I’m going to focus on one word in your comment: “democracy”.
So, you would permit “democracy … to answer various questions formerly answered by scripture”?
It makes me sad to learn that. I am strongly opposed to the idea that counting votes is a good way of arriving at ordinary or moral truth (unless perhaps one is very picky about whose vote counts).
Of course, that pernicious idea—Majority Rule—is so prevalent in our world that I would not bother to voice my objection except that you are the leader of a project that if successful will impose on the entire future light cone decisions that will have the same unbendable and irreversible character that physical law now has. This property of irreversibility is quite unique to your project. (There are other project that would impose irreversible conditions, namely sterilization of the biosphere, if they fail or go wrong, but yours is the only one I know of that would do so if you succeed.)
What makes my agony and my sadness particularly acute is the knowledge that up to the age 19 or so, you wrote about ultimate ends in ways I found completely benign and lovable. I refer of course to documents like TMOLFAQ, which apparently you are now so ashamed of that you have removed it from the web.
Oh how sad it made me to read your Collective Extrapolated Volition document, with its horror of disenfranchisement, plus your speculations about extending the franchise to non-human primates, as if the very contingent, accidental, particular political religion of our times were a universal law of the universe that no rational agent with sufficient time to grow wise could object to!
Oh yeah: nice series of blog entries. Thanks for writing. And know that I know that it is only because your commitment to unambiguous publication of your beliefs that it is possible for me to snipe at you in this way.
I’m going to focus on one word in your comment: “democracy”.
So, you would permit “democracy … to answer various questions formerly answered by scripture”?
It makes me sad to learn that. I am strongly opposed to the idea that counting votes is a good way of arriving at ordinary or moral truth (unless perhaps one is very picky about whose vote counts).
Of course, that pernicious idea—Majority Rule—is so prevalent in our world that I would not bother to voice my objection except that you are the leader of a project that if successful will impose on the entire future light cone decisions that will have the same unbendable and irreversible character that physical law now has. This property of irreversibility is quite unique to your project. (There are other project that would impose irreversible conditions, namely sterilization of the biosphere, if they fail or go wrong, but yours is the only one I know of that would do so if you succeed.)
What makes my agony and my sadness particularly acute is the knowledge that up to the age 19 or so, you wrote about ultimate ends in ways I found completely benign and lovable. I refer of course to documents like TMOLFAQ, which apparently you are now so ashamed of that you have removed it from the web.
Oh how sad it made me to read your Collective Extrapolated Volition document, with its horror of disenfranchisement, plus your speculations about extending the franchise to non-human primates, as if the very contingent, accidental, particular political religion of our times were a universal law of the universe that no rational agent with sufficient time to grow wise could object to!
Oh yeah: nice series of blog entries. Thanks for writing. And know that I know that it is only because your commitment to unambiguous publication of your beliefs that it is possible for me to snipe at you in this way.