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It's not clear to me that there would be a meaningful behavioral difference between an entity that feels pain/pleasure from a given behavior, vs. one that "only
by jnicholasp 10y ago
It's not clear to me that there would be a meaningful behavioral difference between an entity that feels pain/pleasure from a given behavior, vs. one that "only" registers negative/positive incentive. But, like pretty much everything in this topic, the water is murky and it's hard to tell what is reliable and what isn't.
What do you mean by the Calvinism question? Whether the real existence of human p-zombies would parallel the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and there being only a subset of humans who are the elect chosen for paradise? If so.. yeah, maybe?
- aninhumer 10y ago>What do you mean by the Calvinism question? I was kind of throwing out a vague idea/similarity without really thinking it through there... More specifically though, the Calvinist idea that the chosen people are the only ones who will ever be able to understand God. (AIUI)
- jnicholasp 10y agoAh, ok. Yeah, sort of similar: only some "chosen" people might have actual experiences attached to their existence, for better or for worse.
- aninhumer 10y agoPerhaps related is this Slate Star Codex article, which briefly speculates that a god could create a universe where net-negative-utility people are p-zombies: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/15/answer-to-job/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/15/answer-to-job/
- jnicholasp 10y agoI've read that :) And it appears like a plausible world to me, although of course I have no idea if it's the world we happen to live in. It does seem to get as close to an answer of how a good [entity] could have [created|simulated] a world with apparent evil in it, as anything I know of.