Kutta comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong

10 Post author: CronoDAS 16 February 2010 08:29AM

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Comment author: Kutta 17 February 2010 07:58:00PM *  0 points [-]

Well, my above reply was a bit tongue-in-cheek. My concern for other things in general is just as complex as my morality and it contains many meta elements such as "I'm willing to modify my preference X in order to conform to your preference Y because I currently care about your utility to a certain extent". On the simplest level, I care for things on a sliding scale that ranges from myself to rocks or Clippy AIs with no functional analogues for human psychology (pain, etc.). Somebody with a literally wildly differing reflective preference would not be a person and, as you say, would be preferably dealt with in True PD manners rather than ordinary human-human altruism contaminated interactions.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 17 February 2010 10:19:55PM 1 point [-]

Somebody with a literally wildly differing reflective preference would not be a person

This is a very nonstandard usage; personhood is almost universally defined in terms of consciousness and cognitive capacities, and even plausibly relevant desire-like properties like boredom don't have much to do with reflective preference/volition.