Were the Babyeaters immoral before meeting humans?

If not, what would you like to call the thing we actually care about?

"Morals" and "goals" are very different things. I might make it a goal to (say) steal an apple from a shop; this would be an example of an immoral goal. Or I might make a goal to (say) give some money to charity; this would be a moral goal. Or I might make a goal to buy a book; this would (usually) be a goal with little if any moral weight one way or another.

Morality cannot be the same as terminal goals, because a terminal goal can also be immoral, and someone can pursue a terminal goal while knowing it's immoral.

AI morals are not a category error; if an AI deliberately kills someone, then that carries the same moral weight as if a person deliberately kills someone.

Observe the contents of RAM as it's changing?

I'm not 100% sure of the mechanism of said observations, but I'm assuming a real AI would be able to do things on a computer that we can't - much as we can easily recognise an object in an image.

I see morality as fundamentally a way of dealing with conflicts between values/goals, so I cant answer questions posed in terms of "our values", because I don't know whether that means a set of identical values, a set of non-identical but non conflicting values, or a set of conflicting values. One of the implications of that view is that some values/goals are automatically morally irrelevant , since they can be satisfied without potential conflict. Another implication is that my view approximates to "morality is society's rules", but without the dismissive implication..if a society as gone through a process of formulating rules that are effective at reducing conflict, then there is a non-vacuous sense in which that society's morality is its rules. Also AI and alien morality are perfectly feasible, and possibly even necessary.

When you see the word "morals" used without further clarification, do you take it to mean something different from "values" or "terminal goals"?

Depends on context.

When I use it, it means something kind of like "what we want to happen." More precisely, I treat moral principles as sort keys for determining the preference order of possible worlds. When I say that X is morally superior to Y, I mean that I prefer worlds with more X in them (all else being equal) to worlds with more Y in them.

I know other people who, when they use it, mean something kind of like that, if not quite so crisply, and I understand them that way.

I know people who, when they use it, mean something more like "complying with the rules tagged 'moral' in the social structure I'm embedded in." I know people who, when they use it, mean something more like "complying with the rules implicit in the nonsocial structure of the world." In both cases, I try to understand by it what I expect them to mean.

My main source is lecture series towards which I linked above. The Newtonian worldview is presented as the lecture that follows after the one I linked.

This "imperial role" business is arguably a rival form of the idea, though Newton did in fact work for the Crown.

At the time the Crown was the head of the church in England.

Why do you think Newton's focus on new observations/experiments came from Cartesian ontology, when Newton doesn't wholly buy that ontology?

I'm saying the popes inadvertently created a separate concept of secular aspirations - often opposed to religious authorities, though not to God if he turns out to exist. This "imperial role" business is arguably a rival form of the idea, though Newton did in fact work for the Crown.

Why do you think that Newtons proposal of his method of science had something to do with desire for a secular ruler?

Even there, someone points out that Bacon wasn't big on math. I'll grant you I should give him more credit for a sensible conclusion on heat, and for encouraging experiments.

But Newton didn't propose a religious method for science, which is my point. Did you think I meant that the popes turned Dante atheist? What they did was give him a desire for a secular ruler and an "almost messianic sense of the imperial role".

That sort of thinking may have given rise to Descartes' science fiction, so to speak - secular aspirations which go beyond even a New Order of the Ages. So there are a few possible prerequisites for a scientific method. As for someone else writing one down, maybe; what we observe is that the best early formulation came from a brilliant freak.

If anyone is still interested, I've since spun this into a startup called Guesstimate.

http://getguesstimate.com/

https://github.com/getguesstimate/guesstimate-app

http://effective-altruism.com/ea/rv/guesstimate_an_app_for_making_decisions_with/

Asking on StackExchange gives a variety of people before Newton: http://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/5275/was-isacc-newton-the-first-person-to-articulate-the-scientific-method-in-europe/5277#5277

thereby creating a clearer distinction between religious and secular.

Given that Newton was a person who cared about the religious that would be a bad example. He spent a lot of time with biblical chronology.

You claimed that science wouldn't have been invented at the time without Newton. It's historically no accident that Leibniz discovered calculus independently from Newton. The interest in numerical reasoning was already there.

To get back to the claim, following the scientific method and explicitly writing it down are two different activities. It takes time to move from the implicit to the explicit.

Possibly, but I wouldn't say the popes started science by being terrible rulers, thereby creating a clearer distinction between religious and secular.

The main point is that if you buy the philosophic commitments of Descartes the hypothetico-deductive method is a straightforward conclusion. Newton might have expressed the method more clearly but various people moved in that directions once Descartes successfully argued against the old way.

True, but on the other hand humanity has been left alone for millions of years, so odds of some species conquering universe just after humans accidentally happen to meet them (while they are still very limited in size) seem low. If there would be nothing stopping such expansions, i would´ve expected seeing some species conquering universe millions or billions of years ago.

More developments on the vibratory mechanisms of consciousness: http://actu.epfl.ch/news/how-the-brain-produces-consciousness-in-time-slice/

The video is somewhat odd in that he claims Descartes had no problem with experiments, but I recall the philosopher proposing rules which contradicted experiments and hand-waving this by appealing to the impossibility of observing bodies in isolation.

In any case, Hakob does make clear that Descartes used a more Aristotelian method as a rhetorical device to persuade Aristotelians. (In effect, he proved the method of intuitive truth unreliable by producing a contradiction.) I don't believe his work includes any workable method you could use to do science, while Newton's rules for natural philosophy seem like an OK approximation.

From memory without Googling the studies I remember that there are studies that test whether having a "Black name" on a resume will change response rates and it does.

There are also those studies that suggest that blinding of piano players gender is required to remove a gender bias.

Do you have another read on the literature?