jefallbright
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As agents embedded and evolving within our (ancestral) environment of interaction, our concepts of "morality" tend toward choices which, in principle, exploited synergies and thus tended to persist, for our ancestors.
For an individual agent, isolated from ongoing or anticipated interaction, there is no "moral", but only "good" relative to the agent's present values.
For agents interacting within groups (and groups of groups, …) actions perceived as "moral", or right-in-principle, are those actions assessed as (1) promoting an increasing context of increasingly coherent values (hierarchical and fine-grained), (2) via instrumental methods increasingly effective, in principle, over increasing scope of consequences. These orthogonal planes of (1) values, and (2) methods, form a space of meaningful... (read more)
Yes, I think evolutionary processes are the only generator of meaningful novelty, and this is also key to the nearly always neglected question of "hypothesis generation" in discussions of "the" scientific method.
Significantly, your examples are all within the domain of analytical—and I would suggest, reductive—mathematics-science-coding. In my experience, it is often the case that one who has ascended this ladder is quite blind to, and unable to conceive of the importance of, context and perspective to meaning-making.
Apropos, there was a period during my childhood when I tried to question my elders regarding my observation that entropy, probability, and meaning were inherently subjective—meaningless without reference to an observer. Similar to the misnomer of Shannon "information" theory when it is actually about the transfer of data, rather than information through a lossy channel. In virtually every case, they could not understand my... (read more)
What could it possibly mean, to say that something is "better", except from some perspective, within some context? What could it possibly mean to say that something is "right" (in principle), other than from some larger perspective, within a larger context?
It's always perspectival--the illusion of objectivity arises because you share your values, fine-grained and deeply hierarchical, due to your place as a twig on a branch on a tree rooted in the mists of a common physics and with a common evolutionary trajectory. Of course you share values with your neighboring twigs, and you can find moral agreement by traversing the tree of evolutionarily instilled values back toward the trunk to find a branch that supports you and your neighboring agents, but from what god-like point of view could they ever be "objective"?
Oh, and a short, possibly more direct response:
Values (within context) lead to preferences; preferences (within context) lead to actions; and actions (within context) lead to consequences.
Lather, rinse, repeat, updating your models of what matters and what works as you go.
I argued repeatedly and at length on the Extropian and Transhumanist discussion lists from 2004 to about 2010 for a metaethics based on the idea that actions assessed as increasingly "moral" (right in principle) are those actions assessed as promoting (1) values, hierarchical and fine-grained, increasingly coherent over an increasing context of meaning-making, via (2) instrumental methods, increasingly effective in principle, over increasing scope of consequences. Lather, rinse, repeat, with consequences tending to select for values, and methods for their promotion, that "work" (meaning "persist")
The instrumental methods half of this--the growth in scope of our model of of science and technology--is generally well-accepted.
The values half of this--the growth in context
“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” - Zen koan
What does that mean you cryptic bastards! If enlightenment is so great then give me some step by step directions to it!
Here's another, slightly more informative quote:
The famous saying of Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin [Seigen Ishin]
Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again
The most insidious of these misguiding heuristics have, apparently due to their transparency (like water to a fish), gone unmentioned so far in this thread.
Typical game play shares much in common with typical schooling. Children are inculcated with impressions of a world of levels that can (and should) be ascended through mastery of skills corresponding to challenges presented to them at each level, with right action leading to convergence on right answers, within an effectively fixed and ultimately knowable context.
Contrast this with the "real world", where challenges are not presented but encountered, where it's generally better to do the right thing than to do things right, within a diverging context of increasing uncertainty.
As evolved—and evolving—agents, we would benefit from increasing awareness of (1) our values, hierarchical and fine-grained, and (2) our methods for promoting those present but evolving values in the world around us, with perceived consequences feeding back and selected for increasing coherence over increasing context of meaning-making (values) and increasing scope of instrumental effectiveness (methods). Lather, rinse, repeat…
As inherently perspectival agents acting to express our present but evolving nature within the bounds of our presently perceived environment of interaction, we can find moral agreement as if we were (metaphorically) individual leaves on the tips of the growing branches of a tree, and by traversing the (increasingly probable) branches of that tree... (read more)