Polyamory indeed, sorry to be unclear.
smk
Karma: 322
Just musing on how LW has had a profound impact on my life. It was a strong influence in my deconversion from theism, it’s helped me make significant medical decisions, and I’m in love with someone I met at a LessWrong meetup, as well as another person whose first interaction with me was a Bayes theorem joke.
Believing in Santa was not acceptable to my Christian fundamentalist parents. However, they also had the excuse of being immigrants, so they implied (and perhaps it’s even true) that believing in Santa was not common in their culture: “The children in this country think that Santa is real. I don’t know why their parents want them to believe in fairytales!” I was never told to hide the truth from other kids, and I don’t recall if the subject ever came up in my interactions with other kids. We still had Christmas gifts, a tree, sang Christmas songs, and even took pictures sitting on Santa’s lap at the mall. I just understood that it was all for the sake of participating in fun customs.
I think the main result of this was to teach me to feel comfortable with being different. But there were lots of other things in my upbringing as well that had this same effect.
My preferred transhumanist “eutopia” is one where people generally do not die, and new people generally are not created, but if for some reason people do have to be created, they are created with adult-level competencies such as I described above.
I think that the vast majority of people who currently have parental desires would not get to satisfy those desires in my eutopia, because their desires can only be satisfied in a world with a class of temporarily less-competent people. Are you suggesting that “people whose parental desires can only be satisfied in a world with a class of temporarily less-competent people” are dysfunctional, and not really the majority as I suspect? If so, then what state of affairs is required for the majority of parental desires be satisfied? Could they do it in my eutopia? If they could do it in my eutopia, then it seems like they could do that same thing in this world in a relationship with an adult, and not have to create a brand-new child at all.
Of course I chose that word because it’s vague. I guess, if I have to narrow it down, it’s a feeling that something is disrespectful.
I think people’s reasons for having kids usually fall into one of the following categories:
It’s what normal people do, so I’ll just go with the flow.
I have an emotional desire for a parent-child relationship.
I want someone to take care of me when I’m old.
I want an extension of myself to provide me with a kind of proxy immortality.
It might be more obvious why I find 1, 3, and 4 to be disrespectful? So I’ll just talk about 2, which I suspect includes the kind of “liking kids” that you are talking about.
Imagine that, from now on, as soon as a baby is born, it will be instantly granted certain benefits. The baby is given the size, strength, and agility of an adult. They get the intellectual capacity of an adult. They get an assortment of knowledge and skills implanted into their minds, well-suited to independent living in their society, and proof of having those skills. They get the wisdom, rationality, and emotional skills of an adult. But they do not get any episodic memories implanted. They don’t come pre-loaded with any emotional attachments to specific people, which is just fine, because they have great emotional and self-care skills to support them as they meet various people and decide who they want to form relationships with.
Does this even count as a child anymore? Would a relationship with this person satisfy the parental desire in #2? I bet it wouldn’t. All because the person is no longer weaker or more incompetent than the “parent”, and is free to form emotional attachments of their choice based on getting to know people. Liking kids, specifically as kids, usually amounts to liking the weakness and vulnerability of kids. I have heard some people say that what they like about kids is their “innocence” but I don’t believe in this innocence thing, except as a euphemism for ignorance. I cannot think of a single thing about my child psyche which was better than my adult psyche. My child self was more trusting, which I bet many adults liked, but I think my current state of being less trusting is better, and therefore the fact that those adults liked that about me was disrespectful—it was liking my weakness. Some adults may have enjoyed teaching me things. That is a case of them enjoying my ignorance.
I’m not so put off by people wanting to adopt kids, because they see a need that they feel well-suited to fill. But creating a brand-new kid because you want a relationship specifically with a small, weak, ignorant person who is almost guaranteed to love you? Icky.
Doing it to improve the world is maybe ok? Kind of still a bit icky though. But as this article suggests, it might not be such a good way of improving the world compared to other ways, and anyway I don’t think it’s a primary reason that most parents have. What non-icky reasons can you think of?
Probably immoral, yeah. But why would you even want a child in the first place? All I can think of are really icky reasons.
I probably would not join, but I would try to research it to figure out why people who join usually like it. Depending on what I learned, I could change my mind.
What I would prefer is to have the option of sending/receiving thoughts/emotions/memories when and with whom I choose, with consent of those involved. Other mental abilities would of course have to be implemented as well, to allow this kind of telepathy to be manageable.
Awhile back I posted a comment on the open thread about the feasibility of permanent weight-loss. (Basically: is it a realistic goal?) I didn’t get a response, so I’m linking it here to try again. Please respond here instead of there. Note: most likely some of my links to studies in that comment are no longer valid, but at least the citations are there if you want to look those up.
how can anyone deserve anything?
They can’t. The whole idea of “deserving” is… icky. I try not to use it in figuring out my own morals, although I do sometimes use the word “deserve” in casual speech/thought. When I’m trying to be more conscientious and less casual, I don’t use it.
And someone people aren’t either one. Polyamory isn’t the only kind of non-monogamy, and of course there are those who don’t do sexual and/or romantic relationships at all.
I don’t particularly care about biodiversity, except if it offers some benefit to people. I suppose it might offer opportunities for increasing knowledge/understanding of biology/chemistry. Why do other people care about it?
I don’t think there’s much we can do now to ensure successful colonization
Existential risk reduction charities?
Being a transhumanist, and being good at the kind of mental gymnastics that allowed him to do partial transfiguration, Harry might be able to change his Patronus into any form he likes if he tries hard enough. We know mental stuff can change Patronuses in canon: Tonks’ Patronus changed due to her feelings for Lupin, though she didn’t do it on purpose.
The episodic nature of this story is wearing on me a bit. I’m not talking about wanting to know what happens and having to wait for that knowledge to be doled out bit by bit. That’s pretty much fine. It’s the feeling that there’s a grand overarching plot that’s being distracted from by Plots of the Month. Even if the PotM do contribute to the overall plot—and they probably do—it feels like they do so in a rather meandering, patchwork way. Where’s my beloved “use science to figure out the nature of magic, and use that to cure death for everyone” plotline? Will we finally get back to it now that Hermione’s dead?
Yes, shows like that are very popular, and I’m getting really sick of it. I don’t understand it, but I don’t really think that it’s false sophistication. Or courageous self-examination.
I was confused by the way he was using the term “non-determinism”. Then I read this:
It’s important to understand that computer scientists use the term “nondeterministic” differently from how it’s typically used in other sciences. A nondeterministic TM is actually deterministic in the physics sense
-Theoretical Computer Science Stack Exchange
Assuming that person was correct, then it seems like Aaronson is responding to an argument that uses the physics sense of “non-determined”, but replying with the CS sense—which I’m thinking makes a difference in this case. But that’s just what it seems like to me—I must be misunderstanding something (probably a lot of things).
I’d really like it if someone could explain to me what Aaronson is saying here:
I’ve often heard the argument which says that not only is there no free will, but the very concept of free will is incoherent. Why? Because either our actions are determined by something, or else they’re not determined by anything, in which case they’re random. In neither case can we ascribe them to “free will.”
For me, the glaring fallacy in the argument lies in the implication Not Determined ⇒ Random. If that was correct, then we couldn’t have complexity classes like NP—we could only have BPP. The word “random” means something specific: it means you have a probability distribution over the possible choices. In computer science, we’re able to talk perfectly coherently about things that are non-deterministic, but not random.
Look, in computer science we have many different sources of non-determinism. Arguably the most basic source is that we have some algorithm, and we don’t know in advance what input it’s going to get. If it were always determined in advance what input it was going to get, then we’d just hardwire the answer. Even talking about algorithms in the first place, we’ve sort of inherently assumed the idea that there’s some agent that can freely choose what input to give the algorithm.
On #4, I’m fine with my morality existing for it’s own sake. I don’t need a justification for the things from which I derive justification.
Has Sam Harris stated his opinion on the orthogonality thesis anywhere?