From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Jul 19 2003 - 06:03:09 MDT
Ah Anders, you raise a host of issues -- probably my fault
for stirring the pot.
On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> Ah. So you do not think that any of the historical villains thought they
> had really good causes?
Of course they "thought" they had good causes -- but did they really?
The Extropians have a set of "principles" (or one might say that the
WTA might have a general "philosophy" (allowing/promoting the
development of trans/posthumans)). The question with principles
or philosophies may be precisely "where" does one draw the line?
(We know where various terrorist groups seem to be drawing it...)
[snip]
> Good causes are plentiful, but they are not worth getting *others*
> killed for.
Ah, so allowing humanity as a whole to be sacrificed for this
principle is ok???
(I realize that I'm making some giant steps here...)
We have...
a) Sacrifice all of humanity to save a single human life
(probably not good, considerably entropic)
b) Know for certain the absolute best path to the most
extropic future (and precisely *who* needs to be sacrificed
in order to achieve that).
It seems that (a) is the default condition -- without action by
humans humanity is doomed. So one has a situation of determing
actions (by oneself or society) from the perspective of "kill
them now" or "kill them later" -- it seems most people would
prefer to stick their heads in the sand (ignore the state of
the world or entropic/extropic vectors) and put on their
"kill them later" hat. Were that not the case I would expect
to see hundreds of ExI list members demonstrating in the streets
carrying "Sign Up for Cryonics Now" placards.
So if one moves towards (b) (trying to be more extropic than
taking the default "kill them later" position) then one obviously
gets into a slippery slope position.
I would assert that it seems likely that there are one or more paths
between (a) [where we *all* end up dead] and (b) [where we achieve
an unlikely optima with complete foresight] that are better than
the path we are now on.
Blanket claims that "there are no causes worth getting onself
*or others* killed for" seem insufficient to me.
That we need "good principles" to guide us is a given. That is
part of finding one of the better paths. It seems reasonable
in the process of finding a "better path" to look at "whom do
we save" and "whom do we lose" (back to triage again...).
One of the reasons that I brought up the topic of Buddhist beliefs
was that it is relatively non-political at this time but might
become a topic of significance when one considers future paths
for humanity and the very different perspectives that Westerners
(mainly a Christian heritage) and Buddhists have with regard to
the importance/meaning of "life" itself.
Robert
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