The measures you suggest may work as a stopgap, but the real issue is that people other than the intellectual/skills/managerial elite will be outcompeted by the automation, and two people sharing a job are as easily outcompeted as one person is.
1) The actual number of job categories for people will go down. 2) The human work remaining within remaining jobs will be devalued as automation takes over part of the responsibility/work done in those categories. As an extreme example, if medical diagnostic AI (and new bio-testing sensors) start statistically outperforming the average doctor's/specialist's diagnosis (this is already happening with some radiology analysis for tumour detection/classification), then AI will start doing some of the heavy lifting of diagnosis, and doctors will practice ALONGSIDE those AIs, or would risk malpractice lawsuits for not using statistically more reliable method. - So then what is the percentage devaluation of the doctors' work? OR reduction of number of doctors? - If for example a nurse-practicioner can do a higher percentage of primary-care diagnosis or even some specialist-diagnosis when assisted by the AI?
I'm postulating scenario 0; an automation trajectory toward nearly full automation of production and related economic activity. You say: "The costs of goods are reduced and wages increase as productivity increases." But in scenario 0, only a smattering of people's wages/profits increase as productivity increases. The few remaining workers, and the owners. Everyone else's (the vast majority's) share of the productivity increase goes to 0. So the question is whether the cost of goods goes to 0 as fast as the 99%'s income goes to 0. If not, we have an extreme social problem.
In scenario 0, on the assumption that the cost of goods does not go to 0 because there are still inputs and (automated) processes to be paid for, automation then DOES create extra money that can be passed out. Well, it's not extra money, it's the same net-profit money that was earned by production before, but now it's being earned without labor costs.
If you don't pass out a good chunk of the money earned by automated-produced goods, you get a bi-polar economy, call it the 1% and 99% exaggerated to extremes. And the money-and-goods-and-services economy tailors itself to only produce luxury goods and services for the 1%; those who can still pay. Everyone else scrabbles and/or starves in a gang-led subsistence black-market economy.
Universal Basic Income is thought by many to be a necessary response to increasing replacement of human work by automation and A.I. We could easily see scenarios not too far out where 50% of "able" adults are no longer required by the automated economy, because automation and AI are more cost-effective and possibly just outright more effective/high-quality than their labor.
A feature of UBI (the Universal part) is that it is supposed to apply to people whether or not they are supplementing UBI with employment income.
Can we say that the Bernie tax is the first attempt to reclaim from profitable automated industry the funds needed to support UBI?
If so, I think the incentive alignment is wrong with this tax. This tax is making it more expensive to KEEP employees, and cheaper to automated more. A UBI-supporting tax should instead be a tax on automation-driven productivity, and should be REDUCED when more human employees are retained.
Global warming due to CO2 emissions is a major causal factor in the excess fires.
Should have listened to the environmentalists 40 years ago when they started warning about this, instead of going with the log it, burn it, pave it crew.
You just count (A) the motivated electrons generated in the state and being exported, and (B) those generated out of state coming in, using, you know, math, and if (A) >= (B), you're good.
It's slightly more complicated than that, but that's the essence of it.
That's how Google etc. claim to be running on 100% emissions-free electricity.
Regarding paying: Because of people and leadership that did not take action on this 40 years ago when the need was known, you're probably going to be paying a lot more for drought-ravaged food, water, and for fire damage year over year. Just lump it into a massive carbon fee and be done with it.
-Compressed air storage -Pumped hydro -Molten salt heat storage -Central hydrogen storage and fuel cell facility + 2x wind farms and PV to compensate for energy inefficiency -High voltage DC transmission north-south and east west from offshore and onshore windfarms and from PV in the central desert states for pre-dawn power -Geothermal
For a given programming language, any convention (such as camel case for variables and methods, and uppercase with _ for constants) that has become an overwhelmingly consensus-accepted best practice in the language, should be enforced by the (next major version of the) language.
One example. Languages should probably enforce the presence of a method header comment. If you still choose to make it a useless comment, you're just advertising your complete misfit / incompetent status.
Language made it easier to do the right thing and harder to do a bad practice.
Same goes for meaningful indenting enforcement. It's a good thing, because it doesn't hurt, and encourages comprehensible code.
The freedom you NEED as a programmer is freedom to - organize the order of your ifs, loops, and subroutine calls, - choose names, although that should be limited to a limited character set and probably enforced case and/or underscore conventions. - create arbitrary hierarchical data structures.
You actually NEED no other freedoms than that. And the fewer extra freedoms you get, the less you will completely screw up the experience of others trying to read and understand your code.
I can see perhaps adding some greek symbols to ascii for variable names, function names, but allowing full unicode is a disaster of a design decision since it permits all kinds of deliberately obscured code.
Languages need to be about well-chosen constraints to guide creativity, not about absolute freedom. Libertarian languages are a bad idea, since code is maintained and extended collectively.
Unicode for string data, yes, of course. But entity names in the language, no, no, no.
Even if Google does release a censored search engine in China, the chances are very good that the Chinese Government censors, who presumably tell Google what to censor, won't be able to keep up with the flood of information, phrased this way or that way, that is directly or indirectly about all kinds of uncomfortable issues and topics for the Chinese government.
A long time ago, Freeman Dyson said the way to defeat the Soviet Union was to give them PCs (I think he actually said Macs). So that people would be able to gather and pass information easily, without the government in the loop.
Eventually, more knowledge in the hands of more of the population will presumeably reduce totalitarian government power, as independent ideas flourish like weeds.
I don't think you know what a "thought experiment" is.
It doesn't convey an attitude of support or abhorrence of the scenario. It justs asks you to contemplate the scenario as a hypothetical, to elucidate some contemplation of implications in the interests of intellectual exploration.
You come across as one who equates mentioning something with supporting it. That is dumb and a stupifying level of political correctness. Not to mention unjustly insulting. Stop with the completely off-side rhetorical techniques already.
Also, don't call "subjective truth" truth. Call it perception. Or interpretation, or whatever. Once we accept subjective truth as actual truth, the concept of truth loses pretty much all meaning, at least when discussing the actual world.
The notion of "subjective truth" is only useful in psychological counselling and the like, where the issue is the person's mind. "Subjective truth" may have "personal validity" to the perceiver, but it doesn't necessarily say much or anything about the collectively analysable and consensus-measurable external world. Schitzophrenics have their own "subjective truth" too. It's very valid to them, but tells us not much about reality. Most of us are also deluded, or irretrievable biased, when we come up with our "subjective truths". I think a major struggle of post-post-modern philosophy will be to figure out how to recover more properties of objective truth. A truth that any otherwise unbiased observer (including the simplest "observer"; an interacting particle) would have to agree on if it were following principled perception, representation, modelling methods.
Your last paragraph gets to one of the hearts of the problem for sure (no pun intended:-).
Moral rules have to work effectively both for the local immediate situation, and for the stability of the society (and its abilty to maintain morality through collective education and persuasion), longer term. Those morality customs which can do both will likely be more prevalent. And like you say, lottery involintary organ donation; a form of unpredictable, fatal, trust violation toward random individuals for the sake of a group of others would not cause intelligent-agent individuals to be comfortable so stay in such a society. So such a convention is unlikely to persist. It seems to be true that some societies sacrificed individuals for the collective "good" as offerings to gods, but luckily, for whatever reason, including lack of evidence of effectiveness in that case, no doubt, those practices seem to have faded out. In some cases it was through overrun of those societies with ones without that practice and condemning that practice as immoral. But let's not get too specific.
Some practices, like true non-kin altruism, are best understood I think, if we realize that moral decisions (conscious or innate) need to serve individuals for (the dice-roll statistics of their encounters with danger or benefit) over their entire lifetime (to breeding and child-rearing age, anyway.) Not just serve the most survival probability in one incident. Sometimes those goals conflict.
A clear example is alarm calls of birds, squirrels etc, which alert their unrelated neigbours to the danger of a predator, while risking the neck of the whistler. If we considered only the one incident, the altruistic act makes no sense. But if we consider the lifetime risk statistics of living in a protective society of whistlers, vs risking a tiny extra chance of being killed by whistling and attracting predator attention in the current incident, whistling works better.
This sort of stochastic math probably helps explain why moral rules are more prevalent if they work well (or not too badly) in the current situation, but also work really well at improving life-probability and living energy-efficiency, statistically, over the whole natural or reproductive lifespan. How can an individual be thinking about the statistics, in the exigent situation, you say? They don't have to. Evolution of the individual's tendencies to action, and also evolved societal memes such as education and shunning, will do a lot of the thinking for them, leaving them only to follow only their gut instinct or their partly inculcated conscience.
Roles are roles of parts (simple or semi-autonomous) in co-operative or hierarchical persistent complex systems.
They describe constraints on the function/behaviour/position of the part in the whole.
They are part of the information pattern (organizational schema) that organizes the matter and energy in the system in a way that makes the system "function", perhaps in ITS role in a higher-level system. But a prerequisite for any organized/self-organized system to do any externally "useful" role or function is for that system to have form and function for its own stable persistence. So a role of a part may most often get its meaning from the contribution that the part, as long as it stays formed, positioned, and functioning as described by that role constraint, makes to the self-continuation orchestrated function of the next-level up "whole" system.
Roles are aspects of (constraints on) the form and position and function of sub-parts of systems in the operation and continuation of the system.
Living systems exist and persist because of (some essential, adaptive aspects of) the particular way that they are.
The intelligent-agent and intelligent-agent-society subtypes of living systems exist and persist because of the particular way that they are, including the individual mental functioning, their concepts and attitudes towards things and actions, and the collective information and culture that they develop and maintain in their evolution.
Example of one moral philosophical principle, and its origin:
If we ask "why do people value continuing to live their life, despite being able to conceive of many forms of suicide" (Camus's question): (or a generalization: why do people think pro-social, unselfish, sometimes altruistic behaviour is moral)
We should see that, by evolution, those intelligent-agent creatures which have such an attitude (of desire and determination for survival) and act accordingly are the ones that are here (partly because of that attitude and disposition), among all the possible alternative types of potential survivors, who didn't make it, either by chance, or because of flaws in their physical, mental, or attitudinal states.
Same, in a more subtle way, for pro-social, altruistic moral attitudes. They turn out, when widely practiced in a society, to be adaptive for that society type-and-instance's longevity, and for its members' survival. (Compared to societies with less pro-social behaviour and less morality to support such.)
That is how "ought" derives from "is". The adaptive conceptions, attitudes, and personal and social behaviours are the ones that survive longer and more probablty, along with their developers and adherents (societies and individuals.)
That's why we see similar moral principles, at the general level, across many societies. OF COURSE the specializations of those rules are contingent on particulars of the environment, configuration, and experience of each society, but there are clear persistent general threads (themes) to the rules that survive over many generations.
Interestingly, your moral system does not allow you to be a political leader or general or sergeant or whatever who calls for their troops to enter mortal danger to save the society as a whole in a just and necessary defensive war.
Now sure, if everyone were like you (or Jesus), that would all work out, so maybe it is the best ideal principle. What about in the real world.
In one sense, we could say it is a subjective illusion of the leader that THEIR society's membership is more worthy of protection than the "other side's" people and interests are.
I tend to see it all as "self-organized matter-pattern instances making fight/flight/merge decisions" with an overall aim to increase their safe perimeter by patterning more matter and energy around them to be more hospitable to their pattern's continuation, or even, to become part of their pattern's continuation. Evolution in action, in a Borg-like assimilation way. Organized, stable complex embodied-information patterns (individual organisms and societies) compete to maximize opportunities and minimize threats in their environment to their continuation, including the ultimate strategy of patterning MORE of the surrounding environment to be part of their or a larger amalgamated stable pattern. Certainly, that's what Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Victoria; those great or terrible empire builders and path clearers etc etc were up to, whether they knew it or not." How the right moral rules might emerge out of all of that is an interesting puzzle indeed.
Thanks for that insight. That is indeed trolley-problem-like.
It's the variant of the trolley problem that distinguishes between:
Do you pull the track-switch lever to kill one person on one track vs the 10 people on the other track,
and
Do you push the fat man off the bridge over the train tracks to stop the train that would otherwise kill the 10 people.
Anyone have a suggestion how we might quantify our moral intuitions on this question?
Let's assume to make the problem sharper that we know with certainty what will happen in either case.
Is it something about the limits to rights of one person to interfere with another's welfare, in general. So do we just have different moral rules conflicting with each other, with different applicability strengths in the different situations?
Or how else, by what logic and math and model of the situations, could we teach an AI robot about this precisely?
Although any particular complex state is implausible, nevertheless if multiple differences are possible at all, then at least one configuration of these asymmetries can occur. It may be that differences/asymmetries, from that point on, constrain and shape each other in a "convergent evolution" sense, but that is just another hypothesis. My point is that if you are claiming that one particular complex configuration exists, then you are either saying "that's the one that randomly came to be" and there, you are fighting its improbability. That's possible, but extremely unlikely. Or you need to explain why constraints and interactions and properties would have led to something of that sort of configuration, in the later evolution of the universe closer to now.
In other words, this particular opined "ought" "is" because it is evolutionarily adaptive to both the thinker that it "ought", and thus adaptive to that form/content of "ought".
That's how you get "ought" from "is", or vice versa.
The scientific study of moral/ethical systems is a subset of study of self-organizing systems and emergent behaviour and emergent stable complexity (e.g. life) in open thermodynamic systems.
The role of moral/ethical systems is as embodied information patterns that constrain the behaviour of elements of the emerged stable/metastable complex systems, with the effect of the behaviour constraint being energy efficiency of survival of the emerged stable complex matter/energy patterns, through the general mechanism of allowing organized co-operation of generally independent-action-capable sub-parts.
We do agree that moral principles evolved as memes, don't we? If not, I can't talk with you much, since we are on different planets of worldview and discourse. The most likely evolved moral principles are ones which serve to promote human welfare, individual and collective, by governing behaviour, and notably social behaviour.
Conflict between intelligent agent organisms is detrimental to their survival probability, since it uses up some of the energy they acquire and could put to productive purposes of thriving, not to mention the increased risk of physical harm and death through conflict. Small-scale conflict between individuals and small groups is like friction acting on survival effort of individuals. Also, conflict and attendant lack of trust in society lead to inability to get inefficiencies of specialization of labour. Societies with internal conflict and lack of trust are unable to create co-operative economic processes. Co-operative economic processes that emerge in an environment of trust or bad-behaviour constraint, lead to increased energy efficiency of survival maintenance activities. Bottom line is societal cohesion is adaptive, both for society's memes (such as moral rules and norms), and for individual adherents to the memes; society members.
Moral principles are either completely arbitrary, in which case their longevity needs to be explained, or they are evolved and collectively promulgated and enforced memes which essentially encourage pro-social behaviour, or in other words, encourage upsizing of the entity size that tries to co-operate to survive. This leads directly to decreased energy expenditure per unit of survival probability per individual organism in the society. This in a context in which memes persist when a) their operation in society leads to survival benefits for the individual adherents to the meme or subjects of its operation, and b) because of these benefits to individuals, their is a derived survival advantage for the meme (moral ruleset in this case) itself.
That, my friend, is moral science, as an extension of evolutionary theory.
Hard to test in the real world, admittedly, but should be subject to demonstration and validation by computer simulation.
Slashdot Mirror
The measures you suggest may work as a stopgap, but the real issue is that people other than the intellectual/skills/managerial elite will be outcompeted by the automation, and two people sharing a job are as easily outcompeted as one person is.
1) The actual number of job categories for people will go down.
2) The human work remaining within remaining jobs will be devalued as automation takes over part of the responsibility/work done in those categories.
As an extreme example, if medical diagnostic AI (and new bio-testing sensors) start statistically outperforming the average doctor's/specialist's diagnosis (this is already happening with some radiology analysis for tumour detection/classification), then AI will start doing some of the heavy lifting of diagnosis, and doctors will practice ALONGSIDE those AIs, or would risk malpractice lawsuits for not using statistically more reliable method.
- So then what is the percentage devaluation of the doctors' work? OR reduction of number of doctors?
- If for example a nurse-practicioner can do a higher percentage of primary-care diagnosis or even some specialist-diagnosis when assisted by the AI?
I'm postulating scenario 0; an automation trajectory toward nearly full automation of production and related economic activity.
You say: "The costs of goods are reduced and wages increase as productivity increases."
But in scenario 0, only a smattering of people's wages/profits increase as productivity increases. The few remaining workers, and the owners.
Everyone else's (the vast majority's) share of the productivity increase goes to 0.
So the question is whether the cost of goods goes to 0 as fast as the 99%'s income goes to 0.
If not, we have an extreme social problem.
In scenario 0, on the assumption that the cost of goods does not go to 0 because there are still inputs and (automated) processes to be paid for, automation then DOES create extra money that can be passed out. Well, it's not extra money, it's the same net-profit money that was earned by production before, but now it's being earned without labor costs.
If you don't pass out a good chunk of the money earned by automated-produced goods, you get a bi-polar economy, call it the 1% and 99% exaggerated to extremes. And the money-and-goods-and-services economy tailors itself to only produce luxury goods and services for the 1%; those who can still pay. Everyone else scrabbles and/or starves in a gang-led subsistence black-market economy.
Universal Basic Income is thought by many to be a necessary response to increasing replacement of human work by automation and A.I.
We could easily see scenarios not too far out where 50% of "able" adults are no longer required by the automated economy, because automation and AI are more cost-effective and possibly just outright more effective/high-quality than their labor.
A feature of UBI (the Universal part) is that it is supposed to apply to people whether or not they are supplementing UBI with employment income.
Can we say that the Bernie tax is the first attempt to reclaim from profitable automated industry the funds needed to support UBI?
If so, I think the incentive alignment is wrong with this tax. This tax is making it more expensive to KEEP employees, and cheaper to automated more.
A UBI-supporting tax should instead be a tax on automation-driven productivity, and should be REDUCED when more human employees are retained.
Maybe 25% is already zero-emission.
Global warming due to CO2 emissions is a major causal factor in the excess fires.
Should have listened to the environmentalists 40 years ago when they started warning about this, instead of going with the log it, burn it, pave it crew.
You just count (A) the motivated electrons generated in the state and being exported,
and (B) those generated out of state coming in, using, you know, math, and if (A) >= (B), you're good.
It's slightly more complicated than that, but that's the essence of it.
That's how Google etc. claim to be running on 100% emissions-free electricity.
Regarding paying:
Because of people and leadership that did not take action on this 40 years ago when the need was known, you're probably going to be paying a lot more for drought-ravaged food, water, and for fire damage year over year. Just lump it into a massive carbon fee and be done with it.
-Compressed air storage
-Pumped hydro
-Molten salt heat storage
-Central hydrogen storage and fuel cell facility + 2x wind farms and PV to compensate for energy inefficiency
-High voltage DC transmission north-south and east west from offshore and onshore windfarms and from PV in the central desert states for pre-dawn power
-Geothermal
Cryptocurrency is going to be the implementation mechanism for global universal-basic-income, once the AIs and robots take most of the jobs.
Welcome to non-labor-based neosocialism.
For a given programming language, any convention (such as camel case for variables and methods, and uppercase with _ for constants) that has become an overwhelmingly consensus-accepted best practice in the language, should be enforced by the (next major version of the) language.
and try to limit the egregiousness of bad code.
One example. Languages should probably enforce the presence of a method header comment.
If you still choose to make it a useless comment, you're just advertising your complete misfit / incompetent status.
Language made it easier to do the right thing and harder to do a bad practice.
Same goes for meaningful indenting enforcement. It's a good thing, because it doesn't hurt, and encourages comprehensible code.
The freedom you NEED as a programmer is freedom to
- organize the order of your ifs, loops, and subroutine calls,
- choose names, although that should be limited to a limited character set and probably enforced case and/or underscore conventions.
- create arbitrary hierarchical data structures.
You actually NEED no other freedoms than that.
And the fewer extra freedoms you get, the less you will completely screw up the experience of others trying to read and understand your code.
I can see perhaps adding some greek symbols to ascii for variable names, function names, but allowing full unicode is a disaster of a design decision since it permits all kinds of deliberately obscured code.
Languages need to be about well-chosen constraints to guide creativity, not about absolute freedom. Libertarian languages are a bad idea, since code is maintained and extended collectively.
Unicode for string data, yes, of course. But entity names in the language, no, no, no.
Even if Google does release a censored search engine in China, the chances are very good that the Chinese Government censors, who presumably tell Google what to censor, won't be able to keep up with the flood of information, phrased this way or that way, that is directly or indirectly about all kinds of uncomfortable issues and topics for the Chinese government.
A long time ago, Freeman Dyson said the way to defeat the Soviet Union was to give them PCs (I think he actually said Macs).
So that people would be able to gather and pass information easily, without the government in the loop.
Eventually, more knowledge in the hands of more of the population will presumeably reduce totalitarian government power, as independent ideas flourish like weeds.
I don't think you know what a "thought experiment" is.
It doesn't convey an attitude of support or abhorrence of the scenario. It justs asks you to contemplate the scenario as a hypothetical, to elucidate some contemplation of implications in the interests of intellectual exploration.
You come across as one who equates mentioning something with supporting it. That is dumb and a stupifying level of political correctness. Not to mention unjustly insulting. Stop with the completely off-side rhetorical techniques already.
Also, don't call "subjective truth" truth. Call it perception. Or interpretation, or whatever. Once we accept subjective truth as actual truth, the concept of truth loses pretty much all meaning, at least when discussing the actual world.
The notion of "subjective truth" is only useful in psychological counselling and the like, where the issue is the person's mind. "Subjective truth" may have "personal validity" to the perceiver, but it doesn't necessarily say much or anything about the collectively analysable and consensus-measurable external world. Schitzophrenics have their own "subjective truth" too. It's very valid to them, but tells us not much about reality. Most of us are also deluded, or irretrievable biased, when we come up with our "subjective truths". I think a major struggle of post-post-modern philosophy will be to figure out how to recover more properties of objective truth. A truth that any otherwise unbiased observer (including the simplest "observer"; an interacting particle) would have to agree on if it were following principled perception, representation, modelling methods.
Your last paragraph gets to one of the hearts of the problem for sure (no pun intended :-).
Moral rules have to work effectively both for the local immediate situation, and for the stability of the society (and its abilty to maintain morality through collective education and persuasion), longer term. Those morality customs which can do both will likely be more prevalent.
And like you say, lottery involintary organ donation; a form of unpredictable, fatal, trust violation toward random individuals for the sake of a group of others would not cause intelligent-agent individuals to be comfortable so stay in such a society. So such a convention is unlikely to persist. It seems to be true that some societies sacrificed individuals for the collective "good" as offerings to gods, but luckily, for whatever reason, including lack of evidence of effectiveness in that case, no doubt, those practices seem to have faded out. In some cases it was through overrun of those societies with ones without that practice and condemning that practice as immoral. But let's not get too specific.
Some practices, like true non-kin altruism, are best understood I think, if we realize that moral decisions (conscious or innate) need to serve individuals for (the dice-roll statistics of their encounters with danger or benefit) over their entire lifetime (to breeding and child-rearing age, anyway.) Not just serve the most survival probability in one incident. Sometimes those goals conflict.
A clear example is alarm calls of birds, squirrels etc, which alert their unrelated neigbours to the danger of a predator, while risking the neck of the whistler.
If we considered only the one incident, the altruistic act makes no sense. But if we consider the lifetime risk statistics of living in a protective society of whistlers, vs risking a tiny extra chance of being killed by whistling and attracting predator attention in the current incident, whistling works better.
This sort of stochastic math probably helps explain why moral rules are more prevalent if they work well (or not too badly) in the current situation, but also work really well at improving life-probability and living energy-efficiency, statistically, over the whole natural or reproductive lifespan. How can an individual be thinking about the statistics, in the exigent situation, you say? They don't have to. Evolution of the individual's tendencies to action, and also evolved societal memes such as education and shunning, will do a lot of the thinking for them, leaving them only to follow only their gut instinct or their partly inculcated conscience.
The universe is entropic (tending toward higher entropy - lower organization)
Stuff breaks down.
You don't need to plan to have things fail. They will fail by default.
All you need is insufficient planning, budget, and execution of how to make them last unexpectedly long.
Roles are roles of parts (simple or semi-autonomous) in co-operative or hierarchical persistent complex systems.
They describe constraints on the function/behaviour/position of the part in the whole.
They are part of the information pattern (organizational schema) that organizes the matter and energy in the system in a way that makes the system "function", perhaps in ITS role in a higher-level system. But a prerequisite for any organized/self-organized system to do any externally "useful" role or function is for that system to have form and function for its own stable persistence. So a role of a part may most often get its meaning from the contribution that the part, as long as it stays formed, positioned, and functioning as described by that role constraint, makes to the self-continuation orchestrated function of the next-level up "whole" system.
Roles are aspects of (constraints on) the form and position and function of sub-parts of systems in the operation and continuation of the system.
Living systems exist and persist because of (some essential, adaptive aspects of) the particular way that they are.
The intelligent-agent and intelligent-agent-society subtypes of living systems exist and persist because of the particular way that they are, including the individual mental functioning, their concepts and attitudes towards things and actions, and the collective information and culture that they develop and maintain in their evolution.
Example of one moral philosophical principle, and its origin:
If we ask "why do people value continuing to live their life, despite being able to conceive of many forms of suicide" (Camus's question): (or a generalization: why do people think pro-social, unselfish, sometimes altruistic behaviour is moral)
We should see that, by evolution, those intelligent-agent creatures which have such an attitude (of desire and determination for survival) and act accordingly are the ones that are here (partly because of that attitude and disposition), among all the possible alternative types of potential survivors, who didn't make it, either by chance, or because of flaws in their physical, mental, or attitudinal states.
Same, in a more subtle way, for pro-social, altruistic moral attitudes. They turn out, when widely practiced in a society, to be adaptive for that society type-and-instance's longevity, and for its members' survival. (Compared to societies with less pro-social behaviour and less morality to support such.)
That is how "ought" derives from "is". The adaptive conceptions, attitudes, and personal and social behaviours are the ones that survive longer and more probablty, along with their developers and adherents (societies and individuals.)
That's why we see similar moral principles, at the general level, across many societies. OF COURSE the specializations of those rules are contingent on particulars of the environment, configuration, and experience of each society, but there are clear persistent general threads (themes) to the rules that survive over many generations.
Touche.
Interestingly, your moral system does not allow you to be a political leader or general or sergeant or whatever who calls for their troops to enter mortal danger to save the society as a whole in a just and necessary defensive war.
Now sure, if everyone were like you (or Jesus), that would all work out, so maybe it is the best ideal principle. What about in the real world.
In one sense, we could say it is a subjective illusion of the leader that THEIR society's membership is more worthy of protection than the "other side's" people and interests are.
I tend to see it all as "self-organized matter-pattern instances making fight/flight/merge decisions" with an overall aim to increase their safe perimeter by patterning more matter and energy around them to be more hospitable to their pattern's continuation, or even, to become part of their pattern's continuation. Evolution in action, in a Borg-like assimilation way.
Organized, stable complex embodied-information patterns (individual organisms and societies) compete to maximize opportunities and minimize threats in their environment to their continuation, including the ultimate strategy of patterning MORE of the surrounding environment to be part of their or a larger amalgamated stable pattern. Certainly, that's what Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Victoria; those great or terrible empire builders and path clearers etc etc were up to, whether they knew it or not." How the right moral rules might emerge out of all of that is an interesting puzzle indeed.
Thanks for that insight. That is indeed trolley-problem-like.
It's the variant of the trolley problem that distinguishes between:
Do you pull the track-switch lever to kill one person on one track vs the 10 people on the other track,
and
Do you push the fat man off the bridge over the train tracks to stop the train that would otherwise kill the 10 people.
Anyone have a suggestion how we might quantify our moral intuitions on this question?
Let's assume to make the problem sharper that we know with certainty what will happen in either case.
Is it something about the limits to rights of one person to interfere with another's welfare, in general. So do we just have different moral rules conflicting with each other, with different applicability strengths in the different situations?
Or how else, by what logic and math and model of the situations, could we teach an AI robot about this precisely?
That hypothesis may be plausible. Here's why.
Although any particular complex state is implausible, nevertheless if multiple differences are possible at all, then at least one configuration of these asymmetries can occur. It may be that differences/asymmetries, from that point on, constrain and shape each other in a "convergent evolution" sense, but that is just another hypothesis. My point is that if you are claiming that one particular complex configuration exists, then you are either saying "that's the one that randomly came to be" and there, you are fighting its improbability. That's possible, but extremely unlikely.
Or you need to explain why constraints and interactions and properties would have led to something of that sort of configuration, in the later evolution of the universe closer to now.
In other words, this particular opined "ought" "is" because it is evolutionarily adaptive to both the thinker that it "ought", and thus adaptive to that form/content of "ought".
That's how you get "ought" from "is", or vice versa.
The scientific study of moral/ethical systems is a subset of study of self-organizing systems and emergent behaviour and emergent stable complexity (e.g. life) in open thermodynamic systems.
The role of moral/ethical systems is as embodied information patterns that constrain the behaviour of elements of the emerged stable/metastable complex systems, with the effect of the behaviour constraint being energy efficiency of survival of the emerged stable complex matter/energy patterns, through the general mechanism of allowing organized co-operation of generally independent-action-capable sub-parts.
I'm saying:
We do agree that moral principles evolved as memes, don't we? If not, I can't talk with you much, since we are on different planets of worldview and discourse. The most likely evolved moral principles are ones which serve to promote human welfare, individual and collective, by governing behaviour, and notably social behaviour.
Conflict between intelligent agent organisms is detrimental to their survival probability, since it uses up some of the energy they acquire and could put to productive purposes of thriving, not to mention the increased risk of physical harm and death through conflict. Small-scale conflict between individuals and small groups is like friction acting on survival effort of individuals. Also, conflict and attendant lack of trust in society lead to inability to get inefficiencies of specialization of labour. Societies with internal conflict and lack of trust are unable to create co-operative economic processes. Co-operative economic processes that emerge in an environment of trust or bad-behaviour constraint, lead to increased energy efficiency of survival maintenance activities.
Bottom line is societal cohesion is adaptive, both for society's memes (such as moral rules and norms), and for individual adherents to the memes; society members.
Moral principles are either completely arbitrary, in which case their longevity needs to be explained, or they are evolved and collectively promulgated and enforced memes which essentially encourage pro-social behaviour, or in other words, encourage upsizing of the entity size that tries to co-operate to survive. This leads directly to decreased energy expenditure per unit of survival probability per individual organism in the society. This in a context in which memes persist when a) their operation in society leads to survival benefits for the individual adherents to the meme or subjects of its operation, and b) because of these benefits to individuals, their is a derived survival advantage for the meme (moral ruleset in this case) itself.
That, my friend, is moral science, as an extension of evolutionary theory.
Hard to test in the real world, admittedly, but should be subject to demonstration and validation by computer simulation.
Complex physical phenomena that are not consistent with known causal processes are a priori extremely improbable.
Simply by the combinatorics of the number of ways atoms and energy can arrange themselves, compared to the one way you are saying they did.
This applies to orbiting teapots and divine miracles both.