I would mostly like to protest your notion of utopia. A universe where every gram of matter is used for making brains sounds terrible. A “good” life involves interaction with other brains as well as a living environment.
Yeah, I would be in favor of interaction in simulated environments—other’s might disagree, but I don’t think this influences the general argument very much as I don’t think leaving some matter for computers will reduce the number of brains by more than an order of magnitude or so.
That’s not what I meant. What I tried to say is that the universe is full of beautiful things, like galaxies, plants, hills, dogs… More generally, complex systems with so many interesting things happening on so many scales. When I imagine a utopia, I picture a thriving human society in “harmony”, or at least at peace, with nature. Converting all of it into simulated brains sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me.
Since I first thought about my intrinsic values, I knew there’s some divergence between e.g. valuing beauty and valuing happiness singularly. But I’ve never managed to imagine a scenario where increasing one goes so much against the other, until now.
I think a large part of any hypothetical world being a utopia is that people would like to live in it. I’m not sure if you asked people about this scenario, they would find it favourable.
I would mostly like to protest your notion of utopia. A universe where every gram of matter is used for making brains sounds terrible. A “good” life involves interaction with other brains as well as a living environment.
Yeah, I would be in favor of interaction in simulated environments—other’s might disagree, but I don’t think this influences the general argument very much as I don’t think leaving some matter for computers will reduce the number of brains by more than an order of magnitude or so.
That’s not what I meant. What I tried to say is that the universe is full of beautiful things, like galaxies, plants, hills, dogs… More generally, complex systems with so many interesting things happening on so many scales. When I imagine a utopia, I picture a thriving human society in “harmony”, or at least at peace, with nature. Converting all of it into simulated brains sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me.
Since I first thought about my intrinsic values, I knew there’s some divergence between e.g. valuing beauty and valuing happiness singularly. But I’ve never managed to imagine a scenario where increasing one goes so much against the other, until now.
I think a large part of any hypothetical world being a utopia is that people would like to live in it. I’m not sure if you asked people about this scenario, they would find it favourable.