X-Message-Number: 15972 Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 18:38:09 -0800 From: Lee Corbin <> Subject: Re: Trust In All-Powerful Lords Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote > PEOPLE ARE NOT YOUR PROPERTY. They can NEVER be your > property. Everyone owns himself, herself, or verself > and can never be owned by anyone else. > Tell me, if I suddenly revealed that I'm an Observer > construct and that you're living in a sim, would you > suddenly decide that you have no rights? I really don't think that "rights" in the abstract mean anything. Usually when someone forms a sentence "X has the right to do Y", it really means nothing more than "I approve of X being able to do Y". To answer your question, in the case that I find out that I'm living in a sim that belongs to someone else, I'd say, "Gee, I hope they keep this going, it's fun!" What would you do, take to the streets and protest? :-) When people gather to form governments, many of these issues surface, such as "Should one man be able to own another?", and "Should private property be sacrosanct?" Those schemes in the past that did not agree to respect private property floundered and failed, because it turns out that the way people are constituted, wealth creation, prosperity, and progress have never been possible without strong safeguards for private property. Now, to be sure, you are hardly trying to bring people together to form a government. You are merely telling everyone how it is going to be after some program (that you hope that you get to influence) takes over. So many people hate the idea of someone or something taking over, that as an educational or persuasive enterprise, your endeavor is pretty naive. There are many fine people who actually would restrain themselves if given an opportunity to, say, take over the world. I probably would not so restrain myself; (for one reason, if I suddenly had the ability to, then a lot of people might, and I trust myself more than I trust almost anyone else). So unlike many, I'm not clamoring against you that "you have no right to do this" (as I said, that doesn't mean very much). Moreover, if it appeared imminent that somebody's AI was going to take over the solar system, then I'd be motivated to thoroughly check out a number of them, and maybe sign up for protection with one or another, and would certainly join many extropians, cryonicists, and libertarians in throwing our support to the one (of the viable ones) that appeared to be the least intrusive. Why not support the Sysop? I just don't think that it will ever have a clear principle of what and what not to let people do. Even the United States no longer does: here, you cannot practice medicine without a license, nor can you try to fire a rocket into space, nor can you do a host of other things without express permission from the government. Soon, you won't be able to make a clone, either. So far as I can see, the infinite nosiness of the Sysop that you promote arises from a deep utilitarian belief or position, that makes it your business whether or not I give someone life or not. We need hardly talk of the future to expose the principle at work here. I am opposed to legal rights for animals, and do not believe that we actually need statutes on the books forbidding cruelty to animals (if we ever did need them), even though I base my beliefs on utilitarianism also. The reason is simply that if given freedom, so few people would seriously mistreat animals that the laws on the books cause more harm than good. In every case so far, when people band together to form governments, those peoples who establish freedom and a regard for private property do the best. A way of making our current disagreement interesting to many, would be to rephrase it as follows: If in the near future, it became clear that only one AI in the solar system would rule (for techical reasons), and we had a chance to contribute to the principles by which that government would rule, how many reading this would agree with Eliezer that people should not be allowed to run simulations (and not be allowed to torture animals), and how many would agree with me, that our government should exist only to enforce freely arrived-at contracts, and to protect private property? Lee Corbin Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15972