Nevertheless, this approach hardly seems capable of being extended to work in a future where many people may have nontraditional mind architectures, or have a zillion copies of themselves running on all kinds of strange substrates, or be merged into amorphous group minds with no clear boundaries between individuals.
Maybe we have no substantive disagreement. If your point is that a million copy super intelligence will have issues in morality because of their ontologies that we don’t currently have, then I agree. Me, I think it’s kind of cheeky to be prescribing solutions for the million copy super intelligence—I think he’s smarter than I am, doesn’t need my help much, and may not ever exist anyway. I’m not here to rain on that parade, but I’m not interested in joining it either.
However, you seemed to be using present tense for the crisis, and I just don’t see one now. Real people now don’t have big complicated ontological problems lacking clear solutions. That was my point.
The abortion example was appropriate, as that is one issue where currently many people have a problem, but their problem is usually just essentialism, and there is a cure for it—just knock it off.
I find discussions of metaethics interesting, particularly in terms of the conceptual confusion involved. It seemed that you were getting at such issues, but I couldn’t locate a concrete and currently relevant issue of that type from your post. So I directly asked for the concretes applicable now. You gave a couple. I don’t find either particularly problematic.
The abortion example was appropriate, as that is one issue where currently many people have a problem, but their problem is usually just essentialism, and there is a cure for it—just knock it off.
In the paragraph you refer to:
Maybe we have no substantive disagreement. If your point is that a million copy super intelligence will have issues in morality because of their ontologies that we don’t currently have, then I agree. Me, I think it’s kind of cheeky to be prescribing solutions for the million copy super intelligence—I think he’s smarter than I am, doesn’t need my help much, and may not ever exist anyway. I’m not here to rain on that parade, but I’m not interested in joining it either.
However, you seemed to be using present tense for the crisis, and I just don’t see one now. Real people now don’t have big complicated ontological problems lacking clear solutions. That was my point.
The abortion example was appropriate, as that is one issue where currently many people have a problem, but their problem is usually just essentialism, and there is a cure for it—just knock it off.
I find discussions of metaethics interesting, particularly in terms of the conceptual confusion involved. It seemed that you were getting at such issues, but I couldn’t locate a concrete and currently relevant issue of that type from your post. So I directly asked for the concretes applicable now. You gave a couple. I don’t find either particularly problematic.
I don’t see how this addresses the problem.