I hold the belief that it is not possible to instantiate suffering worse than a star. this may be important for understanding how I think about what suffering is—I see it at fundamentally defined by wasted motion. it is not possible to exceed negentropy waste by creating suffering because that’s already what suffering is. I strongly agree with almost all your points, from the sound of things—I’ve gotten into several discussions the last couple days about this same topic, preserving agency even when that agency wants to maximize control-failure.
in terms of self-consistency, again it sounds like we basically agree—there are situations where one is obligated to intervene to check that the agents in a system are all being respected appropriately by other agents in a system.
my core claim is, if an agent-shard really values energy waste, well, that’s really foolish of them, but because the ratio of beings who want that can be trusted to be very low, all one need do is ensure agency of all agent-shards is respected, and suffering-avoidance falls out of it automatically (because suffering is inherently failure of agency-shards to reach their target, in absolutely all cases).
this seems like a very weird model to me. can you clarify what you mean by “suffering” ? whether or not you call it “suffering”, there is way worse stuff than a star. for example, a star’s worth of energy spent running variations of the holocaust is way worse than a star just doing combustion. the holocaust has a lot of suffering; a simple star probly barely has any random moral patients arising and experiencing anything.
here are some examples from me: “suffering” contains things like undergoing depression or torture, “nice things” contains things like “enjoying hugging a friend” or “enjoying having an insight”. both “consume energy” that could’ve not been spent — but isn’t the whole point of that we need to defeat moloch in order to have enough slack to have nice things, and also be sure that we don’t spend our slack printing suffering?
ah crap (approving), you found a serious error in how I’ve been summarizing my thinking on this. Whoops, and thank you!
Hmm. I actually don’t know that I can update my english to a new integrated view that responds to this point without thinking about it for a few days, so I’m going to have to get back to you. I expect to argue to that 1. yep, your counterexample holds—some information causes more suffering-for-an-agent if that information is lost into entropy than other information 2. I still feel comfortable asserting that we are all subagents of the universe, and that stars cannot be reasonably claimed to not be suffering; suffering is, in my view, an amount-of-damage-induced-to-an-agent’s-intent, and stars are necessarily damage induced to agentic intent because they are waste.
again, I do feel comfortable asserting that suffering must be waste and waste must be suffering, but it seems I need to nail down the weighting math and justification a bit better if it is to be useful to others.
Indeed, my current hunch is that I’m looking for amount of satisfying energy burn vs amount of frustrating energy burn, and my assertion that stars are necessarily almost entirely frustrating energy burn still seems likely to be defensible after further thought.
no, I consider any group of particles that have any interaction with each other to contain the nonplanning preferences of the laws of physics, and agency can arise any time a group of particles can predict another group of particles and seek to spread their intent into the receiving particles. not quite panpsychist—inert matter does not contain agency. but I do view agency as a continuous value, not a discrete one.
I hold the belief that it is not possible to instantiate suffering worse than a star. this may be important for understanding how I think about what suffering is—I see it at fundamentally defined by wasted motion. it is not possible to exceed negentropy waste by creating suffering because that’s already what suffering is. I strongly agree with almost all your points, from the sound of things—I’ve gotten into several discussions the last couple days about this same topic, preserving agency even when that agency wants to maximize control-failure.
in terms of self-consistency, again it sounds like we basically agree—there are situations where one is obligated to intervene to check that the agents in a system are all being respected appropriately by other agents in a system.
my core claim is, if an agent-shard really values energy waste, well, that’s really foolish of them, but because the ratio of beings who want that can be trusted to be very low, all one need do is ensure agency of all agent-shards is respected, and suffering-avoidance falls out of it automatically (because suffering is inherently failure of agency-shards to reach their target, in absolutely all cases).
this seems like a very weird model to me. can you clarify what you mean by “suffering” ? whether or not you call it “suffering”, there is way worse stuff than a star. for example, a star’s worth of energy spent running variations of the holocaust is way worse than a star just doing combustion. the holocaust has a lot of suffering; a simple star probly barely has any random moral patients arising and experiencing anything.
here are some examples from me: “suffering” contains things like undergoing depression or torture, “nice things” contains things like “enjoying hugging a friend” or “enjoying having an insight”. both “consume energy” that could’ve not been spent — but isn’t the whole point of that we need to defeat moloch in order to have enough slack to have nice things, and also be sure that we don’t spend our slack printing suffering?
ah crap (approving), you found a serious error in how I’ve been summarizing my thinking on this. Whoops, and thank you!
Hmm. I actually don’t know that I can update my english to a new integrated view that responds to this point without thinking about it for a few days, so I’m going to have to get back to you. I expect to argue to that 1. yep, your counterexample holds—some information causes more suffering-for-an-agent if that information is lost into entropy than other information 2. I still feel comfortable asserting that we are all subagents of the universe, and that stars cannot be reasonably claimed to not be suffering; suffering is, in my view, an amount-of-damage-induced-to-an-agent’s-intent, and stars are necessarily damage induced to agentic intent because they are waste.
again, I do feel comfortable asserting that suffering must be waste and waste must be suffering, but it seems I need to nail down the weighting math and justification a bit better if it is to be useful to others.
Indeed, my current hunch is that I’m looking for amount of satisfying energy burn vs amount of frustrating energy burn, and my assertion that stars are necessarily almost entirely frustrating energy burn still seems likely to be defensible after further thought.
Are you an illusionist about first person experience? Your concept of suffering doesn’t seem to have any experiential qualities to it at all.
no, I consider any group of particles that have any interaction with each other to contain the nonplanning preferences of the laws of physics, and agency can arise any time a group of particles can predict another group of particles and seek to spread their intent into the receiving particles. not quite panpsychist—inert matter does not contain agency. but I do view agency as a continuous value, not a discrete one.