Any adequate disagreement must be about different assignment of truth values to the same meaning.
I think we are probably in agreement that we ought to mean the same thing by the words we use before our disagreement has any substance. But your mention of "truth values" here may be driving us into a diversion from the main issue. Because I maintain that simple "ought" sentences do not have truth values. Only "is" sentences can be analyzed as true or false in Tarskian semantics.
But that is a diversion. I look forward to your explanation of your sense of the word "value" - a sense which has the curious property (as I understand it) that it would be a tragedy if mankind does not (with AI assistance) soon choose one point (out of a "value space" of rather high dimensionality) and then fix that point for all time as the one true goal of mankind and its creations.
But your mention of "truth values" here may be driving us into a diversion from the main issue.
I gave up on the main issue, and so described my understanding of the reasons that justify giving up.
Because I maintain that simple "ought" sentences do not have truth values. Only "is" sentences can be analyzed as true or false in Tarskian semantics.
Yes, and this is the core of our disagreement. Since your position is that something is meaningless, and mine is that there is a sense behind that, this is a failure of communicat...
Ben Goertzel:
Robin Hanson:
We all know the problem with deathism: a strong belief that death is almost impossible to avoid, clashing with undesirability of the outcome, leads people to rationalize either the illusory nature of death (afterlife memes), or desirability of death (deathism proper). But of course the claims are separate, and shouldn't influence each other.
Change in values of the future agents, however sudden of gradual, means that the Future (the whole freackin' Future!) won't be optimized according to our values, won't be anywhere as good as it could've been otherwise. It's easier to see a sudden change as morally relevant, and easier to rationalize gradual development as morally "business as usual", but if we look at the end result, the risks of value drift are the same. And it is difficult to make it so that the future is optimized: to stop uncontrolled "evolution" of value (value drift) or recover more of astronomical waste.
Regardless of difficulty of the challenge, it's NOT OK to lose the Future. The loss might prove impossible to avert, but still it's not OK, the value judgment cares not for feasibility of its desire. Let's not succumb to the deathist pattern and lose the battle before it's done. Have the courage and rationality to admit that the loss is real, even if it's too great for mere human emotions to express.