a really fun paper, mind expandingly strange:

This essay explores the speculative possibility that fundamental physical operations — atomic movements, electron orbits, photon collisions, etc. — could collectively deserve significant moral weight. While I’m personally doubtful about this, I suggest reasons to keep an open mind on the topic. In practice I might adopt a kind of moral-pluralism approach in which I maintain some concern for animal-like beings even if numerically, simple physics-based suffering dominates. I also explore whether, if the multiverse does contain enormous amounts of suffering from fundamental physical operations, there are ways we can change how much of it occurs and what distribution of “experiences” it entails. An argument based on vacuum fluctuations during the eternal lifetime of the universe suggests that if we give fundamental physics any nonzero weight, then almost all of our expected impact may come through how intelligence might transform fundamental physics to reduce the amount of suffering it contains.