I think ethics is an emergent rational order imposed upon impulses that arise from expectations of pain and pleasure, emotions like empathy and moral disgust. and perhaps other sources. It will be hard to know whether there is one true ethics as the natural convergent ideal, without first understanding morality as a phenomenon of consciousness, including how it relates to non-moral factors in human decision making.
I think Schopenhauer or Nietzsche at one point lists saint, artist, and scholar as three distinct human ideals. Note that only the saint is governed by morality; the artist is ruled by aesthetics, and the scholar, we could say, by epistemology. I do suspect that moral, aesthetic, and epistemic normativity are all distinct factors in human psychology (and this is not meant to be an exhaustive list), and that understanding the “human decision procedure” requires identifying their psychological and ontological roots (e.g. how they emerge in an ontology like @algekalipso’s “process-topological monads”), and that this kind of understanding is necessary to obtain the correct metaethics, and to carry out a process like Coherent Extrapolated Volition.
Also, there is probably a different decision-theoretic ontology for entities like non-conscious AIs, in which the basic cause and effect of “decision making” doesn’t even involve qualia, emotion, or conscious thought.
It will be hard to know whether there is one true ethics as the natural convergent ideal, without first understanding morality as a phenomenon of consciousness, including how it relates to non-moral factors in human decision making.
I don’t understand this point. Why do you need to analyze consciousness to understand ethics? I think I’m missing some crucial information here.
Moral feelings are states of consciousness, and moral judgments are acts of consciousness, and these distinctive mental phenomena are the entire basis of morality and ethics. Without them, no one would believe there are such things as moral right and wrong. Examining their nature, how fallible they are, and what they imply about the ontology of the moral, seems to me an essential ingredient in understanding what morality is, and how it relates to the rest of reality. Moral faculties, insofar as they exist, are a specific capability of the conscious mind.
You could try to be a pure materialist and “heterophenomenologist” about this; or you could be a pure moral philosopher who takes the basic structures of subjectivity for granted. But an investigator strictly following the first approach is artificially denying themselves the use of their own first-person knowledge and experience, and everything that can provide; and we are ultimately aiming to make AIs into ideal moral agents, so the second approach also needs something more. I conclude that we need to solve the problems of consciousness in order to really know what we’re doing.
Are you assuming there exists some kind of true and on ethics or is it all subjective? Or is it one of the things you want to research?
I think ethics is an emergent rational order imposed upon impulses that arise from expectations of pain and pleasure, emotions like empathy and moral disgust. and perhaps other sources. It will be hard to know whether there is one true ethics as the natural convergent ideal, without first understanding morality as a phenomenon of consciousness, including how it relates to non-moral factors in human decision making.
I think Schopenhauer or Nietzsche at one point lists saint, artist, and scholar as three distinct human ideals. Note that only the saint is governed by morality; the artist is ruled by aesthetics, and the scholar, we could say, by epistemology. I do suspect that moral, aesthetic, and epistemic normativity are all distinct factors in human psychology (and this is not meant to be an exhaustive list), and that understanding the “human decision procedure” requires identifying their psychological and ontological roots (e.g. how they emerge in an ontology like @algekalipso’s “process-topological monads”), and that this kind of understanding is necessary to obtain the correct metaethics, and to carry out a process like Coherent Extrapolated Volition.
Also, there is probably a different decision-theoretic ontology for entities like non-conscious AIs, in which the basic cause and effect of “decision making” doesn’t even involve qualia, emotion, or conscious thought.
I don’t understand this point. Why do you need to analyze consciousness to understand ethics? I think I’m missing some crucial information here.
Moral feelings are states of consciousness, and moral judgments are acts of consciousness, and these distinctive mental phenomena are the entire basis of morality and ethics. Without them, no one would believe there are such things as moral right and wrong. Examining their nature, how fallible they are, and what they imply about the ontology of the moral, seems to me an essential ingredient in understanding what morality is, and how it relates to the rest of reality. Moral faculties, insofar as they exist, are a specific capability of the conscious mind.
You could try to be a pure materialist and “heterophenomenologist” about this; or you could be a pure moral philosopher who takes the basic structures of subjectivity for granted. But an investigator strictly following the first approach is artificially denying themselves the use of their own first-person knowledge and experience, and everything that can provide; and we are ultimately aiming to make AIs into ideal moral agents, so the second approach also needs something more. I conclude that we need to solve the problems of consciousness in order to really know what we’re doing.