> An objective and grounded ethical framework that applies to all agents should be a top priority.

Sounds like a petrified civilization.

In the later Dune books, the protagonist's solution to this risk was to scatter humanity faster than any global (galactic) dictatorship could take hold. Maybe any consistent order should be considered bad?

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yifanl 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Notably, Dune is a work of fiction.

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delichon 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Isn't it wonderful how much fiction can teach us about reality by building scaffolds to stand on when examining it?

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stonemetal12 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fiction is I have a hypothesis, and since it is not easy to test I will make up the results too. Learning anything from it is a lesson in futility and confirmation bias.

	▲	d0mine 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Gedankenexperiments are valid scientific tools. Some predictions of general relativity were confirmed experimentally only 100 years after it was proposed. It is well known that Einstein used Gedankenexperiments.

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yifanl 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What lesson is there to learn here, is humanity at risk of moral homogenization? Is it practical for factions of humanity to become geographically distant enough to avoid encroachment by others?

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ridgeguy 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Fiction is modeling going by a different name.

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fellowniusmonk 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a narrow and incorrect view of morality. Correct morality might increase or decrease, call for extreme growth or shutdown, be realist or anti-realist. Saying morality necessarily petrifies is incorrect.

Most people's only exposure to claims of objective morals are through divine command so it's understandable. The core of morality has to be the same as philosophy, what is true, what is real, what are we? Then can you generate any shoulds? Qualified based on entity type or not, modal or not.

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uplifter 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I like this idea of an objective morality that can be rationally pursued by all agents. David Deutsch argues for such objectivity in morality, as well as for those other philosophical truths you mentioned, in his book The Beginning of Infinity.

But I'm just not sure they are in the same category. I have yet to see a convincing framework that can prove one moral code being better than another, and it seems like such a framework would itself be the moral code, so just trying to justify faith in itself. How does one avoid that sort of self-justifying regression?

	▲	fellowniusmonk 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not easily but ultimately very simply if you give up on defending fuzzy concepts. Faith in itself would be terrible, I can see no path where metaphysics binds machines. The chain of reasoning must be airtight and not grounded in itself. Empiricism and naturalism only, you must have an ethic that can be argued against speculatively but can't be rejected without counter empirical evidence and asymmetrical defeaters. Those are the requirements I think, not all of them but the core of it.