Maybe natural selection is quite like that scientist
The survival instinct part, very probably, but the "constant misery" part doesn't look likely.
Actually, I don't understand where the "animals have negative utility" thing is coming from. Sure, let's postulate that fish can feel pain. So what? How do you know that fish don't experience intense pleasure from feeling water stream by their sides?
I just don't see any reasonable basis for deciding what the utility balance for most animals looks like. And from the evolutionary standpoint the "constant misery" is nonsense -- constant stress is not conducive to survival.
fear of consequences in an afterlife
Are we talking about humans now? I thought the OP considered humans to be more or less fine, it's the animals that were the problem.
Does anyone claim that the net utility of humanity is negative?
“Is a life net positive in terms of all the experience moments it adds to the universe’s playlist?”
I have no idea what this means.
not an empirical question; it’s more of an aesthetic judgment
Ah. Well then, let's kill everyone who fails our aesthetic judgment..?
then some would claim I have an obligation ... and I’d be doing harm to their preferences
That's a very common attitude -- see e.g. attitudes to abortion, to optional wars, etc. However "paternalistic" implies an imbalance of power -- you can't be paternalistic to an equal.
The survival instinct part, very probably, but the "constant misery" part doesn't look likely.
Agree, I meant to use the analogy to argue for "Natural selection made sure that even those beings in constant misery may not necessarily exhibit suicidal behavior." (I do hold the view that animals in nature suffer a lot more than they are happy, but that doesn't follow from anything I wrote in the above post.)
...Are we talking about humans now? I thought the OP considered humans to be more or less fine, it's the animals that were the probl
I've started listening to the audiobook of Peter Singer's Ethics in the Real World, which is both highly recommended and very unsettling. The essays on non-human animals, for example, made me realize for the first time that it may well be possible that the net utility on Earth over all conscious creatures is massively negative.
Naturally, this led me to wonder whether, after all, efforts to eradicate all consciousness on Earth - human and non-human - may be ethically endorsable.This, in turn, reminded me of a recent post on LW asking whether the possibility of parallelized torture of future uploads justifies killing as many people as possible today.
I had responded to that post by mentioning that parallelizing euphoria was also possible, so this should cancel things out. This seemed at the time like a refutation, but I realized later I had made the error of equating the two, utility and disutility, as part of the same smooth continuum, like [-100, 100] ∈ R. There is no reason to believe the maximum disutility I can experience is equal in magnitude to the maximum utility I can experience. It may be that max disutility is far greater. I really don't know, and I don't think introspection is as useful in answering this question as it seems intuitively to be, but it seems quite plausible for this to be the case.
As these thoughts were emerging, Singer, as if hearing my concerns, quoted someone or other who claimed that the human condition is one of perpetual suffering, constantly seeking desires which, once fulfilled, are ephemeral and dissatisfying, and therefore it is a morally tragic outcome for any of us to have emerged into existence.
Of course these are shoddy arguments in support of Mass Planetary Biocide, even supposing the hypothesis that the Earth (universe?) has net negative utility is true. For one, we can engineer minds somewhere in a better neighborhood of mindspace, where utility is everywhere positive. Or maybe it's impossible even in theory to treat utility and disutility like real-valued functions of physical systems over time (though I'm betting it is). Or maybe the universe is canonically infinite, so even if 99% of conscious experiences in the universe have disutility, there are infinite quantities of both utility and disutility and so nothing we do matters, as Bostrom wrote about. (Although this is actually not an argument against MPB, just not one for it). And anyway, the state of net utility today is not nearly as important as the state of net utility could potentially be in the future. And perhaps utilitarianism is a naive and incorrect ethical framework.
Still, I had somehow always assumed implicitly that net utility of life on Earth was positive, so the realization that this need not be so is causing me significant disutility.