Who steers who steers? A note on identifying vulnerable moral propensities by Steven Kaas

Should our present morals dictate future morals? I would think providing people with greater abilities to comprehend issues is more important than creating a rigid set of morals that supposedly would not change with time.

Also, to grow physics opportunities requires greater application of predicting consequences (business planning) so that the future includes potentially destructive technologies (warping space-time) but the human race has the tools to deduce broad consequences and make informed decisions.

Teaching Teachers to Teach Common Sense

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2045

You've been thinking about this. How do you initially propose to interactively model "steering the future" related processes?

You concept fits in with Deep Thunder (IBM weather simulation software) as a form of broadly modeled finite element analysis.

How might we model public policies, political systems, economic systems ... with physics opportunities as an overlay?

Who steers what? Humanity can only steer the tangible operations of the tangible systems of civilization. People can only make decisions, good or bad,about how the infrastructure operates as it uses up limited natural material wealth, produces immutable material waste and degrades the environment. Humanity can steer the future in a better direction if it comes to understand what the present infrastructure is doing wrong.

Hi Steven,

Thanks for a very interesting essay. Your precautionary warning of moral steering is fascinating. If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying that a moral project leading to some social outcome, which you differeniate from unplanned moral change, can have potentially unforseen effects including outcomes that alter or destroy that morality? This is a fascinating argument and I can see the wisdom in being wary as to the complex and self-referential nature of moral and social change.

If I could ask, wouldn't this also apply to non moral-projects such as technological, business, military, administrative, cultural, economic or any large human project? Moral visions (for example this essay competition?) seem to have been singled out, but isn't morality the product of many many things that are not deliberate moral actions, and wouldn't changes to any of these risk destroying a hidden moral steering process in the same way? In a way, perhaps your warning could apply as a lesson for large human projects in general? Would it also apply to slower, unplanned change, but on a larger time-scale?

If evidence pointed to a moral failure of some kind, such as an impending threat to humanity, do you have any thoughts on the point where a more 'engineered' moral vision might become worth the risk?

Your idea of risk mitigation is quite brilliant, though I am a little confused by your proposed method. My experience with social science has often suggested that isolating factors for mathematical analysis (factorisation) is extremely difficult in the realm of human decision-making such as morality. In the more productive areas of social science that have moral implications, such as experimental psychology (take the Milgram Experiment or the Prisoner Experiment), there has usually been great difficulty in objectively defining factors that can be both quantitatively analysed and also provide accurate predictions in other 'real-life' situations. So perhaps I have not correctly understood your approach (economics appears to be partial exception to this in that there is the discrete objective quantity of price already in place as a starting point).

In any case I think your message of caution in regards to moral visions and understanding their complex social outcomes is extremely thought-provoking. Thanks for your essay. I hope you have a chance to read and rate my own entry!

Above was me, was logged out while writing.

Back again,

Contributing to your concept of monitoring everything everywhere to anticipate the outcomes of complex changes.

http://vixra.org/pdf/1402.0041v1.pdf

This is the foundation of what I believe is such a system. What you propose is the type of system that would be needed to controllably warp space/time.

i.e. if you warp space/time what are the broad consequences of the proposed action?

Steven,

Interesting approach about the connections with morality; "there is a state subspace for the "morality" and a state subspace for the "nature", with partially coupled dynamics." which I see as as valid for steering the future as disaster prevention or 'physical' utopias.

I particularly agree that too often we fail to realise; "If a process which influences the future is being steered by another process, then it is the latter process that is ultimately doing the steering." I suggest it's the same with fundamental physics advancements. Many of the essays here consider symptoms not cause.

An interesting novel view. But are you going to engage in the process here and read others essays s Steven? It seems many won't bother to even read essays, and certainly not score them well, where the authors are absentee and don't respond, Most of the value of the process is then lost.

Best wishes

Peter

Dear Mr. Kaas,

Your essay was quite interesting to read and I do hope that it does well in the contest. I do have one minor quibble that I hope you do not mind me mentioning.

Reality is unique, once. Morality is not unique. Quantum Physics is not unique.

With my best regards,

Joe Fisher

Steven and Steve -

You've provided a very thoughtful contribution on the conceptual and practical difficulties posed by this FQXi essay question. I was particularly interested in your focus on moral norms as being integral to the problem of steering, something which I also raised in my essay The Tip of the Spear. You identify a key question in this passage: "there exists or could exist some entity in the world strategically trying to direct the world to some particular state..." My sense of your essay is that you do not take a position on whether there is any strategic direction inherent in the course of human civilization? If there is no a priori guiding principle, are we then left to the vicissitudes of random moral drift, or are there clear "objective" principles for which you would advocate?

Thanks - George Gantz

Hello Steven and Steve, When you're able to catch up, may I post a short, but sincere critique of your essay? I'd ask you to return the favour. Here's my policy on that. - Mike

Steven,

Your essay is much to short. I'd like to here more. You're touching an interesting topic. The very question on 'how we should ...' is a moral one. And with changed circumstances our moral will change. Would be good to know how.

I'm not sure, what you mean by factorization. Sounds like searching for the socio economic factors for certain morals. A bit like Marx did.

Weber on the other side emphasised the reverse dependency of who the moral influences the development of the socio economic factors.

Both might be right. So we would have a loop back system.

Anyhow. For addressing that important topic I think you earn a good rating.

Luca

Hello Steven & Steve ~

Your essay is an essentially cautionary one. Now that we have the fate of pretty much the entire world in our hands, caution should indeed be our watchword. Nevertheless as I read I hoped that you would make some more concrete suggestions as to the 'road' or pathways we might take.

As I say in my essay I'm convinced that not only does nature have our fate firmly under control but that it is ultimately a very desirable destiny, none other than that state of being which is in perfect harmony with the universe.

On the other hand if we humans don't understand this & as a consequence don't re-align ourselves with this most enviable of 'fates' we'll just wipe ourselves out, & tragically most of the rest of creation too, but nature will 'merely' start all over again & next time some several millions or billions of years from now it (nature) will produce a more tractable fully evolved, perfectly adapted life form, which entity will possibly know of our own checkered existence via the worldwide relics we will have left behind.

You yourselves spoke of 'natural selection' as being one of the processes steering our future. I feel that one of our worst lapses is our misunderstanding of the evolutionary process & that rightly interpreted it can be seen as our salvation - that which could steer us towards a much brighter future than most of us realise.

Hope you have time to read & rate my essay which is second in the 'submissions date' list.

Best regards,

Margriet Anne O'Regan

Steven and Steve,

If I read your essay correctly you seem to conclude that the concept of steering the future is a highly abstract proposition hard to pin down. I did too and in my essay made Einstein seem to say so. At one point you write

"In other words, it will be necessary to consider (in principle) all possible states of the observable universe, and all possible factorisations of that state space (under the appropriate formalisation); and then try to find rules to identify factorisations containing moral processes which plausibly qualify as attempting to steer the future."

That is indeed an abstract, i.e. impractical proposition! But it is laudable that you emphasise the need for moral courses of action. We may all turn to (or at least think like) robots; even so we must follow the first law of robotics: not to harm other robots - er humans.

Good luck to us all

Vladimir