The concept of marriage depends on my internals in that a different human might disagree about whether a couple is married, based on the relative weight they place on religious, legal, traditional, and common law conceptions of marriage. For example, after a Catholic annulment and a legal divorce, a Catholic priest might say that two people were never married, whereas I would say that they were. Similarly, I might say that two men are married to each other, and someone else might say that this is impossible. How quickly those arguments have faded away! I don’t think someone would use the same example ten years ago.
It seems like “human values” aren’t particularly reflective then? Like I could describe the behavioral properties of a species of animal, including what they value or don’t value.
A lot of the particulars of humans’ values are heavily reflective. Two examples:
A large chunk of humans’ terminal values involves their emotional/experience states—happy, sad, in pain, delighted, etc.
Humans typically want ~terminally to have some control over their own futures.
Contrast that to e.g. a blue-minimizing robot, which just tries to minimize the amount of blue stuff in the universe. That utility function involves reflection only insofar as the robot is (or isn’t) blue.
I think you can unroll any of the positive examples by references to facts about the speaker. To be honest, I don’t understand what is supposed to be so reflective about “actual human values”, but perhaps it’s that the ontology is defined with reference to fairly detailed empirical facts about humans.
Could anyone possibly offer 2 positive and 2 negative examples of a reflective-in-this-sense concept?
Positive: “easy to understand”, “appealing”, “native (according to me) representation”
Negative: “apple”, “gluon”, “marriage”
The concept of marriage depends on my internals in that a different human might disagree about whether a couple is married, based on the relative weight they place on religious, legal, traditional, and common law conceptions of marriage. For example, after a Catholic annulment and a legal divorce, a Catholic priest might say that two people were never married, whereas I would say that they were. Similarly, I might say that two men are married to each other, and someone else might say that this is impossible. How quickly those arguments have faded away! I don’t think someone would use the same example ten years ago.
It seems like “human values” aren’t particularly reflective then? Like I could describe the behavioral properties of a species of animal, including what they value or don’t value.
But that leaves something out?
A lot of the particulars of humans’ values are heavily reflective. Two examples:
A large chunk of humans’ terminal values involves their emotional/experience states—happy, sad, in pain, delighted, etc.
Humans typically want ~terminally to have some control over their own futures.
Contrast that to e.g. a blue-minimizing robot, which just tries to minimize the amount of blue stuff in the universe. That utility function involves reflection only insofar as the robot is (or isn’t) blue.
I think you can unroll any of the positive examples by references to facts about the speaker. To be honest, I don’t understand what is supposed to be so reflective about “actual human values”, but perhaps it’s that the ontology is defined with reference to fairly detailed empirical facts about humans.