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Peter Gerdes's avatar

I feel like this whole discussion is a bit confused or at least ambiguous. I mean are you suggeating there is some kind of normative fact you can discover about how you should extrapolate your values to very different futures?

Sure, the kind of considerations you list are ones that I happen to find persuasive when I engage in reflection about my values. However, it doesn't seem like there is anything even slightly inconsistent about saying:

"Yes, my values are a totally contingent feature of my biology and the particular time and place I live but so what. Those are my values so I'll just apply them to very different futures w/o modification even though I know if I lived there I'd have different values"

Unless you think there are something like objective (mind independent) moral facts there isn't any truth to be discerned here...only a choice to be made.

It's no different than deciding whether you (all things considered) want to eat a piece of cake. Maybe thinking about the fact that in the same situation you'd advise a friend not to eat it moves you to decide you don't really want to eat it. But maybe it just doesn't and neither response is anymore correct than the other since there is no external standard against which your judgements are being measured.

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Berder's avatar

> "...Which pushes me to see my core more as trying to win the natural selection game."

Consider scenario A: your descendants evolved/were engineered to become small non-sapient mouse-like rodents, but these rodents were highly successful and managed to spread around the galaxy aboard spaceships of an alien race. The aliens like the rodents and will never let them go extinct for millions of years. You have no sapient descendants.

Now consider scenario B: your descendants are sapient, intelligent, but of much smaller number and biomass, and the aliens restrict your descendants to Earth, though we may suppose the descendants still don't go extinct for millions of years.

Which would you pick, A or B? The rodents in A are "winning the natural selection game" much better than the people in B. But I think you would prefer B over A. This demonstrates that you do not simply want to reproduce as much as possible, but you wish to reproduce certain *phenotypes* that you prefer over others, such as sapience.

If you grant that, it now becomes a question of not simply reproducing as much as possible, but of which phenotypes you prefer among your descendants. Is it merely sapience, or would you like your descendants to be good and high-value people in other ways as well, such as having honesty or kindness?

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