Why I Do Things
I'm starting this off with a disclaimer, no one totally understands why they act the way they do. Therapists help us talk through our reasoning process and cognitive behavioral therapy is based on the idea that examining your own thoughts is both possible and nontrivial. I think people often fail to realize just how wide the gap is between why we think we do things, and why we actually do things. For a great example see this lesswrong post. One of the experiments summarized there was with a split-brain patient. Here's the relevant section:
This divorce between the apologist and the revolutionary might also explain some of the odd behavior of split-brain patients. Consider the following experiment: a split-brain patient was shown two images, one in each visual field. The left hemisphere received the image of a chicken claw, and the right hemisphere received the image of a snowed-in house. The patient was asked verbally to describe what he saw, activating the left (more verbal) hemisphere. The patient said he saw a chicken claw, as expected. Then the patient was asked to point with his left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) to a picture related to the scene. Among the pictures available were a shovel and a chicken. He pointed to the shovel. So far, no crazier than what we've come to expect from neuroscience.
Now the doctor verbally asked the patient to describe why he just pointed to the shovel. The patient verbally (left hemisphere!) answered that he saw a chicken claw, and of course shovels are necessary to clean out chicken sheds, so he pointed to the shovel to indicate chickens. The apologist in the left-brain is helpless to do anything besides explain why the data fits its own theory, and its own theory is that whatever happened had something to do with chickens, dammit!
I found the book that the author sourced for that experiment and it looks awesome. I'm going to buy it on alibris and I might post about it when I get to read it. The point is, the patient believed that the reason they pointed to the shovel was that it could be used to clean out chicken coops but the actual reason was to shovel snow. This is my best guess for why I do the things I do and I can't guarantee it's correct.
My Brain
I usually think of my brain as being comprised of several, semi-autonomous sub-units. Each has it's own goals, personality and reasoning abilities. There's one special sub-unit which I think is the part that is responsible for abstract reasoning and also, I suspect, language. This is the part that carries out conscious decision making. The other parts are responsible for taking context appropriate actions. These are the parts that sometimes do very annoying things like playing Freecell or browsing Youtube when I'm supposed to be working. Those parts make decisions based primarily on habit. In contrast my conscious brain has a formal process for making decisions.
Conscious Decision Making
I'm a utilitarian. Heuristically, this means that my goal is to take actions that get me as much utility as possible. Utility is a measure of how much I like the state of the world. Equivalently it is how beautiful I find a world to be. To be more precise, it is a function that ascribes to every possible world a number. The higher the number, the more I like that outcome. My goal is to maximize the expected value of this function.
A short aside: I do sometimes keep promises even when I think doing so will result in less utility than breaking them. I only do this in special circumstances where commiting to a promise gives me an advantage in expectation. This is a fairly subtle point and doesn't come up all that often, but it does explain why I'm a bit more honest than you'd expect.
The professor that taught an ethics class I took once thought that utilitarians only care about maximizing total happiness. This is absolutely not the case. A world in which everyone is permanently doped up on soma has very high total happiness, but very low actual utility. The exact definition of utility is whatever my brain says it is, but I've built a approximate version from this which is what I'll discuss here.
All other things being equal, I ascribe higher utility to worlds in which any individual person experiences more happiness and less pain over the course of their life. It similarly increases with the degree to which that person can control their own life. It also increases when I have a better understanding of the world and decreases sharply when I believe things that are false. Some bits of knowledge have more value than others with some facts being worthless and others worth a lot of blood, sweat and tears. It increases when people make things like bridges, spaceships and art. The actual function is a non-linear combination of all these factors.
Focusing just on the component that looks at individual lives, I tend to value the happiness of any two people roughly equally. One exception is that I do tend to value my own happiness somewhat less than that of a stranger's. The total value of a life is approximatly their combined happiness and autonomy integrated over the course of their life. For the purposes of this calculation you can think of pain as negative happiness. For most people alive today I consider their utility at any particular moment to almost always be positive. Thus, all other things being equal, the longer someone lives the better.
The reason I help some people so much is because I think that I can significantly improve the utility contributed by their lives by doing so. Obviously there are many potential strategies for maximizing total utility but I think it is often better to focus on helping a few individuals a lot, than many people a little.
In summary I care about you, the reader, being happy, in control of your own life, and alive very much. Let me know if there's anything I can do to improve those things.
