Previous Post - for context on how I discuss utilitarianism for this sequence, read this.
The Literal Meaning
Many people have heard of Negative Utilitarianism, describing the type of utility function that values a large fraction of possible worlds as worse than nonexistence, or in the archetypical case, all worlds.
The less-discussed cousin of this is Positive Utilitarianism, where a large fraction of worlds are valued as better than nonexistence. Many people fall somewhere in between the two, with a lot of worlds evaluated as both better and worse than nonexistence.
I am, to the best of my introspection, a moderate positive utilitarian. This means things like:
- There are circumstances where I would pay money for someone to spin up copies of myself undergoing some minor torture, rather than that simulation not happening. There are many decision theoretic considerations around whether to actually pay for this, though.
- It is and always has been obvious to me that I want to live forever in most realistic timelines. I want to exist right now, and I don't expect to find myself in any worlds that I think I shouldn't exist in, since those are relatively rare. This resulted in young-me being a bit confused at people who only expect to want to live to 80 or 200 or something.
- I often express my idea of a very good future for myself as "learn everything, do ~every thing, experience ~every life that has ever happened or ever could."
Hypothesis: whatever it is about my psychology that makes me a positive utilitarian also makes several other things true:
- I tend to be very low-regret, in that very few/none of my life experiences are worth undoing, from my perspective. Many of the "bad" things that I would keep in my life aren't things that non-positive utilitarians would disprefer to their absolute nonexistence, but I hypothesize that they are more likely to feel something like regret about them, or would have feelings about wanting to undo.
- This also feels related to my tendency of trying to learn and grow stronger from all of my experiences, rather than just positive utilitarianism.
- I am pretty enthusiastic about knowing things that might hurt other people in my position, which is why I use Crocker's rules.
- Flame is a very compelling metaphor to me.
Things I am not quite talking about:
The Real World
While decisions can be framed as deciding which universes should exist and which shouldn't, the ones people make in their day to day lives tend to not change much around positive utilitarianism. It comes into effect primarily in my emotions and when I'm contemplating utopias.