We solve inter-individual problems with laws, so we might be able to solve inter-tribal problems the same way providing that tribes accept to be governed by a superior level of government. Do you think your tribe would accept to be governed this way? How come we can accept that as individuals and not as a nation? How come some nations still have a veto at the UN?

Genocide is always fine for those who perpetrate them.

That solves the whole problem , if relativism is true. Otherwise, it is an uninteresting psychological observation.

To me, the interesting observation is : "How did we get here if genocide looks that fine?"

And my answer is: "Because for most of us and most of the time, we expected more profit while making friends than making enemies, which is nevertheless a selfish behavior."

Making friends is simply being part of the same group, and making enemies is being part of two different groups. No need for killings for two such groups to be enemies though, just to express a different viewpoint on the same observation.

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I don’t agree with any killing, but most of us do otherwise it would stop.

Or co-ordination problems exist.

Of course that they exist. Democracy is incidentally better at that kind of coordination than dictatorship, but it has not succeeded yet to stop killings, and again, I think it is because most of us still think that killings are unavoidable. Without that thinking, people would vote for politicians that think the same, and they would progressively cut the funds for defense instead of increasing them. If all the countries would do that, there would be no more armies after a while, and no more guns either. There would nevertheless still be countries, because without groups, thus without selfishness, I don't think that we could make any progress. The idea that selfishness is bad comes from religions, but it is contradictory: praying god for help is evidently selfish. Recognizing that point might have prevented them to kill miscreants, so it might also actually prevent groups from killing other groups. When you know that whatever you do is for yourself while still feeling altruistic all the time, you think twice before harming people.

These different political approaches only exist to deal with failings of humans. Where capitalism goes too far, you generate communists, and where communism goes too far, you generate capitalists, and they always go too far because people are bad at making judgements, tending to be repelled from one extreme to the opposite one instead of heading for the middle. If you're actually in the middle, you can end up being more hated than the people at the extremes because you have all the extremists hating you instead of only half of them.

That's a point where I can squeeze in my theory on mass. As you know, my bonded particles can't be absolutely precise, so they have to wander a bit to find the spot where they are perfectly synchronized with the other particle. They have to wander from extreme right to extreme left exactly like populations do when comes the time to chose a government. It softens the motion of particles, and I think it also softens the evolution of societies. Nobody can predict the evolution of societies anyway, so the best way is to proceed by trial and error, and that's exactly what that wandering does. To stretch the analogy to its extremes, the trial and error process is also the one scientists use to make discoveries, and the one evolution of species used to discover us. When it is impossible to know what's coming next and you need to go on, randomness is the only way out, whether you would be a universe or a particle. This way, wandering between capitalism and communism wouldn't be a mistake, it would only be a natural mechanism, and like any natural law, we should be able to exploit it, and so should an AGI.

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(Congratulation baby AGI, you did it right this time! You've put my post at the right place. :0)

Why would AGI have a problem with people forming groups? So long as they're moral, it's none of AGI's business to oppose that.

If groups like religious ones that are dedicated to morality only succeeded to be amoral, how could any other group avoid that behavior?

AGI will simply ask people to be moral, and favour those who are (in proportion to how moral they are).

To be moral, those who are part of religious groups would have to accept the law of the AGI instead of accepting their god's one, but if they did, they wouldn't be part of their groups anymore, which means that there would be no more religious groups if the AGI would convince everybody that he is right. What do you think would happen to the other kinds of groups then? A financier who thinks that money has no odor would have to give it an odor and thus stop trying to make money out of money, and if all the financiers would do that, the stock markets would disappear. A leader who thinks he is better than other leaders would have to give the power to his opponents and dissolve his party, and if all the parties would behave the same, their would be no more politics. Groups need to be selfish to exist, and an AGI would try to convince them to be altruist. There are laws that prevent companies from avoiding competition, and it is because if they did, they could enslave us. It is better that they compete even if it is a selfish behavior. If ever an AGI would succeed to prevent competition, I think he would prevent us from making groups. There would be no more wars of course since there would be only one group lead by only one AGI, but what about what is happening to communists countries? Didn't Russia fail just because it lacked competition? Isn't China slowly introducing competition in its communist system? In other words, without competition, thus selfishness, wouldn't we become apathetic?

By the way, did you notice that the forum software was making mistakes? It keeps putting my new messages in the middle of the others instead of putting them at the end. I advised the administrators a few times but I got no response. I have to hit the Reply button twice for the message to stay at the end, and to erase the other one. Also, it doesn't send me an email when a new message is posted in a thread to which I subscribed, so I have to update the page many times a day in case one has been posted.

That's how religion became so powerful, and it's also why even science is plagued by deities and worshippers as people organize themselves into cults where they back up their shared beliefs instead of trying to break them down to test them properly.
To me, what you say is the very definition of a group, so I guess that your AGI wouldn't permit us to build some, thus opposing to one of our instincts, that comes from a natural law, to replace it by its own law, that would only permit him to build groups. Do what I say and not what I do would he be forced to say. He might convince others, but I'm afraid he wouldn't convince me. I don't like to feel part of a group, and for the same reason that you gave, but I can't see how we could change that behavior if it comes from an instinct. Testing my belief is exactly what I am actually doing, but I can't avoid to believe in what I think to test it, so if ever I can't prove that I'm right, I will go on believing in a possibility forever, which is exactly what religions do. It is easy to understand that religions will never be able to prove anything, but it is less easy when it is a theory. My theory says that it would be wrong to build a group out of it, because it explains how we intrinsically resist to change, and how building groups increases exponentially that resistance, but I can't see how we could avoid it if it is intrinsic. It's like trying to avoid mass.

slaughter has repeatedly selected for those who are less moral

From the viewpoint of selfishness, slaughter has only selected for the stronger group. It may look too selfish for us, but for animals, the survival of the stronger also serves to create hierarchy, to build groups, and to eliminate genetic defects. Without hierarchy, no group could hold together during a change. It is not because the leader knows what to do that the group doesn't dissociate, he doesn't, but because it takes a leader for the group not to dissociate. Even if the leader makes a mistake, it is better for the group to follow him than risking a dissociation. Those who followed their leaders survived more often, so they transmitted their genes more often. That explains why soldiers automatically do what their leaders tell them to do, and the decision those leader take to eliminate the other group shows that they only use their intelligence to exacerbate the instinct that has permitted them to be leaders. In other words, they think they are leaders because they know better than others what to do. We use two different approaches to explain our behavior: I think you try to use psychology, which is related to human laws, whereas I try to use natural laws, those that apply equally to any existing thing. My natural law says that we are all equally selfish, whereas the human law says that some humans are more selfish than others. I know I'm selfish, but I can't admit that I would be more selfish than others otherwise I would have to feel guilty and I can't stand that feeling.

Morality comes out of greater intelligence, and when people are sufficiently enlightened, they understand that it applies across group boundaries and bans the slaughter of other groups.

In our democracies, if what you say was true, there would already be no wars. Leaders would have understood that they had to stop preparing for war to be reelected. I think that they still think that war is necessary, and they think so because they think their group is better than the others. That thinking is directly related to the law of the stronger, seasoned with a bit of intelligence, not the one that helps us to get along with others, but the one that helps us to force them to do what we want.

Hi Tag,

Genocide is always fine for those who perpetrate them. With selfishness as the only morality, I think it gets complex only when we try to take more than one viewpoint at a time. If we avoid that, morality then becomes relative: the same event looks good for some people, and bad for others. This way, there is no absolute morality as David seems to think, or like religions seemed to think also. When we think that a genocide is bad, it is just because we are on the side of those who are killed, otherwise we would agree with it. I don't agree with any killing, but most of us do otherwise it would stop. Why is it so? I think it is due to our instinct automatically inciting us to build groups, so that we can't avoid to support one faction or the other all the time. The right thing to do would be to separate the belligerents, but our instinct is too strong and the international rules too weak.

I wonder how we could move away from universal since we are part of it. The problem with wars is that countries are not yet part of a larger group that could regulate them. When two individuals fight, the law of the country permits the police to separate them, and it should be the same for countries. What actually happens is that the powerful countries prefer to support a faction instead of working together to separate them. They couldn't do that if they were ruled by a higher level of government.

If a member of your group does something immoral, it is your duty not to stand with or defend them - they have ceased to belong to your true group (the set of moral groups and individuals).

Technically, it is the duty of the law to defend the group, not of individuals, but if an individual that is part of a smaller group is attacked, the group might fight the law of the larger group it is part of. We always take the viewpoint of the group we are part of, it is a subconscious behavior impossible to avoid. If nothing is urgent, we can take a larger viewpoint, but whenever we don't have the time, we automatically take our own viewpoint. In between, we take the viewpoints of the groups we are part of. It's a selfish behavior that propagates from one scale to the other. It's because our atoms are selfish that we are. Selfishness is about resisting to change: we resist to others' ideas, a selfish behavior, simply because the atoms of our neurons resist to a change. The cause for our own resistance is our atoms' one. Without resistance, nothing could hold together.

A group should not be selfish. Every moral group should stand up for every other moral group as much as they stand up for their own - their true group is that entire set of moral groups and individuals.

Without selfishness from the individual, no group can be formed. The only way I could accept to be part of a group is while hoping for an individual advantage, but since I don't like hierarchy, I can hardly feel part of any group. I even hardly feel part of Canada since I believe Quebec should separate from it. I bet I wouldn't like to be part of Quebec anymore if we succeeded to separate from Canada. The only group I can't imagine being separated from is me. I'm absolutely selfish, but that doesn't prevent me from caring for others. I give money to charity organizations for instance, and I campaign for equality of chances or ecology. I feel better doing that than nothing, but when I analyze that feeling, I always find that I do that for myself, because I would like to live in a less selfish world. Don't think further though says the little voice in my head, because when I did, I always found that I wouldn't be satisfied if I would ever live in such a beautiful world. I'm always looking for something else, which is not a problem for me, but it becomes to be a problem if everybody does that, which is the case. It's because we are able to speculate on the future that we develop scale problems, not because we are selfish.

Being selfish is necessary to make groups, what animals can do, but they can't speculate, so they don't develop that kind of problem. No rule can stop us from speculating if it is a function of the brain. Even religion recognizes that when it tries to stop us from thinking while praying. We couldn't make war if we couldn't speculate on the future. Money would have a smell. There would be no pollution and no climate changes. Speculation is the only way to precede the changes that we face, it is the cause for our artificiality, which is a very good way to develop an easier life, but it has been so efficient that it is actually threatening that life. You said that your AGI would be able to speculate, and that he could do that better than us like everything he would do. If it was so, he would only be adding to the problems that we already have, and if it wasn't, he couldn't be as intelligent as we are if speculation is what differentiates us from animals.

If sentience is real, there must be a physical thing that experiences qualia, and that thing would necessarily be a minimal soul. Without that, there is no sentience and the role for morality is gone.

Considering that morality rules only serve to protect the group, then no individual sentience is needed, just subconscious behaviors similar to our instinctive ones. Our cells work the same: each one of them works to protect itself, and so doing, they work in common to protect me, but they don't have to be sentient to do that, just selfish.