I first thought this is real, then thought this is satire. Then I thought this is real again, then I again thought this is satire, then I stopped thinking. I upvote, but leave no comments on the object-level.
Al W
Karma: −13
Quite interesting collection of quotes in the Post Scriptum, and the post itself is a good shake-up to assumptions about computability of stuff (minds, the universe). It feels directionally opposed to the reigning philosophy here on LW, at least to me, who lurks occasionally, but that’s why I liked it.
P.S. The writing style is nice.
johnswentworth is a freaky guy.
Some of these are good, not all of them
I can’t help myself from questioning the example provided.
Friend #1 asked out his love interest and she said yes. It turns out, however, that another one of his friends had gone on a few dates with her and assumed they would be going to prom together! Friend #1 knew about the dates but assumed this wasn’t a big deal. To friend #2, this was a very big deal.
Like, Friend #1 is just a bad friend?
Friend #1′s mistake wasn’t asking someone out; …
Yes, it was?
...it was not recognizing that friend #2 had built (arguably unreasonable) expectations around an ongoing courtship.
It was not recognising that Friend #2 had built a completely reasonable expectation that his friend, who a) is aware of the dates b) is his friend, won’t interfere in that?
Maybe we just have an object-level disagreement about dating culture, though.
The most probable intuition behind the disagreements, it appears to me, is that “a person going around doing a bunch of good things and a little bit of bad-evil things is net-positive and we should keep him around even if we can’t fix him, and a different person doing the same amount of evil things but not ‘offsetting’ them with anything is a bigger problem.”
Your point could be made even stronger by including people for whom it’s even harder to feel compassion, i.e., someone who is deliberately cruel, rather than just someone who is dumb and isn’t trying to fix that. However, even then, I don’t think your “disgust” is entirely fair.
If we accept certain uncontroversial assumptions from cognitive science and biology, do we not come to conclusions, that for every person on Earth, if you were born with their genes, into their environment, you would be them?
I’m not trying to start a free-will debate, but this seems to me trivially true.
That’s where kindness can come from. You don’t have to excuse anyone’s actions/stupidity/failures in their responsibilities, but instead of feeling “disgust”, you could think of ways to help them from where they stand, or just let them be.
Good post. Some could suggest that hedonium in this is framed unfavourably, because in the story, living people seem to need to cease to exist for the hedonium age to commence.
I’d like to support the notion that a perfectly engineered, multi-dimensional[1] universe of hedonium[2], which does not require non-consentually shredding living people into building material, is still not a desirable future.
i.e., not just “happy”, but also “content”, “meaningful”, “connected” and all other adjectives; based on a great understanding of phenomenal consciousness
or experience machine