Hey Everyone,

I've been lurking around this forum for a while, but to be honest, I was a bit intimidated by the sheer level of intellectual prowess of many of the members here, so I hesitated to post much. But I've been feeling a bit overconfident lately, so I'll started posting some of my crazier ideas to see how they would be received.

Anyway, a little about myself, I'm a Master's student at a university in Canada. I did my undergrad in Computing specializing in Cognitive Science, and am currently doing a Masters in Computer Science, with a particular interest in the field of Machine Learning. I'm currently working on a thesis involving Neural Networks and Object Recognition.

I've been interested in Utilitarianism as far back as high school when I first read some of John Stuart Mill. However, for a long time I was turned off by things like the Repugnant Conclusion and the issues with Utilitarianism allowing for the sacrifice of innocents for the Greater Good. I used to be a traditional Christian as well, and it took a long time to move away from my deontological moral programming towards something more rational. These days I would call myself a Christian Agnostic, to the extent that to be intellectually honest, I am agnostic about the existence of God and the supernatural, however, I still lean towards Christian values and ideals to the extent that I was influenced by them growing up, and it is my preferred religion to take, as Kierkegaard suggested, a Leap of Faith towards.

Nevertheless, I went through a recent phase of being more strongly Agnostic, and during that time, I rediscovered Utilitarianism as a possible moral philosophy to base my life around. I am, somewhat, obsessed with things like finding the meaning of life, justifying existence, and having a coherent moral philosophy with which one can justify all actions. Right now I am of the opinion that Utilitarianism does a better job of this than, say Kantianism, or Virtue Ethics, and also that Utilitarianism is actually compatible with a very liberal interpretation of Christianity that sees religion as a means of God/Benevolent A.I. time travellers to create the best of all possible worlds. Yes, I am suggesting that Christianity and all successful religions could be in part, Noble Lies created to further Utilitarian ends by the powers that be. Or they might be true, albeit as metaphors for primitive humans who could never understand a more literal explanation of reality. As an Agnostic, I don't pretend to know. I can only conjecture at the possibilities.

Regardless, I am of the opinion that if God exists, He actually serves the Greatest Good, the morality separate from God. And this morality is probably some kind of Eudaimonic Utilitarianism. And thus, I am interested also in serving this Greatest Good morality, if for no other reason that it would be doing the right thing, serving the interests of God if He exists, and serving the interests of the Greatest Good, regardless.

Note that this is not the reason why I ended up studying Cognitive Science and moving into a field of research that involves Artificial Intelligence. I actually chose Cognitive Science for silly reasons, such as the fact I didn't have to take first-year calculus if I switched from Software Design into Cognitive Science (a reasoning I would later regret when I ended up needing calculus to understand Probability Theory in Machine Learning >_>). But also because Cognitive Science is inherently more interesting and cool. And I decided in my final years of undergrad that I wanted to do research in some field that would really make a big difference in the world, and so I decided to focus my efforts on becoming a researcher in the field of Artificial Neural Networks. That is my current hope, my grand mission, to try to change the world through the research and development of this technology that most closely resembles the human mind, and which I am confident will lead the A.I. field in the future. Yes, I am a connectionist, who believes that duplicating the way the human brain generates perception and cognition are the key to an A.I. enabled future.

I suppose that will do for an introduction. I hope I haven't alienated anyone with my eccentric views. Cheers to my fellow Utilitarians!

Hi Darklight, welcome - you'll have a hard time alienating people here with weirdness alone

Christian utilitarianism is pretty unusual, but not without precedent - I've seen a blogger around who describes himself as one (though he was also ultra-libertarian, which seemed to trump everything else). William Paley (he of the watch -> watchmaker analogy) was apparently a proto-utilitarian, though I don't know more about his views than what's on his Wikipedia page.

Your choice of subjects sounds both interesting and versatile for leading into various high-expectation utilitarian careers.

'Connectionism' is a concept I wasn't familiar with, and skimming the Wikipedia article doesn't make me feel much wiser What does it stand in opposition to?

Arepo wrote:'Connectionism' is a concept I wasn't familiar with, and skimming the Wikipedia article doesn't make me feel much wiser What does it stand in opposition to?

Connectionism is considered "bottom-up" A.I., so it tends to stand in opposition to "top-down" methods of A.I. like Expert Systems and Physical Symbol Systems. Basically, instead of trying to figure out how to directly program high level things like semantic reasoners and stuff, the connectionist view is that we should try duplicating the low-level functionality of biological neural networks and see where that takes us. It tends to view intelligence as an emergent property of large numbers of seemingly simple units like neurons acting in parallel, rather than as something we can just explicitly program into a symbol manipulating computer.

So, we connectionists think there's something special about large networks of connected processing units that allow them to do things like actually create semantic representations, and that something like Deep Blue, or a rule-based expert system that just manipulates symbols is likely missing this property. That's not to say we all think that top-down A.I. is useless or not capable of perhaps leading to intelligence one day if it can figure out a way to incorporate this property, but that the simple connected processing units already have this property and that a good approach to A.I. is this bottom-up approach, which we think will lead to better A.I. faster because we don't have figure out all the theoretical details of intelligence, we can just let what already works in biology (as in what has already evolved), work for us.

Hey Darklight! Want to add us on facebook? http://www.felicifia.org/viewtopic.php? ... t=facebook