Do you think that it's possible for a machine to have evil intentions?

[Boojatta]

18. "Evil is a reaction to perceived stimuli, similar to beauty and delicious."

Last edited Wed Feb 1, 2012, 07:06 PM - Edit history (1)

That sounds like a somewhat nonstandard definition of the word "evil". In what sense is there a similarity where you claim "similar to"? It occurs to me that you might be using a definition of the word "similar" that is also, in my opinion, nonstandard.

Admittedly not having given the matter much thought, I don't see how it is possible for a moral evaluation to be anything other than moral neutrality or some degree of either goodness or evil. I don't see the concept of evil as something that influences the moral evaluation that people give to genocide. Instead, I see the concept of evil as something that helps define a structure, and I see the making of a moral evaluation as identifying the appropriate point (or small interval) within that structure. Perhaps I could make an analogy with a time scale. I'm pretty confident that agriculture was practiced many thousands of years ago. Thus, if you asked me a multiple choice question "when was agriculture first practiced on planet Earth?" and gave me only two options "BC" and "AD", then I would select "BC", but I don't think that I'm influenced by the concept of Christ's birth. However, it is true that "BC" and "AD" are labels for my options when I take the multiple choice test, and that my answer might be different if the concepts were redefined so that the beginning of the AD era got pushed back to include times far enough in the past.

Some people mistakenly claim that the number two isn't a prime number because all other primes are odd. I suppose that you could say that the concept of an odd number does influence them in their evaluation of the number two as non-prime, because it confuses them about what the phrase "prime number" actually means. If they had no familiarity with the concept of an odd number, then they would be less likely to become confused.