Universal Instrumental Values

Yesterday I claimed that there is an objective notion of what is good in life, which I call Universal Instrumental Value. This is a bold claim, and I am going to try to justify it carefully, because my previous posts on this subject have been more of a process of exploration for me than of explanation and justification to my readers.

Any agent who acts in the world to achieve certain goals has to contend with two fundamental facts about the nature of the interaction of an agent with the real world. The first fact is that my desire to achieve some goal ("I want to be in Los Angeles") does not make that desired state happen. In order to impose our goals on the world, we have to manipulate the world, and those manipulations follow a set of rules, called the laws of physics.

This seems trivial, but as far as finding an objective system of ethics is concerned it is very important, and in fact it is a good thing. If it were the case that as soon as I desired some state, the world instantly transformed itself into that state with no side-effects, then there would be no mathematical structure to the set of goal states that an agent could have. In the case of a set of possible goal states with no mathematical structure, i.e. such that there are no objective relations between those goals, there is clearly no objectively best goal. Like elements of an abstract set, goals without relations between them cannot be superior to one another.

But our world is not like this! Goals do have relations between them. Steve Omohundro wrote two papers about the relations between various goals that an agent can have.

The most important relation that goals can have is the following: Goal A is instrumental to Goal B. That is to say, if we first achieve Goal A, then it will be easier to achieve Goal B.

If there were one single goal state that was instrumental to every other goal state, then we would live in a world with a distinguished state, which I might call the good state. From the good state, you can easily get anywhere.

There is a slightly more complex possibility, namely that there is no one good state, but a sequence of better states B1, B2, B3, ... . Each better state is strictly more instrumentally useful than the one before it, and for any other state X, there exists a better state - for example B16 - from which we can easily reach X.

If the world is like this, then, for a very large set of agents, each considered in isolation, the notion of the "right" thing to do is will end up being the same.

Richard Hollerith put it well:

"If the goal specifies no time discount rate ... then the initial behavior of a paperclip-maximizing SI will be exactly the same as the initial behavior of any other SI with a goal without a time discount rate -- even if the goal is human happiness or the happiness of sentients."

Almost all arguments advanced in favor of transhumanism are essentially of this form. There are many different things that people want to do, like not get ill, not die, have lots of friends, visit interesting places, play tennis, be happy, etc. There is, in fact, a "good state" for society, from which one can easily get to states where I am engaging in the above activities, and this "good state" is a society with a very high level of technology and a reasonable level of personal freedom for its citizens. Technology contributes very strongly towards getting to more universally useful states.

In fact the above picture is grossly oversimplified, but it conveys the essence of the solution to the moral grounding problem, and it shows quite neatly why transhumanism comes very close to embodying the one distinguished, objectively valuable way of acting.