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ModusPonies comments on Mortal: A Transponyist Fanfiction - Less Wrong
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This isn't a restriction on fiction. I chose to make immortality irrevocable and suicide impossible because otherwise the deathists would've been too wrong to make a good story. (Before anyone raises the obvious objection: if immortality is literally permanent, then the second law of thermodynamics is already broken, so the heat death of the universe isn't necessarily inevitable.)
I know. I wanted to rule out a different set of facts about immortality than there were in the story, because deathism under those conditions would basically be a different position from deathism in the story, or deathism in real life. Changing the subject of the argument to make a side right is not steel manning that side, and it's not required by any reasonable rules of fairness.
Also, does it really matter if the deathists are too wrong in our eyes to make a good story? I would think that they just have to have a reasonable position in they eyes of the audience. By making this something of a genuine conflict from the perspective of LessWrongers, maybe you've made it settled in favor of deathism from the perspective of a large fraction of the readers.
Thermodynamics isn't the obvious objection IMO, it's the big rip. Alicorns may be able to create matter around them, but perhaps they are the only things that can't be torn apart by expanding space. And maybe they can almost be torn apart, but not quite. So an eternity of feeling like you're suffocating, being almost torn apart, and almost frozen, and being alone awaits every alicorn eventually.
Hopefully the physics in this world are sufficiently dissimilar from real life that that won't happen.
Entirely possible. I might edit that detail out.
Here's a question that could be asked in that case: Such a fate awaits the immortals. Should mortals with full knowledge of the consequences (and Yhan'f bcvavba ba jurgure be abg n gubhfnaq lrnef fbyvghqr jnf jbegu vzzbegnyvgl) be allowed to choose immortality?
Given that cost, would you choose immortality?
No and no. I read it last morning and didn't have time to respond (literally busy all day with last 2 weeks before graduation), and the way I remembered it, I thought it was (if not a hard question), at least the kind of question that tears at your heartstrings to answer, even if you are dead certain your answer is not changing. (Like the "Torture the terrorist's innocent family to stop the ticking bomb in the city" question). Then I came back and read (or re-read) the rot13'd part (I have no idea why it's rot13'd). And was like: this is easy.
The hard-but-not-really-hard question would be: ponies who think they can stand being torn apart, frozen, suffocated, isolated, without food or water in utter darkness forever want to become alicorns. Ponies without Luna's attitude. Let them? My answer would still be no.
The one way I would say yes is if some kind of extreme mind-hacks that alicorns could unlock would let them endure it.
Okay, so infinite suffering is not a fair trade for a finite nonsuffering life; suppose that there was an infinite lifetime either before or mixed with infinite suffering.
Is it permissible to create somebody that has an infinite amount of life that isn't torture if they also must experience an infinite amount of life that is? Is the relative fraction of time and intensity of the periods of torture relevant?
Yes and yes.
The idea of infinite lifetime and then you start suffering doesn't make sense. There is no time where infinity is over, so I answered for the "mixed with infinite suffering" alternative.
Given the expansion-> torture effect, can you objectively determine when happy life stops and when endless torture begins, or is it possible that for any time C, there could be an alicorn who is not being tortured?
You say "objectively," but unless you confirm that's what you meant, I'll assume you meant "with sufficient evidence to justify," because I think the latter is what you meant.
There is some uncertainty as to when happiness would end and pain would begin (we're dealing with a fictional universe with unknown (and probably undecided) physical laws, for Adun's sake), but the wikipedia article on the big rip says that if it is indeed the fate of the universe, space will stretch infinitely much in a finite amount of time. If that's the case, then it ind of makes no sense for an alicorn to survive. It's like an unstoppable force and an immovable object. But if alicorns are alive at the moments leading up to that point, the stretching on them will grow to whatever level it needs to (and quickly) for it to be torturous. And if they are somehow alive after that point (not sure what that would mean even) "The torture gets less then" sounds like the least sensible option.
So maybe you can't say exactly when every alicorn is getting tortured, but given that the big rip happens, every possibility is bad. And even if a few alicorns weren't tortured (while most were), unless back in Equestria billions of years earlier you could foresee which ones they were gonna be and only make those ones immortal, it's better to kill everyone (or everyone except Luna, Celestia, Cadence, and Twilight, who are fortunately all female and perhaps unable to continue ponykind (unless magic works like it does in a certain fanfic I read...)) than to let that happen.
I meant objectively, unless you are limiting your response to whether you personally would create alicorns; I asked if it should be permissible for alicorns to be made.
Suppose the physical laws are not well enough determined to be sure if the big rip happens, or if there is promising developments in magic that have some chance of preventing it, or some other reason why it is unsure if the happy fun time will be finite or not. How large a chance of "finite good time followed by eternity of torture" is acceptable, if the remainder of the probability space is "infinite good time"? I think multiplication does no good here.
Multiplication does plenty of good. Pretend instead of an infinite time it's a finite time, X after everything else. Make the decision you would make in the limit as X -> infinity.
As for tradeoff rates between torture/happiness, it depends to some extent on the individual. There are cases where I would let someone live (because I thought that was the right thing to do, not because of intuitive deontological constraints) who wanted to risk torture, while I myself would commit suicide. I just wouldn't let people risk torture because of time discounting, or because they refused to imagine how bad it would be.
As for my own tradeoff rate, it's not something I can report without deep introspection, Fermi estimates of how bad torture could be and how good "happy fun time" could be, and binary searching with thought experiments to find which I would prefer, which I don't have time for now.
There's more in your post to respond to. I will later. For now I need to get some work done Today.
The first time you said "objectively" you asked if I could objectively determine the boundary between happy life and torture, and now in this post you're talking about objective/subjective permissibility.
In the first case, limits on how precisely you can tell the happy life/torture boundary are based on uncertainty about the physical details of the possible future, and vagueness in the definitions of "happy" and "torture." It's not that in asking the question "When is that time?" there is a hidden reference to some feature of an external person (such as their utility function, or their taste in food) So I'm not sure what could be subjective of the first case.
As for whether it's objectively permissible, A: I don't believe in objective morality, because it runs afoul of Occam's razor (It probably takes a lot of bits to specify what deserves to be a potential target of moral concern. A LOT of bits). and B: even if moral realism was correct, I wouldn't give a damn (Felicifia doesn't links to individual comments, so the best I can give is a link to the thread, but see my first comment).
I only bring up the second law in nonfictional contexts; clearly, the cosmos behaves in the manner that Celestia tells it to, so we shouldn't have to worry about the stars going out.