@regthefronkeyfarmer –
“Aristotle considered ethical behaviour as something that was to be continually improved upon.”
– I’d agree with that, and it’s definitely a central issue. I’d say it’s an emergent property of a successful system, and interestingly, the act of identifying it amplifies it – the identification is part of the successful system.
“virtuous”
– Ayn Rand said, a virtue is a policy for achieving one’s goals.
“Perfection”
– the reason I gave it the name “Perfect Compassion” is because the well being of the situation is fully maximised, i.e. within each individual, and this has to lead to it being maximised as a whole. I could have called it “maximum compassion” – that might be a good name too – but Perfection is in a class of its own, as is, maximum possible compassion. There’s something special about both those concepts.
“It allow us to be a continuous work in progress where new understandings and experiences can make us wiser and allow us to pass on the wisdom of our knowledge to others.”
– I agree, and this process is actually part of the maximising quality that “The Healing Principle” has. I think that is a fairly rubbish name, that only covers one aspect of the full biological imperative; however, I couldn’t think of a better one.
“I find very little wisdom and even less attempts at any ethical understanding of humanity in religious text.”
– if it’s approached with an enquiring open mind, it turns out to be blazingly successful, if we concentrate on the universal Jesus / Sufi aspect. By contrast, moral philosophy continues to scratch sadly around in the dust.
“Reading philosophy and engaging in dialogue is the best way forward.”
– I agree 100%, and that’s the good thing about the internet. If it wasn’t for the internet, this would never have been possible.
I just saw this, but haven’t had a chance to look at it: some people reckon that morality can be programmed into a computer, which implies a good understanding of morality.
Evolutionary Machine Ethics
Apparently this is state-of-the-art. I’ll make some observations:
1. the Prisoner’s Dilemma has nothing to do with anything in my opinion.
2. the whole thing is very “machiney” in that they have to recreate standard human instincts in a machine.
3. for humans, a completely philosophical and factual approach will do the job, because it allows for simultaneous conceptions at multiple levels, and from multiple perspectives, just like in mathematics.
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. Reason: fricken mobile pos fixes, and senior-moment brain-fart deodorization
