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| quote: | Originally posted by jennypie
Why not? Don't you want to be taken seriously? |
Well, I can give it a try, but I expect a lot of people won't bother reading or won't understand what the fuck I'm saying.
Basic anthropological notions tell us that we are the way we are because we'd not have survived as a species if things were different. Consider two tribes. One is a group of cannibals; the other believes in supernatural beings that punish them if they murder. Which do you think will have a greater population in a few generations? Which tribe's cultures and traditions would have been passed on?
The same goes for religions that teach their followers to "spread the word to others", or to "go forth and multiply", or to teach their children to follow the same religion, or to not use birth control, or to be monogamous (as to spread less disease), and so on. A lot of religious notions exist because they maximize the virility of religion itself. Are these good notions? Hell no. They make sense when you're trying to grow a religion as fast as possible, but not when you've got a finite planet with a large number of people to feed.
Moral notions don't have to be religious. One can easily deduce notions such as the golden rule by simply assigning reasonable objective functions to moral decisions. And generally, such rules make sense regardless of which objective function you apply, be it utilitarianism or so on. The most fundamental notion is that of the
prisoner's dilemma, which essentially states that pareto suboptimal nash equilibria can exist. I believe that EVERY CHILD should know and understand the prisoner's paradox, and should be made to play it over and over again until they UNDERSTAND why the golden rule is globally optimal, even if it is locally suboptimal. Then they need to understand how this very basic notion can be applied to EVERYTHING in life, from not littering to not being an asshole on the road and so on.
Now, at the end of the day, people are just clumps of molecules acting to the laws of physics (which may be deterministic, or perhaps not so; this doesn't really matter). How do we assign value to what we do; how do we decide that killing is wrong and that cocaine use should or should not be condemned? Well, we make rational arguments based on what objective function we're trying to maximize. Are we trying to maximize the overall average integral of happiness dt over a lifespan? Maybe. Seems reasonable. Almost ALL models give the same conclusions at the end of the day. But there are some important differences; I really believe that THESE are the most important in defining a secular moral system. My personal beliefs include stuff like:
- It better to have 1 billion happy people than 10 billion moderately content people. On a planet with finite scarce resources, this would imply that reducing the human population is a good thing. I agree with this notion.
- A human should be valued by its productive capacity. Killing a fetus is cheap. Killing a teenager is terrible because society has wasted many resources in bringing a child up but has yet to reap the rewards of its investment. Dignity in retirement is necessary as an incentive to keep people productive during their working life. And so on.
- Human rights are pretty simple consequences of these same ideas. I don't believe that life is sacred, but I do believe that it is in humanity's best interests to treat it as such in most cases. There are lots of grey areas, but this is OK.
A lot of people have an incorrect notion of "complexity". They think that if a robot builds a car, then the robot itself must be more complex than the car because it contains, inside it, the instructions for how to build a car. Then if a factory builds a robot, it in turn must be more complex than the robot, which is more complex than the car. This is incorrect, as proven by Kleene in 1938 (see Kleene's recursion theorem, which implies that there exist machines that can make copies of themselves.)
I really think that humans are just biological machines (I mean, the entire field of bioinformatics is based upon this simple notion.) A lot of people think humans are special and "they" are special because they get up every morning and look at themselves in the mirror and think "gee, this is me. I feel myself having thoughts. I know I exist. I must have a magical supernatural 'soul' to give me this power." Well, no. A machine that could self-actualize could do the same thing. And when we build machines that realize they're alive (which is ENTIRELY possible), then they will want the same rights that we have as humans if we program them to be able to change their behaviour according to some kind of evolutionary selection (as we do in many genetic algorithms).
Unfortunately, a lot of people find it depressing that I think they (and I) are completely insignificant specks of carbon running programs in a universe which follows physical laws. They'd prefer to believe that they possess a 'soul' and have special powers to communicate with supernatural beings via 'prayer' and such. To me, these notions are absurd. As we learned with Zeus and the lightning bolt, the true explanation of natural phenomena are generally even more elegant and awe-inspiring than any supernatural explanation (I find the laws of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics much more fascinating than old mythological explanations involving pissed off gods.) It's kinda shitty that so many disagree.
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I am nobody. Nobody is perfect. Therefore I am perfect.
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