Joseph_Knecht
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I've voiced my annoyance with the commenting system in the past, in particular that it is non-threaded and so often very difficult to figure out what someone is responding to if they don't include context (which they often don't), so I won't give details again.
On the topic of the 2 of 10 rule, if it's to prevent one person dominating a thread, shouldn't the rule be "no more than 2 of last 10 should be by the same person in the same thread" (so 3 posts by the same person would be fine as long as they are in 3 different threads)?
Optimistically, I would say that if the murderer perfectly knew all the relevant facts, including the victim's experience, ve wouldn't do it
The murderer may have all the facts, understand exactly what ve is doing and what the experience of the other will be, and just decide that ve doesn't care. Which fact is ve not aware of? Ve may understand all the pain and suffering it will cause, ve may understand that ve is wiping out a future for the other person and doing something that ve would prefer not to be on the receiving end of, may realize that it is beh...
But if I understand you, you are saying that human morality is human and does not apply to all sentient beings. However, as long as all we are talking about and all we really deal with is humans, then there is no difference in practice between a morality that is specific to humans and a universal morality applicable to all sentient beings, and so the argument about universality seems academic, of no import at least until First Contact is achieved.
What I am really saying is that the notion of "morality" is so hopelessly contaminated with notions...
Laura ABJ: To expand on the text you quoted, I think that killing babies is ugly, and therefore would not do it without sufficient reason, which I don't think the scenario provides. The ugliness of killing babies doesn't need a moral explanation, and the moral explanation just builds on (and adds nothing but a more convenient way of speaking about) the foundation of aversion, no matter how it's dressed up and made to look like something else.
The idea is not compelling to me and so would not haunt me forever, because like I said, I'm not yet convinced that ...
Hal: as an amoralist, I wouldn't do it. If there is not enough time to explain to me why it is necessary and convince me that it is necessary, no deal. Even if I thought it probably would substantially increase the future happiness of humanity, I still wouldn't do it without a complete explanation. Not because I think there is a moral fabric to the universe that says killing babies is wrong, but because I am hardwired to have an extremely strong aversion to like killing babies. Even if I actually was convinced that it would increase happiness, I still migh...
Traditional notions of morality are confused, and observation of the way people act does show that they are poor explanations, so I think we are in perfect agreement there. (I do mean "notion" among thinkers, not among average people who haven't given much though to such things.) Your second paragraph isn't in conflict with my statement that morality is traditionally understood to be in some sense objectively true and objectively binding on us, and that it would be just as true and just as binding if we had evolved very differently.
It's a differe...
Constant: I basically agree with the gist of your rephrasing it in terms of being relative to the species rather than independent of the species, but I would emphasize that what you end up with is not a "moral system" in anything like the traditional sense, since it is fundamental to traditional notions of morality that THE ONE TRUE WAY does not depend on human beings and the quirks of our evolutionary history and that it is privileged from the point of view of reality (because its edicts were written in stone by God or because the one true speci...
I agree with mtraven's last post that morality is an innate functionality of the human brain that can't be "disproved", and yet I have said again and again that I don't believe in morality, so let me explain.
Morality is just a certain innate functionality in our brains as it expresses itself based on our life experiences. This is entirely consistent with the assertion that what most people mean by morality -- an objective standard of conduct that is written into the fabric of reality itself -- does not exist: there is no such thing!
A lot of confu...
mtraven: many of the posters in this thread -- myself included -- have said that they don't believe in morality (meaning morality and not "values" or "motivation"), and yet I very highly doubt that many of us are clinically psychopaths.
Not believing in morality does not mean doing what those who believe in morality consider to be immoral. Psychopathy is not "not believing in morality": it entails certain kinds of behaviors, which naive analyses of attribute to "lack of morality", but which I would argue are a result of aberrant preferences that manifest as aberrant behavior and can be explained without recourse to the concept of morality.
Unknown: of course it would make a difference, just as my behavior would be different if I had billions of dollars rather than next to nothing or if I were immortal rather than mortal. It doesn't have anything to do with "morality" though.
For example, if I had the power of invisibility (and immateriality) and were able to plant a listening device in the oval office with no chance of getting caught, I would do it in order to publicly expose the lies and manipulations of the Bush administration and give proof of the willful stupidity and rampant di...
On the topic of vegetarianism, I originally became a vegetarian 15 years ago because I thought it was "wrong" to cause unnecessary pain and suffering of conscious beings, but I am still a vegetarian even though I no longer think it is "wrong" (in anything like the ordinary sense).
Now that I no longer think that the concept of "morality" makes much sense at all (except as a fancy and unnecessary name for certain evolved tendencies that are purely a result of what worked for my ancestors in their environments (as they have expre...
Like many others here, I don't believe that there is anything like a moral truth that exists independently of thinking beings (or even dependently on thinking beings in anything like an objective sense), so I already live in something like that hypothetical. Thus my behavior would not be altered in the slightest.
@Richard: I think that's a valid reduction. It explains non-negative integers reductively in terms of an isomorphism between two groups of things without appealing to numbers or number concepts.
@constant: regardless of the label, you still have 2 sets of things, those which it is possible to label fizzbin (following the rules) and those which it is not. Possibility is still there. So what does it mean that it is possible to label a node fizzbin? Does that mean that in order to understand the algorithm, which relies on possibility of labelling nodes "f...
To be clear, there are two different but related points that I've tried to make here in the last few posts.
Point 1 is a minor point about the Rationalist's Taboo game:
With regard to this point, as I've stated already, the task was to give a reductive explanation of the concept of possibility by explaining it in terms of more fundamental concepts (i.e., concepts which have nothing to do with possibility or associated concepts, even implicitly). I think that Eliezer failed that by sneaking the concept of "possibile to be reached" (i.e., "rea...
Cyan: I think your quibble misses the point. Eliezer's directions were to play the rationality taboo game and talk about possibility without using any of the forbidden concepts. His explanation failed that task, regardless of whether either he or Brandon were referring to the map or the territory. (Note: this point is completely unrelated to the specifics of the planning algorithm.)
I'll summarize my other points later. (But to reiterate the point that Eliezer doesn't get and pre-empt anybody else telling me yet again that the label is irrelevant, I realize the label is irrelevant, and I am not talking about character strings or labels at all.)
Eliezer, my point was that you dedicated an entire follow-up post to chiding Brandon, in part for using realizable in his explanation since it implicitly refers to the same concept as could, and that you committed the same mistake in using reachable.
Anyway, I guess I misunderstood the purpose of this post. I thought you were trying to give a reductive explanation of possibility without using concepts such a "can", "could", and "able". If I've understood you correctly now, that wasn't the purpose at all: you were just trying to describe what people generally mean by possibility.
Can you talk about "could" without using synonyms like "can" and "possible"? .... Can you describe the corresponding state of the world without "could", "possible", "choose", "free", "will", "decide", "can", "able", or "alternative"?
My point being that you set out to explain "could" without "able" and you do it by way of elaboration on a state being "able to be reached".
What you decide to label the concept do...
I don't think reachable is permissible in the game, since reach-able means able to be reached, or possible to be reached.
Possibility is synonymous with to be able, so any term suffixed with -able should be forbidden.
The reachability explanation of possibility is also just one instance of possibility among many. to be able (without specifying in what manner) is the general type, and able to be reached is one particular (sub-) type of possibility. The more traditional understanding of possibility is able to exist, but others have been used too, such as able...
"I want the pie" is something that nobody else is affected by and thus nobody else has an interest in. "I should get the pie" is something that anybody else interested in the pie has an interest in. In this sense, the moral preferences are those that other moral beings have a stake in, those that affect other moral beings. I think some kind of a distinct... (read more)