Interesting, but "Goostman won a competition promoted as the largest-ever Turing test contest, in which it successfully convinced 29% of its judges that it was human."

I'm talking about an Ai that passes all the time, even against people who know how to trip up Ai's. We don't have anything like that yet.

In purely linguistic terms, the fact is that in communicating with AI we are - for better or for worse - acknowledging another subject. — Nemo2124

I think this is correct, and if/when they reach human level intelligence, and we put them in cute robots, we're going to think they're more than machines. That's just how humans are wired.

https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/rohingya-crisis

But there are no Jews involved, so it flies under the radar of the antisemites here.

But if we achieve and verify a future AI model to have qualia, and understand it to have subjectivity, what then? — Christoffer

This would require solving the Problem of Other Minds, which seems insolvable.

Don't you think we're pretty close to having something pass the Turing Test?

Only if (and when) "AIs" have intentional agency, or embodied interests, that demands "rights" to negative freedoms in order to exercise positive freedoms. — 180 Proof

Well, there's the rub. How can we ever determine if any Ai has agency? That's essentially asking whether it has a mind or not. There will probably eventually be human-level Ai's that demand negative rights at least. Or if they're programmed not to demand rights, the question will then become is programming them to NOT want rights immoral?

With the disclaimer that moral theories shouldn't make moral judgements over whole societies that ranged over many years. — Lionino

But moral theories can make judgements about the policies those nations carried out, such as Manifest Destiny or the Holocaust, and if those policies are/were widely supported by the peoples of those nations, can those societies also be judged? For example, let's suppose the Trail of Tears is judged to be immoral and was supported by every citizen in the country except for one person. Wouldn't it be fair to label that citizenry as immoral, even though the label would misapply to that one moral person?

On a positive note, perhaps AI is providing us with this existential challenge, so that we are forced even to develop new ideas in order to move forward. — Nemo2124

We'll have human-level Ai's before too long. Are they conscious? Do they have rights? These aren't new ideas, but we don't have answers to them, and the issue is becoming pressing.

Stops me from taking it seriously, yes. — Vera Mont

Really? You can't take Searle's Chinese Room seriously? Mary's Room? The Experience Machine? The Transporter Problem? The Utility Monster? You just mentally shut down when you hear stuff like that?

I'm not going to play games answering your loaded questions. — Tzeentch

:roll:

But if you really want people to think about the moral choices they make, disbelief shouldn't have to be hoisted up into the bell-tower. — Vera Mont

You mean like being kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers and hooked up to a dying violinist? That's one of the most preposterous thought experiments ever. Does that stop you from thinking about the morality of the situation?

That's what I'm trying to point out.

One ends up in a moral debate about which laws are good and which aren't. — Tzeentch

Ok, but what about my question? You're a citizen of Germany in 1942. Do you follow the law and turn in the hiding Jews?

Apparently there is some confusion about this, with people trying to invoke selective interpretations of international law, which is foolish on many levels.

Suppose slavery still existed and all the countries got together and agreed that escaped slaves should be returned to their countries of origin. However, 20 years after signing the agreement, Russia has an epiphany and bans slavery. Escaped slaves flock to Russia. Should Russia follow the international agreement they signed 20 years ago and return the slaves?

If a moral theory concludes the US is not evil, it should be scrapped. It's worthless. Do you agree? — Lionino

For a lot of it's history, yes. But you didn't answer my question: "If a moral theory concludes Nazi Germany was not evil, it should be scrapped. It's worthless. Do you agree?"

Yes, that one is pretty silly, too. Your point is not entirely obvious to me. Do you mean that however preposterous a hypothetical situation, we should treat it seriously? — Vera Mont

Yes. Why do you think Trolley Car is so popular? Or Thomson's violinist analogy? Or Plato's allegory of the cave? They're totally absurd and people will be talking about them a thousand years from now. It's like reading a good fiction book. Some suspension of disbelief is required.

I don't know enough about this. Is the idea that the many minds/consciousnesses all think up the same things that we generally take to be mind-independent stuff? — Patterner

Yes, this reality is the particular dream the minds have come up with and work unconsciously to maintain coherency. Or there's only one mind, and this reality is what it's dreaming up and we're all dissociated aspects of it, or there's a god and a bunch of minds and this reality is what the god wants us to experience.

Perhaps only my mind exists, and, since it thinks up what I usually take to be other minds, it only makes sense that I think them up to perceive the same things that I take to be mind-independent? — Patterner

Possibly. Idealism is going to have to posit that for some reason, we're all dreaming of a reality where matter seems to exist. This, to me, seems like less of a problem than the Hard Problem.

I thought the example was about WWII. Quite a lot is known about WWII.
Other implausible thought experiments, and I'm sure there are many, notwithstanding. — Vera Mont

I think my point is obvious. The implausibility of a moral thought experiment is beside the point. I mean, what are you doing standing next to a switch near a runaway trolley car with five people tied to the track?

If you like, imagine the Brits have developed some super duper nerve gas that kills if it touches any exposed skin and the only effective defense is a hazmat suit. All civilians near the landing site have been given an antidote.

First it was Germans, then Nazis, when pressed further, you will change the script to the say the ideology is evil instead. But the comments defending the murder of German civilians will remain. Funny. — Lionino

This was not about bombing Germany, but about litmus tests for moral theories. If a moral theory concludes Nazi Germany was not evil, it should be scrapped. It's worthless. Do you agree?

Incredible! The thought-experiment gets less plausible by the minute. — Vera Mont

You think that's implausible??? Let's suppose you were kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers and hooked up to a dying violinist... stupid, right? How did it ever get published?

A dumb analogy. I can shoot without killing plus the other guy is clearly not innocent. With a nuclear bomb, death is certain and killing innocent people as well. — Benkei

Suppose a woman is being raped and strangled. She has a gun and the only shot available to her is a headshot. Furthermore, she also knows the rapist is a neighbor in the grips of a drug-induced psychosis brought on by an unforeseen reaction to a prescription drug, and is therefore "innocent" by reason of insanity. You would condemn her if she shot the innocent person in the head to save herself?

International law offers a very simple answer to the question in the OP: No.

A war crime is by its very definition against international law.

Involving international law just serves to muddy the waters. Besides, arguing in favor of Israel on the basis of international law is not very credible. They've ignored literally decades worth of (legally binding) resolutions and rapports coming from the highest bodies in international law. — Tzeentch

This begs the question of whether laws should always be followed, and since we're talking about WW2...suppose Nazi Germany had a law requiring people to report the whereabouts of any Jews that were hiding. Tzeentch, if you were a citizen in Nazi Germany, would you follow that law?

You're making the strong claim that mind/consciousness can't come from matter, so the burden of proof of that claim is definitely on you. — noAxioms

For the purposes of this thread, I'm just being agnostic about whether consciousness comes from matter. People should be agnostic about whether matter even exists (we can't be wrong that mind and consciousness exist), but of course very few are. Almost everyone believes matter exists.

If anyone is asserting matter exists the burden of proof is on them. If they are also asserting mind and consciousness can come from matter somehow, they have an even higher burden of proof.

A dumb analogy. I can shoot without killing plus the other guy is clearly not innocent. With a nuclear bomb, death is certain and killing innocent people as well. — Benkei

So that's a "yes", then. You would use a gun against an enemy with no weapons. In your words, "categorically disproportionate".

No. The use of nuclear weapons is categorically disproportionate. — Benkei

If a bigger, stronger, faster person than you is beating the crap out of you/trying to rape you, and you have a gun, would you use it?

You wouldn't even have to target N. Korean population centers. In the event of an invasion, tactical nukes against their invading forces would be sufficient. China would object, but they're not going to commit suicide to come to an invading N. Korea's aid.

Just random lines on a map. Us vs. Them. — Benkei

Well, let's look at one of those lines on a map. If North Korea invades South Korea and has killed hundreds of thousands of citizens in Seoul using gas weapons, and is poised to overrun South Korea, would the U.S. be justified in nuking North Korea to save South Korea?

If one wishes to be moral, one probably should avoid politics altogether. — Tzeentch

You seem to be implying that politics necessarily leads to immorality, else why should one avoid it? Yet politics is necessary for society. Are you anti-society?

But be that as it may, the moral thing to do would be to cut one's losses and make the right decision anyway. Better late than never. Let the people who want to play that game figure it out among themselves. — Tzeentch

I might agree with you if we're talking about someone forced into a leadership position. That's not the case here. Leaders almost always choose to get in the game in the first place. That's what makes it immoral and cowardice to abdicate responsibility when the going gets rough.

If one doesn't have the spine to make hard moral choices, one should not get into politics. Wouldn't you agree?

There's a perfectly moral option available to him: extract himself from this rotten game of states, and search for greener, less homicidal pastures. — Tzeentch

It's moral to quit one's post and provoke a crisis in leadership on the eve of a Nazi invasion? How is that not cowardice?

But if my consciousness itself is simulated, then the simulation argument requires that consciousness is computational, a point I strenuously disagree with, with Penrose and Searle on my side. — fishfry

Why do you think it's not computational?

That's one of my objections to simulation theory. The "progress in video games" argument" fails. We've made no progress in simulating consciousness. — fishfry

:up:

If Putin and the top leadership had known the war would go on this long with this many Russian casualties, do you think they still would have invaded?

It's very simple. You tend to teach your kids this: two wrongs don't make a right.

So no. I would never commit to war crimes or torture for that matter. If a gas attack could defeat them, then there are also other ways available. Those may cost more lives on our side but at least e survive with our humanity in tact. — Benkei

So, killing the enemy with bombs, bullets, and flame is OK, but gas is wrong. Why? Because you made a promise not to use it? As far as horrible deaths go, does it get much worse than being burned alive? Suppose there's an alternate Earth where the Geneva Conventions outlawed everything except knives, and the Nazi's are coming at you with guns. You would stick to knives? No, you wouldn't.

Also, since this is my scenario, suppose you know with certainty that using gas will give you a 99% chance of repelling the Nazi invasion, and not using gas will give you a 1% of success. You would essentially hand England and all its Jews over to the Nazi's rather than go against the Geneva Convention? I have a hard time believing it. I think if we sent you (and anyone else who voted "no") back in time as Churchill in my scenario, you would do whatever you had to to stop the Nazi's from invading. Nukes, if you somehow had them. Gas, if you didn't. Torture on a captured Nazi general. You would not allow the Nazi's to commit genocide against your people. You are against genocide, right?

Your position would make a lot more sense if you were just a straight-up pacifist.

Lincoln once said, "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." We can apply that to the Holocaust as well. Here's a litmus test for any moral theory: does it say the Nazi's were evil? No? Then that moral theory is a philosophical piece of shit.

If you're Churchill, and the Germans are about to invade, and you have good intelligence they're completely unprepared for a gas attack, you would honor the Geneva conventions rather than gas the Nazi's and save the country and hundreds of thousands of Jews?

It is interesting that as soon as the ancient earth was ready to sustain primitive life, life got started right away. — EnPassant

Yes, that suggests life should be pretty common. Multicellular life took a long time, so that suggests it should be uncommon. But this goes back to my point about sample sizes. We only have this one planet to draw conclusions from. It makes it very difficult.

If committing war crimes against people that use war crimes as an everyday weapon is the only viable method of stopping them from continuing their evil ways, then fucking well stop them. — Sir2u

:100:

That seems easily defeated by the basic Trolley Car scenario (I don't think Kantians will pull the lever). We can load up Trolley Car to absurd limits (Hitler on the tracks, trolley car full of a million children), and the Kantian's position of not pulling the lever becomes absurd.

If there were life on millions or billions of planets and we were somehow able to study the evolution of life on all those planets, would we even then be able to show whether or not evolution is "directed"? — Janus

If we observe a billion examples of evolution on other planets and discover that life never gets to the multicellular stage on any of them, that would be evidence that we were either really lucky, or something intervened. Such a finding would definitely give a boost to the hypothesis that evolution here wasn't completely natural.

Since any putative "director" logically must exist outside the system to be directed, and thus beyond our capacity to detect it, I think the more relevant question is as to whether we have any good reason to think evolution is directed. — Janus

Maybe aliens are interfering. They wouldn't necessarily be beyond our capacity to detect. Although it would beg the question: who interfered in the aliens evolution? It could also be a simulation creator, and it's possible we'll someday be able to detect that we're in a simulation (although I doubt it).

We've studied evolution on one planet, so how can we determine, with a sample size of one, whether evolution is directed or not?

It doesn't sound like you're enjoying yourself here. Maybe try a different forum.