On the “a day in hell cannot be outweighed” question, do you have any analysis of that intuition? Are you assuming that you’ll remember that day and be broken by it, or is there some other negative value you’re putting on it. Do you evaluate “a day in hell, 1000 years in heaven, then termination” differently from “1000 years in heaven, then a day in hell, then termination”? How about “a day in hell, mind-reset to prior state, then 1000 years in heaven”?
The reason I ask is that I’m trying to understand what’s being evaluated. Are you comparing value of instantaneous experience integrated over time, or are you comparing value of effect that experiences have on your identity?
I see all of the situations you describe in the first paragraph as being on the same lexical order. I agree that effects of experiences on identity could factor into how I value things in different ways but these effects would be lexically less important than the issues that I’m worried about. For the sake of the thing I’m trying to discuss, I’d evaluate each of those trades as being the same.
An an aside, here’s a more explicit summary of where I think my “a day in hell cannot be outweighted” intuition comes from—there are two things going on:
1. First, I have difficulty coming up with any upper bound on how bad the experience of being in hell is.
But this does not preclude me trading off 1000 years of heaven for a day in hell so long as heaven is appropriately defined. Just as there are situations that I cannot treat as finitely unpleasant, there are also (in principle) situations that I cannot treat as finitely pleasant and I am willing to trade those off. As I also say in that section, I generally give more credence to this utilitarian approach than a strictly negative utilitarian one. However...
2. I have a better object-level understanding of really bad suffering than the idea of comparably really intense happiness.
which is essentally where my “a day in hell cannot be outweighed” intuition comes from. It’s not just the idea that the instaneous experience integrated over time in hell is an unboundedly high number relative to some less intense suffering; it’s also the physical reality that I grasp (on an intuitive level) how bad hell can be but lack a similar grasp on how good heaven can get. This is just the intuition though—and it’s not something I rationally stand by:
Given both that anthropocentric biases explain devaluing arbitrarily good suffering, and that I prefer ethical systems that are not species-specific, I give more credence to general forms of utilitarianism that allow for arbitrarily intense positive or negative experiences than more limited forms of negative utilitarianism. --me
Interesting. For me, I tend to normalize top and bottom values, so “a day in heaven” and “a day in hell” cancel each other out. I don’t know where the upper and lower bounds are for either, so I’m just assuming they’re of the same magnitude.
But I also tend to assume, for this kind of extreme situation, that we’re talking about no-consequences pain, which doesn’t leave lasting false beliefs or terrors that interfere with future joy and goal-accomplishment. So when it’s done, it’s done. It may be unimaginably bad in the moments, but it ends and is then normalized to tolerable (if unpleasant) levels in my memory. I don’t know what the similar heaven stipulation would be, as I tend to imagine it as getting stronger/smarter and knowing I can meet more and bigger goals (joy and optimism, not just pleasure). Which, from outside the sim, makes me devalue both heaven and hell compared to reality. Making the whole comparison pointless.
All this to say, I still don’t have a good conception of valuation of joy/pleasure vs pain/despair. I honestly don’t know whether they’re a stock or a flow, nor whether the slope, the peak, or the integral over time is most important.
On the “a day in hell cannot be outweighed” question, do you have any analysis of that intuition? Are you assuming that you’ll remember that day and be broken by it, or is there some other negative value you’re putting on it. Do you evaluate “a day in hell, 1000 years in heaven, then termination” differently from “1000 years in heaven, then a day in hell, then termination”? How about “a day in hell, mind-reset to prior state, then 1000 years in heaven”?
The reason I ask is that I’m trying to understand what’s being evaluated. Are you comparing value of instantaneous experience integrated over time, or are you comparing value of effect that experiences have on your identity?
I see all of the situations you describe in the first paragraph as being on the same lexical order. I agree that effects of experiences on identity could factor into how I value things in different ways but these effects would be lexically less important than the issues that I’m worried about. For the sake of the thing I’m trying to discuss, I’d evaluate each of those trades as being the same.
An an aside, here’s a more explicit summary of where I think my “a day in hell cannot be outweighted” intuition comes from—there are two things going on:
1. First, I have difficulty coming up with any upper bound on how bad the experience of being in hell is.
But this does not preclude me trading off 1000 years of heaven for a day in hell so long as heaven is appropriately defined. Just as there are situations that I cannot treat as finitely unpleasant, there are also (in principle) situations that I cannot treat as finitely pleasant and I am willing to trade those off. As I also say in that section, I generally give more credence to this utilitarian approach than a strictly negative utilitarian one. However...
2. I have a better object-level understanding of really bad suffering than the idea of comparably really intense happiness.
which is essentally where my “a day in hell cannot be outweighed” intuition comes from. It’s not just the idea that the instaneous experience integrated over time in hell is an unboundedly high number relative to some less intense suffering; it’s also the physical reality that I grasp (on an intuitive level) how bad hell can be but lack a similar grasp on how good heaven can get. This is just the intuition though—and it’s not something I rationally stand by:
Interesting. For me, I tend to normalize top and bottom values, so “a day in heaven” and “a day in hell” cancel each other out. I don’t know where the upper and lower bounds are for either, so I’m just assuming they’re of the same magnitude.
But I also tend to assume, for this kind of extreme situation, that we’re talking about no-consequences pain, which doesn’t leave lasting false beliefs or terrors that interfere with future joy and goal-accomplishment. So when it’s done, it’s done. It may be unimaginably bad in the moments, but it ends and is then normalized to tolerable (if unpleasant) levels in my memory. I don’t know what the similar heaven stipulation would be, as I tend to imagine it as getting stronger/smarter and knowing I can meet more and bigger goals (joy and optimism, not just pleasure). Which, from outside the sim, makes me devalue both heaven and hell compared to reality. Making the whole comparison pointless.
All this to say, I still don’t have a good conception of valuation of joy/pleasure vs pain/despair. I honestly don’t know whether they’re a stock or a flow, nor whether the slope, the peak, or the integral over time is most important.