From: Francois-Rene Rideau (fare@tunes.org)
Date: Fri Jun 08 2001 - 02:44:15 MDT
>: Anders Sandberg
> As I see it, ethics is really part of your policy function [...]
Exactly. Actually, I'd say it IS our whole policy function,
not just the backbone, as you say. But only a backbone
can be shared between people through objective arguments
(or said more rigorously: the less universal the ethical rule,
the less shareable it is). In this, ethics doesn't differ
from most kinds of knowledge.
> The big problem is finding the right level of regularisation.
> It is computationally expensive to approximate (i.e. you need a
> lot of experience) and (due to its uncomputable nature in the case
> of a complex world like ours) impossible to give error bounds on.
> Hence, a lot of disagreement.
Sure. But that is in no way specific to ethics.
Just any practical knowledge is subject to the very same limitations.
That doesn't mean that they are unknowable, as argued Ben Goertzel, in
"[foo] is a branch of ethics, i.e. there is no given right or wrong answer."
Ethics is every bit as knowable as any human-related thing.
Actually, being the policy function that controls what we'll actually do,
ethics is the very measure of useful knowledge:
Any information that doesn't affect the way we act is irrelevant.
[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ]
Reason wins in the long run, because irrational memes fight each other,
whereas rational memes add up.
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