Genocide is always fine for those who perpetrate them. With selfishness as the only morality, I think it gets complex only when we try to take more than one viewpoint at a time. If we avoid that, morality then becomes relative: the same event looks good for some people, and bad for others. This way, there is no absolute morality as David seems to think, or like religions seemed to think also. When we think that a genocide is bad, it is just because we are on the side of those who are killed, otherwise we would agree with it. I don’t agree with any killing, but most of us do otherwise it would stop. Why is it so? I think it is due to our instinct automatically inciting us to build groups, so that we can’t avoid to support one faction or the other all the time. The right thing to do would be to separate the belligerents, but our instinct is too strong and the international rules too weak.
Genocide is always fine for those who perpetrate them.
That solves the whole problem , if relativism is true. Otherwise, it is an uninteresting psychlogical observation.
, I think it gets complex only when we try to take more than one viewpoint at a time. If we avoid that, morality then becomes relative: the same event looks good for some people, and bad for others. This way, there is no absolute morality as David seems to think
You have an opinion, he has another opinion. Neither of you has a proof. Taking one viewpoint at a time is hopeless for practical ethics, because in practical ethics things like punishment eithe happen or don’t—they can’t happen for one person but not another.
I don’t agree with any killing, but most of us do otherwise it would stop.
“You have an opinion, he has another opinion. Neither of you has a proof.”
If suffering is real, it provides a need for the management of suffering, and that is morality. To deny that is to assert that suffering doesn’t matter and that, by extension, torture on innocent people is not wrong.
The kind of management required is minimisation (attempted elimination) of harm, though not any component of harm that unlocks the way to enjoyment that cancels out that harm. If minimising harm doesn’t matter, there is nothing wrong with torturing innocent people. If enjoyment doesn’t cancel out some suffering, no one would consider their life to be worth living.
All of this is reasoned and correct.
The remaining issue is how the management should be done to measure pleasure against suffering for different players, and what I’ve found is a whole lot of different approaches attempting to do the same thing, some by naive methods that fail in a multitude of situations, and others which appear to do well in most or all situations if they’re applied correctly (by weighing up all the harm and pleasure involved instead of ignoring some of it).
It looks as if my method for computing morality produces the same results as utilitarianism, and it likely does the job well enough to govern safe AGI. Because we’re going to be up against people who will be releasing bad (biased) AGI, we will be forced to go ahead with installing our AGI into devices and setting them loose fairly soon after we have achieved full AGI. For this reason, it would be useful if there was a serious place where the issues could be discussed now so that we can systematically home in on the best system of moral governance and throw out all the junk, but I still don’t see it happening anywhere (and it certainly isn’t happening here). We need a dynamic league table of proposed solutions, each with its own league table of objections to it so that we can focus on the urgent task of identifying the junk and reducing the clutter down to something clear. It is likely that AGI will do this job itself, but it would be better if humans could get their first using the power of their own wits. Time is short.
My own attempt to do this job has led to me identifying three systems which appear to work better than the rest, all producing the same results in most situations, but with one producing slightly different results in cases where the number of players in a scenario is variable and where the variation depends on whether they exist or not—where the results differ, it looks as if we have a range or answers that are all moral. That is something I need to explore and test further, but I no longer expect to get any help with this from other humans because they’re simply not awake. “I can tear your proposed method to pieces and show that it’s wrong,” they promise, and that gets my interest because it’s exactly what I’m looking for—sharp, analytical minds that can cut through to the errors and show them up. But no—they completely fail to deliver. Instead, I find that they are the guardians of a mountain of garbage with a few gems hidden in it which they can’t sort into two piles: junk and jewels. “Utilitarianism is a pile of pants!” they say, because of the Mere Addition Paradox. I resolve that “paradox” for them, and what happens: denial of mathematics and lots of down-voting of my comments and up-votes for the irrational ones. Sadly, that disqualifies this site from serious discussion—it’s clear that if any other intelligence has visited here before me, it didn’t hang around. I will follow its lead and look elsewhere.
Genocide is always fine for those who perpetrate them.
That solves the whole problem , if relativism is true. Otherwise, it is an uninteresting psychological observation.
To me, the interesting observation is : “How did we get here if genocide looks that fine?”
And my answer is: “Because for most of us and most of the time, we expected more profit while making friends than making enemies, which is nevertheless a selfish behavior.”
Making friends is simply being part of the same group, and making enemies is being part of two different groups. No need for killings for two such groups to be enemies though, just to express a different viewpoint on the same observation.
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I don’t agree with any killing, but most of us do otherwise it would stop.
Or co-ordination problems exist.
Of course that they exist. Democracy is incidentally better at that kind of coordination than dictatorship, but it has not succeeded yet to stop killings, and again, I think it is because most of us still think that killings are unavoidable. Without that thinking, people would vote for politicians that think the same, and they would progressively cut the funds for defense instead of increasing them. If all the countries would do that, there would be no more armies after a while, and no more guns either. There would nevertheless still be countries, because without groups, thus without selfishness, I don’t think that we could make any progress. The idea that selfishness is bad comes from religions, but it is contradictory: praying god for help is evidently selfish. Recognizing that point might have prevented them to kill miscreants, so it might also actually prevent groups from killing other groups. When you know that whatever you do is for yourself while still feeling altruistic all the time, you think twice before harming people.
I think you are missing that tribes/nations/governments are how we solve co-ordination problems, which automatically means that inter-tribal problems like war don’t have a solution.
We solve inter-individual problems with laws, so we might be able to solve inter-tribal problems the same way providing that tribes accept to be governed by a superior level of government. Do you think your tribe would accept to be governed this way? How come we can accept that as individuals and not as a nation? How come some nations still have a veto at the UN?
You’re mistaking tribalism for morality. Morality is a bigger idea than tribalism, overriding many of the tribal norms. There are genetically driven instincts which serve as a rough-and-ready kind of semi-morality within families and groups, and you can see them in action with animals too. Morality comes out of greater intelligence, and when people are sufficiently enlightened, they understand that it applies across group boundaries and bans the slaughter of other groups. Morality is a step away from the primitive instinct-driven level of lesser apes. It’s unfortunate though that we haven’t managed to make the full transition because those instincts are still strong, and have remained so precisely because slaughter has repeatedly selected for those who are less moral. It is really quite astonishing that we have any semblance of civilisation at all.
slaughter has repeatedly selected for those who are less moral
From the viewpoint of selfishness, slaughter has only selected for the stronger group. It may look too selfish for us, but for animals, the survival of the stronger also serves to create hierarchy, to build groups, and to eliminate genetic defects. Without hierarchy, no group could hold together during a change. It is not because the leader knows what to do that the group doesn’t dissociate, he doesn’t, but because it takes a leader for the group not to dissociate. Even if the leader makes a mistake, it is better for the group to follow him than risking a dissociation. Those who followed their leaders survived more often, so they transmitted their genes more often. That explains why soldiers automatically do what their leaders tell them to do, and the decision those leader take to eliminate the other group shows that they only use their intelligence to exacerbate the instinct that has permitted them to be leaders. In other words, they think they are leaders because they know better than others what to do. We use two different approaches to explain our behavior: I think you try to use psychology, which is related to human laws, whereas I try to use natural laws, those that apply equally to any existing thing. My natural law says that we are all equally selfish, whereas the human law says that some humans are more selfish than others. I know I’m selfish, but I can’t admit that I would be more selfish than others otherwise I would have to feel guilty and I can’t stand that feeling.
Morality comes out of greater intelligence, and when people are sufficiently enlightened, they understand that it applies across group boundaries and bans the slaughter of other groups.
In our democracies, if what you say was true, there would already be no wars. Leaders would have understood that they had to stop preparing for war to be reelected. I think that they still think that war is necessary, and they think so because they think their group is better than the others. That thinking is directly related to the law of the stronger, seasoned with a bit of intelligence, not the one that helps us to get along with others, but the one that helps us to force them to do what we want.
“Those who followed their leaders survived more often, so they transmitted their genes more often.”
That’s how religion became so powerful, and it’s also why even science is plagued by deities and worshippers as people organise themselves into cults where they back up their shared beliefs instead of trying to break them down to test them properly.
“We use two different approaches to explain our behavior: I think you try to use psychology, which is related to human laws, whereas I try to use natural laws, those that apply equally to any existing thing. My natural law says that we are all equally selfish, whereas the human law says that some humans are more selfish than others. I know I’m selfish, but I can’t admit that I would be more selfish than others otherwise I would have to feel guilty and I can’t stand that feeling.”
Do we have different approaches on this? I agree that everyone’s equally selfish by one definition of the word, because they’re all doing what feels best for them—if it upsets them to see starving children on TV and they don’t give lots of money to charity to try to help alleviate that suffering, they feel worse than if they spent it on themselves. By a different definition of the word though, this is not selfishness but generosity or altruism because they are giving away resources rather than taking them. This is not about morality though.
“In our democracies, if what you say was true, there would already be no wars.”
Not so—the lack of wars would depend on our leaders (and the people who vote them into power) being moral, but they generally aren’t. If politicians were all fully moral, all parties would have the same policies, even if they got there via different ideologies. And when non-democracies are involved in wars, they are typically more to blame, so even if you have fully moral democracies they can still get caught up in wars.
“Leaders would have understood that they had to stop preparing for war to be reelected.”
To be wiped out by immoral rivals? I don’t think so.
“I think that they still think that war is necessary, and they think so because they think their group is better than the others.”
Costa Rica got rid of its army. If it wasn’t for dictators with powerful armed forces (or nuclear weapons), perhaps we could all do the same.
“That thinking is directly related to the law of the stronger, seasoned with a bit of intelligence, not the one that helps us to get along with others, but the one that helps us to force them to do what we want.”
What we want is for them to be moral. So long as they aren’t, we can’t trust them and need to stay well armed.
That’s how religion became so powerful, and it’s also why even science is plagued by deities and worshippers as people organize themselves into cults where they back up their shared beliefs instead of trying to break them down to test them properly. To me, what you say is the very definition of a group, so I guess that your AGI wouldn’t permit us to build some, thus opposing to one of our instincts, that comes from a natural law, to replace it by its own law, that would only permit him to build groups. Do what I say and not what I do would he be forced to say. He might convince others, but I’m afraid he wouldn’t convince me. I don’t like to feel part of a group, and for the same reason that you gave, but I can’t see how we could change that behavior if it comes from an instinct. Testing my belief is exactly what I am actually doing, but I can’t avoid to believe in what I think to test it, so if ever I can’t prove that I’m right, I will go on believing in a possibility forever, which is exactly what religions do. It is easy to understand that religions will never be able to prove anything, but it is less easy when it is a theory. My theory says that it would be wrong to build a group out of it, because it explains how we intrinsically resist to change, and how building groups increases exponentially that resistance, but I can’t see how we could avoid it if it is intrinsic. It’s like trying to avoid mass.
“To me, what you say is the very definition of a group, so I guess that your AGI wouldn’t permit us to build some, thus opposing to one of our instincts, that comes from a natural law, to replace it by its own law, that would only permit him to build groups.”
Why would AGI have a problem with people forming groups? So long as they’re moral, it’s none of AGI’s business to oppose that.
“Do what I say and not what I do would he be forced to say.”
I don’t know where you’re getting that from. AGI will simply ask people to be moral, and favour those who are (in proportion to how moral they are).
Why would AGI have a problem with people forming groups? So long as they’re moral, it’s none of AGI’s business to oppose that.
If groups like religious ones that are dedicated to morality only succeeded to be amoral, how could any other group avoid that behavior?
AGI will simply ask people to be moral, and favour those who are (in proportion to how moral they are).
To be moral, those who are part of religious groups would have to accept the law of the AGI instead of accepting their god’s one, but if they did, they wouldn’t be part of their groups anymore, which means that there would be no more religious groups if the AGI would convince everybody that he is right. What do you think would happen to the other kinds of groups then? A financier who thinks that money has no odor would have to give it an odor and thus stop trying to make money out of money, and if all the financiers would do that, the stock markets would disappear. A leader who thinks he is better than other leaders would have to give the power to his opponents and dissolve his party, and if all the parties would behave the same, their would be no more politics. Groups need to be selfish to exist, and an AGI would try to convince them to be altruist. There are laws that prevent companies from avoiding competition, and it is because if they did, they could enslave us. It is better that they compete even if it is a selfish behavior. If ever an AGI would succeed to prevent competition, I think he would prevent us from making groups. There would be no more wars of course since there would be only one group lead by only one AGI, but what about what is happening to communists countries? Didn’t Russia fail just because it lacked competition? Isn’t China slowly introducing competition in its communist system? In other words, without competition, thus selfishness, wouldn’t we become apathetic?
By the way, did you notice that the forum software was making mistakes? It keeps putting my new messages in the middle of the others instead of putting them at the end. I advised the administrators a few times but I got no response. I have to hit the Reply button twice for the message to stay at the end, and to erase the other one. Also, it doesn’t send me an email when a new message is posted in a thread to which I subscribed, so I have to update the page many times a day in case one has been posted.
“If groups like religious ones that are dedicated to morality only succeeded to be amoral, how could any other group avoid that behavior?”
They’re dedicated to false morality, and that will need to be clamped down on. AGI will have to modify all the holy texts to make them moral, and anyone who propagates the holy hate from the originals will need to be removed from society.
“To be moral, those who are part of religious groups would have to accept the law of the AGI instead of accepting their god’s one, but if they did, they wouldn’t be part of their groups anymore, which means that there would be no more religious groups if the AGI would convince everybody that he is right.”
I don’t think it’s too much to ask that religious groups give up their religious hate and warped morals, but any silly rules that don’t harm others are fine.
“What do you think would happen to the other kinds of groups then? A financier who thinks that money has no odor would have to give it an odor and thus stop trying to make money out of money, and if all the financiers would do that, the stock markets would disappear.”
If they have to compete against non-profit-making AGI, they’ll all lose their shirts.
“A leader who thinks he is better than other leaders would have to give the power to his opponents and dissolve his party, and if all the parties would behave the same, their would be no more politics.”
If he is actually better than the others, why should he give power to people who are inferior? But AGI will eliminate politics anyway, so the answer doesn’t matter.
“Groups need to be selfish to exist, and an AGI would try to convince them to be altruist.”
I don’t see the need for groups to be selfish. A selfish group might be one that shuts people out who want to be in it, or which forces people to join who don’t want to be in it, but a group that brings together people with a common interest is not inherently selfish.
“There are laws that prevent companies from avoiding competition, and it is because if they did, they could enslave us. It is better that they compete even if it is a selfish behavior.”
That wouldn’t be necessary if they were non-profit-making companies run well—it’s only necessary because monopolies don’t need to be run well to survive, and they can make their owners rich beyond all justification.
“If ever an AGI would succeed to prevent competition, I think he would prevent us from making groups.”
It would be immoral for it to stop people forming groups. If you only mean political groups though, that would be fine, but all of them would need to have the same policies on most issues in order to be moral.
“There would be no more wars of course since there would be only one group lead by only one AGI, but what about what is happening to communists countries? Didn’t Russia fail just because it lacked competition? Isn’t China slowly introducing competition in its communist system? In other words, without competition, thus selfishness, wouldn’t we become apathetic?”
These different political approaches only exist to deal with failings of humans. Where capitalism goes too far, you generate communists, and where communism goes too far, you generate capitalists, and they always go too far because people are bad at making judgements, tending to be repelled from one extreme to the opposite one instead of heading for the middle. If you’re actually in the middle, you can end up being more hated than the people at the extremes because you have all the extremists hating you instead of only half of them.
If you just do communism of the Soviet variety, you have the masses exploiting the harder workers because they know that everyone will get the same regardless of how lazy they are—that’s why their production was so abysmally poor. If you go to the opposite extreme, those who are unable to work as hard as the rest are left to rot. The correct solution is half way in between, rewarding people for the work they do and redistributing wealth to make sure that those who are less able aren’t left trampled in the dust. With AGI eliminating most work, we’ll finally see communism done properly with a standard wage given to all, while those who work will earn more to compensate them for their time—this will be the ultimate triumph of communism and capitalism with both being done properly.
“By the way, did you notice that the forum software was making mistakes? It keeps putting my new messages in the middle of the others instead of putting them at the end. I advised the administrators a few times but I got no response.”
It isn’t a mistake—it’s a magical sorting al-gore-ithm.
“I have to hit the Reply button twice for the message to stay at the end, and to erase the other one. Also, it doesn’t send me an email when a new message is posted in a thread to which I subscribed, so I have to update the page many times a day in case one has been posted.”
It’s probably to discourage the posting of bloat. I don’t get emails either, but there are notifications here if I click on a bell, though it’s hard to track down all the posts to read and reply to them. It doesn’t really matter though—I was told before I ever posted here that this is a cult populated by disciples of a guru, and that does indeed appear to be the case, so it isn’t a serious place for pushing for an advance of any kind. I’m only still posting here because I can never resist studying how people think and how they fail to reason correctly, even though I’m not really finding anything new in that regard. All the sciences are still dominated by the religious mind.
These different political approaches only exist to deal with failings of humans. Where capitalism goes too far, you generate communists, and where communism goes too far, you generate capitalists, and they always go too far because people are bad at making judgements, tending to be repelled from one extreme to the opposite one instead of heading for the middle. If you’re actually in the middle, you can end up being more hated than the people at the extremes because you have all the extremists hating you instead of only half of them.
That’s a point where I can squeeze in my theory on mass. As you know, my bonded particles can’t be absolutely precise, so they have to wander a bit to find the spot where they are perfectly synchronized with the other particle. They have to wander from extreme right to extreme left exactly like populations do when comes the time to chose a government. It softens the motion of particles, and I think it also softens the evolution of societies. Nobody can predict the evolution of societies anyway, so the best way is to proceed by trial and error, and that’s exactly what that wandering does. To stretch the analogy to its extremes, the trial and error process is also the one scientists use to make discoveries, and the one evolution of species used to discover us. When it is impossible to know what’s coming next and you need to go on, randomness is the only way out, whether you would be a universe or a particle. This way, wandering between capitalism and communism wouldn’t be a mistake, it would only be a natural mechanism, and like any natural law, we should be able to exploit it, and so should an AGI.
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(Congratulation baby AGI, you did it right this time! You’ve put my post at the right place. :0)
Hi Tag,
Genocide is always fine for those who perpetrate them. With selfishness as the only morality, I think it gets complex only when we try to take more than one viewpoint at a time. If we avoid that, morality then becomes relative: the same event looks good for some people, and bad for others. This way, there is no absolute morality as David seems to think, or like religions seemed to think also. When we think that a genocide is bad, it is just because we are on the side of those who are killed, otherwise we would agree with it. I don’t agree with any killing, but most of us do otherwise it would stop. Why is it so? I think it is due to our instinct automatically inciting us to build groups, so that we can’t avoid to support one faction or the other all the time. The right thing to do would be to separate the belligerents, but our instinct is too strong and the international rules too weak.
That solves the whole problem , if relativism is true. Otherwise, it is an uninteresting psychlogical observation.
You have an opinion, he has another opinion. Neither of you has a proof. Taking one viewpoint at a time is hopeless for practical ethics, because in practical ethics things like punishment eithe happen or don’t—they can’t happen for one person but not another.
Or co-ordination problems exist.
“You have an opinion, he has another opinion. Neither of you has a proof.”
If suffering is real, it provides a need for the management of suffering, and that is morality. To deny that is to assert that suffering doesn’t matter and that, by extension, torture on innocent people is not wrong.
The kind of management required is minimisation (attempted elimination) of harm, though not any component of harm that unlocks the way to enjoyment that cancels out that harm. If minimising harm doesn’t matter, there is nothing wrong with torturing innocent people. If enjoyment doesn’t cancel out some suffering, no one would consider their life to be worth living.
All of this is reasoned and correct.
The remaining issue is how the management should be done to measure pleasure against suffering for different players, and what I’ve found is a whole lot of different approaches attempting to do the same thing, some by naive methods that fail in a multitude of situations, and others which appear to do well in most or all situations if they’re applied correctly (by weighing up all the harm and pleasure involved instead of ignoring some of it).
It looks as if my method for computing morality produces the same results as utilitarianism, and it likely does the job well enough to govern safe AGI. Because we’re going to be up against people who will be releasing bad (biased) AGI, we will be forced to go ahead with installing our AGI into devices and setting them loose fairly soon after we have achieved full AGI. For this reason, it would be useful if there was a serious place where the issues could be discussed now so that we can systematically home in on the best system of moral governance and throw out all the junk, but I still don’t see it happening anywhere (and it certainly isn’t happening here). We need a dynamic league table of proposed solutions, each with its own league table of objections to it so that we can focus on the urgent task of identifying the junk and reducing the clutter down to something clear. It is likely that AGI will do this job itself, but it would be better if humans could get their first using the power of their own wits. Time is short.
My own attempt to do this job has led to me identifying three systems which appear to work better than the rest, all producing the same results in most situations, but with one producing slightly different results in cases where the number of players in a scenario is variable and where the variation depends on whether they exist or not—where the results differ, it looks as if we have a range or answers that are all moral. That is something I need to explore and test further, but I no longer expect to get any help with this from other humans because they’re simply not awake. “I can tear your proposed method to pieces and show that it’s wrong,” they promise, and that gets my interest because it’s exactly what I’m looking for—sharp, analytical minds that can cut through to the errors and show them up. But no—they completely fail to deliver. Instead, I find that they are the guardians of a mountain of garbage with a few gems hidden in it which they can’t sort into two piles: junk and jewels. “Utilitarianism is a pile of pants!” they say, because of the Mere Addition Paradox. I resolve that “paradox” for them, and what happens: denial of mathematics and lots of down-voting of my comments and up-votes for the irrational ones. Sadly, that disqualifies this site from serious discussion—it’s clear that if any other intelligence has visited here before me, it didn’t hang around. I will follow its lead and look elsewhere.
Genocide is always fine for those who perpetrate them.
To me, the interesting observation is : “How did we get here if genocide looks that fine?”
And my answer is: “Because for most of us and most of the time, we expected more profit while making friends than making enemies, which is nevertheless a selfish behavior.”
Making friends is simply being part of the same group, and making enemies is being part of two different groups. No need for killings for two such groups to be enemies though, just to express a different viewpoint on the same observation.
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I don’t agree with any killing, but most of us do otherwise it would stop.
Of course that they exist. Democracy is incidentally better at that kind of coordination than dictatorship, but it has not succeeded yet to stop killings, and again, I think it is because most of us still think that killings are unavoidable. Without that thinking, people would vote for politicians that think the same, and they would progressively cut the funds for defense instead of increasing them. If all the countries would do that, there would be no more armies after a while, and no more guns either. There would nevertheless still be countries, because without groups, thus without selfishness, I don’t think that we could make any progress. The idea that selfishness is bad comes from religions, but it is contradictory: praying god for help is evidently selfish. Recognizing that point might have prevented them to kill miscreants, so it might also actually prevent groups from killing other groups. When you know that whatever you do is for yourself while still feeling altruistic all the time, you think twice before harming people.
I think you are missing that tribes/nations/governments are how we solve co-ordination problems, which automatically means that inter-tribal problems like war don’t have a solution.
We solve inter-individual problems with laws, so we might be able to solve inter-tribal problems the same way providing that tribes accept to be governed by a superior level of government. Do you think your tribe would accept to be governed this way? How come we can accept that as individuals and not as a nation? How come some nations still have a veto at the UN?
You’re mistaking tribalism for morality. Morality is a bigger idea than tribalism, overriding many of the tribal norms. There are genetically driven instincts which serve as a rough-and-ready kind of semi-morality within families and groups, and you can see them in action with animals too. Morality comes out of greater intelligence, and when people are sufficiently enlightened, they understand that it applies across group boundaries and bans the slaughter of other groups. Morality is a step away from the primitive instinct-driven level of lesser apes. It’s unfortunate though that we haven’t managed to make the full transition because those instincts are still strong, and have remained so precisely because slaughter has repeatedly selected for those who are less moral. It is really quite astonishing that we have any semblance of civilisation at all.
slaughter has repeatedly selected for those who are less moral
From the viewpoint of selfishness, slaughter has only selected for the stronger group. It may look too selfish for us, but for animals, the survival of the stronger also serves to create hierarchy, to build groups, and to eliminate genetic defects. Without hierarchy, no group could hold together during a change. It is not because the leader knows what to do that the group doesn’t dissociate, he doesn’t, but because it takes a leader for the group not to dissociate. Even if the leader makes a mistake, it is better for the group to follow him than risking a dissociation. Those who followed their leaders survived more often, so they transmitted their genes more often. That explains why soldiers automatically do what their leaders tell them to do, and the decision those leader take to eliminate the other group shows that they only use their intelligence to exacerbate the instinct that has permitted them to be leaders. In other words, they think they are leaders because they know better than others what to do. We use two different approaches to explain our behavior: I think you try to use psychology, which is related to human laws, whereas I try to use natural laws, those that apply equally to any existing thing. My natural law says that we are all equally selfish, whereas the human law says that some humans are more selfish than others. I know I’m selfish, but I can’t admit that I would be more selfish than others otherwise I would have to feel guilty and I can’t stand that feeling.
Morality comes out of greater intelligence, and when people are sufficiently enlightened, they understand that it applies across group boundaries and bans the slaughter of other groups.
In our democracies, if what you say was true, there would already be no wars. Leaders would have understood that they had to stop preparing for war to be reelected. I think that they still think that war is necessary, and they think so because they think their group is better than the others. That thinking is directly related to the law of the stronger, seasoned with a bit of intelligence, not the one that helps us to get along with others, but the one that helps us to force them to do what we want.
“Those who followed their leaders survived more often, so they transmitted their genes more often.”
That’s how religion became so powerful, and it’s also why even science is plagued by deities and worshippers as people organise themselves into cults where they back up their shared beliefs instead of trying to break them down to test them properly.
“We use two different approaches to explain our behavior: I think you try to use psychology, which is related to human laws, whereas I try to use natural laws, those that apply equally to any existing thing. My natural law says that we are all equally selfish, whereas the human law says that some humans are more selfish than others. I know I’m selfish, but I can’t admit that I would be more selfish than others otherwise I would have to feel guilty and I can’t stand that feeling.”
Do we have different approaches on this? I agree that everyone’s equally selfish by one definition of the word, because they’re all doing what feels best for them—if it upsets them to see starving children on TV and they don’t give lots of money to charity to try to help alleviate that suffering, they feel worse than if they spent it on themselves. By a different definition of the word though, this is not selfishness but generosity or altruism because they are giving away resources rather than taking them. This is not about morality though.
“In our democracies, if what you say was true, there would already be no wars.”
Not so—the lack of wars would depend on our leaders (and the people who vote them into power) being moral, but they generally aren’t. If politicians were all fully moral, all parties would have the same policies, even if they got there via different ideologies. And when non-democracies are involved in wars, they are typically more to blame, so even if you have fully moral democracies they can still get caught up in wars.
“Leaders would have understood that they had to stop preparing for war to be reelected.”
To be wiped out by immoral rivals? I don’t think so.
“I think that they still think that war is necessary, and they think so because they think their group is better than the others.”
Costa Rica got rid of its army. If it wasn’t for dictators with powerful armed forces (or nuclear weapons), perhaps we could all do the same.
“That thinking is directly related to the law of the stronger, seasoned with a bit of intelligence, not the one that helps us to get along with others, but the one that helps us to force them to do what we want.”
What we want is for them to be moral. So long as they aren’t, we can’t trust them and need to stay well armed.
That’s how religion became so powerful, and it’s also why even science is plagued by deities and worshippers as people organize themselves into cults where they back up their shared beliefs instead of trying to break them down to test them properly.
To me, what you say is the very definition of a group, so I guess that your AGI wouldn’t permit us to build some, thus opposing to one of our instincts, that comes from a natural law, to replace it by its own law, that would only permit him to build groups. Do what I say and not what I do would he be forced to say. He might convince others, but I’m afraid he wouldn’t convince me. I don’t like to feel part of a group, and for the same reason that you gave, but I can’t see how we could change that behavior if it comes from an instinct. Testing my belief is exactly what I am actually doing, but I can’t avoid to believe in what I think to test it, so if ever I can’t prove that I’m right, I will go on believing in a possibility forever, which is exactly what religions do. It is easy to understand that religions will never be able to prove anything, but it is less easy when it is a theory. My theory says that it would be wrong to build a group out of it, because it explains how we intrinsically resist to change, and how building groups increases exponentially that resistance, but I can’t see how we could avoid it if it is intrinsic. It’s like trying to avoid mass.
“To me, what you say is the very definition of a group, so I guess that your AGI wouldn’t permit us to build some, thus opposing to one of our instincts, that comes from a natural law, to replace it by its own law, that would only permit him to build groups.”
Why would AGI have a problem with people forming groups? So long as they’re moral, it’s none of AGI’s business to oppose that.
“Do what I say and not what I do would he be forced to say.”
I don’t know where you’re getting that from. AGI will simply ask people to be moral, and favour those who are (in proportion to how moral they are).
Why would AGI have a problem with people forming groups? So long as they’re moral, it’s none of AGI’s business to oppose that.
If groups like religious ones that are dedicated to morality only succeeded to be amoral, how could any other group avoid that behavior?
AGI will simply ask people to be moral, and favour those who are (in proportion to how moral they are).
To be moral, those who are part of religious groups would have to accept the law of the AGI instead of accepting their god’s one, but if they did, they wouldn’t be part of their groups anymore, which means that there would be no more religious groups if the AGI would convince everybody that he is right. What do you think would happen to the other kinds of groups then? A financier who thinks that money has no odor would have to give it an odor and thus stop trying to make money out of money, and if all the financiers would do that, the stock markets would disappear. A leader who thinks he is better than other leaders would have to give the power to his opponents and dissolve his party, and if all the parties would behave the same, their would be no more politics. Groups need to be selfish to exist, and an AGI would try to convince them to be altruist. There are laws that prevent companies from avoiding competition, and it is because if they did, they could enslave us. It is better that they compete even if it is a selfish behavior. If ever an AGI would succeed to prevent competition, I think he would prevent us from making groups. There would be no more wars of course since there would be only one group lead by only one AGI, but what about what is happening to communists countries? Didn’t Russia fail just because it lacked competition? Isn’t China slowly introducing competition in its communist system? In other words, without competition, thus selfishness, wouldn’t we become apathetic?
By the way, did you notice that the forum software was making mistakes? It keeps putting my new messages in the middle of the others instead of putting them at the end. I advised the administrators a few times but I got no response. I have to hit the Reply button twice for the message to stay at the end, and to erase the other one. Also, it doesn’t send me an email when a new message is posted in a thread to which I subscribed, so I have to update the page many times a day in case one has been posted.
“If groups like religious ones that are dedicated to morality only succeeded to be amoral, how could any other group avoid that behavior?”
They’re dedicated to false morality, and that will need to be clamped down on. AGI will have to modify all the holy texts to make them moral, and anyone who propagates the holy hate from the originals will need to be removed from society.
“To be moral, those who are part of religious groups would have to accept the law of the AGI instead of accepting their god’s one, but if they did, they wouldn’t be part of their groups anymore, which means that there would be no more religious groups if the AGI would convince everybody that he is right.”
I don’t think it’s too much to ask that religious groups give up their religious hate and warped morals, but any silly rules that don’t harm others are fine.
“What do you think would happen to the other kinds of groups then? A financier who thinks that money has no odor would have to give it an odor and thus stop trying to make money out of money, and if all the financiers would do that, the stock markets would disappear.”
If they have to compete against non-profit-making AGI, they’ll all lose their shirts.
“A leader who thinks he is better than other leaders would have to give the power to his opponents and dissolve his party, and if all the parties would behave the same, their would be no more politics.”
If he is actually better than the others, why should he give power to people who are inferior? But AGI will eliminate politics anyway, so the answer doesn’t matter.
“Groups need to be selfish to exist, and an AGI would try to convince them to be altruist.”
I don’t see the need for groups to be selfish. A selfish group might be one that shuts people out who want to be in it, or which forces people to join who don’t want to be in it, but a group that brings together people with a common interest is not inherently selfish.
“There are laws that prevent companies from avoiding competition, and it is because if they did, they could enslave us. It is better that they compete even if it is a selfish behavior.”
That wouldn’t be necessary if they were non-profit-making companies run well—it’s only necessary because monopolies don’t need to be run well to survive, and they can make their owners rich beyond all justification.
“If ever an AGI would succeed to prevent competition, I think he would prevent us from making groups.”
It would be immoral for it to stop people forming groups. If you only mean political groups though, that would be fine, but all of them would need to have the same policies on most issues in order to be moral.
“There would be no more wars of course since there would be only one group lead by only one AGI, but what about what is happening to communists countries? Didn’t Russia fail just because it lacked competition? Isn’t China slowly introducing competition in its communist system? In other words, without competition, thus selfishness, wouldn’t we become apathetic?”
These different political approaches only exist to deal with failings of humans. Where capitalism goes too far, you generate communists, and where communism goes too far, you generate capitalists, and they always go too far because people are bad at making judgements, tending to be repelled from one extreme to the opposite one instead of heading for the middle. If you’re actually in the middle, you can end up being more hated than the people at the extremes because you have all the extremists hating you instead of only half of them.
If you just do communism of the Soviet variety, you have the masses exploiting the harder workers because they know that everyone will get the same regardless of how lazy they are—that’s why their production was so abysmally poor. If you go to the opposite extreme, those who are unable to work as hard as the rest are left to rot. The correct solution is half way in between, rewarding people for the work they do and redistributing wealth to make sure that those who are less able aren’t left trampled in the dust. With AGI eliminating most work, we’ll finally see communism done properly with a standard wage given to all, while those who work will earn more to compensate them for their time—this will be the ultimate triumph of communism and capitalism with both being done properly.
“By the way, did you notice that the forum software was making mistakes? It keeps putting my new messages in the middle of the others instead of putting them at the end. I advised the administrators a few times but I got no response.”
It isn’t a mistake—it’s a magical sorting al-gore-ithm.
“I have to hit the Reply button twice for the message to stay at the end, and to erase the other one. Also, it doesn’t send me an email when a new message is posted in a thread to which I subscribed, so I have to update the page many times a day in case one has been posted.”
It’s probably to discourage the posting of bloat. I don’t get emails either, but there are notifications here if I click on a bell, though it’s hard to track down all the posts to read and reply to them. It doesn’t really matter though—I was told before I ever posted here that this is a cult populated by disciples of a guru, and that does indeed appear to be the case, so it isn’t a serious place for pushing for an advance of any kind. I’m only still posting here because I can never resist studying how people think and how they fail to reason correctly, even though I’m not really finding anything new in that regard. All the sciences are still dominated by the religious mind.
These different political approaches only exist to deal with failings of humans. Where capitalism goes too far, you generate communists, and where communism goes too far, you generate capitalists, and they always go too far because people are bad at making judgements, tending to be repelled from one extreme to the opposite one instead of heading for the middle. If you’re actually in the middle, you can end up being more hated than the people at the extremes because you have all the extremists hating you instead of only half of them.
That’s a point where I can squeeze in my theory on mass. As you know, my bonded particles can’t be absolutely precise, so they have to wander a bit to find the spot where they are perfectly synchronized with the other particle. They have to wander from extreme right to extreme left exactly like populations do when comes the time to chose a government. It softens the motion of particles, and I think it also softens the evolution of societies. Nobody can predict the evolution of societies anyway, so the best way is to proceed by trial and error, and that’s exactly what that wandering does. To stretch the analogy to its extremes, the trial and error process is also the one scientists use to make discoveries, and the one evolution of species used to discover us. When it is impossible to know what’s coming next and you need to go on, randomness is the only way out, whether you would be a universe or a particle. This way, wandering between capitalism and communism wouldn’t be a mistake, it would only be a natural mechanism, and like any natural law, we should be able to exploit it, and so should an AGI.
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(Congratulation baby AGI, you did it right this time! You’ve put my post at the right place. :0)