From: Johnicholas Hines (johnicholas.hines@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Mar 03 2009 - 09:01:29 MST
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Matt Mahoney <matmahoney@yahoo.com> wrote:
> The question "how should we compute the probability of being tortured?" is philosophical and irrelevant.
You dismiss the relevance of debating about values. Surely a group of
naked apes can discuss how the group will fit novel situations into
its existing utility function? We are such a group, discussing novel
situations and whether they are good or bad.
Note that I use singular "utility function" rather than "utility
functions" because we're talking about the group deciding, and the
utility function of the group will be some approximation/mishmash of
the individuals' utility functions. In any case, naked apes' utility
functions are all pretty similar, anyway.
I don't see how this question is irrelevant.
> The question "how will we compute the probability of being tortured?" does have an experimentally testable answer.
I agree entirely! In fact, one of the ways that the naked apes will
likely use is philosophical discussion about values.
Johnicholas
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:04 MDT