All of Anonymous_Coward6's Comments + Replies

"Should your parents have the right to kill you now, if they do so painlessly?"

Yes, according to that logic. Also, from a negative utilitarian standpoint, it was actually the act of creating me which they had no right to do since that makes them responsible for all pain I have ever suffered.

I'm not saying I live life by utilitarian ethics, I'm just saying I haven't found any way to refute it.

That said though, non-existence doesn't frighten me. I'm not so sure non-existence is an option though, if the universe is eternal or infinite. That might be a very good thing or a very bad thing.

1Voltairina
re: utilitarianism, the usual sort of thing that pops into my mind is weighing of some minor discomfort versus a significant one, like one person getting their eye poked out with a pen versus an equivalent amount of displeasure spread among thousands of people stepping in something sticky, plus one more person stepping in something sticky. The utility seems higher if we agree to poke the person's eye out, but its intuitively unsatisfying, at least to me, which makes me think that whatever rules makes things seem "bad" or "good" that I'm currently running on aren't strictly utilitarian. I might be thinking of raw pain for pain though, and not adding enough people-stepping-in-sticky-stuff to account for the person who's been poked in the eye suffering in other ways, like losing depth perception, not being able to see out of half of their original visual field, etc.

Why must destroying a conscious model be considered cruel if it wouldn't have even been created otherwise, and it died painlessly? I mean, I understand the visceral revulsion to this idea, but that sort of utilitarian ethos is the only one that makes sense to me rationally.

Furthermore, from our current knowledge of the universe I don't think we can possibly know if a computational model is even capable of producing consciousness so it is really only a guess. The whole idea seems near-metaphysical, much like the multiverse hypothesis. Granted, the nonzero p... (read more)

-3DanielLC
I'm not sure if it's actually possible for someone to die painlessly. My idea was to base happiness on classical conditioning. If something causes you to stop doing what you were doing, you dislike it. If it stops you from doing everything that you do while you're alive, it must be very painful indeed.

Some people with synesthaesia can "feel" numbers and thus perform amazing calculations. It would only make sense to have something similar for other tasks, like computer programming?

I have a sever inability to make big choices such as this, and I have cryocrastinated for quite some time. This year, I became a vegetarian after a lot of difficult reflection, and I doing the same with cryonics.

I feel that there just isn't that much to lose by not signing up, since non-existence does not scare me. Signing up, at that point, becomes a choice between the Precautionary Principle vs Proactionary Principle. Even a small chance that the world I wake up in will be horrible is enough to not want to sign up at all, even despite the potential gain.... (read more)