[extropy-chat] Space: The Final Constraint (was Extinctions)

[Jef Allbright]

On 6/13/06, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at tsoft.com> wrote:
> Let's distinguish between what we believe to be effective (i.e. to "work"
> in Jef Albright's way of thinking), from what is ultimately desirable.
> In particular, few here are socialists; we strongly suspect that the best
> courses of action are in accordance with human liberty, minimal government,
> and minimal use of force.
>
> OKAY! So we *defend* the Nature Conservancy's legal *right* to buy land and
> take it off-line, so to speak. That is, if someday they buy the moon or
> the entire Antarctic, then in principle I don't have any problem with that,
> (except to lament it).
>
> But it's entirely a different matter what we *approve* of. And I don't
> think that anyone answered Rafal's question above. What if you can replace
> the entire Antarctic with computronium running 10^33 people per cubic meter?

Lee, my "way of thinking" is that we can't know what is ultimately
good, but we can increasingly know what principles tend to lead to
good.

Since doing "good" amounts to maximizing the scope of what is
increasingly seen to increasingly promote *our* subjective values in
the future, then the first part is to understand what our values say
about this issue.  The second part is to apply what we know about
effectively promoting these values.  And all of this within a
meta-context of perpetual growth, e.g. recognizing that no particular
issue exists in isolation and there is always a larger context.

Among the fine-grained variously-weighted values that we would
consider are our generally shared appreciation of natural beauty, our
appreciation of the evolutionary "knowledge" encoded into the various
species with regard to their environment of evolutionary adaptation,
the generally shared values that place human enjoyment over
conservation of natural habitat, the values that respect others'
disagreement, and so on and on.

I personally suspect that carrying out this ideal process of social
decision-making would result in an outcome in which we would encode as
much of the natural information as we thought relevant, and move it
all into the computronium simulation in order to greatly enhance the
scope of our growth and enjoyment.

I might be wrong.  We might all be wrong.  But I'm willing to bet that
the process of increasing awareness of our values and increasing
awareness of what works leads to the best social decision-making
practical.

- Jef