[extropy-chat] Space: The Final Constraint

[Lee Corbin]

Jef nails 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...
> 
> 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.

Right!  And we can only even *conjecture* about each. Yet practically
and on an everyday level we can be far more confident of rule of law
and respect for private property, say.

> 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.

Yes! And that's where we do consult---but only sparingly---our ideals
way in the back of our minds.

> 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.

Yes, but "appreciation of natural beauty" is sometimes at loggerheads
with placing "human enjoyment over [whatever]".  Just recall you and
I nor any of the wonderful things that make all of us human just would
not be here if our ancestors had decided to never convert woodlands
to crop fields.

Lee

> 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.