adamimos1

tell us about the food!

Dearest Mr. Singer,

I have been reading some of your work over the last few weeks. I've read about a dozen of your articles and I've read your book How are We to Live. It seems to me that you end many of your altruism arguments at the first order effect. For example, in the drowning-child and related issues, you don't explicitly talk about the possible adverse effects of living in a society where parents treat their own children with no preference to children who live on the other side of the world. In your article discussing Zell Kravinsky's altruism, it is clear that Zell is an incredible altruist. It seems obvious that someone who is capable of donating $45million to charity, and did so, and is willing to donate his kidney even knowing that he stands a 1/4000 chance of death, is a rare altruist, and his life and continued existence is likely to make the world a much better place than the life of the average kidney recipient. It is also likely to be true of his children as well. Thus, it seems crazy that he should be willing to donate his kidney, or kill one of his children to save the lives of two others. You do not mention this in the article.

Do you have works that discuss the second-order effects of your ideas and I just have not yet come across them (if so, what should I read?)? If those works do not exist, have you not discussed the second-order effects because you consider them small or irrelevant, or have you not discussed them because the world is so far from being altruistic enough, that it is not even worth discussing any possible adverse effects of moving people toward altruism?

[deleted]

What do you think are the most important distinctions between machine intelligence as opposed to machine consciousness? Considering we don't have a clue as to what the neural mechanisms of consciousness are, I find it hard to imagine us building a machine consciousness anytime soon.