Douglas Knight:
It’s more amusing if you get the outside input from other people. (but it’s biased)
Not at all—just internally number the choices, and ask a friend to choose 1, 2, or 3. Then, again, react to the result emotionally and act on your reaction. My girlfriend and I do this all the time.
I do not eat steak, because I am uncertain of what my own morality outputs with respect to steak-eating. It seems reasonable to me to imagine that cows are capable of experiencing pain, of fearing death. Of being, and ceasing to be. If you are like the majority of human beings, you do eat steak. The propositions I have suggested do not seem reasonable to you.
Do you imagine that there are facts about the brains of cattle which we could both learn—facts drawn from fMRI scans, or from behavioral science experiments, perhaps—which would bring us into agreement on the issue?
TGGP: Well, any idiot can see that the fish only don’t disagree because they’re not accomplishing anything to disagree about. They don’t build any heaps at all, the stupid layabouts. Thus, theirs is a wholly trivial and worthless sort of agreement. The point of life is to have large, correct heaps. To say we should build no heaps is as good as suicide.
hmmm...It seems to me that the actions we choose to take consist in derivatives with of our utility function with respect to information about the world. so if we have utility (programmer desires X, quantity 20 of X exists) = 20, then isn’t it just a question of ensuring that the derivative is taken only with respect to the latter variable, keeping the first fixed?
I’m still wrestling with this here -
Do you claim that the CEV of a pygmy father would assert that his daughter’s clitoris should not be sliced off? Or that the CEV of a petty thief would assert that he should not possess my iPod?
There needs to be a separate word for that subset of our values that is interpersonal, prosocial, to some extent expected to be agreed-upon, which subset does not always win out in the weighing; this subset is often also called “morality” but that would be confusing.
Are you maybe referring to manners/etiquette/propriety?
This reminds me of an item from a list of “horrible job interview questions” we once devised for SIAI:
Would you kill babies if it was intrinsically the right thing to do? Yes/No
If you circled “no”, explain under what circumstances you would not do the right thing to do: I assume by “intrinsically right thing to do”, you do not intend something straightforward like “here are five babies carrying a virus which, if left unchecked, will wipe out half the population of the planet. There is no means by which they can be quarantined, the virus can cross even the cold reaches of space. The only way to save us is to kill them”. I assume rather, that you, Eliezer Yudkowsky, hand me a booklet, possibly hundreds of pages long. On page 0 are listed my most cherished moral truths, and on page N is written: “thus, it is right and decent to kill as many babies as possible, whenever the opportunity arises. Any man who walks past a mother pushing a stroller, and does not immediately throttle the infant where it lies, is nothing more than a moral coward.” For all n between 1 and N inclusive, the statements on page n seem to me to follow naturally and self-evidently from my acceptance of the statements on page n-1. As I look up, astonishment etched on my face, I see you standing before me, grinning broadly. You hand me a long, curved blade, and tell me the staff of the SIAI are taking the afternoon off to raid the local nursery, and would I like to join?
Under these circumstances I would assign high probability to the idea that you are morally ill, and wish to murder infants for your own enjoyment. That somewhere in the proof you have given me is a logical error—the moral equivalent of dividing by zero. I would imagine, not that morality led me astray, but that my incomplete knowledge of morality led me not to spot this error. I would show the proof to as many moral philosophers as I could, ones whose intelligence and expertise in the field I respected, and held to be above my own, and who were initially as unenthusiastic as I am at the prospect of infanticide. I would ask them if they could point me to an error in the proof, and explain to me clearly and fully why this step, which had seemed so simple to me, is not a legal move in the dance at that point. If they could not explain this to me to my satisfaction, I would devote much of my time from then on to the study of morality so that I could better understand it, and until I could, would distrust any moral conclusions I came to on my own. If none of them could find an error, I would still assign high probability to the notion that somewhere in the proof is an error which we humans have not advanced sufficiently in the study of metamorality to discover. I would consider it one of the most important outstanding problems in the field, and would, again, distrust any major moral decisions which did not clearly add up to normality until it was solved.
Just as the mathematical “proof” that 2=1 would, if accepted, destroy the foundations of mathematics itself, and must therefore be doubted until we can discover its error, so your proof that killing babies is good, would, if accepted, destroy the foundations of my morality, and so I must doubt it until I can find an error.
I am well aware that a fundamentalist could take my previous paragraph, replace “killing babies” with “oral sex” and thus make his prudery unassailable by argument. So much the worse for him, I say. If he considers the prohibition of a mutually beneficial and joyful act to be at the foundation of his morality, then he is a miserable creature and all my rationality will not save him from himself.
I have tried indirectly to answer your question. To answer it directly I will have to resort to what seems a paradox. I would not do “the right thing to do” if I know, at bottom, that it simply is not the right thing to do.
If you circled “yes”, how right would it have to be, for how many babies? N/A
So, would I get the job?
I tried, Unknown, I really did. I wanted badly to be a theist for a long time, and I really tried to think along the path you’re suggesting. But we’ve learned so much about the myriad ways that intelligence isn’t fundamental—can’t be fundamental. It’s too complex, has too many degrees of freedom. You want to postulate a perfect essence of intelligence? Fine—whose? What will it want, and not want? What strategies of rationality will it execute? Intelligence is a product of structure, and structure comes from an ordering of lower levels. As fundamental as it seems from the inside, I don’t think there’s any way to put back the clock and view intelligence as an irreducible entity the way you seem to want to.
You mentioned rationalist fiction, and my mind immediately jumped to this—are you familiar with the graphic short story “Fleep”? Main character passes out, comes to in a phone booth encased in concrete, with a phonebook full of gibberish, a letter in his pocket he can’t read, a few coins and various sundries. From inside the booth he experiments and calculates, manages to work out where he is, who he is, what’s happened, and what to do next.
I’ve always taken cogito as “Here are some thoughts bouncing about. They must be causally related to some set of existent phenomena.” which I think is pretty safe.
The only place where I see it not summing to normality is quantum immortality—any thoughts?
Perhaps we have not evolved to be susceptible to religion as such, but modern religions function as superstimuli to some need which we previously evolved.
Rot13:
Anzrf: Cb’zv: Zvgpuryy Cbegre Aunetynar: Qba’g xabj lrg—vf vg nalbar? Qr’qn: Qnavry Qraarg Lh’ry: Gung’f lbh—Ryvrmre Lhqxbjfxl Un’eb: Ebova Unafba Ob’zn: Znk Obea Ri’uh: Uhtu Rirergg
Unir V tbg vg?
I’m almost seeing shades of Self-PA here, except it’s Self-PA that co-operates.
If I assume that the other agent is perfectly rational, and if I further assume that whatever I ultimately choose to do will be perfectly rational (hence Self-PA), then I know that my choice will match that of the paperclip maximizer. Thus, I am now choosing between (D,D) and (C,C), and I of course choose to co-operate.