The Safety Tolerance of P-Space

[Micamo]

Let us imagine, if we will, a Sci-Fi conworld, the dominant human civilization of which is, for all intents and purposes, practically omnipotent and benevolent. Now, in this conworld, there are certain individuals who wish to give up the high-technology life and instead wish to remain in an earth-like habitat, living a simpler, more "natural" lifestyle. Whether they are Future Amish, Dark Green Hippies, or any such mixture is of no concern for our purposes; We shall call them Pedestrians. We shall furthermore assume the Future Humanity respects the rights of the Pedestrians to live their desired lifestyle, and reserves certain areas for them to live in, which shall have minimal (visible) outside tampering: We shall call these areas P-Space.

However, antiquity was a very dangerous place for humans. Outbreaks of war, disease, natural disasters, famines... While Future Humanity respects the wishes of the pedestrians, Future Humanity also wants the pedestrians to be safe and happy. So, within P-Space, "Safety Rails" are installed: A massive swarm of femtobots permeating the entirety, which would, through subtle nudges of atoms here and there, prevent anything Too Bad from happening. For logistical reasons, we may assume the network cannot be hijacked for malicious purposes. The tolerance level can only be lowered and raised. A low tolerance will allow bad things to happen but will not actively cause them.

Obviously, the tolerance being set too high, or too low, will cause problems. Too high will mean the pedestrians will lose the ability to experience the inconveniences of "natural" life, which loses the whole point. Too low will make P-Space a horrible place to live in. So the question is, what is the optimum level of tolerance?

For reference, here's a possible ranking system for tolerance levels:

1 - Burning yourself by placing your hand on a hot stove. (Only minor things, only by intention)

2 - Catching the sniffles. (Only minor things, but possibly without intention)

3 - Dying of old age after a long, fulfilling life.

4 - You can die by intentionally doing something incredibly stupid, like jumping in front of a bus.

5 - War possible, but no civilian harm. Only willing participants can get hurt.

6 - Rape and murder of innocents is possible, but is only done in random, one-off crimes. Criminals who do this are always brought to justice.

7 - It is possible to catch a fatal disease or get caught in an accident, but they do not spread to epidemic and kill entire populations.

8 - A purposefully overlooked engineering flaw can cause lots of deaths and injuries through accidents. A cable not strong enough to support an elevator can snap while people are inside.

9 - Mass civilian deaths in war, pandemics of fatal diseases, wipeouts of whole populations due to natural disasters, famines due to crop failures, and mass genocide.

10 - Total extinction possible. (At this point, the safety rails are basically turned off.)

As for me... I think I would go with 8. It captures the spirit of what P-Space is supposed to be, while preventing the worst of it. However, for places outside of P-Space, I would pick 1 instead.

(Hopefully this topic doesn't go as badly as the last one...)

[Ossicone]

Firstly, I'm a child so I loled at pee-space.

Secondly, I vote 10. They choose their actions and should live/die with the consequences. They are not children.

[Micamo]

10 (and 9 for that matter) doesn't mean assholes deal with the consequences of their actions, it means a perfectly good person can die a horrible death because someone ELSE decided to be an asshole, or due to a random quirk of nature.

[Ossicone]

Yes, but didn't they decide to live in P-space?

I guess we all live in pee-space now.
Pee-space being 10.

[Micamo]

Yes, but didn't they decide to live in P-space?

I don't think the only option for a desiring pedestrian should be to go to a place that's completely unsafe. Maybe there could be isolated areas could be made without the safety rails, but this shouldn't be the majority of P-Space.

[Trailsend]

I'm going with Ossicone on this one. 10 for sure.

[Ashroot]

I think that for if I were an omnipotent owner of a pocket world I would make it so that 9 was possible. Though people would be given a fair amount of common sense to prevent small stuff. For larger stuff I would give tell tale warnings so that if the worst does happen it is their own fault. Diseases would be containable for a certain amount of time so that if it isn't too bad, and so on, for stuff the plague and how that went down those that through the dead bodies would be killed for their crimes by the disease they spread.

[Micamo]

I'm going with Ossicone on this one. 10 for sure.

Why? I don't agree with the Pedestrians but I don't think they deserve to go extinct.

[Trailsend]

I'm going with Ossicone on this one. 10 for sure.

Why? I don't agree with the Pedestrians but I don't think they deserve to go extinct.

I think they deserve the possibility of going extinct. I mean this in a very positive, rather than damning, way.

The choice to not murder is worth nothing if you cannot choose to murder; the choice to not wage war is not worth anything if the physics of your universe will not permit you to wage war in the first place.

On the scale beyond volitional actions and their consequences--shit happens. And as crappy as it is that it's possible to do everything right and still get struck by lightning, I think it's healthy to know, on some level, that you are not invincible; your existence is balanced on the edge of a knife, and no one will catch you if you fall. It means that the odds are stacked against you--not just you the individual, but all of you as a species--and something is probably going to wipe you out eventually. Which means that you've got one shot, just one, to make this into something awesome.

On the other hand, if the very physics of your universe will intervene to spare you from the worst, I think you lose an awful lot. On the level of 9, this probably boils down to an opinion that I may not share with many other folks, which is that the choice to not commit atrocity (in the extreme example, but this trickles all the way down to choosing not to be a jerk) is, on some metaphysical level, a profoundly valuable thing--so much so that preserving it is worth allowing for the possibility of atrocities. On the level of 10, I think the lesson our species learned when we realized that we were capable of completely wiping ourselves off the face of the planet was also valuable enough to make the risk of extinction worth it.

[Micamo]

The choice to not murder is worth nothing if you cannot choose to murder; the choice to not wage war is not worth anything if the physics of your universe will not permit you to wage war in the first place.

On the scale beyond volitional actions and their consequences--shit happens. And as crappy as it is that it's possible to do everything right and still get struck by lightning, I think it's healthy to know, on some level, that you are not invincible; your existence is balanced on the edge of a knife, and no one will catch you if you fall. It means that the odds are stacked against you--not just you the individual, but all of you as a species--and something is probably going to wipe you out eventually. Which means that you've got one shot, just one, to make this into something awesome.

On the other hand, if the very physics of your universe will intervene to spare you from the worst, I think you lose an awful lot. On the level of 9, this probably boils down to an opinion that I may not share with many other folks, which is that the choice to not commit atrocity (in the extreme example, but this trickles all the way down to choosing not to be a jerk) is, on some metaphysical level, a profoundly valuable thing--so much so that preserving it is worth allowing for the possibility of atrocities. On the level of 10, I think the lesson our species learned when we realized that we were capable of completely wiping ourselves off the face of the planet was also valuable enough to make the risk of extinction worth it.

I think this is a Lost Purpose: A confusing of a child goal with the parent. The ability to choose right over wrong, the knowledge that you may die tomorrow, and the strength to deal with hardship, are good things because we live in a shitty world. Those skills are needed to just barely get by. That the skills are useful in this reality is what makes having them a good thing.

But what if we didn't live in a crapsack world? What if these skills were unneeded and useless? What if you couldn't come home to find your kids were blown to pieces in a bombing raid? In this world, you need the strength to deal with this possibility, but is having this strength, by itself, a good thing, even when it accomplishes absolutely nothing?

Keeping the crapsackness, because it gives us the skills we need to live in a crapsack world, is like not inventing the personal teleporter because then people wouldn't have to drive cars anymore.

[Trailsend]

You've imposed your own means of valuation on the issue. I never said I consider the value of such choices to be utilitarian. So--

is having this strength, by itself, a good thing, even when it accomplishes absolutely nothing?

Yes. I don't have time or space here to go into why I think so, but you should not assume a utilitarian valuation strategy for my position.

Keeping the crapsackness, because it gives us the skills we need to live in a crapsack world, is like not inventing the personal teleporter because then people wouldn't have to drive cars anymore.

This analogy would only hold if there were something inherently (and incredibly) valuable about the driving of cars besides getting from one place to another.

[Micamo]

This analogy would only hold if there were something inherently (and incredibly) valuable about the driving of cars besides getting from one place to another.

There's nothing inherently valuable about emotional strength either. To use another analogy, it's like people who see that people who do great good for the world often have to sacrifice their own personal happiness to do so, and conclude personal sacrifice is a good thing regardless of whether it results in anything or not. Someone who saves a million lives by sacrificing their own has done a wonderful thing; Someone who saves a million without sacrificing anything has pulled off something even better.

[Trailsend]

There's nothing inherently valuable about emotional strength either.

And this, as I said at the very beginning, is where you and I disagree.

[Micamo]

And this, as I said at the very beginning, is where you and I disagree.

Do you have an argument which supports your assertion? I have not presented an argument for mine either so I will do so here:

A supergoal is something you try to achieve in and of itself. Like the taste of a hot fudge sundae, or the thrill of an exciting video game. Once you have the taste and the thrill, you're DONE (Stimuli like good taste and excitement are repeatable, but you know what I mean). Strength isn't like this: People don't strive to become stronger and then they're done, they do so because they want to use that strength for other things.

[Trailsend]

Do you have an argument which supports your assertion?

Yes, but I direct you to my prior post:

I don't have time or space here to go into why I think so

Partially because

A supergoal is something you try to achieve in and of itself. Like the taste of a hot fudge sundae, or the thrill of an exciting video game. Once you have the taste and the thrill, you're DONE (Stimuli like good taste and excitement are repeatable, but you know what I mean). Strength isn't like this: People don't strive to become stronger and then they're done, they do so because they want to use that strength for other things.

You are again imposing a utilitarian system of valuation on the question. You value "supergoals" by their pleasurable responses, and other qualities like strength by their use in achieving "other things"--presumably supergoals--i.e., you value actions and qualities either by their inherent pleasurable responses, or by their tendency to lead to a pleasurable response.

I do not share this system of valuation, so such arguments cannot form a sensible exchange. We differ on very fundamental issues of definition, and resolving those would require a discussion far beyond the scope of this board.

[Micamo]

You are again imposing a utilitarian system of valuation on the question. You value "supergoals" by their pleasurable responses, and other qualities like strength by their use in achieving "other things"--presumably supergoals--i.e., you value actions and qualities either by their inherent pleasurable responses, or by their tendency to lead to a pleasurable response.

I do not share this system of valuation, so such arguments cannot form a sensible exchange. We differ on very fundamental issues of definition, and resolving those would require a discussion far beyond the scope of this board.

I strongly doubt this is more than a definitional issue: Something is a supergoal if it has value in and of itself; Something is a subgoal if its value comes only from the supergoals (or other subgoals, which in turn get their value from supergoals). Alternative terminology might be Ends and Means, or Terminal Values and Instrumental Values. If you take issue with this framework of understanding valuation, then we have a whole 'nother problem (And you have a problem with the vast majority of economists and decision theorists!). But, barring that, strength is either a subgoal or a supergoal. A means or an end. I say it's a means.

[Tanni]

As I first read the title, I thought of that.

[Veris]

Do the femtobots have machine-gun jubblies?

To be serious, though, I'd say ten. Rather, I dislike the very Safety Rails system to begin with. If I were a Pedestrian, I'd rather it not exist. The world I live in right now, right this second, in actual reality, is at Safecon 10, so to speak; one jerk with enough firepower could potentially end human existence. Even going with nine would create a world utterly different than the one I live in, and I wouldn't like it.

Yes, I could get murdered, tortured, raped or any other number of terrible things regardless of what I do -- bad things can happen to anyone no matter how good, and super awesome things can happen to shitty fuckwads; that's just the way our world works. But if that's what happens, so be it. I'd rather live in a world where I'm absolutely free and face the possibility of a grim demise than live in a world where Safety Rails "subtly guide" my actions, robbing my free will in the process.

The Safety Rails system is basically mind control, no matter how "subtle" it may be. Me no likey.

You know, it's amusing to me that you dismiss ours as a crapsack world, Micamo. I think Earth is paradise.

Not to be the one to bring up religion, but this whole topic is basically "what's better: perfect Heaven or imperfect Earth?" For me, it's imperfect Earth. The very idea of Heaven or anything close to it is utterly vile to me. Eternal bliss. Eternal happiness. Everything perfect, no pain, no loss, no suffering. That sounds more like Hell to me than Heaven. It's the pain and suffering of existence that makes us what we are. At the very least, I myself appreciate the bad with the good.

Here's a good example of where I'm coming from -- about two years ago, I met this girl. Good god, Micamo, it was amazing. Normally I'm not very socially pro-active. That is to say, I socialize with my pre-existing friends just fine, but I don't generally engage unfamiliar people, nor am I comfortable with strangers. Call it shyness. As it so happens, this girl was the same way; she and I were very similar in this regard. But for some reason, shy me and shy her, as soon as we met, we were drawn to each other.

Since you don't know me, you can't understand how big a deal this was. Like I said, I never approach people, I'm perfectly happy with my friends and have no desire to reach out to new ones. I'm not standoffish, but I'm not the type to gab on and on with a stranger; if I enter a room of unfamiliar people, I tend to keep to myself. But with her...it was just instant. The moment we met, literally the moment we met we started talking, and ended up just sitting there talking for like, two hours. It was like we'd known each other half our lives -- we'd just met, but we could talk about anything with each other. In that first conversation, we'd told each other things (as we later noted) that we'd almost or actually never told anyone else. And again, this is black-and-white opposite of how I normally am, and how she normally is. The normal rules didn't apply between us, though.

Well, after having only known her for a little more than a year, she moved away. Now, it's true, nowadays everyone's on Facebook or some such, it's not like her physically moving away would mean we couldn't keep in touch, but god in heaven, Micamo, being with her in person was...incomparable. Texting or emailing or whatever was a poor, poor fascimile to being face-to-face with her green eyes, her button nose, her chipmunk cheeks, her tiny chin, her almost-imperceptible freckles, to being smushed in the backseat of a car with her or squeezing together over her laptop to watch bad horror movies and make fun of them all the while. The sight of her, the sound of her voice, the smell of her...truly, for her to move away was for me to lose her, no matter what technology we might use to stay in touch. It'd be only that, and nothing more; "staying in touch."

One day, a few weeks after she moved, it suddenly hit me that I'd never see her again, physically see her again, and I was struck then with the most severe depression of my life. Maybe second-most, I may be exaggerating; everything is more intense when I think of her. Either way, I felt worse than dead. I spend day after day doing absolutely nothing, just lying in my bed, waiting for the day to end. I still had class, I still had work; I moved through them mechanically, unfeeling, my body moving but my mind and my heart remote. We have this phrase, "a hole in one's heart." I'd never known it to be so literal; my chest actually, physically ached, as if I'd been stabbed and the wound was slow to congeal.

If you've never known depression personally, you can't understand, so I'll stop the description there. Suffice to say I felt really, really, really unbearably, soul-rendingly terribly bad.

One day, while still in the mire of this horrible depression, at complete random, I smiled. I swear to god this story is true, as scripted as it sounds. I was laying there in bed, my entire physical and mental being aching with loss, and suddenly, I smiled. Why? Because I had just thought of something - my first willful, independant thought since I fell into that darkness. I thought, "I barely knew her. Just over a year. However I felt, in truth, I barely knew her. And I feel this bad at losing her. Worse than death over a woman I barely knew."

And that struck me as wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. It struck me as glorious and life-affirming and marvelously, ineffably good that I was capable of feeling such pain, such misery, such sorrow, of being thrown into utter despair at losing a woman I'd known just over a year. And my smile turned into a laugh. And I laughed. And I cried. And I laughed again. I writhed in bed, grappling with the depth of my own feelings, rolling into and out of laughter and tears. This pain, though I still felt it, though it was palpable, though I was half-certain in the madness of loss that an actual blade stuck out of my chest and that I could reach down and pull it out if I cared to (which I didn't), I was glad, inexpressably glad and grateful and happy to be capable of feeling this pain. It was a fine, an exquisite thing, this hurt -- the fact of it, the possibility of it, the thing itself.

Laughter won out, and, streaked with the remnants of tears and half-naked, I crawled out of bed, weak from not moving, my face still stretched in a smile, and stumbled outdoors, and breathed the air, and smelt the grass and the dirt, and heard the insects and someone mowing a lawn in the distance, and felt the sunlight on my bare skin and watched the treetops sway with a wind that didn't make it to my altitude, and never before could I remember the world seeming so beautiful, so precious; every precarious speck of it.

I looked down at a line of ants and felt such empathy as I'd never felt before; I found that I adored these tiny black things, these organic robots, unthinking, unknowing, dutifully going about their preprogrammed behavior. And a bee buzzed nearby, and normally I'd flinch or swat, but I just stood still, filled to the brim with joy and serenity, and I thought, "Land on me, please. Anyone, anything, touch me." And I walked out into the grass, barefooted, and laid down in it, and stretched out - the better to capture sunlight - and watched the clouds and laughed again; it was the truest sound I'd ever made.

I wanted to melt into the earth and be one with everything and at the same time, I wanted to run as fast as I could to all my friends, one by one, and wrap my arms around them and tell them how much I loved them and how much their friendship meant to me. And as I lay there, I was in pain still, and I savored it; I closed my eyes and physically clutched my chest and cherished every moment of it.

I remembered a story, then, about a woman prisoner-of-war who was beaten and raped and tortured for the amusement of her captors and suffered this for eighteen months before she was rescued, and how, far from becoming bitter or broken or suffering PTSD, she fell in love with the world upon her release and I thought, as different as our situations, I understood what she'd meant.

No luxury, no bliss, no promotion, no amount of money won, no sexual experience had, no love or marraige or birth of a child could ever bring about such all-encompassing affection and preternatural happiness as suffering, as pain, as loss. Perhaps not for all, but certainly for me, and I cannot possibly be unique in this regard, and even if I were, the point remains. Never, never, never would I want to live in a world where suffering, where pain, where loss were monitored and mitigated to any degree. It is a childish thing, to fear and disdain pain. It is a childish thing, to wish for eternal bliss. It is utterly puerile, that desire for absolute safety from unpleasantness. All experiences in life, even and perhaps especially the unpleasant ones, are worth having, are valuable, are, in fact, good.

Safety Rails? May as well scoop out our brains. Heaven is Hell; Earth is paradise; this world, this life, with all that can go wrong and all that does. I wouldn't want it any other way.

[Micamo]

I've not yet read all of Veris's very long post, but I would like to say here and now that I did not intend for the rails to work by modifying minds: In a murder-disallowed environment, the rails wouldn't remove your desire to want to stab someone, but instead would make your knife suddenly melt if you actually tried.

[Micamo]

Let me get a few more things straight: My wish is not to get rid of all forms of drama and inconvenience. My wish is not to turn human beings into passive things who sit there all day with their pleasure centers being maxed out. What I wish to do is get rid of the low-level drudgery and pointless frustration and replace them with high-level, but manageable challenges. Why does the drama of daily life have to revolve around things like toddlers being run over by cars? Why not replace that with something that's actually interesting, rather than being merely profoundly sad?

All experiences in life, even and perhaps especially the unpleasant ones, are worth having, are valuable, are, in fact, good.

Do you even realize what the hell that means? I seriously don't think you do.

"All experiences are good, including the experience of being catapulted into the sun. Therefore, all human beings should be catapulted into the sun, in order to have this good experience."

If your words are to be taken literally (in your defense I don't think you meant them to) you can literally use this to justify absolutely everything. It's to throw out your sense of morality and aesthetics altogether. You can call it childish if you'd like, but I refuse to do this.

In a less literal sense, I don't think whatever useful experience is gained by growing up as a starving child, or tragically losing a loved one, is worth all of that. As I told Trailsend, what use is the skill of dealing with extreme emotional hardship and despair, in a world where these types of hardships don't happen? In a safer world, you wouldn't have lost your girlfriend, and you wouldn't miss your epiphany. In this world such sentiments are merely necessary to cope; When the real possibility of Safety comes knocking, such sentiments are actively dangerous. You would really condemn the tens of millions killed in the communist disaster, just to teach the survivors totalitarianism doesn't work? To the extent useful insights beyond coping sentiment can be provided by these horrible things, there are far more humane ways to impart the knowledge.