happiness in The Knight

Iorwerth Thomas · 21 Mar 2005, 06:39 · from 2005-March.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: iorweththomas at hotmail.com (Iorwerth Thomas)
Date: Mon Mar 21 06:39:32 2005
Subject: (urth) happiness in The Knight
In-Reply-To: <423D22D9.6090502 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BAY102-F4FA83781043BFECAF79E3B94D0 at phx.gbl>



>From: maru <marudubshinki at gmail.com>


>You wish an objective goal? Very well, I can supply one.
>
>Consider that happiness has a very strong correlation to
>the concentrations of certain chemicals in the human species
>brain, which is objectively measurable; consider further that
>there are brain wave patterns which have a very strong correlation
>with happiness, and are equally objectively measurable.  These two
>tests can be concatenated for a measurement of high confidence.
>
>Find out of the set of all physical behaivours
>which are selectable by a particular human, the action which results in a  
>global maxima
>of a scalar quantity of happiness, measured dimensionlessly, with every 
>homo sapien
>weighted equally.  This would be the ideal well-adjusted, but undoubtedly
>is computationally intractable to find, so practically it can be reduced to
>optimum behaivour findable in a certain finite time.
>This pseudo-definition give you a decent start for what 'well-adjusted' is?
>It isn't that it can't be well-defined, its that no one bothers since we 
>all know it intuitively.

*Puts on G. E. Moore mask*

'And why is maximising that in the majority of the population good?'

Iorwerth

(who really should be getting some work done instead of discussing ethics)

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net