= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Konkvistador comments on A wild theist platonist appears, to ask about the path - 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 (99)
Actually I think grounding morality can be performed on a god-as-a-mathematical-like-entity if you wanted to. For certain settings of God you even get interesting and neat properties, which can be pretty useful (in a sense similar to this) if FAI is not near or possible and you question moral progress.
You can also use God to avoid certain kinds of blackmail and do other neat superrational tricks. Who knows it may even be the best implementation for this that we can currently build on some human brains.
Though in practice the reason we have Jesus is so we can ask "What would Jesus do?", which is easier to answer than "What would the ideal rational agent with unlimited computational resources do?".
'Course, Jesus says "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."; I think we still have a moral obligation to figure out the theoretical foundations of justification for perfect agents.
In Stoicism, we call this type of person a sage. It is actually a very practical concept to make use of. During before-sleep meditation, I'll playback my entire day in fast-forward mentally, but alongside me I imagine a semi-transparent sage-me and I "watch" as our two paths diverge (with the sage-me living a perfectly virtuous life and me falling far short).
Interesting; I am annoyed and relieved that no Stoic seems to have nominated any particular historical person as a sage.
I don't think I could pull off that kind of meditation, due to my having too much structural uncertainty about ethics and meta-ethics. What's that Borges quote? "I have known that thing the Greeks knew not—uncertainty."
BTW random LW people here is the SEP on Stoicism.
I notice that like LessWrong the Stoics are big on Logos and instrumental rationality and related ethics but their (meta-)physics and theology strike me as fuzzy and underdeveloped.
For this, there'd have to be a well-defined God, provably unique up to isomorphism.
Why so? How well-defined? I find it useful to base normative epistemic arguments off of the existence of Chaitin's omega, even though there isn't a unique omega and even though we barely know any bits of any of them. Similarly one could base moral arguments off of just the knowledge of the existence of a normative standard against which moral agents could be compared or by which moral agents could in theory be judged; postulating such a standard is itself a non-trivial meta-ethical position.
I'm not sure exactly what point you wish to illustrate with the Chaitin's omega example. Yes, its value depends on the TM coding. But when a specific one is chosen, the value is unique.