I’ll bite the bullets in your first paragraph. So chess also relies on non-conscious skills. What trap did I just fall into?
I don’t see why I should assign them moral status any more than I would feel morally obligated to listen to a laptop …
There is a major difference between your unconscious mind and a laptop with the same output: specifically, the unconscious mind has a direct, seamless, high-bandwidth connection to your mind. When you recognize a face or a letter, you don’t have to pass it to a laptop, look at the output, and read the output. From your conscious mind’s perspective, you just get insta-recognition. This makes it more valuable that a laptop—in all senses—just as faster mental addition is better than a hand calculator that computes with the same speed.
If and when someone makes a machine that can do these tasks faster, and still interface seamlessly, in the unconscious’s stead, then you will be justified in trivializing the latter’s value. Just like you would feel less bad (though not completely indifferent) about the extinction of honeybees if honey could be more efficiently sythesized.
The only case where the above reasoning doens’t apply is, as you point out, in values. Why is the unconscious mind’s decision of values, er, valuable? Why are you morally bound to its decrees of lust? There answer is, I don’t know. But at the same time, I don’t know how you can clip out the lust while retaining “you”—not given your existing brain’s architecture. That is, I disagree that the brain is as modular as you seem to think, at least if that’s what you meant by the use of “modules”.
And remember, pure value judgments are only a small fraction of its outputs.
I’ll bite the bullets in your first paragraph. So chess also relies on non-conscious skills. What trap did I just fall into?
There is a major difference between your unconscious mind and a laptop with the same output: specifically, the unconscious mind has a direct, seamless, high-bandwidth connection to your mind. When you recognize a face or a letter, you don’t have to pass it to a laptop, look at the output, and read the output. From your conscious mind’s perspective, you just get insta-recognition. This makes it more valuable that a laptop—in all senses—just as faster mental addition is better than a hand calculator that computes with the same speed.
If and when someone makes a machine that can do these tasks faster, and still interface seamlessly, in the unconscious’s stead, then you will be justified in trivializing the latter’s value. Just like you would feel less bad (though not completely indifferent) about the extinction of honeybees if honey could be more efficiently sythesized.
The only case where the above reasoning doens’t apply is, as you point out, in values. Why is the unconscious mind’s decision of values, er, valuable? Why are you morally bound to its decrees of lust? There answer is, I don’t know. But at the same time, I don’t know how you can clip out the lust while retaining “you”—not given your existing brain’s architecture. That is, I disagree that the brain is as modular as you seem to think, at least if that’s what you meant by the use of “modules”.
And remember, pure value judgments are only a small fraction of its outputs.