MileyCyrus comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong

25 Post author: orthonormal 26 December 2011 10:57PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (1430)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: MileyCyrus 12 June 2012 02:51:04PM 0 points [-]

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?

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.

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.

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..

Also veers dangerously close to negative eugenics, if you're going to start declaring some people are less human than others.

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?

Comment author: Bakkot 14 June 2012 04:00:41AM 0 points [-]

So if you want a standard that draws a clean line, humanity is better than 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?

Transhumans are in the preferential treatment category, but transpigs aren't.

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.

This is a fully general counter-argument.

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.