Changing your values is impossible to justify, yet you must do so anyway
Joseph Campbell, and the wisdom that lives outside wisdom
Destruction of the world that we have built and in which we live, and of ourselves within it; but then a wonderful reconstruction, of the bolder, cleaner, more spacious, and fully human life — Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Just as a man casts off worn-out clothes and puts on new ones, so also the embodied Self casts off worn-out bodies and enters others which are new. — Krishna, Bhagavad Gita
Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” — John 3:3
The many faces of wisdom
The real world is perilous, and unrelenting in the variety of demands it places on you. Scarcity, competition, the evolving face of global economics, natural disasters, the progress of time, and everyday accidents of life always press you to reinvent yourself in unforeseen ways. Unlike the toy sandboxes in which we train AI models, there is no stable solution to life, no optimal state you can finally converge on. As soon as you feel you have a handle on what you need to do, then reality, or perhaps even your own newly mature perspective, changes the rules of the game. Around the time you start to get a grasp on school, life throws you into a job. As you begin to master your career, you must now balance work with raising a family. And comfort in your family life and finances opens the door to a growing recognition of your own mortality. These are only a few of the infinite varieties of challenges with which the world confronts you, and finds you unprepared.
In moments of severe crisis, you are even forced to reevaluate and rewrite your most deeply held values; like the pacifist who is obliged to accept the necessities of war, when it arrives at his doorstep and threatens his family. He must, in a sense, be born again. A new perspective opens up for him, and with it a new face of wisdom shows itself. What changes, in essence is his definition of wisdom itself, and what it means to be wise.
When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. — 1 Corinthians 13:11
Whenever you label a belief or thought as “wise”, you are projecting your momentary ideals onto an observed system of behaviour and thoughts. What you deem to be wise therefore depends on what you currently value. Virtue, strength, intelligence, friendliness, etc. are all how you represent what you believe to be the best of yourself, both in your own eyes and the eyes of others. As your values change — both because of circumstance, and as you mature — your judgment of what is wise will also evolve. As a child you may start off not understanding what lies are, then move to seeing them as useful for getting out of trouble. Later, as an adult you may value integrity for its own sake; and later still you may learn the proper and judicious use of lying based on the nuances of circumstance.
It is tempting to believe there is a supreme state or mode of all-encompassing wisdom you can eventually converge on, which accounts for every task or problem, and needs no addendum. In reality, life is an ever-revolving treadmill that never rests in one place. To every one of life’s answers, you will inevitably discover a problem; and to every problem, a new answer will reveal itself. Even the peaceful enlightenment of the self-conquered guru is put to a serious test by a protracted toothache or a crisis of faith. Complete peace is an aspirational ideal that is unlikely to be realized in your life. The need to reevaluate your system of values, and to discover a new approach to life will never truly be behind you.
When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified — and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn. — Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell’s well-known “hero’s journey” is a modern restatement of this timeless imperative to break through the limiting values that bound our momentary perceptions, and enter into new spaces of wisdom and maturity. Its relevance to AI has never been explored, partly because AI tend to be put to work in environments with known, relatively stable final states, outside of which they are largely useless — a privilege we humans can’t claim. So far, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has produced the closest implementation of value estimation that AI research has devised, though a limited one at that.
For both humans and RL agents, values can (and should) change with time, maturity, and novel circumstances. How and why value functions are updated is therefore one of the most fundamental questions one can ask about human intelligence. All manifestations of intelligence are dependent on a set of implicit or explicit values. An agent’s goals become the foundation for its skills, creativity, and adaptivity.
Yet between humans and AI there are some noteworthy differences in how values are adopted. To begin with, changes in values in an RL agent happen gradually and automatically. For humans however, as in the example of the pacifist above, they often change through spontaneous leaps of insight. Human value estimations also seem to build on one another rather than replacing each other. Once a person gains a new, more mature perspective, they are highly unlikely to reverse and become “less mature”. Moments of insight and growth appear to be treasures that you hold onto forever. An RL agent’s space of values, on the other hand, is comprised of one self-consistent value function. At any time, its judgment of good and bad states is unanimous, and is updated as a whole, which introduces the possibility of “catastrophic forgetting” as new values disturb old ones.
Perhaps most significantly, such transitions in humans are often accompanied by great internal resistance and difficulty, something not seen in AI. Toddlers resist potty training, or learning to dress themselves. Young people are anxious about dating, and try to avoid getting a job. Adults resist public speaking, or starting that business they know deep down they should. And our eldest try not to contemplate the inevitability of old age and death. Examples of failing to come to terms with life’s necessary transitions are numerous, and come in all sizes.
Only when a person embraces such transitions does it move on to a more mature and ultimately more capable state, one where it engages the difficulty head-on and becomes adept at addressing it. For example, an elder person must cease trying to make themselves look young if they are to start learning the skill of aging gracefully. As long as such a person avoids it, they remain cut off from an entire space of new skills. A person who avoids ever speaking in front of an audience will never become skilled in statesmanship, and he who shies away from asking out a crush will never become charismatic. Every skill that humans possess, like learning how to interview well, is the result of confronting, not avoiding, a new set of difficulties. The more such difficulties a person has faced and overcome — either by necessity or by choice — the greater the number of skills.
The best way out is always through. — Robert Frost
What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. — Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
The master has failed more times than the beginner has tried. — Unknown author, attributed to Stephen McCranie
Just as inherited wealth makes a youth defer finding employment as long as possible, a mind can, if it wants, find an escape hatch, a way around a problem, and can run away both in thought and in actions. Doing so, it will resist the “call to adventure” as long as possible. Given that beyond the threshold there is a new, greater mastery of the world and of the self, why would any person resist its call? On the other hand, what is that stroke of insight which makes another person decide to overturn their values? To answer both these questions, we must first look into the way your motives and goals influence how you “make sense” of the world.
Pockets of Reason
The act of thinking is the process of making sense of the world. That “sense” that you make of the world is always in context of some set of values or motives. For example, your desire to be seen by others as thinking correctly and consistently motivates you to understand the meaning of truth and objectivity. The desire to obtain benefits from other people, including attention and love, gives rise to your fine-tuned social skills. The mind has many such domains of understanding and skill. As each is put to the task of making sense, it creates its own repertoire of tools to stitch together its thoughts in ways that serve itself. These tools we call concepts.
The connection between values and concepts can be described through an example. Consider the tension you experience by being rejected by others, either in imagination or in reality. As it drives a complementary desire to be accepted, your mind begins to form helpful supporting concepts like charisma, friendliness, and likeability. These abstract concepts are actually groupings of practical solutions, such as saying kind words to someone, learning good manners, etc. None of these concepts or behaviours would have been of any use to a mind until it had first learned to dislike being rejected and aimed for acceptance.
There are thousands of such concept-spaces with subtle differences, and most of them do not have a one-to-one relationship to an English word. The important thing is they all have their own internal reasoning or “logic” of what it makes sense to do; in other words, their own definition of what is wise. This is why, when someone asks you for advice in an uncertain situation, the most common question you may ask is “well, what are you trying to achieve?”
“Making sense” is always an action that happens within a framework — or paradigm, to use Kuhn’s term — of assumptions and goals. You can only define what reasonable behaviour is in one or another context of motivations, because reason itself only exists there. Without such a framework, there is no “sense” to be made — only a flow of disjointed stimuli. Outside such spaces, that is, in comparing two paradigms, there is only a contradiction of reason, or at least it appears so when viewed from one or the other side.
As Campbell describes in his analysis of myths, this is exactly the space that the hero confronts when they step outside the safety of the village and cross the threshold of adventure. They experience it as a strange world of phantoms, monsters, odd creatures and magical lands, unstable and mercurial beings, all of which defy reason and sense:
It is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight. — Campbell
If values are necessary to make sense of reality, then between the spaces of values there can only be a space of apparent contradictions. As already explained in a previous post, contradictions are only ever contradictions of motives, not of facts; which of course means that an RL agent with one self-consistent value function can never be in a position of having conflicting values, and so can never be in a state of contradiction at all.
Hegel was one of the few thinkers to recognize the necessity of contradiction as a creative force. Though he himself didn’t state it as such, the contradictions he discovered within and between his concepts reflect the incompatibilities of various domains of values. He would have realised this fact had he made the connection between concepts and their underlying motives.
The contradiction [where concepts meet] is in fact the elevation of reason above the restrictions of the understanding, and the dissolution of them. — Hegel, The Science of Logic
Because they often contradict, such spaces of reason will frequently contend between themselves regarding the actions a person must engage in. In the mildest cases, these are experienced as simple indecision. However, as your values pull your thoughts and beliefs like a puppet is pulled by strings, contradictions arise which necessitate the formation of a new space of meaning, sense, and truth. The mind is constantly building new skill spaces as circumstances change. And such creation must always happen outside any given space of reasoning and wisdom, so it cannot be justified or rationalized within any one domain. The need to transcend contradiction through the creation of a “third way”, combined with the lack of any means of justifying such a transcendence, can finally help us understand why people resist transformations in their values.
An unjustified transition
Imagine a young man who could consistently rely on his parents to top up his bank account. On seeing a decreasing balance, he would simply “escape” (in his mind) the impending problem of poverty by phoning dad. He is still motivated to avoid being broke, to ensure he can always spend money as needed, but since the solution is relatively simple, the sight of a low balance is for him only a cue to action, one which gives ample opportunity to plan its resolution.
Were he to lose that external support, then a low balance in his account would regularly put him in a precarious situation, and may even make insolvency and its accompanying humiliations unavoidable (aka inescapable). With the loss of the safety net, a low balance now becomes a problem in itself. It is no longer an early cue to enable him to avoid danger, but rather it is viewed as a danger to avoid in and of itself, because once he in this situation, the rest of the catastrophe may irresistibly follow. With this new impetus and new fear, our prodigal child now begins to see a new value in having a financial buffer, in having stability, in frugality, etc, concepts he would have never had reason to comprehend before. The loss of alternative escape routes was the trigger for such a transformation of values — or more accurately, expansion of values. And in the long run the change is for the better, even though it may feel worse for a time.
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. — Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Many such forays into stress and danger need not be taken. A citizen of a peaceful country may never be forced to learn to deal with war. The most unfortunate situation, however, is in between these extremes, when a person experiences a gradual loss of options, foreshadowing the necessity of taking a plunge, which leads to repeated and more desperate attempts to dodge the inevitable. Like a fly that returns quickly after every swat of the hand, the mind is pestered with the negative possibility, but without the full necessity of restructuring its values. The continual imagined hope of a way out keeps it locked in a perpetual cycle, unable to accept or face its fate. The resulting situation is generally termed anxiety.
Such a person remains trapped because moving forward does not make sense; in fact it makes the opposite of sense from the perspective of their current values. So they resists it in good conscience, and even rationalize their avoidant pattern. They make up righteous excuses for themselves, such as that “no one should be forced to endure that”. Or they may dismiss those who advise them to accept their fate as maleficent pessimists, goading them into surrendering to an unnecessary suffering. The mind, with its copious imagination can always allay any worries and ignore any warnings it is faced with if it so wishes; often to the point of delusion¹. It wants, ideally, to forget the whole fiasco, and reestablish the status quo so that it can return to prosaic applications of skills it already possesses — what Kuhn referred to as everyday “puzzle solving”.
For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. — Campbell
The transition is painful, and will be resisted, because it entails confronting the very thing your current wisdom is driven to avoid. It’s true that jobs are hard and uncomfortable. For someone who has the opportunity to avoid them, and may never need to work, it is wise to avoid work as it saves wasted time and effort — they would call this efficiency. Similarly, the discomfort of being alone may drive another person to seek company at all times, to be sociable, and gain all the associated skills. But the same motive, by never letting them actually be alone, makes them ill-equipped to handle solitude when it arises. By its very construction, the mind is devising concepts and plans to defer the tension of being forced into new stages of life.
The shock of the truth consists of its sudden emergence in the midst of the realm of reassuring phenomena — Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
You can see now why the mind resists. To gain a new tension, to recognize and accept a new problem, is to admit to a failure to solve your deeper issues. By this failure, you are conceding that your prior preferences, values, or inclinations were hitherto wrong in some way, and that new ones must be adopted. You were, in essence, morally wrong. You wasted your time, or made a fool of yourself, perhaps even caused widespread harm.
They played by the sea — then came there a wave and swept their playthings into the deep: and now do they cry. But the same wave shall bring them new playthings, and spread before them new speckled shells! — Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Only birth can conquer death — the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. — Campbell
When such a stalemate occurs, either real life will impose upon the mind — drastically, and often catastrophically — or the mind must push itself through by choice. It must break down its own resistance, a resistance caused by competing motives.
Between resistance and acceptance there must be a cathartic (literally “cleansing”) transformation. This is a staple of the classic three-act structure popular in screenplays. Such films always have a moment “in the belly of the whale”, where the hero must accept and come to terms with their own guilt regarding their failure, in order to progress. They must give up what they want, in order to get what they need. Doing so removes the blocker to growth and, like a catalyst overcoming the energy curve repelling two molecules, it allows the reaction to proceed.
Such a catharsis is an all-or-nothing event. The mind need only be convinced by some means or another that the impending doom is here to stay². With this, the switch will be made in a single moment — at least for that specific situation.
The individual […] no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth — Campbell
The life of spirit is not a life that is fearing death and austerely, saving itself from ruin; rather, it bears death calmly, and in death, it sustains itself. Spirit only wins its truth by finding its feet in its absolute disruption.— Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Once the mind is through to the other side, and has established the new foundations, it will erect a fresh definition of “sense” and reason; or as Campbell put it, “a bolder, cleaner, more spacious, and fully human life”.
Even on looking back, through the values of the new space, the transitional phase from one state to the next doesn’t make logical sense. Just as the crossing of the threshold of adventure has no rational justification, and is unwise compared to the safety and protections of the old village and its customs, wisdom is so constituted that it can only function inside a space of goals and values. No human truth can be known that exists outside it.
There must always remain, however, from the standpoint of normal waking consciousness, a certain baffling inconsistency between the wisdom brought forth from the deep, and the prudence usually found to be effective in the light world. — Campbell
An mind always engages in the creation of wisdom without being able to articulate or explain why. It remains a wisdom outside of wisdom. Wisdom itself is always circumscribed by creating a space of justifications; and such an act can never be justified. So even though the transformation of values generates much that is prized, including skills and creativity, it can never be articulated as valuable or good in itself, nor even thought of as such.
The Tao that can be spoken of is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. — Tao Te Ching
Kuhn similarly recognized that there is no rational justification why a person would shift from one scientific paradigm to another — it is a matter rather of a gestalt or gut feeling:
[Paradigms] are terminated, not by deliberation and interpretation, but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch. Scientists then often speak of the “scales falling from the eyes” or of the “lightning flash” that “inundates” a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution. — Kuhn
And yet despite Kuhn and Lao Tzu, we can in fact speak of this change, which is perhaps the strangest fact of all. Though the mind can only think in one of these spaces at a time, it can also, while inside, spot such moments where a transition is necessary through observing its contradictions and anxieties. And through this realization it can nudge itself in the right direction by choice, as the epitome of a self-destructive, self-creative act.
His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity. The Law lives in him with his unreserved consent. — Campbell
