(Subhan wrote:) “And if you claim that there is any emotion, any instinctive preference, any complex brain circuitry in humanity which was created by some external morality thingy and not natural selection, then you are infringing upon science and you will surely be torn to shreds—science has never needed to postulate anything but evolution to explain any feature of human psychology—”
Subhan: “Suppose there’s an alien species somewhere in the vastness of the multiverse, who evolved from carnivores. In fact, through most of their evolutionary history, they were cannibals. They’ve evolved different emotions from us, and they have no concept that murder is wrong—”
The external morality thingy is other people’s brain states. Prove the science comment, Subhan. It is obviously a false statement (once again, argument reduces to solipsism which can be a topic buts needs to be clearly stated as such). Evolution doesn’t explain how I learned long division in grade 1. Our human brains are evolutionary horrible calculators, not usually able to chunk more than 8 memorized numbers or do division without learning math. Learning and self-reflection dominate reptillian brains in healthy individuals.
The latter from a utilitiarian perspective, murder would generally be wrong, even if fun. There is the odd circumstance where it might be right, but it it is so difficult to game the future that it is probably better just to outlaw it altogether than raise the odds of anarchy. For instance, in Canada a head-of-state and abortionists have been targetted (though our head of state was ready to cave in the potential assassin’s skull before the police finally apprehended him). In many developing countries it is much worse. Presumably the carnivore civilization would need a lot of luck just to industrialize; would be more prosperous by fighting their murder urges. Don’t call them carnivores, call them Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. We have an applied example of a militarily-weak government in the process of becoming a tyranny, raping women and initiating anarchy. There are lessons that could be learned here, Britian has just proposed to 2000 strong rapid-response military force, under what circumstances should they be used (I like regression from democracy plus plausible model of something better plus lower quality-of-living plus military weakness plus invasion acceptance of military alliance; if the African Union says no regime change, does that constitute a military alliance?). Does military weakness as a precursor condition do more harm than good by gaming nations to up-arm?
In Canada, there is a problem how to deal with youths, at what age should they be treated as mental competant adults. Brain science seems to show humans don’t fully mature until about 25, so to me that is an argument to treat the onset of puberty to 25 or so as an in-between category when judging. Is alcohol and/or alcoholism analogous to mental health problems? I’d guess no, but maybe childhood trauma is a mitigating factor to consider. How strong does mental illness have to be before using it is a consideration? In Canada, an Afghanistan veteran used post-traumatic stress disorder as a mitigating factor in a violent crime. Is not following treatment or the absence fo treatment something to consider? Can a mentally ill individual sue a government or claim innocence for initiating $10 billion in tax cuts rather than a mental health programme? I’d guess only if it became clear how important such a program was, say, if it worked very successfully in another nation and the government had the fiscal means to do so.
Should driving drunk itself be a crime? If so, why not driving with radio, infant, cellphone...as intersection video camera surveillence catches traffic offenders, should the offence fine be dropped proportionately to the increased level of surveillence?
See, courts know there are other individuals and that the problems of mental health and children not understanding there are other people, don’t prevent healthy adults from knowing other people are real. This reminds me of discussions about geopolitics on the WTA list, with seemingly progressive individuals not being able to condemn torture and the detaining indefinitely of innocent people, simply because the forum was overrepresented with Americans (who still don’t score that bad, just not as good as Europe and Canada when it comes to Human Rights).
(robin brandt wrote:)”But we already know why murder seems wrong to us. It’s completely explained by a combination of game theory, evolutionary psychology, and memetics.”
Sure, but the real question is why murder is wrong, not seems wrong. Murder is wrong because it destroys human brains. Generally, Transhumanists have a big problem (Minsky or Moravec or Vinge religion despite evidence to the contrary) figuring out the human brains are conscious and calculators are not. I have a hard time thinking of any situation when it could be justified by among other things, proving the world is likely to be better off without murder. I guess killing Hitler during the latter years of the Holocaust might have stopped it if it was happening because of his active intervention. But you kill him off too early and Stalin and Hitler don’t beat the shit out of eachother.
This conversation is stuck at some 6th grade level. Could be talking about the death penalty, or income correlating with sentencing, or terrorism and Human Rights. Or employee dangerous technology Human Rights (will future gene sequencers require a Top Secret level of security clearance?). Right now the baseline is to treat all very potentially dangerous future technologies with a High Level of security clearance, I’m guessing. Does H+ have anything of value to add to existing security protocols? Have they even been analyzed? Nope.
If this is all just to brain storm about how to teach an AGI ethics, no one here is taking it from that angle. I’ve had a conversation with a Subhan friend as a teenager. If I was blogging about it, I’d do it under a forum titled Ethics for Dummies.
There are a lot of clever ideas in this post, despite the harsh downvotes.
You may have some misgivings about the extent to which say, mental health issues may be a barrier to security clearances. It’s more like people disqualify themselves by lying or failing to apply in the first place. Those who do get through and get issues, are prisoners of their own misconceptions.
Austalia’s protective security guidelines are based around subjective evaluations of
impair(ment of judgment, reliability, or trustworthiness. They explicitly state
G11. There is no indication of a current problem.
is a mitigating factor in any history of mental illness
see this. Caution, if you’re speaked by getting tracked, note that this is a word document on a Aus gov website.
It also explicitly says that seeking help from mental health places shouldn’t be the sole basis of exclusion, and the guidelines suggest that the opinion of a mental health professional should be given due consideration.
This wasn’t always the way things were down, at least in the us.
The really contentious issue here is whether it is correct to privellage the hypothesis that those seeking mental health care are more likely to have worse judgment, reliability, or trustworthiness. Intuitions and stereotypes say yes. Research suggests they among those seeking treatment, they are not anymore violent, I’m not sure about those criteria specifically, but I suspect that there is far too much assumption of mental illness as a description of abberant behaviour, rather than as an exclusive construct resilient to black swans and that soon mental health and the military and intelligence fields will become subject to scrutinty by mental health activists, the same way other activists have scrutinised discrimination in security fields.
(Subhan wrote:) “And if you claim that there is any emotion, any instinctive preference, any complex brain circuitry in humanity which was created by some external morality thingy and not natural selection, then you are infringing upon science and you will surely be torn to shreds—science has never needed to postulate anything but evolution to explain any feature of human psychology—” Subhan: “Suppose there’s an alien species somewhere in the vastness of the multiverse, who evolved from carnivores. In fact, through most of their evolutionary history, they were cannibals. They’ve evolved different emotions from us, and they have no concept that murder is wrong—”
The external morality thingy is other people’s brain states. Prove the science comment, Subhan. It is obviously a false statement (once again, argument reduces to solipsism which can be a topic buts needs to be clearly stated as such). Evolution doesn’t explain how I learned long division in grade 1. Our human brains are evolutionary horrible calculators, not usually able to chunk more than 8 memorized numbers or do division without learning math. Learning and self-reflection dominate reptillian brains in healthy individuals. The latter from a utilitiarian perspective, murder would generally be wrong, even if fun. There is the odd circumstance where it might be right, but it it is so difficult to game the future that it is probably better just to outlaw it altogether than raise the odds of anarchy. For instance, in Canada a head-of-state and abortionists have been targetted (though our head of state was ready to cave in the potential assassin’s skull before the police finally apprehended him). In many developing countries it is much worse. Presumably the carnivore civilization would need a lot of luck just to industrialize; would be more prosperous by fighting their murder urges. Don’t call them carnivores, call them Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. We have an applied example of a militarily-weak government in the process of becoming a tyranny, raping women and initiating anarchy. There are lessons that could be learned here, Britian has just proposed to 2000 strong rapid-response military force, under what circumstances should they be used (I like regression from democracy plus plausible model of something better plus lower quality-of-living plus military weakness plus invasion acceptance of military alliance; if the African Union says no regime change, does that constitute a military alliance?). Does military weakness as a precursor condition do more harm than good by gaming nations to up-arm?
In Canada, there is a problem how to deal with youths, at what age should they be treated as mental competant adults. Brain science seems to show humans don’t fully mature until about 25, so to me that is an argument to treat the onset of puberty to 25 or so as an in-between category when judging. Is alcohol and/or alcoholism analogous to mental health problems? I’d guess no, but maybe childhood trauma is a mitigating factor to consider. How strong does mental illness have to be before using it is a consideration? In Canada, an Afghanistan veteran used post-traumatic stress disorder as a mitigating factor in a violent crime. Is not following treatment or the absence fo treatment something to consider? Can a mentally ill individual sue a government or claim innocence for initiating $10 billion in tax cuts rather than a mental health programme? I’d guess only if it became clear how important such a program was, say, if it worked very successfully in another nation and the government had the fiscal means to do so. Should driving drunk itself be a crime? If so, why not driving with radio, infant, cellphone...as intersection video camera surveillence catches traffic offenders, should the offence fine be dropped proportionately to the increased level of surveillence? See, courts know there are other individuals and that the problems of mental health and children not understanding there are other people, don’t prevent healthy adults from knowing other people are real. This reminds me of discussions about geopolitics on the WTA list, with seemingly progressive individuals not being able to condemn torture and the detaining indefinitely of innocent people, simply because the forum was overrepresented with Americans (who still don’t score that bad, just not as good as Europe and Canada when it comes to Human Rights).
(robin brandt wrote:)”But we already know why murder seems wrong to us. It’s completely explained by a combination of game theory, evolutionary psychology, and memetics.”
Sure, but the real question is why murder is wrong, not seems wrong. Murder is wrong because it destroys human brains. Generally, Transhumanists have a big problem (Minsky or Moravec or Vinge religion despite evidence to the contrary) figuring out the human brains are conscious and calculators are not. I have a hard time thinking of any situation when it could be justified by among other things, proving the world is likely to be better off without murder. I guess killing Hitler during the latter years of the Holocaust might have stopped it if it was happening because of his active intervention. But you kill him off too early and Stalin and Hitler don’t beat the shit out of eachother. This conversation is stuck at some 6th grade level. Could be talking about the death penalty, or income correlating with sentencing, or terrorism and Human Rights. Or employee dangerous technology Human Rights (will future gene sequencers require a Top Secret level of security clearance?). Right now the baseline is to treat all very potentially dangerous future technologies with a High Level of security clearance, I’m guessing. Does H+ have anything of value to add to existing security protocols? Have they even been analyzed? Nope.
If this is all just to brain storm about how to teach an AGI ethics, no one here is taking it from that angle. I’ve had a conversation with a Subhan friend as a teenager. If I was blogging about it, I’d do it under a forum titled Ethics for Dummies.
There are a lot of clever ideas in this post, despite the harsh downvotes.
You may have some misgivings about the extent to which say, mental health issues may be a barrier to security clearances. It’s more like people disqualify themselves by lying or failing to apply in the first place. Those who do get through and get issues, are prisoners of their own misconceptions.
Austalia’s protective security guidelines are based around subjective evaluations of
see this. Caution, if you’re speaked by getting tracked, note that this is a word document on a Aus gov website.
It also explicitly says that seeking help from mental health places shouldn’t be the sole basis of exclusion, and the guidelines suggest that the opinion of a mental health professional should be given due consideration.
This wasn’t always the way things were down, at least in the us.
The really contentious issue here is whether it is correct to privellage the hypothesis that those seeking mental health care are more likely to have worse judgment, reliability, or trustworthiness. Intuitions and stereotypes say yes. Research suggests they among those seeking treatment, they are not anymore violent, I’m not sure about those criteria specifically, but I suspect that there is far too much assumption of mental illness as a description of abberant behaviour, rather than as an exclusive construct resilient to black swans and that soon mental health and the military and intelligence fields will become subject to scrutinty by mental health activists, the same way other activists have scrutinised discrimination in security fields.