A practical guide to tiling the universe with hedonium

post by Vittu Perkele · 2024-12-16T21:25:44.431Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

This is a link post for https://perkeleperusing.substack.com/p/practical-considerations-for-a-hedonium

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This is a blog post I recently made about what tiling the universe with hedonium (which I believe is morally entailed by a belief in hedonic utilitarianism) would actually involve in practice. It's easy to just say "make as much hedonium as possible," but what is hedonium, anyways, and how would you actually go about making it? I hope you find it interesting, just follow the link to read the full post if you're interested in what the prerequisites for converting the universe into hedonium actually are.

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comment by Dagon · 2024-12-17T06:52:50.185Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

A few missing points, which may break the whole plan:

  1. For a long long time, it's probably better to increase hedons experienced, then absolute amount of hedonium, and only after there's a whole lot of it do we worry about density.
  2. Your description of neural hedonium has no reason to believe it only or primarily experiences POSITIVE hedons.  Your proposal risks creating and maximizing sufferonium.  In fact, this is probably a bigger unsolved problem than identification of substrate.  How do you make something that actually maximizes what you want?
  3. it's a bit suspect to go from "play it safe" on the hard problem with artificial neural material, without playing it even safer, and already-solved manufacturing of just making lots of organic brains.