Short summary: You are mixing together two different views—timeful and timeless view.
This sounds right to me, and I think your subsequent analysis is on target. So we have two views, the timeless view and the timeful view and we can’t (at least directly) translate ethical principles like ‘minimize evils’ across the views. So say we grant this and move on from here. Maybe my question is just that the timeless view is one in which ethics seems to make no sense (or at least not the same kind of sense), and the timeful view is a view in which it is a pressing concern. Would you object to that?
the timeless view is one in which ethics seems to make no sense
I didn’t fully realize that previously, but yes—in the timeless view there is no time, no change, no choice. Ethics is all about choices.
Ethical reasoning only makes sense in time, because the process of ethical reasoning is moving the particles in your brain, and the physical consequence of that can be a good or evil action. Ethics can have an influence on universe only if it is a part of the universe. The whole universe is determined only by its laws and its contents. The only way ethics can act is through the brains of people who contemplate it. Ethics is a human product (though we can discuss how much freedom did we have in creating this product; whether it would be different if we had a different history or biology) and it makes sense only on the human level, not on the level of particles.
I just stick with the timeless view and don’t have any trouble with ethics in it, but that’s because I’ve got all the phenomena of time fully embedded in the timeless view, including choice and morality. :)
Ethics is a human product (though we can discuss how much freedom did we have in creating this product; whether it would be different if we had a different history or biology) and it makes sense only on the human level, not on the level of particles.
I’m happy with the idea that ethics is a human product (since this doesn’t imply that it’s arbitrary or illusory or anything like that). I take this to mean, basically, that ethics concerns the relation of some subsystems with others. There’s no ethical language which makes sense from the ‘top-down’ or from a global perspective. But there’s also nothing to prevent (this is Eliezer’s meaning, I guess) a non-global perspective from being worked out in which ethical language does make sense. And this perspective isn’t arbitrary, because the subsystems working it out have always occupied that perspective as subsystems. To see an algorithm from the inside is to see world as a whole by seeing it as potentially involved in this algorithm. And this is what leads to the confusion between the global, timeless view from the (no less global, in some sense) timeful inside-an-algorithm view.
If that’s all passably normal (as skeptical as I am at the coherence of the idea of ‘adding up to normality’) then the question that remains is what I should do with my idea of things mattering ethically. Maybe the answer here is to see ethical agents as ontologically fundamental or something, though that sounds dangerously anthropocentric. But I don’t know how to justify the idea that physically-fundamental = ontologically-fundamental either.
This sounds right to me, and I think your subsequent analysis is on target. So we have two views, the timeless view and the timeful view and we can’t (at least directly) translate ethical principles like ‘minimize evils’ across the views. So say we grant this and move on from here. Maybe my question is just that the timeless view is one in which ethics seems to make no sense (or at least not the same kind of sense), and the timeful view is a view in which it is a pressing concern. Would you object to that?
I didn’t fully realize that previously, but yes—in the timeless view there is no time, no change, no choice. Ethics is all about choices.
Ethical reasoning only makes sense in time, because the process of ethical reasoning is moving the particles in your brain, and the physical consequence of that can be a good or evil action. Ethics can have an influence on universe only if it is a part of the universe. The whole universe is determined only by its laws and its contents. The only way ethics can act is through the brains of people who contemplate it. Ethics is a human product (though we can discuss how much freedom did we have in creating this product; whether it would be different if we had a different history or biology) and it makes sense only on the human level, not on the level of particles.
I just stick with the timeless view and don’t have any trouble with ethics in it, but that’s because I’ve got all the phenomena of time fully embedded in the timeless view, including choice and morality. :)
I’m happy with the idea that ethics is a human product (since this doesn’t imply that it’s arbitrary or illusory or anything like that). I take this to mean, basically, that ethics concerns the relation of some subsystems with others. There’s no ethical language which makes sense from the ‘top-down’ or from a global perspective. But there’s also nothing to prevent (this is Eliezer’s meaning, I guess) a non-global perspective from being worked out in which ethical language does make sense. And this perspective isn’t arbitrary, because the subsystems working it out have always occupied that perspective as subsystems. To see an algorithm from the inside is to see world as a whole by seeing it as potentially involved in this algorithm. And this is what leads to the confusion between the global, timeless view from the (no less global, in some sense) timeful inside-an-algorithm view.
If that’s all passably normal (as skeptical as I am at the coherence of the idea of ‘adding up to normality’) then the question that remains is what I should do with my idea of things mattering ethically. Maybe the answer here is to see ethical agents as ontologically fundamental or something, though that sounds dangerously anthropocentric. But I don’t know how to justify the idea that physically-fundamental = ontologically-fundamental either.