This short-form is a minimally edited outtake from a piece estimating how many lives x-risk work saves on average. It conservatively estimates how much better future lives might be with pessimistic, moderate, and optimistic assumptions.
A large amount of text is in footnotes because it was highly peripheral to the original post.
Pessimistic
(human remain on earth, digital minds are impossible)
We could pessimistically assume that future lives can only be approximately as good as present lives for some unknown reasons concerning the limits of well-being, or well-being in the long-term future.
Moderate
(digital minds are possible)
It seems likely future lives will have significantly greater well-being or happiness than present lives, especially if brain emulations are possible.
If humans become digital people, we can edit our source code such that we are much happier. Additionally, by designing our digital environment we will be better able to achieve our desires, experience pleasure and avoid pain, and have the good things in life that support happiness.
Because this is speculative, let’s conservatively assume future people could be 10 times happier than present people,leading to one order of magnitude increase in expected value.[1] I will come back to why I think this is conservative and a higher estimate in the optimistic section.
Optimistic
(digital minds are possible)
In the moderate estimate we assumed future lives would have ten times greater well-being or happiness than the average present human life. Yet there isn’t any reason in principle to assume future people couldn’t be many orders of magnitude happier.[2]
In the moments before a seizure, Dostoyevsky reported feeling:
“A happiness unthinkable in the normal state and unimaginable for anyone who hasn’t experienced it… I am then in perfect harmony with myself and the entire universe”
And he wrote this experience into one of his characters, who stated,
“I would give my whole life for this one instant”
Taken literally, if we assume this experience lasted 10 seconds, that would make it over 100 million times better than his average experience.
I can say that I have personally experienced altered states of consciousness which were many orders of magnitude better than my average experience, and far better than even other very good experiences.[3]
In any case, humans are not currently optimized for happiness. We could optimistically estimate that if future minds were optimized for happiness there could be something like a minimum of onemillion times more happiness per unit of time than we currently experience, leading to 6 orders of magnitude increase in expected value.[4]
Because I am using a utilitarian expected value framework, I will assume that an individual being 10 times happier is equivalent to 10 times as many well-being adjusted lives;
In other words,
Average happiness * number of lives = well-being adjusted lives
I will not give special attention to the impact on suffering in this analysis.
Although I lean toward prioritarianism (utilitarianism which prioritizes reducing suffering over increasing positive wellbeing,) my naive intuition it that it is insufficiently likely there will be a large enough amount of suffering in the far-future for there to be much impact on expected value (which was the focus of the piece this short-form was originally embedded in.) Admittedly, I have not spent much time studying s-risks and would appreciate other perspectives.
Additionally, I once briefly dated a woman and remember distinctly thinking to myself multiple times “I would trade 1 minute of kissing this woman for every other kiss, maybe even every other sexual experience I have ever had,” and this still feels accurate. I have repeatedly tried (unsuccessfully) to capture this experience in a poem.
Assuming this intuition was accurate, if I had previously had an average of 12 minutes of kissing/sexual experience per day over about 2 aggregated years of dating by that point in my life, that 1 minute was about 10,000 times better than my average kissing/sexual experience—and these, in turn, were worth perhaps 100 average minutes in a day (I like kissing and sex quite a lot), making a minute of kissing this woman one million times better than my average experience, or about 3 years of my life. While this seems absurd, I doubt it is off by more than ~two orders of magnitude.
Concretely, this means that if the happiest minute of your life was worth 100 days of normal experience, this would be one order of magnitude greater happiness than that.
Such a state may seem difficult to maintain long-term. But considering we can already induce and sustain profoundly intense states of wellbeing over several hours with certain chemical substances, it seems plausible this could be the case.
This section is highly speculative, as it deals with aspects of phenomenology that we are not yet able to empirically test. It is possible that optimal experience requires ups and downs, complexity, moving from a worse past to a better future, or can’t be sustained indefinitely.
That said, this could also be underestimating the real possible happiness by many orders of magnitude. Complete scientific understanding of phenomenology and powerful consciousness engineering techniques could unlock levels of happiness we currently have no way to conceive.
How Happy Could Future People Be?
This short-form is a minimally edited outtake from a piece estimating how many lives x-risk work saves on average. It conservatively estimates how much better future lives might be with pessimistic, moderate, and optimistic assumptions.
A large amount of text is in footnotes because it was highly peripheral to the original post.
Pessimistic
(human remain on earth, digital minds are impossible)
We could pessimistically assume that future lives can only be approximately as good as present lives for some unknown reasons concerning the limits of well-being, or well-being in the long-term future.
Moderate
(digital minds are possible)
It seems likely future lives will have significantly greater well-being or happiness than present lives, especially if brain emulations are possible.
If humans become digital people, we can edit our source code such that we are much happier. Additionally, by designing our digital environment we will be better able to achieve our desires, experience pleasure and avoid pain, and have the good things in life that support happiness.
Because this is speculative, let’s conservatively assume future people could be 10 times happier than present people, leading to one order of magnitude increase in expected value.[1] I will come back to why I think this is conservative and a higher estimate in the optimistic section.
Optimistic
(digital minds are possible)
In the moderate estimate we assumed future lives would have ten times greater well-being or happiness than the average present human life. Yet there isn’t any reason in principle to assume future people couldn’t be many orders of magnitude happier.[2]
In the moments before a seizure, Dostoyevsky reported feeling:
“A happiness unthinkable in the normal state and unimaginable for anyone who hasn’t experienced it… I am then in perfect harmony with myself and the entire universe”
And he wrote this experience into one of his characters, who stated,
“I would give my whole life for this one instant”
Taken literally, if we assume this experience lasted 10 seconds, that would make it over 100 million times better than his average experience.
I can say that I have personally experienced altered states of consciousness which were many orders of magnitude better than my average experience, and far better than even other very good experiences.[3]
Most people have occasional peak experiences that are extremely good when compared with average experience. We may postulate maximum happiness is a Bostromian utopia of unimaginable ecstasy, (maximized hedonic well-being) or a Karnofskian future of maximum choice and freedom (“‘meta’ option”,) (maximized preference satisfaction), or perhaps gradients of bliss so that we can freely navigate choices while also being in unimaginable ecstasy.
In any case, humans are not currently optimized for happiness. We could optimistically estimate that if future minds were optimized for happiness there could be something like a minimum of one million times more happiness per unit of time than we currently experience, leading to 6 orders of magnitude increase in expected value.[4]
Because I am using a utilitarian expected value framework, I will assume that an individual being 10 times happier is equivalent to 10 times as many well-being adjusted lives;
In other words,
Average happiness * number of lives = well-being adjusted lives
I will not give special attention to the impact on suffering in this analysis.
Although I lean toward prioritarianism (utilitarianism which prioritizes reducing suffering over increasing positive wellbeing,) my naive intuition it that it is insufficiently likely there will be a large enough amount of suffering in the far-future for there to be much impact on expected value (which was the focus of the piece this short-form was originally embedded in.) Admittedly, I have not spent much time studying s-risks and would appreciate other perspectives.
Additionally, I once briefly dated a woman and remember distinctly thinking to myself multiple times “I would trade 1 minute of kissing this woman for every other kiss, maybe even every other sexual experience I have ever had,” and this still feels accurate. I have repeatedly tried (unsuccessfully) to capture this experience in a poem.
Assuming this intuition was accurate, if I had previously had an average of 12 minutes of kissing/sexual experience per day over about 2 aggregated years of dating by that point in my life, that 1 minute was about 10,000 times better than my average kissing/sexual experience—and these, in turn, were worth perhaps 100 average minutes in a day (I like kissing and sex quite a lot), making a minute of kissing this woman one million times better than my average experience, or about 3 years of my life. While this seems absurd, I doubt it is off by more than ~two orders of magnitude.
Concretely, this means that if the happiest minute of your life was worth 100 days of normal experience, this would be one order of magnitude greater happiness than that.
Such a state may seem difficult to maintain long-term. But considering we can already induce and sustain profoundly intense states of wellbeing over several hours with certain chemical substances, it seems plausible this could be the case.
This section is highly speculative, as it deals with aspects of phenomenology that we are not yet able to empirically test. It is possible that optimal experience requires ups and downs, complexity, moving from a worse past to a better future, or can’t be sustained indefinitely.
That said, this could also be underestimating the real possible happiness by many orders of magnitude. Complete scientific understanding of phenomenology and powerful consciousness engineering techniques could unlock levels of happiness we currently have no way to conceive.