Conclusion on feelings:

Everything is a feeling. Feelings allow us to guess what our true value system might wan’t us to do. Feelings are a result of heuristics and biases. Feelings are limited in their ability to reproduce reality.

We partially know where feelings are really bad at representing the value system, such as when feelings is expected to work with large numbers; or when the value is different for each scenario which has the same impact. For example, you see a person about to commit suicide, you hear about deaths of 100’s of kids in Africa due to a simple lack of nets, you see a person is going to die if he does not have funding to support his health condition. The impact for all situations is that people are going to die, yet the feelings are not as strong in each of the cases to push us to action.

Going round and round

I know am going round and round. I can’t believe the number of times I have tried to iterate this. Here we go another time!

Assumption: suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad -Peter Singer in Famine Affluence and Action

No contest

if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.

No contest.

if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.

Well. Vague.

Everytime I go in deeper I do not have an answer. I do not have an answer to, “ Does my value system want me to do everything within and beyond my power to help people, or does it wan’t me to do some random thing or does it not wan’t me to do just anything”

I, like many people tear up at the sight of pain. There are enough people in pain. By giving up say buying a TV, buying a house, or buying new clothes, buying shoes, taking a vacation to maldives, buying your girlfriend amazing jewelry, buying your parents and relatives and friends gifts, buying an xbox, buying shades, buying a heavily modified bike, we can do some of our part to those who do not have basic necessities such as food, shelter and medical care. But yet, we don’t do so, as we don’t feel like it a little later, after we see a video of those people whose plight is so bad that if we don’t act, for sure they are going to die.

And so we started investigating how to determine the true value system. Which is it that the brain wants? Does it wan’t us to go all the way, or does it want us not to go all the way? Whenever I say brain, whenever I say “my value system”, I am talking about me and what I want, it appears.

Tearing up vs not

I read this post on facebook on the page called Humans of Bombay, about an acid attack victim who got blind as a result, and still has a child to raise. Did I mention she is poor too, her father doing his best to take care of her. Just like several other people, I tear up like anything while reading the story. So much pain, so very well captured by the post. Just like several other people I did nothing. Although some nice people helped her fundraise to the extent needed, there are several other people just like her or even worse than here in condition who need this help too, and what about them?

Not on Humans of Bombay, no right to fundraise

This man saved 669 children during the holocaust. He didn’t tell his wife about it. 50 years later, she found out that he had a book where he kept account of all of this. A very sweet event was held for him and he was surprised by the entire audience being the kids he saved. He teared. I tore up and so did so many others who watched the video. It felt amazing to see that he was there for so many young innocent children.

An old man named mohammed adopts only terminally ill children and takes care of them. He knows they are going to die soon and need a lot of care that goes against money, sleep, time to have fun, etc… And yet, he continues to do that having lost 10 lives in his house. Read the article, the details, see the video, you will tear up AF.

Some clash between people and the government in South Sudan, several people migrating from South Sudan and going to Uganda. 40,000 refuges are in malaria prone zone, there is lack of food, 10 children die a day, all these people walked for several weeks without food, flies mounting small young helpless children. Tore up the most, watching the video.

Just now when I think about the same Sudan video, I don’t tear up at all. As I think about mohammed who helps terminally ill children, I don’t tear up at all. The same with the other examples. I know several million people are dying all around the fucking world. I don’t tear up. So many incurable diseases, so much pain, so what?

Based on how the information of a dieing man reaches us, we have different intensities of emotions.

Emotional stimulation

When I get emotionally stimulated, I say to myself so many things. “This is what I want to do in life”, “There are so many important things to focus on and yet I find myself thinking about some of the most silliest of social games played”, “A life time wont be enough to solve these problems, and I have got to become a millionaire atleast”, “Distance doesn’t matter, your neighboring village is burning like hell, and here you are thinking about leggings, ass and other shit”. But I am not emotionally stimulated always, and I don’t know if I can trust the emotional stimulation to be reflecting the true value system.

Earlier I seem to have pointed to ‘situations having high emotional arousal’, as the situations where we can gauge the true response of people. I didn’t go into detail of it. But now…

Lets take an example for which the impact is stoppable death. So someone is about to die. They could die as a result of cancer or other deadly diseases, they could be committing suicide 3 miles away, they could die because someone is about to kill them and you are the only one around, or they could die out of starvation at an accessible location a few thousand miles away. In some cases I hear about deaths, in some cases I see videos, and in others I am present in the situation to act.

All the situations have quite similar impacts. The stoppable death of an unknown life. If the impact is the same in all cases, why is the emotional stimulation different. Heuristics and Biases, the way we attempt to see reality with, might be the reason. Visual stimulation creates a much higher emotional arousal than hearing about someone dying for example. When I see a baby is drowning, I am sure to take immediate action, but when I hear about 10 children dying in Sudan every single day due to lack of basic amenities, I am like, “Well Okay.” I feel very strongly about the emotional arousal and subsequent response in the case of the drowning baby and as stated earlier is accepted to be beyond right. I look to my solution in my head to judge the last sentence and it passes with flying colors.

Whats important to us is a drowning baby for sure! A drowning baby creates high emotional stimulation. High emotional stimulation is also found in the many examples quoted in the ‘Tearing up’ section. All these examples from the ‘tearing up’ section & the drowning baby seem to be primarily visually stimulated. (When a human life is involved and we happen to see it in a video format or in plain sight, there seems to be high emotional stimulation, especially when we are able to observe their pain and there is no dearth of such things).

As seen earlier in the ‘tearing up’ section, Visual stimulation creates much higher emotional stimulation than other forms. It seems that the emotional stimulation is the communication to us from our brain regarding what it wants especially when a life is involved (as observed in the drowning baby’s case). I am not yet saying that all high emotional stimulation directly relates to what we want. In conclusion, Visually stimulated tasks with high emotional stimulation involving a life seem to provide information on what we want as human beings.

Looking at the impact from these Visually Stimulated scenarios involving a life and high emotional stimulation, we attempt to extrapolate the data to other scenarios with similar impact that involve a life and are not visually stimulated and hence give us reduced emotional stimulation. It can be argued that whether visually stimulated or not, the impact should ultimately decide what action we should take, as we know from before that the brain is limited in its capabilities to deliver reality word for word, to us. This would mean that whether we feel or not, for all scenarios in the ‘Tearing up’ section we should give it the same action. When there are 4 scenarios with the same impact (loss off an unknown life) but different emotional stimulation, it appears that we should take the emotional response for the visually stimulated case, as the one that shows us the importance of an impact.

There are a couple of aspects that need to be dealt with here on. Namely, what is the action we are expected to take, can we also extrapolate the action just like we extrapolate the emotional stimulation? What does it mean to us that the ‘time of availability of emotional stimulation is for a small period’, for a given scenario as observed in the ‘tearing up’ section?

Time of feeling

I guess it is easy to imagine that the time of feeling is small owing to how our brain is. Heuristics work on availability, when other things are “available” it is easier for it to move on. I don’t know why. Despite the fact that I cry for a minute, the next minute I am almost back to normal. It has short term emotional memory. I guess this part needs to be looked at a little more deeply and clearly. More on the next post.

Action

Having seen that we can extrapolate the importance of a life, from visually stimulated tasks, we ask ourselves, what about the action then?

It is no doubt the action that needs to be taken is to save the baby from drowning. If there are 4 scenarios, that have different emotional responses owing to the fact that some are visually stimulated and some are not, and with the same impact ; if the emotional response/ importance of the scenario can be assumed to be the same for all 4 scenarios, then why should the action be any different?

Partial Summary

  • Important to us = baby drowning
  • Baby drowning => high emotional stimulation
  • High Emotional stimulation also found as in the “Tearing up section”
  • “tearing up section” primarily talks about visually stimulated tasks

  • Visual stimulation tasks appear with high emotional stimulation involving a life

  • Irrespective of scenario, if the impact is the same (death of an unknown life), then all scenarios are equal
  • All scenarios with same impact should be treated as having the emotional response from visually stimulated scenario.