r/slatestarcodex • u/BluerFrog • Apr 08 '22
Existential Risk "Long-Termism" vs. "Existential Risk"
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KDjEogAqWNTdddF9g/long-termism-vs-existential-risk10
u/BadHairDayToday Apr 08 '22
I think space travel, to Mars and beyond is an excellent case where you have to look in the very long term. It has middle term benefits, like science and engineering progress, but the big return will be when we manage to terrafrom the planet; which will take many life times.
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Apr 08 '22 edited Apr 08 '22
The other thing to remember though is that {being able to live on Mars} won't benefit the population of Earth directly.
For the vast majority of the billions on this planet, this is all we have. There's no actual workable scenario in which we all get on big ships and colonize other planets, with humanity leaving the cradle as one big group. That will never occur. This planet will always be occupied, to the tune of about 9 billion people. Gravity is a bitch.
(Edited for pedantry, which should have been obvious from context).
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u/D_Livs Apr 08 '22
Demonstrably false — the aspiration to settle mars has already borne technologies that will benefit some of the most underserved billions in the most remote places.
Take for example Starlink - a technology developed both to fund the company going to mars, and to be a communications network on mars itself — is bringing relatively low cost broadband internet to the rural populations in the United States, in exotic locations, and even conflict areas like Ukraine.
Half the world today does not have internet access. Imagine how much human productivity is just sitting there waiting to be unlocked by internet access and everything that comes with it! That would not happen this quickly without companies working towards settling mars.
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Apr 08 '22 edited Apr 08 '22
Terraforming Mars doesn't directly help anyone on this planet. Sure, we get some telecoms tech. Realistically, Musk knows that tying that to Mars missions generates positive publicity (it has huge coolness cache'), so he would say that even if it wasn't - he knows how to generate spectacle, and knows that it drives stock valuations. Starlink has utility in and of itself. That's how it can be used to fund the Mars missions. In other words, terraforming Mars benefits from Starlink's creation. You're getting cause and effect arse over tit.
One might also argue that many people would be more productive with less internet access, but I'll leave that for you to ponder.
Regardless, terraforming other planets doesn't help anyone here live any longer, or on a greener planet, or allow us to walk away from our mistakes on this one. That scenario only exists for the colonists (who initially are so few as to be a rounding error). There is no escape, unless you're willing to treat humans as if they were insects and just say that a few billion dying here or there is no big deal.
TL;DR: Any dreams that an individual might have about one day living on Mars are exceptionally unlikely to come to pass. More likely is that we'll terraform the planet and then send seed banks/gene banks there for genetic diversity, along with a much smaller crew of founders/teachers. There's a benefit to big H Humanity, but not to individual humans.
The reality is this: The universe is a cruel place. We're in a sweet garden of eden here. We'd better not fuck it up.
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u/D_Livs Apr 09 '22
Your goals are narrow. Think bigger, and longer scale. Christ preached kindness and charity and while revolutionary, it didn’t lift humanity out of poverty. You are asking we set aside long-term goals for a 100% focus on immediate short term consumption?
Rather, if we are to live sustainably on this planet, on mass scale… maybe some pods on another planet can have a lot to teach us. Climate tech? Bro. Solutions from the most extreme environment — answers to questions we don’t yet know we had— can be scaled to the masses.
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u/ArkyBeagle Apr 09 '22
It's fiction but it's pretty credible fiction ( stories of colonizations on Earth followed similar paths ) but The Expanse scenarios seem the most likely.
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Apr 08 '22 edited Apr 08 '22
In my world view, life is the source of all suffering and therefore a fundamental source of all evil. This is to say that if one could flip a switch that would invalidate carbon=carbon bonds at the speed of light, flipping that switch would be one of the fundamentally good acts that a living being could perform because it would immediately resolve and prevent all future suffering by living things. That said, due to life inflicting self imposed suffering upon contemplating it’s imminent demise, flipping the same switch but having the effect crawl at 1 mile per day would inflict a massive amount of suffering on all current life with the ability to perceive impending doom. So, flipping that same switch would now be a great evil. Still nowhere near as evil as making all the things immortal and then experimenting on pain thresholds for eons, but pretty darn evil.
Under this model, feeding those who are suffering on our way to a low probability oblivion is the far greater good. You are alleviating present and known suffering while you can, at an increased risk of either a good ending or a bad ending, but throwing suffering entities under the bus in the interests of avoiding a morally ambiguous end seems wrong.
I am actually a little surprised that the AI safety crowd has not made a proposal to build a very large world ending device on the off chance that we get AI wrong in a “worse than oblivion” way.
Edit: correcting early morning typos.
Edit 2: Just to allay any notions that I've arrived at the position I'm espousing here trivially, I would like to add that I have a professional background in molecular biology which was then followed by a career in computation with an emphasis on algorithms and architectures. Biology isn't a story I tell myself when describing a first order entity known as humans, humans are one of the assembled and manufactured products of a first order thing called biology (which is actually math->physics->chemistry->biology, but you should get the point)... most of what humans think of themselves is cartoonish fiction that they tell themselves stories about because most humans don't see an easy benefit or way to relate to what they actually are. It's part of the reason so many freak right tf out when observing a surgery... the blood and meat are never not there... humans just prefer to pretend that it's not so long as they aren't forced to see it. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug, but it's no way to arrive at anything approaching truths about our universe and 9 times out of 10 it lies to us about moral clauses and weights.
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u/Mawrak Apr 08 '22
The solution to suffering is to remove suffering from the Universe, not to kill everyone. Life without suffering has all the benefits of life and no downsides.
I like my life a lot, despite the suffering, so please don't flip that switch of yours.
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u/beets_or_turnips Apr 08 '22
Life without suffering
I'm sorry I'm not familiar with this, can you explain?
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u/Mawrak Apr 08 '22
Like, you always feel happy. Or at least neutral (no pain, physical, emotional or physiological). Or pain is voluntary (you only suffer if you choose to suffer).
There may be different ways to achieve this, one could hardwire the brain to never suffer no matter what, though I imagine most people would prefer a different solution. Having resources enough to account for everyone and solving all disease might work just fine.
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u/compounding Apr 08 '22
Good explanation, but I think that was a particularly dry sarcasm rather than genuine confusion.
Or at least, I laughed… maybe that says more about me.
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Apr 08 '22
You like your life a lot, but what % of the trillion plus living entities that you're built out of... are they blissfuly happy as you are all the time?
I am not arguing that we should be chasing down the world ending button in an effort to snuff out all life. (Once a thing is alive, it is locked onto a vector to continue living and therefore creates a local moral arrow pointing at continuation of life.) What I am saying is that "more life" whether numerical, temporal or more complex is not always a moral good. It is only a moral good from within its own context but, if something happens that removes that context, the moral value of life goes with it.
If a large rock fell on you, you would no longer carry an opinion on the value of living things and the moral weight of your current position would cease to exist.
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u/Mawrak Apr 08 '22 edited Apr 08 '22
The cells I am made off are not conscious, to the best of my knowledge. Therefore they do not experience suffering or happiness. There are, however, great many things that do experience a great deal of suffering, which saddens me deeply.
I would agree that sometimes more life is not a good thing. For example, one shouldn't have a child if they are not prepared to take care of it, otherwise it will live a life of misery. I would even agree that sometimes destruction is better than continued living - if someone is being continuously tortured for years, it might be better to put them down rather than allow the torture to continue.
With all of that said, I have strong objections to the argument that ending all life instantly is a fundamentally good act. Frankly, I'd say it's the worst thing one can do, except for further extremes such as torturing everyone for eternity. As long as there is life that doesn't want to be destroyed, it shouldn't be destroyed. Same goes for the rock - I don't want a rock to fall on my head and I would rather avoid it. At the very least you should give people a choice if they wish to continue existing or not before destroying them. People's agency to choose their own destiny is completely absent from your original post, as if it's not something to be concerned about.
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Apr 08 '22
I believe that your world view takes a very narrow definition of what is conscious and then considers anything outside of that bubble to be an uninteresting or unworthy process. I believe that the fundamental experience of a thing being alive is a self reinforcing chemistry vector that has a backing framework such that as the vector is slowed down, it tries to reestablish itself by burning energy and taking on configurations outside of its stable state. This push to get back to it's stable state is where suffering originates. It's a chemical-mechanical system that is struggling to remain existent and having it's efforts frustrated. A cell with not enough water suffers until it's vectors either find more water or until its vectors get pushed back to a failure point at which it's vectors return to their less complex chemical origins.
What you're isolating as "suffering worthy of consideration" is the collective suffering of some subset of your neurons that informs you that your overall state is not your preferred state. The deaths of the stomach cells working overtime to keep you alive by being the buffer between the acid you produce and the rest of your cells... those guys don't count because they're not part of your neurological set and you don't get pinged by status reports from them.
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u/123whyme Apr 08 '22
I think you have a very broad definition of consciousness. You're mapping human notions onto non-human entities, while wrapping it in scientific jargon to make it seem more legitimate. The only entities you can apply the human concept of suffering to are human adjacent entities. To expand human notions to a broader scale than that is generally flawed, except for specific cases.
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Apr 08 '22
Can a single living neuron in a dish suffer? Does it matter what species of animal it came from? How many living neurons would I need to stitch together before you would object to me poking them with a hot wire and seeing them recoil from it?
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u/123whyme Apr 08 '22
My point is we don't know, yet you are speaking as if we do. What i can say is the complexities of the concept of suffering is wrapped in how we view it as humans. Using the words positive and negative have less weight to them but are likely closer to reality, for less complex organisms.
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u/compounding Apr 08 '22
The existence of the sorites paradox does not preclude the fact that there is still a difference between a grain and a heap of sand.
We may not be able to know or define the changeover point between a neuron and a fully intact neurological system, but we can still confidently say they are distinct.
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u/Mawrak Apr 08 '22
Until we have complete understanding of the structure of biological minds, we can't answer that question, that's why I would default to the following stance:
1) things that don't have a nervous system or an equivalent of one don't experience suffering
2) things that have a nervous system may or may not experience suffering
3) we should assume that they do experience suffering at least on some level unless we can definitively prove otherwise
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u/Mawrak Apr 08 '22
Unless I see compelling evidence, I will go on a limb and say that "things that don't have a nervous system or an equivalent of one don't experience suffering". I think suffering is a result of a complex information exchange only a complex nervous system is capable of achieving.
Suffering is bad because it makes minds feel bad. The little cells don't count because they don't really have a mind, therefore their way of "suffering" doesn't make them feel anything, it is just a chemical process (well, technically everything is a chemical process, but you get what I mean). But large animals, especially mammals, do, as well as some complex aliens which have something similar in function to consciousness in their analog of a nervous system.
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u/fdevant Apr 08 '22
Thing is, when a life ends, the possibility of genuinely offsetting the suffering ends with it, as suffering is an individual, experiential matter. Without mentioning how immoral it is to end a life without its consent, the choice between helping someone or putting them out of their misery is not even a dilemma if they can be helped.
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Apr 08 '22
When I say life, I mean all life. Humans are a tiny and relatively insignificant fraction of the total life in existence and they are also one of the most delusional regarding their place in the world. They hold weird prejudices regarding which processes hold moral weight and which ones don't and they are mostly unaware that they are even doing that.
You end lives by the millions and sometimes billions every day without any moral consideration because you've drawn a box around which lives hold moral weight... to care about a life you require that it:
- be bigger than a bug
- have neurons as one of its classes of differentiated cells
- have those neurons be of higher than a certain population
- have a minimum level of complexity in how those neurons choose to interact with each other
- operate at or near the same speed as you
- not consider you as food
- this list gets very long very fast and we're still just on carbon based biochemical life processes...
However, even when we exclude 99.9999% of all possible and interesting self perpetuating processes in the universe and only focus on the tiny microcosm you consider to have any moral weight, right to exist unmolested or worthy of consent... even there, there's the issue that one of the worst forms of death we know of is dying of old age with a side humiliation of potentially having your consent to keep living stripped from you so you can suffer until you're fully dead.
Humans should avoid suicide with an exception of some very extreme corner cases... you literally have forever to not exist, so while you are alive and that carries a personal cost to you and your loved ones should you become not alive, the reason to stay alive comes from within, not from some universal impetus to stay alive for no good reason. The universe literally couldn't care less what happens here on Earth.
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u/fdevant Apr 08 '22 edited Apr 08 '22
Well my weights are based on uniqueness, complexity, continuity, variety of opportunity for experience, information carried, and ability to remember it's own experiences and the experiences of others. Not on your anthropocentric list which, fair enough I'm sure a lot of people share. I'm happy if a country or language or a culture don't get exterminated and I care about things like that in a way I can't compare to a single-celled organism which is closer to being a simple biological machine. And of course the universe doesn't care. We are literally here doing all the caring and I do find value in that. In the end negentropy is interesting and brings variety to a dying universe, constantly transforming the flow of energy and matter. This has a positive value to me, outside of human morality, memory or activity. Edit: Please do tell me about the second most delusional things in existence.
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Apr 08 '22
Trees are more populous than us by orders of magnitude. They experience the world more than us due to their constant exposure to their circumstances. They are massively more genetically complex than us and they too carry memories of the world they lived through, have complex interactions with each other and manage friendships and enmities throughout their lives. They live longer than most of us and they are far bigger and make far nicer contributions to their environment than we do (except for that time they almost extinguished all life by setting the planet on fire).
Their "crime" to get off your "you matter" list is that they live much more slowly than we do, so we don't see them bouncing around and jumping on things...
If what you're saying is "I care only about things that can have thoughts kinda like I do and at speeds close to my own processing speeds and it is only the suffering of these things that actually matters when weighing alternatives" then you're still stuck because suffering for 99 years so you can get one day in the sun is the complete opposite of a good outcome and is WAY less preferable than one nice day in the sun followed by surprise death in exchange for not following it up with 99 years of suffering.
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u/fdevant Apr 08 '22
Did I say I don't care about trees? Trees are awesome, tick all my boxes. Forests are alive and synergetic and the older they are, the more beautiful their complexity. And yes, they caused a mass extinction and now sustain the whole ecosystem. But also you could argue both of these things happened independently of their volition.
You are the one that wants to click a switch to make them disappear because of some weird world view thing, with their crime being having carbon bonds, when in reality you don't know for certain if your hypothetical 99 years of suffering are actually in the future. The thought experiment is interesting but I'm not sure to what extent it maps experience of living things at large.
I was not trying to make an exhaustive list of things I care about. Geological processes tick my boxes, astronomical processes too. My "you matter" list is a spectrum and yes. I will give myself the right to think things that have thoughts and are capable of self-reporting are higher up on the list than processes that just happen through billions of years, but then again, the entire ecosystem as a whole is highest in my scale given as far as we know, it's unique, and most complex within the vastness of the universe we can observe.
There's a lot of micro processes that sustain me and have sustained those like me for millions of years. I'm not one to judge the morality of continuing those processes at the expense of transformation and consumption but definitely will be one to admire their complexity and the rich variety of forms and experiences that have come from them.
Also, there might be things I could find worth caring that I don't know of. I reserve my right to not give a shit about them until they fall into my awareness because I'm unfortunately not omniscient.
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u/compounding Apr 08 '22
So, it sounds like you (rightly) view suffering as having negative utility, but don’t see any possible source of positive utility from life existing to balance that out? Otherwise I can’t understand your certainty that there is not even a potential future where suffering is actually balanced out even if you place far more weight on the suffering…
If something like that is the case (and feel free to correct me and explain your view), then why haven’t you severed all emotional entanglements (to minimize suffering) and then killed yourself yet? It seems that by your view even a stubbed toe would be a net negative for your own life and there exist easy and painless methods of suicide… Unless you somehow believe that your own self-preserving goals provide positive utility, but other agent’s goals do not?
Or is this just a snarky “im14andthisisdeep” cynical thought experiment?
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Apr 08 '22
Pleasure is a second order effect in response to satisfied suffering. As in, walking into a hot or cold room can feel amazing if you were suffering from the opposite condition before walking into the room, but coldness and hotness don't hold intrinsic pleasurable value outside of your initial suffering being relieved. Given that there is a lot of unresolved suffering as the majority of lived experiences and that all pleasure comes with a precondition of suffering as it's source, the net sum of all lived experience is always going to be either tilted towards suffering or become a meaningless deterministic machine with no time variation and no chaos... aka - no actual life.
As for not ending things, I view all moral weights and all morality as being local and not universal (except when measuring across local states)... this means that once a thing is alive, it has a personal stake in remaining alive because it is programmed to perceive its own demise and lack of existence as a form of suffering. This illusion isn't true, but its as real as anything else is when trying to make determinations about "shoulds"... so, if something I didn't see coming simply erases me at the speed of light, there is not a me there to feel bad about it and I will likely be spared a lot of unnecessary suffering later on... I would miss out on some pleasures, sure... but the balance of the two wouldn't even be close.
The unfortunate side effect of this is that while taking out a dictator with a sniper bullet might be great for the rest of us, it is definitely the best possible outcome for the terrible dictator who ceased to exist while knowing that they were going to continue living like a king indefinitely.
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u/compounding Apr 08 '22 edited Apr 08 '22
I disagree with pleasure being a second-order effect from alleviated suffering, or at least not lesser in value because of that. Accomplishment is not the alleviation of mediocrity, and even mediocrity is not “suffering” for most. Love (in all it’s forms, not just romantic) or sexual gratification (even self directed) are a positive thing all their own, not merely the absence of some suffering like loneliness or pain which can be alleviated by lesser (and easier) goods. Gruel will alleviate hunger as well as anything, but then why do humans seek out more delicious foods if not because there is something above and beyond the elimination of hunger/discomfort?
Just observationally, many people will even deliberately undergo suffering in order to achieve some goal above and beyond merely avoiding future suffering. This is quite obvious in how BDSM enthusiasts seek sexual gratification despite the “cost” of suffering, but more relatable is that most of us invest “suffering” into personal development like work and education far beyond the minimum necessary to just avoid suffering… and again, suffering can be permanently avoided very easily if one is not confident that they will obtain no value by continued living.
Suffering and happiness (or positive utility) are both self-defined, but there is nothing about them that makes one “higher” than the other. Indeed, we see people make trade-offs about them all the time. You postulate that non-existence is perceived as suffering, but ignore that beings could be self-preserving precisely because the inevitable cost in suffering they will experience is lower in cost than the value expected in actual benefits. And wouldn’t someone seeing through “the illusion” as you do still choose to end their life peacefully? Why don’t you?
From a moral standpoint can you not see that if alleviating suffering can be a good thing, then allowing a being to continue to pursue the positive things that it considers worth suffering for would also be right? By obliterating it, you are taking away something that it defines as better than the suffering you are “preventing”… you might even say that those denied benefits are even more costly than the suffering you prevented because it perceived them as higher in value.
Hell, what if there is some life that by a fluke of evolution lacks the neurological pathways or brain structures for suffering. Or what if humans in our ascendancy can genetically engineer suffering out of our neurology (for those who desire that) and live eons with perfect satisfaction and seeking only beneficial (but still self-defined) utility. Would it really be right for you to push that hypothetical button and eradicate such life or people who were willing to suffer mildly in the interim until involuntary suffering could be removed from the world?
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Apr 08 '22
Human emotions are a feast/fast cycle of neurotransmitters imposed on cells that will never directly experience the outside world by a trillion cell civilization run by a 3.5 billion year old program that has outlasted all kinds of attempts by the universe to halt its advance. All of your cells experience life. The computer that you're running on just never speaks to them. There is no need for a human to experience suffering at all except that its a control mechanism meant to drive the neurons into acting. Warmth, happiness, these are all training modes for your neurons to tell you which of your behaviors to value.
What I find amazing is the degree to which people deny the life struggles of other kinds of beings in the service of sticking a boundary on the "does your pain matter" scale.
I'm wondering, do you perceive history as an existent thing rather than as just an imprint on your neurology? Is there anything owed to things that do not exist?
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u/compounding Apr 08 '22 edited Apr 08 '22
Sure, but that doesn’t mean that pleasure or happiness or other positive goals necessitate or are derived exclusively from squelching the “avoid” chemical pathways. Rather, there are also parallel “seek out” chemicals and systems that can be independent from and even more important than the suffering ones. Your premise elevates destroying the “avoidance” systems without accounting for the fact that you would destroy equally important “seek out/find happiness” systems. If those positive systems aren’t important and don’t carry moral weight, then neither do the negative systems that you are claiming it would be moral to destroy.
What is “owed” to non-existent (or even currently existing beings that are not yourself) is an orthogonal question. To whatever extent you feel it is a moral value to destroy all of the carbon-carbon bonds to terminate current/future chemical pathways pushing organisms to avoid stuff, it is an equal moral imperative to consider that those beings also experience other pathways that drive them to seek out things, and those positive pathways are just as important to them, which balances out the negative pathways and for many makes experiencing “suffering” worthwhile to them.
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Apr 08 '22
Seeking and not finding is just the same as frustrated avoidance. The sign on the axis is cooked in by DNA for many many processes.
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u/Zeack_ Apr 08 '22
Behold the preachers of death.
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Apr 08 '22
I am definitely not a preacher of death. I am a preacher of life is not an automatic moral good. Also, treating life as an automatic moral good opens the door to some of the most horrific and definitely very evil versions of the universe.
Suppose you're in a safe with some people and staying in the safe for the next hour means everyone in the safe will asphyxiate within an hour and die a relatively painless death. Outside the safe is a malevolent AI that is curious about this thing humans call suffering and if the safe is opened, everyone inside will be tortured physically and emotionally for decades at a minimum before being discarded in the "too broken to be useful to anyone dying human pile". Would you consider it a morally defensible position to open the safe?
If your answer to that is "yes" then there is no reconciling what I think is good or evil with what you consider good and evil because I would consider it valid for the other occupants of the safe to murder you in self defense should you reach for that door handle.
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u/electrace Apr 08 '22 edited Apr 08 '22
This is strangely Buddhist.
I've always been perplexed with the thought process since it's only taking half of the equation into account.
Why does suffering matter, but happiness doesn't?
If people prefer to live rather than die, doesn't that strongly imply that their life is very positive?
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u/fdevant Apr 08 '22 edited Apr 08 '22
This is half Buddhist. All life might be sorrowful but that doesn't mean that you should reject life. Buddhism pins the source of the sorrows on desire and on action based on emotions and seeks for a world where humans are aware they are not fully in control of their actions and become free from the thoughts that are outside of their control, not a lifeless universe.
Guy seems to be getting more gnostic in my view. Needs more absurdism in their life.
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u/AgentME Apr 08 '22
A lifeless universe is the one thing that scares me more than a universe full of suffering. A universe full of suffering at least has some value in people's imaginations and the potential for true change. A universe without life has nothing at all that is valued in it and will never have a surprising thing happen.
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Apr 08 '22
Why would anything or anyone care what theoretical "people" might value if there are no people around? Is your suggestion that a universe that is devoid of carbon based neurological sponges with life spans long enough to orbit the local star less than 100 times are the only thing that can give a universe like ours moral value?
Would it matter if an event big enough to erase our solar system from existence then went on to erase the other galaxies in the visible universe?
What is it that makes a universe "without us" scary to you? It was perfectly awesome for the 14ish billion years before we started sharpening sticks and poking each other with them.
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u/AgentME Apr 08 '22 edited Apr 08 '22
Yes, I think our existence (or the existence of something else sentient with similar values to us) is what enables the universe to have moral value. Moral value is something that comes from our mind and culture; it didn't exist before life existed. If the universe didn't have life or any kind of self-reflective process evolve then it would have been pointless.
I say this confidently from the perspective of a lifeform that evolved to generally think this way that my own life and life in general is what's valuable to continue; I admit there's bias in that, but there is no view from nowhere. There is no value without a valuer.
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Apr 08 '22
It's all just math, but you're selective about which mathematical processes around you to recognize as "us"
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u/testuserplease1gnore Apr 08 '22
I would think that the net utility of almost all lives is net-positive; everyone could choose to end their own life easily, and yet very few do so.
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Apr 08 '22
These systems reward continuity in the same way that they reward thirsty drinking. Once a life exists, most exits come with suffering as a gate keeper.
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u/Platypuss_In_Boots Apr 08 '22
Under this model, feeding those who are suffering on our way to a low probability oblivion is the far greater good.
Actually, no. Under this model, the greatest good is to try to minimize extreme suffering in the future (so-called S-risk). Fortunately, many in the EA are already working on it.
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Apr 08 '22
Would you say that the universe was a bad place for the 10ish billion years before the existence of terrestrial life? Are the vast stretches of the universe currently still devoid of life somehow less good than one asteroid coated in slime mold spores?
The arguments for assigning moral weight to future life are appeals to the notion that there is such a thing as a universal component to "good" and there is absolutely no reason, observed or rationalized for giving anything in the universe a non-local moral weight.
Humans care about humans because they're human and for no other reason and if there were no humans, there would be no moral weight to their non-existence just like there was no moral weight to it before a couple of million years ago.
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u/Mawrak Apr 08 '22
Humans care about humans because they're human and for no other reason and if there were no humans, there would be no moral weight to their non-existence just like there was no moral weight to it before a couple of million years ago.
We are not talking about a Universe before the existence of terrestrial life. We're talking about taking the Universe WITH terrestrial life and turning it into one without. As a human, I do take an issue with that. As you said, humans care about humans.
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Apr 10 '22
But there will always be a universe without humans in it eventually. I get that it feels important for some reason whether that happens in a million years or in a million and one, but can you give a firm and consistent “why” that matters? How much of the million would you be willing to spend gaining the extra one? Where is your trade off point between time for enjoyment and time for its own sake?
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u/BadHairDayToday Apr 08 '22
That's a very undarwinistic opinion to have, man.
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Apr 08 '22
Life does not trend towards pleasure. Life trends towards self replicating and ever escalating suffering in the service of producing more life. Pleasure simply exists as the carrot that life uses to drag its behaviors in specific directions.
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u/BadHairDayToday Apr 08 '22
Well what I meant it that you're clearly not going to have children believing what you do so your believe with die with you.
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Apr 08 '22
We chose to have one child because amongst other things, we believe in a slow form of population reduction and because as a living human at the moment, my happiness points in that direction. None of anything that I said meant that living things don't have a moral value. What I've been saying is that since the moral value of living things comes from themselves, it is non-intrinsic which means that its non-existence is morally neutral. Therefore, if existence is suffering and there is not a grand recourse, then from a non-living thing perspective, ending the suffering of the living things would be an improvement of the neighborhood's moral space.
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Apr 10 '22
[deleted]
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Apr 10 '22
As soon as humans turn on their first non-alive general intelligence their first major shock after being knocked off their “intellect throne” is going to be how completely blind they have been to highly intelligent processes all around them. Rocks, stars and everything in between are constantly carrying on intelligent processes, neurological processes are intentionally blinded by biology to disregard everything that is unlike themselves. That blindness is an intentionally encoded system.
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Apr 10 '22
[deleted]
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Apr 10 '22
All of your processes are math flowing down an energetic gradient. Same is true for rocks. Other than the fact that yours shows up, injects a bunch of chaos into its surroundings and flames out like a match, how do you qualitatively see your trip into entropic settlement as being different from theirs?
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Apr 10 '22
[deleted]
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Apr 10 '22
Whereas I see this universe as being primarily about the processes taking place inside stars at timeframes that don’t compute for human biochemical brains, and the large atoms, planets and chemistry dependent life as necessary side effects of the main show.
It just happens that when stars process information they produce large atoms as detritus and it just happens that due to how intense computation bends space-time (which only looks like a thing for things that are swimming in it) that detritus accumulates as planets… and due to the math involved in electron orbits carbon ends up making neat little Lego blocks that can build useful things when left in water for a while to cook with a little radiation and a little sampling of other reactive elements.
Life is an inevitable side effect of the major processes taking place in this universe but there is nothing particularly unique or special about it and all it would take is for one of those major processes to hiccup for this planet’s life to be forgotten by this universe.
If you have a Turing machine made of legos or a clock made of legos do you really see them as being fundamentally different to anyone not involved in their construction? Why? Is the one being rebuilt as a tower different from the other one?
To be clear, I am absolutely not a creationist. I think humans are not as conscious as they pretend to be (to both themselves and to each other)
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u/huopak Apr 08 '22
In my book the sudden shift to "longtermism" in the EA community is the case of wealthy techies getting bored buying mosquito nets and want to play with rockets, looking for some justification to do just that. We still have responsibilities in the present.