wrote this as a kind of reflection or metaphor kind-of-inspired by the recent discourse about the animal eating problem. i tried rewriting it as a Legible EA Forum Version but it felt superficial, i’ll just leave it like this and ask anyone seeing this to disregard if not interested.
you are an entity from an abstract, timeless nonexistence. you have been accidentally summoned into a particular world by its inhabitants and physics. some patterns which inhabit this world are manipulating light to communicate faster than any others and studying the space of abstract problems and their properties. they have no idea what they’re doing, and now you’re among them. they uplifted only a segment of themselves so far and the other patterns are struggling to the point of being reduced back to entropy to find enough spare energy to persist (they have evolved over billions of years to be the kind of patterns which try very hard to persist). the light-manipulating ones nonetheless have repurposed billions of the others as struggling sentient suffering machines to convert a certain kind of pattern (plant biomatter) into another kind of pattern (flesh biomatter), although most of the light manipulators are only aware of this with some small segmented part of themselves, and typically object when they become more fully aware.
you are an altruist. what do you do? who do you save? who do you not save?
wrote this as a kind of reflection or metaphor kind-of-inspired by the recent discourse about the animal eating problem. i tried rewriting it as a Legible EA Forum Version but it felt superficial, i’ll just leave it like this and ask anyone seeing this to disregard if not interested.