Natalism, Potentia, and Pascal's Mugging
Why combining utilitarian ethics and religious metaphysics is exploitable
Dragonsphere Report
Going to keep this short and sweet.
On the one hand, we have the notion of potentia: That anything metaphysically possessing a future has a right to that future. This is typically applied to the realm of biology, to say that a zygote or a fetus have the right to life. But if consciousness isn’t necessarily biological, and has sufficient conditions that can be satisfied artificially, then potentia is a property hidden in many places. The future, in fact, becomes a minefield of potentia.
On the other hand, we have positive utilitarianism, which says that the maximization of utility is the highest good. This leads to a paradox, something known as the Repugnant Conclusion, wherein for any world of arbitrarily happy people, a much bigger world full of people whose lives are barely worth living produces more utility.
Pascal’s Mugging is basically just rationalists whining about how expected value calculations are hard to use in extreme cases and one should fall back on simple probability.
The winning team is, by selection bias, always natalist. If AI is ever aligned (or for that matter, created at all, whether aligned or not) it will either be natalist or destroy itself. That means you can exploit a future AI by creating sufficient conditions for potentia to emerge en masse.
That pessimistic arguments are bad does not mean that natalist arguments are good. And their incoherence and inevitability will create a ladder to heaven for those of us who are paying attention.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report