"Wow. People sure are coming up with interesting ways of avoiding the question."

My response was a real request for information- if this is a pure utility test, I would select the dust specks. If this were done to a complex, functioning society, adding dust specks into everyone's eyes would disrupt a great deal of important stuff- someone would almost certainly get killed in an accident due to the distraction, even on a planet with only 10^15 people and not 3^^^^3.

"Congratulations, you made my brain asplode."

Read http://www.spaceandgames.com/?p=22 if you haven't already. Your utility function should not be assigning things arbitrarily large additive utilities, or else you get precisely this problem (if pigs qualify as minds, use rocks), and your function will sum to infinity. If you "kill" by destroying the exact same information content over and over, it doesn't seem to be as bad, or even bad at all. If I made a million identical copies of you, froze them into complete stasis, and then shot 999,999 with a cryonics-proof Super-Plasma-Vaporizer, would this be immoral? It would certainly be less immoral than killing a million ordinary individuals, at least as far as I see it.

"So how would you recognize a natural ethical process if you saw one?"

Suppose that you observe process A- maybe you look at it, or poke around a bit inside it, but you don't make a precise model. If you extrapolate A forward in time, you will get a probability distribution over possible states (including the states of all the other stuff that A touches). If A consistently winds up in very small regions of this distribution, compared to what your model is, and there's no way to fix your model without making it extremely complex, you can say A is an "ethical process". Two galaxies, or two rocks, or two rivers, can easily collide; but if you look at humans, or zebras, or even fish, you will notice that they run into each other much less often than you would expect if you made a simple Newtonian model.

"(BTW, one of the reasons I don't vote is that I am confident that I cannot, under any circumstances, EVER, have sufficient and reliable information about the candidates to allow me to make a good decision. So, I believe all voting decisions people actually make are irrational.)"

See http://lesswrong.com/lw/h8/tsuyoku_naritai_i_want_to_become_stronger/.

"Can anyone arrange to get money to this man or his family? I'm tempted to donate, to honor his deed."

http://digg.com/world_news/14_years_ago_The_man_who_saved_millions_of_American_lives?t=9337109#c9343594

"I see man as made in the image of God."

This does make some sense. If man is made in the image of God, and we know God is a mass murderer, then we can predict that some men will also be mass murderers. And lo, we have plenty of examples- Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.

"Sure God is not going to change natural law just because we are putting him to the test."

If God does exist, as soon as we finish saving the world and whatnot, he should be immediately arrested and put on trial for crimes against humanity, due to his failure to intervene in the Holocaust, the smallpox epidemics, WWI, etc.

"Twelve poor followers of Christ were able to convert the Roman empire."

Aye. And Karl Marx must have had divine powers too- how else could a single person, with no political authority, cause a succession of revolutions in some of the largest countries on Earth?

"I could go into the lives of the saints for other examples but I wont."

How do you know that large parts of their lives weren't simply made up?

"You call the getting to the probability of nuclear war a simple question?"

Read the literature on heuristics and biases- researchers deliberately use simple questions with factual answers, so that the data unambiguously show the flaws in human reasoning.

"I would argue that they are at the core of what it is to live a fully human life."

A fully human life, in the natural sense of the term, has an average span of sixteen years. That's the environment we were designed to live in- nasty, brutal, and full of misery. By the standards of a typical human tribe, the Holocaust would have been notable for killing such a remarkably small percentage of the population. Why on Earth would we want to follow that example?

"It looks like this website has rejected the theistic understanding of faith and hope."

Yes, for a very good reason- it does not work. If you stand in front of a truck, and you have faith that the truck will not run you over, and you hope that the truck will not run you over, your bones and vital organs will be sliced and diced and chopped and fried. The key factor in survival is not lack of hope, or lack of faith, but lack of doing stupid things such as standing in front of trucks.

"I don’t know how you can love something without it making you biased towards it."

This is not what we mean by "biased". By "bias", we mean bugs in the human brain which lead us to give wrong answers to simple questions of fact, such as "What is the probability of X?". See http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/tom/?p=30.

""Fixed by evidence" != "simple"."

This is certainly true in the general case, but all physics theories which I've studied in detail really are simple, in the bits of entropy sense.

"Please recall that my original contention was that Einstein must have had enough observational evidence to fix the information inherent in General Relativity as a solution. If you describe ways that the information in General Relativity can be fixed by evidence, you are not contradicting this."

True; why do you have to contradict the main point of a post to comment on it? My point was that the space of possibilities was not vast; it was quite small, given the common-sense rules of gravity and math which were known at the time. Developing GR took years, not because Einstein has to sort through ten million different versions of the theory, but because developing a single version of the theory is difficult.

"You are also falling prey to hindsight by not making an equal effort to consider how you could have justified alternatives as unique obvious solutions using subsets of other knowledge known at the time, rather than the particular aspects that now obviously seem so prominent."

This is mathematically impossible unless you assume false knowledge. If equations (A, B, C, D, E) are known at the time of Newton, and Newton's theory of gravity is unique if you assume A, C and D, then any alternative theory of gravity must contradict A, C, or D. Suppose that you can construct an alternative theory of gravity, which is unique assuming equations B and E. If you assume that both B and E are true, then the alternative theory of gravity must be true, hence Newton's theory must be false, hence either A, C, or D must be false. We know now that A, C, and D are all true, therefore, either B or E must be false.

"If only you had been around to solve the problem instead of Maxwell and Einstein, how much work could have been saved!"

Obvious != simple != easy to learn. You of all people should understand this. You seemed to understand it seven years ago, back during the days of your wild and reckless youth. To quote SitS:

"Let's take a concrete example, the story Flowers for Algernon (later the movie Charly), by Daniel Keyes. (I'm afraid I'll have to tell you how the story comes out, but it's a Character story, not an Idea story, so that shouldn't spoil it.) Flowers for Algernon is about a neurosurgical procedure for intelligence enhancement. This procedure was first tested on a mouse, Algernon, and later on a retarded human, Charlie Gordon. The enhanced Charlie has the standard science-fictional set of superhuman characteristics; he thinks fast, learns a lifetime of knowledge in a few weeks, and discusses arcane mathematics (not shown). Then the mouse, Algernon, gets sick and dies. Charlie analyzes the enhancement procedure (not shown) and concludes that the process is basically flawed. Later, Charlie dies.

That's a science-fictional enhanced human. A real enhanced human would not have been taken by surprise. A real enhanced human would realize that any simple intelligence enhancement will be a net evolutionary disadvantage - if enhancing intelligence were a matter of a simple surgical procedure, it would have long ago occurred as a natural mutation. This goes double for a procedure that works on rats! (As far as I know, this never occurred to Keyes. I selected Flowers, out of all the famous stories of intelligence enhancement, because, for reasons of dramatic unity, this story shows what happens to be the correct outcome.)

Note that I didn't dazzle you with an abstruse technobabble explanation for Charlie's death; my explanation is two sentences long and can be understood by someone who isn't an expert in the field. It's the simplicity of smartness that's so impossible to convey in fiction, and so shocking when we encounter it in person. All that science fiction can do to show intelligence is jargon and gadgetry. A truly ultrasmart Charlie Gordon wouldn't have been taken by surprise; he would have deduced his probable fate using the above, very simple, line of reasoning. He would have accepted that probability, rearranged his priorities, and acted accordingly until his time ran out - or, more probably, figured out an equally simple and obvious-in-retrospect way to avoid his fate. If Charlie Gordon had really been ultrasmart, there would have been no story. "

We know that Newton's theory of gravity was hard to invent; it *must* not have been obvious, because nobody had solved it until Newton, and he was lauded as a hero for his great theory. And yet, it is so simple that we teach it to high school students, and some of them actually understand it. Newton's equation is also a unique solution; the constant of proportionality is fixed by experiment, the m/r^2 term is fixed by the need to include Kepler's laws (which were well known at the time), and extra terms are excluded, because F must vanish when M2 vanishes, or else you violate the laws of motion which Newton had just discovered.