The importance of life

Value of a life seems important to us. We cry at the loss of our loved one, We tear up seeing others in pain, We feel good when we help others etc… In this section we attempt to investigate, how important is it to us and what all we would give up for it.

As discussed in earlier posts, 2 Israeli scientists, observed that people are willing to donate money for the costs of a very expensive treatment, more for an individual rather than for a group of 8. How can it be better to have 1 extra happy child in this world, while it might be somehow worse to have 8 more happy children? How can the value of one child be reduced to such an extent because there are 7 other children who need to be saved? In another study, The willingness to pay is the same whether we want to save 1k birds or 10k birds. Looking at this and the fact the brain never appears to understand large numbers we conclude that there is a high chance that the brain is blatantly making a mistake. We concluded earlier that this brain cannot but do arithmetic subconsciously. So now we are left with the option of understanding what the brain might want. But we don’t know how to do it.

Well Eleizer says that we need to ‘shut up and multiply’, the value we might get from saving one life. If one life is worth X, then 2 lives should be worth 2*X. Every life shall be worth the same, because there is no reason to discriminate one life from another. Unless of course there is “moral” reason to say that blacks are worth 0.5X (which there isn’t), or that disabled men are worth much less than normal men, then essentially one life is worth X and n lives worth nX(!). But the brain does not scale feelings based on the number of lives saved. You don’t understand the meaning of saving 1k lives or 10k lives. You don’t feel much much happier having saved 10k lives.

The value of every successive life needn’t be the same. It could very well be possible that the first life is more valuable than the second one; and so on, with every successive life we eventually plateau at large numbers of n. Isn’t this what we observe in the 1k-10k-birds study? It’s not relevant what we observed in the 1k-10k-birds study, as we have concluded that the brain can’t successfully understand large numbers. Nevertheless, the hypothesis is worth considering. In real life though, if I see a person dying and I just saved him, I can’t imagine the scenario being any different when I see another person dying just after that. Looking at examples of natural disasters, I have seen videos over videos where people work round the clock, to save as many people as they can. This suggests that the total value gained is at a peak. It doesn’t offer any information as to the value of successive lives. Nevertheless, people being saved has been maximized in each of the cases and these people chose to save lives instead of other things. Look at this for example, where a doctor works round the clock to save people, goes out of the way to stay awake overnight and saves many many young helpless children. It appears to me at this point that the information about value of each successive life is irrelavant. What is the action I hope to see when I see two people dying, or many people dying? I hope to see people running around to save as many lives as they can. That conclusion is important for me.

I believe that I am justified in looking at the doctor in this example as our potential role in society. Feelings work only in certain scenarios. For example, when something happens around us, the emotional arousal is much higher, than in other cases. We have seen earlier that the emotional arousal for an event happening in a closed sealed room is 0, as we don’t see it. There are things that we would have emotional arousal to, and things that we wouldn’t have emotional arousal to, despite the fact that both lead to the same outcome. Someone telling us that someone is dying 20 km away, and you seeing a video of someone dying 20km away, has different emotional arousal, while both are events of stoppable death of someone. Hence we look at the doctor to provide us data regarding our potential role in the society, by not looking in scenarios where in we know feelings will fail.

Picture this, several crying mothers - some having lost their babies, - panic stricken hospital workers not knowing what to do, the imminent danger of many more children loosing their lives, and the company supposed to deliver oxygen cylinders threatening to deliver oxygen cylinders only when the old dues are paid. There were many other doctors, in the same hospital, but only one had the balls while others gave up (according to the story atleast). There were many in the world, but it took Gandhi to change the scenario in India, while the Britishers were immorally ruling over India. Basically, shouldn’t emotional arousal be the same for everybody, who was in the situation? Why didn’t everyone in the scenario act? I am afraid of naively analyzing the situation but anyways here goes.

There are always others in the same scenario, why didn’t they act? We look at a scenario where in there is high emotional arousal, and then we see that not everyone with that arousal does that. In fact very few people act on it as observed in the doctors case as well as with getting independence from Britain rule of India, by Gandhi. Firstly, feeling and action are slightly two different things. Also, capability, belief in oneself, leadership could be one thing that differentiates one from the other. Road to action, takes something more than feelings. The entire world reacts to the article about the doctor. It says this is such an amazing thing. I can’t imagine anyone in this world who condemns the action of the doctor. (!) The situation with Gandhi seems to be that he was much more affected by the condition of the country, he traveled around the country to see reality, and he seemed to have the resolve necessary, to fight evil.

The only question to myself is that I am afraid if I present this to a committee they are probably going to laugh at my reasoning which is purely based on coming up with excuses to support the outcome that I wan’t.

And could there be a case when one life is worth more than the other? For example, we have this innate thing I think, where we think that saving a child and mother is much more important, dating back to the days when this heuristic made sense (stone age).(!) But for now, for the sake of simplicity, we are going to keep the variables at a minimum. We are not going to consider this. In conclusion, Emotional arousal in simple cases that requires minimum calculation shows us what we might want against other things that we might seemingly want. Life is really valuable.

Conclusion 1:

Everything is a feeling. Feelings are limited in their application. We know feelings make mistakes in some cases, especially those involving calculations, as a result of using hueristics and biases. So we should avoid those cases completely. So we take “simple” examples where the emotional arousal is high, with the belief of avoiding errors due to hueristics, in the hope that it represents our true value system. We hope to uncover more of it, one simple problem at a time.

There are many unanswered questions such as:

  • What is the value of one life as compared to other things?
  • Does it multiply as nX, where n is the number of lives saved and X the value of each life.
  • Can the value of each life be different? What would that mean?
  • Verify the hypothesis:The true value system is visible in “simple” cases where we know the hueristics and biases to not be wrong. This is typically the case where we are connected with the problem i.e, the emotional arousal is high, and the calculations are at an all time low.
  • Why don’t others in the same situation behave differently?

So what don’t you forbid and what do you!

  • Feelings suck at calculations. Anything involving calculations such as comparing numbers >1, shall be avoided

I say numbers greater than 1 as there is the study by Israeli scientists, I often keep quoting in these last few essays, where the difference between 1 and 8 was not clear to many subjects part of the study.

  • Feelings are more pronounced when visual stimulated, rather than audible stimulation. So all events shall happen in sight, hearing about an event is not as distress causing.

  • with money I don’t really know when to trust feelings. I am ready to donate right now 300 bucks a month. 100 over that, dips into my vacation money or my loan money. Which I don’t wan’t to give up at any cost. What is this 300 where did it come from, why is it a round number. I suspect quite some biases working here to make me think like so.

Planning…

This faulty system is the only thing we have. We also have Science, Bayes, computers, writing, etcetera, to help us determine the True value system. We know from before that if we go by only the feelings, we are stuck with circular preferences, if we let go of feelings completely then we are but an empty rock. So we seem to have an option where we look at our intuitions and then from there, see if it makes sense, extrapolate it and so on.

We know places where the feelings are quite wrong. So we should attempt to strip a problem down to its very basics or keep the questions we put forth to our brain simple, such that we stay away from the regions of errors.

  • We could attempt to determine the value of a single event and then compare that with the value of other events. As a hypothetical situation, if we are able to determine that the value of life is 10$ to us and that if the value of saving a bird is 20$, then it might be clear what needs to be done.

  • Or we could compare two events straight up and see which wins in a simplistic battle. For example, we could attempt something like asking us, what we would do in a particular situation, where there is a possibility of saving a life as opposed to say having sex. Attempt to understand the value system from different angles, and of course question every possible outcome from the above action.

I see myself leaning to the latter and let the games begin…

Comparing

Let’s go for the example, that we have always talked about in the past.

  1. Let’s say there is an ice cream truck on your left and a man is about to shoot himself to your right, whom you can attempt to save without any damage to you physically.

What would you do? It seems rather obvious. There seems to be no question in my mind. I would do what I can to save the man’s life.

Corollary:

  • If I substituted the ice cream truck with one of the most hyped pleasurable activities I can imagine such as sex, it appears to me that I should still want to save the life.

  • Whether the person is close by or not, whether you can see/hear the person or not, a life in distress is more valuable to us when compared to other pleasurable activities.

Extension Money can buy us several pleasurable activities such as food, luxury, women etc… If all I do with money is to buy pleasurable activity, and if all pleasurable activity is meaningless in the face of a distressed life, then does it mean that all my money is worth a life?

When I have limited money, I guess I can figure out a way on how to spend my money on different lives.

  1. Let’s say there are 100 million icecream trucks on your left and a man is about to shoot himself to your right, whom you can attempt to save without any damage to you physically?

What would you do? Wait a minute but I do not understand large numbers right! So I should skip this right? Lets answer it anyways. I feel that no matter what pleasurable activities I have and in any number, they will mean nothing to me, in the face of the death of a human being. But if its about money, then the story might be different. I had no hesitation when I made the statement about pleasurable activities meaning nothing. But when I talk about money I just can’t say things without hesitation. How much is a life worth to me? Forget what i can do with the money or how many more lives I can save! Is a life important to me as much as the house I own?

Any amount of pleasurable activity cannot allow the killing of a life, then if I would be ready to invest about a 100 euros a month when I have a girlfriend, I should be more than ready to invest 100 euros/ month in a life. Because people are dying and I seem to choose the dying man instead of pleasurable activities.

Naive reasoning

1) For example, if you look at the above we see that I assume so many things, I assume the emotional arousal to be representative of the value system, what is the logic?

2) Willingness to pay need not be reality.

3) I am afraid I am going in circles. Either I am a caveman or I find myself wanting to be an empty rock.