Oct 14, 2005 15:17
I was reading about how before 1500 or so, people generally believed that God's will, not the whim of probability, decided gambling results (dice, at least). What if people used dice to settle some moral question (they used duels, why not)? However, probability and God influencing the dice aren't necessarily inconsistent, as any run of results is certainly possible. Also, one argument raised against the existence of God is that he can't (doesn't) interact physically with the material world or the results would be seen inconsistent with physics. Sooo...build the Moral Physics Simulator - analogously to an update rule which evaluated the world state and decided the resulting spring forces, the time step update rule would evaluate the state of the world and decide the morally correct additional forces to impose. A kind of God Force, you might say. This of course raises a lot of issues of what the moral heuristic should be, but perhaps we can test the results of our simulation against reality to find out what correct morality is!