BA10

Karma: 5

BA10 5 Aug 2026 17:58 UTC
3 points
2
on: Notes on the possibility of moral progress
I believe so. I expect that we can eventually eliminate almost all moral disagreements purely by discovering facts.
The list provided shows a lot of future empirical questions whose answers will influence ethical theories, but there may also be some interesting past examples already. For example, the Theory of Evolution showing how humans and animals are not different in kind likely played a supporting role in animal welfare. Going back even further, many ancient cultures believed that certain diseases were a sign of either divine punishment or something otherwise supernatural, which we now know is not true thanks to our modern medical science.
How well would a Long Reflection work? It would provide more opportunity to discover ethics-relevant facts and to improve our understanding of how to do good philosophy. But it would also give amoral actors more time to seize power.
The linked article on Long Reflection suggests rather large timescales (1000+ years in certain cases), but since you had mentioned what seems like an accelerating rate of philosophical progress (e.g. the fact that >1/2 of the thought experiments on Wikipedia’s list came after 1960), I’m not entirely sure that humanity would actually have to spend that long before either solving ethics, or at least generally agreeing on immediate next steps. If we presume that at least part of this acceleration exists independently of our recent technological advancement—assuming that a Long Reflection involves a pause in at least some respects, namely advanced AI—then it might not be that long for another doubling in thought experiments / general philosophical output to occur. In summary, even if humanity embarks on a Long Reflection with the intention of it lasting a very long time, I find it plausible that 20-50 years down the line, they may have already accumulated enough knowledge to at least make some changes to the world, and then debate next steps from a new starting point. During a reflection of that length, it is still very much possible for amoral actors to gain more power, but I would consider it less of a risk than with the original timescales.
Overall, I generally agree with your implications for the future, and share your concern about whether those in power will care about others, which seems like a more challenging issue to address as it is difficult to imagine ways to improve our chances on an issue of personal motivation.

BA10 4 Aug 2026 23:27 UTC
1 point
0
on: Don’t Dither
And again, in conversations that fit this pattern, what I notice is that everything the person expresses indicates they want to make this change. They only say positive things about it. They seem eager and hopeful. They give reasons in favor of doing it, and reasons against not doing it.
A somewhat smaller factor in the psychology of this I believe is not quite mentioned by the previous comments (not-yet-verbalized ways in which things could go wrong, general anxiety about something not yet being considered) is that from the speaker’s perspective, they have a plan laid in front of them with nothing but apparent upsides, which leads to a natural sense of suspicion. For example, if somebody saw an advertised service that touted nothing but benefits, one would naturally look for the “catch”—some factor showing how the service wasn’t what it was presented to be. Likewise, in the case of a personal choice that seems entirely positive, perhaps the speaker feels as though there should be a catch to their plan. And, they may experience discomfort from not knowing what it may be.

BA10 27 Jul 2026 7:55 UTC
1 point
0
on: The crux on consciousness
C1: Let me put it this way then, how do you combine all of these tiny little microexperiences into a coherent macroexperience? You have a combination problem.
I believe that even if one affirms an emergent view of consciousness, they would still have to address a, perhaps weaker, version of the combination problem. For example, the two halves of a split-brain patient’s brain in certain circumstances act as though there may be two streams of experience, such as the left hemisphere—which is responsible for speaking—only being able to describe lights in the right visual field (the reason for the reversed direction being that one half of the brain tends to process inputs from the opposite half of the body). Even if in this specific case, there are not literally two separate conscious beings in the brain, we can still imagine a hypothetical case in which we have two brains with two separate streams of experience, who, via an additional connection, could potentially merge into one brain. And, we may use this familiar idea of split-brain patients to develop an intuition for the following thought experiment.

To explain this, suppose that we have two brains A and B both physically kept alive in some container, each with their own separate conscious experiences. Now, imagine that we are to stitch the two brains together via something similar to a corpus callosum, such that we may observe the combined brain C as apparently its own unitary conscious being. From the perspective of A, what would happen when this combination takes place? Does its conscious experience “end” when it combines? Does it assume the full experience of C? If one answers the former, does B’s experience also “end” in favor of there just being one C? If one answers the latter, does B’s experience “end” by some rule then, or do they both end up experiencing the combined inputs of C, such that there are two “observers” inside of C? Whatever one answers to this hypothetical, they all seem rather counterintuitive, so I either may be missing a simpler / more intuitive explanation, or perhaps one of these scenarios might actually be how the experience of combination works.

One may also run the thought experiment in reverse. Suppose that from the perspective of C, the central link between their two halves is severed. What would happen to C’s experience after the severance? Perhaps, C may cease to exist, leaving two new conscious beings A and B in its wake. Alternatively, C may end up becoming just one of the two, which would lead to the question of which one it ends up being. Third, if one answers the latter to both of my questions in the past paragraph (when combining, both A and B share the experience of C), then perhaps the version of C who came from A would return to A, and likewise the version of C who came from B would return to B. Once more, there are a lot of combinations here, all of which counterintuitive, and likely dependent on one’s answers to the previous paragraph.
C1: I think we’ve reached an impasse, because I think you can do this for consciousness. Consciousness just is the causal/functional role of the physical neurons in the brain. There’s no additional property needed to fix phenomenal character.
To tie this in with my previous thought experiment, suppose that one comes up with an answer to what happens when conscious beings combine and (in reverse) split. Suppose we are to apply the answer for what happens with “splitting” recursively, such that we take a brain, cut it in ¹⁄₂, then ¹⁄₄, and so on and so forth, keeping those pieces of it individually alive in our perfect nutrient-supplying container. It is possible that we may only decrease the size of a conscious brain through this method to some minimum threshold beyond which conscious experience can no longer occur. However, it is also possible that we may do this to conceive of conscious beings of minimal size / components, if we are to affirm something like panpsychism. If this latter scenario were the case, we could have something which satisfies C2 in that there could still be some intrinsic property in matter needed for consciousness, but also satisfies at least part of C1′s rejection of the realism of a color-inverted universe which still possesses our same physics. That is, if consciousness exists at a fundamental (or very simple) level, then perhaps our unified idea of “red” is not actually reflective of a red quale, but is due to our brain categorizing many smaller but unique qualia as something we call “red”. As a more intuitive parallel to this idea, one could in a similar light consider activation of each tiny point / smallest possible area of our visual field to be qualia of their own, but each of which also activating an additional categorizing sense that it is part of “vision”; in this case, vision would not be a fundamental sense, but a term we use to categorize many tinier senses. If that is true, we would not literally be able to color-invert the universe as C2 suggested early in the story, because color may not be a fundamental form of experience to invert in the first place.

In conclusion, I am still very unsure about the ideas I presented here, and they would not apply to theories of consciousness requiring some higher-order cognitive function—such as metacognition or reflection; if such a theory is true, it would conflict with my idea of splitting. That being said, I aim to present one hypothesis which could potentially address some of the issues in C2′s original view if correct.

P.S. I wanted to explain a bit more of the last part of this comment, but it was getting too long already, so if I still support the ideas here after more thought, I might turn them into a full-length post.

BA10 25 Jul 2026 6:51 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: bits’s comment on: The Long (Self-)Correction
I just learned about what a viatopia was from your linked article, but I certainly agree that there should be more discussion on this. In general, I think that focusing too much on terminal values can lead to internal disagreement on matters which don’t bear much significance in the present, especially when most of us already agree on certain things that are desirable in the medium-term (such as the ones you’ve listed e.g. curing cancer).
And more generally, at what level of technology would the world be comfortable stopping?
I’m not entirely sure what year I think would be optimal, but since frontier LLMs see upgrades every few months, I feel as though we only scratch the surface of what we can do with our current models before the next generation is already out. As such, I think that even our current LLMs + improved knowledge on how to make use of them (gathered over years) could already offer significant help toward achieving those medium-term goals.

In any case, it would be nice if viatopia had more attention, as it seems like a promising way to do “one thing at a time” and potentially reduce the confusion (and risk of error) of trying to develop full-length plans from the outset.

BA10 19 May 2026 22:37 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Jeffrey Heninger’s comment on: My hobby: running deranged surveys
I speculate that the first study you mentioned (PEW) had the lowest result of the 3 in that while their maximum bound of 120 is a very high age to reach, it is still within the age range that humans can realistically picture. Moreover, since it had also mentioned realistic age ranges, such as the 80s and 90s, the people taking it may have been more wary of consequences of aging that they actually see in real life, such as illness and cognitive decline.

The second study, at least from the abstract I read, was more general about the way in which they framed life extension, mentioning that it was an artificial treatment but not directly listing as many potential benefits. As for the third study, the scenario seemed pretty similar to that of the second one (a hypothetical treatment to halt aging), but since it mentioned a favorable implication (i.e. guaranteed physical / mental health), a larger portion of survey-takers were guided along that line of thinking, and answered yes.

In general, I think that people’s apparent willingness to live longer depends on how the question is framed, as it could either facilitate thinking of aging-related concerns or the benefits of perpetual health. Perhaps, if people were encouraged to think about the implications of an extended lifespan for a while longer (which is of course challenging for an online survey; maybe an open-ended response before the multiple-choice question could help), the results might become more similar.