No plot spoilers here, just wanted to flag a bit of poor reasoning that shows up in Chapter 39: > I shouldn't have believed it even for all of thirty seconds! Because if people had souls there wouldn't be any such thing as brain damage, if your soul could go...
A common background assumption on LW seems to be that it's rational to act in accordance with the dispositions one would wish to have. (Rationalists must WIN, and all that.) E.g., Eliezer: > It is, I would say, a general principle of rationality - indeed, part of how I define...
Donald Regan's masterful (1980) Utilitarianism and Co-operation raises a problem for traditional moral theories, which conceive of agents as choosing between external options like 'push' or 'not-push' (options that are specifiable independently of the motive from which they are performed). He proves that no such traditional theory T is adaptable,...