Estarlio comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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Yeah, but my point was that doing so is not actually useful because now we have to decide whether or not babies fit this criterion (and if this criterion is good), and we're inevitably going to do that by analogy and example if at all. I was trying to skip right to that step, but I suppose we did get there eventually.
Pigs are smart. Pigs are very smart: they have complex personalities, developed rules of social interaction, intentional deception, object permanence, high ability to learn... given a few hours they can figure out how mirrors work and use them to see around or behind obstacles. The list goes on. (Even still, you would not be tempted to confuse them with people.) I'm pretty sure pigs are smarter than wolves, for example. Certainly, if you spend any time around them, pigs are "obviously" smarter than babies.
To my knowledge babies have none of those abilities, nor, indeed, many of the other characteristics of functioning people.
Regardless, I have no doubt that pigs are closer to functioning adult humans than babies are. You'd best give up pork. (Or do what I view as the reasonable thing and give up the idea that babies are people.)
I'd be interested in what standard of "functional" you might propose that newborns would meet, though. Perhaps give examples of things which seem close to to line, on either side? For example, do wolves seem to you like people? Should killing a wolf be considered a moral wrong on par with murder?
I have to ask, at this point: have you seriously considered the possibility that babies aren't people?
The script is as I described it. It's compiling an AI and then launching it. Here, I'll write it for you:
We are supposing that it's still on the first step, compilation. However, with no interaction on our part, it's going to finish compiling and begin running the sufficiently-advanced AI. Unless we interrupt it before compilation finishes, in which case it will not.
You seem to have gotten on something of a tangent here. I'm not sure why you're talking about maladaptive behaviors. I'm talking about immoral behaviors.
It is, for example, almost certainly maladaptive to allow all women to go into higher education and industry, because those correlate strongly with having fewer children and that causes serious problems. (Witness Japan circa now.) This is, as you put it, a poor gambling strategy. Does that imply it's immoral for society to allow women to be education? Do reasonable people look at people who support women's rights and wonder what's wrong with them? Of course not.
So no, maladaptive does not imply immoral. As such, I stand by my original point, which was that I don't think you would have invented a moral rule against infanticide if you weren't raised with one.
I suppose I had, yes. It never really occurred to me that they might be that intelligent - but, yeah, having done a bit of reading they seem smart enough that I probably oughtn’t to eat them.
Wolves definitely seem like people to me, yes. Adult humans are definitely on the list and wolves do pack behaviours which are very human-like. Killing a wolf for no good reason should be considered a moral wrong on par with murder. There's not to say that I think it should result in legal punishment on par with killing a human, mind, it's easier to work out that humans are people than it is to work out that wolves are - it's a reasonable mistake.
Insects like wasps and flies don't seem like people. Red pandas do. Dolphins do. Cows... don't. But given what I've discovered about pigs that bears some checking --- and now cows do. Hnn. Damn it, now I won't be able to look at burgers without feeling sad.
All the videos with loads of blood and the like never bothered me, but learning that food-animals are that intelligent really does.
Have you imagined what life would be like if you were stupider, or were more intelligent but denied a body with which that intelligence was easy to express? If your person-hood is fundamental to your identity, then as long as you can imagine being stupider and still being you that still qualifies as a person. In terms of how old a person would be to have the sort of capabilities the person you're imaging would have, at what point does your ability to empathise with the imaginary-you break down?
As far as I know how, yes. If you've got some ways of thinking that we haven't been talking about here, feel free to post them and I'll do my best to run them.
If Babies weren't people the world would be less horrifying. Just as if food-animals are people the world is more horrifying. But it would look the same in terms of behaviours - people kill people all the time, I don't expect them not to without other criteria being involved.
Not a person.
No, because we've had that discussion. But people did and that attitude towards women was especially prevalent in Japan, where it was among the most maladaptive for the contrary to hold, until quite recently. Back in the 70s and 80s the idea for women was basically to get a good education and marry the person their family picked for them. Even today people who say they don't want children or a relationship are looked on as rather weird and much of the power there, in practice, works in terms of family relationships.
It just so happens there are lots of adaptive reasons to have precedents that seem to extend to cover women too. I don't think one can seriously forward an argument that keeps women at home and doesn't create something that can be used against him in fairly horrifying ways. Even if you don't have a fairly inclusive definition of people, it seems unwise to treat other humans in that way - you, after all, are the other human to another human.
Upvoted.
Huh. I admit, this was not the response I was expecting.
What about fish? I'm pretty sure many fish are significantly more functional than one-month-old humans, possibly up to two or three months. (Younger than that I don't think babies exhibit the ability to anticipate things. Haven't actually looked this up anywhere reputable, though.) Also, separately, would you say that babies are around the lowest level of functioning that you can possess and still qualify as a person?
Trying to narrow down where we differ here: what signs of being-a-person does a one-month-old infant display that, say, Cleverbot does not?
Frequently. It's scary. But if I were in a body in which intelligence was not easy to express, and I was killed by someone who didn't think I was sufficiently functional to be a person, that would be a tragic accident, not a moral wrong.
About age four, possibly a year or two earlier. I'm reasonably confident I had introspection at age four; I don't think I did much before that. I find myself completely unable to empathize with a 'me' lacking introspection.
I am afraid that this might come off as condescending; know that no condescension is felt. :
I really like that in this community, and in this discussion in particular, this question can be asked and answered honestly and seriously. Thank you.
(Data point: I would not have asked if I had known you consider wolves to be people.)
OK. So the point of this analogy is that newborns seem a lot like the script described, on the compilation step. Yes, they're going to develop advanced, functioning behaviors eventually, but no, they don't have them yet. They're just developing the infrastructure which will eventually support those behaviors.
Yes. (Holds outside of Japan as well.) It is, arguably, maladaptive. But it's certainly not immoral, no?
Admittedly the analogy is poor. You're right to point that out, and I'm not going to try to support it. However, thanks to the ensuing discussion, I know the question I actually want to ask: do you think behaviors are immoral if and only if they're maladaptive?
I don't know enough about them - given they're so different to us in terms of gross biology I imagine it's often going to be quite difficult to distinguish between functioning and instinct - this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/3189941.stm
Says that scientists observed some of them using tools, and that definitely seems like people though.
Yes.
Shared attention, recognition, prediction, bonding -
The legal definition of an accident is an unforeseeable event. I don't agree with that entirely because, well everything's foreseeable to an arbitrary degree of probability given the right assumptions. However, do you think that people have a duty to avoid accidents that they foresee a high probability-adjusted harm from? (i.e. the potential harm modified by the probability they foresee of the event.)
The thought here being that, if there's much room for doubt, there's so much suffering involved in killing and eating animals that we shouldn't do it even if we only argue ourselves to some low probability of their being people.
Do you think that the use of language and play to portray and discuss fantasy worlds is a sign of introspection?
I agree, if it doesn't have the capabilities that will make it a person there's no harm in stopping it before it gets there. If you prevent an egg and a sperm combining and implanting, you haven't killed a human.
No, fitness is too complex a phenomena for our relatively inefficient ways of thinking and feeling to update on it very well. If we fix immediate lethal response from the majority as one end of the moral spectrum, and enthusiastic endorsement as the other, then maladaptive behaviour tends to move you further towards the lethal response end of things. But we're not rational fitness maximisers, we just tend that way on the more readily apparent issues.