From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Jan 05 2003 - 21:47:57 MST
Eliezer writes
> Uhhh... Lee, [as you quoted me] you left out a key part of that
> quote, thus, with a few selective deletions, changing its meaning
> to the 180-degree opposite of the original. Is this a subtle joke?
No, certainly not. Sorry about that.
> Eliezer [I] really wrote:
>
> Morality is a function over 4D spacetimes, not 3D spaces. If you
> terminate an existing mind, the termination event is undesirable.
> Declining to create a *new* unhappy mind is not morally equivalent to
> *killing* an unhappy mind.
I wanted to demur here
> Existing is different from not existing.
and agree here, but bungled it.
> If this isn't the case, then instantiating a particular mind has no
> effect; it already has a Platonic existence or whatever.
Whether or not "this isn't the case" I disagree with you here.
I'm sure that you agree that no benefit accrues to patterns
which don't get physically instantiated and run.
> If instantiating a mind *does* make a moral difference, then
> among the moral differences it makes is that *now* the mind
> has civil rights.
Sure, if some legislative body grants them, I suppose.
You still want to derive *rights* from some objective
feature of the universe, and I suppose that we are
still at loggerheads.
> Maybe I should have written that in the subjunctive mode to be clearer:
>
> "Existing is different from not existing. If this weren't the case, then
> instantiating a particular mind would have no effect; it would already
> have a Platonic existence or whatever."
>
> The reason I did not originally write this way is that we do not know FOR
> A FACT that existing (instantiation in our own apparent subjective
> universe) is different from not existing. But I do tend to use it as a
> working assumption.
Of course. And it may save writing to suppose that everyone does
until you meet a counter-example.
Lee
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