91–100 of 148 posts
the assumption the author makes is that longevity will only bring us more time and that pretty much everything about the human condition will remain the same. It is tedious to be human. The amount of time dedicated to maintaining one's body even when young and healthy can feel tiresome. Longevity is not about extending our misery but about finding a way out of these limited meat bags. Perhaps there is a meaning and t…
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> morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up rules. One could argue morals should be based on the survival of mankind. Because that's the only positive goal of it, to survive as long as possible,though, ultimately mankind will come to an end,that's inevitable. On the other hand, as long as there is energy,artificial intelligence could outlast us.It would be mankind's testament and ultimate legacy. I alwa…
No, AnimalMuppet is correct. We are unable to value the survival of mankind as objectively good, as we have no empirical evidence to do so (more accurately: we cannot infer an Ought from an Is). See this for more on why: http://liamk.org/is-love-real/ Our options are Nihilism/Zen/Absurdity or Theism. And if the former is true, it doesn't matter if we hold the latter. As CS Lewis put it, if the Theists are wrong after…
Oughts cannot mean anything in the first place unless they ultimately reduce to some kind of is-checkable fact.
The absurdity of life is the absurdity of existence: that there is anything at all is completely absurd and it's doubtful that this will ever be explained satisfactorily.
You can even split that into steps and levels. Absurdity progresses from the entire universe right down into details like the existence of coffee or oil. Two black liquids that just happen to exist and fuel the world. Can you imagine modern society without them? But what bugs me most is that a universe without an entity to perceive and observe it is just such a waste of ... energy? It's almost like the existence of t…
Entropy leads to life. Life and entropy leads to evolution. Evolution, given enough space and time to work within, eventually leads to intelligent life.
Intelligent life leads to...?
Spoilers!
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Richard Hamming has a talk titled "You and Your Research", in which he discusses what sorts of things you should be working on. The summary is that you should be working on important problems. He then lists three of the most important problems that no one should actually work on, time travel, teleportation, and something else that I can't remember off the top of my head. The thing Hamming understood, but which Bostro…
> The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with reality in a productive way. I think that if there's one thing that philosophers agree on, after arguing with each other for a couple of millennia, it's that the point of philosophy is not to find a clever way to lie to ourselves - it's to find out something true .
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Richard Hamming has a talk titled "You and Your Research", in which he discusses what sorts of things you should be working on. The summary is that you should be working on important problems. He then lists three of the most important problems that no one should actually work on, time travel, teleportation, and something else that I can't remember off the top of my head. The thing Hamming understood, but which Bostro…
But there is no objectively true philosophy. There is, however, objectively inconsistent philosophy. Bostrom would probably argue that most people believe things (such as valuing individual lives) that are inconsistent with complacency in the face of death. Witness, for example, the obstinate resistance to cryonics even among those who would eagerly seek out an untested and experimental surgery to avoid death at the…
There is a vast difference between an untested, experimental surgery to save you from death and a tested, nonworking procedure that relies on beneficent future people to invent wholly new technologies to save you from death.
Cryonics is not about saving lives, it's about hoping against the evidence to recreate them when they are already gone.
If you want to cheat death, you need to actually conduct an experimental science of cheating death (ie: preserving and restoring people before they are truly dead) rather than just buying the first available option, no matter how scientifically unworkable and technologically unrefined, like a lottery ticket.
The Wright brothers did not bet that their first design for an airplane would work. They experimented until they arrived at a design that did work.
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> levels the playing field for newborns We see the effects of longer, more productive lives already in youth unemployment and property prices. It may not be until the post-boomer generation that we adjust to this. Perhaps there is a historical period where a generation has lived far longer than the few preceding it, from which we can get an idea how society managed?
The historical problem is too many children surviving childhood. The oldest son gets the farm, the youngest gets nothing. The solutions have been things like: - subdivide the property (not sustainable) - The younger son goes to the military, or the frontier, or... - The younger son courts a daughter in a family with no sons
- Increase the death rate (war, disease, etc)
- Establish an equilibrium and plan for a given number of living beings, preventing the formation of new ones until there are free resources. (Attempting to defy this will lead to the previous or next outcome.)
- Expand in to new areas to provide more SPACE!
Life is meaningless if you live a finite life because no matter what you do it will be washed out in time. Life is meaningless if you live an infinite life because any finite portion of time in your life approaches 0% of your total life time and by definition has no value. And yet, meaning can only be defined by life, because there is no such thing as inherent meaning. If I created life I would almost certainly make…
That is one of the conjectures propounded by the Upanishads.
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> levels the playing field for newborns We see the effects of longer, more productive lives already in youth unemployment and property prices. It may not be until the post-boomer generation that we adjust to this. Perhaps there is a historical period where a generation has lived far longer than the few preceding it, from which we can get an idea how society managed?
The historical problem is too many children surviving childhood. The oldest son gets the farm, the youngest gets nothing. The solutions have been things like: - subdivide the property (not sustainable) - The younger son goes to the military, or the frontier, or... - The younger son courts a daughter in a family with no sons
I couldn't agree more that our humanity places truly absurd limits on our existence. You get, if you're lucky 30-40 years of solid productivity after 20-30 years of training. Maybe enough time to create one or two solid accomplishments before your capacity for thought, and soon enough your capacity for life is extinguished. Also consider the economic argument. On the one hand, the level of investment experts make in…
But why do you think productivity is any less absurd than non-productivity? And why is intelligence relevant to absurdity? Is a butterfly's life any more absurd than a human's? Humans and humanity don't have goals. The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct. And it is certainly not our goal to be creative, productive, efficient. We make up goals for ourselves to give subjective meaning to our lives, an…
As far as we know currently, the future looks particularly grim†: on the longest time scale imaginable, the very fabric of the universe is being thinned out of existence. The absurd thing here is trying to make sense out of what definitely hasn't, as all information within this universe will ultimately be destroyed.
Whatever, I choose to enjoy the ride.
1. Humans live about 100 years. 2. The highest human ambitions, like writing a great novel, can only be reasonably accomplished in a well-balanced life if that life lasts more than 1000 years. 3. By definition, our life is absurd because we don't have enough time to reasonably accomplish our highest ambitions.
She concludes that human life could be made less absurd by extending life to 1000 years -- this I disagree with.
The problem I have with this thesis is that I think the phrase "highest human ambitions" is really a shifting goal. It's a goal that is set by the accomplishment of a person of extraordinary talent who dedicates her entire life to that one pursuit.
We think today that a brilliant novel on the order of Tolstoy is a high human ambition, only because it's the limit of what a human can do. Instead, consider if humans lived much shorter lives, reaching their cognitive peak at age 15. In such a world, few people would have time to learn calculus, and so solving a differential equation might be within the highest order of a human's mathematical ambitions.
Conversely, let me suggest that if the average person were to live to 1000 years, the definition of human ambition would scale accordingly. Imagine the absolute masterpiece symphony that Beethoven could write if he were alive today. He would have hundreds of years of experience. He would have seen the evolution of music and integrate all these advances in his repertoire. He could afford to spend 50 years writing his mater symphony. This level of music will be now our new target of ambition.
The central problem reduces down to this fact. The high water mark for an ambitious goal is always defined by people in that field who are unreasonably talented and dedicates an unreasonable fraction of their lives to the field. If these experts lives the same number of years as I do, since I'm a generalist of average talent dabbling in their field, I will never be able to accomplish anywhere near their level.
The absurdity here then seems to stem from the intrinsic human desire to always compare ourselves to the best, even when we realize we don't want to commit to the field (with good reason) as the best do.