Encouraging a hedonium shockwave as a long term cause area

[Felix Bauer]

Hello,

I’m writing because there’s something that I view as a massively important cause area that I haven’t seen seriously discussed much in the EA sphere, and I’m hoping to change that and bring about discussion on this issue. To put it briefly, I think the ultimate goal implied by utilitarianism, with its edict of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, is to initiate a hedonium shockwave, by which I mean converting as much of the unthinking matter of the universe as possible into a state of matter that experiences the maximum amount of pleasure per unit mass as possible. This would most likely be carried out by von Neumann probles spreading out at near light speed to convert all the matter they come in contact with into hedonium. While the technology to carry this out might be centuries or even millennia from now, because of how much potential utility a hedonium shockwave would generate, I believe that even slightly increasing the odds of humanity or post-humanity’s progress leading towards a hedonium shockwave swamps almost anything else as a cause area in terms of raw utilitarian benefit. I don’t mean this as a reductio ad absurdum on utilitarianism or a Pascal’s mugging, I genuinely believe that a hedonium shockwave is the best possible outcome for intelligent life to instantiate, and that doing even the smallest things in the present to increase the odds of it coming about have massively outsized utilitarian benefits. So, if this is the case, how can we change the trajectory of humanity to make a hedonium shockwave more likely?

One thing that I think would make it more likely to be accepted as an ultimate end goal for humanity would be to remove fear of it being something that would destroy human or other intelligent life. It would be entirely possible for the shockwave to only convert unthinking matter outside of solar systems that contain life, since that would still make up 99.999...999% of the universe, and would allow intelligent life to still flourish at a superhuman but still sub-hedonium level of bliss. This would allow a “hedge” in case there is some meaning to existence beyond raw utilitarian maximization, so art and culture could flourish while matter that would have otherwise never been conscious is converted to hedonium.

What other things do you think could be done in the present to make the outcome of a hedonium shockwave more likely? Because of how much uncountably more happiness would be generated in a universe with a hedonium shockwave than in one without, I believe the basic utility multiplication makes it the most important long term cause area to focus on, despite how temporally and technologically remote it may be. So how can we make this a cause area that people will take seriously and try to put in effort to bring about, as they already do with other longtermist cause areas?

[Habryka]

I would like to convert a lot of matter into art and culture and diverse conscious beings and as such object to converting 99.9999% of the universe into hedonium (I think it’s fine for you to do that with your part of the lightcone, or for us to trade to make things more blissful in ways that are not very costly for my goals, but I definitely am not up for handing over 99.9999% of the universe to people who really just want hedonium)

[MHR🔸]

I think mainstream longtermist EA is already on a path to try and help create the hedonium shockwave if and only if it’s the right thing to do. The “only if” part seems really important—turning 99.999% of the accessible universe into hedonium seems like a quite bad idea unless you’re extraordinarily confident in your ethical views. But it does seem like one theoretically possible outcome of the type of long reflection MacAskill advocates in WWOTF:

As an ideal, we could aim for what we can call the long reflection: a stable state of the world in which we are safe from calamity and we can reflect on and debate the nature of the good life, working out what the most flourishing society would be. I call this the “long” reflection not because of how long this period would last but because of how long it would be worth spending on it. It’s worth spending five minutes to decide where to spend two hours at dinner; it’s worth spending months to choose a profession for the rest of one’s life. But civilisation might last millions, billions, or even trillions of years. It would therefore be worth spending many centuries to ensure that we’ve really figured things out before we take irreversible actions like locking in values or spreading across the stars.

It’s really not clear to me that there’s a better path to the hedonium shockwave than what longtermsists are already doing—trying to ensure humanity survives and prospers and makes it to a place where we have more hope of reaching a consensus about whether or not it’s the right course of action. Of course, if the shockwave really is the right thing to do, waiting to start it would lead to a great deal of astronomical waste. But this is a small price to pay relative to the risks of destroying ourselves or causing great harm if our moral views are wrong.

[Jason]

So how can we make this a cause area that people will take seriously and try to put in effort to bring about, as they already do with other longtermist cause areas?

In my view: you don’t make it a separate cause area. Even if you think this is the most important thing, your optimal strategy would be working on prerequisites like the survival of the human species and better spaceflight capabilities. I don’t see any clear advantage for your goals to researching any hedonium-specific topics centuries to millennia before you’d expect creating it to become technologically feasible.