this seems like a very weird model to me. can you clarify what you mean by “suffering” ? whether or not you call it “suffering”, there is way worse stuff than a star. for example, a star’s worth of energy spent running variations of the holocaust is way worse than a star just doing combustion. the holocaust has a lot of suffering; a simple star probly barely has any random moral patients arising and experiencing anything.
here are some examples from me: “suffering” contains things like undergoing depression or torture, “nice things” contains things like “enjoying hugging a friend” or “enjoying having an insight”. both “consume energy” that could’ve not been spent — but isn’t the whole point of that we need to defeat moloch in order to have enough slack to have nice things, and also be sure that we don’t spend our slack printing suffering?
ah crap (approving), you found a serious error in how I’ve been summarizing my thinking on this. Whoops, and thank you!
Hmm. I actually don’t know that I can update my english to a new integrated view that responds to this point without thinking about it for a few days, so I’m going to have to get back to you. I expect to argue to that 1. yep, your counterexample holds—some information causes more suffering-for-an-agent if that information is lost into entropy than other information 2. I still feel comfortable asserting that we are all subagents of the universe, and that stars cannot be reasonably claimed to not be suffering; suffering is, in my view, an amount-of-damage-induced-to-an-agent’s-intent, and stars are necessarily damage induced to agentic intent because they are waste.
again, I do feel comfortable asserting that suffering must be waste and waste must be suffering, but it seems I need to nail down the weighting math and justification a bit better if it is to be useful to others.
Indeed, my current hunch is that I’m looking for amount of satisfying energy burn vs amount of frustrating energy burn, and my assertion that stars are necessarily almost entirely frustrating energy burn still seems likely to be defensible after further thought.
this seems like a very weird model to me. can you clarify what you mean by “suffering” ? whether or not you call it “suffering”, there is way worse stuff than a star. for example, a star’s worth of energy spent running variations of the holocaust is way worse than a star just doing combustion. the holocaust has a lot of suffering; a simple star probly barely has any random moral patients arising and experiencing anything.
here are some examples from me: “suffering” contains things like undergoing depression or torture, “nice things” contains things like “enjoying hugging a friend” or “enjoying having an insight”. both “consume energy” that could’ve not been spent — but isn’t the whole point of that we need to defeat moloch in order to have enough slack to have nice things, and also be sure that we don’t spend our slack printing suffering?
ah crap (approving), you found a serious error in how I’ve been summarizing my thinking on this. Whoops, and thank you!
Hmm. I actually don’t know that I can update my english to a new integrated view that responds to this point without thinking about it for a few days, so I’m going to have to get back to you. I expect to argue to that 1. yep, your counterexample holds—some information causes more suffering-for-an-agent if that information is lost into entropy than other information 2. I still feel comfortable asserting that we are all subagents of the universe, and that stars cannot be reasonably claimed to not be suffering; suffering is, in my view, an amount-of-damage-induced-to-an-agent’s-intent, and stars are necessarily damage induced to agentic intent because they are waste.
again, I do feel comfortable asserting that suffering must be waste and waste must be suffering, but it seems I need to nail down the weighting math and justification a bit better if it is to be useful to others.
Indeed, my current hunch is that I’m looking for amount of satisfying energy burn vs amount of frustrating energy burn, and my assertion that stars are necessarily almost entirely frustrating energy burn still seems likely to be defensible after further thought.