Gigadeath: Billions of people, or some number roughly comparable to the number of people alive, die.
That happened during the 20th century.
Human extinction: No humans survive afterward. (Or modified slightly: no human-like life survives, or no sentient life survives, or no intelligent life survives.)
Wait wait wait… These are four vastly different things.
Existential disaster: Some significant fraction, perhaps all, of the future’s potential moral value is lost.
Since a whole lotta people here don’t believe in morals, or at least not without so many qualifications that the average Joe wouldn’t recognize what they were talking about, you need to explain this in a different way.
“Doomsday argument doomsday”: The total number of observers (or observer-moments) in existence ends up being small – not much larger than the total that have existed in the past.
Not all observers are equal; so counting them is not enough. Is a singleton a doomsday?
Existential disaster: Some significant fraction, perhaps all, of the future’s potential moral value is lost.
Since a whole lotta people here don’t believe in morals, or at least not without so many qualifications that the average Joe wouldn’t recognize what they were talking about, you need to explain this in a different way.
It all adds up to normality. The average Joe might not credit our explanations of what morality is. But such explanations are about what morality is “behind the scenes”. That is, they are explanations of what stands behind our experience of morally evaluating something. But that experience itself would probably be very familiar to the average Joe.
So, when we talk about a morally value-less future, the experience that we anticipate, were we to know of this future, is just the normal one of moral repugnance that Joe would expect.
No humans surviving is a very different set of possible worlds than no human-like life surviving. No humans surviving is my default assumption; the latter is not.
Sentient life could be very un-human. Intelligent life could be non-sentient.
I know. The original said “slightly modified” because the modifications were only one word. The current version makes no claims about whether the modifications are slight in any sense.
That happened during the 20th century.
Wait wait wait… These are four vastly different things.
Since a whole lotta people here don’t believe in morals, or at least not without so many qualifications that the average Joe wouldn’t recognize what they were talking about, you need to explain this in a different way.
Not all observers are equal; so counting them is not enough. Is a singleton a doomsday?
It all adds up to normality. The average Joe might not credit our explanations of what morality is. But such explanations are about what morality is “behind the scenes”. That is, they are explanations of what stands behind our experience of morally evaluating something. But that experience itself would probably be very familiar to the average Joe.
So, when we talk about a morally value-less future, the experience that we anticipate, were we to know of this future, is just the normal one of moral repugnance that Joe would expect.
fixed
It still appears the same to me.
No humans surviving is a very different set of possible worlds than no human-like life surviving. No humans surviving is my default assumption; the latter is not.
Sentient life could be very un-human. Intelligent life could be non-sentient.
I know. The original said “slightly modified” because the modifications were only one word. The current version makes no claims about whether the modifications are slight in any sense.