I don’t know, or maybe I don’t understand your point. I would find a quiet and silent, post-human world very beatiful in a way. A world where the only reminders of the great, yet long gone civilisation would be ancient ruins.. Super structures which once were the statues of human prosperity and glory, now standing along with nothing but trees and plants, forever forgotten. Simply sleeping in a never ending serenity and silence...
Don’t you too, find such a future very beatiful in an eerie way? Even if there is no sentient being to perceive it at that time, the fact that such a future may exist one day, and that it can now be perceived through art and imagination, is where it’s beauty truly lies.
I suspect that you are imagining this world a good because you can’t actually separate your imagined observer from the world. The world you are talking about is not just a failure of humanity it is a world where we have failed so much that nothing is alive to witness our failure.
I don’t think you can call such a world good or perfect, but I don’t think it’s all bad either. I quess you could call it neutral.
I mean, I don’t see that world as a big failure, if a failure at all. No civilization will be there forever*, but the one I mentioned had at least achieved something at it’s time: it had once been glorious. While it left it’s statues, it still managed to keep the world habitable for life and other species. (note how I mentioned trees and plants growing on the ruins). To put it simple, it was a beatiful civilization that left a beatiful world.. It isn’t fair to call it a failure only because it wasn’t eternal.
I’ll only speak for myself, but ‘everybody dead’ gives an output nowhere near zero on my utility function. Everybody dead is awful. It’s not the worst imaginable outcome, but it is really really really low in my preference ordering. I can see why you would think it’s neutral—there’s nobody to be happy but there’s nobody to suffer either. However, if you think that people dying is a bad thing in itself, this outcome really is horrifying.
I don’t know, or maybe I don’t understand your point. I would find a quiet and silent, post-human world very beatiful in a way. A world where the only reminders of the great, yet long gone civilisation would be ancient ruins.. Super structures which once were the statues of human prosperity and glory, now standing along with nothing but trees and plants, forever forgotten. Simply sleeping in a never ending serenity and silence...
Don’t you too, find such a future very beatiful in an eerie way? Even if there is no sentient being to perceive it at that time, the fact that such a future may exist one day, and that it can now be perceived through art and imagination, is where it’s beauty truly lies.
I suspect that you are imagining this world a good because you can’t actually separate your imagined observer from the world. The world you are talking about is not just a failure of humanity it is a world where we have failed so much that nothing is alive to witness our failure.
I don’t think you can call such a world good or perfect, but I don’t think it’s all bad either. I quess you could call it neutral.
I mean, I don’t see that world as a big failure, if a failure at all. No civilization will be there forever*, but the one I mentioned had at least achieved something at it’s time: it had once been glorious. While it left it’s statues, it still managed to keep the world habitable for life and other species. (note how I mentioned trees and plants growing on the ruins). To put it simple, it was a beatiful civilization that left a beatiful world.. It isn’t fair to call it a failure only because it wasn’t eternal.
*Who am I to say that?
I’ll only speak for myself, but ‘everybody dead’ gives an output nowhere near zero on my utility function. Everybody dead is awful. It’s not the worst imaginable outcome, but it is really really really low in my preference ordering. I can see why you would think it’s neutral—there’s nobody to be happy but there’s nobody to suffer either. However, if you think that people dying is a bad thing in itself, this outcome really is horrifying.