ME3 comments on The Moral Void - Less Wrong

31 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 June 2008 08:52AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (105)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: ME3 30 June 2008 02:31:21PM -1 points [-]

If everything I do and believe is a consequence of the structure of the universe, then what does it mean to say my morality is/isn't built into the structure of the universe? What's the distinction? As far as I'm concerned, I am (part of) the structure of the universe.

Also, regarding the previous post, what does it mean to say that nothing is right? It's like if you said, "Imagine if I proved to you that nothing is actually yellow. How would you proceed?" It's a bizarre question because yellowness is something that is in the mind anyway. There is simply no fact of the matter as to whether yellowness exists or not.

Comment author: thomblake 07 December 2011 10:50:22PM 3 points [-]

"Imagine if I proved to you that nothing is actually yellow. How would you proceed?"

A propos: Magenta isn't a color.

Comment author: wnoise 07 December 2011 11:54:08PM 3 points [-]

It's not a spectral color. That is, no one wavelength of light can reproduce it. But I've seen magenta things, and there is widespread intersubjective agreement about what is magenta and what isn't. It damn well is a color.

Comment author: rkyeun 29 July 2012 11:31:39PM 1 point [-]

Do not confuse concepts when you use a confusing word. There is no wavelength simultaneously above 740nm and below 450nm. There is a <255 0 255> vector for monitor pixels. Whatever it is you mean by "color", these two facts explain magenta. Think like the star, not like the starfish.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 20 June 2012 02:49:42PM 0 points [-]

That's... precipitating a question, providing a mysterious answer to a question too simple to ask, and probably a few other things.

Comment author: thomblake 20 June 2012 05:30:41PM 0 points [-]

I still think it's spooky.

That said, it makes it a lot easier to ward off the "color means such-and-such wavelength of light" simplification in discussions of color experience. That definition fails to find equivalent the "yellow experience" that you see from yellow light and the "yellow experience" that you see from combined red and green light - but it's much cheaper to note that it simply fails to classify magenta (and nearby colors) as colors.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 24 June 2012 11:51:03PM 0 points [-]

Yes, it's a very interesting thing they're pointing out. The article deserves to exist. It just needs to use words right.