Presumably, you are asking because you want to calculate the worst-case disutility of the universe, in order to decide whether making sure that it doesn’t come about is more important than pretty much anything else.
I would say that this question cannot be properly answered through physical examination, because the meaning of such human words as suffering becomes too fuzzy in edge cases.
The proper approach to deciding on actions in the face of uncertainty of the utility function is utility aggregation. The only way I’ve found to not run into Pascal’s Wager problems, and the way that humans seem to naturally use, is to normalize each utility function before combining them.
So let’s say that we are 50⁄50 uncertain whether there is no state of existence worse than nonexistence, or we should cast aside all other concerns to avert hell. Then after normalization and combination, the exact details will depend on what method of aggregation we use (which should depend on the method we use to turn utility functions into decisions), but as far as I can see the utility function would come out to one that tells us to exert quite an effort to avert hell, but still care about other concerns.
Presumably, you are asking because you want to calculate the worst-case disutility of the universe, in order to decide whether making sure that it doesn’t come about is more important than pretty much anything else.
I would say that this question cannot be properly answered through physical examination, because the meaning of such human words as suffering becomes too fuzzy in edge cases.
The proper approach to deciding on actions in the face of uncertainty of the utility function is utility aggregation. The only way I’ve found to not run into Pascal’s Wager problems, and the way that humans seem to naturally use, is to normalize each utility function before combining them.
So let’s say that we are 50⁄50 uncertain whether there is no state of existence worse than nonexistence, or we should cast aside all other concerns to avert hell. Then after normalization and combination, the exact details will depend on what method of aggregation we use (which should depend on the method we use to turn utility functions into decisions), but as far as I can see the utility function would come out to one that tells us to exert quite an effort to avert hell, but still care about other concerns.