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this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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Asklemmy
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Ok, if afterlife is universally accessible and is perfect for me and my concept of happiness, then it would make the most sense to seek this afterlife as much as I possibly can. Because we are talking about afterlife the only way to get there is to die. The most reasonable conclusion then is that there's no point in living and it's much more beneficial to just die and go to infinine paradise.
That's why afterlife with no rules makes no sense to me.
I agree with you in cases where life here is more suffering than joy. The idea that we should cling to life no matter the situation isn't good for individuals or society and has enabled horrible circumstances to be held over people who might have otherwise escaped them.
I don't see it the same way when joys outweigh suffering though.
If I'm happy being me in the present, why rush being a happier me in the future if there is no time limit?
I don't skip my meals and order straight from the dessert menu.
There are comments elsewhere in this thread by people who would want to experience all kinds of suffering to satisfy their curiosity.
If one's only concern is maximizing one's own happiness in the short term regardless of impacts on loved ones, then yes, those people probably would be better off accelerating paradise. But long term with the term being potentially infinite there's not really any increase to living a full life here vs jumping ahead and there's very often likely fallout on loved ones by doing so, so it seems kind of pointless and callous to me if life is more good than bad.
But yeah, I'm very much a proponent of euthanasia being openly available for people for whom life is more bad than good.
Same question but inverse, why not? There is nothing to loose and something to gain. So why would anyone bother building life now when there is guaranteed happiness with simple and easy path.
Saying I'm content with my situation and don't want to change isn't really an argument for either position. What existential gains are there for continuing? That would be an argument for your position.
But that's the thing, there is no impact. Why shouldn't everyone else just go into eternal paradise? The whole issue with this hypothetical scenario is that it removes any need to live. At least Christianity has hell and sins to ballance it out. But in your case there are no existencial consequences, I can be as evil (which I have no desire for) or as good as I can and end up just the same.
And yes, that does come close to a question Why not be evil then and eat babies or something? The difference here is that we are social creatures among other social creatures (except some outliers), we feel empathy and generally don't want others to suffer. However even this argument breaks down somewhat when I keep unconditional paradise for everyone in the afterlife.
If your relative paradise smells like cinnamon rolls and your best friend's smells like something you hate, what happens if both of you are entitled to your own relative ideals but you want to spend your time with your best friend?
On a technical level, something very much has to be irrevocably lost in leaving a world of shared but randomly generated experiences for one of relative excellence.
The only way that two eventual observers of a superposition can each measure different results is if they are separated from each other when observing it.
So even if you have friends and loved ones on the other side in your relative paradise, from an 'identity' perspective they won't be exactly the same as the ones on this side.
That in and of itself seems a pretty good reason to me to be patient in living out a life in the here and now.
Because (a) most people don't actually want to do that, and (b) there's social consequences for eating babies in this world.
Actually, if eating babies is the most important thing to someone's happiness, that's one of the cases where jumping ahead to an existence where they could do that without consequence would make sense.
Let's not involve physics terminology into a philosophical discussion. It confuses more than clarifies. Especially (with my limited understanding) when the claims might not be correct at all.
I would expect multiple observers to have the same result no matter the distance between them. Such setup entangles the observers and the collapse has one real outcome.
I would not dare to go deeper into the subject as this is the extent of my knowledge. To be convinced otherwise I should see a credible proof, experimental or theoretical.
We might be arguing different things then. A relative paradise for me involves my loved ones. If they would not be there as they are now in my life, then it's no paradise. But that would contradict our initial condition of ideal afterlife.
This seems to be an inherent issue with this condition. It's rather easy to construct contradictions in this framework. Moreover, as a moral framework it's way too complicated for no aparent reason at all. Accepting unconditional relative afterlife idea either nulifies any moral argument at one point or another or requires to arbitrary ignore and contradict certain aspects of it.
If I get to pick and choose things I accept in a theory, then it's a bad theory.
My point exactly. However, what I was ilustrating is how easy it is to devolve into this kind of reasoning. What moral foundation is there to back up the descision? Most people don't want to? That's not a reason, that's an observation. Whatever morals I construct on a social basis become irrelevant. That's why religions have gods and sins.
It's not a matter of distance but of information isolation by additional layers of measurement. You can read on the unintuitive experimental result, a separate mathematical paradox similar to Bell's paradox with consistency as one of the three assumptions where one must be false, and a paper discussing the difference between foundational relative facts and their occasional emergence as stable facts.
It's difficult to describe this topic without falling back on physical parallels, and frankly given the origins of physics and philosophy as having been hand in hand for millennia up until fairly recently, I disagree that it can't offer clarity.
In this case, a classical interpretation does seem contradictory because identity is unique. There's only one of each thing. But when we talk about entangled particles, they are mathematically identical. If we're discussing the notion of a simulated copy of an original reality fracturing into multiple ideal paradises relative to each individual, you can have identical versions of every person in your life in your relative copy of it while the ones you were around are each in their own splinter off worlds. So what's lost is a classical certainty of them being the same. But because it would be impossible to test or evaluate if they are the same or different on the other side, you functionally wouldn't know either way. With a quantum (or even just simulated) cake, you can have it and eat it too.
Actually this is more broad, which is that accepting a fundamental relativity of all things nullifies any absolutist morality. To which I completely agree.
And the beauty of it not being confirmable in the here and now and relatively observed in a hereafter is that even if I'm right you'd be able to have your own experience of existence now or later completely different from what I'm proposing unable to discover that beneath the surface it is technically what I'm laying out above. Christians can think they are in heaven and everyone else is in hell without anyone actually being in hell or their idea of heaven being heaven for everyone, and you can have whatever existence or nonexistence you most desire without it crimping my or anyone else's style.
This is the same argument Christians make when they are confused that atheists don't commit crime when they don't believe in God having told them not to.
Morals don't inform behavior. We've invented morals to fit our preexisting socially adaptive behaviors. We don't eat babies because of our evolved biological desires, environmental necessity, and social consequences. Not because a potential baby eater is thinking over Kant's moral imperative. And in the rare instances where biology, environment, or society encouraged baby eating Kant didn't save those babies.