= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
MileyCyrus comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1430)
Am I the only who bit the speciesist bullet?
It doesn't matter if a pig is smarter than a baby. It wouldn't matter if a pig passed the Turing test. Babies are humans, so they get preferential treatment.
As far as I remember, yes. (This thread has some 522 comments, so I hope you'll forgive my not reviewing all of them.)
For my part, at least, I read too much Asimov growing up to consider giving humans preference among all intelligences. Anyway, "species" isn't a hard-edged category built in to nature - do you get less and less preferential treatment as you become less and less human? (Perfectly reasonable, of course, I'm just wondering.)
Also, what's the standard against which beings are compared to determine how "human" they are? Phenotypically average among the current population? Nasty prospects for the cryonics advocates among us. And the mind-uploading camp. Also veers dangerously close to negative eugenics, if you're going to start declaring some people are less human than others.
I'd say so, yeah. It's kind of a tricky function, though, since there are two reasons I'm logically willing to give preferential treatment to an organism: likelyhood of said organism eventually becoming the ancestor of a creature similar to myself, and likelyhood of that creature or it's descendants contributing to an environment in which creatures similar to myself would thrive.
It's a lot more hard-edged than intelligence. Of all the animals (I'm talking about individual animals, not species) in the world, practically all are really close to 0% or 100% human. On the other hand, there is a broad range of intelligence among animals, and even in humans. So if you want a standard that draws a clean line, humanity is better than intelligence.
I can tell the difference between an uploaded/frozen human, and a pig. Even a uploaded/frozen pig. Transhumans are in the preferential treatment category, but transpigs aren't..
This is a fully general counter-argument. Any standard of moral worth will have certain objects that meet the standard and certain objects that fail. If you say "All objects that have X property have moral worth", I can immediately accuse you of eugenics against objects that do not have X property.
And a question for you :If you think that more intelligence equals more moral worth, does that mean that AI superintelligences have super moral worth? If existed, would you try and maximize the number of paperclips in order to satisfy the wants a superior intelligence?
It was a question, not an objection, one which you didn't quite answer. Do you get less and less preferential treatment as you become less and less human?
Again, this was a question, not an objection, and again you didn't quite answer the question. What's the standard against which beings are compared to determine how "human" they are? In what sense are uploaded humans still humans?
Also, I'll believe you can tell the difference between an uploaded adult human and an uploaded pig, at least given five minutes' conversation, but I'm much less certain you could tell the difference between an uploaded pig and an uploaded baby.
Not quite the way I meant it. My objection is this: I'm OK with beings being treated less well because they are less people. I'm not OK with people being treated less well because they are less human. In particular, the prospect that we might both agree something is completely a person but you might think it deserves less moral weight because it isn't human is, frankly, scary - especially because we might disagree on whether or not it is human, even without disagreeing about whether or not it's a person.