Why You're Wrong about Morality

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The big problem is that without objective moral realism, there is nothing that is truly wrong, just preferences. No evil and no good, and that seems fundamentally wrong. People's morality could be wrong or shaped by evolution, but it seems like to say good and evil don't exist is too much.

Morality of an action depends on affecting another conscious entity

The power of brain machine interfaces to free the mind or enslave it will open sometime this century.

Some estimates posit it early in the century, though I personally disagree on such optimism barring seminal discoveries in the field of research regards the nature of the mind, of intelligence.  As it is intelligence, the rate of thought and its complexity that limits the rate of progress.

Just as people today beam their images from little web cams out onto the Internet for others to share, many people in 2029 will beam the full stream of signals coming directly from their senses onto the web. We will then be able to experience what other people are experiencing, a la John Malkovich. Of course, the everyday lives of many such experience beamers may not be all that compelling, so there will be plenty of prerecorded experiences we can plug into it. Beyond just the five senses, these shared experiences will include emotional responses, sexual pleasure, and other mental reactions.-source KurzweilAbstract

This technology posits the streaming of real world sensations in a distributed manner.  Like virtual reality, but involving all the senses, and involving actual sensations from a real person.

I will say that it need not only be external senses, but internal emotions and thoughts could be shared too.  It is conceivable that even the sensation of desiring and willing and choosing an action could be transmitted, while the memories of the receiving person are blocked such that full synchrony occurs, with some translation, such that both individuals are experiencing everything exactly alike in practically all details, including inner sensations of the brain.

Now here's the thing, as has been stated by Kurzweil famous and infamous people could record their lives, and as I posit even their inner thoughts, emotions and sensation of free will and choice as well as the sensation of having done the actions committed.

A person experiencing the inner life of a noble person there would be no issue.  But what of an infamous person like say a dictator?   Theoretically the person would think and feel all that the dictator did, and make all the same choices, as it is a recording, while feeling they are actually making these choices freely unaware of their true self due to memory inhibition.   Yet despite making the same choices, despite being indistinguishable in act as well as in the sensory input they receive from what appears reality, indistinguishable from real, despite all this it still remains a record.

And given they are basically 'reading' a record, despite doing all the same actions and having all the same feelings and thoughts, despite this, since they have harmed no one or affected anyone but themselves, they have done nothing immoral.  It matters not what the dictator did, all the evil acts he committed, even if they themselves commit them too within a recording, their action's unlike the dictator's are moral.

Everything exactly the same, yet the truth, is it a recording?  Or is it actually affecting someone?  That makes all the difference and takes any action from ethical and moral to potentially immoral.

A record of history, in a sense, what happened, happened.  It cannot be changed.   Recording history and experiencing it, there is no issue with it.   No matter how detailed a record of an event, no matter how vivid, recording and remembering history will never be the same as the actuals events in history even if it is indistinguishable in feeling.

Comment on simulation hypothesis and godlike entities at kurzweilai

Thing is, universal computation emerges from systems implementing extremely simple rules. Equally simple starting state allows such a system to generate all possible programs and simulatable universes. Effectively everything can emerge from extremely simple initial state.

What's to say that general intelligence requires extremely complex end products of millions years of natural selection? It's pretty easy to conceive that general intelligence may emerge from extremely simple set of rules even on simple initial state. If so a godlike entity could easily emerge. This is also ignoring ideas like boltzmann brains which suggest that highly complex objects can actually emerge out of the vacuum fully formed given infinite time and space.

While on the subject of boltzmann brains, it is conceivable that a boltzmann simulation computer could pop out of the vacuum with countless virtual inhabitants or brains in vats if brains have special uncomputable properties.

That said, as a determinist, I believe there is no free will, and all that can be is simply to experience sensations including the sensation of will. Even a being in a godlike state may not actually be able to influence anything. Changing the computations you're performing, may be like changing dvds in a dvd player, you change the movie being played but the characters and events remain unchanged in each individual movie.

A pattern can exist in an infinite number of places, I just don't see how writing down a pattern in a piece of paper or in computer memory, how that changes in any way the pattern or sequence of patterns. Any instance of the pattern seems to be fundamentally changeless and atemporal, independent of any physical copies and changes made to said copies.

That;s the thing with simulations, at least digital simulation rest on patterns. The same exact simulation is probably running in an infinity of places, even if one copy shuts down, it doesn't affect the actual sequence of events. Like a dvd of say terminator 2 being burnt, that doesn't actually destroy the actual characters or story.

What happens if you take a simulation down an unlikely set of paths, say godlike interactions, well that always existed as a possibility. Like the concept of alternate timelines, where the time changes were always there, these interactions were always part of that particular path, and are probably occurring in an infinite number of places. It's like fanfiction of a particular work, it is a possible trajectory.

If digital physics is true, if we've also got determinism and patterns are essentially changeless and atemporal in nature. Then there can be no morality if such is the case, doing something in the real world would be no different from doing it in a virtual world, not only that but there would be no choice just the illusion of choice. And in the end, writing numbers or patterns down, simulating an experience in a computer, would be no different than an interactive movie, all that could be is was and will always be. No matter the actions taken within a digital simulation there would fundamentally not be anything wrong with them, as it'd be simply a transition between pre-existent atemporal patterns not the actual creation of patterns(branching and adding).- source thread