timtyler comments on Separate morality from free will - Less Wrong

6 Post author: PhilGoetz 10 April 2011 02:35AM

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Comment author: timtyler 09 April 2011 03:58:11PM 2 points [-]

My current hypothesis is that most of the purpose of evolving morality is signaling that you are predictably non-defecting enough to deal with.

Morality is also involved in punishment, signalling virtue, and manipulating the behaviour of others - so they stop doing the bad deeds that you don't like.

Comment author: David_Gerard 09 April 2011 04:32:29PM *  4 points [-]

Certainly. I think my central thesis is that morality is a set of cached answers to a really complicated game theory problem given initial conditions (e.g. you are in a small tribe; you are in a big city and poor; you are a comfortable Western suburbanite), some cached in your mind, some cached in your genes, so it's unsurprising that using intelligence to extrapolate from the cached answers without keeping a close eye on the game theoretical considerations of whatever the actual problem you're trying to solve is will lead to trouble.