tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6753820.post8009768046859172688..comments2023-10-30T04:16:25.917-04:00Comments on Sentient Developments: Guest blogger David Pearce answers your questions (part 2)Georgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13003484633933455827noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6753820.post-66187986790263135422009-05-14T20:40:00.000-04:002009-05-14T20:40:00.000-04:00My main question (not a challenge but a question, ...My main question (not a challenge but a question, a projected wonderment) is:<br /><br />What forms of caprice will substitute for suffering?<br /><br />Caprice, chance, chaos, what have you, seem essential components of conscious development.<br /><br />Strife, i.e. striving to overcome suffering, is perhaps the quintessential motivator of what human call progress.<br /><br />Superhappiness doesn't mean perfection, so we will have to continue to solve problems. While it seems easy to say we'll just associate creative problem-solving with uncommonly high levels of bliss in order to inspire us to work for solutions, one of the problems might well be BOREDOM. The ennui of God. (The Big Bang might have been God blowing His brains out from sheer desperate apathy.) <br /><br />This line of thought is based on the notion that what makes consciousness worth its cognizance is its raw ability to give a damn, period, and the possibility that bliss might make us apathetically sated. <br /><br />(Not that bliss would distract us from taking care of business as in that classic old Vonnegut story about the happiness transmitter, but that we would increasingly find it hard to care enough to bother project our imaginations into the future and deal with the inevitable Big Ass Problem coming our way like a rogue dark star or something.)<br /><br />But then, boredom might be its own answer. Boredom might cause us to back off from bliss just enough to get a little hit of misery and be thereby motivated to continue enough strife to keep the ball rolling.<br /><br />Underneath all this is this simple question: would serendipity survive superhappiness?<br /><br />But that's just me; I have an irrational security fetish for serendipity. fofr me, it is the music of the spheres, the quintessence of reality that holds everything together.<br /><br />Thanks for giving me cause to pause and wonder on such matters.Robin Morrisonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15098768488282086396noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6753820.post-59751450939889500962009-05-02T22:54:00.000-04:002009-05-02T22:54:00.000-04:00One of the more counterintuitive implications of a...<I>One of the more counterintuitive implications of applying a compassionate utilitarian ethic in an era of biotechnology is our obligation to reprogram and/or phase out predators.</I>Predatory animals are a vital part of the environment (they stop prey animals from overpopulating an ecosystem), and the natural world has been managing itself quite well for millions of years without human interference! Being squeamish about the actions of predators (such as the cat and mouse example) is no good reason to try to change them.<br /><br /><br /><I>In any case, for better or worse, by the mid-century large terrestrial mammals are unlikely to survive outside our "wildlife" reserves simply in virtue of habitat destruction. How much suffering we permit in these reserves is up to us.</I>Maybe humans should manage their own population (which is already far too high), then other animals won't be endangered.Suzannehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09614967467899550774noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6753820.post-64118626424620695672009-05-02T22:51:00.000-04:002009-05-02T22:51:00.000-04:00This comment has been removed by the author.Suzannehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09614967467899550774noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6753820.post-44631187408260168132009-04-29T23:49:00.000-04:002009-04-29T23:49:00.000-04:00You seem to hold a Chalmers-style supernatural acc...You seem to hold a Chalmers-style supernatural account of consciousness, e.g. in carbon-silicon comparisons. In Chalmers' account we just happen to exist in a world in which contingent psychophysical laws are astronomically fine-tuned so that the claims our brains make about conscious experience (e.g. that different functional states are accompanied by distinct supernatural phenomenal states) come out right.<br /><br /><br />Even if the psychological intuition that our own psychological experiences are matched with corresponding supernatural experiences is inescapable (despite the knowledge that it is essentially uncorrelated with its truth over possible worlds), you can't infer from that to experiences in other sorts of systems (an Occam's Razorish prior over contingent physical law.<br /><br />Under the Chalmers account, in the utterly overwhelming majority (consider the number of degrees of freedom) of possible worlds in which your phenomenal experiences match your phenomenal judgments, the same correspondence does not hold of other functionally different systems (including your past and future selves). Anthropic reasoning then suggests active disbelief that in our world psychological experiences other than the ones we are having right now are organizationally matched by phenomenal experience.Carlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16384464120149476437noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6753820.post-68866498977217316712009-04-29T22:12:00.000-04:002009-04-29T22:12:00.000-04:00When you talk about "phasing out predators," do yo...When you talk about "phasing out predators," do you mean phasing out the species that are currently predators? Or do you mean eliminating predation by uplifting them into, for example, post-felines? <br /><br />I understand why you say your views are closer to Singer's since you are both utilitarians, and since unlike Francione you have no objection to "using" nonhuman animals (or humans) as long as no suffering is involved. But in a crucial way your views are closer to Francione's, since Singer thinks it's fine to murder (but not torture) nonhuman animals and you do not.Leafynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6753820.post-12631055432321136582009-04-29T20:01:00.000-04:002009-04-29T20:01:00.000-04:00Michael,
I agree that the "golden rule" is a rule...Michael,<br /><br />I agree that the "golden rule" is a rule of thumb which humans created to live peacefully amongst each other during these early years. But I disagree that it is a fundamental principle of morality. I would argue that morality is about reducing suffering and possibly increasing happiness. This itself of course does not preclude the golden rule. Personally I wish an intelligence arrived on Earth a million years ago and built a better world here. As it is, natural selection has created too much unnecessary suffering.<br /><br />How is it that we evolved our own sapience? Personally I had nothing to do with the development of human or animal intelligence. One might argue that no human that has ever lived shaped the development of intelligence to any great extent. Its development is a fact of natural selection pressure based on genetic competition.<br /><br />If it is even possible to truly control the development of our intelligence at this stage, it can only be advanced by a project such as the one DP writes about. As he points out, "life in dopaminergic overdrive" is more rewarding and more likely to lead to advances in knowledge. This includes knowledge in the sciences such as physics and extends to an understanding of the nature of intelligence and what it means to be "an intelligent species".<br /><br />Frankly, predators are homicidal, genocidal, etc. and do monstrous things. I don't see what's so great about preserving the status quo. Should we make H1N1 and allow it to infect cells in vitro?James Evanshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11976370973526046791noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6753820.post-64903482166000347052009-04-29T18:43:00.000-04:002009-04-29T18:43:00.000-04:00This Abolitionist Project of yours violates the mo...This Abolitionist Project of yours violates the most basic of moral principles: the reciprocity principle or "golden rule".<br /><br />Had some other sapience with your ideas found Earth a million years ago and undertaken such a project, we would not have had the opportunity to evolve our own sapience.<br /><br />Frankly, your ideas about predators are genocidal, and using euphemisms like "phase out" is monstrous. It's somewhat perplexing that you would posit something as outlandish as "uplifting" with all its logical inconsistency over simply giving the cat vat grown mouse meat.Michael Kirklandhttp://michaelkirkland.org/blognoreply@blogger.com