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DanielLC comments on Life is Good, More Life is Better - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (54)
I don't believe in personal identity. As such, death is just an arrangement of observer-moments. It's not that different from birth.
I also don't see why it would be bad if I did. Pleasure is good. Pain is bad. Death tends to involve pain in some way, but it isn't in of itself pain. As such, there's nothing wrong with it. More life is better, but you can do that by creating more people instead of having them last longer.
That said, death is expensive. It costs a lot to raise someone from childhood to replace people that died.
Which is better: a society of immortals who never give birth, or a society that procreates and dies in the normal manner, whose population is stable at the same size?
That is to say, if both equally maximize observer-moments, does the "life-cycle" increase or decrease utility?
Dying and giving birth both seem to involve considerable suffering, so you'd need to augment your stable population with additional assumptions like 'childbirth is rendered painless' before it's even a challenging question.
Then pretend he did. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Least_convenient_possible_world
Because at some point it stops being least convenient and it becomes 'let me define away any counterpoints which might matter'. Maybe quentin really did forget about birth & death as major disutility generators and pointing out that alone contributes to the discussion.
I don't see why it would change it (ignoring pain of death and childbirth, and cost of raising kids, of course).
Also, since birth is death in reverse, I'd expect it to count as negative one deaths, so the net amount of death is zero anyway. This is sort of like how, since pain makes you want it to happen less, I count it as negative pleasure.
Also, as I said in the beginning, I don't believe in personal identity. If one choice is for everyone to die every night and be instantly replaced with someone who has the same memories, and the other choice is to go on as normal, I wouldn't care at all between them because they're the same choice.
Saying:
Does not necessarily imply that you don't believe in personal identity, just that personal identity is not something that is attached to the body, something all (most) physicalists would agree on.