What You (Want to)* Want

This piece like quite a few others is a kind of musings which many find interesting and PG doesn't claim it to be scientific.

There are areas of human interests that lie well outside our scientific capabilities. People should be allowed to speculate on them. Reasonable conjectures often precede solid evidence/proofs in math and science.

This reminds me of:

"PhD student, c.2020: Here’s a limited argument I made based on years of specialized research. Hope it’s OK

Philosopher dude, c.1770: Here are some Thoughts I had in the Bath. They constitute Universal & Self-Evident Laws of Nature. FIGHT ME."

Source: https://twitter.com/ethicsinbricks/status/122555554335763251...

The way we experience our lives indicates that we make choices and they have consequences. I don't know what kind of life you would have if you suddenly decided to stop making choices one day, but you would probably end up institutionalized if it didn't kill you first.

Even if my choices are predetermined somehow, I can do an end run around that by flipping coins or rolling dice when faced with multiple options. I have in fact done so on many occasions. At that point I didn't choose, RNG did. You could argue a particular coin flip was predetermined to land on 'heads', but I cannot see how that argument is useful if it doesn't lead to making better predictions.

We have autonomy but must generally work for the welfare of the whole organism. If some people are not aligned to the general good we try to dissuade them or punish them because if it become too big the whole system collapse in the same way that our organism would if there is too many cancer cells.

Our consciousness operate on the scale of a human life but there is a similar "consciousness" of the civilisation that operate on a much larger timescale, thousand of years, we call those religions.

While we can seek personal gain, it’s much the same as a cell trying to outcompete it’s neighborhoods, it’s misaligned to the more important goal of global welfare. There is something inside us in our soul that know this and won’t make you satisfied of yourself if you are not a net positive for the whole.

Now we have looked everywhere to try to find the God of our stories but didn’t (it's a pattern operating on a different timescale). So we are like cells that rebelled against the organism, discarting all the rules that we had because we don’t understand them. The result will be a sickness of the organism up to a point where we see we have to go back to our ancients rules or the death of the organism (civilisation collapse)

Those rules are: each must try to align himself with truth and love toward others, must try it’s best, it’s ok to fail, but recognised it and improve.

Those rules are the preconditions for the survival and slow improvement of our civilisation.

Other religions have other rules and other outcomes.

I've wrestled with this question from time to time and, to the extent I've found a solution, the key is duration:

In the short term, choices are mutable (but determined by character), and character is fixed.

In the long term, character is mutable, and determined by some inner nature plus the integral of experience, influence, and choice.

There's still a recursive element here, because the investments you make in yourself are strongly influenced by a prior version of that self. (In a limited sense, this resembles coherent extrapolated volition.) Still, I've found it more helpful to think about short-term vs. long-term processes - in the sense of stock vs. flow, intercept vs. slope, or short-term vs. long term elasticity - than about recursion. Adding time conveys an intuitive understanding not only of what you can and can't change, but what you should and shouldn't.

To phrase it a simpler way: willpower is a muscle, as are most other traits. Most people can be strong, but not all at once, and when you see someone lifting a heavy weight it means they've been training for a long time.