Al W

Quite interesting collection of quotes in the Post Scriptum, and the post itself is a good shake-up to assumptions about computability of stuff (minds, the universe). It feels directionally opposed to the reigning philosophy here on LW, at least to me, who lurks occasionally, but that's why I liked it.

P.S. The writing style is nice.

Some of these are good, not all of them

I can't help myself from questioning the example provided.

Friend #1 asked out his love interest and she said yes. It turns out, however, that another one of his friends had gone on a few dates with her and assumed they would be going to prom together! Friend #1 knew about the dates but assumed this wasn’t a big deal. To friend #2, this was a very big deal. 

Like, Friend #1 is just a bad friend?

Friend #1's mistake wasn't asking someone out; ...

Yes, it was?

...it was not recognizing that friend #2 had built (arguably unreasonable) expectations around

The most probable intuition behind the disagreements, it appears to me, is that "a person going around doing a bunch of good things and a little bit of bad-evil things is net-positive and we should keep him around even if we can't fix him, and a different person doing the same amount of evil things but not 'offsetting' them with anything is a bigger problem."

Your point could be made even stronger by including people for whom it's even harder to feel compassion, i.e., someone who is deliberately cruel, rather than just someone who is dumb and isn't trying to fix that. However, even then, I don't think your "disgust" is entirely fair.

If we accept certain uncontroversial assumptions from cognitive science and biology, do we not come to conclusions, that for every person on Earth, if you were born with their genes, into their environment, you would be them?

I'm not trying to start a free-will debate, but this seems... (read more)