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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

That seems to be taking the concept outside of where it's useful, unless you want to elaborate further.

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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