2 ms·

"The philosopher Nick Bostrom contended that, if humanity successfully colonized the planets within its “light cone”—the plausibly reachable regions of the univ

"The philosopher Nick Bostrom contended that, if humanity successfully colonized the planets within its “light cone”—the plausibly reachable regions of the universe—and harnessed the computational power of the stars to run servers upon which the lives of digital consciousnesses might be staged, this could result in the efflorescence of approximately ten to the power of fifty-eight beings." It's hilarious how much this sounds, and the science-fiction writer Charles Stross has pointed this out in the past, Russian cosmism [1], a weird offshoot of Christianity dressed in secularism and rationalism. That something like this emerged so quickly out of the decidedly pragmatic and genuinely secular altruism of Singer is in my opinion evidence of the weakness of Effective Altruism as a philosophical system. It's such a bureaucratic, mechanical system that it's already started to branch off into weirder, less utilitarian schools. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov#Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov#P...

imtringued 4y ago
That is long termism. Think about it, some dude tells you he has every right to exploit you today for the sake of people an unbelievable number of people that only exist in some fake statistic. This is basically utilitarianism turned into a parody. Let's turn this into a trolley experiment, 1 million planets colonized with 8 billion humans each living the same lives we live today vs 10^58 humans of which the majority don't exist and are just made up. The extreme utilitarianists and long termists will pick the 10^58 fake humans even if there is a near 99% chance that none of the humans actually exist. That 1% chance would by far outweigh any lesser goal despite the fact that it is unlikely to happen in your universe. Another problematic aspect is that if there were actually 10^58 flesh and blood humans, there wouldn't be any planets left for potential alien neighbours, by aliens I do not necessarily mean independently evolved intelligence, it could simply be a new human space race that develops in some quiet corner of the galaxy isolated from everyone else.

imtringued 4y ago

That is long termism. Think about it, some dude tells you he has every right to exploit you today for the sake of people an unbelievable number of people that only exist in some fake statistic. This is basically utilitarianism turned into a parody. Let's turn this into a trolley experiment, 1 million planets colonized with 8 billion humans each living the same lives we live today vs 10^58 humans of which the majority don't exist and are just made up. The extreme utilitarianists and long termists will pick the 10^58 fake humans even if there is a near 99% chance that none of the humans actually exist. That 1% chance would by far outweigh any lesser goal despite the fact that it is unlikely to happen in your universe. Another problematic aspect is that if there were actually 10^58 flesh and blood humans, there wouldn't be any planets left for potential alien neighbours, by aliens I do not necessarily mean independently evolved intelligence, it could simply be a new human space race that develops in some quiet corner of the galaxy isolated from everyone else.