It's an interesting idea, but it's not at all new. Most moral philosophers would agree that certain experiences are part (or all) of what has value, and that the precise physical instantiation of these experiences does not necessarily matters (in the same way many would agree on this same point in philosophy of consciousness).
There's a further meta-issue which is why the post is being downvoted. Surely is vague and maybe too short, but it seems to have the goal of initiating discussion and refining the view being presented rather than adequately defending or specifying it. I have posted tentative discussions - much more developed than this one - in meta-ethics or other abstract issues in ethics directly related to rationality and AI-safety, and I wasn't exactly warmly met. Given that much of the central problems being discussed here are within ethics, why the disdain for meta-ethics? Of course, it might as well just be a coincidence or that all those posts were fundementaly flawed in a obvious way.
Yeah I am not happy about the way I'm being received. Any advice, other than avoiding interesting meta-ethics questions?
Wrt how new it is: how about if I put it this way:
Maybe experience is fundamentally not a function of brain state, but a function of brain state over time. Note that this is not strongly anti-physicalism. Especially if you believe in discrete time, in which case you can have experience be a function of the transitions that occur between states in successive time-steps:
Experience = f(s{t}, s{t-1}).
As Tegmark argues, the idea of "final goal" for AI is likely incoherent, at least if (as he states), "Quantum effects aside, a truly well-defined goal would specify how all particles in our Universe should be arranged at the end of time."
But "life is a journey not a destination". So really, what we should be specifying is the entire evolution of the universe through its lifespan. So how can the universe "enjoy itself" as much as possible before the big crunch (or before and during the heat death)*.
I hypothesize that experience is related to, if not a product of, change. I further propose (counter-intuitively, and with an eye towards "refinement" (to put it mildly))** that we treat experience as inherently positive and not try to distinguish between positive and negative experiences.
Then it seems to me the (still rather intractable) question is: how does the rate of entropy's increase relate to the quantity of experience produced? Is it simply linear (in which case, it doesn't matter, ethically)? My intuition is that is it more like the fuel efficiency of a car, non-linear and with a sweet spot somewhere between a lengthy boredom and a flash of intensity.
*I'm not super up on cosmology; are there other theories I ought to be considering?
**One idea for refinement: successful "prediction" (undefined here) creates positive experiences; frustrated expectations negative ones.