Dear Eliezer,
First of all, great post, thank you, I truly love you Eli!! It was really the kind of beautiful endpoint in your dance I was waiting for, and it is very much in the lines of my own reasoning, just a lot more detailed. I also think this could be labeled metametamorality, therefore some of the justified complaints does not yet apply. But the people complaining about different moral preferences are doing so with their own morality, what else could they be using, and in doing so they are acting according to the arguments of this post. Metametamorality would be about the ontological reductionistic framework in which metamorality and morality takes place. Metamorality would be about simplifying and generalizing morality into certain values, principles and rules to which groups of different sizes would try to approximate, that we ought to follow. Morality would be about applying the metamorality. But it may also complicate things too much using this terminology, and I might even prefer Eliezers use. Metametamorality could also be called metamorality and metamorality, metaethics. Anyway, I found this amazingly summarizing of your viewpoints, and it helped me a lot in grasping this course in Bayescraft.
I have been working for a long time on my own metamorality or metaethics. Which you may take a peak at in this diagram http://docs.google.com/File?id=d4pc9b6_188cgj9zgwz_b.
It workes from the same metametamoral assumptions that eliezer does. And I have done my best in using my inbuilt moral computation to onstruct a coherent metamoral guide for myself and others who may be like me.
For me the basic principle is and has been for a couple of years now: There is no values outside humanity, so therefore everything has 0 value. But being an agent, with a certain set of feelings, morality and goals I may as well feel them and use them(some of them), because it is rather fantastic after all that there is anything at all. Although this amazement is a human feeling produced by my evolved psychology for curiosity it seems rather nice. It is just beautiful that there is something rather than nothing(especially in a Tegmark MUH universe), so I assign +1 to everything, including particles, energies, all events, everything that exists, every piece of information, it is good, it is beautiful because it exists, so hence I love everything!! But this was only the first level of morality, I can not and do not want to be left only with that, because that would leave me sitting still and doing nothing. So I let my evolved psychology discriminate on the highest possible general level. I let more feelings slip in gently, building up a hierarchy of morality and values on many different levels. A universe with three particles is better than one with only 1. Complexity, information is beautiful, diversity is, but simplicity is also. Beauty in general although elusive as a concept is a very important but comlicated terminal value for me consisting of a lot of parts, and I believe it is in some sense for everybody, although seldom explicit. Truth is also one of the great terminal values, and I think David Deautch expressed it nicely in a TED talk once. The Good is also of great importance, since it allows the expansion of beauty and knowledge about truth.
So important for me is:
To construct a metamorality that is very general
That is not tied only to experience, although the values may originate from our experience and psychology and may very often be the same as pleasure in our experience. This is mostly because of elegance and a stability concern, also because it may affect our belief in it more, i.e. stronger placebo.
For me a universe with matter distributed randomly is uglier than an universe only consisting of a great book or intelligent, complex construction, even though nobody might experience it.
Of course experience and intelligence is of the greatest and most beautiful things ever. So I value them extremely highly. Higher than anything else because it makes everything else so much more beautiful when there is someone to experience it.
The complete hierarchical structure of my value system is not complete and will never be, but I will try to continue to approximate it, and I find it valuable and moral to do so, as it might help myself and others in deciding on values, and choosing wisely. It might not be the value sstem of choice for most individuals, but some people might find it appealing.
Sorry for the Sketchy nature of this comment, I just needed it to get out, I hope I could get some comment from Eliezer, but I may as well wait until I get enough strength to make this thing better and to mail it then...
Dear Eliezer, First of all, great post, thank you, I truly love you Eli!! It was really the kind of beautiful endpoint in your dance I was waiting for, and it is very much in the lines of my own reasoning, just a lot more detailed. I also think this could be labeled metametamorality, therefore some of the justified complaints does not yet apply. But the people complaining about different moral preferences are doing so with their own morality, what else could they be using, and in doing so they are acting according to the arguments of this post. Metametamorality would be about the ontological reductionistic framework in which metamorality and morality takes place. Metamorality would be about simplifying and generalizing morality into certain values, principles and rules to which groups of different sizes would try to approximate, that we ought to follow. Morality would be about applying the metamorality. But it may also complicate things too much using this terminology, and I might even prefer Eliezers use. Metametamorality could also be called metamorality and metamorality, metaethics. Anyway, I found this amazingly summarizing of your viewpoints, and it helped me a lot in grasping this course in Bayescraft.
I have been working for a long time on my own metamorality or metaethics. Which you may take a peak at in this diagram http://docs.google.com/File?id=d4pc9b6_188cgj9zgwz_b. It workes from the same metametamoral assumptions that eliezer does. And I have done my best in using my inbuilt moral computation to onstruct a coherent metamoral guide for myself and others who may be like me. For me the basic principle is and has been for a couple of years now: There is no values outside humanity, so therefore everything has 0 value. But being an agent, with a certain set of feelings, morality and goals I may as well feel them and use them(some of them), because it is rather fantastic after all that there is anything at all. Although this amazement is a human feeling produced by my evolved psychology for curiosity it seems rather nice. It is just beautiful that there is something rather than nothing(especially in a Tegmark MUH universe), so I assign +1 to everything, including particles, energies, all events, everything that exists, every piece of information, it is good, it is beautiful because it exists, so hence I love everything!! But this was only the first level of morality, I can not and do not want to be left only with that, because that would leave me sitting still and doing nothing. So I let my evolved psychology discriminate on the highest possible general level. I let more feelings slip in gently, building up a hierarchy of morality and values on many different levels. A universe with three particles is better than one with only 1. Complexity, information is beautiful, diversity is, but simplicity is also. Beauty in general although elusive as a concept is a very important but comlicated terminal value for me consisting of a lot of parts, and I believe it is in some sense for everybody, although seldom explicit. Truth is also one of the great terminal values, and I think David Deautch expressed it nicely in a TED talk once. The Good is also of great importance, since it allows the expansion of beauty and knowledge about truth. So important for me is:
To construct a metamorality that is very general
That is not tied only to experience, although the values may originate from our experience and psychology and may very often be the same as pleasure in our experience. This is mostly because of elegance and a stability concern, also because it may affect our belief in it more, i.e. stronger placebo.
For me a universe with matter distributed randomly is uglier than an universe only consisting of a great book or intelligent, complex construction, even though nobody might experience it.
Of course experience and intelligence is of the greatest and most beautiful things ever. So I value them extremely highly. Higher than anything else because it makes everything else so much more beautiful when there is someone to experience it.
The complete hierarchical structure of my value system is not complete and will never be, but I will try to continue to approximate it, and I find it valuable and moral to do so, as it might help myself and others in deciding on values, and choosing wisely. It might not be the value sstem of choice for most individuals, but some people might find it appealing. Sorry for the Sketchy nature of this comment, I just needed it to get out, I hope I could get some comment from Eliezer, but I may as well wait until I get enough strength to make this thing better and to mail it then...