From: Colin Hales (colin@versalog.com.au)
Date: Sat Jun 22 2002 - 00:09:00 MDT
Jef writes:
> To me, there's no essential difference between Lee's
> scenario and the "scenario" each of us lives in now.
Rafal wrote:
### A cool experiment. It might give an answer to the the question of how
much hardwired are your emotional systems - once you know the "others" are
not sentient, there is no rational connection between your emotions, and
your altruistic behaviors (=behaviors modified by concern for other
sentiences). The reasoned altruism of a self-aware person in search of
general moral principles no longer applies even in principle. What remains
are the hard-wired simple habits, the ones that are important for behavior
at earlier levels of human ontogeny (Kohlberg stages 2 to 4 or 5). How long
will you stay nice out of force of habit? Are you able to discard the layers
of conditioning that normally would (hopefully) prevent you from stealing
money from a blind beggar in the street? Are you able to discard the
hard-wired desire to survive, now that you know the truth?
###end
The key point here is, IMO: "once you know the 'others' are not sentient".
In the movie The Truman Show the 'puppets' are very poor
puppets (actors) who's shallow external veneer is maintained on a knife edge
of collapse. The first crack in this veneer would show a 'real' sentience
the presence of fabrication and direct evidence of an accessible alternate
world, justifying changes in attitude and behaviour.
What is proposed by Lee is not that at all.
In Lee's example we have 'gods' that tell you that you are the only
'real' person. Everyone else is a puppet indistinguishable from the
'real thing'. This means that they are all 'shells' with whatever drives
them located 'outside'. I propose that whatever it is 'outside' that
drives the puppets is as sentient as the poor VR solipsist. The fact that
they are all avatars with 'real' veneers is irrelevant. More than that
I propose that what we humans are experiencing now is indistiguishable
from the proposed scenario. The software that enacts your world
which contains all your history and relationships and the characters
of all all those you interact with, that had you fooled so well that you had
to be informed of the 'deception', is 'off-board' but no less real,
even though declared by Lee as such - this I think is at the heart of it.
A tautology involving the use of 'real' and 'exists'.
As such, it would be pointless to alter your behaviour. Truman had
an option. The simulated VR solipsist doesn't. The real issue here, IMO,
is understanding what a 'real' sentient entity is. I think we have to
lose our prejudice of an absolute standard := 1 x healthy human as
the only benchmark. The most amoral entity I see in the simulation
is the 'Gods' who think they can create viable sentiences and play
with them like toys. That's a God's right I suppose....what else is
there to do?
I think this line of thought has migrated to another thread, so I'll leave
it
at that.
Colin Hales
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