Life as Slime

I see you're a man of culture as well.

> you are equally entitled to believe it is a terrible cosmic mistake - acknowledging the rarity of life doesn't obligate you to change your belief.

I don't know, thinking life and humanity is a "cosmic mistake" seems to be a destructive nihilistic take. Easy to justify horrible things, because why not?

Shouldn't we all seek to be pro-human? All of the things I care about most in this life are human.

“Mistake” imparts intentionality. Perhaps life is an accident, but it can only be a mistake if intelligence is behind the cosmos. Observation, not argument.

I agree that "precious" might be too much of a leap, but nevertheless think that there's a legitimate argument here for life being "interesting". I'm particularly reminded of Schrödinger's "What Is Life?", which (amongst other great arguments) posits that life is what actively rejects within itself the increase in entropy (via homeostasis). I'm not aware of any mechanisms doing so that aren't either alive or were assembled by living beings.

This function comes hand in hand with the creation and maintenance of information, and in my opinion makes life particularly "interesting", especially if it is rare in the universe. In other words, if our universe is to be analyzed by a hypothetical external entity, it is likely that a significant fraction of the analysis effort would go towards our small corner of the universe (and any others) with living organisms.

Thinking this way is a necessary prerequisite before pushing humans into an oven.

The nifty feature of intelligence is that you get to examine what you value. Critical peer comments (so far) don't seem to address the "naturalistic fallacy" part, or even lean into it.

As far as I am tell, life can be maximally ambiguously defined as "entropy deferral". Nothing can stop entropy, but life crams as much organization into that lifetime as possible. I think that is kinda cool and I want to help, so I think we should make as much matter alive as possible before the universe fizzles out.

Rationalizing value judgments is always a challenge. We can argue over facts and implication of facts all we want, but the "predicate values" are arbitrary and you can't change them in others. I generally don't bother unless I have a strong idea of my audience's "predicate values". If they don't match mine, or I can't manipulate others into agreeing we share instrumental values, I am just out of luck.

Are you personally alive?

Without life nothing is precious or a mistake. There is nothing to make a value judgement.

Indeed, it should be slick and smooth.