Hmm. I remember being non-reflective in first grade but not in second grade. One consequence was that I couldn’t re-write explicit beliefs in response to new information and I saw general injunctions and commands as relatively binding and automatic. Conflicting commands couldn’t be accommodated, nor could common sense. I don’t think that my emotions were any more intense. I never re-wrote myself, or noticed a change at the time, but I notice it in my memories. Early ones don’t include the question “why am I doing this?” or “why do this rather than that”. In 6th grade I suffered catastrophic failure to relate to anyone who was not reflective and largely but incompletely corrected this failure as a college sophomore at age 18. Efforts to correct it continue, with large steps in the last 2 years.
I agree with much of what Robin has said here but wish he would write his own blog post about it.
I agree that deriving morality from stated human values is MUCH more ethically questionable than deriving it from human values, stated or not, and suggest that it is also more likely to converge. This creates a probable difficulty for CEV.
It seems to me that if it’s worth destroying Huygens to stop the Superhappies it’s plausibly worth destroying Earth instead to fragment humanity so that some branch experiences an infinite future so long as fragmentation frequency exceeds first contact frequency. Without mankind fragmented, the normal ending seems inevitable with some future alien race. Shut-up-and-multiply logic returns error messages with infinite possible utilities, as Peter has formally shown, and in this case it’s not even clear what should be multiplied.