From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Nov 23 2002 - 14:12:21 MST
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> I seriously doubt that the pursuit of truth leads to ethics.
It does, or at least I think it would very strongly tend in that direction
given a human emotional background. It just takes a *lot* of truth before
the effects get strong enough to play a dominant factor in forming your
personality - conclusions strong enough to contend with innate emotions,
and metarationality strong enough to face down the rationalization warp
that usually enlists verbal reasoning in the service of political goals.
Building up a lot of specialized knowledge in fields unrelated to
evolutionary psychology, the explicit study of rationality, etc. wouldn't
be enough for definite determination of ethics, although I'd wager you'd
find it was strong Bayesian evidence for ethics and that it played a
direct causative role in those cases.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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