Computational Morality (Part 4) - Consequentialism
I suggested in part 3 that all the best proposals may be converging in on the same destination, and that we might be able to use my method of calculating morality to help with the process of unification of the best ones (and rejection of the hopeless ones). So, in the absence of a league table of the best proposals, we'll just have to examine them as they turn up and hope that we encounter all the ones that matter. In the comments under Part 1, a link was provided to a page which provides a good starting point, and I'm going to use it to show where people have been making fundamental errors which have driven them in ill-advised directions: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/ - it may be worth keeping it open in another tab as you read this. What do we see on that page? Well, let's start at section 3. In the second paragraph we see an objection to the idea of an unsophisticated game being regarded as being as good as highly intellectual poetry. Now, such poetry is outside of my experience, but we can substitute a play by Shakespeare, such as King Lear, while the unsophisticated game can be darts. A common man who likes spending time in the pub might well turn down an invitation to go to see this Shakespeare play in favour of a few games of darts with his friend, while a more sophisticated individual might scoff at that and head for the theatre. If both derive exactly the same amount of pleasure from their chosen activity (which includes all the intellectual satisfaction of the appreciation of the high quality content of the play, and the intellectual satisfaction of the calculating the score for the darts player), who's to say that the Shakespeare play is really the superior option? Another intellectual with no tolerance for cheap manipulation may rate the Shakespeare play very differently from the average intellectual, finding the play deeply unsatisfying because of the extreme artificiality where two of the daughters express no love at all for any
There is no pain particle, but a particle/matter/energy could potentially be sentient and feel pain. All matter could be sentient, but how would we detect that? Perhaps the brain has found some way to measure it in something, and to induce it in that same thing, but how it becomes part of a useful mechanism for controlling behaviour would remain a puzzle. Most philosophers talk complete and utter garbage about sentience and consciousness in general, so I don't waste my time studying their output, but I've heard Chalmers talk some sense on the issue.