Q: How to cope with the possibility of immense suffering?
I want to address the psychological aspect first, because at the start you say “I’ve been stuck on s-risks for over a month now. My life has been turned upside down since I first learned about this subject.”
The most helpful emotional state for thinking about this is calm, sober, lucid, and patient. If you rush to conclusions based on anxiety, you’ll probably get the wrong answer.
Although immense suffering is possible, your body is reacting to that possibility as if it were a physical threat in your immediate environment. Your heart rate increases, your breathing gets faster, and your muscles tense. This topic requires careful thinking, so that physiological response is totally unhelpful. You can work with the problem more effectively if you’re in an emotional state conducive to high quality thinking.
To calm down you can breathe more slowly, take a break from things that trigger anxiety, and observe the physical sensations of anxiety with a neutral attitude.
Q: Is suicide justified by subjective s-risk?
We don’t know enough to answer this question. There’s too much we don’t understand. The s-risk part of the equation is a complete mystery, which means the ordinary reasons against suicide take precedence. There’s no reason to sacrifice your life and the wellbeing of the people around you when the expected value is a question mark (meaning total cluelessness, not just error bars).
If you say death is oblivion and therefore reduces subjective s-risk, I would ask why you think you know that.
To take one example (that’s not quantum immortality), consider that before you were born, nothing in the universe was “you”. Then “you” came into existence. After you die, nothing in the universe will be “you”. If there’s no information in reality to identify “you” because you no longer exist, then that’s the same situation as before you were born. In other words, you’ll be in a situation that once preceded your coming into existence. Nonexistence isn’t an experience, so the subjective duration between dying and coming into existence would be zero.
In other words, the zero-information oblivion that produced you once can produce you again, maybe in a different form.
In that case, death is not subjective oblivion, but a rolling of the cosmic dice. I have no idea what experiences would follow, but I don’t see why they would predictably include less suffering.
If you say that our current universe has unusually high s-risk so the dice roll is worth it, again I ask why you think you know that. Maybe most minds exist in simulations run by unaligned AGI. Maybe our slightly pre-AGI world has unusually low s-risk.
Maybe we’re in a simulation that punishes suicide because it harms others and is therefore a defection against the common good.
When you’re in such a state of extreme uncertainty, going around sacrificing things you value, like your life, doesn’t magically help. The best thing you can do is relax, because psychological stability is conducive to clear thinking.
Thank you for your excellent reply. Indeed, I tend to think about the situation in a rather anxious way, which is what I’m trying to work on. I had already thought a certain way about the “roll of the dice”, but it seems clearer to me now. That’s helpful.
Q: How to cope with the possibility of immense suffering?
I want to address the psychological aspect first, because at the start you say “I’ve been stuck on s-risks for over a month now. My life has been turned upside down since I first learned about this subject.”
The most helpful emotional state for thinking about this is calm, sober, lucid, and patient. If you rush to conclusions based on anxiety, you’ll probably get the wrong answer.
Although immense suffering is possible, your body is reacting to that possibility as if it were a physical threat in your immediate environment. Your heart rate increases, your breathing gets faster, and your muscles tense. This topic requires careful thinking, so that physiological response is totally unhelpful. You can work with the problem more effectively if you’re in an emotional state conducive to high quality thinking.
To calm down you can breathe more slowly, take a break from things that trigger anxiety, and observe the physical sensations of anxiety with a neutral attitude.
Q: Is suicide justified by subjective s-risk?
We don’t know enough to answer this question. There’s too much we don’t understand. The s-risk part of the equation is a complete mystery, which means the ordinary reasons against suicide take precedence. There’s no reason to sacrifice your life and the wellbeing of the people around you when the expected value is a question mark (meaning total cluelessness, not just error bars).
If you say death is oblivion and therefore reduces subjective s-risk, I would ask why you think you know that.
To take one example (that’s not quantum immortality), consider that before you were born, nothing in the universe was “you”. Then “you” came into existence. After you die, nothing in the universe will be “you”. If there’s no information in reality to identify “you” because you no longer exist, then that’s the same situation as before you were born. In other words, you’ll be in a situation that once preceded your coming into existence. Nonexistence isn’t an experience, so the subjective duration between dying and coming into existence would be zero.
In other words, the zero-information oblivion that produced you once can produce you again, maybe in a different form.
In that case, death is not subjective oblivion, but a rolling of the cosmic dice. I have no idea what experiences would follow, but I don’t see why they would predictably include less suffering.
If you say that our current universe has unusually high s-risk so the dice roll is worth it, again I ask why you think you know that. Maybe most minds exist in simulations run by unaligned AGI. Maybe our slightly pre-AGI world has unusually low s-risk.
Maybe we’re in a simulation that punishes suicide because it harms others and is therefore a defection against the common good.
When you’re in such a state of extreme uncertainty, going around sacrificing things you value, like your life, doesn’t magically help. The best thing you can do is relax, because psychological stability is conducive to clear thinking.
Thank you for your excellent reply. Indeed, I tend to think about the situation in a rather anxious way, which is what I’m trying to work on. I had already thought a certain way about the “roll of the dice”, but it seems clearer to me now. That’s helpful.
Huh, that’s Epicurus’s argument against fearing death. But while Epicurus assumed there is no afterlife, you’re using it to argue there is one!