Ethics 101
October 19th, 2009
I’m not sure this is something that happens to many others, but recently I’d been feeling like my ethics were getting too purely abstract.
When we talk about what we want a superintelligence to do or what we want a future world full of uploads and self-modification to look like, it’s especially important to know what you want as explicitly as possible. It often takes hard work to think intelligently about what you really want and what you really consider right. Starting off with preferences that are incoherent and contradictory seems more common than not, and to strive for coherence you may have to prune or mold a few values, ever so carefully. If you really want to apply your ethics in such a complex world as the future may be, thinking hard and abstractly is the way to go. For myself though, sometimes all that abstract thinking makes me feel a little dry. It doesn’t help that I’ve been around people for some time who haven’t been feeling/displaying much that’s extreme. I know both great anguish and joy are being experienced right now somewhere in the world, but again, that’s more of an abstract thought.
I saw the film “Where The Wild Things Are” today, it was good. I’d heard it was supposed to be like being 9, and though I don’t remember exact ages that’s pretty much exactly what it was. It wasn’t a magical childhood journey or about how difficult it is to be a kid today, so much as it was just the experience of being a kid.
Kids seem to have greater highs and lows – I think I did – and/or display them more readily. Partly it was that, partly it was just the acting of the characters (impressive considering the monsters’ faces were CGI), but it brought to the forefront the reason for all this, and the reason we construct and use abstract theories at all. It’s not because we care about some huge fictitious happiness counter in the sky, or about a display of little numbers that appear after doing an expected value calculation.
It’s because feeling good is awesome, and suffering sucks balls.
Tags: Bad Stuff, Childhood, Good Stuff, Utilitarianism