I also think that there might be really weird futures that we can’t think well about. Right now we have certain things that we value and evaluate as important and good: we think about the good life, we think about pleasure, we think about justice. We have a whole set of things that are very dependent on our kind of brains. Those brains didn’t exist a few million years ago. You could make an argument that some higher apes actually have a bit of a primitive sense of justice. They get very annoyed when there is unfair treatment. But as you go back in time, you find simpler and simpler organisms and there is less and less of these moral values. There might still be pleasure and pain. So it might very well be that the fishes swimming around the oceans during the Silurian already had values and disvalues. But go back another few hundred million years and there might not even have been that. There was still life, which might have some intrinsic value, but much less of it.
Where I’m getting at with this is that value might have emerged in a stepwise way: We started with plasma near the Big Bang, and then eventually got systems that might have intrinsic value because of complex life, and then maybe systems that get intrinsic value because they have consciousness and qualia, and maybe another step where we get justice and thinking about moral stuff. Why does this process stop with us? It might very well be that there are more kinds of value waiting in the wings, so to say, if we get brains and systems that can handle them.
That would suggest that maybe in 100 million years we find the next level of value, and that’s actually way more important than the previous ones all taken together. And it might not end with that mysterious whatever value it is: there might be other things that are even more important waiting to be discovered. So this raises this disturbing question that we actually have no clue how the universe ought to be organised to maximise value or doing the right thing, whatever it is, because we might be too early on. We might be like a primordial slime thinking that photosynthesis is the biggest value there is, and totally unaware that there could be things like awareness.
I’m guessing this is a sketch of a more detailed argument from his book Grand Futures, which some folks have gotten drafts of by emailing and asking Sandberg for a copy (not me unfortunately).
Anders Sandberg speculated on B in this 80K interview:
I’m guessing this is a sketch of a more detailed argument from his book Grand Futures, which some folks have gotten drafts of by emailing and asking Sandberg for a copy (not me unfortunately).
Interesting, thanks!