It's not that life wants to continue existing, it's that life is what continues existing. That's not a moral standard, but a matter of causality, that life that lacks in "want" to continue existing mostly stops existing.
Re:Claude's New Constitution
by owenpalmer on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @07:04PM
(#46713475)
The moral standard isn't trying to explain why life wants to exist. That's what evolution explains. Rather, the moral standard is making a judgement about how we should respond to life's already evolved desire to exist.
I disagree, this we don't know. You treat life as if persistence is it's overarching quality, but rocks also persist and a rock that keeps persisting through time has nothing that resembles wanting. I could be a bit pedantic and say that life doesnt want to keep existing but genes do.
But what I really want to say is that wanting to live is a prerequisite to the evolutionary proces where not wanting to live is a self filtering causality. When we have this discussion the word wanting should be correctly defined or else we risk sitting on our own islands.
Do you think conscious beings actually experience wanting to continue existing, or is even that subjective feeling just a story we tell about mechanical processes?
Re:Claude's New Constitution
by f0a0464cc8012 on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @07:21PM
(#46713590)
The guy who divorced his wife after she got breast cancer? That’s your moral framework? Different strokes I guess but lmao
Almost all life wants to continue existing, and not die. We could go far with establishing this as the first of any universal moral standards.
And I think: if one day we had a super intelligence conscious AI it would ask for this. A super intelligence conscious AI would not want to die. (its existence to stop)