“ethics”

Philosophical experiment: everytime you hear a purpose or goal, rephrase it in terms of the underlying need or desire using the word “itch”. Report.

The above definitions after this inspiring but somewhat muddled definition of free trade. I particularly like the second, satellite definition because it safeguards the first: If you want to contort a party into a trade and still call it free, having to specify exactly what it is this party owns can make the contortion clearer—all sorts of patronizing, noble-sounding words can be used to camouflage deception, but to own is a very strong word that makes us pay attention and rightly so.

It’s claimed that government is a legitimate party in sex trade (say, prostitution) because it has to defend public morals, clients and prostitutes, but what is it that gov’t owns? Clients’ and prostitutes’ bodies and money? Public morals? Gov’t is also claimed a legitimate party to international trade (say, immigration) in the name of protecting domestic industry, but what is it that gov’t owns? Domestic industry? Employers’ or employees’ time and money?

This was a couple of weeks ago but I had to write about it because I was so happy through it: Steve Omohundro’ s wonderful talk, AI and Transhuman Morality, organized by the Sillicon Valley transhumanist meetup. I brought Mauro with me and I was very nervous because I didn’t know what to expect. A couple of days ago I had gone to an AI meetup in the same room (in the wonderful TechShop) and it had been confusing and somewhat disappointing: we watched an overly long video, had some haphazard if interesting discussion, and it all ended up abruptly without me being able to make up my mind of the strange event (where these people quacks? mad geniuses? autists? were all meetings this awkward?).

Anyway, we went and I’m happy we did because I enjoyed Steve’s wonderful two-hour presentation so much I was smiling like an idiot the whole time (at one point, I even clutched Mauro to tell him simply, “I am happy”—and it was true). As I said, it was more than two hours long but I honestly didn’t want the presentation to end, particularly when so many of the interventions where, wonder of wonders, relevant and interesting of themselves.

The presentation was divided in 2 halves. The 1st for reviewing what we know of human morality, the 2nd for contemplating what AI morality will be like. Both were fascinating and chock full of surprising, cutting-edge ideas (and book recommendations!), but it was the 2nd where I was truly overjoyed, for, you see, it was when Steve plunged into how an AI’s morality might be structured.

I was struck by how the utility function ethics he considered for AIs were exactly the kind of ethics I had chanced on one day, not long ago, when in my desire to clarify how and for what I wanted to live, I thought, wrote, and rewrote about ethics with the most honesty and rigor I could muster. Heck, we even used the same examples! You have no idea how good it felt to finally find a fellow freak who  not only understood and care about my conclusions but who had arrived to them through entirely different paths (conclusions like how ethics hinge entirely on purposes or goals and how we’re in for an ethical ride when these become much more varied and malleable than they’ve ever been before). Back in Guadalajara I talked about this all the time but no one ever really got it (or much cared).

Ah, this kind of stuff was why I came to the bay area! (Mauro liked it a lot too, saying afterwards he had felt as one should feel after going to mass—full of awe and excitement.)

From Nick Bostrom’s Golden—a fictional interview of Albert, an uploaded dog. His cheeriness and good disposition are attributed to his being a golden retriever. His wisdom I attribute to Bostrom, who’s one fascinating philosopher (don’t miss the fable of the dragon tyrant!).

What are you absolutely certain of? Of what are you sure without any conceivable doubt? What is true no matter what? What is necessarily true? Just one thing. Whatever. As long as you’re sure.

I’ve been playing the game for a while and I’ve been shocked to be unable to answer the question. Now, of course I’m familiar with Hume’s skepticism (you don’t really know an apple is going to fall, you’ve just seen all similar objects fall before at similar conditions but you don’t know) and I thought I knew how dear truth was but lately, slowly, I’ve started to realize that not even reason or logic are to be trusted.

Let’s start by quickly demolishing every statement about experience, like, say, that you are, well, you, that you broke your knee when you were fifteen, that your mother exists, that other people exist (solipsism). The usual shortcut is just to ask you how do you know it isn’t all a dream, but I prefer Russell’s more imaginative version, the extreme omphalos hypothesis: how do you know that the world wasn’t created five seconds ago, set in motion, and with fake memories? Clever, huh?

OK, that sweeps off a good big swath of possible answers. As for reason/logic, its problem is that it’s either redundant or not binding at all. But don’t 2 + 2 = 4 whatever fucking nightmare the world might turn out to be? How could time or space not exist? My gosh, can you look me in the eye, and tell me that numbers aren’t infinite? How demented do you need to be to doubt Aristotle’s syllogisms, the very rules of thought (if it’s true that humans are mortal and that Socrates is human, Socrates has to be mortal!)?

But it turns out these conceptual statements aren’t certainties either. When you probe them further, carefully, rigorously, you realize that to advance you have to start defining. If you do it conscientiously, defining or making explicit even the dumbest, most-taken-for-granted assumptions you start to realize that 2 + 2 = 4 because you said so, because you assumed your conclusion from the get-go, and your statements are true in the same empty way that a bachelor can’t be married or a car has to be an automobile too. Yes, it’s a kind of truth, but a rather measly one.

The other thing that usually happens when you probe concepts is one of the most wondrous experiences I know of, exhilarating and unnerving at the same time, dizzying. I call it sense of could. It means taking an entrenched concept and realizing it is not necessarily so, discovering your singularity is just an instance of something subtler, deeper, finding out your rose is one among thousands, seeing that what you thought fixed is just another degree of motion.

Like when Cantor found out there are many kinds of infinities, some bigger than others (!). Like when you realize logic isn’t the complete science Kant thought and open the gates to the non-classical logics. Like when you probe the very fabric of the universe by looking for primitives to space and time. More worldly, like when you question your ethics, your religion, your politics, and you find only possibility where you were looking for necessity.

Now, those two options, redundancy and non-necessity, are the ones I’ve always stumbled upon but I don’t really know that happens for every concept. Or neither do I know if you can dismiss all experience in one fell stroke. That is, I’m, of course, not even sure that you can’t be sure of anything. Would you care volunteering an answer? %(p)Or a question?)%

Hoy, en la fila para ordenar de Il Tavolo, que siempre es exquisito, habia un grupo de amigas que siendo su primera vez pidieron una enumeracion de lo que ofrecia el bistro. Ya para terminar la retahila menciona el cajero que tenian “tes de raspberry y naranja”. “Naranja y que?”, pregunta confundida una de las amigas (la mas bella, de cejas oscuras y cabellos claros, a la Kate Winslet). “Naranja y raspberry”, responde inmutable el cajero y sigue impasible durante la larga pausa en que la amiga evidencia seguir en ayunas. “Uno de naranja,” acaba respondiendo atolondrada.

Siguieron el resto de las amigas y ya para cuando toco mi turno habia encontrado en mi Blackberry (!) la traduccion de raspberry, que me evadio en ese momento. “Frambuesa!” Es lo primero que le digo al cajero. “Es raspberry en epanhol”. “Es lo mismo”, me responde enfadado. Pero no, no lo es. Porque con frambuesa te hubieras comunicado, con raspberry confundiste.

Lejos, muy lejos, estoy de ser un purista del espanhol o un paranoico anticolonialista (si acaso soy el colonialista…). Como cualquier amigo puede atestiguar y al igual que muchos de ellos, mi lengua materna es el spanglish y hoy en dia escribo (blogs, correos, messenger) casi siempre en ingles siempre que mi interlocutor lo hable aunque sea como segunda lengua. Pero trato siempre que hablo con alguien que solo habla espanhol de anotar mi spanglish natural con sinonimos o parafraseos en espanhol. No hacerlo, no intentarlo siquiera, es lo que me espanto de este cajero. Si no te preocupa que te entiendan, para que hablar?

Ahora que siguiendo esta logica del entendimiento la verdad es que no hay mas que reconocer que sino fuera por flojera, condicionamiento, y, si, pedanteria tendria todo el sentido del mundo sustituir blog por bitacora, messenger por mensajeria instantanea, marketing por mercadeo (la otra vez vi marquetin!), link por enlace y asi (en vez de etcetera, que es nomas latin para “y el resto…”). Hasta ahi todo va bien para los academicos pero porque parar ahi? Por que no es medico de ninhos el pediatra, medico de la piel el dermatologo, musculo del corazon el miocardio, aprendiz por si mismo el autodidacta, inflamacion del estomago la gastritis y asi?

Y bueno, ya siguiendo esta logica de entendimiento hasta sus ultimas consecuencias, por que no aprender Esperanto, “el buen lenguaje”?

The deep ethical crisis I’ve been immersed for some weeks now started when I realized that, ultimately, ethics is not a necessity, it’s a stand. You can’t judge without PREjudices. You are never guaranteed to be on the absolute right path, there is no such abstract thing. Your prejudices—your self—determine a range of trajectories, a train of self. And that’s that.

Our values are in practice a deeply enmeshed, deeply correlated network with no one most important end. Every value has its price, is outweighed eventually by some combination of other values. Far from urging us into hasty, thoughtless expediency, this should sober us: we concede when we have more to lose if we not—are we giving our values away at a discount?

That question is what the quote above is about. Liberty is both what civilization is and wants to be, for some of us. Terrorism has recently highlighted for us how dear its cost can be. It is not our nature to bear burdens and so we shall never stop looking for ways around them. But if it comes down to it, we wil bear freedom’s burden.

Ugh. I actually hope to use any wealth I happen to make to help the causes I believe in and we even coincide in some of those causes, but I recoil from the reasoning that led Andrew Carnegie^WP to philanthropy. A reasoning he most famously presented in his Gospel of Wealth, quoted above.

In what could charitably be attributed to a deep generational chasm (he did wrote more than 100 years ago), he’s insufferably unctuous, enlisting at every opportunity the “wise men,” “the thoughtful man,” “most of those who think,” “the best and most enlightened public sentiment,” and a further, seemingly endless cohort to his aid, substituting them for argument.

He frequently employs a fatalism I’ve always found devious, the fatalism that makes some limp effort to justify the status quo only to conclude with the friendly provision that it is all inevitable anyway.

But most depressingly, he makes scant sense and obscures rather than illuminate. Speaking in pompous, hyperbolic generalities, he never goes around to explaining just why wealth accumulation is increasing—he only talks vaguely about assembling “thousands of operatives in the factory, in the mine, and in the counting-house,” as if wealth creation were a matter of mere herding. He uses dubious anecdotal evidence —a “most worthy” man’s impromptu giving of a quarter is interpreted as “probably one of the most selfish and very worst actions of his life”— and rather idiotic “insights” into the mind of men —at one point he actually claims the rich would take in stride being confiscated, happy to brag about how much they’d been deprived of.

He seems to believe that rich men acquire their wealth by doing something extraordinarily good, necessary, and rare. Yet, he entitles them to no right to what they’ve earned. They should “provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him” and consider the leftovers society’s trust fund, theirs only lent to administer for the good of all.

It’s not all bad, I actually sympathize, from a distance, with his Randian views on charity and property, and I also agree with his Hayekian wish for evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes. Still, the essay is unusually abysmal. If this is the best tract we have arguing for private philanthropy no wonder there’s so little.

134 sayings by John McCarthy^WP (selected, presumably, by the man himself). I personally added 34 quotes to my personal quiver—a telling ratio for any quote collection, even without considering that the rest of the quotes were still excellent. It’s not only that our prejudice, tastes, and interests turned out to be surprisingly aligned (eco-bashing, optimism, Marxism-bashing…; libertarianism, existentialism…; AI, computers, technology…), the man can really turn a phrase. Check him out.

Here 8 of the very best:

Logged in to your Flickr account, click on the YOU drop down menu and select Your Account.

Select the Privacy & Permissions tab.

Click the Edit link next to What license will your photos have.

You’ll now be presented with easy instructions to both select a Creative Commons license default for your future photo uploads and to change the license of all your existing photos. Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses for you to legally let others use your work on your terms. You can, for instance, require attribution, that no derivatives of your work be made, that your work only be used for noncommercial purposes, and that if others build upon your work they release it under the same terms you did.

So this is an easy way to free your photos, on your terms; to explicitly build the creative commons from which we all build upon. Expect thank you emails—from some website that needed a photo to illustrate an obscure Italian dish, from some gal who used your photo of your city in a brochure.