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syllogism comments on Settled questions in philosophy - Less Wrong Discussion

32 Post author: lukeprog 16 February 2011 06:53AM

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Comment author: syllogism 16 February 2011 03:13:18PM 4 points [-]

Taking "solved" to mean "there's only one right-thinking answer, given the arguments that have been raised", I would definitely agree with the questions you think are settled.

I'm also highly confident on:

  • Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? Anti-realism
  • Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics? Consequentialism
  • Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? Survival

I wrote up how I "derive" my ethical position here, where I'd hoped you'd see it, but the thread was a bit old by the time I posted.

My thoughts on the teleporter problem are not novel --- I agree with Robin Hansen's take here, although I'd put it a bit differently. I came to the answer when I described the problem to a friend and he told me immediately that I'd arrived at the reductio ad absurdem correctly but had failed to resolve it: the answer was that my definition of "myself" was broken, and that it's better to think there will just be a future-copy of me who thinks he was me, but I will not be him. This is true in general, as it is in the teleporter problem. If you're comfortable making life easy and pleasant for future-you, you can be just as comfortable making life easy and good for teleported-you.

So I think the teleporter is a very simple problem. It's just that the answer is hidden behind a strong adaptive intuition about what constitutes identity.