Net Utility and Planetary Biocide

First of all, I don't think that morality is objective as I'm a proponent of moral anti-realism. That means that I don't believe that there is such a thing as "objective utility" that you could objectively measure.

But, to use your terms, I also believe that there currently exists more "disutility" than "utility" in the world. I'd formulating it this way: I think there exists more suffering (disutility, disvalue, etc.) than happiness (utility, value, etc.) in the world today. Note that this is just a consequence of my own personal values, in particular my "exchange rate" or "trade ratio" between happiness and suffering: I'm (roughly) utilitarian but I give more weight to suffering than to happiness. But this doesn't mean that there is "objectively" more disutility than utility in the world.

For example, I would not push a button that creates a city with 1000 extremely happy beings but where 10 people are being tortured. But a utilitarian with a more positive-leaning trade ratio might want to push the button because the happiness of the 1000 outweighs the suffering of the 10. Although we might disagree, neither of us is "wrong".

Similar reasoning applies with regards to the "expected value" of the future. Or to use a less confusing term: The ratio of expected happiness to suffering of the future. Crucially, this question has both an empirical as well as a normative component. The expected value (EV) of the future for a person will both depend on her normative trade ratio as well as her empirical beliefs about the future.

I want to emphasize, however, that even if one thinks that the EV of the future is negative, one should not try to destroy the world! There are many reasons for this so I'll just pick a few: First of all, it's extremely unlikely that you will succeed and will probably only cause more suffering in the process. Secondly, planetary biocide is one of the worst possible things one can do according to many value systems. I think it's extremely important to be nice to other value systems and promote cooperation among their proponents. If you attempted to implement planetary biocide you would cause distrust, probably violence and the breakdown of cooperation, which will only increase future suffering, hurting everyone in expectation.

Below, I list several more relevant essays that expand on what I've written here and which I can highly recommend. Most of these link to the Foundational Research Institute (FRI) which is not a coincidence as FRI's mission is to identify cooperative and effective strategies to reduce future suffering.

I. Regarding the empirical side of future suffering

• Reducing Risks of Astronomical Suffering: A Neglected Priority.
• Against Wishful Thinking
• Risks of Astronomical Future Suffering

II. On the benefits of cooperation

• Gains from Trade through Compromise
• Differential Intellectual Progress as a Positive-Sum Project
• Reasons to Be Nice to Other Value Systems

III. On ethics

• Measuring Happiness and Suffering
• What Is the Difference Between Weak Negative and Non-Negative Ethical Views?
• Are pain and pleasure equally energy-efficient?

I'm not convinced that perpetual suffering is particularly human. We could be the species of animal that suffers least on an average day, since we have better solutions to hunger and thirst than anyone else and no predator is likely to disembowel us and our offspring in our sleep.

So it seems to me what you're really doing is questioning the value of (conscious) life itself. Is that right?

It is an old question that has been answered many ways, because no single answer has appealed to everybody. Buddhism is one answer that I particularly dislike but is apparently soothing to many.

To me, an indictment of life itself as not worth living is a reductio ad absurdum of the whole project of reducing the complexity of literally everything to a single one-dimensional utility-disutility scale to which everything is commensurable. (The paperclip maximizer is another.)

My personal supposition is that (conscious) life is an engine that runs on (conscious) suffering to produce (conscious) understanding. And since there are probably innumerable lifeless universes, I'd rather have one with suffering and understanding in it, if only for variety, than prefer another lifeless one. I don't expect to convince you, I'm just saying this works for me.

There is no reason to believe the maximum disutility I can experience is equal in magnitude to the maximum utility I can experience. It may be that max disutility is far greater.

Obligatory xkcd.

quoted someone or other who claimed that the human condition is one of perpetual suffering, constantly seeking desires which, once fulfilled, are ephemeral and dissatisfying

That someone wouldn't be Buddha, would it?

I had somehow always assumed implicitly that net utility of life on Earth was positive

Most sentient creatures can commit suicide. The great majority don't. You think they are all wrong?

It would be kind-of surprising if the capabilities to create pleasure and suffering were very asymmetrical. Carl has written a little around this general topic - Are pain and pleasure equally energy-efficient?

I've not read the comments so perhaps repeating something (or saying something that someone has already refuted/critiques).

I think it's problematic to net all this out on an individual bases much less some aggregate level even for a single species much less multiple species.

First, we're adaptive creatures so the scale is always sliding over time and as we act.

Second, disutility feeds into actions that produce utility (using your terms which might be wrong as my meaning here is want/discomfort/non-satisfaction and satisfaction/fulfillment type internal states). If on net a person is on the plus side of the scale you defined what do they do? In this case I'm thinking of some of the scifi themes I've read/seen where some VR tool leave the person happy but then they just starve to death.

Finally, isn't the best counter here the oft stated quip "Life sucks but it's better than the alternative." If one accepts that statement then arguments the lead to the conclusion choosing death (and especially the death of others) really need to review the underlying premises. At least one must be false as a general case argument. (I'll concede that in certain special/individual cases death may be preferred to the conditions of living)

I've had arguments before with negative-leaning Utilitarians and the best argument I've come up with goes like this...

Proper Utility Maximization needs to take into account not only the immediate, currently existing happiness and suffering of the present slice of time, but also the net utility of all sentient beings throughout all of spacetime. Assuming that the Eternal Block Universe Theory of Physics is true, then past and future sentient beings do in fact exist, and therefore matter equally.

Now the important thing to stress here is then that what matters is not the current Net Utility today but overall Net Utility throughout Eternity. Two basic assumptions can be made about the trends through spacetime. First, that compounding population growth means that most sentient beings exist in the future. Second, that melioristic progress means that the conscious experience is, all other things being equal, more positive in the future than in the past, because of the compounding effects of technology, and sentient beings deciding to build and create better systems, structures, and societies that outlive the individuals themselves.

Sentient agents are not passive, but actively seek positive conscious experiences and try to create circumstances that will perpetuate such things. Thus, as the power of sentient beings to influence the state of the universe increases, so should the ratio of positive to negative. Other things, such as the psychological negativity bias, remain stable throughout history, but compounding factors instead trend upwards at usually an exponential rate.

Thus, assuming these trends hold, we can expect that the vast majority of conscious experiences will be positive, and the overall universe will be net positive in terms of utility. Does that suck for us who live close to the beginning of civilization? Kinda yes. But from a Utilitarian perspective, it can be argued that our suffering is for the Greatest Good, because we are the seeds, the foundation from which so much will have its beginnings.

Now, this can be countered that we do not know that the future really exists, and that humanity and its legacy might well be snuffed out sooner rather than later. In fact, the fact that we are born here now, can be seen as statistical evidence for this, because if on average you are most likely to be born at the height of human existence, then this period of time is likely to be around the maximum point before the decline.

However, we cannot be sure about this. Also, if Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true, then even if for most worlds humanity ceases to exist around this time, there still exists a non-trivial percentage of worlds where humanity survives into the far distant future, establishing a legacy among the stars and creates relative utopia through the compound effects aforementioned. For the sake of these possible worlds, and their extraordinarily high expected utility, I would recommend trying to keep life and humanity alive.

I will say the same thing here that I did there: if (and only if) you attempt to kill me, I'll attempt to kill you back with appropriately much torture to make you fear that outcome. your morality should be selected for being the best for you, logically. I commit to making sure anything that involves attacking me is very bad for you.

Um, obvious solution: redefine your morality. There is no objective morality. If you think the net utility of world is negative, that really says more about you than the world.

And if you are totally sincere in this belief, then honestly: seek professional mental help.

I think you can confuse yourself by treating utility too literally as a scalar quantity. I won't argue (here) against interpersonal comparisons, but I will point out that we have a lot of evidence that even people who report lots of pain and suffering and almost no pleasure do not usually commit suicide, nor advise it to younger people when they're later in life.

This implies pretty strongly that most people's self-evaluation of their life is NOT a sum of their individual moments.

The topic of hedonic adaptation and the fact that some kinds of memories fade faster than others is another difficulty in the evaluation of retrospective value of living. Individual self-evaluations of a point-in-time change over time - how much it hurts now is simply different from how much I remember it hurting tomorrow. Which value do you use in your sum?

Recently I can't get past the notion that Pain/Suffering and and Joy/Pleasure shouldn't be considered to be two poles of the same scale. It just doesn't feel psychologically realistic. It certainly doesn't describe my inner life. Pain/Suffering feels like it exists on its own axis, and can go from essentially zero to pretty intense states, and Joy/Pleasure/Whatever is simply a different axis.

I might not go so far as to say that these axes are completely orthogonal simply because it's pretty hard to feel transcendent joy when you're feeling profound suffering at the same time, but this doesn't actually seem like it has to be a fundamental property of all minds. I can feel some pretty good temporary states of joy even when I'm having a really rough time in my life, and I can feel intense waves of suffering even when I'm deeply happy overall.

If you choose to put these two different phenomena on the same scale, and treat them as opposites, then that just leads you to really unpleasant conclusions by construction. You have assumed the conclusion by your decision to treat pain as anti-joy.

I think most people find utopias containing absolutely no suffering to be kind of off-putting. Is the kind of suffering you endure training for a sporting competition something that you would want permanently erased from the universe? I think the types of suffering most people are actually against are the types that come along with destroyed value, and if that's the case, then just say you're against destroying value, don't say you're against suffering.

I realized later I had made the error of equating the two, utility and disutility, as part of the same smooth continuum, like [-100, 100] ∈ R. There is no reason to believe the maximum disutility I can experience is equal in magnitude to the maximum utility I can experience.

For evolved beings, I'd expect maximum pain to exceed maximum pleasure in magnitude. For example, the wolf may get pleasure from eating the deer, but the deer may get pain from being killed. But the evolutionary selection pressure is much stronger on the deer in this case. If the wolf loses the fight, it only loses its lunch and can try again later. But if the deer loses the fight, it loses its life. Psychological studies on humans bear this out. We tend to weight negative events four or five times more strongly than positive ones.

torture of future uploads

parallelizing euphoria

You're mistaken if you assume this imbalance must apply to the space of all possible minds. We know it's true of unmodified humans. There's really no reason it must apply to uploads, is there? Your original counterargument was valid.

The essays on non-human animals, for example, made me realize for the first time that it may well be possible that the net utility on Earth over all conscious creatures is massively negative.

The truth is, we really don't know which creatures are conscious. On the one hand, I'm quite confident that animals that can pass the mirror test are conscious, self aware, and capable of suffering. Most animals don't pass this test.

On the other hand, consider the fact that you can have a "pain" response without actually being conscious of it. It happens all the time. If you touch the hot stove, you reflexively withdraw your hand before the nerve impulse has time to even reach your brain. The spinal cord does the processing. I'm not ready to call my spinal cord conscious, are you? (If you want to go down that route, how do you know rocks aren't conscious?) The nervous systems of many species are simpler than that. I don't believe jellyfish are conscious. Just because an animal reacts to a "pain" signal, doesn't mean it actually hurts. This is true even of humans.

There are many cases in between these extremes. I don't know which animals are conscious in these cases. But that doesn't mean they can suffer like humans do. Humans have a lot of willpower. They can override their basic instincts to an astonishing degree using their frontal lobes. Therefore, instincts and emotions may have to have evolved to be much stronger in humans than in other conscious animals to compensate. Where a human must experience an overwhelming urge, an animal may only need a mild preference to act. Animals that do suffer may suffer much less than one might think.

Net utility according to what function? Presumably pleasure - pain, right? As people have pointed out, this is not at all the utility function animals (including humans) actually use to make choices. It seems relevant to you presumably because the idea has some aesthetic appeal to you, not because God wrote it on a stone tablet or anything.

I think once people recognize that questions that seem to be about "objective morality" are really usually questions about their own moral preferences, they tend to abandon system-building in favor of self-knowledge.

I find the idea that net utility among people in our world today is negitive to be an extremly implausible one. Even people who have brief periods of time where their utility is so far negitive and attempt suicide (but survive) generally regret it later, as that kind of deep depression is usually something that passes pretty quickly and before long they find themselves back in a positive-utility state regretting that they almost ended their life. Most people overall enjoy life, I think, and generally want to extend it for as long as possible.

Life can be hard, and it's certanly nowhere close to optimal (yet?) but overall it's definitely a positive utility state. So much so, that the possibility of losing life (fear, danger, illness, ect) is itself one of the most utility-lowering things that can happen to a person.

As for the other point; when comparing two possibile futures you also have to consider the possibility of either one happening. The only way you could get a future with an AI torturing vast numbers of people forever is if someone specifically designed it to do that. That's not impossible, but it's far, far more likely that a person would want to create an AI that would make large numbers of people happy, either altruistically, or for economic or political reasons, or as a cooperative effort between people, ect. (And of course it's also possible that we fail and the AI just kills everyone, or that super-AI ends up not happening or not being as important as we think ect.) But just looking at those two probabilities, "AI-tortures-everyone" vs "AI-makes-people-happy", if the second one is far more likely then the first one, then you need to give that greater utility weight.