“This essay explores the speculative possibility that fundamental physical operations—atomic movements, electron orbits, photon collisions, etc.—could collectively deserve significant moral weight. While I was initially skeptical of this conclusion, I’ve since come to embrace it. In practice I might adopt a kind of moral-pluralism approach in which I maintain some concern for animal-like beings even if simple physics-based suffering dominates numerically. I also explore whether, if the multiverse does contain enormous amounts of suffering from fundamental physical operations, there are ways we can change how much of it occurs and what the distribution of “experiences” is. An argument based on vacuum fluctuations during the eternal lifetime of the universe suggests that if we give fundamental physics any nonzero weight, then almost all of our expected impact may come through how intelligence might transform fundamental physics to reduce the amount of suffering it contains. Alas, it’s not clear whether negative-leaning consequentialists should actively promote concern for suffering in physics, even if they personally care a lot about it.”
maybe relevant:
Is There Suffering in Fundamental Physics?
By Brian Tomasik
“This essay explores the speculative possibility that fundamental physical operations—atomic movements, electron orbits, photon collisions, etc.—could collectively deserve significant moral weight. While I was initially skeptical of this conclusion, I’ve since come to embrace it. In practice I might adopt a kind of moral-pluralism approach in which I maintain some concern for animal-like beings even if simple physics-based suffering dominates numerically. I also explore whether, if the multiverse does contain enormous amounts of suffering from fundamental physical operations, there are ways we can change how much of it occurs and what the distribution of “experiences” is. An argument based on vacuum fluctuations during the eternal lifetime of the universe suggests that if we give fundamental physics any nonzero weight, then almost all of our expected impact may come through how intelligence might transform fundamental physics to reduce the amount of suffering it contains. Alas, it’s not clear whether negative-leaning consequentialists should actively promote concern for suffering in physics, even if they personally care a lot about it.”
Thanks, but I think this is a different topic.