In this case, I do think that the number of happy people in expectation is infinite both now, and in the future, for both somewhat trivial reasons, and somewhat more substantive reasons.
The trivial reason is I believe that space is infinite with non-negligible probability, and that’s enough to get us to an expected infinity of happy people.
The somewhat more sophisticated reason has to do with the possibility of changing physics, like in Adam Brown’s talk, and in general any possibility of the rules being changeable also allows you to introduce possible infinities into things:
I think that here you should re-evaluate what you consider “natural units”.
Like, it’s clear due to Olbers’s paradox and relativity that we live in causally isolated pocket where stuff we can interact with is certainly finite. If the universe is a set of causally isolated bubbles all you have is anthropics over such bubbles.
Why would the value to me personally of existence of happy people be linear in the number of them? Does creating happy person #10000001 [almost] identical to the previous 10000000 as joyous as when the 1st of them was created? I think value is necessary limited. There are always diminishing returns from more of the same...
Most value functions that grow without bound like logarithms or even log log x also tend to infinity, though for you personally, you might think that the value of existence of happy people is bounded, but this isn’t true for at least some people (not including myself in the sentence here), so the argument still doesn’t work.
In this case, I do think that the number of happy people in expectation is infinite both now, and in the future, for both somewhat trivial reasons, and somewhat more substantive reasons.
The trivial reason is I believe that space is infinite with non-negligible probability, and that’s enough to get us to an expected infinity of happy people.
The somewhat more sophisticated reason has to do with the possibility of changing physics, like in Adam Brown’s talk, and in general any possibility of the rules being changeable also allows you to introduce possible infinities into things:
https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/adam-brown
I think that here you should re-evaluate what you consider “natural units”.
Like, it’s clear due to Olbers’s paradox and relativity that we live in causally isolated pocket where stuff we can interact with is certainly finite. If the universe is a set of causally isolated bubbles all you have is anthropics over such bubbles.
Why would the value to me personally of existence of happy people be linear in the number of them? Does creating happy person #10000001 [almost] identical to the previous 10000000 as joyous as when the 1st of them was created? I think value is necessary limited. There are always diminishing returns from more of the same...
Most value functions that grow without bound like logarithms or even log log x also tend to infinity, though for you personally, you might think that the value of existence of happy people is bounded, but this isn’t true for at least some people (not including myself in the sentence here), so the argument still doesn’t work.