FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
I don't think the epistemic position is the same.
It's not that I, as a pro-lockdown person, abetted and ignored the possible genocide of Covid infectees, it's that I had a very strong positive expectation that there would not be a genocide or even a significant mass murder. (And, you know, I was right.) I don't think that can be said for people who supported the Nazi regime.
You think these are the core defining traits of the Holocaust? Not, say, the mass murder?
If Hitler had put Jews, invalids, gypsies and various dissidents in camps and then kept and fed them until the end of the war, we would be ... very confused, morally, for one, considering what other claims he made, but we'd probably have a different view on Nazis. Depending whether he'd used them for labor, we may even consider the camps "relatively humane" as far as camps go. Certainly they wouldn't be considered synonymous with absolute evil.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
The gassing is kinda an important aspect. As a pro-lockdowner, if I thought the government would outright murder twelve million people (or, honestly, a lot less than that) in the name of a bad model of a disease, I would have had a very different reaction.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Has Trump given any indication of caring?
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Sure but it's still embarrassing to go off on a topic that it turns out later you're wrong about.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
I think to make this work, you also need automated construction and maintenance, including maintenance of maintenance drones, recursively.
At which point you're not in a 1%-rulership scenario, but an ALife/digital ecosystem takeoff scenario.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Ah, revealed-preference dogma. :)
What of an adult? What if you decide somebody's life is too hard and murder them? For their own good? After all, we are doing so many things to force people to behave in certain ways that they don't want to behave, for their own good. Why not make the ultimate step and murder them for their own good, since we are so smart we totally can decide for them that their lives aren't worth living?
I do think there's a fundamental difference in morality between creating life and sustaining life. I don't think that we have a moral duty, for instance, to instantiate the greatest number of barely net positive existences (the Repugnant Conclusion). But to reject it requires assigning special moral worth to beings who are currently alive, which is why there is still, IMO, a moral difference between embryo selection for trait and murder for trait.
And at any rate, if you allow a citizen to give birth to a child whose life is going to be comparatively of much less value - to themselves - than another, you have also made a choice. Inaction is not inherently morally privileged.
Again, the question is just the form and the degree. I am all for reducing the amount of suffering, but deciding for another that their life is not worth living because of the suffering is a huge step, which we should be very very very careful about.
Well, sure, I am fully on board with this. I just think that we will grow up to become worthy of this step, and when we do I would like us to have preserved that impulse to reduce suffering and multiply joy in our heart, not snuffed it out.
edit: That's overdramatic, but you know what I mean.
I think you're making it a bit too easy on yourself here, though I broadly agree.
The holocaust was bad. (Galaxy brain take, I know.) It was such a humongous bad, and it existed in such a cluster of other bad things, that the entire memetic landscape around it is rightfully considered toxic forever. Nobody should be killed for genes, nobody should be sterilized for genes. But. But. Any child born with a preventable disease is still a stain on humanity's rap sheet! Any person born deaf, or born dumb, or born spastic - we say that such people not just have a right to life but exhibit their own worth, in one of the most blatant instances of sour grapes in the history of civilization. If that was true, why is nobody lining up to have their ears pierced, or their brain lobotomized? It seems obvious that if all other things were equal, you should choose for a child to be born healthy rather than sick, smart rather than stupid, capable rather than incapable. That impulse has enabled and abetted horrible crimes, and we may say that humanity is not capable of safely enacting such improvements, that it gives far too much license to sociopaths and demagogues to advocate disfigurement and naked murder - all granted. But the impulse in itself is good.
Then we can ask further: what of a woman who knowingly brings a sick child to term? Is it a moral good to bring a life into the world that is doomed to an early death? What of a child that is in continuous pain until their untimely but predictable death? If we continue along this line long enough, we either lose the ability to say that a child being born in suffering and doomed to death is morally bad, or we may end up in the bizarre position of "a significant crime is being committed, but we are bound to idly stand by." Fine, be that the case, we may know that granting ourselves license to intercede will only result in worse crimes. But I think we must hold in mind that this does not make the lesser crime a moral good.
A day may come when genetic editing becomes so cheap and widely available that any child can be easily modified before birth to exclude all of those disorders which make life not worth living, or even improve on the human template. When that day comes, I think we do not want to be ideologically committed to the idea that an act of willingly and knowingly creating beings to suffer has inherent moral worth.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Let's say that person A asserts both that X, and that no future interpreters may gainsay X.
Then a century later, person B asserts both that not X, and that future interpreters may contradict A.
If both A and B are church leaders, it would be easy to say that B is simply mistaken. However, I think a better way to look at it may be that there are two separate churches, "A-type catholicism" and "B-type catholicism".
(If however B-types then go around asserting that they are and have always been A-types, we may have a problem.)
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
We just got owned by Covid, and Covid was found by random walk.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Tl;dr AIs controlled by the Elite will be better than humans at everything, including being the Elite.
Competition happens for humans because absolutely nothing you can do will buy you longer life, you biologically cannot win hard enough to succeed forever, or get a fundamentally better body, or get less susceptible to cancer than baseline, or get more intelligent. Training can get you swole, but it can't turn you into One Punch Man - human beings are harshly levelcapped. Every human who has ever lived exists inside a narrow band of capability. You can't train yourself to survive an arrow to the head, let alone a sniper bullet. Hence democracy, hence liberalism, hence charity and altruism, hence competition.
None of this applies to AI.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Of course, the reason this works is that the left is already using is-statements as a shortcut for oughts. On this matter, the ought-debate has been near-completely abandoned.
Oh come on, we literally just did this for subatomic particles, for electromagnetism, for spacetime. Physicists have gone so accustomed to being fucked with in this way by the Universe that people now mock them for speculating about "dark" thingamajigs and multiversefuls of hypothetical.
I think there's a fundamental difference here. Subatomic particles, quantum physics, relativity etc. explained to us, mainly, how particles sometimes did unusual things. But given the theory, it was relatively clear in advance how the high-level properties could ensue. For instance, once somebody tells you that energy is quantized, it is clear how emitters avoid the ultraviolet catastrophe: the cause is sufficient to the effect.
Here I'll turn around and use a standard dualist argument in reverse: it is not clear to me, if you already believe that materialism as stated cannot explain qualia, how the addition of a novel property of the cosmos or law about particles could even in theory change this. Note that GitS's ghosts are precisely not this; they're a restatement of the problem, repackaged in "law" form, rather than an actual mechanistic explanation. What law about particles do you expect to give rise to a sense of self?
Of course, given that I'm a compatibilist, I already believe that the laws we know of are sufficient-in-kind to explain this. However: maybe once we understand the mechanics of the mind, we'll see that the brain really does employ a specific unique physical principle that doesn't show up anywhere else in nature, and if we understand consciousness, we also understand why this law is necessary. But given that we don't understand consciousness; I don't see how such a law would be called for: when you don't even understand fusion yet, it is simply epistemically unwise to ask for quantum physics, no matter how inaccurate your current ones are: you have not yet even begun to exhaust the limit of the tools provided to you. Physical laws are not a substitute for understanding! The way to go is to begin with the assumption that the laws as known are sufficient, and investigate until you find a clear mechanistic contradiction. IMO, this is clearly not how dualism has gone about it, which is why I predict that even if new laws are found, they will not help them.
If you lack a clear situation where consciousness requires that an electron zig, but standard physics says the electron will zag, then any new laws that are found will not help you make sense of consciousness either.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Let's concentrate discussion in the other thread.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
So you're saying that we need new laws because we haven't found evidence? If people had argued this about QM, it really would have been nonsense.
(Personally, I don't see qualia as incompatible with materialism at all. It seems clear to me that mere physical laws can give rise to redness. So my subjective view on the topic is mostly one of baffled incomprehension.)
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Ah, so substance dualism? I guess that could make sense. I have a hard time taking it seriously, because souls would just obviously have to be insanely complex objects and laws about souls would have to come to utterly dominate our world models.
(Also, Ghost in the Shell is great but Shirow is drawing from the exact same sort of uncertainty here that causes people to doubt materialistic explanations of qualia and consciousness in the first place, so this is kind of double-counting evidence.)
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Sure, but QM actually made testable predictions that explained reality better than the prevailing theories. Where is qualia's Michelson-Morley? Where is consciousness's precession of Mercury?
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Do you apply this same logic to any other system we don't totally understand? Also, can you give an example for a law that makes qualia easier to explain?
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
The fact that we miss perfection doesn't mean we can't give various more or less well supported theories. To say "no explained reason" seems to suggest that all these highly detailed scientific edifices amount to nothing, which seems excessive: we don't know how cells work in totality, but we have surely at least made progress enough to put paid to any claim that they require new physical laws.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
There's no explained reason for lots of things that we don't invoke the need for new physics for. What makes qualia unique?
I think this is gesturing at the common philosophical stance "I see no way that materialism could even in theory give rise to qualia". That of course has the problem that it's equally difficult to see how any set of laws would give rise to qualia; as such, it's just hiding the confusion of qualia outside of physics.
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
"matter being alive for no explained reason"
I don't understand this. Biology and paleontology are entire fields that are in no small part about discovering these reasons; I'd say we have a pretty good grasp now on the whys. What step is unclear to you?
FeepingCreature
2yr ago
Now they do of course, but in no ways that are predicted by the laws we understand.
I don't understand this. Everything the body does is hard to predict by the laws we understand. We don't understand consciousness, sure, but we also don't (fully) understand cell biology, DNA assembly, protein folding etc. either, and nobody is suggesting those require new forces or laws.
the extremely complex computer has been broken in a subtle way that can't be repaired.
How would this not also apply to death of the body? It seems to me postulating a separate soul does not meaningfully reduce complexity here. Most deaths are not a failure of the brain.
If consciousness was simply a property of certain arrangements of matter, you wouldn't really expect nature to select the ones that can be bricked.
Sure, but that's not a "death" thing. Once you know that organisms stop being able to procreate at a certain age, it seems necessary that they will die after, as nothing would select against it. The weird thing here is menopause, not death.
I believe the most honest thing to do here is to be humble and admit that we don't know how consciousness works
Sure, but we can place constraints well before we have operational understanding. Few people know how almost anything works; again, they don't see a need to postulate novel physics.
Anyways, I don't understand either why you see the need to add entities, nor what adding entities even gives you. What is the mind doing that physics clearly does not suffice for?
Okay, well, I don't believe that. In fact, I'd consider the US japanese internment camps much closer to a "serious mistake of governance" than an "act of immense evil" that I do the Holocaust. To put a number on it, I would maybe put them on the moral order of magnitude of 10-100 murders?
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