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This addresses my arguments pretty well, but I think you're contorting things by starting with the central definition of a person as a being who is sapient.
Sleeping people are still people, so a person should be "a being who is or recently was sapient."
OK, but dead people are no longer people, so a person should be "a being who is or recently was sapient and will be in the future."
OK, but people in comas are still people, even if the comas last a long time. So a person should be "a being who was ever previously sapient and will be in the future."
People in comas may not wake up, but they're still people. So a person should be "anyone who was previously sapient and may again be sapient".
Do they need to have previously been sapient though? I'd argue that if people came into existence as fully-formed adults, needing only to be woken up, those people would be people even though they have never previously been sapient. So now we're back to square one, "people are any beings which may become sapient." At that point we run into obvious issues like the ones you've mentioned--do we classify random biomass as a person?
I'd prefer to start with an alternate definition: a person is any theoretically sapient being. Most such beings do not and will not ever exist, but I consider it a moral obligation to bring as many of them into existence as possible, so long as existing people aren't harmed too much by this. Sleeping people, people in comas, and dead people are all included by this definition. Do dead people have a right to life? I'd say so, if we could give it to them. Do unborn people (so far nonexistent) have a right to life? Yes, I'd say so. I think we're morally obligated to bring more people into existence to share in our enjoyment of this wonderful life. Going a step further, I think even very miserable people are still better off existing than not. I was one myself for a very long time, and noticed that all the things that caused me the most misery were not actually bad things, but rather the absence of good things, which implies that from an objective standpoint life is far better than the baseline of nonexistence.
Somebody in a coma does though, sometimes even more than a baby.
Ha, I would be totally down to round people up for that sort of thing as well. In some states (including mine) that sort of behavior is classified as child abuse which I think is the right approach.
This is part of what @Blueberry was gesturing towards when he mentioned how helpless babies are. If an adult and baby are both drowning, the former is likely to survive longer without assistance, be harmed less by temporary oxygen deprivation, and be more likely to recover from a longer stay in the water than the baby. If you absolutely had to choose one then I don't think choosing the adult is necessarily the wrong choice (they may have people relying on them at home etc.), but in practice most of the time the baby will be a better choice, and our moral intuitions should ideally guide us towards the best choices in those practical situations.
I get that it's just a thought experiment but I really want to stress that saving the baby would usually be the correct choice.
More importantly, I'm not sure temporal discounting should apply to happiness. Yes, it does apply in our day-to-day decisions, but that's because nothing in real life is guaranteed and we are built accordingly. In real life the choice isn't "one marshmallow right now vs two in ten minutes", it's "99% chance of a marshmallow right now vs. 99-x% chance of a marshmallow in ten minutes", which is further worsened because two marshmallows isn't double as good as one. I think the QALY of the baby and the adult should just be compared directly, taking things like lifespan, expected happiness, etc. into account. Most of the time the baby would come out on top, but maybe if the baby is disabled, or the adult is young and very happy or has lots of people depending on them, then the calculus changes.
If we were to apply temporal discounting to QALYs then we'd have to conclude that people from the past were morally more valuable than we are.
Sure, and this sounds like the second scenario. There's a credible hope that even very miserable people will become quite happy in a few years. Even if they don't contribute to the Singularity their lives still have value.
Comas are not made alike. Someone who is outright brain dead isn't coming back.
The word "may" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, unless one quantifies how likely they are to resume being sapient as the same entity.
Someone asleep has a 99.999% chance of resuming consciousness.
Someone in a coma might have 20% odds, without checking.
Someone freshly dead and cryopreserved before the brain decomposed might have a 1-5% chance of ever being revived.
Someone rotting or dead decades back? Even given singularity tech I would wager it's impossible to revive them, at most you can get sorta close.
In an ideal scenario, we would weigh ever case accordingly, but even in the murkier aspects, I'm sure you can see a difference between someone napping and someone with their brainstem missing.
You have no idea how incredibly alarming I find this, and I can only hope it's because you haven't thought the ramifications of this approach through.
Modern society exists in the Dream Time, when humanity has temporarily overcome Malthusian constraints but hasn't physically, mentally or memetically become adapted to exploiting all of the surplus in the system.
We live in what seems to be a fundamentally resource constrained universe according to most models of physics and cosmology. One day, the stars will die (this is not a big deal).
Several orders of magnitude of time later, the last blackholes will evaporate, and then the civilizations clinging to them as an energy source will die in the endless cold.
It only takes a few thousand years of 2% growth, as the human race has been performing on average, to require more biomass than there is mass in the observable universe.
No technological advance, short of literally infinite energy, solved this fundamental issue.
Not fusion, not blackhole farming, not direct matter to energy conversion. Their is a fixed energy budget, and the more thinly you slice the pie, the less everyone gets to eat.
Sure, I'm fully ok with us going from ~10 billion to quintillions eventually without denting the living standards of a galactic or extragalactic civilization too badly, but the idea of instantiating every possible consciousness that ever could exist will leave us all as beggars even when we own the stars.
On the other hand, resurrecting the mere 97 billion anatomically modern humans who have ever lived isn't a biggie, but most of them died without any hope of returning from tech advances I consider plausible.
My intuition also suggests that simply going for numbers is a bad move, since a post human consciousness might have OOMs richer internal experiences than the same energy budget of humans, in the same manner 1 ton of humans is worth a lot more than 1 ton of chimps.
Given that I intend to live till Heat Death, I am very leery of unnecessarily increasing the number of people a dying universe needs to host.
Mostly agreed, depending on how miserable in question the person is.
I am very depressed. This is the worst bout I've had in years to the point I have mild suicidal ideation half a dozen times a day.
However, I wager that I'm not a significant suicide risk, because my rational brain knows that there's a good chance I can eventually find a treatment that works and an outright cure in less than a decade.
My life would have to get a lot worse before I rationally decide it's not worth living, even though I am very unhappy right now.
This seems to be overly fixating on the exact mechanics of the thought experiment and not the actual point. Replace death from drowning with a bomb strapped to the chest and only one code to switch one off and then the survival advantages of being a baby become nil.
That seems to be taking the concept outside of where it's useful, unless you want to elaborate further.
I don't agree here. To me someone has the same amount of personhood regardless of the chance that they ever regain sapience. Very elderly people have a much greater chance of dying in their sleep but have the same amount of personhood as much younger sleeping people. Someone in a medically induced coma may have a 40% chance of recovery, but imo does not have 40% of the personhood of a sleeping person--they still just have the same amount of personhood.
I am highly optimistic about future technological advances etc. and highly pessimistic about the quality of our current understanding of the laws of physics. There still appear to be many holes in our understanding big enough to drive a literally infinite utopia through. That may change in the future but for now we are far from a complete understanding, and any new discoveries are much more likely to help our future prospects than hurt them.
I'd say go for both. Human internal experiences seem qualitatively different from chimp experiences in a unique way. In other words I think sapience >>> sentience but there's no big step above sapience, just marginal improvements in the intelligence etc. of sapient beings.
I'm very sorry to hear that. Totally agree that an eventual cure seems likely; I'd go so far as to say that one seems virtually guaranteed. I have lived through some darkness--long periods of pretty extreme chronic pain with very little social support or (more importantly to me) redeeming qualities to my own personality. What I found was that:
Pain, even extreme pain, isn't really all that bad at all. Infinite Jest has a great quote about this which I unfortunately don't fully remember. In essence any single instant of pain is pretty easily tolerable. It only begins to feel intolerable when our minds look forward at all those instants of pain lined up together, and we try to experience them all at once rather than just enduring them as they come.
The vast majority of my suffering came from a mismatch between expectations and reality. When I forgot my goals and expectations for a moment I was capable of finding simple joy in small things like the beauty of my surroundings and the naturally comedic nature of surrounding people's actions. Forgetting expectations is a very hard thing to do, and I'm not sure even a correct thing to do (my goals/expectations are probably the thing that most makes me who I am) but being able to do this for even a moment does put things into perspective. I could live as a hermit out on some desolate island or something and still be quite happy, so everything that happens to me in life instead of that is just a big bonus.
I don't know if either of these unsolicited insights will be helpful to you at all. Maybe they are only meaningful to me, or they are universally meaningful but can only be learned through personal experience, never communicated. If they are meaningful then of course that matters infinitely more than whatever we've been arguing about though.
I just don't think in general that our lives are worth more than future lives. I think temporal discounting exists so that we as imperfect humans take guaranteed things above risky things. When it comes to economics, it seems that we are capable of growing money, so temporal discounting has become a valid universal law of economics. When it comes to QALYs I don't think temporal discounting applies at all.
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This seems to imply endorsing the Repugnant Conclusion.
I think the Repugnant Conclusion is very overhyped. There's room in this universe for countless quintillions of people, and who knows what will be possible when our understanding of physics is further along. Also I don't think bringing new people into the world actually decreases the others' standard of living. For quite a few reasons (economies of scale, increased specialization, etc.) I think we are all better off when there are more people around.
If miserable people were miserable by definition then I'm not sure I'd want to tile the universe with them, but if we ever get to that point then surely we will have solutions to their problems. As I mentioned though, I don't think miserable people are really all that miserable at all anyways. I think the vast majority of people dealing with terrible situations are quite happy.
The Repugnant Conclusion deviates enough from everything I understand about reality to not seem very insightful or useful to me.
People have tried using this explanation already.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
...
Yes, people have tried using all sorts of explanations. The existence of counterarguments doesn't automatically make the original argument wrong. This is especially true when my argument was less "in theory the repugnant conclusion is wrong" and more "In practice the repugnant conclusion seems highly unlikely to ever be relevant or useful." I feel like the Repugnant Conclusion, more than any other thought experiment, directly leads people to make conclusions about real life, and this is highly unwarranted. Whether you think it's true or not has very very little to do with whether the current population of the earth should be increased or decreased.
Still, to the extent that I must pick a repugnant conclusion, the repugnant conclusion seems far more correct than the other conclusions. See Magic9Mushroom's comment on astralcodexten:
If you don't endorse the repugnant conclusion, which of those do you endorse? I'd ordinarily be very sympathetic to arguments along the lines of "all of these thought experiments are just thought experiments, and real ethics in the real world must be more practical" but you're the one trying to constrain me into endorsing a highly theoretical thought experiment, so I expect you to have some kind of answer here, or a good reason why these 29 philosophers are wrong.
Here's another good article, responding to what Scott wrote on the subject. In short, utilitarian attempts to "dodge" one of these conclusions seem to lead to either obvious contradictions or to even worse repugnant conclusions.
The "this is why utilitarianism sucks" conclusion.
Counterarguments and reductio ad absurdum don't work that way.
If I say "your reasoning implies that all left-handers should be executed", it's not a valid reply to say "well, I'll never be in a position where I have a chance to execute any left-handers". A valid principle applies even to situations that are logically consistent but can't actually happen.
If utilitarianism has any value at all, and it does, it's important to decide what flavor of utilitarianism is most correct. The best way to do that is by taking it to extremes, deciding which extreme sounds most correct, and then extrapolating from there back to normal actually relevant morality. This is because deciding whether to create 1 happy person or increase someone's standard of living by 1% may not be intuitively clear, but imo the answer to the impossibility theorem is pretty clear, and that can inform our decisions on more proximate questions, though it shouldn't determine them.
I'm not a pure utilitarian--I'd probably be closest to being an ethical intuitionist--but I think we can hone our ethical intuitions by being knowledgeable and consistent about other theories of morality. So I don't think you should just dismiss the thought experiment entirely.
Let me be more clear:
The universe is not designed such that the Repugnant Conclusion will ever matter
If it were, then my moral beliefs would be different than they are.
If my reasoning implies that both left-handers should be executed, and also that left-handers don't exist, "I'll never be in a position to execute left-handers" absolutely is a valid response to any complaints against the "left-handers should be executed" conclusion. Any scenario where I'm convinced that left-handers do exist is also one where I rethink whether they should be executed. Our moral beliefs are shaped by reality, so my beliefs about reality are relevant to my moral beliefs.
If you look at what I actually said though, I never said the repugnant conclusion etc. was totally irrelevant, just that it was mostly irrelevant. I did answer your question pretty quickly. The repugnant conclusion just seems particularly nefarious to me because people take it way beyond where any thought experiment should be taken, directly porting conclusions back to reality despite the numerous differences between the hypothetical and reality.
If your reasoning implies that left-handers don't exist because the concept is logically impossible, you don't have to care whether it tells you to execute them. But there's a difference between "it's logically impossible" and "it doesn't exist in practice".
Sure. My original response did include:
So I feel I was pretty clear about my position.
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