Scientist by training, coder by previous session,philosopher by inclination, musician against public demand.
Team Piepgrass: “Worried that typical commenters at LW care way less than I expected about good epistemic practice. Hoping I’m wrong.”
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Promoting your own well-being only would be egoism, while ethics seems to be more similar to altruism
Well, yes. (You don’t have to start from.a tabular area , and then proceed in baby steps, since there is a lot of prior art)
because of the meaning of the involved term
But “desires” is not how “ethics” is defined in standard dictionaries or philosophy. It’s not “the” definition.
This doesn’t reflect the actual methodology, where theories are judged in thought experiments on whether they satisfy our intuitive, pre-theoretical concepts
That’s irrelevant. Rival theories still need shared connotation.
They can be low/non agentic, because current ones are. I’m not seeing the fallacy.
conducive to well-being
That in itself isn’t a good definition , because it doesn’t distinguish ethics from, e.g. Medicine...and it doesn’t tell you whose well being. De facto people are ethically obliged to do things which against their well being and refrain from doing some things which promote their own wellbeing...I can’t rob people to pay my medical bills. (People also receive objective punishments, which makes an objective approach domestics justifiable).
Though I think the meaning of “ethical” is a bit different, as it doesn’t just take well-being into account but also desires
Whose desires? Why?
The various forms of theories in normative ethics (e.g. the numerous theories of utilitarianism, or Extrapolated Volition) can be viewed as attempts to analyze what terms like “ethics” or “good” mean exactly.
They could also be seen as attempts to find different denotations of a term with shared connotation. Disagreement , as opposed to talking-past, requires some commonality
(And utilitarianism is a terrible theory of obligation, a standard objection which its rationalist admirers have no novel response to).
Whether morality is an objective property of the universe
Thats running together two claims—the epistemic claim that there are moral truths, and the ontological claim that moral value is a property of the universe (as opposed to be something more like a logical truth).
If morality were objective, it would have to be conceivable that the statement “George’s actions were wrong and he deserves to be punished” would be true even if every human in the world were of the opinion, “George’s actions seem fine to me, perhaps even laudable”.
That’s not such a high bar. Our ancestors accepted things like slavery and the subordination of women , which we now.deplore—we think they were universally wrong.
Thus, a subjective morality is strongly preferable to an objective one!
That doesn’t follow, since nihilism, error theory, etc. are possible answers...which means you need to positively argue for (some form of subjectivism) , not.just argue against objectivism.
That’s because, by definition, it is about what we humans want.
No it isnt.
Would we prefer to be told by some third party what we should do, even if it is directly contrary to our own deeply held sense of morality?
If we are rational , we prefer to believe what is true. So we would defer to an omega if there were moral truths, and if we trusted it to know them. Just as rational people defer to scientists and mathematicians. And.of course, objective morality doesn’t have to be based on commandment theory in the first place.
We humans have a lot to be proud of: by thinking it through and arguing amongst ourselves, we have advanced morality hugely
How do you know? Moral subjectivism implies any moral stance is as good as any other...any stance is rendered true (or true-for-the-person) just by believing it. But moral progress is only defineable against an objective standard. That’s one of the arguments for moral objectivism.
So why are we all so afraid of admitting that, yes, morality is subjective?
You are characterizing objectivists as being emotion driven...but a selection of dry arguments can be found in the literature, which you should have read before writing the OP.
Subjective does not mean arbitrary.
Yes it does. Individual level subjectivism is the claim that simply having a moral stance.makes it correct.
Subjective does not mean that anyone’s opinion is “just as good”. Most humans are in broad agreement on almost all of the basics of morality. After all “people are the same wherever you go”. Most law codes overlap strongly, such that we can readily live in a foreign country with only minor adjustment for local customs. A psychopathic child killer’s opinion is not regarded as “just as good” by most of us, and if we decide morality by a broad consensus — and that, after all, is how we do decide morality — then we arrive at strong communal moral codes.
That’s favouring group level subjectivism over individual subjectivism. But similar problems apply: the group can declare any arbitrary thing to be morally right. You can fix that problem.by regarding group level morality as an evolutionary adaptation , so that well adapted.ethics is sort-of-true a s poorly adapted ethics is sort-of-false… but then you are most of the way to objectivism.
Our moral sense is one of a number of systems developed by evolution to do a job:
That doesn’t support the claim that morality is subjective, only the claim.that it is natural. Some kinds of objectivism are supernaturalistic but not all.
Human intuition that morality is objective is really the only argument
There are also a bunch of pragmatic arguments , like the need to justify punish ments, the need to define moral progress, etc.
A K-selected species would have very different morality from an r-selected species
I agree! But that shows morality isn’t universal—not that it isn’t objective facts. Objective facts can be local. Objective morality can vary with anything except moral stances.
It’s also worth noting that this argument implies that different human races could have different conceptions of morality.
Its clearly the case that different kinds of society—rich versus poor, nomads versus agricultrualists—have different kinds of de facto ethics.
Many attempts at establishing an objective morality try to argue from considerations of human well-being. OK, but who decided that human well-being is what is important? We did!
That’s a rather minimal amount of subjectivism. Everything downstream of that can be objective , so its really a compromise position. (Harris’s theory, which you seem to have in mind here , fails at being a completely objective theory, whilst succeeding in being a mostly objective theory).
But, if you want to arrive at an objective morality you now need a scheme for aggregating the well-beings of many creatures onto some objective scale, such that you can read off what you “should” do and how you “should” balance the competing interests of different people.
No, objective morality doesn’t have to be universalistic.
Insularity—being an echo chamber—is bad for truth seeking, even if it is good for neighbourhoods.
I think this is way too strong. There are only so many hours in a day, and they trade off between
(A) “try to understand the work / ideas of previous thinkers” and
(B) “just sit down and try to figure out the right answer”.
It’s nuts to assert that the “correct” tradeoff is to do (A) until there is absolutely no (A) left to possibly do, and only then do you earn the right to start in on (B).
You need to remember that C,do nothing, don’t have an opinion, is an option. Nobody is forcing you to think about these things. If you don’t have enough time for due diligence, then you don’t have to do B as the only alternative.
That weaker statement is certainly true in some cases. And the opposite is true in other cases.
I can’t think of a single example of too much A.
And nothing went wrong anywhere in this process
Ahem!
Even if they are using the term to denote two different things, they can agree on connotation. Meaning isn’t exhausted by denotation (reference, extension). Semantic differences are ubiquitous, but so are differences in background assumptions,in presumed ontology.
I just want to be in touch with the ground reality, and I believe that there has to be a set of algorithms we are running, some of which the conscious mind controls and some the autonomous nervous system, it can’t be purely random else we wouldn’t be functional, there has to be some sort of error correction happening as well
“Algorithms” and “purely random” are nowhere near the only options.
>If I ask you to do 2+2, a 100 times, you would always respond 4,
What if you ask.me for a random number?
>We don’t have perfect predicatability in psychology because we don’t understand it yet
You also need physical.determinism to.be true. But determimism isn’t a fact
Some people.think that an information ontology must be some sort of idealist ontology because they think of information as a mental thing. But you can ponens/tolens that: inasmuch as physics can deal with information, it’s not something that exists in only minds.
Then the phenomenon could be stem from punctuation habits, as @bfinn says. Did you notice that my original comment doesn’t contain a sentence, by your standards?
What is a sentence anyway… is there something special about a period, as opposed to other punctuation marks? Many are available: the colon is a possibility; also its half-brother; and the comma,of course...also the ellipsis—even the mighty m-dash!
What is a sentence anyway… is there something special about a period, as opposed to other punctuation marks? Many are available: the colon is a possibility; also its half-brother; and the comma,of course...also the ellipsis—even the mighty m-dash!
The idea that grammar is just inflection is misleading: languages that are mostly isolating can have complex ordering rules,like the the notorious adjective ordering of English.
As for french …Moi, je ne me défile pas.
1st person. Sing.
1st person. Sing, again.
Negative.
1st person. Sing, reflexive.
Verb!!!
Negative,again.
I have heard of versions of many-worlds that are supposed to be testable
The’re are versions that are falsified, for all practical purposes, because they fail to.predict broadly classical observations—sharp valued real numbers, without pesky complex numbers or superpositions. I mean mainly the original Everett theory of 1957. There have been various attempts to patch the problems—preferred basis, Decoherence , anthropics, etc, -- so there are various non falsified theories.
The one that I’m most familiar with (“classic many-worlds”?) is much more of a pure interpretation, though: in that version, there is no collapse and the apparent collapse is a matter of perspective. A component of the wavefunction that I perceive as me sees the electron in the spin-down state, but in the big superposition, there’s another component like me but seeing the spin-up state. I can’t communicate with the other me (or “mes,” plural) because we’re just components of a big vector—we don’t interact.
Merely saying that everything is a component of a big vector doesn’t show that observers dont go into superposition with themselves, because the same description applies to anything which is in superposition..it’s a very broad claim.
What you call classic MWI is what I the have-your-cake-and-eat-it … assuming nothing except that collapse doesn’t occur, you conclude that observers make classical observations for not particular reason...you doing even nominate Decoherence or preferred basis as the mechanism that gets rid of the unwanted stuff.
On the other hand, classic decoherence posits that the wavefunction really does collapse, just not to 100% pure states. Although there’s technically a superposition of electrons and a superposition of mes, it’s heavily dominated by one component. Thus, the two interpretations, classic many-worlds and classic decoherence, are different interpretations.
OK. I would call that single world decoherence. Many worlders appeal to Decoherence as well.
So classic decoherence is more falsifiable than classic many-worlds.
If classic MW means Everetts RSI, it’s already false.
I’ve already told you why Im not going to believe chatGpt. Judge for yourself: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bruno-Marchal-3.
Why? I was there, it wasn’t.
Bruno Marchal was talking about this stuff in the nineties.
alignment is structurally impossible under competitive pressur
Alignment contrasts with control, as a means to AI safety.
Alignment roughly means the AI has goals, or values similar to human ones (which are assumed, without much evidence to be similar across humans), so that it will do what we want , because it’s what it wants.
Control means that it doesn’t matter what the AI wants, if it wants anything.
In short, there is plenty of competitive pressure towards control , because no wants an AI they can’t control. Control is part of capability.
MWI is more than one theory.
There is an approach to MWI based on coherent superpositions, and a version based on decoherence. These are (for all practical purposes) incompatible opposites, but are treated as interchangeable in Yudkowsky’s writings. Decoherent branches are large, stable, non interacting and irreversible...everything that would be intuitively expected of a “world”. But there is no empirical evidence for them (in the plural) , nor are they obviously supported by the core mathematics of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation.Coherent superpositions are small scale , down to single particles, observer dependent, reversible, and continue to interact (strictly speaking , interfere) after “splitting”. the last point is particularly problematical. because if large scale coherent superposition exist , that would create naked eye evidence at macrocsopic scale:, e.g. ghostly traces of a world where the Nazis won.
We have evidence of small scale coherent superposition, since a number of observed quantum.effects depend on it, and we have evidence of decoherence, since complex superposition are difficult to maintain. What we don’t have evidence of is decoherence into multiple branches. From the theoretical perspective, decoherence is a complex , entropy like process which occurs when a complex system interacts with its environment. Decoherence isn’t simple. But without decoherence, MW doesn’t match observation. So there is no theory of MW that is both simple and empirically adequate, contra Yudkowsky and Deutsch.
Decoherence says that regions of large complex superpositions stop interfering with each other
It says that the “off diagonal” terms vanish, but that would tend to.generate a single predominant outcome (except, perhaps, where the environment is highly symmetrical).
Physicalism doesn’t solve the hard problem, because there is no reason a physical process should feel like anything from the inside.
Computationalism doesn’t solve the hard problem, because there is no reason running an algorithm should feel like anything from the inside.
Formalism doesn’t solve the hard problem, because there is no reason an undecideable proposition should feel like anything from the inside.
Of course, you are not trying to explain qualia as such, you are giving an illusionist style account. But I still don’t see how you are predicting belief in qualia.
And among these fictions, none is more persistent than the one we call qualia.
What’s useful about them? If you are going to predict (the belief in) qualia, on the basis of usefulness , you need to state the usefulness. It’s useful to know there is a sabretooth tiger bearing down in you , but why is an appearance more useful than a belief ..and what’s the use of a belief-in-appearance?
This suggests an unsettling, unprovable truth: the brain does not synthesize qualia in any objective sense but merely commits to the belief in their existence as a regulatory necessity.
What necessity?
ETA:
self-referential, self-regulating system that is formally incomplete (as all sufficiently complex systems are) will generate internally undecidable propositions. These propositions — like “I am in pain” or “I see red” — are not verifiable within the system, but are functionally indispensable for coherent behavior.
I still see no reason why an undecideable proposition should appear like a quale or a belief in qualia.
That failure gets reified as feeling.
Why?
I understand that you invoke the “Phenomenological Objection,” as I also, of course, “feel” qualia. But under EN, that feeling is not a counterargument — it’s the very evidence that you are part of the system being modeled.
Phenomenal conservatism , the idea that if something seems to exist ,you should (defeasibly) assume it does exist,.is the basis for belief in qualia. And it can be defeated by a counterargument, but the counter argument needs to be valid as an argument. Saying X’s are actually Y’s for no particular reason is not valid.
Something that inputs a brain state and outputs a quale ie solves the Mary’s Room problem. And does it in a principled way, not just a look up table of known correlations.
To say that X “is just” Y is to say there is no further explanation.