This is a beautiful essay. But ultimately consciousness and subjective experience don't matter. Outcomes matter. If your life was pure suffering but you achieved a great purpose, then that's a better life than one full of subjective joy. Giving children a great childhood can be good, but only insofar as it causes them to live a purposeful life.
Submission statement: There is a popular model of subjective time which holds that your perception of an interval is proportional to what fraction of your life so far it is. Taking this seriously recontextualized a lot of things felt about the nature and purpose of life, which inspired this essay.
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Notes -
Not at all.
This is a beautiful essay. But ultimately consciousness and subjective experience don't matter. Outcomes matter. If your life was pure suffering but you achieved a great purpose, then that's a better life than one full of subjective joy. Giving children a great childhood can be good, but only insofar as it causes them to live a purposeful life.
They're the only thing that matters! In the absence of subjective experience, there is no way to define 'better'!
Because they affect the subjective experience of consciousnesses.
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Define your terms.
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Submission statement: There is a popular model of subjective time which holds that your perception of an interval is proportional to what fraction of your life so far it is. Taking this seriously recontextualized a lot of things felt about the nature and purpose of life, which inspired this essay.
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