life forms, emotions would not evolve. Or perhaps in pretty much all complex forms of life which are communicating with each other, some form of emotions would evolve, I don't know. I don't see the need for a magical sky-father to have desired emotions to exist, who then guided reality to this point.

Also, I am not sure how the universe-creator would accomplish this. If the degrees of freedom they have are to create the underlying fundamental laws of physics, and the initial conditions of the universe, how would they be able to compute out what sets of laws/initial conditions would lead to the physics which would lead to the chemistry which would lead to the biology which would lead to the life forms which would have these emotions? And why would that be the goal of the universe-creator? In the absence of evidence which would distinguish this hypothesis from others, I don't see why we should privilege this hypothesis to such an extent, when it is pretty clear that the real reason for "believing" in it is actually "I want it to be true". (And also "A strong meme which many people believe in is threatening that I will be harmed if I do not "believe" that this is true, and promising to reward me if I do "believe" it is true).

If anyone can correct my thoughts regarding evolution and emotions, or can point to some studies or scientific theories which either support or refute this post, I would love to read them!

I'm pretty intimidated about posting, since you guys all seem so smart and knowledgeable, but here goes.

So I take the quality of this post along with this statement to indicate LW is not being friendly enough. I think we're currently losing more than we're gaining by being discouraging to newbies and lurkers. One suggestion I have that is probably unrealistic would be integrating the LW chatroom into the main site somehow so that people could get to it via a link from the front page. Chat feels like much less of a commitment than posting to even an open thread.

OP: good post. Don't worry about not being "up to snuff."

I think you are over-optimistic about human goodness. If you had to deconvert at all it is possible you are from a culture where Christian morals still go strong amongst atheists. (Comparison: I do not remember any family members with a personal belief, I do remember some great-grandmas who went to church because it was a social expectation, but I think they never really felt entitled to form a personal belief or deny it, it was more obedience in observation than faith.) These kinds of habits don't die too quickly, in fact they can take centuries - there is the hypothesis that the individualism of capitalism came from the Protestant focus on individual salvation.

My point is that this "goodness" is probably more culturally focused than genetic. While it may be possible that if people are really careful they can keep it on and on within an atheistic culture forever, it can break down pretty easily. Christianity tends to push a certain universalism - without that, if no effort is made to stop it, things probably regress to the tribal level. We cannot really maintain universalism without effort - it can be an atheist effort, but it must be a very conscious one.

As my life experience is the opposite - to me religious faith is really exotic - it seems to me that the difference is that religious folks and perhaps post-religious atheists for a generation or two keep moral things real - talk about right and wrong as if it was something as tangible as money. But in my experience it washes out after a few generations and then only money, power, status stay as real things, because they receive social feedback but right and wrong doesn't.

To put it differently - religions form communities. Atheists often just hang out. So there is a tendency to form looser, not so tightly knit social interactions. In a tight community, right and wrong gets feedback, people judge each other. When interaction becomes looser, it is more like why give a damn what some random guy thinks about what I did t was right or wrong? But things like power, status, money still work even in loose interactions, so people become more machiavellian. At least that is my experience. I am not claiming this universalistic goodness cannot be maintained in atheistic cultures, I am just claiming it requires a special, conscious effort, it does not flow from human nature.

I also think you typically get this "goodness" culture if you participate in a culture who thinks of themselves as high-status winners, on an international comparison. Sharing is a way to show this status, this surplus. It requires a certain lack of bitterness. If you feel like your group was maltreated by greater powers, or invaders etc. you will probably stick to the group. Thus sharing still happens in less winner cultures but more on a personal level, family, friends, not with strangers.

This over-optimism about goodness is a typical feature of LW and the Rationality book, so I guess you will feel more at home here than I do. To me it comes accross as mistaking the culture of the US as human nature.

I have not formulated this exactly, but I think there is such a thing as a "winner bias". It is very easy for someone from the Silicon Valley to think the behaviors there are universal, precisely because being powerful and succesful gives on the "privilege" to ignore everything you don't like to see. The most extreme form is a dictator thinking everybody agrees because nobody dares not to, but it also exists in a moderate form, that the voices of more succesful people and cultures being louder, hence coming accross as more popular, more universal unless you know the alternatives first-hand. However they are pretty sure not universal - if they were the whole world would be as succesful as SV. Well, or at least closer.

For example, a typical "winner bias" may be reading interviews with succesful CEOs and thinking this is how all CEOs think. No - but the mediocre ones don't get interviewed. So it is more of an availability heuristic. The availability heuristic forms a winner bias making first-worlders think everybody thinks like first-worlders, because voices that are not propped up by success are not heard accross oceans. The other way around is not true, of course.

However I think this "winner bias" is more than just an availability heuristic. Probably it has also something to do with not having egos hurt from other groups having higher status.

Good post. I think you are thinking about morality correctly, and I share your feelings about the sentiments behind virtue ethics and consequentialism not being particularly dissimilar or totally incompatible.

Um... so my high school Calculus teacher, who is lots, lots smarter than I am, thinks "emotion" is evidence of intelligent design. I thought this was just a "god of the gaps" thing, but maybe it is really the simplest explanation. I think most people here have ruled out an omnipotent, omni-benevolent God... but maybe life on earth as we know it is really just an alien-child's abandoned science fair project or something.

So: I'm noting your de-conversion story cites emotional reasons and thoughts about morality, rather than epistemic parsimony (the idea that simpler explanations are more likely). Personally, I see this as a "wrong reason" to de-convert.

You can't start out thinking about what is good, and arrive at what is factual. The universe doesn't care about what we think is good. Reality can be messed up and weird, there's no rule against it, so discovering that some of the logical implications of a belief are messed up and weird morally does not mean that belief is false.

And you do allude to this, in this quoted paragraph. You've basically said, "okay, maybe we don't have an omni-benevolent God, maybe reality is messed up and weird, an abandoned science project".

But while a realization that religious explanations are morally and emotionally unsatisfying, followed by a realization that reality is allowed to be morally and emotionally unsatisfying might lead to superficially rational-ish beliefs by removing religious impediments to clear thinking, this is not the same thing as matter-of-factly concluding "religious explanations are false because they're simply too complicated to be true" without even touching upon emotions and morals.

maybe it is really the simplest explanation

The shortcut to refute that is "but why did the alien god want to do such a science project? That just brings us back to the same question. In positing another conscious being, we haven't added anything to our explanation of the preferences of conscious beings."

Here's the thing: Gods (and conscious beings in general) are very complicated. People seem simpler because we have mental shortcuts to model people, we evolved to deal with people, all our lives people have been doing stuff. But when you step back outside of that, you see that "a conscious being did it" is actually a much more complicated explanation than a five-thousand page essay detailing how a complex phenomenon arose from chemical soup. Conscious beings are really complicated and you can't invoke them without introducing a whole bunch of complexity concerning how they are structured into your hyopthesis. And that's the right reason to deconvert, or to change one's beliefs about reality. The simplicity of a logically consistent explanation should increase your estimate of its likelihood of it being correct. The moral niceness should have no baring.

TL:DR - parsimony + the realization that humans suffer from a sort of "illusion" that consciousness is fundamentally simple = deconversion for epistemically correct reasons. Not ethical or hedonistic considerations.

And I think that coming more fully into that realization might help with the whole "I'm still not very satisfied with the idea of something being an end-in-itself" problem. It shouldn't help, because preferences are preferred regardless of how they are created, whether by god or biochemical soup, but I think it does anyway, because when you intuitively know you've hit the logical bottom as far as justifications the "dissatisfied" feeling goes away.

(I'm guessing you know all of this at some level and are mostly kidding with the alien science project hypothesis - perhaps I'm explaining something that doesn't really need to be explained for you at this point. I just thought, given that morality might still be implicitly tangled up in god within your psyche, maybe thinking about parsimony explicitly when thinking about this question will help.)

We want to do things that make ourselves happy, and we want to do things that make others happy.

One way to test whether we all want to do things that make others happy is to read a book or two. Try "Human Smoke" by Nicholson Baker, for instance. Another test would be to spend part of a day in prison or a mental hospital. But the most direct means I found to disabuse myself of the idea we all want to do things that make others happy is to meet more people. Having met more people, I am now more appreciative of the not-all people who not-all of the time want to be happy and see happiness. And I get made less not-happy because I no longer think everyone is terminally trying to make me happy.

It could not be less wrong that all hearts are as your heart.

I don't have anything to add to the discussion, but in the interest of being phatic I just want to say that this is a great introductory post -- welcome to LessWrong!

Part 2

One ultimate psychological motivation can trump even goodness, and that's the second terminal virtue: personal happiness.

If goodness was a terminal virtue, then how could it ever be trumped by anything? Actually, I think there's an answer to this. To me, being a terminal virtue seems to mean that you value it regardless of whether it leads to anything else. Contrast this with "I value X only to the extent that it leads to Y". But if you have more than one terminal virtue, it seems to follow that you'd have to choose which one you value more, and thus one can trump another. I'd address these points.

Anyway, so are you saying that the drive for happiness trumps that of goodness? In most people? If so, to be clear, is it your opinion that happiness and goodness really are terminal goals/virtues of people, or are you just saying that "They are terminal virtues, but in cases where you have to choose, I think happiness trumps goodness"?

We usually want what makes us happy. I want what makes me happy. Spending time with family makes me happy. Playing board games makes me happy. Going hiking makes me happy. Winning races makes me happy. Being open-minded makes me happy. Hearing praise makes me happy. Learning new things makes me happy. Thinking strategically makes me happy. Playing touch football with friends makes me happy. Sharing ideas makes me happy. Feeling free makes me happy. Adventure makes me happy. Even divulging personal information makes me happy.

1) You are too cool!

2) From a literary perspective, that's a great job of illustrating with example.

Happiness and goodness might be subconsciously motivating them to choose this instrumental goal. Few people can introspect well enough to determine what's truly motivating them.

Indeed. I think belief in belief would be a great thing to bring up here. Furthermore, I think that explaining it, not just bringing it up, would be a good idea. Ie. a religious person might claim that he wants to become Christ-like even if it meant certain drops in happiness and goodness over the long term. But he may actually act differently, and if he does, then his actual drives oppose what he claims his drives are.

So anytime a Christian does anything but pray for others, do faith-strengthening activities, spread the gospel, or earn money to donate to missionaries, he is anticipating as if God/hell doesn't exist.

Or perhaps willfully disobeying Him? Which actually seems rather likely to me, because most religious people seem to not follow the instructions with 100% comprehensiveness. As someone raised as a reform Jew, I'm all too aware of this, and always wondered how you could pick and choose what instructions you follow. Perhaps more religious people are different, but my impression was that they follow more like 80-90% of the instructions.

Imagine how many deconversions we would see if it were suddenly sinful to play football, watch TV with your family, or splurge on tasty restaurant meals.

Or maybe we'd just see some interesting new rationalizations! I get your point though.

Basically everyone who says this believes "God wants what's best for us, even when we don't understand it."

I'm not sure what you mean by "best for us" here. Ie. do people believe that God wants happiness for them, goodness for society, or both? (And a new question just came to me - what does God think of animal rights?)

Becoming happy [section]

Your claim in this section seems to be that the terminal virtue of happiness trumps that of goodness (usually?). To really argue this, I think you'd need a lot more evidence.

But given that this is just a section of a larger article, you have limited space. Perhaps a solid intuitive argument could be made in that space, but I didn't find your examples to be intuitively general enough. Ie. if you gave examples that made me think, "Oh yeah, we do things like that in sooooo many different situations", then I would have been more convinced by your claim.

Whatever that stuff is, is what accounts for individual variance in which virtues are pursued.

My strong consequentialist instincts may be giving me a particularly hard time here... but I would specify that you're referring to instrumental virtues. When I think "virtue", I just instinctively think "terminal", and thus I had to reread this a few times before understanding it.

Also worth noting is the individual variance in the extent to which an individual is consciously motivated by happiness vs. goodness. If you look at the preference ratios between the two values, sociopaths are found at one end of the spectrum; extreme altruists, the other. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

We talked for a while about preference ratios and altruism ratios, so I know what you mean, but I don't think you explained it thoroughly enough.

Preference ratio := how much I care about me : how much I care about person X

Altruism ratio := "I act altruistically because it will lead to goodness" : "I act altruistically because it will lead to my happiness"

I think that these are two fantastic terms, and that they should be introduced into the "vocabulary of morality".

For most people, the only true terminal values are happiness and goodness.

I think what you meant is that for most people, their only terminal values are happiness and goodness. Terminal values belong to a person. Using the word "the" makes it sound like it's some sort of inherent property of the universe (to me at least).

And I'm still not very satisfied with the idea of something being an end-in-itself: [section]

Nicely done!

Why should we be controlled by emotions that originated through random chance?

Wrong question. It's not a matter of whether they should control us. It's a fact that they do.

Exactly! Not many people seem to understand this.

Um... so my high school Calculus teacher, who is lots, lots smarter than I am, thinks "emotion" is evidence of intelligent design. I thought this was just a "god of the gaps" thing, but maybe it is really the simplest explanation. I think most people here have ruled out an omnipotent, omni-benevolent God... but maybe life on earth as we know it is really just an alien-child's abandoned science fair project or something.

The former two lines felt like such a great place to end :(

Why bring up the possibility of intelligent design here? You already mention the alien-god of evolution which implies that there is no intelligent design (I think; I just read the wiki article for the first time quickly). Regardless, the origin of the universe/emotions doesn't seem too relevant and felt like an awkward ending to me.

In short, it was the first time I've had a conversation with a fellow "rationalist" and it was one of the coolest experiences I've ever had in my life.

Likewise!! On both counts.

For the record, I went really hard on you here. I would say "don't take it personally", but I know that you won't ;)

Part 1

This is probably the first "philosophical" thought I've had in my life

Haha, good one. Humor is often a good way to open :)

happy

I assume you mean "desirability of mind-state". People associate the word "happy" with a lot of different things, so I think it's worth giving some sort of operational definition (could probably be informal though).

So I suspect a certain commonality among human beings in that we all actually share the same terminal values, or terminal virtues.

I think a quick primer on consequentialism vs. virtue ethics would be appropriate. a) Some people might not know the difference. b) It's a key part of what you're writing about and so a refresher feels like it'd be useful.

You use the phrase "terminal virtues" without first defining it. I don't think it's an "official" term, and I don't think it "has enough behind it" where people could infer what it means.

I think you should more clearly distinguish between what's a question for the social sciences, and what's a question for philosophy.

Social sciences:

1) Do people claim to be consequentialists, or virtue ethicists?

2) Do people act like consequentialists, or virtue ethicists? Ie. what would the decisions they make imply about their beliefs?

3) What are the fundamental things that drive/motivate people? Can it always be traced back to happiness or goodness (as you define them)? Or are there things that drive people independent of happiness and goodness? Example: say that someone claims to value truth. Would they tell the truth if they knew for a fact that it would lead to less happiness and goodness in the long-run?

One of the key points you seem to be making is that as far as 3) goes, for the overwhelming majority of people, their drives/motives can be traced to happiness or goodness. But what does it mean for a drive to be traced to something? Well, my thought is that drives depend on what we truly care about. We may have a drive for X, but if we only care about X to the extent that it leads to Y, then Y is what we truly care about, and I predict that the drive for X will only be as strong as the expectation that X -> Y (although I'm sure the relationship isn't perfectly linear; humans are weird).

However, this is a question for the social sciences. The way to figure it out would be to study it scientifically. Ie. by observing how people act and feel in different situations. In particular, since it involves people, the domain would be one of the social sciences.

Philosophy:

1) Does anything have "intrinsic value"?

2) What does having "intrinsic value" even mean exactly? How would the world look if things had intrinsic value? How would it look if things didn't have intrinsic value?

3) What about morality? What does it mean for something to be moral/good? How do these rules get determined?

My stance is that a) the words I mention above are hard to use because they don't have precise and commonly accepted definitions, and b) terminal goals are completely arbitrary. Ie. you can't say that killing people is a bad terminal goal. You can only say that "killing people is bad if... you want to promote a sane and happy world. (Instrumental) rationality is about being good at achieving our ends. But it doesn't help us pick our ends.

I don't want to believe this though. I've been conditioned to feel like ends are good/bad, despite my understanding. And I've been conditioned to seek purpose, ie. to find and seek "good" ends. Because of the way I've been conditioned, I don't like believing that goals are completely arbitrary, but unfortunately it's the view that makes the most sense to my by very large margins.

Often, but not always, these two desires go hand-in-hand.

I don't think it's completely clear what this means. I think you mean "doing good tends to also make us happy". You do end up saying this, but I think you say it two sentences too late. Ie. I'd say "doing good tends to also make us happy" before using the hand-in-hand phrase, and before talking about the "components" of happiness (I'd use the word determinants, which is a bit of a nitpick).

psychological motivators

I have a feeling that this isn't the right term. Regardless, I'd explain what you mean by it.

handing out money through personal-happiness-optimizing random acts of kindness

Aka warm fuzzies.

As rational human beings, we occasionally will consciously choose to inefficiently optimize our personal happiness for the sake of others.

Very important point: If you're claiming that doing so is rational, then one of two things must be the case:

1) You alter your claim to say that it's rational... presuming a terminal value of goodness.

2) You argue that a terminal value of goodness is rational.

As I read, I couldn't help but think that virtue ethics and consequentialism are not really so different at heart.

Another very important point: distinguish theory from practice.

As I understand it:

• In theory, they're complete opposites. A virtue ethicist would say, "X is just inherently virtuous. It doesn't matter what the consequences are." A consequentialist would say that it does depend on the consequences. Someone might say, "But consequentialists have to choose terminal values don't they?" My response, "Yes, but they admit that this is an arbitrary decision. They don't claim that these terminal values are virtuous (as I understand it)."
• In practice, virtue ethicists often pursue things to achieve the end of being virtuous, and their virtues are often very very similar to the terminal values of consequentialists. At the end of the day, their virtues are pretty much just happiness and goodness. And at the end of the day, these are often the terminal values that consequentialists choose. I think that this is the point that you were making. And I thank you for making it, because I didn't really pay much attention to that fact. My overly literal and reductionist approach failed to lead me to notice how important the practical outcome is. Furthermore, I'm not sure how true this is, but it seems that in practice, a lot of consequentialists believe that their terminal goals do posses inherent virtue, in which case the lines do get really fuzzy between consequentialism and virtue ethicism.

Why did the alien-god give us emotions?

The alien-god does not act rationally.... The origin of emotion ultimately seems like the result of random chance.

Emotions are likely as useless as other things the alien-god gave us, things like eyes and livers and kidneys and sex-drives and fight-or-flight responses.

Emotions appear to drive social cooperation at least between mammals. Human partnership with dogs is mediated and cemented by emotions, I think only someone who has spent no time with dogs could disagree with this observation. Emotions and their expressions are common enough between humans and dogs that they probably exist across, at least, a broad swath of mammals.

Just two examples of what emotions get us: 1) pair-bonding leading to effective partnership at raising our extremely needy young, and 2) a nearly irresistibly powerful impetus to get the hell away from scary animals, especially if they surprise us at night. Pretty clearly, both of these are quite useful to our survival and so these emotions would have been developed by natural selection for fitness, just as the kidney's ability to clean blood and they eye's ability to focus would have been.