thomblake comments on Spock's Dirty Little Secret - Less Wrong

46 Post author: pjeby 25 March 2009 07:07PM

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Comment author: thomblake 27 March 2009 09:12:35PM 0 points [-]

I completely agree with you about Data. pjeby is begging a question w.r.t. metaethics - he assumes that judgments of 'good' and 'bad' have only emotional content, apparently based solely on the fact that they are correlated with emotions (we call that emotivism - it's not very popular amongst ethicists).

Comment author: pjeby 27 March 2009 09:56:06PM *  4 points [-]

I didn't say anything about meta-ethics; I said that human brains require emotion in order to prioritize their thinking... no matter how much you might like the case to be otherwise. The brain with which you seek to devise some sort of extra-emotional calculation requires emotion in order to perform those calculations.

That doesn't say anything about the content of the calculations themselves, however. Your brain needs emotion to learn chess or play it... but that doesn't mean that chess itself is emotional. So there's your escape hatch.