Like so many of my peers, I’ve been afflicted by the bad habit of arguing about utilitarianism. I’m generally a supporter of utilitarianism, but I think it needs to be tempered by all sorts of meta/game-theoretic issues and I worry a lot about what’s the right thing to do when we can create new utility-having entities.
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Consciousness will slip through our fingers
Can technology explain subjective experience?
I guess life makes sense: For some reason there’s a universe and that universe has lots of atoms bouncing around and sometimes they bounce into patterns that copy themselves and then those patterns go to war for billions of years...
Reasons after nonpersons
AI will make some old-school philosophical thought experiments seem much more relevant
The year is 2029 and you’ve finally done it. You’ve written the first AI program that is so good—so damn good—that no one can deny that it thinks and has subjective experiences. Surprisingly, the world doesn’t end. Everything seems fine....
The hard problem of feelings
Or: Why you like burrritos
Here's something weird. At least, I think it's weird. The hard problem of consciousness is why it feels like something to be alive. Physics does a good job of explaining everything that happens in terms of fields and atoms and...
Why it's bad to kill Grandma
Commonsense morality is an OK-ish utilitarianism
1. In college, I had a friend who was into debate competitions. One weekend, the debate club funded him to go to a nearby city for a tournament. When I asked him how it went, he said: Oh, I didn’t...
Reasons and Persons: The case against the self
A review of the thought experiments in Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit (part three)
You want to go to Mars. There’s a machine that will scan and destroy all the matter in your body, send the locations of every atom to Mars, and then recreate it. You worry: Does this transport you, or does...
Reasons and Persons: Watch theories eat themselves
A review of the thought experiments in Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit (part one)
You live with a group of utterly rational and self-interested people on an island, gathering coconuts to survive. Tired of working so hard, Alice builds a machine and implants it in her brain. This machine leaves her rational except when...
Are ethics all a lie?
If we only believe in ethics because of evolution, does that mean ethics are a lie?
Some people claim ethics aren’t practical. Others make a grim philosophical argument:
Pragmatic reasons to believe in formal ethics
Some situations where formal ethics are really needed for practical problems in real life.
Here’s a “low-brow” take on ethics that’s worth taking seriously:
It's hard to use utility maximization to justify creating new sentient beings
The ethical theory of Utilitarianism applies to many situations, but runs into problems when choices might create new beings.
Cedric and Bertrand want to see a movie. Bertrand wants to see Muscled Duded Blow Stuff Up. Cedric wants to see Quiet Remembrances: Time as Allegory. There’s also Middlebrow Space Fantasy. They are rational but not selfish - they care...