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@PavelPotocek what do you suggest is more important? 😼

@levifinkelstein For hungry people - food, people at war - peace, ill people - health, prisoners - freedom. Are these people going to prefer love over their more primal needs? Love can't fix societies suffering by scarcity, disease, or tyranny. Love only comes second, after the more important needs are satisfied.

@levifinkelstein From the comfort of our homes, playing with words at virtual markets, love seems much more important to us than to less fortunate peoples ❤

@PavelPotocek In addition to this, it seems like once you hit a certain level of comfort, you even get persons that do not experience a desire for (or joy from) certain types of love (see: aro/ace persons). It's not super hard to imagine someone having a completely fulfilling and happy life even sans love (just imagine someone like Derek Parfit, singly-mindedly devoted to academics, just sans someone like Janet Radcliffe Richards).

@PavelPotocek "Love can't fix societies suffering by scarcity, disease, or tyranny. Love only comes second, after the more important needs are satisfied."

Why do you think this? Many people living in societies not plagued by scarcity help people who do for example.

@hmys Maybe compassion is a better word for this than love. And only somewhat prosperous societies can help. Our prosperity is not built on love in the first place.

You can call the wanting to reduce suffering a kind of love, but it would not follow that love is more important.

If I care about X, it isn’t because I care to care about X (quite the opposite, I would care to care about X, only because I care about X, as a mean).
I can love (in the particular way of thinking reducing suffering is the most important thing), without it being downstream of thinking love is the most important thing. (love would just be a description of the fact, not a reason for it)

Anyway, love is still important.

@dionisos So infinite amounts of moderate suffering is less important than any amount of extreme suffering?

@dionisos Countless people have volunteered to suffer extremely for their loved ones. Fathers saving their children from a fire and dying in the flames, Brothers gifting a vital organ to keep the other alive, A mother suffering during childbirth. Extreme suffering is nothing against love.

@levifinkelstein No, but the amount would be really high to compensate. I was speaking in practical terms.
Otherwise, my answer would just be : Whatever maximize my utility function.

@Rwin Most of your examples is choosing extreme suffering to avoid extreme suffering.

@levifinkelstein if talking about infinites. Integral of suffering squared over all cases should be minimised.

@KongoLandwalker Why squared (instead of another function)?

@dionisos I think an important thing to add regarding the point about extreme suffering is that the capacity to suffer requires a sufficiently complex mind. My argument here is essentially the same as in my own comment thread. Most living beings that are capable of suffering, will be K-strategists in the very abstract or more concretely higher animals. As such they will rely on family structures and bonding between individuals and will not exist without it. Surveys of humans show, that family and children rank the highest for the question what makes life meaningful (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/11/18/what-makes-life-meaningful-views-from-17-advanced-economies/). The capacity to suffer is highly correlated with a requirement for love to keep a species that is capable of experiencing it going.

@dionisos square is most commonly used in "mistake" calculations in engineering and statistics. If we say that any suffering is a mistake, then we extrapolate the same formula to this question. Square adds weight to huge suffering. So it is better to make many people in discomfort than a few with a lot of suffering. So when optimising for this function we should help the most suffering people first.

I see, this is interesting, but I feel like thinking of it as an error would not work well with positive well-being (I think well-being should be counted sublinearly and not super linearly).
The analogy seems harder to make with that, but still there is maybe something in the intuition.

Personally, I would choose a use an exponential function, something like 1-K^(-x), with "x" representing the intensity of suffering/well-being.

@Rwin I agree with you that importance is subjective, and I think that probably suffering require a brain, and more intense suffering require a bigger one.
But I still think a lot of K-strategist can unfortunately still suffer.

I disagree that love is a prerequisite to the whole concept of importance (but I am unsure you meant it literary, of you was thinking there is just a factual correlation between both).

Also in some way, you can maybe consider that wanting to reduce suffering is a kind of love (or is linked to it), but at the end of the day, I care more about reducing suffering than love, I care about what I care, I don’t care about the fact I care (except as a mean, as an instrumental value).

@Rwin What if objective value is a real thing

@levifinkelstein Objective value cannot exist, as value is a subjective judgement. No scientist will ever measure "value" in nature. When we observe the universe, it's cycles of birth and destruction, heading into an era of absolute nothing, there is no reason to assume the concept of value would be part of physics.
Even from a religious point of view, a god or the supervisor of the simulation is required as a way to invoke "objective values". Such a being would have to be sentient to judge and assign value.

@Rwin "Objective value cannot exist, as value is a subjective judgement" what's the argument that value is subjective?

@levifinkelstein The concept of value does not derive from physics, but from an individuals prioritization of things that are connected to an emotional judgement. Value can't be measured, only approximated, changes from person to person and over time.

@Rwin I understand that's what you're claiming, I'm just requesting an argument for it.

@levifinkelstein There are multiple theories of value, none of which describe it as a physical property. As value is not a scientifically measurable quantity, has never been observed by itself and is merely an abstract philosophical concept, it does not exist outside of an observer's mind. Value is at best an emergent property of something, that derives from a perceived hierarchy in relation to other things.

Think of a universe that contains nothing but a single hydrogen atom. Does the hydrogen atom have value? A human would probably say yes, as the atom is all that exists. But there is no human in that universe.
The hydrogen atom is not capable of assigning value to itself. So how many things can we add to that unverse until the concept of value emerges? Is there any point before conciusness where value can be found?
The only point between a single atom and conciousness that could point into that direction is the concept of priority. Single celled organisms are capable of prioritizing tasks. But these decisions follow strict rules and aren't assigning a hierarchy, where the observing organism is aware of the priority in relation to other things.
Importance or value is a highly abstract concept and requires sufficiently complex mind. Sentient minds tend to say love is the most important thing in the universe and mostly don't exist without it. As such, there is nobody to argue with them against it.

@Rwin Firstly, value is not a physical property, but this does not mean that it does not have a real-world impact. Many important concepts, such as justice or freedom, are not physical properties, but they have a profound effect on our lives. Value is a crucial aspect of human existence, shaping our relationships, decisions, and actions. It is also an essential component of economic theory, which is based on the idea that people make rational choices based on the value they assign to different options.

Secondly, while it is true that value is an abstract concept, this does not mean that it is solely a product of the human mind. Value is a property that emerges from the interaction between subjects and objects, and it is not dependent on the presence of a conscious observer. For example, the value of a particular resource, such as water or food, is determined by its scarcity and the demand for it, regardless of whether there is a human observer present.

Finally, the idea that value only emerges with consciousness is also problematic. While it is true that sentient beings assign value to things based on their subjective experiences, this does not mean that value does not exist before the emergence of consciousness. For example, natural selection operates on the basis of fitness, which can be seen as a form of value that is independent of consciousness.

@levifinkelstein
a) Justice and freedom, just as value are subjective and do not exist without an observer. If those things were objective, politics and philosophy would be much easier.
b) The economic theories, that describe value as intrinsic still rely on an observer. Marx' labour theory of value for example relies on a societal framework. An amoeba does not perform labour, a human does. Maybe a horse or an elephant do too, but r-strategists simply live.
c) The value of scarce resources may be understood by other animals with complex minds. The vast majority of them being K-strategists. But bacteria for example are not capable of understanding that value. We can see this by the fact, that many r-strategists deplete the resources available in a given environment and die. A particularly stark example are deadly pathogens, that kill the host they need to stay alive.
d) Yes fitness can be "seen" or rather be perceived as a form of value, but by whom? Only by a concious observer, that understands the concept of evolution and judges natural selection as positive. But I am certain that even regarding this, different people would assign different value. A eugenicist and a humanist would have vastly differing views on the value of evolutionary fitness.

e) Also, natural selection does not in any way judge by value anyway. It simply happens. This is a very important thing to stress: The mental models we develop of the world are human-shaped. We say quantum objects "decide" their state when we observe them, say that noble gases "don't like to" bind with other molecules, that natural selection "decides". But all of these things simply happen and we describe them to be able to talk about them.

@CadeMataya name one 😼

@levifinkelstein I rest my case

@hmys Happiness is pretty important, more so than love.