[extropy-chat] Are ancestor simulations immoral?

[Lee Corbin]

Russell writes

> > > Please!!  To those of you in the far future who are running this
> > > simulation!  JEFFREY IS OUT OF HIS MIND, AND IS NOT SPEAKING FOR
> > > THE REST OF US!  This is a very *fine* simulation, thank you!
> > > It's just swell!  We are so grateful!
> >
> > Lee has a good point here. Suppose this is a simulation. Would you rather
> > the simulators had just left the machines running a flying windows screen
> > saver? Would you rather not have lived at all? Me, I think on the whole life
> > as it is has positive value, so I prefer it to not having lived.

What could be clearer?   :-)

Jef Albright (not Jeffrey H.) writes

> For those who have bought into Kant's Categorical Imperative, then
> that argument will seem to make sense.  "Without a doubt I would not
> want  *my* simulation shut down, given my belief that life is better
> than no life at all, therefore I am morally bound to say that runtime
> of any simulation of sentience is good."
> 
> Sounds attractive, and it's good as far as it goes, but it is
> ultimately incoherent.
> 
> With apologies to Lee, I'll use that word again, because it is
> essential:  There is no intrinsic good.  "Good" is always necessarily
> from the point of view of some subjective agent.

#!?%#&*$!  No word is *essential*.  To believe that some particular
word *is* essential, I fear, uncovers a bug in your thinking. As I've
said before, all of us here have perfectly good vocabularies, and, as
I've said elsewhere:

      Words are like ball-bearings on a skating rink:  to get
      anywhere to you have to tread very carefully and be
      especially wary of putting too much weight on any one of them.

Worse, Jef persists not only in using a phrase I don't understand
at all,  "intrinsic good", but denies that it even exists!  Now,
I guess that's easier on me than someone claiming "XYZWX" exists,
which could have serious implications, but to claim that "PMXTW"
does *not* exist leaves a scary hole, maybe, somewhere in my
ontology!   :-)

Well, how about this:  since it doesn't exist, would you mind
dropping it from your discourse?

> While its own growth is always preferable to no growth from the point
> of view of any evolved agent [ref:  Meaning of Life], from another
> point agent's point of view, the Other may or may not be a good thing.
> On the good side, the Other may provide a source of increasing
> diversity, complexity and growth, increasing opportunities for
> interaction with Self.  On the bad side, the Other may deplete
> resources and quite reasonably compete with and destroy Self.

I should have another cow about "good" here, since I have no clear
idea of what you mean by it!  But I will *try* to get in the spirit
of the thing, whatever it is.

This last statement seems to boil down to Darwinian evolution.

> The greatest assurance of good in human culture is the fact that
> we share a common evolutionary heritage... and thus we hold deeply
> and widely shared values.

Yes, that's true, we do. But many other animals are solitary
by nature.

> Increasing awareness of these increasingly shared values with
> [will] lead to increasingly effective social decision-making
> that will be increasingly seen as good.

I believe that this indeed is the way we've progressed the last
10,000 years or so, but I don't think that you've put your finger
on the actual mechanism.

For, were it just a matter of "increasing awareness", then why
just the last 10,000 years?  We had at least 80,000 years before
that to become aware of our "shared values", but nothing really
happened.

I think that "increasing awareness" of our shared values is a 
luxury that we can now afford, due to increased mastery of
nature (technological advances). At this time it's easier to
sit back in a comfortable job and make money than it is to go
seize it from the neighboring tribe; but this has been really
true only the last couple of hundred years!

> The reason this is important and why I keep bringing it up, is that
> as we are faced with increasingly diverse challenges brought by
> accelerating technological change, the old premises and heuristics
> that we may take as unquestioned or obvious truth are going to let us
> down.
> 
> - Jef
> Increasing awareness for increasing morality

Yes, the old premises and heuristics may indeed let us down.
We have to stay on our toes; all conjectures are tentative.

Lee