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lessdazed comments on The Apocalypse Bet - Less Wrong
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This reminds me of "life has no meaning because/if you merely die at the end."
That would only apply to those who assign no value to their genetic / memetic legacy.
Since humans and their culture evolved, there are not many humans that are very much like that.
Humans aren't "naturally" like that - at least only a small subset of memes convinces normal ones of the intellectual truth of the proposition "life has no meaning because/if you merely die at the end".
It is a valley of rationality sickness. If I get money now and there is an apocalypse later - such as perhaps the sun expanding to swallow the Earth (especially if we never colonize other places), or the heat death of the universe - I still consider it all worthwhile. The future in which I get a lot of stuff and then everyone dies in a cataclysm is much preferable to me to the one in which I don't get a lot of stuff and everyone dies in a cataclysm.
I feel compelled to point out here that selection pressure pointing towards genetic/memetic fitness doesn't necessarily imply explicit values oriented towards the same goal, merely values correlated with it, and even that can sometimes get fuzzy based on moral fashion or political forces. Explicitly legacy-oriented values clearly do exist, but they're far from universal: compare Havamal 75 to Analects of Confucius 1:11 to Epicurus' letter to Menoeceus to get three very different perspectives on the general topic of an enduring legacy.
Humans' "explicit values" are not to be trusted either. Humans invent all kinks of bullshit stories about their values for the purpose of signalling to prospective partners how great they are so as to better manipulate them. They are like the priests who preach chastity and fidelity - and then roger the altar boy in "a moment of weakness".
By their works ye shall know them.
Sure, but the same goes for anyone talking about how life is meaningless because of the period at the end. We're generally pretty terrible at making our explicit values consistent with out implicit objectives, but it doesn't do much good to invoke an implicit goal to resolve explicit existential angst if we don't acknowledge that goal in the first place.