If the clever rhetorical questions you ask are rhetorically wrong then they remain wrong even if you have some good point that you want to ultimately support. I know this is a peculiar cultural norm to go by but it’s a valuable one.
50 billion years still remain absurdly small compared to eternity.
Quite a lot smaller, yes.
The interesting question to ask here is what chance of eternal life we would be willing to exchange for a given 1% chance of 50 billion years of life in terms of hypothetical decision making. For instance someone who valued years of life linearly would, given the chance, dedicate the cosmic commons to computronium dedicated to optimistic matrix hacking even if almost completely certain there is no escape possible. I don’t value life years linearly and I’m quite sure that there are finite numbers of life years that I would prefer over chances of eternal life but I don’t know quite what the equivalence function looks like.
What I am arguing against are these particular comments.
If the clever rhetorical questions you ask are rhetorically wrong then they remain wrong even if you have some good point that you want to ultimately support. I know this is a peculiar cultural norm to go by but it’s a valuable one.
Quite a lot smaller, yes.
The interesting question to ask here is what chance of eternal life we would be willing to exchange for a given 1% chance of 50 billion years of life in terms of hypothetical decision making. For instance someone who valued years of life linearly would, given the chance, dedicate the cosmic commons to computronium dedicated to optimistic matrix hacking even if almost completely certain there is no escape possible. I don’t value life years linearly and I’m quite sure that there are finite numbers of life years that I would prefer over chances of eternal life but I don’t know quite what the equivalence function looks like.