If a human child grew up in a less painful world—if they had never lived in a world of AIDS or cancer or slavery, and so did not know these things as evils that had been triumphantly eliminated—and so did not feel that they were “already done” or that the world was “already changed enough”… Would they take the next step, and try to eliminate the unbearable pain of broken hearts, when someone’s lover stops loving them?
Here is a more instructive thought experiment. Suppose a human child grew up in a painless world and did not feel that pain was already there or that the world had already changed enough. Should she try to create, in that possible world, the kind of pain that Eliezer doesn’t think we should destroy in the actual world?
That’s a good point. Except I’m not sure why I should care about hypothetical humans that develop from a different set of starting conditions. How is that different from regular speculating of what different kinds of minds might want?
(If its not obvious I think that biologically normal human brains might end up with very different values, different enough for several kinds of future universes preferred by any one such brain to be utterly worthless to many of the others.)
If a human child grew up in a less painful world—if they had never lived in a world of AIDS or cancer or slavery, and so did not know these things as evils that had been triumphantly eliminated—and so did not feel that they were “already done” or that the world was “already changed enough”… Would they take the next step, and try to eliminate the unbearable pain of broken hearts, when someone’s lover stops loving them?
Here is a more instructive thought experiment. Suppose a human child grew up in a painless world and did not feel that pain was already there or that the world had already changed enough. Should she try to create, in that possible world, the kind of pain that Eliezer doesn’t think we should destroy in the actual world?
That’s a good point. Except I’m not sure why I should care about hypothetical humans that develop from a different set of starting conditions. How is that different from regular speculating of what different kinds of minds might want?
(If its not obvious I think that biologically normal human brains might end up with very different values, different enough for several kinds of future universes preferred by any one such brain to be utterly worthless to many of the others.)