What We Owe the Past

Suppose Alex!20 reads about play pumps, and vows to give some money to them every month. Alex!30 learns that actually, this charity is doing harm (on net). If he went back in time and gave Alex!20 a short presentation, Alex!20 wouldn't make the vow. Alex!20's actual goal was to make the world a better place, and he thought play pumps did that. Making simple vows that bind your behaviour restricts your freedom to act on the best available evidence. The rational thing to do is to be actively checking that such actions make sense, based on the best available evidence. As soon as some evidence suggests a new charity may be more effective, say oops and switch. 

I mean I would say that 

Partly because mass is good on rational merits (the utility gained from meeting up with fellow humans, thinking about ethics, meditating through prayer, singing with the congregation).

Is questionable. It reads like the excuse of someone who never really said oops, and decided they had made a mistake. I am sure that there are lots of clubs and knitting groups you could go to. I suspect that the rest of the activities are not helpful to actually getting ethics and rationality right. (It wouldn't help a mathematician to sing songs about how "2+2=7" every week. ) The human brain is incapable of listening to and singing about obvious nonsense every week without being somewhat influenced by it. And I suspect that influence may not be in a good direction. 

My short answer is: nothing.

Of course one may owe debts to various people, especially one's parents for their role in creating you, but those debts are eventually repaid, or lapse when they die. The past parts of myself are informative, not normative, for whatever decisions my present part makes. Why does Austin-27 want to fulfil commitments made by Austin-17 that Austin-27 no longer believes in?

The past provides examples (positive and negative) to learn from, Chesterton fences to examine before changing, ideas to consider, and situations it has placed us in, but imposes no obligations.

Your finger is on the scales with the example of the conservationist. That person's desires are an applause light, while those of their descendants are a boo light. Switch the two sets of desires and the example is no longer persuasive, if it ever was.

A lot of comments (partly highly upvoted*) do not do much beyond disagreeing and affirming that they don't feel obligated to their or other past selves. That's fine and their privilege but it is not engaging with the meat of the argument - and an argument that is pretty close to arguments about caring about future people. 

UPDATED: * This comment was made when the top-voted comment had 26 karma, right now it is at 14.

I pretty strongly disagree.  Honoring past WISDOM seems good - learning from their pain and knowledge is hard to argue against.  There may be past wishes which allow me to update my own preferences.  But that doesn't translate to respecting, agreeing with, or paying for any of their crazy specific demands.  

I don't even think I owe very much to many stated preferences of contemporary living humans, although I do try to respect and support my interpretation of those parts which I think encourage long-term satisfaction.  For instance, I park my car in my garage, which frustrates those who'd like to cut out the catalytic converter.

This does mean I'll try to commit future-me (and other future humans) to courses of action that I think are good for them.  But it does not mean that those future people have a moral duty to agree with me.  

I notice that my ethics, my morality, my beliefs, differ in many ways from those of the past; I expect these things to differ in many ways from my own, in the future.  I notice the relationship between these two concepts is reciprocal.

My grandfather talked to me, several times, about how he knew I had my own life, and that I wouldn't always want to spend a lot of time with him; he was explicitly giving me permission, I think, to do something that he himself regretted in his youth, but understood better with age.  He was telling me to live unfettered by that particular obligation.  I didn't see him much after I started working, and then he passed away.

If I have grandchildren some day, I know what I will tell them.

I consider the alternative grandfather who I didn't have, who was jealous of my time and attention, and how it would have changed things.

What do we owe the future?

I think maybe we owe the future the freedom to choose for themselves, unfettered by the chains of our expectations.  The freedom to choose means nothing if it does not include the freedom to make what we think are the wrong choices.  The conservationist wanted to restrain the choices of the future, to limit them.  And while I think the cuteness-maximizers are wrong, we owe them the right to be wrong, just as we act in so many ways our ancestors would have regarded as wrong.

The idea of a god-AI enshrining some particular group of people's values forever doesn't look very appealing to me; indeed, it looks like an abdication of our fundamental responsibility to the future.

What do I owe the past, therefore?

Gratitude, that I have more choices than they did.

As I wrote in a commentary on Gwern's "The Narrowing Circle" [EA · GW], respect for ancestors is probably justified in some sort of acausal-negotiation sense, even if (as commenters Richard Kennaway and Dagon feel) we don't actually care about their values:

A drop in respect for ancestors might also directly cause a drop in concern for descendants -- it might be logical to disregard the lives of future generations if we assume that they (just like us) will ignore the wishes of their ancestors!

Consider: it's certainly important that we somewhat respect the financial wishes of the dead (trusts, foundations, inheritance, etc) rather than (as might seem logical at first glance) confiscating all their assets upon death.  This is because being able to pass on wealth and create a durable legacy (like the Rockefeller Foundation or etc) is part of what motivates people to earn and invest for the future in the first place.

By a similar logic, it might be important that we should also commit to respecting the cultural wishes of the dead, in order to somehow motivate people to take a more long-term outlook.  As an off-the-cuff example, maybe a culture that emphasized respect for ancestors would be higher-fertility, since parents would know that their children would be more likely to carry forward their values than in today's no-respect-for-past-generations culture.

I wasn't expecting to based on the title, but I like this. I think it's important to be able to hold commitments in mind for your future self. But it's also important, when trying to hold your future self to something, to be conservative about what you commit to so you don't screw up your ability to make these commitments in the future.

I can think of several times when I explicitly tried to ... do something like acausal trade ... with my future self.

1. When I was about 9 years old, I had a very complex set of relationships with other kids, including some kind of "war" and an on/off relationship with a specific boy. I remember thinking to myself, "Usually, when people are adults, they think this kind of thing that kids do is stupid. But future me, you'd better not do that. Think of this as important. This is really important to me."
2. When I was deciding which college to go to, I attended a weekend at one of the places I was accepted that they held to attract students. I really enjoyed it, but the college was extremely expensive. I thought, "Hey, future self... I don't want to hold you to this, but listen, this is REALLY nice. I know it's expensive, but seriously try to work out if there is any way you can go here, for real."
3. When I was giving birth (recently), I thought, "You know, I've been planning to do this again, but holy shit, it sucks. Future self, seriously consider whether this is actually worth it."

I'm shaping up to ~violate the commitment in all 3 cases, but I think there are good reasons that past-me would accept if they knew.

1: I don't find it that important in retrospect, but it's not because I was "only a child" at the time; it's because basically all things in life recede in importance when they happened to you a long time ago and you don't interact with the relevant people anymore. I plan to try to honor this commitment by having more respect for the experiences of children in general.

2: I didn't attend the expensive college. I did try quite hard to figure out if it was feasible, but unfortunately I was lacking in good information about money at that time in my life. My best guess was that it would have been pretty crappy graduating with that much debt, and I now think that was basically true. Ultimately, though, my life would have been so different that it's hard to say what the right decision was.

3: Haven't had the opportunity yet, but I do plan to have another child, even keeping in mind the agony of childbirth (note that I did have medical pain relief, but they don't tell you how bad it can be even with that). My past self wasn't aware of how great having a newborn child was, and I like to think would agree that this is the right choice all told. (Also, later births are on average easier, so that helps too.)

If we look at 17!Austin and 27!Austin as two different people, then I don't see why 27!Austin would have any obligation to do anything for 17!Austin if 27!Austin doesn't want to do it, just like I wouldn't attend masses just because my friend from 10 years ago who is also dead now wanted me to. 

If we look at 17!Austin and 27!Austin as a continuation of the same person, then 27!Austin can do whatever he wants, because everybody has a right to change their mind and perspective, to evolve and to correct mistakes of their past.

If we consider information preservation to be important and valuable, then I would argue that 27!Austin already keeps much more of 17!Austin by simply existing than he could by attending masses. 27!Austin and any future version of Austin is an evolution of 17!Austin, and the best he can do to honor 17!Austin is to just stay alive.

27!Austin apparently shares lots of values with 17!Austin, but I would submit not out of any moral principle. If 27!Austin has different values from 17!Austin then that's possibly sad in some weird sort of way, but statements like

if 27!Austin decides to ignore the values of 17!Austin, then that constitutes a kind of murder

are simply ridiculous hyperbole. If you literally believe this, then why are you not calling for anyone who changes their mind to be prosecuted and jailed for 20 years? Obviously not with the intent of rehabilitation, because inducing someone to change their values and beliefs is a kind of murder.

I take this a step further. I say that frontier14's opinion holds more sway than frontier!24's opinion. Frontier!14 has less information, but his mind is significantly more facile. Almost every single person drops iq points as they age. If in the intervening years I haven't gained any new information which refutes the reason underlying frontier!14's goals then I should on the whole trust his analysis over mine. Which is what I do.

This is more so an argument that it's rational to respect your past convictions, rather than that it's ethical to do so.

I think you'll find that this community will be very opposed to respecting the past because they are largely fans of hedonism. Honoring past obligations made to one self is kind of the polar opposite of hedonistic pleasure seeking behavior.

I owe the past my forgiveness, and the future my learning.

Promises should be kept. It's not only a virtue, but useful for pre-commitment if you can keep your promises.

But, if you make a promise to someone, and later both of you decide it's a bad idea to keep the promise, you should be able to break it. If that someone is your past self, this negotiation is easy: If you think it's a good idea to break the promise, they would be convinced the same way you were. You've run that experiment.

So, you don't really have much obligation to your past self. If you want your future self to have obligation to you, you are asking them to disregard any new evidence they may encounter. Maybe you want that sometimes. But that feels like it should be a rare thing.

On a society level, this argument might not work, though. Societal values might change because people who held the old value died. We can't necessarily say "they would be convinced the same way we were." I don't know what causes societal values to change, or what the implications therefore are.

Adding religion to the equation immensely complicates this topic, since most religions posit the continued existence of the soul after death. In this case you're not really respecting the wishes of past people, per se, but merely people you can no longer see. When we talk about respecting the graves of the dead, I suspect it's a little of this persisting: maybe they're still there somewhere, watching. In this case, include their utility in relevant calculations, times the probability that they exist. 

The main topic that I feel is missing from this discussion is consent. There are always reasonable boundaries to what any contract, with yourself or others, can force someone to do, and we now accept that even legally-binding promises such as marriage can't bind our future selves unconditionally. Insofar as your future self is similar to your past self, your previous consent binds your future self, but even when contracts don't have official get-out clauses there are practical things that will prevent them from mattering. Although you're the same legal entity, I'd argue that in cases of Hollywood amnesia, for instance, the separation of past and future self is sufficient to make marriage vows morally dubious. It is only because of the similarity between 17! and 27!Austin that you can bind yourself to anything at all: I see no reason to generalise this obligation to your past self to your ancestors. They don't get utility out of your actions, so the only reason to worry about their opinions is where there is a contract you've consented to. You didn't consent to be created, so have no intrinsic obligations to your ancestors.
Regarding whether your descendants are forced to fulfil a will: they have not consented to the contract, but can simply not take the money if they wish. If they take the money, they are consenting to reasonable requests in the will, although if the requests are clearly absurd (such as saving something that has already been destroyed) then the conditions will just be ignored. 
"The people in the past were roughly as intellectually capable as you are": maybe in genetical potential, but not phenotypically, as shown in the Flynn effect. "The people in the past had similar modes of thought, similar hopes and dreams to you." They were mostly farmers with very limited capacity for abstract thought. To the extent that their hopes and dreams are similar to mine, I see no reason to double-count them. Furthermore, they don't have working knowledge of the current world, and giving them it would render them effectively different people, by your own arguments. 

So many things to ponder. I am this day 69!George. 19!George was a mess; 29!George not so much(quit drinking).  I miss the youth and energy of 19-65!George. Try as I might, the body and brain runs its natural course, but I am not complaining and try not to use aging as a mask for bitterness or an excuse for giving up on new ideas. I regard my ancestors with a mix of anger, sorrow, and joy.  I try to encourage hopeful thoughts about the future because I was lucky to have been able to live out an “average” life span, so I feel a responsibility to support conditions that would best allow future (and current lives) to live as simply and as well as I have been able to live. 

I disagree, because past people had their chance to influence us and I am equipped to influence my descendants. If I don't kick in for their values, or my descendants don't kick in for mine, it means the people in the past failed; they don't get extra control over me just because they hoped they would have it.

The closest thing I believe to this is that it's good to empathize with past people, and not dismiss the things they cared about as locally absurd. In my opinion, engaging with Catholicism at all is adaptive for a higher fraction of Westerners in the 1600s than now, leaving aside the fact that its epistemic claims are false.

It's also good to try to spend time with my aging relatives because I care about them, and because I want to model to my descendants how to care for me when I'm old, but again not for decision theoretic reasons that can be generalized from reasoning about future people.