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James_Miller comments on Stupid Questions June 2015 - Less Wrong
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No, it's better to live a good finite life than to have never been born.
I've always been uncomfortable with this kind of reasoning. You say it would be better to live than to never have been born. Better for who? Can we say that a nonexistent person has utility, or any properties at all? I don't believe so; I think I agree with Kant that existence is not a predicate. From SEP:
I don't get most philosophy, but this does seem like a silly question. Things that exist have properties such as mass that things that don't exist lack.
Consider the subset of all possible human minds that would rather exist than not exist. Each are, tautologically I think, better off existing. One reason I hope for a positive singularity is so that far more of these minds will have a chance to live. I think the greatest form of inequality is between the subset of this subset that gets to exist and those that don't.
Yes, there are possible minds that would rather exist than not exist. However, those minds don't exist, so why should I factor them into my utility function? I'm not doing 'them' a disservice, since there is no 'them' that I'm doing a disservice to.
It seems to me equivalent to Anselm's ontological argument, where we say that since god is by definition the greatest, and it's greater to exist than to not exist, then god must exist. The counterargument is that god, not existing, has no properties. Attempting to take into account the properties of nonexistent or hypothetical entities leads us to all sorts of weird conclusions.