A Somewhat Vague Proposal for Grounding Ethics in Physics

By the way, welcome to the club of posters on LW! Try not to let your first posts not being well-received get you too down, it's quite common, I promise.

It's an interesting idea, but it's not at all new. Most moral philosophers would agree that certain experiences are part (or all) of what has value, and that the precise physical instantiation of these experiences does not necessarily matters (in the same way many would agree on this same point in philosophy of consciousness).

There's a further meta-issue which is why the post is being downvoted. Surely is vague and maybe too short, but it seems to have the goal of initiating discussion and refining the view being presented rather than adequately defending or specifying it. I have posted tentative discussions - much more developed than this one - in meta-ethics or other abstract issues in ethics directly related to rationality and AI-safety, and I wasn't exactly warmly met. Given that much of the central problems being discussed here are within ethics, why the disdain for meta-ethics? Of course, it might as well just be a coincidence or that all those posts were fundementaly flawed in a obvious way.

Maybe check out Christopher Alexandrt's Nature of Order.

It sounds like his wholeness function is what you are poking around.

So how can the universe "enjoy itself" as much as possible before the big crunch (or before and during the heat death)*.

Maybe read the Fun Theory sequence?

In AI research, intelligent agents typically have a clear-cut and well-defined final goal, e.g., win the chess game or drive the car to the destination legally. The same holds for most tasks that we assign to humans, because the time horizon and context is known and limited. (...) a truly well-defined goal would specify how all particles in our Universe should be arranged at the end of time.

We typically only care about the arrangement of particles at the end of the task, because that is the nature of the simple tasks we usually use machines for today. Actually, even that is not true: when "driving the car to destination legally" we care not only about the arrangement of the particles of the car at the end of the trip, but also about what happened on the way -- that's what "legally" means here. (Unless we also count "police sending us tickets" as particles. But I guess the car is supposed to follow the laws even when the police does not look.)

We can define "journey" goals e.g. by calculating score at each time interval, and trying to maximize the sum or the average (or some other function) of all the intervals. This can make sense even if we don't know how long the task will last.

treat experience as inherently positive and not try to distinguish between positive and negative experiences.

This sounds wrong. But I am not even sure what exactly would we measure here, if both positive and negative experience count the same. Is it the intensity of the experience (in either direction) which counts? (That is, would you rather be tortured than bored? Would you rather be tortured really painfully than enjoying a mild pleasure?) Or is it duration of the experience? (That is, we want to maximize the subjective time of sentient beings, regardless of what happens during the time? Would you rather live 1001 years in hell than 1000 years in heaven?)