the versions of “mature folk morality” and “reflective equilibrium” and “analytic descriptivism” and “moral functionalism” are never quite exactly right, they are built on entirely different premises of argument and never quite optimized for Friendly-AI thinking.
and that you prefer to “invent all these things the correct way”.
From this and your preceding text I understand,
that philosophers have identified some meta-ethical theses and concepts similar to concepts and theses you’ve invented all by yourself,
that the philosophers’ theses and concepts are in some way systematically defective or inadequate, and
that the arguments used to defend the theses are different than the arguments which you would use to defend them.
(I’m not sure what you mean in saying the concepts and theses aren’t optimized for Friendly-AI thinking.)
You imply that you’ve done a comprehensive survey, to arrive at these conclusions. It’d be great if you could share the details. Which discussions of these ideas have you studied, how do your concepts differ from the philosophers’, and what specifically are the flaws in the philosophers’ versions? I’m not familiar with these meta-ethical theses but I see that Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit are credited with sparking the debate in philosophy—what in their thinking do you find inadequate? And what makes your method of invention (to use your term) of these things the correct one?
I apologize if the answers to these questions are all contained in your sequences. I’ve looked at some of them but the ones I’ve encountered do not answer these questions.
You disparage the value of philosophy, but it seems to me you could benefit from it. In another of your posts, ‘How An Algorithm Feels From Inside’, I came across the following:
When you look at a green cup, you don’t think of yourself as seeing a picture reconstructed in your visual cortex—although that is what you are seeing—you just see a green cup. You think, “Why, look, this cup is green,” not, “The picture in my visual cortex of this cup is green.”
This is false—the claim, I mean, that when you look at a green cup, you are seeing a picture in your visual cortex. On the contrary, the thing you see is reflecting light, is on the table in front of you (say), has a mass of many grams, is made of ceramic (say), and on an on. It’s a cup -it emphatically is not in your brainpan. Now, if you want to counter that I’m just quibbling over the meaning of the verb ‘to see’, that’s fine—my point is that it is you who are using it in a non-standard way, and it behoves you to give a coherent explication of your meaning. The history of philosophical discussions suggests this is not an easy task. The root of the problem is the effort to push the subject/object distinction -which verbs of perception seem to require- within the confines of the cranium. Typically, the distinction is only made more problematic—the object of perception (now a ‘picture in the visual cortex’) still doesn’t have the properties it’s supposed to (greenness), and the subject doing the seeing seems even more problematic. The self is made identical to or resident within some sub-region of the brain, about which various awkward questions now arise. Daniel Dennett has criticized this idea as the ‘Cartesian Theatre’ model of perception.
Having talked to critics of philosophy before, I know such arguments are often met with considerable impatience and derision. They are irrelevant to the understanding being sought, a waste of time, etc. This is fine—it may be true, for many, including you. If this is so, though, it seems to me the rational course is simply to acknowledge it’s concerns are orthogonal to your own, and if you seem to come into collision (as above), to show that your misleading metaphor isn’t really doing any work, and hence is benign. In this case you aren’t re-inventing the wheel in coming up with your own theories, but something altogether different—a skid, maybe.
You say,
and that you prefer to “invent all these things the correct way”.
From this and your preceding text I understand,
that philosophers have identified some meta-ethical theses and concepts similar to concepts and theses you’ve invented all by yourself,
that the philosophers’ theses and concepts are in some way systematically defective or inadequate, and
that the arguments used to defend the theses are different than the arguments which you would use to defend them.
(I’m not sure what you mean in saying the concepts and theses aren’t optimized for Friendly-AI thinking.)
You imply that you’ve done a comprehensive survey, to arrive at these conclusions. It’d be great if you could share the details. Which discussions of these ideas have you studied, how do your concepts differ from the philosophers’, and what specifically are the flaws in the philosophers’ versions? I’m not familiar with these meta-ethical theses but I see that Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit are credited with sparking the debate in philosophy—what in their thinking do you find inadequate? And what makes your method of invention (to use your term) of these things the correct one?
I apologize if the answers to these questions are all contained in your sequences. I’ve looked at some of them but the ones I’ve encountered do not answer these questions.
You disparage the value of philosophy, but it seems to me you could benefit from it. In another of your posts, ‘How An Algorithm Feels From Inside’, I came across the following:
This is false—the claim, I mean, that when you look at a green cup, you are seeing a picture in your visual cortex. On the contrary, the thing you see is reflecting light, is on the table in front of you (say), has a mass of many grams, is made of ceramic (say), and on an on. It’s a cup -it emphatically is not in your brainpan. Now, if you want to counter that I’m just quibbling over the meaning of the verb ‘to see’, that’s fine—my point is that it is you who are using it in a non-standard way, and it behoves you to give a coherent explication of your meaning. The history of philosophical discussions suggests this is not an easy task. The root of the problem is the effort to push the subject/object distinction -which verbs of perception seem to require- within the confines of the cranium. Typically, the distinction is only made more problematic—the object of perception (now a ‘picture in the visual cortex’) still doesn’t have the properties it’s supposed to (greenness), and the subject doing the seeing seems even more problematic. The self is made identical to or resident within some sub-region of the brain, about which various awkward questions now arise. Daniel Dennett has criticized this idea as the ‘Cartesian Theatre’ model of perception.
Having talked to critics of philosophy before, I know such arguments are often met with considerable impatience and derision. They are irrelevant to the understanding being sought, a waste of time, etc. This is fine—it may be true, for many, including you. If this is so, though, it seems to me the rational course is simply to acknowledge it’s concerns are orthogonal to your own, and if you seem to come into collision (as above), to show that your misleading metaphor isn’t really doing any work, and hence is benign. In this case you aren’t re-inventing the wheel in coming up with your own theories, but something altogether different—a skid, maybe.