Re: Metarationality (was: JOIN: Alden Streeter)

From: Mitch Howe (mitch@iconfound.com)
Date: Sat Aug 24 2002 - 12:27:51 MDT


Samantha Atkins wrote:

> So you believe that nothing at all is meaningful in the least
> and you might as well be a cow turd in the street as a human
> being heh? You might as well be dying form starvation as
> uploaded and on your way to Alpha Centauri.

No... my problem has not been that I believe nothing is meaningful, but
rather that I have not felt that I could competently explain why anything
should be reasonable. In other words, my stubbornly clinging to support of
things like Friendly AI -- or anything at all -- has seemed, to me, a bit
irrational. But I suppose I have to anchor myself to something, somewhere,
for the reasons you so directly describe: it IS a rot on the mind to do
otherwise. So if only for pragmatic reasons, I will continue to value those
things that I see as the highest voluntary manifestations of *human* virtue,
and extend my lines of rational reasoning from these. I am currently
incapable of thought processes outside of my human brain's design
limitations anyway.

But it does beg the interesting, if frightening question of what happens
when a Friendly SI from human space runs into the Friendly SI for Kzin
space. Friendliness as referenced to human moral perspective may look very
different from Friendliness referenced to Kzin morality.

--Mitch Howe



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