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Article 5700 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: AI failures
Message-ID: <1992May16.162406.17453@news.media.mit.edu>
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Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <1992May14.234328.12094@news.media.mit.edu> <92May16.003923edt.48037@neat.cs.toronto.edu> <1992May16.125258.15430@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 16 May 1992 16:24:06 GMT
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In article <1992May16.125258.15430@news.media.mit.edu> nlc@media.mit.edu (Nick Cassimatis) writes:
>
>Well, the circularity can perhaps be escaped or made docile by the
>following considerations: if we as humans desire a happy, healthy
>existence as opposed to a wretched, miserable one, and we recognize
>that certain actions are more conducive to health and happiness than
>the other alternative, then we perform those actions.  So all of the
>harm of the circularity is bottled up into the choice of happiness
>over misery. Now this is not a hard choice to make.  So moral
>deliberation becomes both a scientific and technological endeavor.

Sorry, but it is an *extremely* hard choice to make, because you're
programmed to be biased in favor of pleasure, comforts, "happiness",
etc.  As a stoic, I have to work very hard to dislike fun, etc.  I
don;t succeed very well and, as a result a lot of my time gets wasted.
Almost as much as most other people.

You say, "health and happiness".  And we frequently see claims that
these are correlated, so that cancer patients do better if kept happy.
I presume that most "thinkers" see this as evidence of some inherent
connection, but one might speculate that if these experiments are
correct, the cause could be just one more set of sinister evolutionary
mechanisms to weed out the seeds of "rational stoicism".

.


