= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
JoshuaZ comments on The Evil AI Overlord List - 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 (80)
That's a pretty decent argument for vegetarianism. One person's reducio ad absurdum is another person's modus ponens.
Careful: Some alien intelligence may also hate us for not killing enough animals. e.g. How cruel must we be not to wipe out carnivores so that herbivores can live life in peace?
Or as I recently said in a different forum, might think us evil that we aren't exterminating all animal life that we can find... The moral syllogism for that is quite simple.
Alien? Never mind alien. Your aliens are insufficiently alien.
I would make that exact argument. Sure, we need the biosphere for now, but let's get rid of it as soon as possible.
Except, how could such a set of preferences have evolved? How would that behavior ever be adaptive?
Most every human preference is adaptive in some sort of ancestral context. We can, at least, assume that alien preferences are adaptive as well (given that the aliens appear via evolutionary processes, rather than some other way)
Moral considerations need not be directly adaptive; you can probably get there from routes as simple as empathy + deductive reasoning. If humanity hasn't come to that collective conclusion yet, despite having the hardware, I suspect it's because such an omnicidal conclusion hasn't been in any major group's interests yet.
Being in a group's interest == adaptive, no?
But you are right of course...vegetarianism is a good example of a conclusion reached via empathy + deductive reasoning which is in no way adaptive to the vegetarian (though you might argue that the vegetarian shares many alleles with the animal).
However: a maladaptive morality would never be hardwired into a species. A human might think and ponder, and eventually come to take a maladaptive moral stance...but not all humans would be inherently predisposed to that stance. If they were, natural selection would quickly remove it.
So some of our aliens might hate us for not killing animals...but it would be very unlikely if this was a universal moral among that alien species.
Well, I'd be inclined to agree that the prior probability of some civilization adopting this is low [1], but I can't agree with what seems to be your implicit assumption that a non-predispositive attitude can't be widespread - partially because group inteterests are defined much more widely than adaptiveness.
[1] I'd probably extend that to anything other than "don't lie or break your promises," "play tit for tat," "do what the ruling power says," or "maximize utility," and even those I wouldn't say are anything like sure bets.
Hmm...actually, the implicit assumption I was making was that aliens would forgive another species for adopting norms that they considered non-predispositive.
A Western human would not forgive another culture for torturing sentient beings, for example...but they would forgive another culture for polyamory/polygamy/polygyny. A human can make the distinction between morality which is instinctive and morality which is culturally constructed, and the latter can be compromised in certain contexts.
But you are right, bad implicit assumption. Aliens might not make that distinction.
That's me, the Plant Avenger! A steak every chance I get.