All I'm saying is that I believe that what morality actually is for each of us in our daily lives is a result of what worked for our ancestors, and that is all it is.
But if I understand you, you are saying that human morality is human and does not apply to all sentient beings. However, as long as all we are talking about and all we really deal with is humans, then there is no difference in practice between a morality that is specific to humans and a universal morality applicable to all sentient beings, and so the argument about universality seems academic,...
I would emphasize that what you end up with is not a "moral system" in anything like the traditional sense, since it is fundamental to traditional notions of morality that THE ONE TRUE WAY does not depend on human beings and the quirks of our evolutionary history
Are you sure about the traditional notions? I don't see how you can base that on how we have actually behaved visavis morality. We've been partially put to the test of whether we consider morality universally applicable, and the result so far is that we apply our moral judgments to other ...
Suppose you learned, suddenly and definitively, that nothing is moral and nothing is right; that everything is permissible and nothing is forbidden.
There are different ways of understanding that. To clarify, let's transplant the thought experiment. Suppose you learned that there are no elephants. This could mean various things. Two things it might mean:
1) That there are no big mammals with trunks. If you see what you once thought was an elephant stampeding in your direction, if you stay still nothing will happen to you because it is not really there. If yo...
Hopefully - it sure sounds like you're seriously misunderstanding me. Economics is a theory and therefore is a map. I'm not saying anything directly about the territory. I'm saying that major economic maps use the concept of choice the way all of AAA's road maps use ink. Removing the choice is like removing the ink. There's no map left if you do that.
So anyway, no, there's no territory/map confusion, except possibly in your interpretation of me.
Is this substantially correct?
I would say not, because you write:
and determining that the phenomenon is reachable.
This uses the word "reachable" in a sentence, without quotes, and therefore makes use of its meaning. But that was merely an infelicitous choice of label. Eliezer has since asked you to substitute labels, so that you not be confused by the meaning of "reachable":
Knecht, for "able to be reached" substitute "labeled fizzbin". I have told you when to label something fizzbin.
If you were to substitute this...
Hopefully Anonymous writes: I don't think "choice" is a central concept to economics. It seems pretty easy to me to reimagine every major economic theory of which I'm aware without "choosing" occuring.
Well, okay. Let me see what you mean. Let's start with revealed preference:
If a person chooses a certain bundle of goods (ex. 2 apples, 3 bananas) while another bundle of goods is affordable (ex. 3 apples, 2 bananas), then we say that the first bundle is revealed preferred to the second.
What do you propose doing about that? Keep in min...
This should urge caution in keeping concepts that seem to give rise to much confusion.
Well, I'll give you that. Though I am not ready to drop the concept of choice, I do admit that, among some people, it can lead to confusion. However, it does not seem to confuse all that many, and the concept of choice appears to be a central component of what I would consider a highly successful subject and one which I'm nowhere near ready to toss into the trash - economics.
mitchell,
I think Eliezer recognizes the the vagueness of "world" but sees it as a problem for single-worlders. This is what he seems to be saying here:
We have specific reasons to be highly suspicious of the notion of only one world. The notion of "one world" exists on a higher level of organization, like the location of Earth in space; on the quantum level there are no firm boundaries (though brains that differ by entire neurons firing are certainly decoherent). How would a fundamental physical law identify one high-level world?
Remember, that-which-exists at any moment does not just consist of a set of worlds, but a set of worlds each with a complex number attached. And that-which-exists in the next moment is - the same set of worlds, but now with different complex numbers attached.
You seem to be talking about the wavefunction, which is a complex function defined over the configuration space (a set of configurations each with a complex number attached). But in that case you seem to be confusing a world with a configuration. A configuration defines only position. (Assuming we're t...
"Fuzzle" = "Morally right."
Hm... As described, "fuzzle" = "chosen course of action", or, "I choose". Things labelled "fuzzle" are sent to the action system - this is all we're told about "fuzzle". But anything and everything that a system decides, chooses, sets out, to do, are sent to the action system. Not just moral things.
If we want to distinguish moral things from actions in general, we need to say more.