Isn pleasure the meaning of life?
The possibility does exist that the conscious experience of pleasure is in fact the True Ultimate External Meaning of Life. I mean, conscious experiences are weird, and they seem to be really real, as real as quarks (and a lot more complex), so maybe the conscious experiences of goals are actual goals, purpose made flesh. If I had to point to the thing most likely to be meaningful, in all the world, I would pick the conscious experience of pleasure. But in practical terms, that doesn’t really make much of a difference. When you consider that even the no-superintelligence formulations of the future involve a humanity spreading across billions of planets, spreading throughout the galaxy and eventually the Universe, and that even the no-Singularity version of superintelligence will let you run billions of trillions of humans on a computer with the mass of a basketball, the moral value of the future far outweighs that of the present. Our primary duty is to ensure that there is one, and tha
