There’s a false equivalence, similar to what’d happen if I were predicting “the lottery will not roll 12345134” and someone else predicting “the lottery will roll 12345134″. Predicting some sudden change in a growth curve along with the cause of such change, that’s a guess into a large space of possibilities; if such guess is equally unsupported with it’s negation, it’s extremely unlikely and negation is much more likely.
This sounds to me like an argument over priors; I’ll tap out at this point.
That strikes me as a rather silly way to look at it. The future generations of biological humans are not predictable or controllable either.
Well, do you trust humans with humanity’s future? I’m not sure I do.
The point is that you need bottom-up understanding of, for example, suffering, to be able to even begin working at an “ethics module” which recognizes suffering as bad. (We get away without conscious understanding of such only because we can feel it ourselves and thus implicitly embody a definition of such). On the road to that, you obviously have cell simulation and other neurobiology.
Well yeah and I could trivially “defeat” any argument of yours by declaring my prior for it to be very low. My priors for the future are broadly distributed because the world we are in would seem very weird to a hunter-gatherer, so I think it’s likely that the world of 6,000 years from now will seem very weird to us. Heck, World War II would probably sound pretty fantastic if you described it to Columbus.
Priors can’t go arbitrarily high before the sum over incompatible propositions becomes greater than 1.
If we were to copy your brain a trillion times over and ask it to give your “broadly distributed” priors for various mutually incompatible and very specific propositions, the result should sum to 1 (or less than 1 if its non exhaustive), which means that most propositions should receive very, very low priors. I strongly suspect that it wouldn’t be even remotely the case—you’ll be given a proposition, then you can’t be sure it’s wrong “because the world of future would look strange”, and so you give it some prior heavily biased towards 0.5 , and then over all the propositions, the summ will be very huge .
When you’re making very specific stuff up about what the world of 6000 years from now will look like, it’s necessarily quite unlikely that you’re right and quite likely that you’re wrong, precisely because that future would seem strange. That the future is unpredictable works against specific visions of the future.
This sounds to me like an argument over priors; I’ll tap out at this point.
Well, do you trust humans with humanity’s future? I’m not sure I do.
Maybe.
If you just make stuff up, the argument will be about priors. Observe: there’s a teapot in the asteroid belt.
Well yeah and I could trivially “defeat” any argument of yours by declaring my prior for it to be very low. My priors for the future are broadly distributed because the world we are in would seem very weird to a hunter-gatherer, so I think it’s likely that the world of 6,000 years from now will seem very weird to us. Heck, World War II would probably sound pretty fantastic if you described it to Columbus.
I’ll let you have the last word :)
Priors can’t go arbitrarily high before the sum over incompatible propositions becomes greater than 1.
If we were to copy your brain a trillion times over and ask it to give your “broadly distributed” priors for various mutually incompatible and very specific propositions, the result should sum to 1 (or less than 1 if its non exhaustive), which means that most propositions should receive very, very low priors. I strongly suspect that it wouldn’t be even remotely the case—you’ll be given a proposition, then you can’t be sure it’s wrong “because the world of future would look strange”, and so you give it some prior heavily biased towards 0.5 , and then over all the propositions, the summ will be very huge .
When you’re making very specific stuff up about what the world of 6000 years from now will look like, it’s necessarily quite unlikely that you’re right and quite likely that you’re wrong, precisely because that future would seem strange. That the future is unpredictable works against specific visions of the future.
Are there alternatives..?