850,000 subscribers. Let's do some questions. And by the way, I will at some point soon be doing a private

Q&A for my supporters on sub-stack. You can find my sub-stack at Alex O'Connor.com.

If a mysterious stranger offered you a chance to play this game, would you? If you agree to play, he will flip a coin. If the coin lands on heads, you'll go to heaven forever, which is as awesome as you could possibly want. If it lands on tales you will go to

hell where you will be tortured maximally for the rest of time. If you choose not to play, you will live

until the end of your natural life and then your consciousness will cease to exist forever.

Okay, so if we don't play a tool, there's nothing, no afterlife whatsoever.

If we choose to play, we flip the coin and there's 50% chance of infinite good essentially and 50%

chance of infinite bad. On face value it seems like we should treat these equally

and be indifferent because infinity one way, infinity the other way, 50% chance, that should sort of cancel out in terms of

expected value to zero.

And on the other side you have literally zero, so maybe we should be indifferent.

But that doesn't feel right.

I mean, the difference between choosing

a kind of existence whose expected value

is something like zero, but will in fact always

be infinitely good or infinitely bad,

seems very different from from no experience whatsoever.

More importantly, however, consider a point that I first learned from David Benatar, who is the

author of Better Never to have been and a somewhat famous anti-natalist.

Benetor makes the case that suffering counts for more than pleasure does.

And the way he does this is he asks a question. He says, would you take 30 seconds of the worst

imaginable pain, just complete torture? If afterwards you were granted 30 seconds of the greatest joy and pleasure that you could imagine,

...