AspiringKnitter comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1953)
You were not entirely clear, but you seem to be taking these as signals of things being Bad or Good in the morality sense, right? Ok so it feels like there is an objective morality. Let's come up with hypotheses:
You have a morality that is the thousand shards of desire left over by an alien god. Things that were a good idea (for game theory, etc reasons) to avoid in the ancestral environment tend to feel good so that you would do them. Things that feel bad are things you would have wanted to avoid. As we know, an objective morality is what a personal morality feels like from the inside. That is, you are feeling the totally natural feelings of morality that we all feel. Why you attached special affect to the bible, I suppose that's the affect hueristic: you feel like the bible is true and it is the center of your belief or something, and that goodness gets confused with a moral goodness. This is all hindsight, but it seems pretty sound.
Or it could be Jesus-is-Son-of-a-Benevolent-Love-Agent-That-Created-the-Universe. I guess God is sending you signals to say what sort of things he likes/doesn't like? Is that the proposed mechanism for morality? I don't know enough about the theory to say much more.
Ok now let's consider the prior. The complex loving god hypothesis is incredibly complicated. Minds are so complex we can't even build one yet. It would take a hell of a lot more than your feeling-of-morality evidence to even raise this to our attention. A lot more than any scientific hypothesis has ever collected, I would say. You must have other evidence, not only to overcome the prior, but all the evidence against a loving god who intelligently arranged anything,
Anyways, It sounds like you were primarily a moral nihilist before your encounter with the god-prescribes-a-morality hypothesis. Have you read Eliezers metaethics stuff? it deals the with subject of morality in a neutral universe quite well.
I'm afraid I don't see why you call your reward-signal-from-god is an "objective morality" It sounds like the best course of action would be to learn the mechanism and seize control of it like AIXI would.
I (as a human) already have a strong morality, so if I figured out that the agent responsible for all of the evil in the universe were directly attempting to steer me with a subtle reward signal, I'd be pissed. It's interesting that you didn't have that reaction. I guess that's the moral nihilism thing. You didn't know you had your own morality.
A really intelligent response, so I upvoted you, even though, as I said, it surprised me by telling me that, just as one example, tarot cards are Bad when I had not even considered the possibility, so I doubt this came from inside me.
Well you are obviously not able to predict the output of your own brain, that's the whole point of the brain. If morality is in the brain and still too complex to understand, you would expect to encounter moral feelings that you had not anticipated.