It may or may not be a good idea to redefine the word ‘right’, but such is permitted in reasoned argument. But it is meaningless to speak of humanity evolving to approximate an algorithm if the only way we can refer to the algorithm is by extrapolating from humanity’s behavior.
If we had some objective criteria for what ‘rightness’ was, we could talk about the degree to which any individual’s evaluation was similar to or different from the function. We could do the same for humanity in general, or an averaged or extrapolated function derived from humanity’s behavior.
Without such, though, our only source of content for the linguistic category we’ve established is human actions. It is then meaningless to talk about ‘hitting a small target in a large search space’, or marvel at the ‘moral miracle’ of humanity evolving to do what is ‘right’. There’s nothing there but a self-referential loop, a verbal short circuit. There’s no way to define the target, and no feature of reality that could have induced the evolution of humanity to proceed in any particular way.
For those lines of discussion to be meaningful, we’d need to establish what properties ‘rightness’ would have to possess beyond defining it by referring to our opinions, and we’d be right back where we started.
This discussion of ‘meta-ethics’ resolves nothing. It in fact introduced a systematic error into our thinking by creating a causal loop—we can’t talk about the algorithm guiding evolution and simultaneously define that algorithm in terms of what humans do and prefer.
I will reiterate the point:
It may or may not be a good idea to redefine the word ‘right’, but such is permitted in reasoned argument. But it is meaningless to speak of humanity evolving to approximate an algorithm if the only way we can refer to the algorithm is by extrapolating from humanity’s behavior.
If we had some objective criteria for what ‘rightness’ was, we could talk about the degree to which any individual’s evaluation was similar to or different from the function. We could do the same for humanity in general, or an averaged or extrapolated function derived from humanity’s behavior.
Without such, though, our only source of content for the linguistic category we’ve established is human actions. It is then meaningless to talk about ‘hitting a small target in a large search space’, or marvel at the ‘moral miracle’ of humanity evolving to do what is ‘right’. There’s nothing there but a self-referential loop, a verbal short circuit. There’s no way to define the target, and no feature of reality that could have induced the evolution of humanity to proceed in any particular way.
For those lines of discussion to be meaningful, we’d need to establish what properties ‘rightness’ would have to possess beyond defining it by referring to our opinions, and we’d be right back where we started.
This discussion of ‘meta-ethics’ resolves nothing. It in fact introduced a systematic error into our thinking by creating a causal loop—we can’t talk about the algorithm guiding evolution and simultaneously define that algorithm in terms of what humans do and prefer.