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Pavitra comments on Lifeism, Anti-Deathism, and Some Other Terminal-Values Rambling - Less Wrong Discussion
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Hurting others is ethically problematic, not morally. For example, I would probably be okay with hurting someone else at their own request. Avoidance of torture is a question of an entirely different type: what I value, not how I think it's appropriate to go about getting it.
I don't have a formalization of my terminal values, but roughly:
I have noticed that sometimes I feel more conscious than other times -- not just awake/dreaming/sleeping, but between different "awake" times. I infer that consciousness/sentience/sapience/personhood/whatever you want to call it, you know, that thing we care about is not a binary predicate, but a scalar. I want to maximize the degree of personhood that exists in the universe.
What's the difference between ethics and morals?
So, if you create a person, and torture them for their entire life, that's worth it?
By morals, I mean terminal values. By ethics, I mean advanced forms of strategy involving things like Hofstadter's superrationality. I'm not sure what the standard LW jargon is for this sort of thing, but I think I remember reading something about deciding as though you were deciding on behalf of everyone who shares your decision theory.
If the most conscious person possible would be unhappy, I'd rather create them than not. The consensus among science fiction writers seems to be with me on this: a drug that makes you happy at the expense of your creative genius is generally treated as a bad thing.
Sounds like decision theory.
That link was what I needed. By ethics I mean, roughly, the difference between causal decision theory and the right answer.
Do you mean to equate here the degree to which something is a person, the degree to which a person is conscious, and the degree to which a person is a creative genius?
That's what it reads like, but perhaps I'm reading too much into your comment.
That seems unjustified to me.
I don't mean to equate them. They're each a rough approximation to the thing I actually care about.