You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

paper-machine comments on Open thread, Sept. 1-7, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: polymathwannabe 01 September 2014 12:18PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (162)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: polymathwannabe 05 September 2014 06:38:28PM 3 points [-]

Your original post says,

the logical conclusion is that we should completely destroy the universe, in a quick and painless manner

Would you please describe the sequence of thoughts leading to that conclusion?

Comment author: mgg 06 September 2014 08:55:14PM 2 points [-]

Sure. Goal is to make TotalSuffering as small as possible, where each individual Suffering is >= 0. There may be some level of individual Suffering that rounds down to zero, like the pain of hurting your leg while trying to run faster, or stuff like that. The goal is to make sure no one is in real suffering, not eliminate all Fun.

One approach to do that is to make sure everyone is not suffering. That entails a gigantic amount of work. And if I understand MWI, it's actually impossible, as branches will happen creating a sort of hell. (Only considering forward branches.) Sure, it "all averages out to normal", but tell that to someone in a hell branch.

The other way is to eliminate all life (or the universe). Suffering is now at 0, an optimal value.