[jayd16]

It's pretty wild. People are punching into a calculator and hand-wringing about the morals of the output.

Obviously it's amoral. Why are we even considering it could be ethical?

[Quarrelsome]

Have you tried "kill all the poor?" [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE

[coldtea]

Obviously, why? Because it makes calculations?

You think that ultimately your brain doesn't also make calculations as its fundamental mechanism?

The architecture and substrate might be different, but they are calculations all the same.

[mrguyorama]

Brains do not "make calculations". Biological neurons do not "make calculations"

What they do is well described by a bunch of math. You've got the direction of the arrow backwards. Map, territory, etc.

[coldtea]

If what they do is "well described by a bunch of math", they're making calculations.

Unless the substrate is essential and irreducible to get the output (whic is not if what they do is "well described by a bunch of math"), then the material or process (neurons or water pipes or billiard balls or 0s and 1s in a cpu) doesn't matter.

>You've got the direction of the arrow backwards. Map, territory, etc.

The whole point is that at the level we're interested in regarding "what is the process that creates thought/consciousness", the territory is not important: the mechanism is, not the material of the mechanism.

[optimalsolver]

The coming years are gonna be rough for the human exceptionalism crowd.

[pixl97]

So what does a chemical based computer do?

[p-e-w]

> Obviously it's amoral.

That morality requires consciousness is a popular belief today, but not universal. Read Konrad Lorenz (Das sogenannte Böse) for an alternative perspective.

[coldtea]

That we have consciousness as some kind of special property, and it's not just an artifact of our brain basic lower-level calculations, is also not very convincing to begin with.

[paltor]

In a trivial sense, any special property can be incorporated into a more comprehensive rule set, which one may choose to call "physics" is one so desires; but that's just Hempel's dilemma.

To object more directly, I would say that people who call the hard problem of consciousness hard would disagree with your statement.

[coldtea]

People who call "the hard problem of consciousness hard" use circular logic (notice the two "hards" in the phrase).

People who merely call "the problem of consciousness hard" don't have some special mechanism to justify that over what we know, which is as emergent property of meat-algorithmic calcuations.

Except Penrose, who hand-waves some special physics.

[pixl97]

Luckily there are a fair number of people that reject the hard problem as an artifact of running a simulation on a chemical meat computer.

[jayd16]

You'd be hard pressed to convince me, for example, a police dog has morals. The bar is much higher than consciousness.