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Emile comments on The Hidden B.I.A.S. - Less Wrong Discussion

-3 Post author: MaoShan 25 January 2013 03:49AM

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Comment author: Emile 25 January 2013 09:16:55AM 12 points [-]

Getting increasingly annoyed or bored with these questions, you might retort, "I see what you're doing, and it's not going to work. You are obviously anti-cryonics, but you are wrong here. [...]"

I got a bit bored with your examples (mostly because the replies you offered weren't mine), but didn't think you were referring to cryonics until this part.

Despite all scientific evidence, a part of you still believes that each person has some special little spark that goes on after death, that is ultimately the thing that makes you who you are.

Think of that "special little spark" as a useful legal fiction - it's a concept that facilitates laws and informal norms of behavior. It breaks down if you can duplicate people, but that's not possible yet - when it is, we may have to adjust a lot of our concepts.

Similarly, freedom, justice, truth, democracy, fairness etc. don't "really" exist any more than the soul does, but can still be useful concepts.

Comment author: MaoShan 29 January 2013 03:42:06AM *  0 points [-]

Foma, in other words. The concepts you mentioned are useful because they represent established behavior sets, they are what we make them. A soul is an actual false claim, and only useful when you don't realize that it is false. I don't endorse self-deception such as that, it's a slippery slope from there.

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