If not, and you're just restricting the arena of discourse to utility-based-on-concern rather than utility-in-general, then OK... within that restricted context, I agree.
yes...we agree
If it's true that negative affect and negative utility are roughly synonymous, it's impossible to make a being that negatively values torture and doesn't feel bad when seeing torture.
Shit I'm in a contradiction. Okay, I've messed up by using "affect" under multiple definitions, my mistake.
Reformatting...
1) There are many mechanisms for creating beings that can be modeled as agents with utility 2) Let us define Affect as the mechanism that defines utility in humans - aka emotion.
So now....
3) Do moral considerations apply to all affect, or all things that approximate utility?
if we meet aliens, what do we judge them by?
They aren't going to be made out of neurons. Our definitions of "emotion" are probably not going to apply. But they might be like us - they might cooperate among themselves and they might cooperate with us. We might feel empathy for them. A moral system which disregards the preferences of beings simply because affect is not involved in implementing their minds seems to not match my moral system. I'd want to be able to treat aliens well.
I have a dream that all beings that can be approximated as agents will be judged by their actions, and not any trivial specifics of how their algorithm is implemented.
I'd feel some empathy for a FAI too. Even it it doesn't have emotions, it understands them. It's utility function puts it in the class of beings I'd call "good". My social instincts seem to apply to it - I'm friendly to it the same way it is friendly to me.
So, what I'm saying is that "affect' and "utility" are morally equivalent. Even though there are multiple paths to utility they all carry similar moral weight.
If you remove "concern" and replace it with a signal that has the same result on actions as concern, then maybe "concern" and the signal are morally equivalent.
I agree that distinct processes that result in roughly equivalent utility shifts are roughly morally equivalent.
People want to tell everything instead of telling the best 15 words. They want to learn everything instead of the best 15 words. In this thread, instead post the best 15-words from a book you've read recently (or anything else). It has to stand on its own. It's not a summary, the whole value needs to be contained in those words.
I'll start in the comments below.
(Voted by the Schelling study group as the best exercise of the meeting.)