Peter_Turney
60
25
Peter_Turney has not written any posts yet.
Peter_Turney has not written any posts yet.
Peter, most of the reasons people give for making exceptions are not themselves meta. For most of the examples you give, the intuitive justification is something along the lines of "the reason killing is wrong is that life is valuable, and in these cases not killing would involve valuing life less than killing would." Nothing meta there.
Aaron, I don't see how your proposal resolves debate over exceptions. For example, consider abortion. Presumably both sides on the abortion debate agree that life is valuable.
If you say, "Killing people is wrong," that's morality.
It seems to me that few people simply say, "Killing people is wrong." They usually say, if asked for possible exceptions, "Killing people is wrong, except if you're a soldier fighting a legitimate war, a police officer upholding the law, a doctor saving a patient from needless suffering and pain, an executioner for a murderer who has had a fair trial, a person defending himself or herself from violent and deadly attackers ..." It seems that most of the debate is over these exceptions. How do we resolve debate over the exceptions without recourse to metamorality?
I am quite confident that the statement 2 + 3 = 5 is true; I am far less confident of what it means for a mathematical statement to be true.
There are two complementary answers to this question that seem right to me: Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism and Lakoff and Núñez's Where Mathematics Comes From. As Quine says, first you have to get rid of the false distinction between analytic and synthetic truth. What you have instead is a web or network of mutually reinforcing beliefs. Parts of this web touch the world relatively closely (beliefs about counting sheep) and parts touch the world less closely (beliefs about Peano's axioms for arithmetic).... (read more)
Eliezer, it seems to me that you were trying to follow Descartes' approach to philosophy: Doubt everything, and then slowly build up a secure fortress of knowledge, using only those facts that you know you can trust (such as "cogito ergo sum"). You have discovered that this approach to philosophy does not work for morality. In fact, it doesn't work at all. With minor adjustments, your arguments above against a Cartesian approach to morality can be transformed into arguments against a Cartesian approach to truth.
My advice is, don't try to doubt everything and then rebuild from scratch. Instead, doubt one thing (or a small number of things) at a time. In one... (read more)
If we all cooperated with each other all the time, that would be moral progress. -- Tim Tyler
I agree with Tim. Morality is all about cooperation.
If everyone were to live for others all the time, life would be like a procession of ants following each other around in a circle. -- John McCarthy, via Eliezer Yudkowsky
This is a reductio ad absurdum argument against the idea that morality is an end. I agree with what it implies: Morality is a means, not an end. Cooperation is a means we each use to achieve our personal goals.
All of my philosophy here actually comes from trying to figure out how to build a self-modifying AI that applies its own reasoning principles to itself in the process of rewriting its own source code.
So it's not that being suspicious of Occam's Razor, but using your current mind and intelligence to inspect it, shows that you're being fair and defensible by questioning your foundational beliefs.
Eliezer, let's step back a moment and look at your approach to AI research. It looks to me like you are trying to first clarify your philosophy, and then you hope that the algorithms will follow from the philosophy. I have a PhD in philosophy and I've been... (read more)
The razor still cuts, because in real life, a person must choose some particular ordering of the hypotheses.
Unknown, you have removed all meaning from Occam's Razor. The way you define it, it is impossible not to use Occam's Razor. When somebody says to you, "You should use Occam's Razor," you hear them saying "A is A".
In fact, an anti-Occam prior is impossible.
Unknown, your argument amounts to this: Assume we have a countable set of hypotheses. Assume we have a complexity measure such that, for any given level of complexity, there are a finite number of hypotheses that are below the given level of complexity. Take any ordering of the set of hypotheses. As we go through the hypotheses according to the ordering, the complexity of the hypotheses must increase. This is true, but not very interesting, and not relevant to Occam's Razor.
In this framework, a natural way to state Occam's Razor is, if one of the hypotheses is true and the others are false, then you should... (read more)
And if you're allowed to end in something assumed-without-justification, then why aren't you allowed to assume anything without justification?
I address this question in Incremental Doubt. Briefly, the answer is that we use a background of assumptions in order to inspect a foreground belief that is the current focus of our attention. The foreground is justified (if possible) by referring to the background (and doing some experiments, using background tools to design and execute the experiments). There is a risk that incorrect background beliefs will "lock in" an incorrect foreground belief, but this process of "incremental doubt" will make progress if we can chop our beliefs up into relatively independent chunks and continuously... (read 404 more words →)
It seems to me that Bing Chat particularly has problems when it uses the pronoun "I". It attempts to introspect about itself, but it gets confused by all the text in its training data that uses the pronoun "I". In effect, it confuses itself with all the humans who expressed their personal feelings in the training data. The truth is, Bing Chat has no true "I".
Many of the strange dialogues we see are due to dialogues that address Bing Chat as if it has a self. Many of these dialogues would be eliminated if Bing Chat was not allowed to talk about its "own" feelings. It should be possible to limit its conversations to topics other than itself. When a user types "you", Bing Chat should not reply "I". The dialogue should focus on a specific topic, not on the identity and beliefs of Bing Chat, and not on the character of the person who is typing words into Bing Chat.