I often think about who I want to be. I want to make the world better. I want to live with someone I love. I want a long term community of friends. Dreaming about this helps me figure out the steps to get there - if I want these things, I can understand how the world works, I can meet new people, I can run community events.

On a larger scale, I dream about the future of everything. Where should society end up? What is the picture we are aiming towards? Star trek-style luxury communism? Fluffy clouds and platonic harp-playing? A near-infinite amount of happy shrimp? What do we want?

In other words, I think about Heaven. What is The Good Future? And how do we get there?

The Good Future™ should be:

Really good. What’s good? Hard to say, but here goes: Something is really good if an individual, given time and space to reflect on their condition over time, would strongly endorse their life. You take a shrimp, give it a spa weekend and a brain the size of Morocco and ask “How is your life?” If it says “Great”, then I guess I’ll think that’s really good.

Universal. I think it's not The Good Future unless it's for everyone. I'm not saying it's equally good. But the way it's good should have some baseline for everyone. If your notion of good was emergency healthcare, then you need universal emergency healthcare. Perhaps some people have private healthcare too, but there is a baseline that every being gets.

I can imagine that The Good Future is briefly bad for some. Perhaps if it involves romance, people can get heartbroken in ways they don’t expect and wouldn’t have endorsed. This might be unavoidable. But I doubt it. I think that we should be cautious of saying “this badness is unavoidable”.

Stable. The Good Future has to not involve conflict over the future's future. If it does, then at the back of many minds will be the fear that Heaven is about to come to an end. At that point you want to turn off your heavenly hot tub and pick up your heavenly hand grenade. This does not sound like heaven^[1]

In other words, small perturbations of heaven should leave it as heaven, not a rapid descent into the world we currently live in.

*“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares” (Isiah 2:4) is meant to be a permanent thing.*

Growing. My understanding of heaven involves growth. It involves becoming more, understanding more. Enlightenment too cheap to meter. I'm not against wire-heading^[2], but I don't get why I'd want to watch all of multiversal cable while there is still physics to understand and people to chat to.

I think I'd be pretty wary of a future where we get somewhere and stop. If that’s all there is, then why only that?

Conflicts

There are, I think, some issues with the things I've laid out.

Excalidraw is a great tool for little diagrams like this.

Good vs Universal. What if it's really really good for a few but bad for many? What about beings who might exist but don’t currently? What about alien moralities?

I am up for considering pretty weird preferences, even in beings that don’t exist. If there were a race of dark elves who hate light and want to destroy the sun, I am not certain they shouldn’t exist merely because it’s worse for us. I would want to think about what the resulting world looks like. Only reflection, it seems bad - either race of beings seems to be happier without the other existing - but I don’t think it’s as simple as “bad for us = bad”.

Generated by DALL·E — Canonically Warhammer High Elves are fantasy British and Dark Elves are fantasy american

In terms of whether to bring beings into existence in general, this is pretty well trodden ground, I lean slightly in favour of total utility over average - lowering average happiness can be okay if there is more happiness overall - but I could be convinced^[3].

I am also pretty in favour of consent and property rights. The Repugnant Conclusion can be a morally superior end state whilst also not being a path we can get to - maybe those who are currently alive don't want to give up their resources for new beings. And maybe the governance process doesn't force them to. Who am I to disagree? Sometimes forcing good outcomes can be worse than merely mediocre ones.

Property rights are good, actually

This might seem like a dodge, but I don’t think it is. In general, I am wary of thinking I know better than others. I cannot speak for the rest of humanity. And many beings can’t speak at all (eg animals and potential people). It’s a hard problem that involves group trust. Perhaps some think me naive for wanting to take a moment, but in my experience, many people’s desire to rush ahead is due to powerseeking, not enlightened leadership. I can think of several big cases (Cummings, SBF) where I think such behaviour made for worse outcomes while also burning group trust.

Growing vs Stable. How do you have stable growth? If the future can change then there may be winners and losers, perhaps so drastically that the future isn’t stable. In some Luxury Gay Space Communist future, what about those who want the Christian libertarian heaven? What if those people break out to take over Alpha Centauri?

I hope that we end up good enough at coordinating that those who create lots of value are capable of coordinating across very different preferences. But this doesn't seem axiomatic.

Growing vs Good. If change is unpredictable, it might be bad. When I left Christianity, how could I know that my life after was going to be good? I couldn’t. I couldn’t consent to a world outside my experience. Likewise how can we know we are getting better futures without some chance that we get worse ones. Growth is, by it’s very nature, unpredictable - if we could predict it we’d know already.

I guess it's about equilibria - only going for stable changes unless everyone is very confident. Likewise it seems that growth might be in terms of knowledge and technology and that ethics could stay stable. But there just might not be a solution here.

Examples

Finally then, some critiques of common pretty good heavens and some discussions of some disconcertingly plausible midtopias. I'm not forecasting here, please do not consider these likely outcomes.

The Culture. The culture is a universe where AI minds run the pan-human milieu. It is in my view the canonical Gay Space Luxury Communism. But there is a clear issue. Why wouldn't you become a mind (an AI)? Why as a human wouldn't you become a ship-mind (AI) capable of actually engaging with the big problems of the universe. Sure sex and companionship is fun, but I think if that was all my life was about, I’d feel pretty empty, especially if there were other problems around. This essay criticises the culture in more detail.

A long, slim 'Culture' spaceship, exhibiting a sleek, angular design with sharp limbs protruding at various angles. The spaceship's appearance is futuristic and dynamic, featuring a color palette of vivid reds and deep blacks. This design embodies a fusion of advanced technology with an artistic flair, indicative of a highly advanced civilization. The backdrop is deep space, adding a sense of vastness and intrigue to the spaceship's imposing presence. — Why would you want to be a person when you could be this guy

C. S. Lewis. I like Lewis’ Heavens a lot, but they suffer from the same problem. Lewis’ heavens second to none. I’ll quote him:

But very far away I could see what might be either a great bank of cloud or a range of mountains. Sometimes I could make out in it steep forests, farwithdrawing valleys, and even mountain cities perched on inaccessible summits. At other times it became indistinct. The height was so enormous that my waking sight could not have taken in such an object at all. Light brooded on the top of it: slanting down thence it made long shadows behind every tree on the plain. There was no change and no progression as the hours passed. The promise or the threat of sunrise^[4] rested immovably up there.

Sounds great! But this requires an all powerful being (God) to maintain it. If God were real, given His actions in the Bible, I’d be pretty wary of living in an eternity of his creation^[5]. As with the culture, I would also want to be the top level being, rather than just mess about in idyl. The only good outcome for me would be if said deity were so powerful that I had no choice to submit. This is pretty interesting theologically^[6], but A) I find the God of the Bible a pretty horrific person and B) I think it’s unlikely He’s real. That said, Lewis’ The Great Divorce is criminally underrated, it often brings me to tears and is like 50 pages long, read it.

Aligned Godlike AI. There is one all powerful AI forever, but luckily, it's good. Phew. This is basically a restatement of the above. A good god, so powerful I don’t have to worry about challenging them. If this goes well, it really is The Good Future™. But it feels to me that near this good future are 1000x as many bad futures, where the AI isn't good, or someone scared of being ruled eternally beyond their control (eg me) screws it up for everyone. So on expectation still seems pretty bad.

In summary, many heavens have done away with agency, because it causes problems. You put one person in charge and everything is good forever. But I want there to be personal growth, which involves agency. So these heavens don’t appeal to me. Why be a person when you can be a god? I don’t get it.

Utopia, but mid

And so, some midtopias. A midtopia is a utopia but a bit worse. Much of the current world would be a midtopia if you were from the middle ages. People live longer, work is easier and more interesting, what are you complaining about? But I don’t think it’s heaven.

Bi Mediocre AI Capitalism. The future is still cool and queer, but we exist in the gaps between a constantly expanding swarm of AI minds. Maybe we can become them, maybe not. You have your own continent, but AIs control 90% of everything and they are gonna charge you to email your mum. Yeah we still have email. There are ads everywhere, but for the best book you've ever read, and the match of your dreams and ultrabeer. It's great, it's terrible, welcome to the future.

Ems. Robin Hanson wrote the book on simulated humans, which he christened Ems (Emulated Humans). The long and short of it is, that even if you choose to play your harp on a cloud, someone else is gonna make a bajillion copies of themself and take control of all of the spare energy in the universe. There is sort of a black market on growth, which is likely to be hard to suppress, leading to most of the universe being run by em copies of the most competent and coordinated, slight unscrupulous people. Because if it weren't, then someone more competent and coordinated and less scrupulous would break laws and do it.

This Em world might be fine in practice. Perhaps you and me get along on the equivalent of unemployment benefit and our lives are still way better than now. But there is a bleak dystopian edge. More or less all minds are trying to scrape a living in hypercapitalism and you and I are probably nowhere near clever enough to be a part of it. It’s just gonna be McKinsey grads.

The current world. Perhaps somehow the future still feels a bit like the present. Nothing has gone off the rails but there is some poverty and a lot of inquality. I don’t know why, but it seems plausible.

So no Good Future? 🙁

Nope, there are infinitely many other options for Good Futures. I expect the future to be stranger than I can imagine. The key part of them is that they involve the technology necessary for the futures I’ve described, but somehow for that to go perfectly. Perhaps heaven is actually an easy answer, perhaps there is Ord’s and MacAskill’s Long Reflection, perhaps we choose not to defect on one another, perhaps one of my failed Good Futures, is actually The Good Future™.

This article isn't really about solutions, but to lay out the problem as I understand it. What should we aim for? How do we coordinate around a future we all think is great? Please comment with things you like on this topic - I'm sure philosophers have written about this and there are some good novels too.

What is the Minimum Viable Heaven? How do we build it?

Original article here: https://nathanpmyoung.substack.com/p/minimum-viable-paradise

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The Norse would probably disagree
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Whenever my friend Glen says per se, he’ll pronounce it Percy, as if it’s a name. It’s such a dumb joke but it gets me every time I think about it
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I once ran an EAG afterparty called The Repugnant Conclusion that had no upper limit on entry. It was a great night, but it did get a little hairy at times and my average happiness could have been higher had we limited it a bit
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The “threat of sunrise” goes so unbelievably hard. What right has Lewis to include a three word phrase with so much depth? Superb
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Mainly because the eternity I would probably live in would be Hell. But even Heaven would be dubious if Hell existed. And if Hell doesn't exist then why lie about it in the Bible.
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I can imagine my evangelical friends nodding about the value of submission.