Julian,

Agreed. Utilitarians are not to be trusted.

kekeke

I don't find this surprising at all, other than that it occurred to a consequentialist. Being a virtue ethicist and something of a Romantic, it seems to me that the best world will be one of great and terrible events, where a person has the chance to be truly and tragically heroic. And no, that doesn't sound comfortable to me, or a place where I'd particularly thrive.

Jed, your comment (the second example, specifically) reminds me of the story about how the structure of DNA was discovered. Apparently the 'Eureka' moment actually came after the researchers obtained better materials for modeling.

Tilden is another roboticist who's gotten rich and famous off of unintelligent robots: BEAM robotics

Interesting idea... though I still think you're wrong to step away from anthropomorphism, and 'necessary and sufficient' is a phrase that should probably be corralled into the domain of formal logic.

And I'm not sure this adds anything to Sternberg and Salter's definition: 'goal-directed adaptive behavior'.

>>I've yet to hear of anyone turning back successfully, though I think some have tried, or wished they could.

It seems to be one interpretation of the Buddhist project

Regarding self, I tend to include much more than my brain in "I" - but then, I'm not one of those who thinks being 'uploaded' makes a whole lot of sense.

Anonymous: torture's inefficacy was well-known by the fourteenth century; Bernardo Gui, a famous inquisitor who supervised many tortures, argued against using it because it is only good at getting the tortured to say whatever will end the torture. I can't seem to find the citation, but here is someone who refers to it: http://www.ewtn.com/library/ANSWERS/INQUIS2.htm

Toby,

>>You should never, ever murder an innocent person who's helped you, even if it's the right thing to do

>>You should never, ever do X, even if if you are exceedingly confident that it is the right thing to do

I believe a more sensible interpretation would be, "You should have an unbreakable prohibition against doing X, even in cases where X is the right thing to do" - the issue is not that you might be wrong about it being the right thing to do, but rather that not having the prohibition is a bad thing.

pdf, the only reason that suggestion works is that we're not in the business of bombing headquarters at 2AM on a weekend. If both sides were scheduling bombings at 2AM, I'd bet they'd be at work at 2AM.

"Everyone has a right to their own opinion" is largely a product of its opposite. For a long period many people believed "If my neighbor has a different opinion than I do, then I should kill him". This led to a bad state of affairs and, by force, a less lethal meme took hold.