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eli_sennesh comments on No Universally Compelling Arguments in Math or Science - Less Wrong
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Even a token effort to steelman the "universally" in "universally compelling arguments" yields interesting results.
Consider a mind that thinks the following:
But don't consider it very long, because it drank the poison and now it's dead and not a mind anymore.
If we restrict our observations to minds that are capable of functioning in a moderately complex environment, UCAs come back, at least in math and maybe elsewhere. Defining "functioning" isn't trivial, but it isn't impossible either. If the mind has something like desires, then a functioning mind is one which tends to get its desires more often than if it didn't desire them.
If you cleave mindspace at the joints, you find sections for which there are UCAs. I don't immediately see how to get anything interesting about morality that way, but it's an avenue worth pursuing.
Well-argued, and to me it leads to one of the nastiest questions in morality/ethics: do my values make me more likely to die, and if so, should I sacrifice certain values for pure survival?
In case we're still thinking of "minds-in-general", the world of humans is currently a nasty place where "I did what I had to, to survive!" is currently a very popular explanation for all kinds of nasty but difficult-to-eliminate (broadly speaking: globally undesirable but difficult to avoid in certain contexts) behaviors.
You could go so far as to note that this is how wars keep happening, and also that ditching all other values in favor of survival very quickly turns you into what we colloquially call a fascist monster, or at the very least a person your original self would despise.