From: Tommy McCabe (rocketjet314@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Jan 03 2004 - 06:32:34 MST
--- "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> wrote:
>
> Tommy McCabe <rocketjet314@yahoo.com> writes:
> >> Lawrence Foard <entropy@farviolet.com> writes:
> >> > On Fri, 2 Jan 2004, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> >> >
> >> > [...]
> >> >
> >> >> So what sort of strategies does evolution
> favor? Quite a number
> >> >> of them, actually, but none of them can be
> characterized as
> >> >> "pacifist".
> >> >
> >> > Not pacifist, but also not unreasoningly or
> overly aggressive.
> >>
> >> If you think ours is not an extraordinarily
> vicious and aggressive
> >> race, I direct you to the nearest factory farm or
> >> slaughterhouse. Most people are fully aware of
> where their food
> >> comes from, and yet we (in general) have very
> little compunction
> >> about continuing to eat it.
> >
> > This is an artifact of 1), needing food to
> survive,
> > 2), the limitations of our digestive system,
>
> You don't need to eat animals to survive. You can
> live on a vegan diet
> very well -- in fact, the objective evidence is that
> it is far more
> healthy than an animal protein based diet. It is, of
> course, far
> cheaper to live on a vegan diet, and uses fewer
> resources, so if one
> is poor it is pretty much the sort of diet one lives
> on -- meat eating
> is what the rich do, not what the poor do to
> survive.
>
> Even if we needed to eat animals to survive, which
> we don't, it would
> be unnecessary to intentionally torture baby cows to
> produce more
> tasty veal, or to torture geese to produce tasty
> goose livers.
>
> Why do we torture animals to produce tastier food?
> Because they can't
> fight back and we like tasty food. Is this moral or
> immoral? I unask
> the question -- it is meaningless.
and 3), our tastes, which of course don't carry over
to transhumans, and are also an artifact of Darwinian
evolution..
> > and #0, Drawinian evolution, none of which applies
> to AIs.
>
> I don't know about this Drawin fellow, but you can
> as easily abandon
> Darwin as you can abandon Einstein.
Sorry about the misspelling.
> >> By the way, I will repeat a contention I've made
> pretty frequently,
> >> with a new example. There are people out there
> that say "meat is
> >> murder". There are people who enjoy a good steak.
> Which of them is
> >> "morally correct"? What is the experiment we can
> conduct that will
> >> answer this question? I contend there is none,
> and that there is
> >> no answer because absolute morality is an
> illusion.
> >
> > If you want to start a separate thread on
> objective vs. subjective
> > morality, please do. Underline separate thread.
>
> I see no reason to do so -- the threads are
> identical. Without an
> objective morality, you can't determine whether or
> not it is wrong to
> allow someone to torture a calf in order to make it
> tastier to
> eat, so a Friendly AI can't try to go off and
> enforce one or the other
> behavior. Sadly, no objective morality exists, so it
> isn't possible to
> program the "Friendly" AI to be perfect in its
> "Friendliness".
If morality is subjective, then the morality which
says the Holocaust was the greatest thing in the world
is every bit as good as the morality which condemns
it.
> >> That's not to say, by the way, that I draw any
> sort of absolute
> >> morality under which gluing the feet of geese to
> the bottoms of
> >> cages and force feeding them to make their livers
> particularly
> >> tasty is "evil". I don't believe there is an
> absolute morality, so
> >> I'm not going to pretend that it is somehow
> "wrong" to turn geese
> >> into foie gras. However, you would be pretty much
> incorrect if you
> >> thought the geese weren't pissed off about the
> process -- it is
> >> very obvious that they're miserable. (One might
> argue if animals
> >> can suffer, but the arguments used to claim they
> can't could just
> >> as easily be applied to other people -- I'm going
> to stipulate that
> >> if a cat screams in pain when you stick it with a
> hot iron that it
> >> is in fact suffering.)
> >
> > Aha, so you agree that morality is at least partly
> objective.
>
> No. I simply believe the question of whether or not
> geese or cats
> experience pain is objective -- they exhibit pain
> responses.
>
> By the way, I don't see any experiment that would
> tell us that it is
> wrong to torture you (yes, you!) in order to turn
> your liver into
> tasty meat, either. As it happens, I wouldn't do it
> because my
> personal behavior code doesn't go for that sort of
> thing -- but I
> can't see any objective way to determine that it is
> wrong.
>
> What I'm getting at, of course, is that we can't
> even settle a very
> simple question about whether or not it is okay to
> kill animals, and
> claims are being made that an absolute moral code
> can be derived
> suitable for loading into a substitute for God, God
> having
> conveniently failed to exist on his own.
> >> > You will often see that predators have evolved
> strategies to
> >> > avoid actual aggression, instead resolving
> disputes with a proxy
> >> > aggression to assert dominance and territory.
> >>
> >> *With each other*, since two members of the same
> species have
> >> nearly the same capacity for violence. It is rare
> that you will see
> >> cheetahs negotiating with herds of antelope to
> try to non-violently
> >> settle their "disputes".
> >
> > Cheetahs and antelopes aren't sentient (that's
> another
> > discussion entirely) aren't sentient and therefore
> > can't negotiatie, at least not in the way humans
> do.
>
> Humans rarely negotiate with tuna before turning
> them into very tasty
> sushi.
A negotiation, at least in the way we understand it,
requires that both parties be sentient.
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