I find it plausible that future humans will choose to create much fewer minds than they could. But I don’t think that “selfishly desiring high material welfare” will require this. Just the milky way has enough stars for each currently alive human to get an entire solar system each. Simultaneously, intergalactic colonization is probably possible (see here) and I think the stars in our own galaxy is less than 1-in-a-billion of all reachable stars. (Most of which are also very far away, which further contributes to them not being very interesting to use for selfish purposes.)
When we’re talking about levels of consumption that are greater than a solar system, and that will only take place millions of years in the future, it seems like the relevant kind of human preferences to be looking at is something like “aesthetic” preference. And so I think the relevant analogies are less that of present humans optimizing for their material welfare, but perhaps more something like “people preferring the aesthetics of a clean and untouched universe (or something else: like the aesthetics of a universe used for mostly non-sentient art) over the aesthetics of a universe which is packed with joy”.
I think your point “We may seek to rationalise the former [I personally don’t want to live in a large mediocre world, for self-interested reasons] as the more noble-seeming latter [desire for high average welfare]” is the kind of thing that might influence this aesthetic choice. Where “I personally don’t want to live in a large mediocre world, for self-interested reasons” would split into (i) “it feels bad to create a very unequal world where I have lots more resources than everyone else”, and (ii) “it feels bad to massively reduce the amount of resources that I personally have, to that of the average resident in a universe packed full with life”.
Another relevant consideration along these lines is that people who selfishly desire high wealth might mostly care about positional goods which are similar to current positional goods. Usage of these positional goods won’t burn much of any compute (resources for potential minds) even if these positional goods become insanely valuable in terms of compute. E.g., land values of interesting places on earth might be insanely high and people might trade vast amounts of comptuation for this land, but ultimately, the computation will be spent on something else.
Hmm true, I think I agree that this means the dynamics I describe matter less in expectation (because the positional goods-oriented people will be quite marginal in terms of using the resources of the universe).
Good point re aesthetics perhaps mattering more, and about people dis-valuing inequality and therefore not wanting to create a lot of moderately good lives lest they feel bad about having amazing lives and controlling vast amounts of resources.
Re “But I don’t think …” in your first paragraph, I am not sure what if anything we actually disagree about. I think what you are saying is that there are plenty of resources in our galaxy, and far more beyond, for all present people to have fairly arbitrarily large levels of wealth. I agree, and I am also saying that people may want to keep it roughly that way, rather than creating heaps of people and crowding up the universe.
There might not be any real disagreement. I’m just saying that there’s no direct conflict between “present people having material wealth beyond what they could possibly spend on themselves” and “virtually all resources are used in the way that totalist axiologies would recommend”.
I find it plausible that future humans will choose to create much fewer minds than they could. But I don’t think that “selfishly desiring high material welfare” will require this. Just the milky way has enough stars for each currently alive human to get an entire solar system each. Simultaneously, intergalactic colonization is probably possible (see here) and I think the stars in our own galaxy is less than 1-in-a-billion of all reachable stars. (Most of which are also very far away, which further contributes to them not being very interesting to use for selfish purposes.)
When we’re talking about levels of consumption that are greater than a solar system, and that will only take place millions of years in the future, it seems like the relevant kind of human preferences to be looking at is something like “aesthetic” preference. And so I think the relevant analogies are less that of present humans optimizing for their material welfare, but perhaps more something like “people preferring the aesthetics of a clean and untouched universe (or something else: like the aesthetics of a universe used for mostly non-sentient art) over the aesthetics of a universe which is packed with joy”.
I think your point “We may seek to rationalise the former [I personally don’t want to live in a large mediocre world, for self-interested reasons] as the more noble-seeming latter [desire for high average welfare]” is the kind of thing that might influence this aesthetic choice. Where “I personally don’t want to live in a large mediocre world, for self-interested reasons” would split into (i) “it feels bad to create a very unequal world where I have lots more resources than everyone else”, and (ii) “it feels bad to massively reduce the amount of resources that I personally have, to that of the average resident in a universe packed full with life”.
Another relevant consideration along these lines is that people who selfishly desire high wealth might mostly care about positional goods which are similar to current positional goods. Usage of these positional goods won’t burn much of any compute (resources for potential minds) even if these positional goods become insanely valuable in terms of compute. E.g., land values of interesting places on earth might be insanely high and people might trade vast amounts of comptuation for this land, but ultimately, the computation will be spent on something else.
Hmm true, I think I agree that this means the dynamics I describe matter less in expectation (because the positional goods-oriented people will be quite marginal in terms of using the resources of the universe).
Good point re aesthetics perhaps mattering more, and about people dis-valuing inequality and therefore not wanting to create a lot of moderately good lives lest they feel bad about having amazing lives and controlling vast amounts of resources.
Re “But I don’t think …” in your first paragraph, I am not sure what if anything we actually disagree about. I think what you are saying is that there are plenty of resources in our galaxy, and far more beyond, for all present people to have fairly arbitrarily large levels of wealth. I agree, and I am also saying that people may want to keep it roughly that way, rather than creating heaps of people and crowding up the universe.
There might not be any real disagreement. I’m just saying that there’s no direct conflict between “present people having material wealth beyond what they could possibly spend on themselves” and “virtually all resources are used in the way that totalist axiologies would recommend”.