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Let's go back to deliberate killing. It is apparently OK for a soldier to kill a uniformed opponent at a distance, or even hand-to-hand, but not to execute a wounded opponent.
But it is a moral imperative to execute a wounded animal of any other species. Or he could kill a plain-clothes spy, but arbitrarily butchering other civilians is a war crime. Except if said civilians happen to be in the vicinity of a legitimate (or reasonably suspected) bombing target...... Surely, of all the possible human interactions, acts of war should be cut and dried by now? But they aren't.
QuoteEating ice cream is enjoyable. Finding true love is more enjoyable. Do you think that if you just eat enough ice cream, the accumulated pleasure could ever equal the rapture of true love?Not a universal example, by any means. There are some people who choose to eat to excess (say outside the 3σ region of the normal distribution) and end up with no friends. Some people are socially anhedonic and prefer any amount of ice cream to even a hint of love. Some people (me included) don't much like ice cream.You can base your moral standard on an arithmetic mean, or some other statistic, but the definition of immorality requires an arbitrary limit on deviation.
Eating ice cream is enjoyable. Finding true love is more enjoyable. Do you think that if you just eat enough ice cream, the accumulated pleasure could ever equal the rapture of true love?
Goodhart's Curse and meta-utility functionsAn obvious next question is "Why not just define the AI such that the AI itself regards U as an estimate of V, causing the AI's U to more closely align with V as the AI gets a more accurate empirical picture of the world?"Reply: Of course this is the obvious thing that we'd want to do. But what if we make an error in exactly how we define "treat U as an estimate of V"? Goodhart's Curse will magnify and blow up any error in this definition as well.We must distinguish:V, the true value function that is in our hearts.T, the external target that we formally told the AI to align on, where we are hoping that T really means V.U, the AI's current estimate of T or probability distribution over possible T.U will converge toward T as the AI becomes more advanced. The AI's epistemic improvements and learned experience will tend over time to eliminate a subclass of Goodhart's Curse where the current estimate of U-value has diverged upward from T-value, cases where the uncertain U-estimate was selected to be erroneously above the correct formal value T.However, Goodhart's Curse will still apply to any potential regions where T diverges upward from V, where the formal target diverges from the true value function that is in our hearts. We'd be placing immense pressure toward seeking out what we would retrospectively regard as human errors in defining the meta-rule for determining utilities. 1Goodhart's Curse and 'moral uncertainty'"Moral uncertainty" is sometimes offered as a solution source in AI alignment; if the AI has a probability distribution over utility functions, it can be risk-averse about things that might be bad. Would this not be safer than having the AI be very sure about what it ought to do?Translating this idea into the V-T-U story, we want to give the AI a formal external target T to which the AI does not currently have full access and knowledge. We are then hoping that the AI's uncertainty about T, the AI's estimate of the variance between T and U, will warn the AI away from regions where from our perspective U would be a high-variance estimate of V. In other words, we're hoping that estimated U-T uncertainty correlates well with, and is a good proxy for, actual U-V divergence.The idea would be that T is something like a supervised learning procedure from labeled examples, and the places where the current U diverges from V are things we 'forgot to tell the AI'; so the AI should notice that in these cases it has little information about T.Goodhart's Curse would then seek out any flaws or loopholes in this hoped-for correlation between estimated U-T uncertainty and real U-V divergence. Searching a very wide space of options would be liable to select on:Regions where the AI has made an epistemic error and poorly estimated the variance between U and T;Regions where the formal target T is solidly estimable to the AI, but from our own perspective the divergence from T to V is high (that is, the U-T uncertainty fails to perfectly cover all T-V divergences).The second case seems especially likely to occur in future phases where the AI is smarter and has more empirical information, and has correctly reduced its uncertainty about its formal target T. So moral uncertainty and risk aversion may not scale well to superintelligence as a means of warning the AI away from regions where we'd retrospectively judge that U/T and V had diverged.
Goodhart's Law is named after the economist Charles Goodhart. A standard formulation is "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Goodhart's original formulation is "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse when pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."For example, suppose we require banks to have '3% capital reserves' as defined some particular way. 'Capital reserves' measured that particular exact way will rapidly become a much less good indicator of the stability of a bank, as accountants fiddle with balance sheets to make them legally correspond to the highest possible level of 'capital reserves'.Decades earlier, IBM once paid its programmers per line of code produced. If you pay people per line of code produced, the "total lines of code produced" will have even less correlation with real productivity than it had previously.
Touch underlies the functioning of almost every tissue and cell type, says Patapoutian. Organisms interpret forces to understand their world, to enjoy a caress and to avoid painful stimuli. In the body, cells sense blood flowing past, air inflating the lungs and the fullness of the stomach or bladder. Hearing is based on cells in the inner ear detecting the force of sound waves.
Decades earlier, IBM once paid its programmers per line of code produced. If you pay people per line of code produced, the "total lines of code produced" will have even less correlation with real productivity than it had previously.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 14/01/2020 04:49:02Decades earlier, IBM once paid its programmers per line of code produced. If you pay people per line of code produced, the "total lines of code produced" will have even less correlation with real productivity than it had previously.A fine example. Slightly off topic from universal morality, but I've always distinguished between production and management. Production workers should get paid per unit product since they have no other choice or control. The function of management is to optimise, so managers should be paid only from a profit share. The IBM example is interesting since a line of code is not product but a component: if you can achieve the same result with less code, you have a more efficient product: the program or subroutine is the product.
Glyn Williams, Answered Aug 11, 2014I personally define intelligence as the ability to solve problems.And while we often attempt to solve problems using conscious methods. (Visualize a problem, visualize potential solutions etc) - it is clear from nature that problems can be solved without intent of any sort.Evolutionary biology has solved the problem of flight at least 4 times. Without a single conscious-style thought in its non-head.Chess playing computers can solve chess problems, by iterating though all possible moves. Again without a sense of self.Consciousness as it is usually defined, is type of intelligence that is associated with the problems of agency. If you are a being and have to do stuff - then that might be called awareness or consciousness.
IQ Range ("ratio IQ") IQ Classification175 and over Precocious150–174 Very superior125–149 Superior115–124 Very bright105–114 Bright95–104 Average85–94 Dull75–84 Borderline50–74 Morons25–49 Imbeciles0–24 Idiots
Moral rules are set to achieve some desired states in reliable manner, i.e. they produce more desired results in the long run.QuoteIn the broad and always disconcerting area of Ethics there seem to be two broad categories for identifying what makes acts ‘moral’:Deontology: Acts are moral (or not) in themselves: it’s just wrong to kill or torture someone under most circumstances, regardless of the consequences. See Kant.Consequentialism: Acts are moral according to their consequences: killing or torturing someone leads to bad results or sets bad precedents, so (sic) we should not do it.Then there is Particularism: the idea that there are no clear moral principles as such.https://charlescrawford.biz/2018/05/17/philosophy-trolley-problem-torture/Even someone who embrace Deontology recognize that there are exceptions to their judgement toward some actions, as seen in the usage of the word most, instead of all circumstances. It shows that the moral value is not inherently attached to the actions themselves. It still depends on the circumstances instead, and the consequences are part of those.All objections/criticisms to Consequentialism that I've seen so far get their points by emphasizing short term consequences which are in contrast to their long term overall consequences. If anybody know some counterexamples, please let me know.
In the broad and always disconcerting area of Ethics there seem to be two broad categories for identifying what makes acts ‘moral’:Deontology: Acts are moral (or not) in themselves: it’s just wrong to kill or torture someone under most circumstances, regardless of the consequences. See Kant.Consequentialism: Acts are moral according to their consequences: killing or torturing someone leads to bad results or sets bad precedents, so (sic) we should not do it.Then there is Particularism: the idea that there are no clear moral principles as such.
prominent moral authorities such as prophets, which presumably had higher moral standards than their peers.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 22/01/2020 09:02:51prominent moral authorities such as prophets, which presumably had higher moral standards than their peers. Illegitimate presumption! Priests, politicians, philosophers, prophets, and perverts in general, all profess to have higher moral standards than the rest of us, but so did Hitler and Trump.
presumption/prɪˈzʌm(p)ʃ(ə)n/noun1.an idea that is taken to be true on the basis of probability."underlying presumptions about human nature"
"By their deeds shall ye know them" (Matthew 7:16) is probably the least questionable line in the entire Bible.
I think that we can safely presume that many of their peers have lower moral standard.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 23/01/2020 04:21:12I think that we can safely presume that many of their peers have lower moral standard. Lower than Hitler and Trump? Really?Priests, politicians, and other parasites, assert their moral authority. "Proof by assertion" is not valid.
I was talking about moral authority instead of formal authority, which you seem to use as counter examples.
It's also worth noting that being conscious doesn't necessarily having high intelligence.
Take an ordinary map of a country, and suppose that that map is laid out on a table inside that country. There will always be a "You are Here" point on the map which represents that same point in the country.
Another key feature of the human brain is the ability to make predictions, including predictions about the resultsof its own decisions and actions. Some scientists believe that prediction is the primary function of the cerebral cortex,although the cerebellum also plays a major role in the prediction of movement.Interestingly, we are able to predict or anticipate our own decisions. Work by physiology professor BenjaminLibet at the University of California at Davis shows that neural activity to initiate an action actually occurs about athird of a second before the brain has made the decision to take the action. The implication, according to Libet, is thatthe decision is really an illusion, that "consciousness is out of the loop." The cognitive scientist and philosopher DanielDennett describes the phenomenon as follows: "The action is originally precipitated in some part of the brain, and offfly the signals to muscles, pausing en route to tell you, the conscious agent, what is going on (but like all good officialsletting you, the bumbling president, maintain the illusion that you started it all)."114A related experiment was conducted recently in which neurophysiologists electronically stimulated points in thebrain to induce particular emotional feelings. The subjects immediately came up with a rationale for experiencingthose emotions. It has been known for many years that in patients whose left and right brains are no longer connected,one side of the brain (usually the more verbal left side) will create elaborate explanations ("confabulations") foractions initiated by the other side, as if the left side were the public-relations agent for the right side.The most complex capability of the human brain—what I would regard as its cutting edge—is our emotionalintelligence. Sitting uneasily at the top of our brain's complex and interconnected hierarchy is our ability to perceiveand respond appropriately to emotion, to interact in social situations, to have a moral sense, to get the joke, and torespond emotionally to art and music, among other high-level functions. Obviously, lower-level functions ofperception and analysis feed into our brain's emotional processing, but we are beginning to understand the regions ofthe brain and even to model the specific types of neurons that handle such issues.These recent insights have been the result of our attempts to understand how human brains differ from those ofother mammals. The answer is that the differences are slight but critical, and they help us discern how the brainprocesses emotion and related feelings. One difference is that humans have a larger cortex, reflecting our strongercapability for planning, decision making, and other forms of analytic thinking. Another key distinguishing feature isthat emotionally charged situations appear to be handled by special cells called spindle cells, which are found only inhumans and some great apes. These neural cells are large, with long neural filaments called apical dendrites thatconnect extensive signals from many other brain regions. This type of "deep" interconnectedness, in which certainneurons provide connections across numerous regions, is a feature that occurs increasingly as we go up theevolutionary ladder. It is not surprising that the spindle cells, involved as they are in handling emotion and moraljudgment, would have this form of deep interconnectedness, given the complexity of our emotional reactions.What is startling, however, is how few spindle cells there are in this tiny region: only about 80,000 in the humanbrain (about 45,000 in the right hemisphere and 35,000 in the left hemisphere). This disparity appears to account forthe perception that emotional intelligence is the province of the right brain, although the disproportion is modest.Gorillas have about 16,000 of these cells, bonobos about 2,100, and chimpanzees about 1,800. Other mammals lackthem completely.
Dr. Arthur Craig of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix has recently provided a description of thearchitecture of the spindle cells.115 Inputs from the body (estimated at hundreds of megabits per second), includingnerves from the skin, muscles, organs, and other areas, stream into the upper spinal cord. These carry messages abouttouch, temperature, acid levels (for example, lactic acid in muscles), the movement of food through the gastrointestinaltract, and many other types of information. This data is processed through the brain stem and midbrain. Key cellscalled Lamina 1 neurons create a map of the body representing its current state, not unlike the displays used by flightcontrollers to track airplanes.The information then flows through a nut-size region called the posterior ventromedial nucleus (VMpo), whichapparently computes complex reactions to bodily states such as "this tastes terrible," "what a stench," or "that lighttouch is stimulating." The increasingly sophisticated information ends up at two regions of the cortex called the insula.These structures, the size of small fingers, are located on the left and right sides of the cortex. Craig describes theVMpo and the two insula regions as "a system that represents the material me."Although the mechanisms are not yet understood, these regions are critical to self-awareness and complicatedemotions. They are also much smaller in other animals. For example, the VMpo is about the size of a grain of sand inmacaque monkeys and even smaller in lower-level animals. These findings are consistent with a growing consensusthat our emotions are closely linked to areas of the brain that contain maps of the body, a view promoted by Dr.Antonio Damasio at the University of Iowa.116 They are also consistent with the view that a great deal of our thinkingis directed toward our bodies: protecting and enhancing them, as well as attending to their myriad needs and desires.Very recently yet another level of processing of what started out as sensory information from the body has beendiscovered. Data from the two insula regions goes on to a tiny area at the front of the right insula called thefrontoinsular cortex. This is the region containing the spindle cells, and tMRI scans have revealed that it is particularlyactive when a person is dealing with high-level emotions such as love, anger, sadness, and sexual desire. Situationsthat strongly activate the spindle cells include when a subject looks at her romantic partner or hears her child crying.Anthropologists believe that spindle cells made their first appearance ten to fifteen million years ago in the as-yetundiscovered common ancestor to apes and early hominids (the family of humans) and rapidly increased in numbersaround one hundred thousand years ago. Interestingly, spindle cells do not exist in newborn humans but begin toappear only at around the age of four months and increase significantly from ages one to three. Children's ability todeal with moral issues and perceive such higher-level emotions as love develop during this same time period.The spindle cells gain their power from the deep interconnectedness of their long apical dendrites with many otherbrain regions. The high-level emotions that the spindle cells process are affected, thereby, by all of our perceptual andcognitive regions. It will be difficult, therefore, to reverse engineer the exact methods of the spindle cells until we havebetter models of the many other regions to which they connect. However, it is remarkable how few neurons appear tobe exclusively involved with these emotions. We have fifty billion neurons in the cerebellum that deal with skillformation, billions in the cortex that perform the transformations for perception and rational planning, but only abouteighty thousand spindle cells dealing with high-level emotions. It is important to point out that the spindle cells are notdoing rational problem solving, which is why we don't have rational control over our responses to music or overfalling in love. The rest of the brain is heavily engaged, however, in trying to make sense of our mysterious high-levelemotions.
Spindle neurons, also called von Economo neurons (VENs), are a specific class of mammalian cortical neurons characterized by a large spindle-shaped soma (or body) gradually tapering into a single apical axon (the ramification that transmits signals) in one direction, with only a single dendrite (the ramification that receives signals) facing opposite. Other cortical neurons tend to have many dendrites, and the bipolar-shaped morphology of spindle neurons is unique here.Spindle neurons are found in two very restricted regions in the brains of hominids (humans and other great apes): the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the fronto-insular cortex (FI), but recently they have been discovered in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of humans.[1] Spindle cells are also found in the brains of a number of cetaceans,[2][3][4] African and Asian elephants,[5] and to a lesser extent in macaque monkeys[6] and raccoons.[7] The appearance of spindle neurons in distantly related clades suggests that they represent convergent evolution—specifically, as an adaptation to accommodate the increasing size of these distantly-related animals' brains.
Spindle neuron concentrationsACCThe largest number of ACC spindle neurons are found in humans, fewer in the gracile great apes, and fewest in the robust great apes. In both humans and bonobos they are often found in clusters of 3 to 6 neurons. They are found in humans, bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, some cetaceans, and elephants.[16]:245 While total quantities of ACC spindle neurons were not reported by Allman in his seminal research report (as they were in a later report describing their presence in the frontoinsular cortex, below), his team's initial analysis of the ACC layer V in hominids revealed an average of ~9 spindle neurons per section for orangutans (rare, 0.6% of section cells), ~22 for gorillas (frequent, 2.3%), ~37 for chimpanzees (abundant, 3.8%), ~68 for bonobos (abundant/clusters, 4.8%), ~89 for humans (abundant/clusters, 5.6%).[17]Fronto-insulaAll of the primates examined had more spindle cells in the fronto-insula of the right hemisphere than in the left. In contrast to the higher number of spindle cells found in the ACC of the gracile bonobos and chimpanzees, the number of fronto-insular spindle cells was far higher in the cortex of robust gorillas (no data for Orangutans was given). An adult human had 82,855 such cells, a gorilla had 16,710, a bonobo had 2,159, and a chimpanzee had a mere 1,808 – despite the fact that chimpanzees and bonobos are great apes most closely related to humans.Dorsolateral PFCVon Economo neurons have been located in the Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of humans[1] and elephants.[5] In humans they have been observed in higher concentration in Brodmann area 9 (BA9) – mostly isolated or in clusters of 2, while in Brodmann area 24 (BA24) they have been found mostly in clusters of 2-4.[1]
Clinical significanceAbnormal spindle neuron development may be linked to several psychotic disorders, typically those characterized by distortions of reality, disturbances of thought, disturbances of language, and withdrawal from social contact[citation needed]. Altered spindle neuron states have been implicated in both schizophrenia and autism, but research into these correlations remains at a very early stage. Frontotemporal dementia involves loss of mostly spindle neurons.[18] An initial study suggested that Alzheimer's disease specifically targeted von Economo neurons; this study was performed with end-stage Alzheimer brains in which cell destruction was widespread, but later it was found that Alzheimer's disease doesn't affect the spindle neurons.
The research results mentioned above support assertion that humans have higher consciousness level than other animals. They also provide some ways to rank other animals based on their capacity to experience emotions.
con·scious·ness/ˈkän(t)SHəsnəs/ nounthe state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings."she failed to regain consciousness and died two days later"Similar:awarenesswakefulnessalertnessresponsivenesssentienceOpposite:unconsciousnessthe awareness or perception of something by a person.plural noun: consciousnesses"her acute consciousness of Mike's presence"Similar:awareness ofknowledge of the existence ofalertness tosensitivity torealization ofcognizance ofmindfulness ofperception ofapprehension ofrecognition ofthe fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world."consciousness emerges from the operations of the brain"
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 22/01/2020 08:40:14It's also worth noting that being conscious doesn't necessarily having high intelligence.At least there are two things required for consciousness or self awareness of an agent.First is ability to represent itself in its internal model of its environment. As an illustration, if you put a map of your country on the floor, there will be a point on the map that is touching the actual point it refers to.QuoteTake an ordinary map of a country, and suppose that that map is laid out on a table inside that country. There will always be a "You are Here" point on the map which represents that same point in the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brouwer_fixed-point_theorem#IllustrationsIn a real conscious agents, some part of the agent's data storage must represent some property of the agent itself.The next is the existence of preference for one state over the others. One of the most common examples in animal world is pleasure over pain. Thus a map, even a dynamic one, is not conscious due to lack of preference.
2. Please show how you measured it in at least three species (a mammal, an insect, a fish)3. Is religious intolerance indicative of rank in the same sense as altruism? Please list some non-human species that exhibit religious intolerance.