A good place to start might be
http://www.tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html#interim
I was arguing against Eliezer's idea that we have an ethical
obligation to build systems that will discover the Objective Meaning
of Life for us. Strictly speaking, I was not asserting subjectivity
of meaning against objectivity of meaning, I was just criticizing
Eliezer's particular model of objective meaning. I particularly
objected to his notion that the Interim Meaning of Life is an AI
project. I think there is considerably more to the Meaning of Life
than that, and I find the idea that the Meaning of Life could be
encapsulated in a single book, project, or the philosophy of some
Horatio (proud mutant or otherwise) to be, at the very least, a
philistine notion. Life is a lot bigger than I am, and Life is
a lot bigger than Eliezer is.
As for my own views, I didn't carry out the debate in public because
I suspect it will take me at least a few more decades to shape up
my own opinions about objectivity vs. subjectivity of meaning. I
find the idea (which Max More referred to in a recent post) that
information-theoretic entropy is an observer-dependent quantity to
be a very salient idea in relation to these things, but I'm not
sure quite exactly where the salience is yet.
But when Eliezer says that my version isn't experimentally
testable, I'm not sure what he is referring to as my version.
(I guess indeterminacy is enough to preclude experimental
testability, but Eliezer's claim makes it sound as if there is
more going on here than there is.)
-- Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pobox.com ++ expectation foils perception -pcd