[ExI] [Ethics] Consequential, deontological, virtue-based, preference-based..., ...

[Jef Allbright]

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 5:20 AM, Vladimir Nesov <robotact at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 7:53 PM, Jef Allbright <jef at jefallbright.net> wrote:
>
> Jef, I heard you mention this coherence over context thing several
> times, as some kind of objective measure for improvement.

I've mentioned, I'm afraid, ad nauseam on this list and a few others,
attempting to plant merely a seed of thought with the hope that it
might take root in a few fertile minds.  I would object that it is far
from objective, and I used to overuse the word "subjective" as badly
as "increasingly" and "context." these days.  It's important to
recognize that reductionism, with all its strength, has nothing to say
about value.  An effective theory of morality must meaningfully relate
subjective value with what objectively "works" and without committing
the fallacy of "ought from is."

It may be useful here to point out the entirely subjective basis of
Bayesian inference (within the assumption of a coherent and consistent
reality.)

It may be useful here to point out that fundamentally, decision-making
never depends on absolutes, but only inequalities.


> Do you have
> this concept written up somewhere, perhaps in earlier messages, or is
> it a standard thing, and there are references?

Several years ago I said I was going to write a book on this thinking
which I call the Arrow of Morality.  I began working on the outline,
and soon realized I couldn't possible afford the time to do the job.

I'm not aware of any comprehensive source.  I've been encouraged by
hints within the answers to the Edge questions the last couple of
years that this thinking is beginning to spread.  I'm quite sure
Daniel Dennet gets it, but hasn't written on it yet.  Robert Wright
(author of Non-Zero) gets it, I think, but seems to have gone off on a
disturbingly religious tangent.  Stuart Kauffman (of Santa Fe) is
getting very close, I think, with his own slant.  Francis Heylighen
(of Principia Cybernetica) probably gets it and is looking further
down the path.

My own critical path included reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance when I was about 16 and finding in it some key insights
about value, or Quality, as Pirsig called it.  I've always been of a
strongly rationalist/scientific/engineering bent, but recognized that
science said everything about meaning but nothing of Meaning.  (Sorry
for the shorthand there.  It will probably offend some who will take
it as a mark of my lack of true appreciation for Truth.)  Shortly
afterward, I got deeply into Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics followed
by the Hofstadter's highly inspirational Godel, Escher, Bach.  Then
for nearly twentyyears my focus was almost entirely on my family and
my career in scientific instruments, while these ideas stewed on a
back burner.  Then in the 90's I came across evolutionary psychology,
heuristics and biases, and Bayes theorem, and the pieces of this
thinking fell into place for me.


> I'm very much
> interested, since I'm myself struggling to develop the notion of
> "benevolent" modification: when given a system, what changes can you
> make in it that are in general enough sense benevolent from the point
> of view of the system, when no explicit
> utility-over-all-possible-changes is given.

I think there's no more important question than that, and that we
should be satisfied (and even happy) that there can be no such
guarantee within a system of growth.  That said, while there can be no
absolutely perfect solution, we can certainly become increasingly good
at applying an increasingly intelligent probabilistic hierarchical
model of what does appear to work.  This is my main focus of
theoretical interest but I'm by no means qualified to speak with any
authority on this.

- Jef