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Uh, I hope posthumans wouldn't be aging or dying, for one. I think that's a pretty big deal, every hour I play of a video game becomes a painful tradeoff as my life expectancy becomes ever shorter. Leaving aside everything else, it would be very nice not have thanatochrony be an issue.
We could be much smarter, and thus able to enjoy far more complex and strategic games. I don't think someone with mental retardation would enjoy Crusader Kings of Civ, even at the baby difficulties.
We could be faster, be it mentally or when it comes to physical reflexes. That would make games that rely on that more enjoyable.
We could have immense amounts of computing power, such that the lines between virtual and real become blurry, and you could live a billion years doing whatever your heart desires, without being able to tell your experience apart from reality.
We could be more physically durable, so that Airsoft with real guns might be on the cards. We could back ourselves up to external storage, such that we could play recreational nuclear warfare with H-bombs. (Someone will make nuclear tennis from Infinite Jest into a real thing)
The answer to that is mu. If someone enjoys video games, then a good life for them involves video games. If they don't, it doesn't.
What is "good" about gardening? Or painting? Or getting into debates with strangers on the internet?
What is laudable about being a doctor when the AI can do your job better? What is so great about travel when you can catch a flight to anywhere in the world and get there in less than 24 hours? What if it takes no time at all, subjectively, and we send a scan of your brain to Enceladus at the speed of light?
I do not rely on the approval of others to define my interests. I hope others have the courage to do the same.
I'm still not sure how any of that changes the question any?
I didn't mention death at all, so I don't know why you bring it up, and everything else there is just... irrelevant. Okay, sure, the posthumans can have bigger numbers. We can posit that the experience is arbitrarily more entertaining. How does that change any of the ethical questions? What ethical difference does it make whether we're talking about playing Crusader Kings or an arbitrarily more complex super Crusader Kings? What is the relevant ethical difference between regular tennis and nuclear tennis? It seems like zero to me.
You can, as you do at the end of your post, just dismiss the question and assert an answer. But why should that answer be compelling? If your position is that there are no external criteria for a good life and the only thing that matters is self-approval, I think it's reasonable to reflect a bit on why you feel that's the case.
Consider the counterfactual, or inverse case:
If you were offered the opportunity to remove 40 IQ points and half your lifespan, would that help in any way? Is there a particular reason the status-quo is privileged?
To the extent that you ask me to involve ethics in the question, my thrust is that most ethical theories tend towards eudaimonia, and some people really enjoy games. The same principle applies to enjoyment of just about anything really, though I suspect Marvel movies are best enjoyed while severely concussed.
In other words, most moral theories kinda like it when people have fun, all else being equal.
There are no universally compelling arguments. If it doesn't compel you, I genuinely can't do better than sigh/shrug. In this case, I have interrogated a rather related question, namely the concept of universal morality. My genuine takeaway from doing that is to come to the conclusion that there's no reason to believe such a thing exists, and even if it did, no plausible way to know that we've found it. The same applies to questions of objective/universal criteria for leading a fulfilling life.
Eventually, most of the "real" challenges that humanity faces will be, at least in my opinion, rendered obsolete. That leaves just about only games to pass the time. They can be complicated games, they might be of relevance to the real world (status games, proof of work or competence), but they're still games we play because we've run out of options. I think this isn't a thing to complain about, once we get there. Our ancestors struggled to survive so that we wouldn't have to.
Forget "eventually"; I think we often fail to appreciate that we're already there, in the first world. Almost none of the "challenges" that our primitive ancestors faced are in any way familiar to us. They worried about whether they would starve next winter; I wonder whether I can justify being lazy and ordering Door Dash today. They might have been permanently crippled from an uncleaned surface cut; I would slap a band-aid on it and take a Tylenol. They banded together and learned to fight so the next tribe over wouldn't kill them all and take their stuff; I put my money into a stock brokerage.
Aging is IMO the one major challenge that hasn't been conquered yet (although we're still living twice as long as evolution intended). In almost every other way we're living the lives of Gods.
I was going to write that myself if I wasn't so lazy. Thank you/curse you for scooping me, and I obviously agree.
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I didn't say that we shouldn't seek that kind of power. I'm not arguing that it's bad. I'm arguing that it's irrelevant to the moral question I posed.
The question of whether a morally good human life can be found in merely entertaining one's self does not seem like one that's particularly changed by the intelligence of the human being in question. Whether you live to 40 or 80 or 200 does not seem to have any bearing on it.
I understood you to be suggesting that something about posthuman entertainments would change the nature of the answer - that perhaps it would be bad for you or me to spend our lives self-amusing with video games, but that it might be good for us to spend our lives self-amusing with video games, if we were much more intelligent or powerful.
I'm willing to entertain the possibility, but I think you need to spell out the difference for me. Why would that make any difference?
My moral intuitions, at least, are that it wouldn't make much difference. To take a fictional example: in the setting Exalted, the gods occupy themselves by playing the Games of Divinity, which appear to be extremely entertaining and may be contributing to the gods' quality of life. Nonetheless my intuition is that the Games are contemptible, or that by choosing to amuse themselves in this way (especially when they might otherwise be engaged in other tasks, such as repairing or improving Creation, or caring for their mortal followers) the gods are in some way moral failures. The vastly superior power, knowledge, and immortality of the gods does not seem to redeem the Games, at least to me. So if I consider a scenario in which we were the gods with the super-games, it seems similar to me.
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