Worrying about or valuing the pain, pleasure or whatever of people who don’t yet exist or who might never exist is something that has always struck me as ludicrous around here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense, I am saying it just has no resonance with me.
Seeing all the other posts over the months that lead me to believe/realize that morality IS based on moral intuitions, and that moral systems are an attempt to come up with something which is more internally consistent than the intuitions on which it is based are, I feel comfortable (relatively) saying: I don’t care about people who don’t exist. I am not creating less good by not creating people who could then have some net good to multiply by their numbers and thus earn me brownie points with the god which does not exist anyway.
So my comment on this post: I don’t value a billion wireheaders any more than I value a billion non-wireheaders, and I don’t value 10 billion wireheaders that do not yet exist at all. IF wireheading sucks your brains out like a zombie (that is, if it renders you incapable of doing anything other than finding that wire to reconnect to) than my evolutionary sensibilities suggest to me that the societies the future will care about, because they have outcompeted other societies and still exist, are the one that have one way or another kept wireheading from being an acceptable choice. Whether through banning, death penalties, or some remarkable insertion of memes into the culture that are powerful enough to overpower the wire, it barely matters how. Societies that lose much of their brain talent to wireheading will be competed away by societies that don’t.
I’m not sure if in my intuitions that makes it right or not. I’m not sure my intuitions, or morality qua morality for that matter, are the important question anyway.
Worrying about or valuing the pain, pleasure or whatever of people who don’t yet exist or who might never exist is something that has always struck me as ludicrous around here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense, I am saying it just has no resonance with me.
Seeing all the other posts over the months that lead me to believe/realize that morality IS based on moral intuitions, and that moral systems are an attempt to come up with something which is more internally consistent than the intuitions on which it is based are, I feel comfortable (relatively) saying: I don’t care about people who don’t exist. I am not creating less good by not creating people who could then have some net good to multiply by their numbers and thus earn me brownie points with the god which does not exist anyway.
So my comment on this post: I don’t value a billion wireheaders any more than I value a billion non-wireheaders, and I don’t value 10 billion wireheaders that do not yet exist at all. IF wireheading sucks your brains out like a zombie (that is, if it renders you incapable of doing anything other than finding that wire to reconnect to) than my evolutionary sensibilities suggest to me that the societies the future will care about, because they have outcompeted other societies and still exist, are the one that have one way or another kept wireheading from being an acceptable choice. Whether through banning, death penalties, or some remarkable insertion of memes into the culture that are powerful enough to overpower the wire, it barely matters how. Societies that lose much of their brain talent to wireheading will be competed away by societies that don’t.
I’m not sure if in my intuitions that makes it right or not. I’m not sure my intuitions, or morality qua morality for that matter, are the important question anyway.