Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> >the more I think
> >about it, the more I wonder if I'm asking the right questions.
>
> Not before time, Grasshopper.
...but rest assured that I still know, as I've known for the last five years, that everyone else's views on this subject are shot through with logical flaws. I can't ever recall someone saying to me: "You know, I don't claim to know the ultimate answers on this subject, but your answers are obviously wrong because..." Everyone who says I'm wrong claims to know all they need to know about morality. Even you, Damien.
> It seems to me that your ambition of finding an `objective or external
> morality' is based on a bafflingly simple error. You are seeking a
> teleological answer in a non-teleological cosmic substrate.
To me the question is not "Do goals exist?" but "Can goals exist?" If the cosmic substrate can construct cognitive events as ontological matter (qualia), can it construct teleologies? The question deserves investigation.
Eliezer.
PS: Actually, I dimly recall that Mitchell Porter challenged my 1996 claim that "the Powers would be ethical" on the grounds that my conception of ethics was anthropomorphic, a conclusion I later came to myself.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way