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Let’s be clear that pain avoidance, no matter how huge, is still finite and therefore a cost, not stakes. It’s the price-to-minimize of life, not the value of living.
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Let’s say worst-case climate models are correct and we’re looking at 5 gens of extreme pain for say 100b human+animal souls. Add it all up with adequate kinship-discounting. It still won’t be stakes. Just costs. Why is life worth it for any of the 100b souls in the formula?
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This imponderable is why stakes=costs people studiously avoid and taboo discussion of euthanasia and antinatalism. If a trivial solution exists to solve pain (don’t make babies, commit suicide painlessly) it subverts most of their logic. So ban all talk of that solution.
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I like to keep that option in the picture as a null hypothesis. If you can’t imagine a future with more worthwhile stakes than the cost of the trivial pain-elimination solution, you’re not really trying.
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The thing about priceless stakes is that they can actually be pretty transient. So long as they do the fractal-eternity thing, there’s always a next grain of sand to see the world in. If McNugget sauce keeps you interested today and next week it’s Mars rovers, that’s fine.
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The key is to bootstrap a receding horizon into infinite time one way or another. In a way stakes is curiosity about how something in motion today will turn out past a horizon of prediction/planning. You can’t see it so your only option is to live to see it.
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You either die a hero or live long enough to watch the sequel. Choosing life is always a kinda villainous option. The truly good are always acting dead. Goodness is stakes blindness. All is pain because that’s all you can feel.
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A lot of this thread is what people usually discuss under the heading of Meaning Crisis,™ which I increasingly dislike. “Meaning” imo is an unhelpful concept. “Stakes” is better. The thing against which the cost-of-living is evaluated as either worth it or not.
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The physical metaphor of a stake — a spike driven into the ground to claim a part of the universe besides yourself is great. A declaration of a non-minimal life. Its meaning or lack thereof can be set aside. It’s your point of positive involvement with reality.
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