I believe that iff naturalism is true then strong moral realism is as well. If naturalism is true then there are no additional facts needed to determine what is moral than the positions of particles and the outcomes of arranging those particles differently. Any meaningful question that can be asked of how to arrange those particles or rank certain arrangements compared to others must have an objective answer because under naturalism there are no other kinds and no incomplete information. For the question to remain unanswerable at that point would require supernatural intervention and divine command theory to be true.
You need to refute non-cognitivism, as well as asserting naturalism.
Naturalism says that all questions that have answer have naturalistic answers, which means that if there are answers to ethical questions, they are naturalistic answers. But there is no guarantee that ethical questions mean anything, that they have answers.
For the question to remain unanswerable at that point would require supernatural intervention and divine command theory to be true.
No, only non-cogntivism, the idea that ethical questions just don’t make sense, like “how many beans make yellow?”.
. If you there can’t be an objective answer to morality, then FAI is literally impossible.
Not unless the “F” is standing for something weird. Absent objective morality, you can possibly solve the control problem, ie achieving safety by just making the AI do what you want; and absent objective morality, you can possibly achieve AI safety by instilling a suitable set of arbitrary values. Neither is easy, but you said “impossible”.
Do remember that your thoughts and preference on ethics are themselves an arrangement of particles to be solved.
That’s not an argument for cognitivism. When I entertain the thought “how many beans make yellow?”, that’s an arrangement of particles.
Instead I posit that the real morality is orders of magnitude more complicated, and finding it more difficult, than for real physics, real neurology, real social science, real economics, and can only be solved once these other fields are unified.
Do you have an argument for that proposal? Because I am arguing for something much simpler, that morality only needs to be grounded at the human level, so reductionism is neither denied nor employed.
If we were uncertain about the morality of stabbing someone, we could hypothetically stab someone to see what happens. When the particles of the knife rearranges the particles of their heart into a form that harms them, we’ll know it isn’t moral. When a particular subset of people with extensive training use their knife to very carefully and precisely rearrange the particles of the heart to help people, we call those people doctors and pay them lots of money because they’re doing good. But without a shitload of facts about how to exactly stab someone in the heart to save their life, that moral option would be lost to you. And the real morality is a superset that includes that action along with all others.
It’s hard to see what point you are making there. The social and evaluative aspects do make a difference to the raw physics, and so much that the raw physics counts for very little. yet previously you were insisting that a reduction to fundamental particles was what underpinned the objectivity of morality.
You need to refute non-cognitivism, as well as asserting naturalism.
Naturalism says that all questions that have answer have naturalistic answers, which means that if there are answers to ethical questions, they are naturalistic answers. But there is no guarantee that ethical questions mean anything, that they have answers.
No, only non-cogntivism, the idea that ethical questions just don’t make sense, like “how many beans make yellow?”.
Not unless the “F” is standing for something weird. Absent objective morality, you can possibly solve the control problem, ie achieving safety by just making the AI do what you want; and absent objective morality, you can possibly achieve AI safety by instilling a suitable set of arbitrary values. Neither is easy, but you said “impossible”.
That’s not an argument for cognitivism. When I entertain the thought “how many beans make yellow?”, that’s an arrangement of particles.
Do you have an argument for that proposal? Because I am arguing for something much simpler, that morality only needs to be grounded at the human level, so reductionism is neither denied nor employed.
It’s hard to see what point you are making there. The social and evaluative aspects do make a difference to the raw physics, and so much that the raw physics counts for very little. yet previously you were insisting that a reduction to fundamental particles was what underpinned the objectivity of morality.