By morals, I mean terminal values. By ethics, I mean advanced forms of strategy involving things like Hofstadter’s superrationality. I’m not sure what the standard LW jargon is for this sort of thing, but I think I remember reading something about deciding as though you were deciding on behalf of everyone who shares your decision theory.
I want to maximize the degree of personhood that exists in the universe.
So, if you create a person, and torture them for their entire life, that’s worth it?
If the most conscious person possible would be unhappy, I’d rather create them than not. The consensus among science fiction writers seems to be with me on this: a drug that makes you happy at the expense of your creative genius is generally treated as a bad thing.
By ethics, I mean advanced forms of strategy involving things like Hofstadter’s superrationality. I’m not sure what the standard LW jargon is for this sort of thing
Do you mean to equate here the degree to which something is a person, the degree to which a person is conscious, and the degree to which a person is a creative genius?
That’s what it reads like, but perhaps I’m reading too much into your comment.
What’s the difference between ethics and morals?
So, if you create a person, and torture them for their entire life, that’s worth it?
By morals, I mean terminal values. By ethics, I mean advanced forms of strategy involving things like Hofstadter’s superrationality. I’m not sure what the standard LW jargon is for this sort of thing, but I think I remember reading something about deciding as though you were deciding on behalf of everyone who shares your decision theory.
If the most conscious person possible would be unhappy, I’d rather create them than not. The consensus among science fiction writers seems to be with me on this: a drug that makes you happy at the expense of your creative genius is generally treated as a bad thing.
Sounds like decision theory.
That link was what I needed. By ethics I mean, roughly, the difference between causal decision theory and the right answer.
Do you mean to equate here the degree to which something is a person, the degree to which a person is conscious, and the degree to which a person is a creative genius?
That’s what it reads like, but perhaps I’m reading too much into your comment.
That seems unjustified to me.
I don’t mean to equate them. They’re each a rough approximation to the thing I actually care about.