From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jan 30 2006 - 15:59:49 MST
Russell Wallace wrote:
>
> I'm not a religious man, but I believe in love and life and laughter. I
> believe in beauty and truth and goodness, and I believe these things are
> worth protecting, even though neither I nor anyone else can prove it; at
> some point I, like any civilized man, must resort to belief in the
> absence of evidence; for people who don't believe in beauty produce
> ugliness; people who don't believe in truth produce falsehood; and
> people who don't believe in good produce evil.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-consequences.html
You're conflating empirical propositions with moral choices, mixing up
probability theory and decision theory. Perhaps you are confused
because English uses the same word "believe in" to indicate both your
hypotheses and your ethics.
I *choose* love and life and laughter, beauty and goodness. I also
choose truth. I strive to attain the map that reflects the territory;
to believe based solely on evidence, and to abjure any shift of credence
whatsoever which is not based on evidence. For you cannot draw an
accurate map of a city by sitting in your living room and having great
faith in your doodles. You must go outside and walk down streets, and
keep your eyes open, and look around, and make lines on paper that
correspond to what you see, and resist the temptation to draw in a few
extra lines just for fun.
P.C. Hodgell said: "That which can be destroyed by the truth should
be." I have never heard a declaration of rationality which is both
simpler and better than this. If a wire approaches, and I believe it to
be electrified, and it is *not* electrified, then the truth opposes my
fear. If a wire approaches, and I believe it is not electrified, and it
*is* electrified, then the Way opposes my calm. I wish to attain those
feelings and ethics and emotions and principles which I would aver if I
saw truly, being the person that I am. Where is the false statement I
must believe, to choose love and life and laughter?
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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