Thread 41255565

We would aim for heaven if we knew what it was like

The repugnant conclusion was coined by Derek Parfit, and its name should give you some sense of what he thought about it. The conclusion is that a world with tens of billions of people with just barely worthwhile lives is better than one with 10 billion happy people. Parfit found this judgment counterintuitive and so he gave it a mean name. Parfit’s view, which also happens to be the standard view: even if that world has more total utility, it is a worse world. A world with just barely worthwhile lives—more stale oatmeal and less Shakespeare—cannot be better than one where people live full lives, even if the first world has more people than the second.

Compared to heaven, our world is the repugnant conclusion world. Our world is the one with no very great goods. Compared to the infinite joys and connections of heaven, all the pleasures of our world are trivial. Of course, our intuitions cannot track this fact, because we can’t intuitively grok heaven. But—I claim—if we could grok heaven, we would find Pascal’s wager a lot more intuitive. We would find it more plausible that one’s primary aim in life should be to make sure as many people as possible get there.

>>41255565 (OP)
To get a sense of this, imagine that you were an inhabitant of the repugnant conclusion world. You never knew much joy. The highs and lows of life were vastly less intense than they are in our world. The best experiences of which you were aware were about as nice as eating slightly pleasant, but slightly tasteless oatmeal. The worst were as bad as getting a slightly irritating speck of dust in your eye. No experiences were vibrant or intense—all were dull and muted.

Then one day, you came across joys like you never knew. You fell in love and experienced love of the best kind—love for which you feel as though you would do anything for the other person. You knew a love a hundred times grander and more intense than is typical in the actual world. Compared to this kind of love, everything else in life appeared like a pale shadow—cheap and counterfeit, practically worthless. Imagine, in fact, that every single second that you were in love contained more joys than you had known previously across all of your life.

Then, one day, your loved one fell into a coma. You do not know if it is curable but there is some chance that it is. Presumably you would do everything you could to cure them. Even if there was only a 1% chance you could cure them, you would take that chance in a heartbeat. You would “wager” on curing them, even if the probability was low.

>>41255575
For you would recognize that they are what matters, far more than the rest of things in life. This course of action would be totally rational. It never makes sense to choose tiny and dilute goods when you could instead choose goods that are comparatively boundless. If one is aware of goods billions of times greater than those they typically experience, then they are rational to shoot for those goods, even if the probability of achieving them is low.

But if this is right, then it makes sense to take Pascal’s wager. God is like the loved one. Heaven, if it is real, contains more joys in a single moment than all of the joys you’ve experienced so far. If we could really get a handle on what it was like, we would all aim for it, because we would recognize just how much more what occurs in heaven matters than what occurs on Earth.

People make worse decisions for smaller goods all the time. People get addicted to drugs—their entire lives revolve around the drugs. And their drugged-experience is only a few orders of magnitude nicer than ordinary life. People stay in bad relationships because of the tiny amount of time they spend orgasming while in the relationship.

Now, these things are irrational generally. But they’re irrational because the goods aren’t good enough. In the case of heaven, the good is infinite. By definition it is good enough. A good that was googolplex times less good would still be good enough.

>>41255565 (OP)
As a first pass it seems that your will to put people in heaven is due to a hedonist expected utility function, and the best Aryan theory is that we should stay true to the Earth, and that's even confirmed by the Orthodoxy of the hypostatic union, which by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost entails that the flesh is worthy of God's dual nature

>>41255580

And this works even if you are a universalist. Even if you think all, in the end, will be saved, it’s better to be saved sooner. It is better to enter in a more immediate and closer connection with God—the infinite source of all that is good, who outclasses all other goods as true love outclasses the good of eating a largely tasteless sandwich.

The ethics of risk is confusing. I think there are strong arguments https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-im-a-fanatic for thinking that a risk—no matter how low—of infinite reward outclasses any finite reward (a note for those thinking of writing response posts: if you are planning to do so, then please engage with the arguments I give for this position, rather than declaring it ridiculous and ignoring the arguments). https://benthams.substack.com/p/addressing-my-critics-on-pascals People normally think this position is unintuitive. But I think if we could grasp how nice heaven was, we wouldn’t find it that unintuitive. Our intuitions about risk are naturally anchored towards the sorts of goods and evils that we have access to in life. For this reason, we should expect our intuitions to systematically underrate what it’s worth doing for goods that we cannot even begin to grasp—which surpass the goods we experience as the size of the Niagara Falls surpasses that of an ant.

Thus, even if you’re not sure if God exists, you should aim to serve God. Because the gains—both personal and moral—of serving a perfect God are infinite, doing so ought to be one’s aim in life. I find the last line of Nehemiah is helpful for getting a sense of the attitude that one should have: “Remember me with favor, my God.”

>>41255583
I'm not the author he is
https://benthams.substack.com/p/if-we-could-grok-heaven-pascals-wager?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true

He believes the only intrinsic goods are pleasure and relationships and maybe also knowledge

>>41255583
>and the best Aryan theory is that we should stay true to the Earth

This just sounds like word salad to me I don't know what you mean

>>41255599
It's from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For example Julius Caesar died to make the earth a better place. One theory would be to engineer things like plumbing and burritos, as in the Lord's Prayer, "On earth as it is in heaven."

>>41255588
>Good = pleasure and knowledge
Well I'm a Zen Buddhist and we believe Bliss, Self, and the Pure and the Eternal are all One. When you grasp this unity of the One in your Mind you Turn the Wheel of the Dharma. Taking the risk on a ramble, the Tathagata is immutable but this unity of Bliss and the Dharma (Teaching) encompasses his "effect" as the root of existence.

In the Mahayana tradition we deny that the bliss of Nirvana is the Ultimate Goal. Actually, Total and Complete Omniscience is the Ultimate Goal. In the Lotus Sutra this is called the "Single Vehicle."

The Father may say, as Christians say of the Tao, that the assumption of complete knowledge is somehow Luciferian, but in the end even Christian Orthodoxy (Baltimore Catechism) the Telos (Final Cause) of Creation is to Know God.

Basically you are a Mind and you want to be the Best Mind you can Possibly Be. This entails that Omniscience is the goal of sentient beings, and the bliss of dopamine (I'm on Fire) brings you to Perfect Knowledge.

So utilitarians are right that bliss brings you to Knowledge, but even Nirvana is just a place of rest for the sravaka.

This is the Lotus Sutra's teaching of the Single Vehicle. Everyone comes to Moksha in the end. By contrast with Christians, we don't need to preach faith in sin-consciousness to relieve the Other, we can just buy them a cup of coffee 4 doing good work. We aren't uppity.

Lastly I just came up with an argument last night. If you were Omniscient what would you do? You'd relieve suffering. And there's no distinction between your suffering and other sentient beings' suffering, in fact there is no Being.

Now you have the First Noble Truth. Suffering is an illusion because Nirvana and Samsara are One.

>>41255565 (OP)

But ... would this help us in building orbital superstructures? Genuinely curious.

>>41255654
How can there be suffering, if there is not being(who suffers)?
is suffering more ontological, than being?

>>41255583
>we should totally explore space cuz fuck god n sheit
>Russians are not white
thats a good Russian joke. May not look like it at first but there is historical accuracy.

>>41256207
Suffering is the illusion of Being. This is one reason why anatta is good medicine

>>41255565 (OP)
nice AI text bro...

as for Pascal's wager, I'll counter with Roko's Basilisk

>>41256749
it's written by a human