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ThrustVectoring comments on "Stupid" questions thread - Less Wrong
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Would you rather have one person living a happy, fulfilled life, or two? Would you rather have seven billion people living with happy, fulfilled lives, or seven billion planets full of people living happy, fulfilled lives?
I am more interested in the variety of those happy, fulfilled lives than the number of them. Mere duplication has no value. The value I attach to any of these scenarios is not a function of just the set of utilities of the individuals living in them. The richer the technology, the more variety is possible. Look at the range of options available to a well-off person today, compared with 100 years ago, or 1000.
Oh, okay. Personally I lean much more towards average utilitarianism as opposed to total, but I haven't really thought through the issue that much. I was unaware that total utilitarianism was popular enough that it alone was sufficient for so many people to endorse space colonization.
But, now that I think about it, even if you wanted to add as many happy people to the universe as possible, couldn't you do it more efficiently with ems?
Even without total utilitarianism, increasing the population may be desirable as long as average quality of life isn't lowered. For instance, increasing the amount of R&D can make progress faster, which can benefit everyone. Of course one can also think of dangers and problems that scale with population size, so it's not a trivial question.
It would be more efficient with ems, but we can’t make ems yet. Technically we could already colonize space; it’s expensive, but still, it’s closer.
Think about why old-world people colonized the Americas (and everything else they could, anyway). The basic cause was space and resources. Of course, with current tech we can extract much more value and support a much larger population in Europe than we could at the time. But even if they anticipated that, it still wouldn’t have made sense to wait.
Either way, more territory means more matter and energy, which means safer and longer lives.
I don't subscribe to either average or total utilitarianism. I'm more of a fan of selfish utilitarianism. It would make me personally feel better about myself were I to move the universe from 1 person living a life worth celebrating to 2 people living such lives, so it's worth doing.
Ems are still limited by the amount of available matter. They may enable you to colonise non-Earthlike planets, but you still need to colonise.
In fact, pretty much everything possible is limited by available energy and matter.
Personally, I too tend toward 'utilitarianism's domain does not include number of people', but I think most people have a preference toward at least minor pop. growth.
Also, many people (including me) are skeptical about ems or emulation in general. Plus, you'd want to colonize universe to build more emulation hardware?
You should check out this post and its related posts. (also here, and here). Which is to say, there is a whole wide world out there of preferences - why should I have one or two small options?
Both/and.