Did anything come of this? I for one would love to play an RPG with a group of rationalists and make cool new friends in the LW community, although I’ve never been able to keep interest in play-by-post games—I prefer real-time chat using a MU* or Maptools.
Scottbert
Meetup Interest: Rhode Island
D’oh, you’re right, so the “coherent” extrapolated volition is a concept applied to all of humanity, not just one person (that would just be an extrapolated volition?). That’s what I get for reading the CEV post days ago and then reading this one after forgetting part of it.
So, morality as Eliezer is trying to explain it, is to do your best to understand and work for the CEV?
The one missing piece here seems to be how each individual human’s morality blob corresponds to any other’s morality blob. I suppose we could argue that the CEV of all humans would be the same (certainly my own CEV would want happiness etc for people I will never meet or have knowledge of), but you didn’t actually say that and if you meant it you should say it. Is this covered in an interpersonal morality post elsewhere?
I spent much time searching for the morality outside myself once I lost faith, although I assumed it would hold true to most of my assumptions rather than be something scarily different. the best I could find was Kant’s categorical imperative since it claimed to make good logical, though I found it to be flawed as conventionally interpreted (although I suppose it may be as good a source as any of rules to follow in general).
That morality is extremely complicated and not reducible to a few simple rules does make sense to me upon reflection, however difficult it makes it to argue with religious people to whom ‘The bible has guidelines, but the real specific answer is complicated’ is not an acceptable answer—but that’s their problem, not a problem with the truth.
So it’s a year-old comment that finally gets me to say something here.
This is how I felt too—I was raised Christian—specifically Quaker, a branch of Christianity with a nonviolent bent and the belief that God could speak to anyone at anytime, not just to prophets.
Eventually I somehow formed the impression that God, if He were as kind and all-loving as I was told, would surely judge nonbelievers and believers in other faiths based on their actions. I don’t know how heretical this would be—it may have helped that our Quaker meeting was and is a rather laid-back place that seems willing to accept atheism and progressive things—I once prepared to give a speech on why gay marriage should be allowed only to find everyone there was cool with it.
When I started to move towards agnosticism, I had the same thought: A kind god, if he really exists, as unlikely as any particular god seems, will understand and judge me by my actions. A cruel judgemental god might send me to hell, but I consider such a hypothetical figure’s decisions not worth respecting, and within the probability-space of that god’s existance, there is the chance that hell, run by a devil who rebelled against such a god, is full of cool people and not so bad. And if hell in such a world is eternal torture… well, then we live in a crapsack world and are powerless to do anything about it (looking back at these thoughts now, I wonder if life extension could be seen as giving the finger to a judgemental but non-interventionist god—if you would have us go to hell, then we’re staying here!). I rated the probability of that rather low, though.
Since then, my expected probability for any kind of god relatable to by humans has only dropped until I consider it more appropriate to say I am an atheist than an agnostic.
Ditto for me—The difference between the two chords is crystal clear, but in the cadence I can barely hear it.
I’m not a professional, but I sang in school chorus for 6 years, was one of the more skilled singers there, I’ve studied a little musical theory, and I apparently have a lot of natural talent. And the first time I heard the version played in cadence I didn’t notice the difference at all. Freaky. I know how that post-doc felt when she couldn’t hear the difference in the chords.