Do you find effort max on Fable is worth it? In my experience anything above high causes Claude to severely overthink and burn lots of tokens for little benefit.
BrandonHowe
Karma: 6
Are any of those moral goods and bads? Should you be punished for eating food you don’t like?
I didn’t say anything about punishment. What I mean by bad here is given a choice between World A where I’m eating something tasty and World B where I’m eating something yucky, World B is less preferable, so it is bad in that sense.
“Bad” is a highly ambiguous term. The badness of a bad apple is not that of a bad movie is not that of a bad person.
Goodness and badness are traits of experience and actions, not objects. When we say someone is a “bad person”, we are capturing a bundle of intuitions about that person (they have bad intentions, their actions had bad results, etc). I don’t think analyzing goodness or badness as a trait of people generally is productive, since these intuitions aren’t actually rigorous (e.g. George Bush’s policies were generally bad, but PEFPAR saved tens millions of lives, so he was plausibly the best president of the 21st century in terms of lives saved?). Likewise with an apple or movie, calling an apple bad captures some intuitions about desireable properties of apples (tasty, does not give you illness, etc), but it’s not as if the apple has some inherent quality of goodness.
I also believe phenomenal conservatism, but I am a moral realist and think analytic hedonism is likely to be true. As you mentioned, arguments for moral realism based on our moral intuitions are quite bad. Instead, I think the good is based on the intrinsic quality of our experiences. When I eat a food I like, the reason I enjoy it and desire it doesn’t seem to be reducible to anything other than that the experience seems good. Likewise, if I touch a hot stove, I have a desire to avoid that experience not because of the instrumental considerations of burning my hand, but rather some intrinsic quality of badness that the experience entails. Upon reflection it really does seem like our experiences carry a valenced quality which is inherently motivating. This seems roughly as certain to me as that I have experiences at all. Compare this to other aspects about our experiences which are not motivating in this regard, such as whether I am looking at a certain color or doing an activity.
With regard to Mackie’s argument, I think the biggest problem is that there are just a lot of things about consciousness we just don’t have access to information about. So I don’t think we could know about “goodness” or “badness” atoms any more than we know about consciousness atoms, but we do have some information about goodness and badness the same way we do about experiences. When determining if an action is good or bad, the objective property of goodness can be compared in the worlds where the action happens and where it doesn’t, and it seems like a world with more goodness is more desireable than the ones without it.
Even without knowing any details about people or their civilization, an advanced alien civilization can send a message that when received on Earth would make it clear to at least some people that the message contains a computer program with instructions on how to run the program. (I can explain how to do this if asked.)
Can you elaborate on this? This seems quite interesting.
Are you sure the chat links are public? I can’t seem to access them