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There can be 'tragedy of the commons' where every uses a strategy that at all times maximises its individual fitness even if it eventually leads to extinction, where a cooperative strategy could have avoided extinction.

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"Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change."- Stephen Hawking

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FWIW, I tend to use the term "memetic hijacking" to refer to meme interests overriding gene interests.

Memes don't cause fertility decreases through self-delusional facades used for signalling purposes. Rather they more directly cause fertility decreases by diverting resources away from gene-reproduction and towards meme reproduction. The classic example is the chaste priest - who cares much more for his memetic descendants, than his genetic descendants.

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In the show, the Nietzscheans had spread throughout known space, reproducing rapidly until they constituted 8 percent of the overall Human population.

In practice, group and individual fitnesses are often correlated. A group of very fit individuals is itself often fit. If your group dies, then normally you and all your relatives die.

However, as you say, the Nietzscheans in the show are a bit of a "straw man".

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@bhw

"Our" society is far from the ideal: we still discriminate against LGBT people, atheists and the poor (who are only poor because of the sick economic system we have).

You cannot discuss my two assumptions separately for the murder thing, you need both of them to outlaw murder. You talk about the definition of "good reason", which is fine, but you forget that any logical mind can figure out that religious resons are not good reasons, calling on the authority of "nobility" (or wealth) is another example of what is obviously not a good reason (religion and nobility/wealth are the source of more than 90% of all discrimination).

Can you logically argue that people should put up with bad odors? Yes you can. Can you argue that being women should be disqualified for work? No, you can't. So go ahead and argue for more freedoms than we currently have, that's fine and sometimes even the right thing to do, but arguing against rights we already have is usually demonstrably illogical.

To reiterate the validity of my "assumptions": ask any person anywhere on Earth whether they want to be killed or not and whether or not they believe others should get preferential treatment and they'll answer "no" and "well, sometimes, but only when it's in accordance with my complicated belief-system (usually a form of religion, that leaders need to justify giving some people preferential treatment against the inherent will of all other members of society)". I can guarantee you that no one will say "sure, give some people preferential treatment, I don't care", instead they'll always cite some complicated belief-system to base their exceptions on.

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It depends. Individual fitness doesn't always coincide with group fitness.

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Yes, these stances don’t follow from the laws of physics but virtually every human being that has ever lived and will ever live agrees with them (and the ones that don’t are usually psychotic), so do the great apes and most likely intelligent aliens as well (these stances are pretty much an inevitable result of the evolutionary path social sentient beings had to survive).A ridiculously arrogant statement. This is to assume that modern western secular human liberal morality is somehow the FINAL, INEVITABLE, end-of-history product that can never be changed that will likely apply to ALL intelligent beings under all possible environments. And you dismiss anyone who could possibly disagree with you as "mentally abnormal" ("psychotic" as you called it).

You would agree that if a society operates under a different moral set as yours and they manage to function just fine, then you can not claim that your set is superior to theirs, or somehow they will eventually convert to yours, right? Countless of society have survived for much longer than the modern western moral set have ever existed (maybe ~40-50 years).

The seemingly invincibility of modern social movements seem to have convince people that somehow their belief is an universal inevitable tenets. Just because you have not observed anything that surpassed or will surpass your preferred moral set, does not mean nothing ever will. You realize your statements are just as stupid and short-sighted as some Christians in medieval era declaring that the Christian moral norms and their ideal lifestyle are the end-of-history and inevitable. They also think that anyone who disagreed with them as evil/unexplainable/possess by the devil/people who have not seen the light, which I think is a good parallel to your "psychotic"-label. I think we are in agreement how wrong they have proven to be, by our current world.

Also, to address your actual moral preferences that are somehow infallible.

The only assumptions I had to make in my examples were that humans don’t like being killed and don’t like other people getting preferential treatment for no good reason.

These assumptions do not naturally lead to your tenets. Humans don't like to be killed, but they might not have such a dislike to kill others. For example, in a moral set that might seem even feasible to us (let's constrain the possible moral set only to things that seems feasible to us, and not possibly appeal to anything that will ever exists), the leading morality might be that everyone should be responsible for their own defense. If you got murdered, it is your own fault. Perhaps this world might have a stronger evolutionary advantage than our own, such as much faster genetic evolution. Their society might be even more competitive than our own.

For your second assumption, "don’t like other people getting preferential treatment for no good reason". The key point lies in who defines good reason. If you get enough people to agree with you that certain traits are good reason of discrimination, then it becomes a good reason, so I doubt that this qualifies as being universal. For example, people who have bad body odor (to be even more objective, let's say what WE considered to smells bad:) faces a severe disadvantage in society. You could say they can get gels to cover their smell up, but then again there is always a second possible direction you can argue. Why is it that they should be cover themselves up, instead of getting people to accept their smell? They could decide to that their right to their own traits trumps the preferences of society. (Maybe they could even have BO pride parades :).) The point is that the selection criterions on people that we have as a society are never universal and somehow logically objective.

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"Morality should be adaptive; it should help groups survive."

If we assume that EMs are not human and that the creation of EMs will lead to the eventual total dispalcement of humanity (both propositions seem fairly reasonable), what does that tell us about what our stance towards EMs should be?

Robin, if it turns out that the EMs economy requires biological humans to go extinct because of their inefficiency, would you say that we, as a species, are justified to prevent the creation of EMs?

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@ Tim Tyler

It credits the “Nietzscheans” in Andromeda as the source of the name. You may want to mention that as the term Nietzscheanism will reference the actual philosopher for most people, as opposed to a fictional future subspecies whose backstory harkens to the same uncareful reading of Nietzsche’s philosophical works as Ayn Rand’s (much more offhanded) references to Nietzsche. If memory serves, the regular Nietzschean cast member can even be found reading a copy of Rand’s The Fountainhead as though it were a liturgical text. And even he comes to appreciate the long-term benefits of sustained eusocial cooperation.

Also, your video’s argument that Dennet’s informal surveys failed to draw out anyone openly stumping for his or her genome’s maximal propagation because of self-deluded signaling misses at least two important points.

One, memetic processors as sophisticated as humans are perfectly capable of being selfish with regards to motivations other than simple reproduction, and those selfish motives are quite capable of overriding the biological imperative to reproduce. Memes don’t need genetic relations to survive. If you ever watch one of Dennet’s full lectures you’ll see that he argues for the manifest ability of memetic imperatives to override instinctual genetic ones.

And two, if it was a façade, education and “acculturation” wouldn’t result in actual statistical drops in the cultured populations’ birthrates. Since your argument boils down to memetic imperatives acting contrary to genetic imperatives are a form of self-delusion, you may want to note that humans didn’t dominate the ecosphere by mere reproduction, and numbers of progeny are no sinecure for memetic survival. Nor are they a sinecure for genetic survival. Overpopulation is a seriously flawed survival strategy.

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We, the unwashed lay persons say don't understand your Latin,so we are in need of a pontiff. Any volunteers?

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If Andromeda's Nietzscheans went extinct, they wouldn't have been implementing their own philosophy very well.

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Moral instinct. If evolution is defined by adaption can we justly say that through our existence in this world, we have adapted and perhaps generated a moral instinct? Sociology, biology, astronomy, etc. can not determine this separately but give reverence to the entity of our being. Neurological processes equip us with reaction as do sociological processes. Life is complex and the process of morality even more so. If we can only examine one layer at a time when can we put it all together? Adaptive morality exist amongst different perceptions but instinctive morality exist in all human beings, it has to. If it does not, than we as a race of beings are screwed. Say goodbye to type one civ....

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I didn't say 'math' could solve the problems of morality, I said 'algorithmic information theory'. Whilst math alone is indeed value-free, algorithmic information theory is math + additional empirical ingredients (properties of computation).

The failure to solve moral problems is simply due to the rampant stupidly of information theorists to date, who have failed to grasp even the most basic implications of their own ideas.

I've already hinted that when the problems of ethics are re-formulated in terms of knowledge representation of goals rather states of the world, all of them fall to the power of algorithmic information theory very easily, with 'beauty' turning out to be the primary universal terminal value. Algorithmic information theory is the only 'religion' you need ;)

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Yes, taking the standard freshman philosophy textbook position is very safe and very easy. But really, please try a little harder and give some constructive criticism. The only assumptions I had to make in my examples were that humans don't like being killed and don't like other people getting preferential treatment for no good reason. Yes, these stances don't follow from the laws of physics but virtually every human being that has ever lived and will ever live agrees with them (and the ones that don't are usually psychotic), so do the great apes and most likely intelligent aliens as well (these stances are pretty much an inevitable result of the evolutionary path social sentient beings had to survive).

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Math is value free.I am no math genius,but I thought it was just internally consistent ,not able to explain externalities,just in some cases model them.

Morality on the other hand always leads to logical paradox which people then unsuccesfully try to paper over using ever more complex digressions, caveats,and tricky word play,because they think morality should be logically consistent so that it can be universal. I believe that there is morality and immorality. Math won't be able to nail it down. It is some sort of religious like thing.

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The “lossyness” of algorithms is built into them. Yes, an algorithm can be designed to erase data, but if that is the function of the algorithm, it is not the kind of losses that I was thinking about. A Turing Machine doesn't have losses. The losses in the brain are due to the substrate the brain uses (neural networks with unknown properties), not the algorithms the brain uses.

The brain is not algorithmic. There are no algorithms that are being operated to manipulate data to achieve results.

Making a pie is not using an algorithm to manipulate data. Pie ingredients are not data.

Implementing algorithms is substrate independent. Any Turing Equivalent can implement any and every algorithm that any other Turing Equivalent can implement. If human brains are algorithmic, then they should all be equivalent. They should all be equally capable of implementing the human intelligence algorithm and all humans should be equivalently intelligent. All humans are not equivalently intelligent. Human intelligence is not reducible to an algorithm operating in the human brain.

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