Thanks for diagnosing my thinking. You're right, it probably is
more of a psychological hypothesis or hedonic heuristic or both
than a moral principle. Your paraphrase identifying my clumsy
English phrase with the old Latin one makes me a little
uncomfortable, though I can see how I gave that impression, because
I tried to head off that impression by quacking about how I found
it quite likely that Aristotle's "summum bonum" is a meaningless
phrase. They might be the same though... that would just mean
that my phrase is meaningless too. ;)
The possibility of a summum bonum would to me imply the possibility
of a permanent end to all progress. Whether my resisting this idea
is merely wishful thinking on my part I am not sure yet.
But you make an excellent diagnosis in pointing out the generalizable
extrinsicity of proposed projects in nano and AI, because thinking
about that is indeed one of things that prompted the development
of this idea for me.
-- arkuat@idiom.com