Michael, life doesn’t have to be “meaningful” for people to be happy. Nor do “genuinely loving relationships” seem to be necessary. It seems to me to be just a neurochemical state that can probably be induced by a variety of methods, not all of them social.
Like you, I noticed the cryonics throw-in. I thought it was problematic for a different reason. It’s a bit of a tell IMO that cryonics serves at least (if not only) as opiate for Eliezer. I look at cryonics as just a persistence maximizing hedge against information theoretic death, and probably a weak and unsuccessful one at that (for probabilistic reasons, not because the science is unsound).
I lived for a time with someone that was probably depressed due to genetic factors. They would always have rationalizations about their depression that had to do with social events and factors. It seemed pretty clear to me that their depression was pretty independent of those factors and was rooted in their biology. But for some reason, they were very resistent that they were sad simply because their brain produced a lot of the sad chemicals, with little correlation to social factors or life circumstance. I see a similar reluctance to acknowledge what I think is this common phenomenon in a lot of the commenters here.
Michael, life doesn’t have to be “meaningful” for people to be happy. Nor do “genuinely loving relationships” seem to be necessary. It seems to me to be just a neurochemical state that can probably be induced by a variety of methods, not all of them social.
Like you, I noticed the cryonics throw-in. I thought it was problematic for a different reason. It’s a bit of a tell IMO that cryonics serves at least (if not only) as opiate for Eliezer. I look at cryonics as just a persistence maximizing hedge against information theoretic death, and probably a weak and unsuccessful one at that (for probabilistic reasons, not because the science is unsound).
I lived for a time with someone that was probably depressed due to genetic factors. They would always have rationalizations about their depression that had to do with social events and factors. It seemed pretty clear to me that their depression was pretty independent of those factors and was rooted in their biology. But for some reason, they were very resistent that they were sad simply because their brain produced a lot of the sad chemicals, with little correlation to social factors or life circumstance. I see a similar reluctance to acknowledge what I think is this common phenomenon in a lot of the commenters here.