Richard, hello.
Human beings are analogous to computers. Morality and other aspects of behavior and cognition are analogous to programs. It is a type error to ask whether a program "really exists" somewhere outside a computer, or is "intrinsic" to a computer, or is "contingent", or something like that. Such questions don't correspond to observations within the world that could turn out one way or the other. You see a computer running a certain program and that's the end of the story.
Your mind is a program too, and your moral intuitions are how your algorithm feels from inside, not a direct perception of external reality (human beings are physically incapable of that kind of thing, though they may feel otherwise). I know for a fact that you have no astral gate in your head to pull answers from the mysterious source of morality. But this doesn't imply that your moral intuitions "should" be worthless to you and you "should" seek external authority! There's nothing wrong with mankind living by its internal moral lights.
Yes, it's possible that different computers will have different programs. Our world contains billions of similar "moist robots" running similar programs, perhaps because we were all created from design documents that are 99% identical for historical reasons, and also because we influence each other a lot. Your intuition that all "possible" sentient agents must share a common morality is unlikely to survive an encounter with any sentient agent that's substantially different from a human. We can imagine such agents easily, e.g. a machine that will search for proofs to Goldbach's conjecture and turn surrounding matter and energy into computing machinery to that end. Such a machine may be more ingenious than any human in creating other machines, discovering new physics, etc., but will never gravitate toward your intuition that one shouldn't kill babies. Most possible "intelligent agents" (aka algorithms that can hit small targets in large search spaces) aren't humans in funny suits.
Yeah, as Vladimir guessed, this is all familiar.
Your last paragraph suggests that you've misunderstood my view. I'm not making an empirical claim to the effect that all agents will eventually converge to our values -- I agree that that's obviously false. I don't even think that all formally intelligent agents are guaranteed to have normative concepts like 'ought', 'reason', or 'morality'. The claim is just that such a radically different agent could share our normative concepts (in particular, our aspiration to a mind-independent standard), even if they...
In You Provably Can't Trust Yourself, Eliezer tried to figured out why his audience didn't understand his meta-ethics sequence even after they had followed him through philosophy of language and quantum physics. Meta-ethics is my specialty, and I can't figure out what Eliezer's meta-ethical position is. And at least at this point, professionals like Robin Hanson and Toby Ord couldn't figure it out, either.
Part of the problem is that because Eliezer has gotten little value from professional philosophy, he writes about morality in a highly idiosyncratic way, using terms that would require reading hundreds of posts to understand. I might understand Eliezer's meta-ethics better if he would just cough up his positions on standard meta-ethical debates like cognitivism, motivation, the sources of normativity, moral epistemology, and so on. Nick Beckstead recently told me he thinks Eliezer's meta-ethical views are similar to those of Michael Smith, but I'm not seeing it.
If you think you can help me (and others) understand Eliezer's meta-ethical theory, please leave a comment!
Update: This comment by Richard Chappell made sense of Eliezer's meta-ethics for me.