The Orthogonality Thesis is the Orthogonality Thesis, not the Orthogonality Theorem. My understanding is that it has not been proven.
It is often the case that things that disagree with other things (regardless of whether they are considered “core principles” or not) will get downvoted on the basis of being “low quality” or being in want of something, but it is not obvious to me that disagreement should be equated with a lesser level of understanding. Here that appears to be the equivocation.
There are two ways in which the Orthogonality Thesis may be false:
there is a set of values all intelligent agents converge to for some reason, but those values hold no special role in the universe, and this is just a quirk of intelligence, or
there is a set of values that is objectively correct (whatever that even means) and the smarter you are, the more likely you are to discover it.
Talking about moral realism is suggesting 2, which is a fantastically strong hypothesis that is disbelieved by many for very good reasons. It is mostly the realm of religion. To suggest something like empirical moral realism requires a lot of work to even define the thing in a way that’s somehow consistent with basic observations about reality. I mean, you can try, but the attempt has to be a lot more solid than what we’re seeing here.
The Orthogonality Thesis is the Orthogonality Thesis, not the Orthogonality Theorem. My understanding is that it has not been proven.
It is often the case that things that disagree with other things (regardless of whether they are considered “core principles” or not) will get downvoted on the basis of being “low quality” or being in want of something, but it is not obvious to me that disagreement should be equated with a lesser level of understanding. Here that appears to be the equivocation.
There are two ways in which the Orthogonality Thesis may be false:
there is a set of values all intelligent agents converge to for some reason, but those values hold no special role in the universe, and this is just a quirk of intelligence, or
there is a set of values that is objectively correct (whatever that even means) and the smarter you are, the more likely you are to discover it.
Talking about moral realism is suggesting 2, which is a fantastically strong hypothesis that is disbelieved by many for very good reasons. It is mostly the realm of religion. To suggest something like empirical moral realism requires a lot of work to even define the thing in a way that’s somehow consistent with basic observations about reality. I mean, you can try, but the attempt has to be a lot more solid than what we’re seeing here.
There’s a bunch of ways it could b wrong, but many of them aren’t very impactive.