And again, in conversations that fit this pattern, what I notice is that everything the person expresses indicates they want to make this change. They only say positive things about it. They seem eager and hopeful. They give reasons in favor of doing it, and reasons against not doing it.
A somewhat smaller factor in the psychology of this I believe is not quite mentioned by the previous comments (not-yet-verbalized ways in which things could go wrong, general anxiety about something not yet being considered) is that from the speaker's perspective, they have...
C1: Let me put it this way then, how do you combine all of these tiny little microexperiences into a coherent macroexperience? You have a combination problem.
I believe that even if one affirms an emergent view of consciousness, they would still have to address a, perhaps weaker, version of the combination problem. For example, the two halves of a split-brain patient's brain in certain circumstances act as though there may be two streams of experience, such as the left hemisphere -- which is responsible for speaking -- only being able to describe lights in ...
I just learned about what a viatopia was from your linked article, but I certainly agree that there should be more discussion on this. In general, I think that focusing too much on terminal values can lead to internal disagreement on matters which don't bear much significance in the present, especially when most of us already agree on certain things that are desirable in the medium-term (such as the ones you've listed e.g. curing cancer).
And more generally, at what level of technology would the world be comfortable stopping?
I'm not entirely sure what year ...
I speculate that the first study you mentioned (PEW) had the lowest result of the 3 in that while their maximum bound of 120 is a very high age to reach, it is still within the age range that humans can realistically picture. Moreover, since it had also mentioned realistic age ranges, such as the 80s and 90s, the people taking it may have been more wary of consequences of aging that they actually see in real life, such as illness and cognitive decline.
The second study, at least from the abstract I read, was more general about the way in which they framed l...
The list provided shows a lot of future empirical questions whose answers will influence ethical theories, but there may also be some interesting past examples already. For example, the Theory of Evolution showing how humans and animals are not different in kind likely played a supporting role in animal welfare. Going back even further, many ancient cultures believed that certain diseases were a sign of either divine punishment or something ot... (read more)