I’m mostly half-serious.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • There are a lot of claims here, but I’m going to focus on one in particular. I don’t think we have any moral obligation to reach our potential as a “creator race”. Taking into account your initial starting point, consider the following argument:

    1. Either intelligent beings were created or intelligent beings arose by chance (at least once).
    2. If intelligent beings were created, then there is already a creator.
    3. If intelligent beings arose by chance once, then it is possible for intelligent life to arise by chance again.
    4. Therefore, either there is already a creator of intelligent life or intelligent life can arise by chance again.

    If this argument is sound, then the possibility of intelligent life does not depend on us. To me, this weakens any suggestion that we are morally obligated to fulfill our intellectual potential.

    Perhaps one could object to my argument above on utilitarian grounds. If we can create more intelligent life than already exists, then we will be increasing the total amount of good in the universe. We are morally obligated to increase the good in the world (however “good” is defined) and so we are morally obligated to create intelligent beings. But this is a non sequitur. It isn’t clear that the creation of more intelligent beings will result in more happiness than misery. In which case, on a utilitarian analysis, it could turn out that we are morally prohibited from creating intelligent beings.

    I know this isn’t the crux of your post, but I wanted to engage philosophically since posts in this community often go unanswered.




  • I don’t understand. If a mod from memes.world bans me from a meme community, I can still comment on memes.world from another instance? Or are you saying just go to another community on another instance that has the same kind of content? Because if it’s the latter then Lemmy’s userbase number problem comes into play. Even popular subjects only have like one or two big communities.












  • There would be no religious wars, honor killings, more freedom, no religious leaders abusing their powers, no waste of labor and money on religious things, etc. It may seem that we would be more educated and have better understanding.

    Removing the word religion from this excerpt wouldn’t remove any of these problems. We would still squabble over territory, resources, and ideological differences. To give a non-religious analogy: if a time traveler went back and killed Hitler, Germany would still retain all the problems from WW1 and the Weimar Republic that were ripe for a dictatorship.