Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2
Yeah, but when it's a high-level transhuman doing the deciding, waiting won't necessarily make the issue any clearer. If the transhuman says, "You see, 'x' was necessary because otherwise 'y' would have happened.", the human in question can't test the premise if he's inherently incapable of understanding the connections, because he either lacks the necessary perceptions or just isn't smart enough. He has to take the transhuman's word for it, possibly forever.
That's the unnerving part.
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But "'x' was necessary because otherwise 'y' would have happened" is, once again, hinging on the assumption that the transhuman in question will be of the utilitarian/consequentialist stance. This is a stance that can be very opaque to others, as evidenced as early as Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger (at least that's the earliest example I can name). It's a system of morals and/or ethics that grows in complexity with the wielder, and is notorious for not scaling down easily with intelligence.
So it's not that transhuman moralities are
necessarily in comprehensible, but rather that in the prominent examples of incomprehensibility, the authors have deliberately picked a system of ethics that produces wildly different results depending on the intelligence level of the wielder, and that is very opaque to lower intelligence levels, since it relies so heavily on calculations and predictive ability . . . and has a helping of "the outcome will change if the targets of an influence understand how they're being influenced, so I'll deliberately keep them in the dark".