“I think the major issue here is that you seem to be taking moral realism for granted and assume that if we look hard enough, morality will reveal itself to us in the cosmos. I’m a moral anti-realist, and I’m unable to conceive of what evidence for moral realism would even look like.”
That may be a correct assessment.
I think that like all our knowledge about anything, statements about ethics rest on unproven assumptions, but that there are statements about some states of the world being preferable to others that we shouldn’t have less confidence in than many of the mathematical and metaphysical axioms we take for granted.
That being said, I do realize that there are differences between statements about preferences and statements about physics or mathematics. A child-torture-maximizing alien species could have a self-consistent view of morality with no internal logical contradictions, and would not be proven wrong by interaction with reality in the way interaction with reality can show some ideas about physics and mathematics to be wrong.
I don’t think moral law somehow is ingrained into the universe somehow and will be found by any mind once sufficiently intelligent, but I do think that we are right to consider certain experiences as better to occur than not occur and certain experiences as worse to occur than occur, and that we should consider ways of thinking that lead us to accept statements entail statements that are in logical contradiction with this as wrong.
To summarise some of my views that I think are relevant to your original post:
I don’t expect every being above a certain intelligence-level to be conscious (although I don’t dismiss the possibility), and I certainly don’t think every satisfaction of a reward function has value.
I’m unsure about how much or little progress we will make in our understanding of consciousness, but it’s not at all intuitively clear to me that it should be an unrealistic problem to solve (even with todays limited intelligence and tools for reasoning we’re not totally clueless).
If we don’t get a better understanding of consciousness I think and making inferences about the possible consciousness of other structures by noticing differences with and similarities with our own brains will be a very central tool, and it may be that the best way to go is to fill much of the universe with structures that are similar to human brains having positive lives/experiences, but avoid structures that if plausible theories of consciousness are true could be very bad (like e.g. computer simulations of suffering brains).
For all I know, “selective pressures to become less like humans and more like paperclippers” could be something to worry about.
While I think likeness-to-humans can be a useful heuristic for avoiding getting things wrong and ensuring a future that’s valuable, I think it is unreasonable to make the assumption that conscious experiences are valuable only insofar as they are similar to those of humans.
“I think the major issue here is that you seem to be taking moral realism for granted and assume that if we look hard enough, morality will reveal itself to us in the cosmos. I’m a moral anti-realist, and I’m unable to conceive of what evidence for moral realism would even look like.”
That may be a correct assessment.
I think that like all our knowledge about anything, statements about ethics rest on unproven assumptions, but that there are statements about some states of the world being preferable to others that we shouldn’t have less confidence in than many of the mathematical and metaphysical axioms we take for granted.
That being said, I do realize that there are differences between statements about preferences and statements about physics or mathematics. A child-torture-maximizing alien species could have a self-consistent view of morality with no internal logical contradictions, and would not be proven wrong by interaction with reality in the way interaction with reality can show some ideas about physics and mathematics to be wrong.
I don’t think moral law somehow is ingrained into the universe somehow and will be found by any mind once sufficiently intelligent, but I do think that we are right to consider certain experiences as better to occur than not occur and certain experiences as worse to occur than occur, and that we should consider ways of thinking that lead us to accept statements entail statements that are in logical contradiction with this as wrong.
To summarise some of my views that I think are relevant to your original post:
I don’t expect every being above a certain intelligence-level to be conscious (although I don’t dismiss the possibility), and I certainly don’t think every satisfaction of a reward function has value.
I’m unsure about how much or little progress we will make in our understanding of consciousness, but it’s not at all intuitively clear to me that it should be an unrealistic problem to solve (even with todays limited intelligence and tools for reasoning we’re not totally clueless).
If we don’t get a better understanding of consciousness I think and making inferences about the possible consciousness of other structures by noticing differences with and similarities with our own brains will be a very central tool, and it may be that the best way to go is to fill much of the universe with structures that are similar to human brains having positive lives/experiences, but avoid structures that if plausible theories of consciousness are true could be very bad (like e.g. computer simulations of suffering brains).
For all I know, “selective pressures to become less like humans and more like paperclippers” could be something to worry about.
While I think likeness-to-humans can be a useful heuristic for avoiding getting things wrong and ensuring a future that’s valuable, I think it is unreasonable to make the assumption that conscious experiences are valuable only insofar as they are similar to those of humans.