There are many more states of the world that are bad for an individual than good for that individual, and feeling pleasure in a bad world state tends to lead to death. So no, in an amoral world I’d expect much more suffering than pleasure, because the suffering is more instrumentally useful for survival. I think, given that, you’re last point is just… completely unsupported and incorrect.
The first part of your reply is basically repeating the point I made, but again, the issue is you’re assuming the current laws of physics are the only laws that allow conscious beings without a creator. I disagree that must be the case.
How can my last point be supported? Do you expect me to create a universe with different laws of physics? How do you know it’s incorrect?
I fully agree with you that there are a vast set of possible laws of physics that could create conscious beings without a creator. Not sure where it seemed like I meant the opposite? What I disagree with is the idea that us ending up in an amoral world is “bad luck.” A priori I expect it would require literally-unbelievably good luck to end up in a “good” world without a creator/designer, because almost all possible laws supporting conscious beings will not be like that.
And I agree with your point that evolution leans towards suffering, but I disagree with your assertion that an indifferent process would tend to have a symmetry between the two. I see no underlying reason why there would be such a symmetry, and many why there would not.
As for your last point—sorry I wasn’t precise, but at some level yes, I agree that such a thing is technically possible. It is just superexponentially unlikely to the point that a random being is more likely to be a Boltzmann brain than to actually be in such a universe. How many bits of data does it take to reduce a moral system to math, encode that math into physics, and arrange the entire universe’s mass-energy such that over time good greatly outweighs bad across it’s entire spacetime? What fraction of the 2^(N+1)-1 possible datasets that large or smaller correspond to good universes, as opposed to neutral or bad ones? That’s the level of “unlikely” we’re considering. When I say literally unbelievable, I mean the entire cosmos, let alone a human mind, is incapable of representing a number that small.
You don’t need a moral universe; you just need one where the joy is higher than suffering for conscious beings (“agents”); There are many ways in which it can happen:
Starting from a mostly hostile world but converging quickly towards a benevolent reality created by the agents.
Existing in a world where the distribution of bad vs. good external things that the agent can encounter is similar.
Existing in a hostile world, but in which the winning strategy is leeching into a specific resource (which will grant internal satisfaction once reached)
I’m sure you can think of many other examples. Again, it’s not clear to me intuitively that the existence of these worlds is as improbable as you claim.
I’m curious why or whether it would matter whether a universe starts out with goodness baked into the laws themselves, or becomes better over time through the actions of beings the amoral laws and initial conditions cough up? Our own universe gave itself a trillion trillion stars around which to potentially create life, just in our own Hubble volume, and will continue to exist for many times longer than the few hundred million years since the first life capable of suffering or joy appeared on Earth. If it’s possible for good things in one place/time to outweigh bad things in other places and times (which seems to be a prerequisite for this discussion to be meaningful), and possible in principle for beings like us to make things better, then how can we draw any conclusions on the morality of the whole of spacetime except that we should try our best and reserve judgement?
Because you have a pretty significant data point (That spans millions of years) on Earth, and nothing else is going on (to the best of our knowledge), now the question is, how much weight do you want to give to this data point? Reserving judgment means almost ignoring it. For me, it seems more reasonable to update towards a net-negative universe.
Then I think that’s the crux for me. I’d say the right amount of weight is almost none, for the same reason that I don’t update about the expected sum of someone’s life based on what they do in the first weeks after they’re born. We agree the universe did not come into being with the capacity for aiming itself toward being good. It remains to be seen whether we (or other lifeforms elsewhere) do have enough of that capability to make use of it at large scale, which we didn’t even have the capacity to envision until very, very recently.
Given the trajectory and speed of change on Earth in the past few centuries, I think the next few centuries will provide far more data about our future light cone than the entirety of the past millions of years do.
There are many more states of the world that are bad for an individual than good for that individual, and feeling pleasure in a bad world state tends to lead to death. So no, in an amoral world I’d expect much more suffering than pleasure, because the suffering is more instrumentally useful for survival. I think, given that, you’re last point is just… completely unsupported and incorrect.
The first part of your reply is basically repeating the point I made, but again, the issue is you’re assuming the current laws of physics are the only laws that allow conscious beings without a creator. I disagree that must be the case.
How can my last point be supported? Do you expect me to create a universe with different laws of physics? How do you know it’s incorrect?
I fully agree with you that there are a vast set of possible laws of physics that could create conscious beings without a creator. Not sure where it seemed like I meant the opposite? What I disagree with is the idea that us ending up in an amoral world is “bad luck.” A priori I expect it would require literally-unbelievably good luck to end up in a “good” world without a creator/designer, because almost all possible laws supporting conscious beings will not be like that.
And I agree with your point that evolution leans towards suffering, but I disagree with your assertion that an indifferent process would tend to have a symmetry between the two. I see no underlying reason why there would be such a symmetry, and many why there would not.
As for your last point—sorry I wasn’t precise, but at some level yes, I agree that such a thing is technically possible. It is just superexponentially unlikely to the point that a random being is more likely to be a Boltzmann brain than to actually be in such a universe. How many bits of data does it take to reduce a moral system to math, encode that math into physics, and arrange the entire universe’s mass-energy such that over time good greatly outweighs bad across it’s entire spacetime? What fraction of the 2^(N+1)-1 possible datasets that large or smaller correspond to good universes, as opposed to neutral or bad ones? That’s the level of “unlikely” we’re considering. When I say literally unbelievable, I mean the entire cosmos, let alone a human mind, is incapable of representing a number that small.
You don’t need a moral universe; you just need one where the joy is higher than suffering for conscious beings (“agents”); There are many ways in which it can happen:
Starting from a mostly hostile world but converging quickly towards a benevolent reality created by the agents.
Existing in a world where the distribution of bad vs. good external things that the agent can encounter is similar.
Existing in a hostile world, but in which the winning strategy is leeching into a specific resource (which will grant internal satisfaction once reached)
I’m sure you can think of many other examples. Again, it’s not clear to me intuitively that the existence of these worlds is as improbable as you claim.
I do think our universe will converge that way, if we make it do so. The future is bigger than the past, and we can be the mechanism for that.
Maybe, and maybe not.
I’m curious why or whether it would matter whether a universe starts out with goodness baked into the laws themselves, or becomes better over time through the actions of beings the amoral laws and initial conditions cough up? Our own universe gave itself a trillion trillion stars around which to potentially create life, just in our own Hubble volume, and will continue to exist for many times longer than the few hundred million years since the first life capable of suffering or joy appeared on Earth. If it’s possible for good things in one place/time to outweigh bad things in other places and times (which seems to be a prerequisite for this discussion to be meaningful), and possible in principle for beings like us to make things better, then how can we draw any conclusions on the morality of the whole of spacetime except that we should try our best and reserve judgement?
Because you have a pretty significant data point (That spans millions of years) on Earth, and nothing else is going on (to the best of our knowledge), now the question is, how much weight do you want to give to this data point? Reserving judgment means almost ignoring it. For me, it seems more reasonable to update towards a net-negative universe.
Then I think that’s the crux for me. I’d say the right amount of weight is almost none, for the same reason that I don’t update about the expected sum of someone’s life based on what they do in the first weeks after they’re born. We agree the universe did not come into being with the capacity for aiming itself toward being good. It remains to be seen whether we (or other lifeforms elsewhere) do have enough of that capability to make use of it at large scale, which we didn’t even have the capacity to envision until very, very recently.
Given the trajectory and speed of change on Earth in the past few centuries, I think the next few centuries will provide far more data about our future light cone than the entirety of the past millions of years do.