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OrphanWilde comments on Group Rationality Diary, April 5-14 - Less Wrong Discussion
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To paraphrase Robin Hanson, rationality should exist.
Personally, in terms of utility functions, I'm inclined to give my own suffering positive utility (it's just, y'know, substantially lower than the utility of pleasure). But then, I write poetry on the beauty of the meaningfulness of pain. It's curious what a few years of systematically killing emotion will do to you when it reawakens with a vengeance.
Sure, if humans exist then rationality should exist.
But my question stands, why should humans exist? If I'm reading correctly your post assumes that a rapid cessation of humans would be somehow a bad thing.
Stop me if you feel this is entering into uselessly nihilistic territory and we can call it quits here.
Objectively, without reference to human perspective? No reason whatsoever, unless you count the fact that humans would generally prefer to exist than to not exist as an objective reason.
Subjectively? Because we, generally, prefer to exist, and more than that, prefer that other human beings continue to exist. Should we count the preferences of people who don't exist yet? Doesn't really matter. The preferences of people today are, cumulatively, that people exist tomorrow. We can of course ignore the general preference of people tomorrow to exist (as they're functionally counterfactual in consideration of antinatalism) but then we don't get to then selectively -fail to ignore- their potential suffering. Otherwise you're just selecting what counterfactuals you include based on what conclusion you want to reach.
If their suffering doesn't matter (ignoring counterfactuals) then their potential preference not to exist doesn't matter. OR if their suffering DOES matter (accepting counterfactuals), then we have to also include the general preference of people to exist.
Or we could say preferences don't matter whatsoever (full objectivity) inwhichcase there's no argument -against- reproducing, even if there's likely no argument for it.
[Edited some grammatical mistakes.]