I will state below what I call the “strong anti consciousness maximalism” position:
Because human values are such a tiny portion of value space (a complex, fragile and precious thing), “almost all” possible minds would have values that I consider repugnant:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_all
A simple demonstration: for every real number, there is a mind that seeks to write a representation of that number to as many digits as possible.
Such minds are “paperclip maximisers” (they value something just a banal as paperclips). There are an uncountable (as many as there are real numbers) number of such minds.
I would oppose the creation of such minds and should they exist will support disempowering them.
Thus, I oppose “almost all” possible conscious minds.
In the infinitude of mindspace, only a finite subset are “precious”.
I no longer endorse this position, but don’t feel like deleting it.
Tbe construction I gave for constructing minds who only cared about banal things could also be used to construct minds who were precious.
For each real number, you could have an agent who cared somewhat about writing down as many digits of that number as possible and also (perhaps even more strongly) about cosmopolitan values (or any other value system we’d appreciate).
So there are also uncountably many precious minds.
The argument and position staked out was thus pointless. I think that I shouldn’t have written the above post.
Quantification is hard, and I can understand changing your position on “most” vs “almost all”. But the underlying realizations that there are at least “some” places in mindspace that you oppose strongly enough to prevent creation and attempt destruction of such minds remains valuable.
The Strong Anti Consciousness Maximalism Position
I will state below what I call the “strong anti consciousness maximalism” position:
Because human values are such a tiny portion of value space (a complex, fragile and precious thing), “almost all” possible minds would have values that I consider repugnant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_all
A simple demonstration: for every real number, there is a mind that seeks to write a representation of that number to as many digits as possible.
Such minds are “paperclip maximisers” (they value something just a banal as paperclips). There are an uncountable (as many as there are real numbers) number of such minds.
I would oppose the creation of such minds and should they exist will support disempowering them.
Thus, I oppose “almost all” possible conscious minds.
In the infinitude of mindspace, only a finite subset are “precious”.
I no longer endorse this position, but don’t feel like deleting it.
Tbe construction I gave for constructing minds who only cared about banal things could also be used to construct minds who were precious.
For each real number, you could have an agent who cared somewhat about writing down as many digits of that number as possible and also (perhaps even more strongly) about cosmopolitan values (or any other value system we’d appreciate).
So there are also uncountably many precious minds.
The argument and position staked out was thus pointless. I think that I shouldn’t have written the above post.
Quantification is hard, and I can understand changing your position on “most” vs “almost all”. But the underlying realizations that there are at least “some” places in mindspace that you oppose strongly enough to prevent creation and attempt destruction of such minds remains valuable.
You’re equivocating on minds and conscious minds. In fact, I wouldn’t call an algorithm that prints digits of pi a mind at all.
I define “mind” as conscious agent. If I didn’t specify that in my OP, that was an error.