Analogous in that people once discriminated against other races, other sexes, but over time with better ethical arguments, we decided it was better to treat other races, other sexes as worthy members of the “circle of compassion”. I predict that if and when we interact with another species with fairly similar might (for example if and when humans speciate) then humancentrism will be considered as terrible as racism or sexism is now.
Moral realism (if I understand it correctly) is the position that moral truths like ‘eating babies is wrong’ are out in the world something like the law of gravitation. Yudkowsky has argued convincingly in the Baby-Eater sequence against moral realism (and I agree with him). However, he implied a false fork that, if moral realism is false, then humancentrism is the answer. Yes, our sense of morality is based on our history. No, our history is not the same as our species.
DNA is one residue of our history, but libraries are also a similar residue. There are two instances in our history of allying with a very alien form of life: Viral eukaryogenesis, and the alliance with memes.
Does this help at all? I feel like I’m saying the same thing over again just with more words.
I feel like you’re trying to say we should care about “memetic life” as well as… other life. But the parallel you draw seems flawed: an individual of any race and sex is still recognizably conscious, and an individual. Do we care about non-sentient life, memetic or otherwise? Should we care?
You’re right, it’s infeasible to care about individual memes (or for that matter, the vast majority of individual animals) the way we care about other humans. I don’t have an answer to your question, I’m trying to break a logjam of humancentric ethical thinking.
Forgive me for passing on my confusion here, but I’m not certain that consciousness/sentience, is anything more than ‘recognizably human’. You and I have a common brain architecture and one of our faculties is picking that out from trees and rocks. Perhaps there are plenty of evolved, competent alien minds that would pose a challenge to our ape-like-me recognition systems simply because they’re so alien.
But if and when humans upload, then they will become effectively memes. We need to solve the question of how to care about non-sentient life, because a datafile could be you or me or a descendent.
No. This is regarding the ‘possibly irrelevant rant’ which I marked explicitly as a ‘possibly irrelevant rant’. The concepts in the rant seemed nearby and inspirational to the main article in my mind when I wrote it, which is why I included it, but I cannot articulate a direct connection.
In what way is it analogous, and why should we care?
Analogous in that people once discriminated against other races, other sexes, but over time with better ethical arguments, we decided it was better to treat other races, other sexes as worthy members of the “circle of compassion”. I predict that if and when we interact with another species with fairly similar might (for example if and when humans speciate) then humancentrism will be considered as terrible as racism or sexism is now.
Moral realism (if I understand it correctly) is the position that moral truths like ‘eating babies is wrong’ are out in the world something like the law of gravitation. Yudkowsky has argued convincingly in the Baby-Eater sequence against moral realism (and I agree with him). However, he implied a false fork that, if moral realism is false, then humancentrism is the answer. Yes, our sense of morality is based on our history. No, our history is not the same as our species.
DNA is one residue of our history, but libraries are also a similar residue. There are two instances in our history of allying with a very alien form of life: Viral eukaryogenesis, and the alliance with memes.
Does this help at all? I feel like I’m saying the same thing over again just with more words.
I feel like you’re trying to say we should care about “memetic life” as well as… other life. But the parallel you draw seems flawed: an individual of any race and sex is still recognizably conscious, and an individual. Do we care about non-sentient life, memetic or otherwise? Should we care?
I don’t know about ‘should’ - but many humans do act as though they care about their favoured memes.
Catholicism, Islam, patriotism—there are many memes that are literally ‘to die for’.
You’re right, it’s infeasible to care about individual memes (or for that matter, the vast majority of individual animals) the way we care about other humans. I don’t have an answer to your question, I’m trying to break a logjam of humancentric ethical thinking.
Forgive me for passing on my confusion here, but I’m not certain that consciousness/sentience, is anything more than ‘recognizably human’. You and I have a common brain architecture and one of our faculties is picking that out from trees and rocks. Perhaps there are plenty of evolved, competent alien minds that would pose a challenge to our ape-like-me recognition systems simply because they’re so alien.
But if and when humans upload, then they will become effectively memes. We need to solve the question of how to care about non-sentient life, because a datafile could be you or me or a descendent.
I don’t think he would put it that way. He defines good as “that which leads to sentient beings living, to people being happy, to individuals having the freedom to control their own lives, to minds exploring new territory instead of falling into infinite loops, to the universe having a richness and complexity to it that goes beyond pebble heaps, etc.”, not as ‘what humans value’, and considers it a “moral miracle” that humans value what leads to sentient beings living etc. etc. (Of course, the reason why we’re talking about what leads to sentient beings living etc. etc. in the first place is that that’s what we value, so IMO being surprised that we value that would be—as Feynman put it (though he was talking about something else)-- like being surprised that I can see the car with the number plate AC 443 MW.)
Does this have anything to do with the main point of your article? I can find no links, except an unproven theory used only as an analogy.
No. This is regarding the ‘possibly irrelevant rant’ which I marked explicitly as a ‘possibly irrelevant rant’. The concepts in the rant seemed nearby and inspirational to the main article in my mind when I wrote it, which is why I included it, but I cannot articulate a direct connection.