Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

Today, we have a special guest.

William:

Hi, it's me.

Robin:

And who are you?

William:

I am William Eliot. I have been helping Robin and Agnes with the podcast since the start. We have been improving sound quality and helping with the distribution as well.

Robin:

And we very grateful, so grateful that you are visiting with us and we have decided to let you choose the topic of this podcast.

William:

Yeah, very generously you've invited me out and I'm very happy to be here. It's exciting to be in Washington, D. C., which is near where Robin works. And Agnes is also visiting, so all three of us are in Agnes's Airbnb at the moment.

Robin:

Well, it's exciting conditional in your existing but that's going to be the question for us right now.

William:

This is the question of the day. So, I'm very interested in this whole concept of existence versus nonexistence. I think that's kind of weird biases, anthropic one is the most obvious one or the fact that you exist. But I wonder if there's a way of talking about existence or marking of whether existence has value outside of the fact that we are experiences of existence.

Robin:

Would it help to comment on preferences over existence, which isn't quite the same as value but to show us that people have choices about their future existence at least. So they can choose how long to live and we might think they are composed of many parts like a person in a moment is one of their parts and they are this combination of all their person moments. And some people choose to have more person moments and they make tradeoffs based on in some of those person moments, they might think, “Oh, that's a pretty bad one. I guess I wouldn't want that to happen.” So like somebody about to suffer a very painful death might choose to make the death happen earlier just to cut off that whole painful part. Right? But somebody who expects a healthy life, they would regret losing those – dying earlier than they planned and aren't – don't those count as preferences over existence?

William:

They seem to, just that in the description that you gave right there. I think that – given that every time stamp of existence, we can choose whether to continue existing roughly because suicide is an option that's available to everybody on earth, and that implies that you therefore choose to continue to exist. So it is quite a common thing that if you think existence is probably negative then you might say to that person, “Why not just …”

Robin:

Why keep going?

William:

Or the alternative. [Laughs]

Robin:

Why not stop?

William:

Yeah, why not stop? Right? So I think it's easy to say that but it's kind of a weird thing which is it's almost like once you're on the boat, it's harder to get off than it is to – it's not as abstract. It's just a binary decision to continue living or not, at least in my experience personally it is.

Robin:

But since we all expect eventually to stop then people make choices about when to stop.

William:

Yeah.

Robin:

So stopping sooner or later and doesn't that suggest that if they try to stop later that they want to continue?

Agnes:

Can I respond to it? I just want to develop Will's thought, which is it's just very well-known that there are these biases like status quo bias or endowment effect or however you want to call it where once you have something, you don't want to let it go.

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

And I think that our attachment to life is like the mega status quo bias. Hold on. And so, I think that just really often actually, people will cling to something even something that is worse for them and it makes them miserable because they just can't imagine letting it go. And it could be a marriage. It could be a job. It could be sort of like the idea of having to stay in academe job or whatever. And I think it could very well be existence. And so, we can't go merely on preferemces. And to your point, Robin, that we all know we are going to die eventually, I don't think that's so obvious. That is, it's not so obvious people have accepted that. I think we are in a massive amount of denial about the fact that we are going to die and we don't really accept it and we don't allow that thought to enter into our conscious existence. And when it does, we are just filled with blank mute terror. And so, I don't think we can use that to say, “Well, we are going to die eventually. We just want it to happen later rather than sooner.” I think it's in fact, we are in denial about it and we cling in a not rational way to the we've always had and none of that is an obvious indication that it's better.

Robin:

I think people throw around these bias arguments way too freely. [Laughs] As author of a blog called Overcoming Bias, there are many psychological review articles that suggest that this endowment effect goes both ways. I think there isn't an average effect one way or the other so in some cases, people may be overly attached, other case, they're underly attached. I also don't think it's obvious that people are in terror, therefore suggests they don't really know if they don't want to die. The most obvious interpretation is they are in terror of dying suggests they don't want to die. Isn't that just the most obvious straightforward interpretation?

Agnes:

Can I read you something from – I read this to you before, Robin, but I'm really happy that I get to read it to you again. This is from an essay by Schopenhauer that's called On the Doctrine of the Suffering of the World. And so I'm just going to read two quotes first. “If suffering is not the first and immediate object of our life then our existence is the most inexpedient and inappropriate thing in the world.” Yeah, that first one. The second quote is, “Whoever wants to test the assertion that pleasure in the world outweighs the pain or at any rate, that the two balance each other should compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of that other.” So Schopenhauer thinks it's just an obvious self-evident fact that life is on balance, incredibly painful like for human beings, for animals. It's just filled with pain and suffering and occasional tiny amounts of pleasure. But the dominant experience of existence is one of pain and suffering. That's his view.

William:

Yeah. I mean going off of this, there is this problem. I know you say you're reluctant to call it a bias but I think this is kind of like how a game theory situation where you're in the game and by being in the game, as in you're existing, you do have this sense that it's not a decision that someone outside of the game is making. It's someone inside of the game. And that I think is subject to the biases such that the ones that Agnes was just talking about, the status quo bias and so on and so forth because it's not as if we are talking about a question of, “I'm God. Do I create William or not?” We are talking about, “OK, William is being created. Does he continue existing or not?” So I guess there's actually – there's kind of before the life is created, should be it made or not? That's kind of question one we have here. And then there's question two here, which relates to the Schopenhauer quote and it's general of a utilitarianism argument is, should you – I guess, should you end life prematurely or how should you deal with the fact that there is suffering in the world? What's the best solution?

Agnes:

And with respect to the – sorry, I forgot what I was going to say. Robin, go ahead.

Robin:

So the relevant fraction of suffering and pleasure is just not directly relevant to the question we are talking about. The question is: do you want to keep going?

Agnes:

Is it worth living?

Robin:

Right. And you could want to keep going even if your life is full of pain. That's a completely coherent stand because it's the alternative isn't pleasure in this case. It's not existing at all and you could just want to keep going. And I still would say, the vast majority of people seem to want to keep going. That is, in most situations, that's what they choose. It seems like the straightforward interpretation is that they would rather have more existence.

Agnes:

Oh, I remember what I wanted to say. One way to test the idea of like suppose you were God, would be instead of looking whether people want to continue their lives where they are likely to, I do think they are likely to be subject to biases. It's similar to do they continue romantic relationships that make them miserable? Right? They just can't imagine getting out of it.

Robin:

And they break them up too soon too.

Agnes:

You can measure it as how many – how much are people choosing to create life, right?

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

Like are people choosing to have kids or not? And you might think, if people choose to have less and less kids, that's just a sign that people value life less than they used to when they have more kids. That will be one way to measure not like – that would be better because you are talking about like existence that you don't – that you are not already implicated in.

Robin:

So there are two questions that are closely related. One is, do you want to keep going? And the second is, do you want to create more life?

William:

Exactly.

Robin:

That is, do you want to have fertility? Do you want to have children basically? They're related in a sense they're both choices to create more existence but one choice is much closer to you in the sense that you are continuing you, say right now, you have a much better sense of what that life would be like.

Agnes:

But you are also got the bias in the one case …

Robin:

I don't – you haven't established that this bias exists. You just have claimed that this bias exists. I don't actually see the evidence for it.

William:

I think that we have to remember that we are – I don't know if there's a word for this, but it's like a biological bias, which is evolution has primed us to “keep going.”

Robin:

That doesn't make it a bias.

William:

It does if we are thinking about a philosophical plane where we are just determining whether existence is a good thing. We are trying to …

Robin:

Why think of evolution's attitude as presumptively wrong? I mean why not think evolution thinks you should exist and that's a good reason to think you should exist?

William:

Because I don't know – because I personally don't go to evolution for guidance of what my morality is.

Robin:

Why not?

Agnes:

This is another argument.

William:

I guess this is kind of the underlying – this is the seed inside the apple maybe is, does evolution provide morals and can you use the fact that it's constantly driving for survival as proof that survival is a good thing regardless of say, pain and pleasure. And I'm undecided. I'm not a philosophy student.

Robin:

I would say, evolution is a good guide for you to guess all aspects of your mind that you aren't directly able to inspect. That is, evolution designed this mind of yours. It's a big complicated object and you can't see all the parts of it but you could use evolution to draw inferences about what's likely to be in the parts you can't see. And yes, evolution has likely designed your mind to make you want to survive and persist. Therefore, you probably want to survive and persist exactly because evolution probably put that there.

William:

And you don't think that's a bias.

Robin:

No.

William:

Why is that any different to say, status quo bias?

Robin:

Pause for a moment. I didn't accept there was a status quo bias if you recall.

William:

I see.

Robin:

Sometimes there's a status quo – I mean sometimes people are bias in that direction, sometimes in the other. The literature I do not think gives an overall bias.

Agnes:

So can I give an example? Suppose there's a kind of animal, let's say, it's a koala. It's so cute. And that animal is sort of if left to its own devices in its natural environment, it's going to go extinct, which we could represent in Robin's terminology as evolution wants the animal to go extinct. It has competitors, whatever. Now, according to you, the moral thing to do then is to let it go extinct because we are following through an evolution's intentions.

Robin:

That wasn't the structure of my argument.

Agnes:

But it seems like that was.

Robin:

No.

Agnes:

That it's a parallel to your own case. Like evolution wants me to keep living so I should. Evolution wants the koala to die.

Robin:

So, I mean part of your question is what do I want? OK? And what you want is in part indicated by all the choices you've ever made. Those are indication of what you want. Part of what you want is also indicated in part by the thoughts in your head that occur when you imagine making a choice one way or another. Is it terror or joy?

William:

Yup.

Robin:

But another thing that is a predictor of what you want is the fact – the process that produced you, which is evolution. So the koala, we would expect evolution to produce the koala to try to survive. That would be our prediction about koalas. But we do not predict that if a species is going extinct that evolution has encoded in that species the desire to go extinct. That is just not plausible evolutionary story.

Agnes:

Right. But it's like encoded in the other species the desire to take up a niche …

Robin:

Right. So if we are trying to predict the koala competitors' minds then that's what we would predict about those minds.

Agnes:

But we would also predict about the whole – like that whole part of the world.

Robin:

But the challenge here was to predict what one person wants, i.e., Will, and I would say evolution is a guidance to help us predict what does Will want in the cases where Will can't just look directly and know what he wants.

William:

It just seems to me that there are so many occasions where we want is not parallel with evolution. So to say that evolution is going to tell us what we want with regards to our existence …

Robin:

Again, I gave you a bunch of different things, all of which were indicators. So you are going to try to combine all the weak indicators you can to make your best guess of what you want. But it's one of the indicators that certainly – it's correlated positively. It's not correlated perfectly.

William:

Sure. OK. So can I ask you? Why do you – I think I can put in the answer but why do you care about – why do you think that evolution does provide a good guide for what decisions to make?

Robin:

The idea would be: you want something. That's the key concept we are trying to infer. That is, you are about to make a choice and one of the choices somehow corresponds better to what you want. And you've made many choices in the past. So it's the same concept basically, reapplied it to a new context like you made a choice before about what you wanted. Now, all the times you make choices, you make it in a noisy environment where there's a lot that can go wrong so you don't perfectly choose well. Right? So one of our explanations for your choices is noises. We expect noise goes into your choices, but we are trying to disentangle what you really want from all the other noise. And so, again, you are a machine created by evolution, a complicated one. And if we can understand the design priorities that went into constructing you, that can give us a hint about the kind of decisions you were designed to make and therefore, about the kind of things you would want. And that's one useful source of information about what you would want in addition to again, the previous choices you've made, the choices of other people who are like you, the feelings you get in your head as you think about making the choice. Those are all clues about what you want and you want to combine all the clues you can to make your best guess about what you want.

Agnes:

I think I understand why you are not scared about the AIs like then singularity, whatever, AI becoming conscious because if the AI were the reason in the way that you just reasoned …

William:

Exactly.

Agnes:

… then it would just do what we want. But the reason people are scared …

Robin:

Well, it would adjust to it.

Agnes:

The reason people are scared is they don't know whether AI is going to start thinking for itself. And that's what all of us are doing. We are thinking for ourselves. We are like, “I don't care what I was designed to do. I now own myself and I now am able to reorient myself towards the good in my own.”

Robin:

You can say those words but you are in fact still executing the program that evolution built inside of you.

Agnes:

I mean I'm going to do that no matter what. I don't have to worry about what evolution wanted. It will just work.

Robin:

Right. But you might say, “You want to produce choices that you would not regret later.” And evolution can be a guide to what you won't regret because evolution produced your regret.

Agnes:

Sex produces many regrets.

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

And that's what evolution designed us to do. So it doesn't seem true that following evolution doesn't lead to regret.

Robin:

Here's a whole different way to think about the subject. So often in society, we think about all of us together trying to sort of have shared responsibilities. That is, if we have the shared infrastructure of say, a government, electricity or whatever, then we should each do our part to make it continue and support it, right? That we have some social responsibility to allow society to continue, right? And that's a responsibility a bit above just what you want. You should help society continue to exist. Now, it's not an overwhelming consideration, right? If you have enough considerations, say, you want to – for some reason, you need to crash your car into a power station, and that will deprive us all for power or something, right? We want you not to do that. We have a bit of a responsibility to avoid that, but not an overwhelm, right? Well, think of then all the generations in sequence that go all the way through time, right? The ball gets handed. Generation passed to generation. And if you drop the ball, all the generations after you lose. You're part of this collective effort where you shouldn't …

Agnes:

Let the team down.

Robin:

Let the team down. Right. So there is this introspection like sometimes like somebody will be out drowning in the ocean and they will make a human chain of people with somebody on the shore holding on to something and one by one they're all holding on each other until they stretched out to the person in the ocean and they get and grab their hand and then pull them in, right? And if you join this human chain, you have a bit of responsibility not to let go of the people next to you. Not only might you be in trouble but like the whole rest of the people out toward the ocean, they might get swept out. And I would say, you have a bit of a responsibility as the result of all the generations that came before you, all of whom continued to exist and passed the ball on. You should …

Agnes:

You should have kids. But you can commit after that.

Robin:

OK.

Agnes:

Then you've done your part.

Robin:

But I am making – that part of it is still, I would say, you have a bit of a responsibility there.

William:

Okay, I have doubts on this as well. I just don't know a life that isn't going to exist where you not to have a child has any value, moral value to you today? Because no one is affected by it not existing except for the rest of society which may have required its presence, that child's presence.

Robin:

I think you're comparing two states of the world, one state where the creatures exist and other state where they don't. You're anchoring on the state where they don't and saying, “That other state is hypothetical, I can ignore it. I can anchor on the state where they exist and say you're other state is hypothetical and say this is the default state.” And with respect to this default state, you're killing them.

William:

So if I say that society is going to continue and that these human will exist, then I think it's more to act in ways which are going to positively influence their lives. So don't drive into the power station. Focus on things which might seem problematic to future existence such as AGI safety for example or a nuclear risk, maybe even something like climate change. I understand focusing on those when you know that those lives are going to exist but you could also take a different strategy, couldn't you? You could say, “No one is to have any more children ever and we are going to fade out fizzle away.” And I wonder if the latter strategy of fizzling away is more or less positive in terms of moral value than the former of letting life continue. And when we make that decision, we've kind of got to forget what's happening right now because that can change in a matter of, I don't know, 150 years.

Robin:

How about think of it this way? In terms of cosmology, we are alone say, probably for the nearest million galaxies, and if you really like the existence of dead stuff with no people with pain, look at all of the galaxies, there's just this one planet out of a million galaxies that has life, why not just allow that one experiment to continue there; must everything be dead? Why don't just allow one of them?

Agnes:

But you think there are aliens.

Robin:

I think – there's one per million galaxies I would say.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

Yes, there are aliens out there but they each are alone per million galaxies. And so, within the million galaxies of each alien species, almost all of it is dead and empty and there's just this one tiny piece of life. And you are saying, “Shouldn't that be dead too?” And I'm going, “Come on. Let there be some life somewhere.” If there is a portfolio benefit here, maybe death is good, maybe life is good. Let there be a little bit of life.

Agnes:

I think that with respect to the – and so I'm sort of with Will in saying that there's something weird about the idea of moral obligations to nonexistent people. And like you said, “Well, Will is anchoring on the case in which they don't exist.” But I don't think that – and you want to anchor on the case in which they do exist. But in the case of which they do exist, you can't make them not exist if we are in that. So it seems to me, we are neither assuming …

Robin:

This is true in the other case too.

Agnes:

Right. We are neither assuming that they do don't exist, right?

Robin:

That's what I mean by anchoring. We are focusing on one case and pairing the other to it as the reference point.

Agnes:

Right. But I think in so far as we are trying to decide what to do, we actually have to view both of the life possibilities.

William:

Agreed.

Agnes:

And I think if there is going to be a rule that says we have to go this way rather than this way, I don't think it can be because you have a moral obligation to those nonexistent people because I don't think you can have a moral obligation to not yet existing people even if they are potentially existing. I think you can have an obligation to them conditional on their existence. So supposing we know there will be people in a hundred years or in a thousand years, we have obligations to keep the environment in a certain way. But the obligation to the nonexistent people who would only exist conditionally on our decision to make them exist is just not obvious that we can have an obligation to them to make them exist. It might still be good to make them exist for other reasons than having an obligation to them. We might just have an obligation to make the world as good as possible. That might be the best world. And so, we have an obligation to bring it about. But I don't – one thing I don't think we have is an obligation to them to bring them about. I don't think that makes any sense. So utilitarian argument still works, just not a deontic argument that you – like you can just think that world and that's sort of what Robin was saying, “Look, the world in which earth has life in it is a better world than in the world in which earth doesn't and you should bring better things about so you should make that come about.” The question then is just whether that's true. But I don't think you have a duty to – it's not like the human chain case where the people are already there and they're going to die. And so, I think that that's really …

Robin:

I could say I was always destined to let go of the chain. I'm letting go of the chain now. That was always the way it was going to be. They were always going to drown, therefore I have no responsibility.

Agnes:

If it's true that you are always that – I mean you could say that would be lying, but suppose it's the truth that you couldn't control your arms and that a thing was going to strike you, well then in fact, you are not responsible. Right. So if we suppose that their death actually have nothing to do with any of your choices, which is what you're doing when you're anchoring on the possibility that it exists then it no longer makes sense to speak about what you are morally obligated to do or not.

Robin:

I am more of the position that you'd be morally obligated to make the good if you can.

Agnes:

Right. So the question is, what is the structure of that obligation? Why? There are two possible reasons. One is you have a duty to those people, which is what you are holding hands metaphor was getting at. I don't think that works. So I think we got to dump that one.

Robin:

I disagree.

Agnes:

Well, I'd like an argument. Your argument was that in your example, it's crucial to your example …

Robin:

You say I can't be obligated to a creature who doesn't exist yet, and I disagree.

Agnes:

I can't – you can't be obligated to bring about that creature's existence.

Robin:

Why not?

Agnes:

Because their existence is conditional on that very decision.

Robin:

Yeah. So? That's a coherent obligation. You could say it's wrong but it's a coherent obligation.

Agnes:

What I'm saying is you can't argue for the existence of such an obligation on the basis of an example where that example is you letting down people that are holding your hand that already exist.

Robin:

Any example is motivating. It's not going to be an exact parallel.

Agnes:

OK. But this is the feature that we think is relevant. So you're not going to persuade us by trading on an ambiguity exactly there.

Robin:

I would add to the example of history that not only are you the end of a long chain of people who continued your lineage, you're the end of a long chain many of whom eagerly wanted that lineage to continue. They weren't indifferent to this lineage.

William:

And so, it's kind of like a historical debt. You are continuing to …

Robin:

Yeah. They created you in part. You owe them. Part of what they want from you is that you continue.

Agnes:

I don't understand why you owe them. You didn't make a deal. There was no contract.

Robin:

We can owe things without a contract that you made. You can be endowed with contracts.

Agnes:

Suppose that somebody comes to your house and they would renovate your house and the make it look really nice. They sneak in and they renovate it and they are like, “You owe me now. You owe me money for this renovation.”

Robin:

But we are talking about your parents, not a random person that comes to your house. What do you owe you parents?

Agnes:

Oh, your parents are a random person that you never met before you come into existence.

Robin:

I think you can owe your parents. They are not just some strangers.

Agnes:

Of course they are.

William:

But your parents had you for their sake, not for your sake.

Robin:

How do you know it's not for your sake?

William:

Because I think most of the times – well, because evolution would say like sex is enjoyable, we have now created this child.

Robin:

I think of course parents can do things for their children's sake, part of which is to create the children. I think one of the things parents most do for their children's sake is to create the children.

Agnes:

I mean suppose your parents came to your house while you weren't there and they renovated your whole house with very, very expensive materials and your parents say, “OK, we did this whole thing and we are your parents, you owe us money.” Do you think you owe them?

Robin:

I think your parents get a lot of deference when they say, “Look kid, we are happy you exist. We are glad you are happy you exist. But there was a deal here. There's something we wanted out of you.”

Agnes:

Did you have kids basically because – to satisfy your parents?

Robin:

Perhaps; I wasn't very consciously thinking about that. But that's not what we are talking about here. We are talking about can your parents have claims on you? Can they say, “Look, we did this nice thing for you, you should do this nice thing for us.”

Agnes:

But one sign of whether they can have such claim is do any of us respond to that? Do you have kids – I certainly don't have kids to satisfy my parents. It didn't sound like you did either.

Robin:

Long ago, there were these people called Hare Krishnas, it was a religious group, and they had this trick of staying at airports and handing people flowers. And part of the trick was if somebody gives you something, you accept the gift and then they ask for something. You feel obligated to give in return. So they were asking for donations in return for their flowers.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And this is a common marketing trick or strategy, which is I do think reflecting the actual human norm. If somebody gives you a gift of value and then ask for something from you, you have a bit of an obligation to try to help them out. Not infinite but, you owe them …

William:

You can't refuse the gift because you can't at the point of birth say, “No, thanks.”

Robin:

No. Nevertheless, the norm still applies.

Agnes:

I mean it doesn't seem to me like you thought it applied in my example of the people sneaking into your house even when those people were your parents. So in many cases then, it doesn't apply.

Robin:

I would say, if somebody sneaks in your house and actually does something that adds value, you could be pissed they didn't ask for your permission but you should honestly ask, did they add value? And how much are you willing – and how much is that worth to you? And if they actually did something nice for you then you should acknowledge it and maybe credit them some compensation even. Yes. [Laughs] They did something nice for you.

Agnes:

You know there's a philosopher who I can't – was it Shauna Schaffer? I think it might be her, who thinks that you wrong your children when you bring them into existence because you didn't ask for their permission to exist and there might be – I think there are in fact lots of bounds on why you can't commit suicide like it's being illegal or you might think it's immoral for a variety of reasons. You might think you're not allowed to commit suicide and so you've trap your kids in existence and that's an immoral thing to do and it's like wrong to have children for that reason because you didn't get their permission.

Robin:

In our last podcast, we discussed this common observation that consent is actually not that central to our concept of many kinds of social processes. Consent is more how we manage our conflicts.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

Consent is an important central construct to figuring out how to deal with the fact that we each see value differently and have – and achieve different values in things. But that the thing itself, consent isn't that central to it. So I might invoke that observation here and say, “Look, the fact that you owe your parents doesn't have that much to do with consent.” Parenting is the kind of process where they really just can't your permission. Sorry. They are going to have to make a choice and we'll have to deal with that. I mean it would be nice if you could ask permission. So actually, as a side comment, I have this book called The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth were emulations create other emulations. And for emulations, they can ask permission before they create an emulation because they are making a copy. And so you could go to someone and say, “Can we make a copy of you? We will have this life over here. Will that be OK?” And you could say yes and then the copy is made and then they have this life. So for emulations, we can ask them before we create them, “Would that be OK?” But that's just not feasible for humans today.

William:

So I totally agree. That would be a really lovely solution to a lot of problems if you could ask your child before it is born, “Do you want to exist?” And the fact that it could be a thing with the ems is a good thing. But I mean I'm worried about something, which is that the em isn't making – the child em in its unborn state might not be making a decision completely by itself and it might have the same – to come back to what we are talking about earlier, it's like the same, sorry to use the word biases, or the same kind of impacts, the same kind of influences in its decision-making which might not mean it's making an accurate choice. So let's just say briefly for a moment that evolution hasn't made us into philosophers. It has. But let's just say it hasn't briefly. And let's say we were deciding whether to make a brand new planet with a brand new species or not. And let's also say – I mean I think this is why I don't know, does evolution exist without life? I don't know if it does or doesn't. It seems to me it probably does but it just kind of one of those like undiscovered laws maybe that these …

Robin:

We might say selection creates life so if selection can't create life unless there was a moment when there was a selection without life.

William:

Yeah, exactly. So that's interesting. I guess what I'm saying is I'm worried that if we are making decisions about whether existence is good or bad from the point of existence, as in we are existing, if only we could be like the God that's deciding, “Should I make this pattern, this planet, this universe or not make it?” And then we wouldn't be going to these arguments like, “Oh, evolution has decided that it's imperative to continue existing.” Because you choose – if you are God, you would choose evolution. So the fact that we can't choose that doesn't seem like a strong reason why we should continue to follow it. It's something that we haven't chosen. It's something that we've been forced into.

Robin:

What other basis could you possibly have for figuring out what you want other than what you are? That is, either what you want comes from inside of you or comes from outside of you, if you are going to reject inside of you, what outside will you point to? Where in the universe will you look to find out what you want? I would say most people think of what you want is found inside you. But inside you was created by evolution. All those intricate structures you might look at and reflect on inside you to figure out what you want. Those are all created by evolution.

William:

Yes. That's very convincing to me as in like where else am I going to find the answer because it's not as if there is non-life forms which are capable – I mean I don't even know how to think of this.

Robin:

I mean the moon is dead. Well, where on the moon will you find the answer to what you want?

William:

And kind of the DNA of the moon, that it's not going to be the answer to this question, I agree with you. And like if you thought you'd made some kind of super maxi intelligent AI which you could ask questions about the kind of source code of the universe, even that would still be maybe subject to the same concerns about evolution because …

Robin:

The AI would have come from some sort of process.

William:

Exactly. Where do you go for this answer?

Agnes:

I imagine human beings trying to ask themselves this question before there was language. OK? They can't figure out what they want. Obviously, they are not very sophisticated in how they think. And you might have thought like, well, first thing, if you want to figure out what's going to make you happy, what's going to make your life fulfilled and meaningful, first thing you have to do is find a way to like interact with the others of your kind in certain ways. As we learn to do that then we also learn to like connect with each other in ways that are deeper than our original pre-linguistic modes of connecting with each other. And evolution, that mostly gets us – I mean maybe up until now but probably not.

Robin:

No, I would disagree.

Agnes:

Well, this is a question of cultural evolution. But – and like I guess I think that it's not right to say that our understanding of who we are is something like, “Well, we will be satisfied by what corresponds to our antecedent programming.” I think that we can become different and we can learn and discover things that are of real meaning and value that we didn't grasp at the beginning. They're not just the kind of logical upshot of where we started. And I think that – so there's a philosopher named Bernard Williams and he has this system between things that I desire conditional on my existence is where Robin reminded me of when he started talking, about like how you want to this conditional on your existence, so things that I desire conditional on my existence, and then things that would give me reasons to exist. And so like conditional on the fact that I'm going to keep existing. I want food so I don't the pain of hunger. I want the room at a reasonable temperature so that I'm not sweating. But those are not reasons to exist. They are just things I want given that I do exist, right? And then he has a separate thing of like, what could actually make – give you like reason to exist or make your life worth living, and he calls those things ground projects, right? There are things where there is something important that you are trying to bring about with your life and it could be parenting, it could be a change in the world, it could be a way that you relate to other people. There is like some source of meaning and value that means you have a reason for existing. And I think most people are looking for that in their lives. They are looking for the things that would give their life a reason for existing. And in some sense up until that point where someone is taking it on faith, and that's actually sort of how I'd put it rather than status quo which is like OK, I'm going to keep existing. I'm just going to assume this is going somewhere. But we are actually looking and searching. So I don't think that it has to be the case that we have to look to our coding to say, “I'll find what I want by looking at what the person made me as.” I think it's like, “No, no, there's a process of inquiry that I'm engaged in. I'm engaged in it probably by talking to other people and by looking into what other people has valued over life and by trying out sources of value.” And what I'm searching for in that process are these ground projects that would give my life meaning. Williams himself thought that you could find those things and they could engage you but like maybe for one or two or three hundred years. He thought weren't the sorts of creatures that could handle immortality. We wouldn't find enough ground projects. We just get bored of them. So he thought like you could imagine life extension and having ground projects for a certain amount of time but not for like maybe more than like 300 years.

Robin:

So I really want to challenge this picture you painted that evolution has sort of created humans up until the moment they started to talk. And then after that, evolution turned off and everything since has been some sort of philosophical conversation. [Laughs]

William:

Yes. So I really love this distinction between reasons to exist and things that are morally good while you exist in a sense. But again, this does have to – I feel like this has a weakness that Robin is talking about, which is that all those things that we might described as ground projects, good things, reasons to exist were also designed by evolution.

Robin:

Even more so that this whole process of discussing things with people and thinking about things in your head, evolution set up that process and has been selecting for that process for a long time. Not just biological but cultural evolution. That is, you are the result of biological and cultural evolution honing that whole process of thinking and discussing things and selecting the versions of them that would survive and reproduce. So you should predict that the kind of thoughts you will have and the kind of discussions you will have will in fact be ones that promote reproduction, at least in the ancestral environments. That it's not – that it's not just a random relationship or historical relationship. They are directly related in that way.

Agnes:

But then they often don't promote reproduction so like fertility is knocked down.

Robin:

But evolution has this really hard task in this complicated world to produce a tendency to reproduce. We shouldn't expect it to do it in every case exactly, right? That's way too much to expect of it.

William:

But the complicating world was made by evolution.

Robin:

Yes. Well, it was influenced by. It wasn't entirely made but it was greatly influenced by evolution.

William:

Sure. Sorry, I had a point. But again, I've forgotten it, like Agnes. [Laughs]

Robin:

So you ask, what is the basis of all these bases that you will use to argue for you would wanting to exist or what to do conditional on existence or all of these projects you might accept or not accept, all of the machinery that you will use to do all that arguing and discussing, that was all produced by this evolutionary process which was blind to the consequences. So it's going to be a noisy thing and have a lot of randomness and have a lot of unintended consequences from its point of view, but nevertheless, that's the process that produced you.

Agnes:

But not only evolution, right? You were just saying other things like laws of physics and stuff.

Robin:

But those are constant and will never change, right? So …

Agnes:

Evolution is also constant in that sense that it's just – the basic structure was constant maybe.

Robin:

But if we want to predict why you would do one thing versus another thing, we can imagine, we need to be imaging counterfactual variations that are possible. So we want to know what we would choose. We are trying to imagine choice A versus choice B. So we have to be thinking about distinctions between A and B. So things that are constant between A and B would not be very informative for looking at prediction the choice between A and B, or advising a choice between A and B. So A and B both are consistent with physics then that would not help with that choice.

William:

I remember what I was going to say. It's just maybe an interesting remark which is, imagine if actually evolution is ultimately a self-killing thing and over time, it evolves to create philosophies and then ultimately whatever instantiation of evolution will ultimately decide actually it's better for nothing to exist, and so it kills itself.

Robin:

So I mean a standard observation, its a bit trite but I guess there's some truth to it. The story is most animals don't understand death. They don't know that death will happen to them. They just know how they do various things. And even if they notice a death in front of it, they don't make the connection to themselves in the future. Right? And so, they are not terrified of death. Humans are these creatures who can think about death. And so the story was, well, it was this big problem. As soon as evolution created human minds that could think about death like they got obsessed with death and then that got in the way of those creatures being productive, etc. Or they could see the cosmos and see they are a insignificant tiny fraction of it. So the story is, there was this long period of evolution where evolution had deal with the fact that giving human minds these broad capacities would create all these dysfunctional scenarios where they would get obsessed and think about the wrong stuff. But we are results of a long period of selection after that. And so we are constructed exactly to avoid those problems. Our minds are able to set aside our fear of death or come to terms with your small part of the cosmos. Right? I mean we haven't perfectly maybe done that but that's what you should expect your mind to be, the sort of mind that can think about these big things but still go on with doing stuff.

Agnes:

I want to go back to Will's, I feel you haven't fully faced up to Will's question which is a really great question. So suppose we make the following empirical discovery about evolution. We don't know everything about evolution, right? We don't know our state of knowledge. I mean we are still working on it. And there could be big transformations in our knowledge and we imaging a hypothetical scenario where we learn that sort of – that evolution is like programmed with a death drive, right? And it is designed for us all to go extinct and this is the way life works throughout the galaxy is that it's supposed to go for a little bit and then stop. And it kind of shuts itself off. Maybe it shuts itself off by having people developed nuclear weapons or whatever. That's just part of the evolutionary programming. It's designed to go out in this way. If we were to discover this, would you think, OK, well, this should change everything, we should no longer aim for fertility. We should just – maybe we should all kill ourselves because that's what evolution wants and it will make us really happy because we now know this is our evolutionary programming.

Robin:

So distinguish two very different hypotheses here, right? One is that evolution will create creatures who try to survive but nevertheless some net effect of the whole process will make it all end and die. A second scenario is that evolution would create creatures who want to die. That's a much harder to believe scenario. That is, evolution would select for creatures who want to die and that's how evolution would die. The first scenario is more believable. That is, evolution would create creatures who want to survive and nevertheless indirectly as a net effect of everything, it would all die. But under the theory that evolution will create people – creatures who want to survive, who try to survive and it will fail then the prediction is, you will also want to try to survive, and therefore it doesn't predict that you should expect to find inside yourself a desire to die.

Agnes:

But suppose we are in the second case, I don't think it's so crazy and implausible that there is inside of, let's say human creatures, a certain kind of impulse towards death. And that in effect, let's say, it's encoded in us this desire to die, but the way it's going to work, the way we will eventually kill each other is that the way that we evolved is that that desire to die grows bigger over time as a proportion of our total desires. This is part of how the coding works. And so over time, it becomes more and more important to us. And maybe the first way you see that is lower fertility. Those are the beginning of the new humans, the humans who want to die. And so, this is how we see the trend, right? And we see that what our future is, is going to be these human who more and more want to die. Would you say we should reason from to, well, we don't want to have future, we don't want to have descendants, and we don't – we should commit suicide.

Robin:

It's just not coherent with what an evolutionary process is. You are imagining some other process and you are giving it the name evolution because this is just not evolution.

Agnes:

Right. So like maybe let's just agree that this is not consistent with what we take ourselves to know about evolution.

Robin:

Let's just take a religious analog, right? God made my mind and God gave my desires and God created this world of life and then God for whatever purposes, wanted us all to die. And God encoded in our minds the desire to die.

William:

Yup.

Robin:

And that's slowly getting realized and then we are all going on the track to die because we are trying to make ourselves die because have found that. So that's – I'm setting kind aside evolution …

Agnes:

Yeah, yeah. Fair enough.

Robin:

But we can work with a hypothetical there, right?

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

And so now, what you should predict is, you want to die. That's the literal prediction of this theory. Deep inside you, the deepest, most real structures, the most persistent and more reliable pattern structures are in fact patterns that say that you want to die. That is your deepest desire.

Agnes:

And do you think once you learned this, you should try to die?

Robin:

It would tell you that if you choose that, you would not regret it so much. It will be consistent with everything else …

Agnes:

I mean you will be dead.

Robin:

Yes, but nevertheless, it would be completely consistent with your nature and your desires that you would make this choice. If you want to recommend someone to make a choice on the basis of do they want it, this is – that's the recommendation here.

William:

OK. So earlier, we are saying – you are saying that because it's evolution that gives us a drive to survive, therefore it's a good thing to survive and we should continue to …

Robin:

Therefore, it's what you want.

William:

OK. Therefore, it's what you want. Therefore, it's what human values might determine …

Robin:

If you reflected on all the complications and signs, you try to come together with a picture of what you want, that is what you want.

William:

So then that must – but just the principle it must extend so that evolution wants us to die, that would be …

Robin:

Or if God wanted you to die. If the process that made you …

William:

If the process made us …

Robin:

… made you to want to die, if we can predict that, then we predict that you want to die.

William:

Then we would say that it's like – I mean in the evolution frame of mind, you would say, “OK, this is like a moral decision to die.” And …

Robin:

So for morality, it's seperate. So maybe it's time to like make this distinction. But I get the most leverage out of “what you want.” That is, if we just look at all the choices you've ever made and we say, in each choice, you try to choose what you want and then you're about to make another choice. And in this choice, the question might be what you want. We could – there's a different question we could ask. Is that the moral choice? And I would make a distinction between what you want and what is the moral choice. I think most people do recognize that distinction. Often, there's a conflict between what they want and what the moral choice is. And so I think the better way to say is that we all want to be moral in part. We just also want other things and so then sometimes there's a conflict between the part of our wants that is to be moral and the other parts of our wants.

Agnes:

But the parts that wants to be moral, is that also determined by evolution?

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

So, in this story …

Robin:

In actual fact, in the counterfactual – no, in the common factual, maybe God put it there. But in actuality, it's …

Agnes:

Right. Right. But like in this world where we determine that overall, it's God that put all these wants into you. He also puts the moral ones into you.

Robin:

Right. And the things that conflict against them.

Agnes:

Right. So how do you determine in the world that we are actually in, say, evolution put in us some desires to continue to exist and to reproduce. But that leaves open for you the question of what are we morally to do? And so, how do you determine that we morally ought to do what evolution wants us to do?

Robin:

I didn't determine that.

Agnes:

But I mean you were giving an argument that it's like this is the helping hands that are given, right?

Robin:

Right. That was showing there was a moral component. That wasn't saying that that was the only thing …

William:

I guess there's the other complication such as like what you feel like in the moment or what society might be telling you, those other aspects. So I guess what Robin is saying is that evolution is a part of your decision.

Robin:

Morals are a part of your decision and evolution produced that part and many other parts. Maybe not all parts.

William:

It seems kind of faulty to me to be making assessments about how to act in a system using the laws which brought you about in the first place. There's some kind of faulty paradox there.

Robin:

But what else is there? What other possible basis could there actually be?

William:

So I'd like to believe that there's something kind of like gravity or some other law like the speed of light, etc., that is like the – whether life should exist or not.

Robin:

Well, we can have those laws as the cause of these wants that evolution gave you. So for example, one standard account of morals is that they are ways to manage the peace in large social groups. That is, what we do is we agree on some morals and we watch for people violating the moral rules and then we get indignant if they violate them and that energizes us to punish them for the violations, and that manages and keeps the group cooperative in certain ways. That's a standard story for what morals are, where they came from, why they have the features they do. Under that theory, it will – you will have similar morals in a wide range of social creatures. It wouldn't just be humans happen to have one particular set of morals. You would expect to see similar morals in a very wide range of alien and other creatures if they function in that same way to keep the peace in a social group. So that would be a way in which they are like the speed of light, right? But the causal chain is then the universe, cooperation I useful in the universe. Evolution needed you to cooperate so evolution gave you the morals that produce cooperation and then that's why you feel the moral obligation to be cooperative in certain ways.

Agnes:

So I mean I would try to sketch the alternative method of making decisions that didn't require you to just look into your own wiring and then say, “OK, this is what it makes me enjoy or something.” And like I think that the word for like coming to have a new conception of how things are that's based not on like studying what would be a satisfying conception but studying the way things are is learning. And so you might think, look, value is something that we are still learning. As a species, we are learning what's valuable. We don't have a complete understanding of it and we make mistakes. And so we've done things that are bad, objectively bad and wrong, and we try to correct and we try to improve. And just like we are learning about physics or learning about math and it's just not learning about our brains, it's learning about the structure of the world, the way the world really is, there is learning we have to do about value. And we do that learning by talking to one another, by building institutions, etc. And those values are not just like the things that evolution – the constraints that evolution programmed into us to get along. They are in fact – I mean that may also be true about them. I don't want to deny that because of course, physics and math and whatever, those results are also in some sense, our brains were programmed to have those thoughts. Sure. But that just like to say that our programming is consistent with our coming to know the way things are. And we don't do math by trying to do what evolution and figuring out which mathematical result that evolution programmed me to have and I don't think we should do morality that way either. That is, I think that the way we do moral inquiry is by trying to figure out what the right answer is, which is the way we do mathematical inquiry too. And I think that kind of inquiry is possible.

Robin:

So it's possible that different creatures want different things. It's also possible that along some dimensions, they all want the same thing. For the kinds of things they would all want the same thing of, then it makes sense to inquire about that same thing together in a universal way because everybody will learn the same thing because it's all the same. If different creatures have different things they want then it's not enough to know something generic. You have to know about you.

Agnes:

I think you can make the same thing about believing. Like different creatures believe different things and you have to know specifics about that creature to figure out what it's going to believe. Well, no. I mean the creatures – if the creatures are all trying to learn math or they are all trying to understand physics, they are supposed to converge irrespective of if one of them has green tentacles and the other ones look like us.

Robin:

Right. That's exactly in fact, in decision theory, the distinction between facts and values. Facts are about things outside yourself and values are about you and we combine them together in expected utility to make choices. So yes, we usually conceive of facts as things that are just true about the world. Now, your belief about facts in standard story will depend not just about the world. It will depend on the information you have and your priors. And so, we understand how individual beliefs could vary based on individual differences and information and priors. But of course, we also see them as converging with more information to the fact that they are about. I wanted to make the observation that if somehow you could defy your evolutionary heritage, which no doubt you can in individual cases, and just make a choice about what you value and so maybe you don't discover what you value but just somehow choose in a way that reaffirms and reinforces such that you become different than you were and say, you say, choose to like pistachio. And evolution only gave this potential to like pistachio but over time as you keep doing something that reaffirms your taste for pistachio, you become someone who likes pistachio more, right? You could say that's a way in which you can defy evolution, right? Evolution just gave you a general – potential of a wide range of things but you made a choice in your life and became someone who had this value, right? So we could say literally that's a way in which evolution isn't the only determinant of the values you have at the end of this process. Even in that sort of situation, however, in a large world of creatures like you, evolution continues. And the next generation or generation after that is much better predicted by say, evolution, than your taste with pistachio in the sense that evolution already encompasses the knowledge that different people can play this game of changing their values, and that's what evolution is taking into account when it vary things to try to – to get the outcome. And that's all part of the game and all anticipated.

Agnes:

OK. But how is that relevant in my choice? I mean it's kind of like saying, “Well, look, evolution doesn't need me.” And then I'm kind of at liberty. And then I might as well just think about what is actually good since it's going do its thing.

Robin:

Within a modest degree of freedom. That's the ..

Agnes:

I mean I only have this one life. That's my degree of freedom. And like I can have faith that evolution is going to do its job, with me playing some small part, in that and then I should just figure out what's good and not worry too much about evolution.

Robin:

But in fact, if you think about evolution might help you get there fast because it might tell you …

Agnes:

How to get where faster? Where evolution wants?

Robin:

No, no, to those pistachio thing, right? You might realize they look. No, it's going to make me want to do pistachio.

William:

Kind of like a spin-off of the pistachio idea, I was thinking about like kind of contradictions within what evolution wants. And let's say we knew kind of in advanced that humans were going to be killed by like a fleet of giant squids and they were going to evolve to rise out the ocean and kill us. How would humans react? Or humans would – if we knew about this, we usually develop anti-giant squid weaponry and then kind of – based off this pistachio example, I was just like thinking, actually, whatever humans choose to do, whatever they choose to do is because evolution ultimately effectively selected them to be able to do that or to do that in the first place. So it's kind of – it's like an escapable thing like constantly reflecting us.

Robin:

Right. But up to a point that is. So there are many games in game theory as you know where the optimal strategy is to flip the coin.

William:

Yup.

Robin:

That is the equilibrium strategy is to flip the coin. Now, the equilibrium doesn't say whether the coin comes up head or tail. So in some sense, you are the captain of your ship, the author of your life. You flip the coin and you decided if it was head or tail. So in some sense, evolution could have constructed you with some randomness. I mean no doubt, it had to take into account there are just going to be randomness it couldn't control. And so, it's overall strategy for you includes the fact that it can't predict a bunch of details about what you will do and then that's sort of a story about freewill in some sense.

William:

Yeah.

Robin:

What seems to you freewill is the randomness that the system that designed you couldn't anticipate that it just had to accept.

William:

Yeah, evolution definitely has this deterministic flavor where what happens will be because in a sense, evolution willed it. So even if you think I'm going to do activities which were …

Agnes:

Defying.

William:

No. What I'm saying like one which weren't defined by evolution. They were still defined under it.

Agnes:

Yes. I mean defy.

William:

Oh, defy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Defy, yeah. They will still defy. They were still defined by evolution.

Agnes:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

William:

It's kind of a weird – like it's not the question of like freewill or deterministic …

Robin:

Right.

William:

It's kind of like a weird abstract version which still encapsulates it.

Robin:

So you can think of a boss with a bunch of employees. And the boss gives certain orders to the employees, knowing full well 80% of people will follow he orders and 20% will be pissed off and do the opposite. And that's exactly what the boss expects. And he chose his orders with that fact in mind.

Agnes:

So like supposed that you are trying to decide whether not to have a kid, and you might think that people should have – I know you're a pro natalist person so you think people should have kids. But presumably, you don't think that everyone in every situation should have kids, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And we will think of the following situation. You know that your kid that for their entire life, from birth to death, they will be subject to a tyrannical master and they will – it will be like this boss. I mean they basically will just have to do. They will never have a moment of free choice in their lives. They will just have to do whatever this boss tells them. And sometimes it will bring them very great suffering. And sometimes they will think they are defying the boss. But actually, like the boss controls them so well that that's just what their boss wanted. And you might think, “Should I create this child,” and like understood in that way? And it's like far from clear to me that the answer to that questions is yes, but that's the situation you think we are all in.

William:

Because the boss deserves, somehow deserves this.

Agnes:

Yeah, exactly.

William:

She is like what we would expect.

Agnes:

We are rooting for this weird boss.

William:

The tyrannical master.

Agnes:

It's not our parents because our parents didn't choose to create us. Evolution made our parents to create us. It's evolution, our evil demon of a god.

William:

Exactly.

Agnes:

That we think we are all enslaved to. And we have to do its will.

Robin:

So do you guys remember when we started?

William:

Oh, I do.

Robin:

So let's wrap here.

Agnes:

You have the final word, Robin.

Robin:

So, I will again pull your mind back to the image, which is factually correct that for the nearest million galaxies, it's all dead and empty.

William:

Yeah.

Robin:

Completely dead and empty except on this one planet where there is this …

Agnes:

A lot of slaveery going on.

Robin:

… one species …

William:

A lot of astronomical suffering.

Robin:

… one species which as a lot of suffering, but also a lot of joy and insight and community. And the question is, should this one planet and this one species, this one set of species, should this be also like the rest of the dead universe? Should we empty it out and kill it there so that everything can be uniformally dead or should there be at least one, maybe a million planets …

William:

We'll be expanding.

Robin:

Where it's not like that. Now, when the universe is half full of life and half full of dead, then talk to me about maybe we should say some dead stuff and not fill it all with life. But at the moment, it seems to me, if you have at all any uncertainty here, give a bit more to the life because it's way unbalanced.

Agnes:

OK. I feel we can stop.

William:

Yeah. [Laughs]

Robin:

Right click. I'll stop the recording, right? Here?

William:

Yup.