From: Cliff Stabbert (cps46@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Sep 17 2002 - 12:45:43 MDT
Tuesday, September 17, 2002, 1:28:15 PM, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
ESY> Suppose that I did tend to focus more on material poverty if I
ESY> were experiencing it. That supervention of my wired-in
ESY> chimpanzee priorities is not necessarily more correct. I might
ESY> as well say to some Third Worlder "You might consider material
ESY> poverty less serious if you lived here." For that matter, I
ESY> could also be tortured until I considered ending the pain to be
ESY> the most important thing in the universe. So what?
The difference between these two examples, of course, is that vast
numbers of human beings *are* living in extreme material poverty, many
to the point of malnourishment, etc. I agree that there's a bigger
picture here, i.e. your earlier statement that
ESY> the most important forms of poverty are not monetary poverty but
ESY> intelligence poverty, lifespan poverty, and the lack of other
ESY> resources which are currently so hard to obtain that people tend
ESY> not to think of their absence as "poverty" but simply "the human
ESY> condition".
...but I don't think *monetary* poverty is what was meant by "material"
poverty -- rather, the direct, moment-to-moment suffering related to
lacking the basics of survival. In that sense, it's not really a
matter of "more" or "less" importance but a component (or perhaps
prerequisite) of the above, at least as long as we're stuck in these
bodies.
--
Cliff
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