It's very possible that he changed his outlook between coining the term and now

We just need to find a way to skip the intervening 10 years each time so that nothing gets in the way of all these amazing developments.

At least this guy talks about a roadmap...but yes I agree, I want to see that roadmap.

My nitpick is that he shouldn't have put a specific probability number on this because he did not attempt to validate or verify it numerically. He has educated impressions and estimations about how the tech will develop, but as a physicist, I prickle at putting a number on something without quantitatively finding that number.

As for the actual subject matter: I think he's right. I actually think the consciousness problem is overblown. Subjective data (sensations, "what it's like to be a bat"), action planning, and executing actions - repeated frequently or continuously over a period of - is a good enough definition of consciousness for me. As such making a conscious general AI seems doable, and by my low standards, some probably exist already. I'd go so far as to say that the hardest part about making a human-like consciousness is not in creating a form of consciousness, but in generalizing its intelligence to the point where it can be used for multiple things (like humans are).

In other words, I think that making a toy model of consciousness that is either useless or only good for one thing (like chatting via text) is totally doable. I think making a consciousness with enough general intelligence that it looks like a human intelligence is incredibly difficult.

If it can be reasonably rejected, then its not a good reason. No one would want to bind their freedom to that specific reason.

No people are not identical, but they possess identical freedom. There's no basis for differentiating one's own freedom from another. In the same way that you cannot say you are more "alive" than another living being (except metaphorically) being "more free" makes about as much sense. If you value reason, then you can't deny that people's freedom are equal, since there is no basis for stating otherwise.

If morality is just rational interest, subject to game theoretic stability, then its not morality, just rationality. Why not be a free rider if there are no consequences to being so? Thats what I mean by morality.

I don't think this answers my questions. I gave you a specific example, why is "in order to maximize the happiness of EyeSprout" not a good public justification? The above is an objective basis for differentiating my freedom from that of others; it's really a description of how some atoms in some server's memory are arranged. You claim that it's not reasonable, but why is it not reasonable?

The key point here is that people are not identical, and I can always define some set of properties that distinguish me from other people and hence value my freedom from other people. There are more "common" ways to distinguish people, such as based on they contribute to society, or how much money they make. Are you saying that no such set of conditions is "reasonable"? But you have been somehow restricting your moral system to only include humans. Why is only including humans a "reasonable" differentiation while other things are not? In general, why are some methods of differentiation "reasonable" and some not?

The reason I'm a stickler for this point is because there's an explanation I do accept for why people should follow morality, and the answer turns out to be "because morality is designed so that it's usually in their self-interest to follow morality", i.e. morality follows a game-theoretic stability principle.

Reasons is a public justification in favor of something. And if you want to constrain someone's freedom, it must be on the basis of some justifiable reason that couldn't be reasonably rejected.

Since freedom is a property of the skeptic, and the skeptic has no reasonable basis from differentiating this property from the equal properties of others, the skeptic would have to recognize and value the freedom of others. There is no reason to prioritize his freedom-asset over that of others which can be publicly justified.

Only if you know the initial state of the system and can describe the evolution of the system.

Deterministic systems are systems where any "future state" is a fixed function of the "initial state". If the observer knows both of these things, then it's predictable by definition. That doesn't mean that an observer actually knows the initial state or what the fixed function is. Things can get a little complicated if the system includes the observer itself.

There is a question of is it even possible to know or approximate what the initial state of a system is? It's possible to have a system where there's a limit to how much information you can get about the initial state.

(There's nothing special about the "math" part, "math" is really just any language that describes something precisely.)

Try introducing him to Godel's incompleteness theorem via either the Nagel/Newman book or GEB. For talented children, it's probably good to expose them to the foundations of philosophy and logical reasoning early on as it can guide one's thought process later on.

The article doesn't really explain what "reason" is supposed to mean in this context, but the central argument is very much dependent on this one definition.

> Second, the value of reason is established by asking why. The question isn’t “who shall force me to be moral” or “what is moral,” both of which imply an outside force imposing morality through authority. But rather the question is like “what argument for morality can you provide that I can be reasonably expected to accept?” The skeptic will only accept a reason-based response.

What is a "reason-based response"? Obviously,"the happiness of people with reddit accounts named 'eyespout' should be maximized" is not what you would consider a "reason-based response", but on what grounds exactly? Usually by "reason" we mean a system of statements that can be derived from axioms... but every logical system depends on axioms, why can't I choose whatever I want as an axiom for my system?

What constraints are you putting on your allowed axioms?

>If the skeptic recognizes his own freedom, as well as that freedom being subject to reason, then he must accept the freedom of others. It cannot be reasonable that the skeptic’s own personal freedom is the only freedom worth valuing.

That requires a constraint on what "reason" is: whatever this "reason" means has the property that "it cannot be reasonable that the skeptic’s own personal freedom is the only freedom worth valuing". But why exactly would "reason" have that property?

Their job is to remove clutter from the streets. Returning the finger painting to its owner removes it from the streets, therefore it isn't mutually exclusive from doing their job.

Critical theory isn't bad, it's useful to a point. However, when one can only find problems, meaning is going to be lacking. The ultimate flaw of the program, IMO, is that change cannot happen without understanding; understanding tends to remove the urge for change. This is why I find the critical theory aggravating, if you don't understand it, how can you know what needs to change? Most of my dislike of critical theory stems from it being too easy and mostly rather boring in the end (perspective wise I prefer interaction theory), it's exciting when young and inexperienced, but personal experience should reveal how ultimately there is no answer or solution to anything offered by critical theory, just constant flux and power dynamics and questions without resolutions. This is a very unsatisfying view of the world that lived experience puts the lie to.

Even if that is literally the definition of their job?

Not as arrogant as claiming to blow up an entire philosophy based on a knee-jerk response to one quote taken out of context though…umuhright?

>> Once you include my feelings as a source or metric of value, you end up on a very slippery slope.

What about the trolley problem? If subjectivity has no place in moral philosophy, why even ask the trolley question? If we're throwing feelings out the window and measuring by objective value, then we're valuing human life by how many people are alive. In that case, if 3 people died instead of 1, which creates 2 excess deaths in a "value pool" of 8 billion people, that's a .00000000025% loss of value. That is so negligible that it renders the trolley problem silly and not worth thinking about.

Even if you upped the stakes and put 4 billion people on a trolley track, it still wouldn't mean much from a purely objective standpoint. We've done just fine in the past with far less people than that, and it's not even close to the brink of extinction, so objectively, the trolley problem doesn't matter, and neither does death in general.

The reason that death and the trolley problem are important is because of the subjective feelings of the loved ones left behind by the people who got run over. They're not your loved ones, but the problem expects you to empathetically consider the people who would be affected emotionally.

Similarly, if a street cleaner were to find your finger painting, they would have a moral obligation to use empathy, recognize that a kid's finger painting may hold sentimental value to someone, and do what they can to return the finger painting to that someone. If they are incapable of returning it, that's that, they did what they could. But it would be immoral to throw it out immediately with no second thought.

I think there's a certain literary qualitiy to the "for want of a nail" view of historical events, where seemingly insignificant things have disproportionate effects on the world. But those events only stand out because they're ironically unexpected. Wars start because of tectonically sized movements of economies and political factions so vast that one single bullet could only make them flinch a little, but that doesn't make as memorable a story.

I value your finger.

But, joking aside, I see what you mean. I get the impression that in the effort to be too general, they under-specified the criteria for what X is in that statement.

You aren’t understanding. The sentiments that the macaroni picture elicit are the valuable thing that we can recognize in another. It’s not about the value of the picture, it’s about recognizing the value of sentimental feelings.

Imagine if we used the internet for something constructive that wasn't pared down into a "marketplace" of ideas, but rather became a central conversation for the most important ideas, where you didn't need a presence to have a valid contribution, merely an opinion that could be voiced with a vote, a non-binary vote with the freedom to change one's opinion at any given moment, to elaborate on one's thought processes and learn from others.

Imagine if the statistics from that process were available to all people everywhere, and the output was verifiable such that it wasn't subject to any of the kinds of trickery we see in a divided, corporate-controlled world such as we currently live in.

Could we build a conversation out of logical filters and linguistic indices that would lead us to the answers we seek, if the process were truly educational and not just feeding the whims of a billion narcissistic aims?

If the beliefs were studied, versus being codified, could we not eventually find a calculus of human thought that eviscerated the authoritarian structures that now influence us, which we have been attempting to overthrow for millennia as raging loners, dying in the darkness, unheard?

If this was a useful project, would it not direct the path of future human evolution, by giving us a strong notion of who we are and what we really want, instead of doing this same old tired work of attempting to define or codify morality subjectively?

I say "subjectively" because of all of the instances of people blindly struggling to incorporate the topic of subjectivity into the conversation here. We are struggling with the automation of autocracy and that can't be overcome with a purely subjective perspective, creating a significant open code dilemma/solution issue.

Can we ever truly have a notion of what morality means if we can't do something which should be as simple as this, given that the technology to do so has existed for decades already, in the face of ubiquitous public confusion and frustration over it's absence (the absence of ANY solution that we can all agree on, that is)?

Right, but he's suggesting that it holds true. Through experience, I can guarantee that my macaroni picture is worth absolutely nothing to a random stranger. They may recognize that it holds value to another, but they are not that other and will trash it.

Nobody puts up "found macaroni art" posters.

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You aren’t disagreeing with me. We value sentiments for their own sake. The macaroni picture isn’t what he really values, it’s the feelings that the picture elicits.

Just the opposite. He's saying that if we accept that our sentimental things hold value, we should respect that others' sentimental objects hold similar value to them.

Because I don't want to throw away my macaroni picture, I should not force others to throw away theirs.

Isaiah Berlin’s family moved to UK in 1921, when he was 12. I wouldn’t say they had to dodge Hitler. Also, in 1958 he was not a “refugee” but an established Russian-British philosopher.

Why are so many people aligned with accelerationism/dark enlightenment /nick lands thinking very anti liberal, when I thought the point is this argument that the only way to cause societal change is to accelerate capitalism to a breaking point (and liberal ideologies are serving greatly to accelerate capitalism in the modern day) I understand from their POV why they would be anti any genuine leftist ideologies, but I can’t grasp why many spout anti-trans, racist, or just any sort of anti-progressive rhetoric intending to be anti liberal it makes no sense to me

>Asking "why should I be moral?” already presupposes (in the question itself) the values of freedom and reason, as well as reason’s priority over freedom.

What about a person who values only their own freedom, and has no inclination to stack their faculty of reason against that of anyone else?

>the questioner must recognize and value the freedom of others, having no justification to do otherwise.

What if it doesn't occur to them that any justification is necessary?

I propose an alternative reason for people to behave in a way that approximates local custom, even if they have no natural inclination to think of themselves as equal members of society, with the "two-way street" that implies:

It makes life easier by removing sources of hindrance.

If I don't go around beating people over the head, then I won't get arrested for doing that. Maybe I really want to do that, but I want to be free even more.