robin_brandt2
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Dear Eliezer, First of all, great post, thank you, I truly love you Eli!! It was really the kind of beautiful endpoint in your dance I was waiting for, and it is very much in the lines of my own reasoning, just a lot more detailed. I also think this could be labeled metametamorality, therefore some of the justified complaints does not yet apply. But the people complaining about different moral preferences are doing so with their own morality, what else could they be using, and in doing so they are acting according to the arguments of this post. Metametamorality would be about the ontological reductionistic framework in which metamorality and morality takes... (read 655 more words →)
http://www.physorg.com/news135580478.html interesting news on evolutionary game theory!
@Hopefully anonymous There are different levels on which the gears of nature operate. The fact that happiness and excitement are rooted in biochemistry is common sense these days and but that is on a totally different level than Eliezers argument. The structure of how our mood works, how it reacts to different environmental situations, how some things make people happy or sad is not arbitrary. We can take advice and get better at solving the right questions.
There is an argument from David Deutsch about the beauty of flowers. It is available here http://www.qubit.org/people/david/index.php?path=Video/Why%20Are%20Flowers%20Beautiful
Although I do not agree with everything he says in that talk. I think he may be right in that one reason both bees and humans find flowers attractive is that there was a huge genetic gap between bees and flowers, and so the shortest way of signaling between the species was to use a more universal standard, a standard that seems to be embedded in the very nature of intelligence(at least in part of mindspace) and therefore also appealing to human general intelligence, I think it has something to do with simplicity and complexity, minimal... (read more)
My version is "there is experience, therefore something is", but some year after I also understood that there is no reason even to trust that logic, no matter how bullet-proof it sounds...
A hard question for me is still, what is the functional role and underlying mechanism of qualia in the timeless mathematical structure of the multiverse. And what is the minimal structure required for qualia. And I mean qualia in the direct phenomenal sense, not defined as anything epiphenomenal. I am perfectly aware of and a great fan of the Anti-Zomibe principle. Still this basic question just does not disolve for me.
I will try to express some of my points more accurately... A human value, may it concern, knowledge, morality or beauty gets it's meaning from it's emotional base although it may be a frequent value in the space of possible intelligent species. Only minds can attribute value to something. The thing it attributes it to, may be universal or specific, but the thing itself is can not be valued by something other than a mind. To value something is a cognitive, emotional process, not some intrinsic property of some phenomenon. But to believe this as the mind you are may not be the best way to achieve what you value and desire. We seem... (read more)
As with human aesthetic sense, human morality may be approximations and versions of more absolutely definable optimal solutions to information-theoretic, game-theoretic, social, economic, intelligence, signaling, cooperation problems. Therefore it may be likely that an alien race could share some of the same values as we do, because it may turn out that they are "good" solutions for intelligent culture bearing species in general. But there is nothing in the universe in it self that says that theese optimal solutions, or any value what-so-ever can be valuable, and I don´t understand why some atheists even expect there to be something like this. It is minds that give value to certain phenomena, and it... (read 422 more words →)
P.S. So my additinon is really, choose a stable value structure that feels right, try to maximize it, try to make it better and change so when you feel it is right. I have my own high-level suggestion of Beauty, Truth and the Good, and I later discovered Plato and a lot of others seem to argue for the same three...