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.
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.