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Illano comments on Crazy Ideas Thread - Less Wrong
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Since this is a crazy ideas thread, I'll tag on the following thought. If you believe that in the future, if we are able to make ems, and we should include them in our moral calculus, should we also be careful not to imagine people in bad situations? Since by doing so, we may be making a very low-level simulation in our own mind of that person, that may or may not have some consciousness. If you don't believe that is the case now, how does that scale, if we start augmenting our minds with ever-more-powerful computer interfaces. Is there ever a point where it becomes immoral just to think of something?
God kind of ran into the same problem. "What if The Universe? Oh, whoops, intelligent life, can't just forget about that now, can I? What a mess... I guess I better plan some amazing future utility for those poor guys to balance all that shit out... It has to be an infinite future? With their little meat bodies how is that going to work? Man, I am never going to think about things again. Hey, that's a catchy word for intelligent meat agents."
So, in short, if we ever start thinking truly immoral things, we just need to out-moral them with longer, better thoughts. Forgetting about our mental creations is probably the most immoral thing we could do.
So George R. R. Martin is a very evil man.
In e.g. Christianity it's immoral to think of a lot of things :-/
Not exactly. If I ask you "what if you robbed a bank?" you will think of robbing a bank, you actually cannot prevent yourself from thinking about robbing a bank. And yes, you just lost the Game.
What makes such a "thinking of a lot of things" immoral is not the thinking itself, but whether it is coupled with a desire.
But you think you can prevent desire from sneaking into your thinking about sinful things..? ;-)
In the interest of steel-manning the Christian view; there's a difference between thinking briefly and abstractly of the idea of something and indulging in fantasy about it.
If you spend hours imagining the feel of the gun in your hand, the sound of the money sliding smoothly into the bag, the power and control, the danger and excitement, it would be fair to say that there's a point where you could have made the choice to stop.
Yes, of course, there is a whole range of, let's say, involvement in these thoughts. But if I understand mainstream Catholicism correctly, even a brief lustful glance at the neighbor's wife is a sin. Granted, a lesser sin than constructing a whole porn movie in your head, but still a sin.
Yes, and in Yudkowskian rationality, lying to oneself is a sin.
What's wrong with having a conception of sin that includes thoughts?
Well that's why I called it steel-manning, I can't promise anything about the reasonableness of the common interpretation.
That depends on how strongly a person is suggestible.
It doesn't. Just by parsing that sentence, if you understood it, it means you though of it.
No, it's quite possible to parse the sentence without actually going along with it. Just because you can't doesn't mean that other people can't.
In this case we should define "going along" and "thinking of", because otherwise this will be just empty arguing about semantics.
My point was that parsing and understanding that sentence means you are thinking of it, even if for just a short moment, and that it is different from actually having even the slightest desire to actually do it. Where does your definition of "going along" fit into it?