[extropy-chat] Moral Truths (was Collective Singularities)

[Lee Corbin]

Anders writes

> Damien Sullivan wrote:
> > For practical purposes, yeah.  I was thinking of the jump to being
> > approximately Turing-complete, though, being able to be arbitrarily
> > precise and complex in our reference to the world, including references
> > to past and future and things not present,

Just to be clear, you [Damien] are saying humans achieved Turing
completeness (well, at least as much as any error-prone physical
device can) quite a long time ago.  I agree.

> > It doesn't encourage belief in a plane above ours, though.
> 
> Yes, I have tried to bring it up around the philosophers here but with no
> luck yet

I assume that I'm correctly assuming that we have no inkling of any level
level of computability beyond the most general one we are familiar with,
and quite a bit of circumstantial evidence to suppose that no such level
exists.

> From an ethical standpoint this is relevant, since if there is nothing
> above us then  if moral is something that can be discovered or deduced
> all posthumans will be equivalent in potential understanding of morality.

Do you in fact believe that what is moral can be deduced or discovered?
If so, why?  I must say that to me, the entire notion of evolutionary-
independent morality is extremely dubious. 

> But maybe there are moral truths or decisions that can only be reached
> using quantum computing?

Well, until you persuade me that moral truths exist at all, this will
continue to sound pretty silly  :-)

Lee