dependent and independent wants

[lamargue]

I had a very interesting conversation a while ago with a member of the community. It primarily covered the nature by which we seek out and reinforce relationships within the fabric of wants; he, professing an attitude which sought to reduce complexity, to build upon our intuitions which are useful in building rapport with others, could be seen as a refinement of our intuition; to do away with harmful assumptions which may beleaguer our capacity to form any meaningful connection with others. To accord only a modest amount of power to the intellect in judging whether or not any particular relationship is fruitful, if you will. It is not a matter of doing away with intellect, but avoiding those cheap solecisms that are caused by conflicting interests, of which are indicative of what how this particular relationship ought to obtain.

I can understand this point somewhat, as we might falsely operate within the constraints of wants which might be mischaracterisations of our behaviour. We are wont to assign value to those impulses which occlude our social intuition, and thus might be particularly harmful in actually integrating into a society which hold none of the same wants, or at least, wants which can never be confirmed empirically. In other words, to never other-think and out-step the natural boundaries imposed by our social circles.
I think in order to understand this, we must distinguish between dependent and independent wants. I perceive that dependent wants are those which require some shared understanding of transaction; specifically, attitudes which are assumed shared, always providing an estimate for local and, perhaps, arbitrarily met conditions for social normativity. And this provides us with a blueprint on how to form relationships. We are expected to receive as much as we are willing to give. It would be more accurate perhaps to classify them as being either global or local. Dependent wants which are global consist of attitudes inherited, and thus consanguineous, with a social apparatus, ab ovo, a particular normative model for which we are taught to assess in relation to how it may obtain in the future. We are taught to steer clear from bad crowds, insofar as society is taught to diminish their value.

Dependent wants which are local are characteristic of smaller communities, and are consequently reflective of attitudes inherited from the needs of the particular community, more often than not the microcosm, which players find themselves in. Local wants predicate a particular brand of moralism, whilst global wants are conflated with human nature. This is also why the model of the nuclear family works so well in Western society; it is, contrary to common sentiment, not indicative of the values of a particular microcosm, like rural communities with an almost theophanic relationship to God, but of the underlying structure of all communities; we don't consider communities as autonomous entities, but networks of people consigned to the rules of the game, a universal concept.

Now independent wants are, in some sense, local dependent wants, the difference being the removal of transaction in favour of according import to our desires. The desire to have ones social circle reflect his own interests, or to be integrated into the intelligentsia, the literati or aristocracy. They are wants which are not understood by virtue of their particular relationship to the wider social circle. Imagine a graph of a community, where each member represents a particular node, taking on weighted values, and are connected by functional connections. In some sense we can think of these members as represented by something qualitatively similar to an Erdos number. I perceive that these functional connections are predicated on local dependencies; in order to build up your network, you must try to meet certain standards of adequacy in maintaining relationships; relationships which are stronger require more effort, and those which we may call acquaintance-ships require a minimal amount of effort, though these will consequently obtain minimally. If we wanted to be really precise, we could try to assign value to things like time invested, stability (changes in functional connections), some measure of happiness in proximity to a particular person, etc., of which I won't do, since the aim of this graph is didactic by nature. The point is that all we have done are model connections based on certain constraints, of which are seen in observable occurrences. The means by which we extract the most utility from these relationships is one which is embedded into our graph; we can consider this a generative algorithm of sorts. Wants do not need to be explicated in order to be properly understood within these constraints.

So, if these functional connections are dependencies, we would find it very trifling to try to model independent wants. I consider these nomological danglers i.e something external to the model by virtue of its distinct qualitative properties. It would appear that independent wants are far more diaphonous in nature; so we must take a different course in trying to model these relationships, since by definition our graph cannot represent them in any meaningful way. Now, if we treat of independent wants in a game-theoretic fashion, we might arrive at an important epistemic conclusion. If A and B assume global wants and build a relationship based on local dependencies, and if we assume that happiness is the main object of these dependencies, then defecting from this entails that, in order to maintain the value of these dependencies, they must cooperate, so as to maximise the rewards from such a system. In other words, if happiness is a delusion, as some consider it, then defecting would be equivalent to rejecting the definition of happiness inherited from the community, while cooperating would be to accept its definition and yield all the benefits therefrom. If both defect, they may still be able to cooperate in terms of this commonality. This, I think, serves as a basis for subcommunities. The dependencies in question can be a number of things, hence why we may find a great many cliquish communities that oppose normative values; but these are local differences, not global, since they are still inherently social.

Considering this, if we treat independent wants as those things which we can only estimate, then the game takes on a very different flavour. Our players now must accomodate for wants which are unknown to them, yet both acknowledge must exist. It cannot be as simple as asking what these independent wants are, for the players themselves may not even be aware of this. It would be optimal to have perfect information of these wants; if, however, only one side has perfect information, the transaction will not be seen as equal, insofar as the degree to which these wants matter to A is equivalent to that of B. I think this is the primary failing of the utilitarian worldview. No matter how hard we try to extract value from relationships in order to further our own gain, if we don't make a committed effort to understand people we will always, inevitably, be short of obtaining any real value.

Hence, I can understand the point of wanting to refine our intuition and to never do away with it entirely. This is why I gave up on the social component of utilitarianism long ago; not out of protest, nor contempt, but simply because it seemed useless. There is, I think, a lot which I haven't covered, such as the role which our particular representations have in modeling utility, Nagel's semantic step wrt social conditioning, etc., all of which I might write up in the future. I suppose it's nice to try to clear my own thoughts every once in a while.

 

[DarkRange55]

So in essence, the refinement of intuition, the balance of dependent and independent wants, and the careful consideration of social dynamics are all critical for understanding and fostering meaningful relationships. While intellect and rational analysis have their place, they must be complemented by a deeper, more intuitive understanding of human connections to achieve true fulfillment and social cohesion. That would be my 2 cents
You can understand something intellectually and then you understand something on an emotional/visceral level.

 

[lamargue]

So in essence, the refinement of intuition, the balance of dependent and independent wants, and the careful consideration of social dynamics are all critical for understanding and fostering meaningful relationships. While intellect and rational analysis have their place, they must be complemented by a deeper, more intuitive understanding of human connections to achieve true fulfillment and social cohesion. That would be my 2 cents
You can understand something intellectually and then you understand something on an emotional/visceral level.

i suppose if you want to excel within the rules of the game. from your previous posts i imagine you as being very adept at social cohesion (you spoke at some point, i forget when, of holding acquaintances in order to extract specific wants in the future. i might be butchering your words but i recall reading something like that)

i would say that intellect must be subservient to our passions, since we rarely ever are able to place the former above the latter; so my post read as a tl;dr amounts to the fact that if people accord more meaning to intuition, then it would be preferable to also accord with our own intuitions
but who knows? perhaps our intuitions don't accord with the desiderata of social traits common in society. perhaps those who are unable to function well in society put less emphasis on the irrational component of human relations and moreso on their own formulas for deriving personal utility

 

[lamargue]

There is, I think, a lot which I haven't covered, such as the role which our particular representations have in modeling utility, Nagel's semantic step wrt social conditioning, etc., all of which I might write up in the future. I suppose it's nice to try to clear my own thoughts every once in a while.

As a sort of addenda to my post, and perhaps as an invocation of that diaphanous concept, I should like to establish what is meant by modeling utility. In particular, the epistemic difficulties which may arise from thinking of relationships as existing in a graph of nodes. There is certainly a didactic component to such thought, but there is a deeper problem: the gamble which we subject ourselves to in order to convene any methodological authority to our original idea is what I shall heretofore call an epistemic leap of faith. This leap of faith is perhaps not one restrictive to just social utility, but rather persists as a sort of modicum of philosophical practice; the advances in this particular field we can attribute to Hintikka, but I digress. In order for our current system to obtain, we require some means of circumventing any unsafe assumptions which may collapse our current system. I currently see no problem with the nature of independent and dependent wants, both local and global; though this may perhaps change if we apply a degree of scrutiny equivalent to that of direct theory-appraisal. Moreover, we must ensure that we can produce practical outcomes within the constraints of the system.

I do consider the epistemic leap of faith a form of gambling. It is gambling with the possibility that our ceteris paribus clause holds; this is why I stated that unsafe assumptions should ideally not collapse the epistemic framework of the theory, even if we are not able to model the particular nature of how players may invoke its principles. Of course no player would really overthink such matters, but this is irrelevant to our inquiry. The fact is that rules of cooperation entail that any rule derived outside of the system will be functionally useless; like that of speaker haranguing a mob of lawful denizens who are corralled by his primary argument, and are thus not specifically concerned with whether or not such arguments are rigorous; they are corralled by entailment. This could probably be applied loosely to judicial systems, as expounded by H. L. A. Hart, though maybe an actual lawyer could clarify that (@derpyderpins).

To simplify, we must ensure that the conceptual framework of our model never produces new features a posteori. The conceptual root of the system, even if predicated by observable occurrences, should theoretically be apriori; that is, the understanding of our epistemic framework should follow from the structure of our minds, and consequently must never be an extension of some theoretical representation of the mind. So the monadology of Leibniz may perhaps serve a metaphoric purpose, but will never provide any substantial information on the nature of the world, insofar as all truths derived in that system are conducive to truths relating to the representation thereof.

Perhaps this addenda is more imprecise in nature. The TL;DR is that the very fact that outcomes can be assigned a particular value from things which are observationally dependent, entails that the conceptual root of our thesis can be represented in any number of ways, but will still obtain some degree of value because of the a priori nature of the way in which we construct theories of social normativity. If we assume that we are mindless simulacra this fails, though I doubt that solipsism is enough to defeat our current model. Nagel's semantic step is perhaps a very strong argument against this i.e that the very fact that we can produce adequate representations of other conscious beings should be sufficient proof that solipsism is false; and of course, this requires a representation constructed in language; obtaining facts of consciousness, and then attempting to think about the semantic content of these facts; like that of the properties of experience ranging from our mammalian brains to fruit-flies. But that's for another time. I should in future try to adopt a less rabbinical tone.