Rather than put words in the mouths of other people at FRI, I’d rather let them personally answer which philosophical premises they accept and what motivates them, if they wish.
For me personally, I’ve just had, for a long time, the intuition that preventing extreme suffering is the most important priority. To the best that I can tell, much of this intuition can be traced to having suffered from depression and general feelings of crushing hopelessness for large parts of my life, and wanting to save anyone else from experiencing a similar (or worse!) magnitude of suffering. I seem to recall that I was less suffering-focused before I started getting depressed for the first time.
Since then, that intuition has been reinforced by reading up on other suffering-focused works; something like tranquilism feels like a sensible theory to me, especially given some of my own experiences with meditation which are generally compatible with the kind of theory of mind implied by tranquilism. That’s something that has come later, though.
To clarify, none of this means that I would only value suffering prevention: I’d much rather see a universe-wide flourishing civilization full of minds in various states of bliss, than a dead and barren universe. My position is more of a prioritarian one: let’s first take care of everyone who’s experiencing enormous suffering, and make sure none of our descendants are going to be subject to that fate, before we start thinking about colonizing the rest of the universe and filling it with entirely new minds.
Rather than put words in the mouths of other people at FRI, I’d rather let them personally answer which philosophical premises they accept and what motivates them, if they wish.
For me personally, I’ve just had, for a long time, the intuition that preventing extreme suffering is the most important priority. To the best that I can tell, much of this intuition can be traced to having suffered from depression and general feelings of crushing hopelessness for large parts of my life, and wanting to save anyone else from experiencing a similar (or worse!) magnitude of suffering. I seem to recall that I was less suffering-focused before I started getting depressed for the first time.
Since then, that intuition has been reinforced by reading up on other suffering-focused works; something like tranquilism feels like a sensible theory to me, especially given some of my own experiences with meditation which are generally compatible with the kind of theory of mind implied by tranquilism. That’s something that has come later, though.
To clarify, none of this means that I would only value suffering prevention: I’d much rather see a universe-wide flourishing civilization full of minds in various states of bliss, than a dead and barren universe. My position is more of a prioritarian one: let’s first take care of everyone who’s experiencing enormous suffering, and make sure none of our descendants are going to be subject to that fate, before we start thinking about colonizing the rest of the universe and filling it with entirely new minds.