Jef_Allbright comments on Ethical Inhibitions - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 October 2008 08:44PM

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Comment author: Jef_Allbright 20 October 2008 08:48:03PM 0 points [-]

@Caledonian: "...we must therefore conclude that a fatal flaw exists in our model..."

It's not necessarily that a "fatal flaw" exists in a model, but that all models are necessarily incomplete.

Eliezer's reasoning is valid and correct -- over a limited context of observations supporting meaning-making. It may help to consider that groups promote individual members, biological organisms promote genes, genes promote something like "material structures of increasing synergies"...

In cybernetic terms, in the bigger picture, there's nothing particularly privileged about the role of the gene, nor about biological evolutionary processes as a special case of a more fundamental organizing principle.