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Claude's new constitution

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude's new constitution

#261

Post by TeMPOraL »

pineaux wrote: post #248
IgorPartola wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The universe cares not what we do. The universe is so vast the entire existence of our species is a blink. We know fundamentally we can’t even establish simultaneity over distances here on earth. Best we can tell temporal causality is not even a given. The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the con…

You dont know this, this is just as provable as saying the universe cares deeply for what we do and is very invested in us. The universe has rules, rules ask for optimums, optimums can be described as ethics. Life is a concept in this universe, we are of this universe. Good and bad are not really inventions per se. You describe them as optional, invented by humans, yet all tribes and civilisations have a form of mora…

That still makes ethics a human thing, not universe thing. I believe we do have some ethical intuition hardwired into our welfare, but that's not because they transcend humans - that's just because we all run on the same brain architecture. We all share a common ancestor.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#262

Post by IgorPartola »

holoduke wrote: post #240
IgorPartola wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The universe cares not what we do. The universe is so vast the entire existence of our species is a blink. We know fundamentally we can’t even establish simultaneity over distances here on earth. Best we can tell temporal causality is not even a given. The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the con…

Maybe it does. You don't know. The fact that there is existence is as weird as the universe being able to care.

Think of it this way: if you flip a coin 20 times in a row there is a less than 1 in a million chance that every flip will come out heads. Let’s say this happens. Now repeat the experiment a million more times you will almost certainly see that this was a weird outlier and are unlikely to get a second run like that.

This is not evidence of anything except this is how the math of probabilities works. But if you only did the one experiment that got you all heads and quit there you would either believe that all coins always come out as heads or that it was some sort of divine intervention that made it so.

We exist because we can exist in this universe. We are in this earth because that’s where the conditions formed such that we could exist on this earth. If we could compare our universe to even a dozen other universes we could draw conclusions about specialness of ours. But we can’t, we simply know that ours exists and we exist in it. But so do black holes, nebulas, and Ticket Master. It just means they could, not should, must, or ought.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#263

Post by crabkin »

IgorPartola wrote: post #202
simpaticoder wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. The universe does tell us something about morality. It tells us that (large-scale) existence is a requirement to have morality. That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere. I tend to think this implies we have an obligation to live sustainably on this world, protect it from…

The universe cares not what we do. The universe is so vast the entire existence of our species is a blink. We know fundamentally we can’t even establish simultaneity over distances here on earth. Best we can tell temporal causality is not even a given. The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the con…

Well are people not part of the universe. And not all people "care about what we do" all the time but it seems most people care or have cared some of the time. Therefore the universe, seeing as it as expressing itself through its many constituents, but we can probably weigh the local conscious talking manifestations of it a bit more, does care.

"I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans." This is probably not entirely true. People developed these notions through something cultural selection, I'd hesitate to just call it a Darwinism, but nothing comes from nowhere. Collective morality is like an emergent phenomenon

Re: Claude's new constitution

#265

Post by rcoder »

simpaticoder wrote: post #196
spicyusername wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

objective truth moral absolutes I wish you much luck on linking those two. A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.

>we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. The universe does tell us something about morality. It tells us that (large-scale) existence is a requirement to have morality. That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere. I tend to think this implies we have an obligation to live sustainably on this world, protect it from…

This sounds like an excellent distillation of the will to procreate and persist, but I'm not sure it rises to the level of "morals."

Fungi adapt and expand to fit their universe. I don't believe that commonality places the same (low) burden on us to define and defend our morality.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#266

Post by jtsiskin »

simpaticoder wrote: post #196
spicyusername wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

objective truth moral absolutes I wish you much luck on linking those two. A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.

>we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. The universe does tell us something about morality. It tells us that (large-scale) existence is a requirement to have morality. That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere. I tend to think this implies we have an obligation to live sustainably on this world, protect it from…

An AI with this “universal morals” could mean an authoritarian regime which kills all dissidents, and strict eugenics. Kill off anyone with a genetic disease. Death sentence for shoplifting. Stop all work on art or games or entertainment. This isn’t really a universal moral.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#268

Post by staticassertion »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #140

As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…

Even if we make the metaphysical claim that objective morality exists, that doesn't help with the epistemic issue of knowing those goods. Moral realism can be true but that does not necessarily help us behave "good". That is exactly where ethical frameworks seek to provide answers. If moral truth were directly accessible, moral philosophy would not be necessary.

Nothing about objective morality precludes "ethical motivation" or "practical wisdom" - those are epistemic concerns. I could, for example, say that we have epistemic access to objective morality through ethical frameworks grounded in a specific virtue. Or I could deny that!

As an example, I can state that human flourishing is explicitly virtuous. But obviously I need to build a framework that maximizes human flourishing, which means making judgments about how best to achieve that.

Beyond that, I frankly don't see the big deal of "subjective" vs "objective" morality.

Let's say that I think that murder is objectively morally wrong. Let's say someone disagrees with me. I would think they're objectively incorrect. I would then try to motivate them to change their mind. Now imagine that murder is not objectively morally wrong - the situation plays out identically. I have to make the same exact case to ground why it is wrong, whether objectively or subjectively.

What Anthropic is doing in the Claude constitution is explicitly addressing the epistemic and application layer, not making a metaphysical claim about whether objective morality exists. They are not rejecting moral realism anywhere in their post, they are rejecting the idea that moral truths can be encoded as a set of explicit propositions - whether that is because such propositions don't exist, whether we don't have access to them, or whether they are not encodable, is irrelevant.

No human being, even a moral realist, sits down and lists out the potentially infinite set of "good" propositions. Humans typically (at their best!) do exactly what's proposed - they have some specific virtues, hard constraints, and normative anchors, but actual behaviors are underdetermined by them, and so they make judgments based on some sort of framework that is otherwise informed.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#269

Post by drdeca »

chairmansteve wrote: post #244
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lying is generally sinful. With the ax murderer, you could refuse to answer, say nothing, misdirect without falsehood or use evasion. Absolute morality doesn't mean rigid rules without hierarchy. God's commands have weight, and protecting life often takes precedence in Scripture. So no, I wouldn't "have to let them in". I'd protect the friend, even if it meant deception in that dire moment. It's not lying when you do…

"even if it meant deception in that dire moment". You are saying it's ok to lie in certain situations. Sounds like moral relativism to me.

That’s not what moral relativism is.

Utilitarianism, for example, is not (necessarily) relativistic, and would (for pretty much all utility functions that people propose) endorse lying in some situations.

Moral realism doesn’t mean that there are no general principles that are usually right about what is right and wrong but have some exceptions. It means that for at least some cases, there is a fact of the matter as to whether a given act is right or wrong.

It is entirely compatible with moral realism to say that lying is typically immoral, but that there are situations in which it may be morally obligatory.

Re: Claude's new constitution

#270

Post by tomrod »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #140

As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal mo…

As an existentialist, I've found it much simpler to observe that we exist, and then work to build a life of harmony and eusociality based on our evolution as primates.

Were we arthropods, perhaps I'd reconsider morality and oft-derived hierarchies from the same.

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