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Sep 17, 2022·edited Sep 17, 2022Liked by Ives Parr

I also have problems with the Repugnant Conclusion. I haven't given enough thought to my philosophical position to state one.

But, a thought - I have the feeling that happiness doesn't sum in a simple linear fashion.

Suppose we said the utility of an additional life with happiness H is something like H^E, where E is a positive exponent, where the unit of utility is the mean (or perhaps median) happiness of all lives, then I think we get a measure of utility that can be summed in a way that fits with (my) intuition.

Yes, I know I'm being terribly vague and handwavy. And I have no idea how we'd figure out the proper value of E. And no argument why the unit should be the mean (or what else it ought to be).

If E were (just for example) 2, then:

A new life with happiness at the mean of all lives has utility 1^2, or 1.

A new life with happiness 5x the mean has utility 5^2 = 25.

A new life with happiness 1/10th of the mean has utility 0.1^2 = 0.01

I think this works for negative (net unhappy) lives, too.

Not only does this make intuitive sense, but it eliminates the incentive to drag down very happy people in order to create more less happy people. (Assuming that happiness is linear with resources available, which seems like it might be reasonable within some range.)

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“A theory with an indifference to the creation of happy people seems to have a major blindspot”

I would not view any society as just which seeks to control peoples power of procreation, even for the sake of hypothetical happy people.

Imagine the US were to implement a law requiring that every healthy able-bodied person have at least one child or pay a fine. This would not only be unconstitutional, but morally perverse.

Imposing a duty to procreate is forcing procreation. Creating future happiness is just a factor for one’s own person preference and is outweighed by other factors from having moral force. Population ethics of this type falls outside the bounds of morality and cannot create an obligation.

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I think treating everyone the same leads to wrong conclusions. American women having 1 extra child to the same father for a generation is going to have vastly different outcomes to the same population increase in the US coming from increased Somalian immigration.

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Regarding your source number 4, about quantifying the wellbeing from the two selection strategies:

"One way to calculate this total is to multiply the number of individuals (N) with their average quality of life (Q)."

Life years gained is an easy number to understand.

IQ points gained is an easy number to understand.

What is a good way to quantify Q? This would actually be a really interesting question. Once you have it, you can figure out how to trade life years for Q.

One way to do it would be to measure chronic pain.

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Sep 17, 2022·edited Sep 17, 2022

In order to make better use of information, one must invariably possess a higher level of intellect which would be able to recursively comprehend the interactionist effects between multi-level variables of different order structures. There is no certainty to the degree of magnitude of maximizing one parameter over the other as even maximizing a utility or value function from the perspective of an individual is dependent on the local and global environment as well as the collective environment of other individuals which that individual is dependent on. The principles we should abide to are ones where we can observedly make informed judgements on the nature of such potential lives on the basis of many differing dynamics of many collective groups of various aggregate levels of parameters. Shyness, intolerance, ethnocentrism, trust, pride, benevolence, lawfulness, many-complex emotional states which tend to have a high-dimensional manifold of characterization of adaptivensss in trade offs. Parameters which increase the order, increase the efficiency of processes, increase the ability to cultivate and transform environments and individuals into greater actuations of phemeonologically-inductive beings will always be rendered superior to all other parameters. If one can harness the energy, the nature of space, time and reality then by all means such an entity would become the ultimate actuator of the universe and henceforth be able to rewrite existence at will from a foundational level where a sequence of atoms can be traced all the way into causing a series of events that create entire civilizations and even self-perpetuating life and “immaterial” second-order transformations of mappings like the game of life. This would be the ultimate form of morality in my view. In everyday life man may move objects, harness energy, outcompete against his fellow men, create alliances and co-conspire with one another until he unifies peoples and collectives as an en tente force of unified system of comprehensible logistics and materiel to produce a certain state or quality of civilization as he sees fit in the longer time horizon where his less salient predecessors are either absorbed, displaced or removed from existence altogether. Just as cells organize collectively or the organelles or the dna or ribosomes or transcript ones, the organizing nature of the world itself is only locally retrieved at the moment at an entropic level but such processes are cascading in tandem to produce greater consciousnesses. In effect, a population which exhibits this characteristic of heightened awareness and aptitudes will also possess an upward mobility capability that is not previously available or accessible. Where the industrial revolution was possible due to a combination of high numbers of manpower and resources, cognition will be the next tier for which the predicate is based on to unleash the potential of unmapped space of possible and contingent existences, including unified superorganisms that span more than interplanetary distances in the future. All lower forms of order of life are subject to active processing as an eventuality. While there are inherent mechanisms such as rna restriction enzymes, retrotransposons and other modifier mechanisms working at the local level just as there are organizations, governments, corporations, etc the higher self-containing being would be able to directly intervene the modular sub-components of its own total being which would transcend a physical form or perceptible form as we know it in a time-less state that is enacted on as an operational-processing causal agent. Any ideal less than this would be in pursuit of the annihilation of self and existence and would only serve to mimick the backwater waves of the sea like oscillating vibrations. That is to say, in effect, retrograde existences cease to exist and the low-minima processing function units are eliminated and not invoked or called as a function because it has already served as a gateway to a higher-ordered construction which is non-reversible at a certain n-th level of perception. That it is to say, it is unidirectional in an aggregated abstract sense like a cosine embedded in a sine wave nested in an exponential function. When one observes AI agents exhibit emergent phenomena, cooperation, lying, cheating, stealing… more complex behaviour can and does arise and it is impossible to regress to a previous state— even if X at future state plays against Y 100, 300 or 5000 states ago there will be an unsymmetric continuum of evolving paths which cannot be collapsible to a singular state which preceded it. From a point of contention of one singular entity exhibiting a negative parametization of value relative to itself or to the collective of a society, it is merely a process to in itself of transition between temporal states, that is to say by invoking certain existences to come into being, it may have cascading consequences which are seemingly negative within the time span of whatever entities in relative abundance of some weighting function possesses but a greater entity would be able to correspond the mappings of each of those units of being to an operational abstraction in some loci of phenomenologically relevant effect in procuring tangibility. Just as geological processes create volcanoes or shape the terrain, creating war machines or corrupt politicians are necessary a prior conditions of conflict or in other words such seemingly antagonistic forces at the psycho social level are merely reducible to atomic interactions of Brownian motion like negatively charged ions and positively charged positrons, they necessarily must obey all the systematic operational-mechanisms of the contained space and medium which itself is in and can be variably and possibly manipulated if a being is conceivable to have expanded beyond the contains of such mediums of operation.

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