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Let me get this straight. You want to promote the short-circuiting the mental circuit of promotion?
I don't mean that it has to do with which universe we are in. A lot of people believe, for reasons which have never been clear to me, that if a God created the universe, then that God's opinions have special moral status. I was presuming that that God does not have special moral status if it had been created by another God, or through evolution. But I don't know what Christians would say. Possibly they would refuse to consider the scenario.
If God created the universe, then that's some evidence that He knows a lot. Not overwhelming evidence, since some models of creation might not require of the creator to know much.
In response to
How I Am Productive
Re inbox zero: this paper seems to suggest it's a waste of time (and my experience concurs). How complicated is your folder structure?
You are curious now. You might become less curious after the first billion years. :-)
PS. I'm not advocating deathism. Just saying that any period of time is insignificant, when compared to a much larger period of time. The billion-year happy intergalactic civilization is still absurdly tiny compared to the eternity of Boltzmann-brain-infested Darkness that follows...
PPS. Or we could just taboo the word "absurd".
As a function of how long the universe will exist? ETA: a short period of time might be significantly located.
In response to
Reality is weirdly normal
I'd like to point out the parallel to the existentialist concept of "absurdity". From Wikipedia:
It is illogical to seek purpose or meaning in an uncaring world without purpose or meaning, or to accumulate excessive wealth in the face of certain death. Absurdity is used in existentialist and related philosophy to describe absurdly pointless efforts to try to find such meaning or purpose in an objective and uncaring world, a philosophy known as absurdism.
To draw out the connection: rather than saying "reality is weirdly normal", I would say: Reality is absurd in human terms. Physics does not care about you. 'Every action has an equal and opposite reaction' is not a principle of justice; it has only to do with kinetic motion. Conservation of energy does not entail survival after death. The universe is allowed to kill you. Physics will happily twist everything you find meaningful beyond recognition (including you yourself).
This has a depressing aspect which is not present in the post. Perhaps that is the largest flaw of existentialism. However, I think this concept of absurdity is valuable. "Absurd" takes things one step further than "weird", in a way I feel clarifies things.
Reality is absurdly normal.
=Edit=
The ensuing discussin has made me change my mind. The concept of the absurd is not an improvement here. Insisting that reality is absurd in human terms (strongly violating our intuitions and also our values) is not helpful; it's relevantly similar to insisting that life is a mystery or that quantum mechanics is impossible to understand.
The absurd claim is "there is nothing you ought to do or ought to not do". The claim "life is tough" is not absurd. ETA: existentialism in the absurdist flavor (as opposed to for example the Christian flavor) is a form of value anti-realism which is not nihilism. It denies that there are values that could guide choices, but puts intrinsic value into making choices.
reality would probably seem a lot less existential!absurd in a happy intergalactic civilization, also permitted by physics.
Nope. If the Big Rip doesn't do you in, the Heat Death of the universe will. Enjoy billions of years contemplating your inevitable demise.
I would still be curious how much I can get out of life in billions of years.
You seem to be suggesting that there are properties of the system that are relevant for the quality of its experiences, but are not computational properties. To get clearer on this, what kind of physical details do you have in mind, specifically?
I do not strongly believe the claim, just lay it out for discussion. I do not claim that experiences do not supervene on computations: they have observable, long-term behavioral effects which follow from the computable laws of physics. I just claim that in practice, not all processes in a brain will ever be reproduced in WBEs due to computational resource constraints and lack of relevance to rationality and the range of reported experiences of the subjects. Experiences can be different yet have roughly the same heterophenomenology (with behavior diverging only statistically or over long term).
The claim then rules out computationalism.
Isn't it sufficient for computationalism that WBEs are conscious and that experience would be identical in the limit of behavioral identity? My intent with the claim is to weaken computationalism -- accommodate some aspects of identity theory -- but not to directly deny it.
Therefore a WBE will have different consciousness (i.e. qualitatively different experiences), although very similar to the corresponding human consciousness.
That would depend on the granularity of the WBE, which has not beens pecified, and the nature of the superveninece of experince on brains states, which is unknown.
The truth of the claim, or the degree of difference? The claim is that identity obtains in the limit, i.e. in any practical scenario there wouldn't be identity between experiences of a biological brain and WBE, only similarity. OTOH identity between WBEs can obviously be obtained.
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Update: I decided on Permutation City, and was unable to put it down until it was done. I am very happy with the book. I am a lot more convinced now that I will eventually read almost all of these, so the order doesn't matter as much.
I liked "Diaspora" more.