From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri Jul 18 2003 - 01:10:17 MDT
Anders seemed to give good replies to several people, including this to Brent:
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 09:49:34PM +0000, brent.allsop@comcast.net wrote:
>
> > To take this to the next level will our spreading "garden" consist of
> > evolution - or more precisely death? Will there be lions that eat lambs and so
> > on? Or will everything "natural" or "primitive" be "uplifted" and will
> > progress be made, from then on, by better intelligent and intentional methods
> > than "survival of the fittest"?
> I don't think it is realistic to imagine everything being
> uplifted to being happy and smart (like in the _Hedonistic
> Imperative_ by David Pearce where we will sometime around
> the year 3000 finally save the last deep ocean invertebrate
> from aversive experience - I love that passage :-).
Me too. Though I agree with you that, as you say, "let evolution
sort it out" and that we cannot oversee everything, the Pearce
goal sound very good as a private rather than global project.
I might, for example, insist that within my own private domain
there be no aversive experience---be it far from one, however,
to attempt to dictate what to do to another or to the rest of
the universe unowned by one.
> We will likely do this a lot anyway, and might even pass laws about
> helping creatures endowed with enough nervous systems. But if we are to
> constantly monitor every environment we have created, deliberately or
> not, to save structures from bad experiences and competition, then we
> are not going to be doing much else.
Yes; not long ago on the SL4 list, Perry Metzger spoke of Rice's
Theorem in a similar context, (the computational infeasibility
thereof, see http://kilby.stanford.edu/~rvg/154/handouts/Rice.html)
> My ethical position is that we do not have a moral obligation
> to help everybody and everything, it is up to us to make the
> judgement from case to case, aided by some general principles.
> Personally I would love to help a lot of beings in creative
> ways, it is just that I don't think I *have to* help them.
>
> In fact, attempting to "save" every creature is very close
> to the kind of top-down control that stifles surprises and
> evolution.
All very well said!
> We want to minimize irreversible information loss and unnecessary
> pain, but there is a lot of useful information loss and pain too.
Sorry, but you are sounding like one of the usual apologists
for pain and suffering here. There really isn't anything that
can be computed with pain that cannot be computed without it.
Lee
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