Re: Cryo-suspension for death row

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Oct 10 2000 - 12:33:11 MDT


I must say that I find this entire discussion extremely disturbing. As far as
I'm concerned, pain and coercion and death are bad things, period, and there
is nothing that can flip that negative to a positive. There may or may not be
a place for the death penalty in modern society on grounds of deterrence;
there is *no* place in *any* ethical mind for hatred. In a Sysop Scenario,
there is no need, and therefore no place, for the death penalty - or mental
revision, or so much as a slap across the face - for crimes committed
pre-Sysop. (Murdering someone post-Sysop is impossible without explicit
consent, of course.)

Brian D Williams wrote:
>
> From: Alex Future Bokov <alexboko@umich.edu>
>
> >So let me get this straight... even if you could separate out the
> >bad part and destroy that, you'd still feel that the whole thing
> >needs to be destroyed.
>
> How could a sentient, caring person live with themself knowing they
> had murdered another person? Denial? That wasn't the "real" me?

So you're basically of the "let's stake Angel" camp.
I myself always thought that the whole guilt thing made no logical sense.

-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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