Dang that last one is the most interesting to me. Also sorry for getting anal about the axis. I trust you knew what you were saying.
This is all presupposing that consciousness exists at all. If not, then everything’s moral value is 0. If it does, then I feel confident that steel beams don’t have consciousness.
So there is a moral hierarchy but you regard its source as only possibly existing and extremely nebulous. Given that foundation why do you stand by the validity of the hierarchy, and especially why do you say it is moral to do so?
Also I imagine that your difference in how you see the steel beam vs a brain is based on how much communication you’ve understood from each. Do you think our ability to understand something or someone is a reasonable way to build a moral framework? I think there are many pit falls to that approach personally, but I get its intuitive appeal.
The reason that I stand by the moral hierarchy despite the possibility that it doesn’t exist at all is that I can only reason about morality under the assumption that consciousness exists. I don’t know how to cause pain to a non-conscious being.
To give an analogy: suppose you find out that next year there’s a 50% chance that the earth will be obliterated by some cosmic event – is this a reason to stop caring about global warming? No, because in the event that the earth is spared, we still need to solve global warming.
It is nebulous, but everything is nebulous at first until we learn more. I’m just trying to separate things that seem like pretty safe bets from things I’m less sure about. Steel beams not having consciousness seems like a safe bet. If it turns out that consciousness exists and works really really weirdly and steel beams do have consciousness, there’s still no particularly good reason to believe that anything I could do to a steel beam matters to it, seeing as it lacks pain receptors.
I see. I really appreciate you taking the time to tell me how you see things. It’s been very interesting to me to read it.
I get anxious about asserting things I am not confident in. Do you ever wonder if holding onto something that you know you don’t understand could end up being harmful?
I totally get not understanding how to make a steel beam happy. No reason to put effort into that.
My personal view is that matter inherently experiences since I experience and I can’t find a magical hard line between me and rocks. Also I belive there is no smallest bit of matter, so there really isn’t a way to compare the amount of interactions a system could have. Both are infinite. Therefore I have no real way to make a logical hierarchy. So I just interact how I can with respect for whatever I understand. I don’t think elephant’s are greater than ants.
Full respect for how you see things BTW. Our differences are basically faith based assumptions about the universe.
I get not being able to find a magical hard line between A person and a rock. I do think there is actually a clear distinction: computation. Rocks are not computing anything; brains and arguably bacteria are computing things. I think consciousness is more like computation than matter – this fits with my intuition that you could upload someone’s mind onto a computer (one neuron at a time, maintaining continuity), and that simulation of you is still you.
If you think all matter experiences equally, then shouldn’t creatures with larger mass be worth more?
I agree with you on experience is computation. To me any interaction/change is computation. A ball rolling down a hill is a complex interaction with computation. Humans are a very specific and interesting reaction that feel in cool ways.
To me more matter could be worth more if more matter meant more interactions. Yet if matter is infinitely devisable then the amount of possible interactions is infinite. If matter is continuous rather than discrete then I don’t know enough about the math of infinities to compare organisms. My rudimentary knowledge says they are equivalent infinities but I’m not confident.
However, if more interactions means more worthy, then at near any scale that would benefit those with resources and those in an environment that already suits them. It would favor heat over cold. Change over stability. Anxiety over calm. Psychedelics over alcohol. Those with access to more calories. It gets really weird when applied at different scales IMO.
So in summary: I don’t think we can compare how much two systems compute. If we could, then using that comparison to assign moral worth still has a ton of very odd outputs.
Measure theory was discovered to be able to say that a rock twice as large as another rock can be accurately described as being twice as large as another rock, even if it’s not discrete. (Detractors will point to the paradox that something can be cut up and reassembled to have more measure with a finite number of cuts, but the cuts have to be infinitely complex so it doesn’t apply in reality.)
I agree a rock can be bigger than another rock. Yet 2 times infinity is not greater than infinity.
Edit: So my point is the interactions may be considered equal.
Edit: to be more pointed, measurement theory only applies to things that we know the shape of. The shape of anything in reality seems infinitely complex to me. Even if we can smooth the atoms out, there is still the EM field being perturbed by the orbiting electrons.
Measure theory can still describe the volume of fractal shapes, for instance using squeeze theorem if you can find an iterative upper and lower bound. Just because something’s surface area isn’t well-defined doesn’t mean the volume isn’t. Similarly, the coastline problem may preclude meaningfully measuring a country’s perimeter, but its (projected) area is still measurable.
Wouldn’t you agree that surface area is more important to computation and interaction than volume? Things interact at their surface. Therefore computation is infact subject to the coastline paradox?
If you actually try to measure the top surface of a country you run into the same issues as measuring the coast: infinite complexity.
Those projected volumes are practical to calculate, but must be interacted with through the surface.
Dang that last one is the most interesting to me. Also sorry for getting anal about the axis. I trust you knew what you were saying.
So there is a moral hierarchy but you regard its source as only possibly existing and extremely nebulous. Given that foundation why do you stand by the validity of the hierarchy, and especially why do you say it is moral to do so?
Also I imagine that your difference in how you see the steel beam vs a brain is based on how much communication you’ve understood from each. Do you think our ability to understand something or someone is a reasonable way to build a moral framework? I think there are many pit falls to that approach personally, but I get its intuitive appeal.
The reason that I stand by the moral hierarchy despite the possibility that it doesn’t exist at all is that I can only reason about morality under the assumption that consciousness exists. I don’t know how to cause pain to a non-conscious being. To give an analogy: suppose you find out that next year there’s a 50% chance that the earth will be obliterated by some cosmic event – is this a reason to stop caring about global warming? No, because in the event that the earth is spared, we still need to solve global warming.
It is nebulous, but everything is nebulous at first until we learn more. I’m just trying to separate things that seem like pretty safe bets from things I’m less sure about. Steel beams not having consciousness seems like a safe bet. If it turns out that consciousness exists and works really really weirdly and steel beams do have consciousness, there’s still no particularly good reason to believe that anything I could do to a steel beam matters to it, seeing as it lacks pain receptors.
I see. I really appreciate you taking the time to tell me how you see things. It’s been very interesting to me to read it.
I get anxious about asserting things I am not confident in. Do you ever wonder if holding onto something that you know you don’t understand could end up being harmful?
I totally get not understanding how to make a steel beam happy. No reason to put effort into that.
My personal view is that matter inherently experiences since I experience and I can’t find a magical hard line between me and rocks. Also I belive there is no smallest bit of matter, so there really isn’t a way to compare the amount of interactions a system could have. Both are infinite. Therefore I have no real way to make a logical hierarchy. So I just interact how I can with respect for whatever I understand. I don’t think elephant’s are greater than ants.
Full respect for how you see things BTW. Our differences are basically faith based assumptions about the universe.
I get not being able to find a magical hard line between A person and a rock. I do think there is actually a clear distinction: computation. Rocks are not computing anything; brains and arguably bacteria are computing things. I think consciousness is more like computation than matter – this fits with my intuition that you could upload someone’s mind onto a computer (one neuron at a time, maintaining continuity), and that simulation of you is still you.
If you think all matter experiences equally, then shouldn’t creatures with larger mass be worth more?
I agree with you on experience is computation. To me any interaction/change is computation. A ball rolling down a hill is a complex interaction with computation. Humans are a very specific and interesting reaction that feel in cool ways.
To me more matter could be worth more if more matter meant more interactions. Yet if matter is infinitely devisable then the amount of possible interactions is infinite. If matter is continuous rather than discrete then I don’t know enough about the math of infinities to compare organisms. My rudimentary knowledge says they are equivalent infinities but I’m not confident.
However, if more interactions means more worthy, then at near any scale that would benefit those with resources and those in an environment that already suits them. It would favor heat over cold. Change over stability. Anxiety over calm. Psychedelics over alcohol. Those with access to more calories. It gets really weird when applied at different scales IMO.
So in summary: I don’t think we can compare how much two systems compute. If we could, then using that comparison to assign moral worth still has a ton of very odd outputs.
Measure theory was discovered to be able to say that a rock twice as large as another rock can be accurately described as being twice as large as another rock, even if it’s not discrete. (Detractors will point to the paradox that something can be cut up and reassembled to have more measure with a finite number of cuts, but the cuts have to be infinitely complex so it doesn’t apply in reality.)
I agree a rock can be bigger than another rock. Yet 2 times infinity is not greater than infinity.
Edit: So my point is the interactions may be considered equal.
Edit: to be more pointed, measurement theory only applies to things that we know the shape of. The shape of anything in reality seems infinitely complex to me. Even if we can smooth the atoms out, there is still the EM field being perturbed by the orbiting electrons.
Measure theory can still describe the volume of fractal shapes, for instance using squeeze theorem if you can find an iterative upper and lower bound. Just because something’s surface area isn’t well-defined doesn’t mean the volume isn’t. Similarly, the coastline problem may preclude meaningfully measuring a country’s perimeter, but its (projected) area is still measurable.
Wouldn’t you agree that surface area is more important to computation and interaction than volume? Things interact at their surface. Therefore computation is infact subject to the coastline paradox?
If you actually try to measure the top surface of a country you run into the same issues as measuring the coast: infinite complexity.
Those projected volumes are practical to calculate, but must be interacted with through the surface.