Wei_Dai comments on Ontological Crisis in Humans - Less Wrong

41 Post author: Wei_Dai 18 December 2012 05:32PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 19 December 2012 05:25:04AM *  5 points [-]

No crisis. And I don't see a lot of other people in crisis over such things either.

I explained in the post why "ontological crisis" is a problem that people mostly don't have to deal with right away, but will have to eventually, in the paragraph that starts with "To fully confront the ontological crisis that we face". Do you have any substantive disagreements with my post, or just object to the term "crisis" as being inappropriate for something that isn't a present emergency for most people? If it's the latter, I chose it for historical reasons, namely because Peter de Blanc already used it to name a similar class of problems in AIs.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 19 December 2012 09:00:50PM *  0 points [-]

In the paragraph you refer to:

Nevertheless, this approach hardly seems capable of being extended to work in a future where many people may have nontraditional mind architectures, or have a zillion copies of themselves running on all kinds of strange substrates, or be merged into amorphous group minds with no clear boundaries between individuals.

Maybe we have no substantive disagreement. If your point is that a million copy super intelligence will have issues in morality because of their ontologies that we don't currently have, then I agree. Me, I think it's kind of cheeky to be prescribing solutions for the million copy super intelligence - I think he's smarter than I am, doesn't need my help much, and may not ever exist anyway. I'm not here to rain on that parade, but I'm not interested in joining it either.

However, you seemed to be using present tense for the crisis, and I just don't see one now. Real people now don't have big complicated ontological problems lacking clear solutions. That was my point.

The abortion example was appropriate, as that is one issue where currently many people have a problem, but their problem is usually just essentialism, and there is a cure for it - just knock it off.

I find discussions of metaethics interesting, particularly in terms of the conceptual confusion involved. It seemed that you were getting at such issues, but I couldn't locate a concrete and currently relevant issue of that type from your post. So I directly asked for the concretes applicable now. You gave a couple. I don't find either particularly problematic.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 December 2012 02:15:16AM 1 point [-]

The abortion example was appropriate, as that is one issue where currently many people have a problem, but their problem is usually just essentialism, and there is a cure for it - just knock it off.

I don't see how this addresses the problem.