Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2018 3:42:48 GMT
Jan 6, 2018 10:23:20 GMT @miccee said:
If an AI did exist which was charged with acting in the best interests of the welfare of all sentient organisms, there would be no rational arguments against swiftly and peacefully eradicating all sentient life.It's like if a person blind from birth declared painting useless, or a person deaf from birth declared music useless. There may be rational reasons for arguing like this; but nobody has to listen to them.
Jan 6, 2018 10:23:20 GMT @miccee said:
First, that's a strawman; and second, humans are not entirely rational. In fact, philosophers like Pascal and La Rochefoucauld have argued that the irrational side in humans is more important than the rational side.
We're not entirely rational, that's true. But if someone trespasses against you for an irrational reason, it's likely to offend you more than if you were trespassed against for a rational reason. Just because we're irrational by nature, doesn't mean that a potential rational agent (the AI) should not prevent us from creating more victims in our unreason.
Do you have any rational arguments against "might makes right"? If you don't, then you admit that people shouldn't always make rational decisions. And if you do, then you have rational arguments for the right to reproduce. Either way, your argument is pointless.
It doesn't work as an organising principle in civilised society, and if we adopted that principle in every aspect of life, then only a very small privileged few would have any rights, and we would all be at their mercy. People shouldn't make irrational decisions when it is on behalf of someone else, and that someone else cannot consent. What's your 'rational argument' for the right to enter people into a dangerous lottery without their consent? What's your 'rational argument' that someone should be freely able to make me vulnerable to harm (without any benefit to myself), just because I wasn't capable of refusing consent at the time of imposition? And what's your rational argument that you deserve a happy life more than someone who just happened to be born crippled or diseased, and spends their entire life in misery? The fact is that there wasn't any condition of fairness or desert which separates your fate from theirs.
And as I pointed out (and other posters as well): What you consider "best logic and reasoning" is nothing more than your subjective opinion. Not that there's anything wrong with it; but you shouldn't present it as more logical or rational than the opinions of goz, cupcakes, or other posters.
'The non existent do not feel deprived of existence, but the existent often feel harmed' is not a statement that can be refuted with the current scientific understanding of consciousness. So certainly the bedrock of my argument is based on sound logical and rational principles. Conversely, the suggestion that we should be able to subject people to harm just because we feel like it is psychopathic nihilism, and the bedrock of the argument for why it isn't selfish to do so makes absolutely no sense. If you're going to take this tack, you should at least expect the reproducers to admit that all of their motives are selfish ones. Also, if their only contention is 'the universe doesn't care about torture, so therefore nothing ought to be done to prevent it', then they are hypocrites if they are claiming to be moral people, given that the bedrock of modern moral codes and jurisprudence is not to harm other people, or cause them to be put in harm's way, without reason. In short, if the costs of reproduction are irrelevant, then the only alternative to that is amoral nihilism. And neither goz nor cupcakes have claimed to be, or owned up to being, amoral nihilists, which makes them hypocrites.