I don’t bite the bullet in the most natural reading of this, where very small changes in i_s do only result in very small changes in subjective suffering from a subjective qualitative POV. Insofar as that is conceptually and empirically correct, I (tentatively) think it’s a counterexample that more or less disproves my metaphysical claim (if true/legit).
Going along with ‘subjective suffering’, which I think is subject to the risks you mention here, to make the claim that the compensation schedule is asymptotic (which is pretty important to your topline claim RE: offsetability) I think you can’t only be uncertain about Ben’s claim or “not bite the bullet”, you have to make a positive case for your claim. For example:
I will add that one reason I think this might be a correct “way out” is that it would just be very strange to me if “IHE preference is to refuse 70 year torture and happiness trade mentioned in post” logically entails (maybe with some extremely basic additional assumptions like transitivity) “IHE gives up divine bliss for a very small subjective amount of suffering mitigation”
Like, is it correct that absent some categorical lexical property that you can identify, “the way out” is very dependent on you being able to support the claim “near the threshold a small change in i_s --> large change in subjective experience”?
So I suspect your view is something like: “as i_s increases linearly, subjective experience increases in a non-linear way that approaches infinity at some point, earlier than 70 years of torture”?[1] If so, what’s the reason you think this is the correct view / am I missing something here?
RE: the shape of the asymptote and potential risks of conflating empirical uncertainties
I think this is an interesting graph, and you might feel like you can make some rough progress on this conceptually with your methodology. For example, how many years of bliss would the IHE need to be offered to be indifferent between the equivalent experience of:
1 person boiled alive for an hour at 100degC
Change the time variable to 30mins / 10min / 5min / 1 minute / 10 seconds / 1 seconds of the above experience[2]
Change the exposure variable to different % of the body (e.g. just hand / entire arm / abdomen / chest / back, etc)
(I would be separately interested in how the IHE would make tradeoffs if making a decision for others and the choice was about: 10/10000/1E6 people having ^all the above time/exposure variations, rather than experiencing it themselves, but this is further away from your preferred methodology so I’ll leave it for another time)
And then plotted the graph instrument with different combinations of the time/exposure/temperature variables. This could help you either elucidate the shape of your graph, or the location of uncertainties around your time granularity.
The reason I chose this > cluster headaches is partly because you can get more variables here, but if you wanted just a time comparison then cluster headaches might be easier.
But I actually think temperature is an interesting one to consider for multiple additional reasons. For example, it’s interesting as a real life example where you have perceived discontinuities of responses to continuous changes in some variable. You might be willing to tolerate 35 degree water for a very long time but as soon as it gets to 40+ how tolerable it is very rapidly decreases in a way that feels like a discontinuity.
But what’s happening here is that heat nociceptors activate at a specific temperature (say e.g. 40degC). So you basically just aren’t moving up the suffering instrument below that temperature ~at all, and so the variable you’d change is “how many nociceptors do you activate” or “how frequently do they fire” (all of which are modulated by temperature and amount of skin exposed), and that rapidly goes up as you reach / exceed 40degC.[3]
And so if you naively plot “degrees” or “person-hours” at the bottom, you might think subjective suffering is going up exponentially compared to a linear increase in i_s, but you are not accounting for thresholds in i_s activation, or increased sensitisation or recruitment of nociceptors over time, which might make the relationship look much less asymptotic.[4]
And empirical uncertainties about exactly how these kinds of signals work and are processed I think is a potentially large limiting factor for being able to strongly support “as i_s increases linearly, subjective experience increases in a non-linear way that approaches infinite bliss at some point”[5]
I obviously don’t think it’s possible to have all the empirical Qs worked out for the post, but I wanted to illustrate these empirical uncertainties because I think even if I felt it would be correct for the IHE to reject some weaker version of the torture-bliss trade package[6], it would still be unclear that this reflected an asymptotic relationship, rather than just e.g. a large asymmetry between sensitivity to i_s and i_h, or maximum amount of i_s and i_h possible. I think these possibilities could satisfy the (weaker) IHE thought experiment while potentially satisfying lexicality in practice, but not in theory. It might also explain why you feel much more confident about lexicality WRT happiness but not intra-suffering tradeoffs, and if you put the difference of things like 1E10 vs 1E50 vs 10^10^10 down to scope insensitivity I do think this explains a decent portion of your views.
I’m aware that approaching 1 second is getting towards your uncertainty for the time granularity problem, but I think if you do think 1 hour of cluster headache is NOS then these are the kinds of tradeoffs you’d want to be able to make (and back)
Going along with ‘subjective suffering’, which I think is subject to the risks you mention here, to make the claim that the compensation schedule is asymptotic (which is pretty important to your topline claim RE: offsetability) I think you can’t only be uncertain about Ben’s claim or “not bite the bullet”, you have to make a positive case for your claim. For example:
Like, is it correct that absent some categorical lexical property that you can identify, “the way out” is very dependent on you being able to support the claim “near the threshold a small change in i_s --> large change in subjective experience”?
So I suspect your view is something like: “as i_s increases linearly, subjective experience increases in a non-linear way that approaches infinity at some point, earlier than 70 years of torture”?[1] If so, what’s the reason you think this is the correct view / am I missing something here?
RE: the shape of the asymptote and potential risks of conflating empirical uncertainties
I think this is an interesting graph, and you might feel like you can make some rough progress on this conceptually with your methodology. For example, how many years of bliss would the IHE need to be offered to be indifferent between the equivalent experience of:
1 person boiled alive for an hour at 100degC
Change the time variable to 30mins / 10min / 5min / 1 minute / 10 seconds / 1 seconds of the above experience[2]
Change the exposure variable to different % of the body (e.g. just hand / entire arm / abdomen / chest / back, etc)
(I would be separately interested in how the IHE would make tradeoffs if making a decision for others and the choice was about: 10/10000/1E6 people having ^all the above time/exposure variations, rather than experiencing it themselves, but this is further away from your preferred methodology so I’ll leave it for another time)
And then plotted the graph instrument with different combinations of the time/exposure/temperature variables. This could help you either elucidate the shape of your graph, or the location of uncertainties around your time granularity.
The reason I chose this > cluster headaches is partly because you can get more variables here, but if you wanted just a time comparison then cluster headaches might be easier.
But I actually think temperature is an interesting one to consider for multiple additional reasons. For example, it’s interesting as a real life example where you have perceived discontinuities of responses to continuous changes in some variable. You might be willing to tolerate 35 degree water for a very long time but as soon as it gets to 40+ how tolerable it is very rapidly decreases in a way that feels like a discontinuity.
But what’s happening here is that heat nociceptors activate at a specific temperature (say e.g. 40degC). So you basically just aren’t moving up the suffering instrument below that temperature ~at all, and so the variable you’d change is “how many nociceptors do you activate” or “how frequently do they fire” (all of which are modulated by temperature and amount of skin exposed), and that rapidly goes up as you reach / exceed 40degC.[3]
And so if you naively plot “degrees” or “person-hours” at the bottom, you might think subjective suffering is going up exponentially compared to a linear increase in i_s, but you are not accounting for thresholds in i_s activation, or increased sensitisation or recruitment of nociceptors over time, which might make the relationship look much less asymptotic.[4]
And empirical uncertainties about exactly how these kinds of signals work and are processed I think is a potentially large limiting factor for being able to strongly support “as i_s increases linearly, subjective experience increases in a non-linear way that approaches infinite bliss at some point”[5]
I obviously don’t think it’s possible to have all the empirical Qs worked out for the post, but I wanted to illustrate these empirical uncertainties because I think even if I felt it would be correct for the IHE to reject some weaker version of the torture-bliss trade package[6], it would still be unclear that this reflected an asymptotic relationship, rather than just e.g. a large asymmetry between sensitivity to i_s and i_h, or maximum amount of i_s and i_h possible. I think these possibilities could satisfy the (weaker) IHE thought experiment while potentially satisfying lexicality in practice, but not in theory. It might also explain why you feel much more confident about lexicality WRT happiness but not intra-suffering tradeoffs, and if you put the difference of things like 1E10 vs 1E50 vs 10^10^10 down to scope insensitivity I do think this explains a decent portion of your views.
And indeed 1 hour of cluster headache
I’m aware that approaching 1 second is getting towards your uncertainty for the time granularity problem, but I think if you do think 1 hour of cluster headache is NOS then these are the kinds of tradeoffs you’d want to be able to make (and back)
There are other heat receptors at higher temperatures but to a first approximation it’s probably fine to ignore
Because of uncertainty around how much i_s there actually is
Also worth flagging that RE: footnote 26, where you say:
You should also expect this to apply to the suffering instrument; there is also some upper bound for all of these variables
e.g. 1E10 years, rather than infinity, since I find that pretty implausible and hard to reason about