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The ignorance of normative realism bot - Joe Carlsmith

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And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind And then you know that she will trust you For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind Non-naturalist normative realism claims that there are objective normative facts that are irreducibly “over and above” facts about the natural world (see here for more details). This post lays out what I see as the most important objection to such realism: namely, that it leaves us without the right type of epistemic access to the normative facts it posits. To illustrate the point, I discuss various robots in unfortunate epistemic situations. Non-naturalist realism, I claim, makes ours analogous. Thanks to Ketan Ramakrishnan and Katja Grace for discussion. My views on this topic have been especially influenced by the work of Sharon Street. In a previous post, I discussed a robot whose value system is built to assume the existence of a certain envelope, inside of which is written an algorithm for scoring the “goodness” of a given worl

The ignorance of normative realism bot - Joe Carlsmith The ignorance of normative realism bot Contents hide I. What’s in the envelope? II. Can you touch the ghostly frosting with your mind? III. Does the frosting exist? IV. Third-factor explanations V. Is this just generic skepticism? VI. How to be a normative realist VII. Will the aliens agree? Last updated: 01.18.2022 Published: 01.17.2022 The ignorance of normative realism bot And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind And then you know that she will trust you For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind Leonard Coh

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