Ногa

I just always like a way to do something fun with the Doomed Timeline type concept

Would we get some hints of this throughout the story? Like, they get way drunker than anticipated because their drunk brain couldn’t send back accurate information about the strength of a drink?

That would be fun
Hm
This isn't necessarily ordained only by ideas so far, but it feels like you could do something interesting with hallucinogenic poisons
If their future seeing is limited by their own observations
"If we go to the Castle, all I see is darkness. Probably a bad sign"
(they got thrown in a barrel)
bracing to get poisoned
really does meet god
Huh

You’d almost have to explain it upfront with a lecture in psyker school about all the diviners who failed to see their own deaths or were misled by other weird flukes of perception and time
Otherwise the reader would feel just as blindsided as the precog
(c)

Dude # 1:
The problem with the happiness of a wirehead is that it's disgusting

Dude # 2:
And also it's a signal of a person who is completely useless to you, and the person who will die shortly because they don't care about sustaining themselves
People in transhumanist future probably have different intuitions

Dude # 1:
My point is that actually deciding whether the wireheader is wrong actually is kind of difficult if you're otherwise concerned mostly with pleasure and suffering in your rational justifications
It's effectively a repugnant conclusion

Dude # 2:
Well, your rational justifications are working with your values that arise from your intuitions. Different experiences/environments will alter your intuition, and probably alter your values too

So you can try to imagine how it feels to be in a different environment (e.g. glorious transhumanist future) and try to guess how you'll change your views

And then you can do that without waiting to receive these experiences, OR convince yourself not to change when/if you receive that experience in the future

Thinking about a fascinating idea from a fanfic I'm reading: a culture for whom last thursdayism is in fact objectively correct (thier universe was created about two months ago and this is verifiable) but their religious interpretation of last thursdayism was in fact founded thousands of years ago in their history, as a religion saying that the world doesn't yet exist but it might one day so we need to be virtuous and obedient so that when the god empress makes the world she makes this world and not any of the other worlds she could have made. (с) Archon

For example, imagine that the industrial revolution had never happened, and that the farming era had continued for another ten thousand years, leading to more than today’s world population, mostly farming at subsistence incomes within farmer-era social institutions. Oh there’d be a lot of sci/tech advances, just not creating much industry. Perhaps they’d farm the oceans and skies, and have melted the poles. Following farmer era trends, there’d be less violence, and longer term planning horizons. There’d be a lot more thoughtful writings, but without much intellectual specialization having arisen. Towns and firms would also still be small and less specialized.

Or, imagine that the farming revolution had never happened, but that foragers had continued to advance for another two million years, also reaching a population like today. They’d still live in small wandering bands collecting wild food, but in a much wider range of environments. Maybe they’d forage the seas and the skies. Their brains would be bigger, their tools more advanced, and their culture of participatory dance, music, and stories far more elaborate.

Fill the god-shaped hole in your soul with molten metal, then shatter your soul, leaving only a metal god (c)

kid: omg dad pleeeeease let me upload

dad: no it destroys your subjective experience

kid: but all my friends are playing virtual fortnite, i neeeeed to upload

dad: you can just play it in neuralink vr

kid: noooo everyone is playing 10-copies-of-each-of-us mode

dad: your friends are dead, eat your dinner

kid: omg my dad is the worst, hes so old he wont let me upload bc of his stupid religion. as soon as i turn 18 im doing it myself (c)

Hmm, people also train people to speak as if they are conscious. Resembles aphantasia/lack of smell perception stories. Oh wait, you actually can see a cube in your mind? Oh wait, the smell is not an inferred characteristic?

Oh wait, you guys are actually [description of what is it entails to be conscious obtained from neuroscience research]?

Would be a huge L for moral theories/theories of ethics that bind everything to being conscious, conscious experiences and all that.
Or maybe they'll bite the bullet and will be like "oh yes, there are rocks, trees, people with this particular syndrome, bacteria, clouds, ..."

Insofar as intensity of pleasures and pains correspond to strength of behavioral responses, evolution should tend to adjust hedonic experiences to yield approximately fitness-maximizing degrees of effort to attain or avoid them. But for human beings, it is generally much easier to lose large amounts of reproductive fitness in a short time than to gain an equivalent amount. Staying in a fire for a few moments can result in permanent injury or death, at the cost of all of an organism’s remaining reproductive opportunities. No single meal or sex act has as much at stake per second—it takes weeks to starve, and the expected number of reproducing children produced per minute of mating is small. Thus, evolution may have had call to generate more intensely motivating-per-second pains in response to injury than pleasures in response to positive events