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But you've gotta have something, and millions of people even in our "modern nihilistic age" do find something, so you don't have much of an excuse to not get to it.
This sort of precludes the possibility of depression among people who aren't experiencing immediate threat, though, since depression is in large part a problem of lack of meaning. Crucially, you can't simply will a telos into existence when you don't have one. I'm not saying rolling over and dying is the correct answer (it's not), but "finding purpose" is a very open-ended task with a very individualised solution and it can be easy or nearly impossible depending on the person in question.
It always strikes me just how radically different people are in terms of mental architecture, such that imagining a different cognitive landscape is sometimes like trying to conceptualise an alien mind.
Honestly I think you're closer to the population norm than I am. Everyone's always talking about how depressed they are and how meaningless everything seems. I feel like the odd one out in that I've never struggled with any of that.
Selection bias is probably a very big factor influencing that perception. People talk about their malaise partially because they need to get it off their chest; people who are doing fine don't speak about just How Very Ok they are. I don't really think the Redditors traumaposting about their deep depression are at all representative of what the general population actually is like.
Regarding "suffering", I think that's a very difficult thing to quantify and can't necessarily be assessed so easily. Generally I think the discourse surrounding suffering is flawed in many ways; firstly people tend to overweight sources of suffering that are essentially severe but temporary over sources of suffering that are lower-level but more persistent, and secondly people tend to underweight the influence and importance of someone having hope that things will get better for them in the future and belief in their own agency to change it. The lack of conception of what a feasible "better life" would look like is an extremely underrated factor in suicides. More than anything else, I think our brains regard the idea of being stuck as intolerable, and searches for any kind of actionable solution.
In your hypothetical of someone experiencing a potentially fatal health condition, often suicide doesn't even occur to them because there's some kind of conception of a better future to fight for and a clearly defined set of steps to possibly stop the suffering that is currently occurring; you have something to fight against and a sense that you will either reach a state where things will get better or you're going to die trying. Paradoxically, I think actively being under assault creates more of a sense of urgency and purpose. You can look to the future and declare that you will be happy once you make the negative stimulus stop (at least, until the hedonic treadmill inevitably kicks in and you return to your natural affective baseline, but your brain focuses on the here and now and doesn't think about that). But when, on paper, you already possess the things that any reasonable person could expect - you're healthy and have a job, friends, hobbies, and so on, and yet you're still coming back to your apartment feeling horribly empty and unmotivated as if the things you were doing only served to prevent you from having to deal with yourself, there's nothing to work towards. It's much easier to fall into a mindset where life itself, or your own ingrained mental patterns, are the problem, because that's less of a concrete issue that you can identify and take steps to address.
I'm not sure people do it on a whim per se, rather I'd frame the impulsive nature of suicide as being a response to the straw that broke the camel's back. I think we have affective baselines which are more insensitive to circumstances than we would like to believe they are, and there is a subsection of unlucky people whose affective baseline oscillates somewhere between misery and ennui (an idea partially supported by behaviour genetics). Modern life has reduced the number of blameworthy agents they can pin the problem on and try to fix, which only makes it worse. When you don't even know what the problem even is, what would make you happy, or what there is to even strive for, when you on paper should be doing okay but everything only seems like pointless sound and fury, I see why one would look around at the paucity of other feasible options and choose the only way out.
Can’t give a full response now, but mostly agree.
I don't think you need to be a spiritualist (although I am) to think that ML systems cannot experience pain.
I believe we’ve spoken about this before; I agree with this if you are defining pain as the sensation of physical pain, since you likely can’t capture most of its dimensions without a body or a sense of ownership over that body as belonging to you. Affective and emotional pain, on the other hand, is a broader category; it’s not prima facie implausible for an artificial system to have some kind of weird hall-of-mirrors distorted analogue of that which represents “negatively valenced response to stimulus”.
But qualia is very subtle - for instance, things as similar as men and women can experience distinctly different qualia.
It gets way weirder and more fucky than that: I’m aware of a study where researchers blinded rats and fitted them with a prosthesis which fed their visual cortexes info from a geomagnetic sensor. Their brains quickly adapted to the new sensory modality, to the extent that they were navigating mazes almost as well as sighted rats. Mole rats use magnetonavigation, and become incredibly stressed out and fearful when placed in experimental conditions that prevent them from sensing that. I have no clue how it would feel to be that rat, to be able to experience the Earth’s magnetic field firsthand. I literally have no conception of what that looks or feels like.
Thus I think that if we ever were able to make self-aware machines, their qualia could and would likely be vastly different from ours, possibly incomprehensibly so.
This is my take too. There’s no reason to expect their subjective perceptions would be similar at all; just because qualia may arise does not mean that qualia needs to be anthropomorphic. It’s the main problem I have with a lot of sentient-AI fiction; they’re just humans in metal skins meant to induce empathy and understanding. But in all likelihood the inner workings of a human mind and any kind of hypothetical future ML model won’t be the same.
I won’t speak on the topic of whether radically dissimilar alien qualia deserves moral consideration, except that I expect the topic to be divisive if it ever becomes a salient point of conversation. Though as per the blinded rat study it’s possible that humans themselves in the future will be able to use prostheses to experience many dimensions of unnatural qualia inaccessible to us, it’s likely they’ll assign moral value to them, and as such they may be far more sympathetic to the idea of the welfare of cognitive aliens.
This is true, but what I do find to be rather frustrating sometimes with these AI discussions is that people (not you necessarily) very often bake in their assumptions and take it for granted that AI cannot be sentient and choose to ridicule the idea that "electric patterns" can experience hurt (your brain substantially runs on electric patterns too but we'll just ignore that). Many people within this community act as if the hard problem of consciousness has been solved already, and we know what makes things sentient, and we know for a fact that ML systems cannot experience qualia. Well, we don't; when and how exactly has this been established? This argument has been made for so long, with many (flawed) thought experiments like Searle's Chinese Room to try and disprove the idea that any kind of sentience can ever actually be attributed to a chatbot.
Please note: I'm fairly certain they aren't currently sentient, and if they ever become such their "subjective experience" will be very different from any human one. But the strain of thought here that is essentially a contrarian reaction against the admittedly sometimes irritating crop of rationalists who care way too much about model welfare is frankly quite annoying and bakes in a number of assumptions that are framed as common sense. If you are a spiritualist, then explicitly state that assumption and acknowledge that it's one strand of possibility among others predicated on a metaphysical view of consciousness, not the only possible one that can exist.
Firstly, thank you. Secondly, I see people are coming off Reddit to find me now. I stopped doing this because I'm now supremely busy (and dealing with the absolute state of gender research and discourse was like trying to stem a river of diarrhoea with my hands for no good reason), but since you went to the trouble of actually getting here I'll try to respond.
Regarding the two studies you linked from India, you're correct that the sample size is small, but in my opinion an even bigger issue is that the "modified CTS" (from what I see, these studies are actually using questionnaires based off the modified CTS) is being utilised here in two separate studies conducted a year apart, one which only studies men and one which only studies women. I'd be very careful with this. Since they were conducted in two different sessions these studies can feature subtly different questions, interviewing norms, and methodologies, and the "methods and materials" section of the study is very high level and does not provide a whole lot of methodological detail other than really high-level coverage of basics; they may very well have adapted their approach over time. Without detailed methodological information, it's possible that the questions administered or the approach taken to the respondents in both studies may have been subtly different.
From a cursory read of the studies it does appear that there were differences in the questionnaire administered; e.g. economic violence was assessed in the female study, while it was excluded in the male study, and it's hard to know how differences like that would affect respondent behaviour within the study. As an example of how this can work, it's possible for there to be a priming and framing effect wherein a longer module with a broader list of behaviours signals a wider definition of violence, and can change what respondents recognise and count as abusive, including in other domains like physical violence. In general it's always better to source either a meta-analysis featuring a very large curated swath of studies that harmonises definitions, assesses study quality, and models between-study heterogeneity, or to use a singular study where the explicit goal is to provide comparative data for the sexes, instead of picking out two different studies conducted at two different times and then trying to compare figures from these to come to an overall conclusion.
There have, however, been studies conducted with the goal of providing a large slate of comparative data that surveys men and women in many different countries; a pretty early example of this is the International Dating Violence Study, with results summarised here. They asked students regarding their domestic violence perpetration, and if an incident was reported they asked about bidirectionality. The results from India show that approximately equal proportions of men and women perpetrated minor violence on their partners, and a higher proportion of women perpetrated severe violence compared to men. Of those relationships with violence, 8.3% featured male perpetration only, 16.6% featured female perpetration only, and 75% was bidirectional. You'll note that if you look at the Middle Eastern countries on that list there's also gender symmetry. This isn't the only one either; there are many studies like that around, showing the same patterns.
Oh, this is Johnson. To be quite frank, this is probably one of the single worst domestic violence researchers I have ever come across; his entire body of academic work on domestic violence has entirely been about "intimate terrorism" and trying to create two different categories of domestic violence: "Common couple violence" and "intimate terrorism", with the first occurring out of routine frustration and the latter being perpetrated out of a desire for control. He claims that the former is largely gender symmetrical and the latter is mostly male-perpetrated, and around the '00s and '10s he basically tried to launder a false idea of gender asymmetry into academia. When he first attempted to prove this claim he literally used samples that included either known female victims of male violence or samples drawn from crime surveys of women’s victimisation using only women's reports. When this was actually tested by other researchers using non-selected general population samples, it was repeatedly found again, and again, and again, and again that intimate terrorism as per his own typology was either gender symmetrical or majority female-perpetrated. Johnson of course does not want to acknowledge all this research as it delegitimises his ideology and his "contribution" to the field.
In this study, in order to try and save face he claims that asking people about their experiences with "ex-spouses" is much more of a better measure than asking them about their current relationships, and says that in survey data he finds more intimate terrorist ex-husbands compared to intimate terrorist ex-wives. But his data source for this study is the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS), which isn't the best source to draw from, to say the least. As this blogger notes; "The study was never intended to measure domestic violence in both genders. It was developed by feminist researchers for the purpose of exclusively surveying women [7]. Indeed, for the first three months of the study, only female respondents were interviewed [8]. The CDC later decided to add a male sample as well. However, the male respondents were not treated equally in this survey. While all female respondents were assigned female interviewers, only half of the male respondents were assigned a male interviewer [9]. A further bias, or a consequence of the above mentioned biases, was the much higher refusal rate among men in the survey (45% vs 36%) [10]. Because of these methodological and statistical biases, the findings of this study are far from the last word on the subject." Given the issues with the survey and its methodology, such research operating off the NVAWS is definitely not to be taken as definitive proof of, well, anything. Yet the state of the academy is such that this is the kind of research people are touting as "evidence" for their pet theories.
I was never the biggest Trump fan, but I will cheer on his defunding academia and cracking down on DEI for as long as he wants to do it.
Honestly, dissidents are dispersed all over the internet and many of the old guard that were critical of SocJus academia have dispersed now. And given my inactivity lately on gender issues, I'm probably not the best person to ask for up-to-date, centralised sources which actually go in-depth on the problems with progressive academia. It also increasingly seems to me like the popularity of the old identity politics hobbyhorses of the 2010s have largely waned in popular discourse as well, and the focus has shifted to new things like AI and the Iran War and so on. While feminism/women's studies is still an extremely powerful lobby and still produces a lot of crap academic work, in popular-discourse circles these kinds of topics seem to have gotten increasingly stale.
Or maybe I'm just less terminally online. Hard to say.
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