i mean, both probably have to say what persons are, but egoists additionally have to say which person is the self. across time and change
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and the decision-making self isn't the life-experiencing self. at best, they live in the same brain and interact a lot
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so the "ego" in egoism is misleading. it's the agent self acting on behalf of the patient self that is nearest to it and most entangled
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not the agent self acting for the sake of the agent self
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there's two kinds of egoism. one is saying things similar to you matter more, the other is saying things that *are* you matter more
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as in, my judgments as to what a good life is are irreducible. they are caused by me being me and that makes them be of a certain character
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that's the former thing and i think it's in some sense, to some extent, not mistaken
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the latter thing is a different person experiencing the exact same life as you has different value than you
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and it seems like a lot of effort to make sense out of that and by the time i've tried i no longer have the intuition that i should
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humans are arguably programmed to model themselves and other people differently. even when the exact same things go on inside
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and once you realize this, valuing yourself more because you happen to be in the same brain no longer seems as appealing
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my brain feels you exist less when you're far away. but my brain is just wrong on that point. (modulo weird simulation measure stuff)
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or maybe my brain doesn't distinguish between existence and importance-given-existence. it uses heuristics interpretable both ways
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at times when i grok that what it is like to me be is what it is like to be you, an egoistic component to morality is no longer common sense
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at those times, i think i want you to have a good-life-according-to-me no less than i want me to have a good-life-according-to-me
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or maybe just not much less. but you need a huge egoism/groupism multiplication factor to get common sense back
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at least if you accept linear aggregation, which is another somewhat separate source of possible objections
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i don't necessarily accept linear aggregation, but i don't think it's broken in the simple ways that people say it is, either
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nonlinear aggregation is *weird*. "how much should i care about this person? best figure out who else there is in the whole universe first"
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i haven't really seen people successfully reduce common sense to a bunch of principles
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you can successfully say "screw any principles, whatever i feel like doing is correct"
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but then what if you run into a decision where you feel that it's really important but you don't have clear feelings about what's correct
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i run into decisions like that all the time
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also i don't want to screw principles. it's not what i want, stop telling me what i want
End of conversation
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