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Notes -
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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