I don't think you have to be a moral anti-realist to believe the orthogonality thesis but you certainly have to be a moral realist to not believe it.

Now if you're a moral realist and you try to start writing an AI you're going to quickly see that you have a problem.

/#Initiates AI morality /#

1. action_array.sort(morality)
2. do action_array[0]

Doesn't work. So you have to start defining "morality" any you figure out pretty quickly that no one has the least idea how to do that in a way that doesn't rapidly lead to disastrous consequences. You end up with the only plausible option looking like : "Examine what humans would want if they were rational and had all the information you have". Seems to me that that is the moment you should just become a moral subjectivist -- maybe of the ideal observer theory variety.

Now you might just believe the orthogonality thesis because you are a moral realist who doesn't believe in motivational internalism-- they're lots of ways to get there. But you can't be an anti-realist and ever even come close to making such a mistake.

Since high school I've been involved in conworlding - collaborative development of fictional worlds and societies, then setting stories or games in them.

Around 2005, I and some friends set a story in a culture with a goddess named Per married to a god named Elith. The religion gets called "Perelithve".

Skip to 2008. Neil Stephenson publishes Anathem, One throwaway reference mentions two of the avout, a woman named Per who marries a man named Elith. The marriage rite they invent gets called "Perelithian"

If names can have between 3 and 8 letters, and always alternate vowels and consonants, and ''th' counts as one sound, I calculate that the chances of someone who needs two names coming up with "Per" and "Elith" is on the order of one in a billion. The similarity in stories maybe adds another two or three bits of unlikelihood. If I've read 1000 novels, each of which has 100 minor characters, and my conworlds contain 1000 characters, then the odds aren't really that bad, maybe as high as 1%

Still freaks me out, though.

I'm not American, so I could be wrong about this. But at first glance it seems to me that Republicans have to run two vastly different campaigns, one in the primaries and the other in the general election, while Democrats could run pretty much the same campaign in the primaries as well as the general election. It seems to me that people like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz would have to get called flip-flops if they were to run for presidency in 2016 while Hillary Clinton would be able to run just one campaign.

Am I wrong, or is the Democratic party just larger than the Republican party and therefore more mainstream?

The first one is rude, the second one is blunt, the third one is subtle/tactful/whatever.

We keep hitting the Typical Mind Fallacy over and over again :-)

Let me offer you my interpretation: the first one is blunt and might or might not be rude, depending on what the social norms and context are (and on whether thinking about frobnicating the beezlebib does provide incontrovertible evidence of severe brain trauma). The second one is not blunt at all, it's entirely neutral. The third one is a slighly more polite version of neutral. Your fourth example is still neutral, by the way -- there's nothing particularly blunt about explaining why something should not be done (or about using four-letter words, for that matter).

To contrast I'll offer my examples:

• (rude) You are a moron and can't code your way out of a wet paper bag! Stuff your code where the sun don't shine and never show it to me again!
• (blunt) This is not working and will never work. You need to scrap this entirely and start from scratch.
• (subtle) While this is a valuable contribution, we would really appreciate it if you went and twiddled the bogon emitter for us while we try to deal with the beezlebib frobnication on our own.

What's so special about Linux?

It's only the most successful open software ever. Otherwise, not much :-P

I would rather the QM sequence was shortened to the low-controversy subset Eliezer described in An Intuitive Explanation of Quantum Mechanics and checked for technical accuracy. The pure MWI advocacy part belongs in some appendix, and the outright nonsense like "a Bayesian can become as smart as Einstein" should be chucked and never mentioned again.

how sure are you that whole brain emulations would be conscious

Slightly less than I am that you are.

is there anything we can do now to to get clearer on consciousness?

Experiments that won't get approved by ethics committees (suicidal volunteers PM me).

In this analogy, they correspond to non-human animals, who have not yet expressed an opinion on the matter.

Killing it reduces the overall suffering, since its quality of life is well below the "barely worth living" level, with no hope of improvement.

I kinda think the opposite is true. It's people who live in cities who join PETA. Country folk get acclimatized to commoditizing animals.

This sounds right to me. After all, you don't find plantation owners agitating for the rights of slaves. No, it's people who live off far away from actual slaves, meeting the occasional lucky black guy who managed to make it in the city and noting that he seems morally worthy.

I am mildly consequentialist, but not a utilitarian (and not in the closet about it, unlike many pretend-utilitarians here), precisely because any utilitarianism runs into a repugnant conclusion of one form or another. That said, it seems that the utility-monster type RC is addressed by negative utilitarians, who emphasize reduction in suffering over maximizing pleasure.