Weird take I frequently get funny looks for, no matter where I say it, rationalist community or other places: I currently think it is accurate to say that the sun is a ball of nearly pure suffering, devoid of the conscious experience that normally might make suffering worth it.
Because I hold this belief, I also hold the belief that we therefore have an obligation to starlift it. I don’t claim we need to then turn it into computronium, and I’d still like warmth and lights for our planets. But starlifting the sun would likely break up the solar system, so we’d need to recoordinate the planets to do it. It would be an immense undertaking of scales not often spoken of even in science fiction. But I think we have a moral obligation to give negentropic matter the chance to become happy people as its path towards entropy.
For further understanding of how I think about this—perhaps in over-dense jargon, sorry to be over-brief here—I am very close to being a pure positive utilitarian, and my current understanding of nociception and avoidance behaviors implies that suffering in the brain may just be when brain-managed matter moves away from its path to entropy being made of patterns of intended-selfhood, eg because it is damaged, and the agency of returning to an intended self-form costs negentropy. Therefore, all energy spend that is not a being having its intended form is waste, and that waste is suffering because of there being life forms who wish it to be otherwise. My priority right now is preserving life on earth, but once we’ve got that more stable I think ensuring there’s not astronomical waste is a moral imperative because wasted negentropy is unconscious suffering.
So, does this mean that you have descended past “We need to eliminate the suffering of fruit flies” and gone straight for “We need to eliminate the suffering of atomic nuclei that are forced to fuse together?” This seems like a pretty wildly wrong view, and not because rectifying the problem is beyond our technological abilities. It seems like there is plenty of human suffering to attend to without having to invent new kinds of suffering based on atoms in the sun.
it does not. human suffering is the priority because they contain the selfhoods we’d want to imbue descendants of onto the sun’s negentropy. earth is rapidly losing the information-theoretic selves of beings and this is a catastrophe. My moral system adds up to being pretty normal in familiar circumstances, the main way I disagree with mainstream is that I want to end farmed animal suffering asap too. But my main priority in the near term is preserving human life and actualization; my concern that the sun is pure suffering is relative to the beings who are themselves dying. The underlying principle here is measuring what could have been in terms of complex beings actualizing themselves with that negentropy, and in order for that could-have-been to occur we need to end the great many sources of death, disease, and suffering that mean those people won’t be with us when we can achieve starlifting.
Weird take I frequently get funny looks for, no matter where I say it, rationalist community or other places: I currently think it is accurate to say that the sun is a ball of nearly pure suffering, devoid of the conscious experience that normally might make suffering worth it.
Because I hold this belief, I also hold the belief that we therefore have an obligation to starlift it. I don’t claim we need to then turn it into computronium, and I’d still like warmth and lights for our planets. But starlifting the sun would likely break up the solar system, so we’d need to recoordinate the planets to do it. It would be an immense undertaking of scales not often spoken of even in science fiction. But I think we have a moral obligation to give negentropic matter the chance to become happy people as its path towards entropy.
For further understanding of how I think about this—perhaps in over-dense jargon, sorry to be over-brief here—I am very close to being a pure positive utilitarian, and my current understanding of nociception and avoidance behaviors implies that suffering in the brain may just be when brain-managed matter moves away from its path to entropy being made of patterns of intended-selfhood, eg because it is damaged, and the agency of returning to an intended self-form costs negentropy. Therefore, all energy spend that is not a being having its intended form is waste, and that waste is suffering because of there being life forms who wish it to be otherwise. My priority right now is preserving life on earth, but once we’ve got that more stable I think ensuring there’s not astronomical waste is a moral imperative because wasted negentropy is unconscious suffering.
So, does this mean that you have descended past “We need to eliminate the suffering of fruit flies” and gone straight for “We need to eliminate the suffering of atomic nuclei that are forced to fuse together?” This seems like a pretty wildly wrong view, and not because rectifying the problem is beyond our technological abilities. It seems like there is plenty of human suffering to attend to without having to invent new kinds of suffering based on atoms in the sun.
it does not. human suffering is the priority because they contain the selfhoods we’d want to imbue descendants of onto the sun’s negentropy. earth is rapidly losing the information-theoretic selves of beings and this is a catastrophe. My moral system adds up to being pretty normal in familiar circumstances, the main way I disagree with mainstream is that I want to end farmed animal suffering asap too. But my main priority in the near term is preserving human life and actualization; my concern that the sun is pure suffering is relative to the beings who are themselves dying. The underlying principle here is measuring what could have been in terms of complex beings actualizing themselves with that negentropy, and in order for that could-have-been to occur we need to end the great many sources of death, disease, and suffering that mean those people won’t be with us when we can achieve starlifting.