Eliezer clarified earlier that this blog entry is about personal utility rather than global utility. That presents me with another opportunity to represent a distinctly minority (many would say extreme) point of view, namely, that personal utility (mine or anyone else’s) is completely trumped by global utility. This admittedly extreme view is what I have sincerely believed for about 15 years, and I know someone who held it for 30 years without his becoming an axe murderer or anything horrid like that. To say it in other words, I regard humans as means to nonhuman ends. Of course this is an extremely dangerous belief, which probably should not be advocated except when it is needed to avoid completely mistaken conclusions, and it is needed when thinking about simulation arguments, ultratechnologies, the eventual fate of the universe and similarly outre scenarios. If the idea took hold in ordinary legal or political deliberations, unnecessary suffering would result, so let us be discreet about to whom we advocate it.
Specifically, I wish to reply to Take away the individuals and there is no civilization which is a reply to my I believe it is an error to regard civilization as the servant of the individual. Ultimately, it is the other way around. Allow me to rephrase more precisely: Ultimately, the individual is the servant of the universe. I used civilization as a quick proxy for the universe because the primary way the individual contributes to the universe is by contributing to civilization.
The study of ultimate reality is of course called physics (and cosmology). There is an unexplored second half to physics. The first half of physics, the part we know, asks how reality can be bent towards goals humans already have. The second half of physics begins with the recognition that the goals humans currently have are vanities and asks what the deep investigation of reality can tell us about what goals humans ought to have. This “obligation physics” is the proper way to ground the civilization-individual recursion. Humanism, liberalism, progressivism and transhumanism ground the recursion in the individual, which might be the mistake made by most contemporary educated humans that could benefit the most from correction. The mistake is certainly very firmly entrenched in world culture. Perhaps the best way to see the mistake is to realize that subjective experience is irrelevant except as a proxy for the relevant things. What matters is objective reality.
Contrary to what almost every thoughtful person believes, it is possible to derive ought from is: the fact that no published author has done so correctly so far does not mean it cannot be done or that it is beyond the intellectual reach of contemporary humans. In summary my thesis is that the physical structure of reality determines the moral structure of reality.
Eliezer clarified earlier that this blog entry is about personal utility rather than global utility. That presents me with another opportunity to represent a distinctly minority (many would say extreme) point of view, namely, that personal utility (mine or anyone else’s) is completely trumped by global utility. This admittedly extreme view is what I have sincerely believed for about 15 years, and I know someone who held it for 30 years without his becoming an axe murderer or anything horrid like that. To say it in other words, I regard humans as means to nonhuman ends. Of course this is an extremely dangerous belief, which probably should not be advocated except when it is needed to avoid completely mistaken conclusions, and it is needed when thinking about simulation arguments, ultratechnologies, the eventual fate of the universe and similarly outre scenarios. If the idea took hold in ordinary legal or political deliberations, unnecessary suffering would result, so let us be discreet about to whom we advocate it.
Specifically, I wish to reply to Take away the individuals and there is no civilization which is a reply to my I believe it is an error to regard civilization as the servant of the individual. Ultimately, it is the other way around. Allow me to rephrase more precisely: Ultimately, the individual is the servant of the universe. I used civilization as a quick proxy for the universe because the primary way the individual contributes to the universe is by contributing to civilization.
The study of ultimate reality is of course called physics (and cosmology). There is an unexplored second half to physics. The first half of physics, the part we know, asks how reality can be bent towards goals humans already have. The second half of physics begins with the recognition that the goals humans currently have are vanities and asks what the deep investigation of reality can tell us about what goals humans ought to have. This “obligation physics” is the proper way to ground the civilization-individual recursion. Humanism, liberalism, progressivism and transhumanism ground the recursion in the individual, which might be the mistake made by most contemporary educated humans that could benefit the most from correction. The mistake is certainly very firmly entrenched in world culture. Perhaps the best way to see the mistake is to realize that subjective experience is irrelevant except as a proxy for the relevant things. What matters is objective reality.
Contrary to what almost every thoughtful person believes, it is possible to derive ought from is: the fact that no published author has done so correctly so far does not mean it cannot be done or that it is beyond the intellectual reach of contemporary humans. In summary my thesis is that the physical structure of reality determines the moral structure of reality.