-----Original Message-----
From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com>
To: extropians@extropy.com <extropians@extropy.com>
Date: 11 January 1999 17:02
Subject: Re: Dyson (Was: Paths to Uploading)
>Don't worry, Terry Donaghe. Even for those who aren't philosophers,
>defending objective morality is easy. Any argument against objective
>morality also applies to objective reality. Watch.
>
>KPJ wrote:
>> So you might wish to inform us on the question of which end you should
>> eat the egg (the war in Gulliver's travel to Lilliput was about this
>> question). Since either one was right and the other wrong, please feel
>> free to declare one of objective right.
>
>(Actual answer to above: The objective right, in this case, is almost
>certainly that the question is false. Even if eating one side of the
>egg results in a hurricane in Australia due to the Butterfly Effect,
>then the answer is not the same on all occasions and will almost never
>be to bite into the egg exactly along the axis.)
And the answer of "Is it good or evil to kill someone" is that the question is meaningless, since there is no objective definition of the terms involved.
Reality will determine whether the sun travles around the earth of visa/versa, it will tell us the exact goings on in any particular situation, it will tell us whether an item is longer than another, or who killed another person. But it will not tell us whether any of these is a 'good' or a 'bad' thing, because these two words denote opinions and have no relation whatsoever to reality, except as filterered through a persons brain.
Samael