= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
MugaSofer comments on How to Seem (and Be) Deep - 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 (118)
You're welcome.
I think I see the problem now. The quoted sentence only makes sense if by "we do not desire it" you mean "on average, it's not part of a human's terminal values". Much of the disagreement, I think, stems from the computer science crowd automatically checking such a broad assertion ("we do not desire it / are human values suicidal") against the extreme cases, then, having found cases for which it doesn't hold, return "This is a false statement".
Similar to a reductio ad absurdum, you just need one counter example to falsify such a blanket statement.
I'd advise you, on this forum specifically, to avoid such confusion by saying e.g. "Do you believe neurotypical (current culture/time frame) human terminal values are suicidal?" In that case, a charge of "typical mind fallacy" would be baseless since, well, you are only talking about "typical" humans (whatever that may be).
You won't find much disagreement that most currently living humans do not value suicide for its own sake.
Then again, most currently living humans do not value certain kinds of liquor. Same thing.
Good points. For various reasons, I tend to use "human" to mean neurotypical human, at least when considering minds. I need to be more careful to correct that.
But this is kind of the point of my question. If someone decides they want to die (when they're not terminally ill and in great pain so it's not immediately obvious why) do we assume that this is evidence that they're NOT neurotypical and immediately start treating their desires as weird brain fluctuations and trying to save them from themselves? Or do we let them do what they want even if this is an indication of mental illness? Or is there a line in the middle somewhere?
If we suppose there is a small batch of humans that profess the desire to die as a thing to do does a transhumanist immortalist jump in and try to save that batch or leave them alone?
Well, some would argue that if they're not neurotypical (as opposed to neurotypical and <s>stupid</s> misguided) then we should respect their terminal values.