Edit: added a paragraph nearing the end
Usually the question is: “What is wrong with our society?”, but I guess my gripe is that if you look at things with a System-lense, usually what you focus on is what has the most influence.
In other words, if our Planet would veer off course, it isn’t really the fault of the Ants—even when they could have done more! The reason is bigger gravitational forces, or our Sun wanting some more space.
So, why would you blame a human being for something that seems to be governed by laws, forces and powers we A) don’t fundamentally understand, B) can’t fundamentally influence C) can’t fundamentally change ?
I mean, from a human perspective, there are a lot of answers—Psychology, sociology, anthropology, evolutionary disciplines, religion—even transdisciplinary groups and projects. But again, you only answer the question from inside the box. If the box gives a certain output, and has specific constraints, why blame the Outputs for how the box works?
It makes more sense to me to assign fault at the level where the problem lies. If we dislike and abhor something, at which level does it arise?
A lot of expressions we use are filled with assumptions that are focused on our personal actions. Take murder, for example. Killing is bad, I agree, but is it the personal choice of the killer to enable murder, to make possible the possibility of dying? The pain, suffering, dread etc.? It is the Universe’s Laws and principles that are allowing it and actively engaging in it (There are endless ways this Universe can and will kill us), is it not?
That is just one of numerous examples I can think of where I am questioning if by looking closely at an issue, it seems to be the direct consequence of a superintended principle we have 0 direct control over.
I mean, personal responsibility sounds nice, but if you really look at it—does it make any sense? Take genes, for example. They are based on millions of years of biological, and then even cultural evolution. That you have the ‘ability’ to see a different way than eating your fellow friend, and can see more gains in keeping them alive—is it really “Your” achievement? How many choices are really “Yours”, and not the inexplicable results of processes that started millions of years before you were even consciously aware that you had a face and a body separate from the rest of the world?
Because if the problem is the Universe, wouldn’t you have to fix its underlying Laws and principles if you wanted to fundamentally change anything? Because any other change would only be superficial, partial and temporary.
To also add that here, you can of course look at humans as ‘Part’ of the universe, and not separate. Different maybe, but not separate. Which is a relevant vein to delve into, if you have something. As I see it, there doesn’t seem to be a reciprocally positive relationship between the Universe and our individual consciousness—which seems odd. If break-ups have taught me anything, it might seem that the Universe is still bitter we stole that god-damn apple.
On a separate note (Joke joke?)
And so It is that I am still looking for the Universe help-desk. If anyone knows the number, or how to contact them, please let me know. If I’m a beta-tester, I believe I should let them know that some things really, really, really don’t seem to work that well.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Yes. Obviously. Put on an economist’s glasses, look at it through the framework of mechanism design. The incentives it sets up for the agents embedded in it are abhorrent. Just off the top of my head: limited resources, physical offense often triumphing over physical defense, everything always going to disorder as the system evolves (which also causes that offense > defense inequality), lack of built-in machinery for inviolable contracts which makes non-defection hard to enforce, plus the local natural agent-generating processes (“evolution”) approach intelligence from the bottom up and naturally select for the stupidest/most malfunctioning possible agents...
And this is what we get as the natural end product: dog eat dog, a war of all against all, a myriad of agents with disparate values ruthlessly competing with each other over finite scraps, unable to work together because they simultaneously lack any convenient coordination/enforcement mechanisms and are too stupid to coordinate voluntarily, and unable to opt out of the war and build their own safe garden.
Terrible design. Even we could do better. Even we do do better — when designing institutions and states, or virtual worlds.
If we were programming the universe from scratch, we’d do a better job, pick the laws of physics that naturally incentivize niceness and civilization instead of cancer. Out of the box, with no need for the embedded agents to cobble together homemade solutions.
Eh, not sure it makes sense to think in terms of blame here, though. Blame is ultimately about credit assignment, which is about identifying which parts of the system are performing well or poorly and how to fix them. And, well— I mean, sure, I’m down to take the fight to God and/or our Matrix Lords eventually. But in the meantime, it still makes sense to assign blame to the things we can affect at the current moment, instead of prematurely skipping to the end.
Out of topic: if you change nothing else about the universe, an easy to use “magical” mechanism for inviolable contracts would be a dreadful thing. As soon as you have power of life or death over someone you can pretty much force into irrevocable slavery. I suppose we could imagine a “good” working society using that mechanism. But more probably almost all humans would be slaves, serving maybe a single small group of aristocrats.
You might want to add a “free of influence” condition to the contract system, but in a society that normalizes absolute power (such as many ancient monarchies), that becomes difficult to define.
If you suddenly introduce it in the middle of our universe’s execution, sure. The scenario I was considering is where it exists from the beginning, with life evolving to take advantage of it from the get-go. In which case… Well, it really depends on the specific evolutionary setup, but plausibly organisms would evolve to accept death rather than a bad deal in such situations (the way humans evolved e. g. death-before-dishonor), and so most deals made would be net-positive.
I didn’t spend much time considering specific mechanisms, though; by all means, I can imagine it going perversely too.
How would life even evolve in the first place with such a system in place?
Have you thought through all the common thought experiments and methods described on LW before posting this?
From one perspective, nature does kind of incentivize cooperation in the long term. See The Goddess of Everything Else.
Hello Thane Ruthenis,
Thank you for your comment. Reading it, I want to ask something. Since you are aware that the design is terrible, and there are no safeguards, and we have to use homemade solutions in a hostile environment, who are the humans that make things better? And how do you argue that the chances of them “winning” are somehow higher than of those that follow the natural incentives of the Universe?
You say that I am prematurely skipping, but that also implies that we will somehow reach the end, does it not? And so you say I should stay and be patient, when if we are just going to spiral into madness or chaos eventually, making a conscious choice early instead of wasting time and resources on staying in a sinking ship, seem to be just as valid a choice, does it not?
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
I mean, their chances, whatever they may be, would sure get worse if they stopped running credit/blame-assignment algorithms on the systems under their control in order to incrementally improve their efficiency and competitiveness, and instead sat around like rocks assigning it all to the Primal Mover, waiting to die?
Mm, that seems like a separate topic. See here for advice on “how to cope with living in a probably-doomed world”.
Personally, it doesn’t seem completely hopeless, and it would sure be sad if we could’ve made it, but lost because many of us decided it looks too hopeless, and so didn’t even try.
Well, I do not argue that the approach I chose Could be seen as some kind of “giving up” mentality, but that also requires you to read that into it. But isn’t it also quite the leap to claim that assigning systematically too much responsibility to the people and systems around you, will lead to an increase in effectiveness and competitiveness? In contrast, whatever system you are working under would then function less precisely and correctly.
Yes, it takes a leap in abstraction and mentality, and precise thinking is dangerous for society at large, but That is a different discussion.
As I wrote in my approach to the Question, It isn’t people that enables killing, it is the Universe. And Humans, as a species, wouldn’t have had the option to kill, even if they wanted, if the rules were different. At least, that is one possible way to frame it. There are others, but I chose this one.
Hm, I just wonder how you view Efilism or Negative Utilitaranism, as mentioned in a comment below. It isn’t only a question of if we can reach the end, but also if we should try.
Since by saying ‘lost’, you imply that there is only one way to win.
What about the argument that we should not gamble away the future of mankind, on the probability that things will work out. That premise opens up the possibility for a different kind of Win. For example, to acknowledge and agree that the Risk is too high, this place too volatile, and therefore to willingly disable that possibility altogether. Is that option something you view as a complete loss?
Oh, that depends on the mechanism by which you “assign responsibility”. I mean that in the fully abstract sense of tracking the causality from outcomes to the parts of the system that contributed to them and and adjusting the subsystems to improve the outcomes, which should by definition improve the system performance.
I don’t mean some specific implementation of this mechanism like “shame people for underperforming and moral failings”, if that’s what you’re reading into it — I mean the kinds of credit-assignment that would actually work in practice to improve performance.
I think we’re either going to get an unqualified utopia, or go extinct, with very little probability on “an eternal hellscape”. So giving up right away can only decrease expected utility, never increase it: we won’t be turning away from a gamble of “X% chance of 3^^^3 utility, (100-X)% chance of −3^^^3 utility”, we’d be going from “Y% chance of 3^^^3 utility, (100-Y)% chance of 0 utility” straight to “100% chance of 0 utility”.
Hello again,
the only system I am aware of in which that is possible, as of now, would be my own body… Still, what would be an “improvement to the system performance” is also a matter of conviction, values and goals, or am I not understanding it correctly?
Since you believe that we are going to get an unqualified utopia, or go extinct, with very little probability on “an eternal hellscape”, how do you view people that disagree with you? When I look at both sides of that equation, one part of it can be different probabilities assigned to ‘terribleness’, but another point might a different threshold for where you draw the line at what chances are worth taking.
Because if you get a Pandora’s box, and by choosing to open it you have a 99 % chance of a fantastic life for you and everything else, 0.9% chance of simply perishing, and 0.099… chance of getting terrible torture for you and everything else—statistically speaking it might seem quite safe to open it.
BUT, why would you open a box when there is even the slightest possibility of that outcome? Why not simply let it be? Why not wait till you reach a point where there is 0 chance of an eternal hellscape?
And if you aren’t sure that Humanity will reach that point, then is it so weird that people turn Misanthropic? Not because they like hating others, necessarily, but maybe because they completely and totally abhor the constant risk we would be running of things turning to an eternal hellscape; without seeing a way for it to change.
Yes, you can argue that we can create an A.I. that can ‘fix’ that problem—but that is circular reasoning. If an extremely volatile species, in a competitive, hostile environment, are going to ‘solve the problems once and for all’ - History doesn’t really say that we make a great job of it.
If we can’t fix our problems Before we create an A.I., it simply shouldn’t be made.
If you believe that Human nature is the problem, then you harp on till others take your concerns seriously, and they are adequately addressed. That, of course, goes both ways. In that sense, to give up or resign isn’t right either. There are many ways to improve or fix a problem, not just one.
Caerulea-Lawrence
I’ve had these kinds of thoughts many times. I don’t think they were very healthy for me, and ultimately they’re not very useful. Whether they’re in some sense “correct” is an interesting question, though.
First, the concepts of right/wrong and credit/blame also exist within humans, or at least within animals. Applying those concepts to a level where they don’t naturally exist is also questionable. We humans do this a lot in part because our minds naturally treat other things as having minds when they don’t, and we do this historically in the context of religion and thinking the world was designed by something capable of having those categories applied to it.
Second, the laws that govern reality at a fundamental level are amoral, not immoral. What would it mean for those laws to be altered in such a way as to make a better universe? How much complexity and precision in the laws and in the initial conditions would that require? Because almost all possible sets of laws and initial conditions are amoral. This is in some sense a thermodynamic/entropic/probabilistic argument: amoral laws and conditions are exactly what we should expect for what kind of universe we might find ourselves in. If it were otherwise, that would be something that needs a deep level of explanation.
Third, a few parts of your post come down to a discussion of free will in a deterministic universe. I would ask, what is the alternative? Either the universe is deterministic, and it would be possible-in-principle for some entity outside it to use those laws to predict your actions and choices in advance in large part by modeling you. Or it is not deterministic, and such a prediction is not possible, and also no actually existing entity including you can be said to determine your choice. Neither options seems to get you what you’re after, and I have never found any suggestion of what a third option might even look like. The deterministic option at least lets you act for reasons, (usually) puts the locus of control within the part-of-the-universe you call you, and offers a path (become more powerful in various ways) to making that be the case more often. (And it is not necessarily impossible that this becoming-more-powerful could, someday, include changing what kind of universe you live in, with what laws.)
I suspect that they are unhealthy for a lot of people.
Jordan Peterson asserts that many mass murders are motivated by desire for revenge against the Universe and offers as evidence the observation that many mass murders choose the most innocent victims they can. (More precisely, since Peterson is religious, he has “revenge against God”, but the nearest translation for non-religious people would be “revenge against the Universe”.) And of course for a person to accumulate a large pool of vengeful feelings, the person must believe or at least strongly suspect that the target of the feelings is responsible for the bad things that happened to the person.
I cannot recall whether Peterson ever explicitly said so, but I am left with the impression that Peterson considers vengeful feelings directed at the Universe (and possibly also other large collective entities, e.g., the Cambodian nation) to be more likely to accumulate to the extent that they blot out the ability to think rationally in the pursuit of one’s own self-interest than vengeful feeling directed at a mere person or clique of persons. (Harboring vengeful feelings directed at the Cambodian nation would be particularly harmful to you if you were Cambodian or lived in Cambodia.)
I would argue that the amount of murders committed by people with the desire for “revenge against the universe” is less than 0.01% of murders and probably much less than murders committed in the name of Christianity during the Crusades. Should we conclude that Christianity is also unhealthy for a lot of people?
This idea of cherry-picking the worst phenomenon related to a worldview and then smearing with it the entire worldview is basically one of the lowest forms of propaganda.
Hello AnthonyC,
thanks for your thoughtful reply.
With regard to healthy, I do believe I understand what you mean. I want a balance between the different ways of seeing the world, and this question is by no means an expression of the totality of existence. Still, I find it important, to see if I can hold that which is difficult a bit more gently.
I’ll take your points in order:
I can see this point, but of the ones you make, I wonder if this is the one it is easiest for me to see a counter to. Furthermore, since we ‘are’ also part of the universe, I would say that gives us an inherent right to evaluate what the Universe feels like, does it not? You say that other things don’t have minds, but since we are an amalgamation of those things, how would you differentiate? I know that it is a quagmire to do, but I also believe that it is too easy to say we are ‘separate’ in that sense. We have many of the essential elements of the universe inside us, and as such, where does it make sense to draw the line between ‘them’ and ‘it’? I mean, some argue we are machines, but that is another topic altogether.
I guess this could relate to your first point, that by adding ‘minds’ to concepts, laws and atoms, we are extrapolating. I’m on a bit of thin ice with regard to the laws and entropy, but isn’t it so that the laws of physics should also work in reverse, basically how a movie works. But if it goes both ways, doesn’t that imply that Life and the Laws are somehow connected? If immoral laws and energy can create moral life, moral life can also create immoral laws. How does it make sense to separate the two?
Is that a stupid way to think about it?
Yeah, living life without ‘control’ of some degree is depression and hopelessness. I mean, to answer your question here, what if it is part of both? Since we are made of the universe, and have a certain influence, there is some semblance of free will. At the same time, there are forces that govern our behavior, that we, for various reasons, are unable to influence. That we are in this universe, doesn’t really make it impossible that we should exist somewhere else as well, and so we could ourselves be that entity outside, but could make the choice not to predict what is going on.
Now, I’ll not delve further into speculations and conjecture at this point. Again, thanks for your response.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Out of curiosity, have you had a chance to read the Free Will sequence yet? If so, what did you think?
If you would like a hard line between self and other, or between mind and not-mind, then yeah, you’re not going to find one. Not unless you postulate supernatural components of the world that enforce the distinction. A deeper explanation of why such a physical distinction is not going to exist is a bit more complicated, but if you feel like delving into it, have you tried the Quantum Physics sequence? Way clearer conceptually than what I got from textbooks in college (physics major) and way more precise than any other intro I’ve seen for a more general audience.
On entropy/thermodynamics: sorry, I used a metaphor that only half fit and that I didn’t explain at all. What I was trying to point at is, most possible physical laws that could generate a universe capable of sustaining some form of life have no moral valence at all. Morality is complicated, far more complex than the laws of physics, and you can’t pack a whole morality into a few short equations. Technically you probably could pack it into the initial conditions of the universe if you were a sufficiently smart creator god. But almost all possible configurations of particles and energies that could have existed in the beginning have no moral valence at all.
And if you’re wondering about amoral (not immoral) laws creating moral life/minds—I’d say you’ve got your causality backwards. The laws of reality generated us. We are the ones whose ancestors survived and reproduced slightly better in the ancestral environment. We got here in part because of the moral instincts that evolution managed to pack into a few GB of DNA. We have those instincts because they’re the ones that survived, and any other lineages died out. Part of the structure of our minds is that humans look for mind-like features in things that are not-minds, so now we look for morality outside ourselves. The time-reversal symmetry of physics doesn’t really come into it at all, except to confirm that yes, if you ran the laws of physics and they ended up in a configuration of the universe that contained no humans, then there would be no more morality.
And I apologize but I’m having trouble interpreting your last paragraph.
This is the premise of Stanislaw Lem’s (quite wonderful) story “The Eighteenth Voyage” (included in the collection Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy):
Hello AnthonyC,
Yes, your view is consistent with your arguments, and it makes perfect sense, but it also seems to me that it partly dismisses the intention with my question.
We are humans, we are made of matter and energy, we feel and we evaluate.
Yes, you can argue, correctly I assume, the Universe isn’t inherently moral, and to disagree with the spin I put to the question, but I am asking the Mind-you, not the Universe, how you feel, evaluate and discern this question, and the direct consequences those laws have in your life.
If you believe it is counterproductive to focus on the question, what I would find much more interesting is how you reasoned to get to that point.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Ah, I see.
Well, first I grew up reading fiction where the heroes had no choice but to win and make things better in an uncaring or outright-antagonistic universe, and subconsciously internalized the idea that everything is my/our responsibility, whether it’s my fault or not, and whether it’s within my power to change or not.
Then in a meandering discussion I had a biology professor freshman year of college I brought up the determinism/randomness dilemma I posed previously and he asked me, “Well, what is it you want from your free will?” After which I read a whole bunch of philosophy books and majored in physics. Along the way I had one philosophy professor say, in a lecture on moral philosophy, that, “A truly virtuous person would not have friends, just a general disposition to friendliness.” AKA that valuing any one person, including yourself, above others is a moral error (Note: I still believe this would be great in a world where everyone believed it and acted accordingly, but I don’t live in that world).
Along the way the mindset from the first paragraph, plus a few other things, led to me subconsciously suppressing my ow emotions. That slowly drove me into a depression over the course of about eight years, which it’s taken seven years of therapy and five years of antidepressants to break out of. It involved accepting that large parts of the world are just not my problem. Not that I won’t make an effort to improve them anyway, but rather that it’s ok, and necessary, for that effort to be bounded. And that feeling bad about this fact is a pure loss, to me, to those around me, and to my ability to enact the types of positive change I care about.
One positive note I’d add is that the more I learned about the physical world, the more I was able to see how much improvement is actually possible with the right knowledge and enough time and coordination to build stuff. As many problems and horrors as the world has, the laws of reality contain more than enough possibility for us to reduce, eliminate, or harness them and create a truly amazing future. Most people in daily life seem to think the world is bounded by what they’re familiar with, and I can’t even count how many times I’ve had people tell me that things that have already been done are either impossible or many decades away. It’s sad how many opportunities we’ve missed by just not trying or coordinating to make them happen faster, but that’s a temporary problem as long as we manage not to destroy ourselves.
I read, I think in one of Daniel Dennett’s books, that “The devil is the unfortunate amount of time it takes for sinners to evolve into saints.” I would add, “and learn to build angels.” But we’re getting there. I think this was maybe easier to see and believe a century or more ago, when physical progress was newer and we were less bombarded with images of every horror. The people who were alive to watch the Niagara Falls power plant being built and turned on could appreciate it without thinking about how America was still massacring the native Americans out west, and could feel and notice the wonders it brought to their own lives. But it’s really even more true today. For a number of years Nicholas Kristof would publish an end-of-year NYT column about how humanity had just had it’s best year ever, highlighting all the amazing progress that’d been made. And it’s not that hard, if you look in the right places, to see how we go from where we are today, technologically and infrastructurally, to a future where we’ve eradicated all infectious disease. solved aging, ensured abundant water and healthy food for everyone, dramatically reduced all forms of waste and pollution, and replaced all dirty energy sources while making everyone much richer. We already know that these will have huge downstream effects on other types of problems (political, social, personal, distributional) and will also let us redirect and target our future efforts on the many problems that will remain. I think it’s likely that my nieces and nephew will live for millennia, and at least possible that my parents might as well. In the long run, there’s no reason we can’t make the Goddess of Everything Else win.
I wasn’t expecting this response from you. Thank you, I am truly grateful for you sharing this with me. It is definitely a gift I will treasure, and it is also something I can work with more easily.
I am more of an intuitive person. Reading psychology, sociology, social sciences and experimental ideas/theories, and a lot of fiction and mind-boggling film. I am prone to reflecting, and delving into introspection, self-understanding and communication, societal and relational understandings. I haven’t read that much, but I have talked and delved deep into the nitty-gritty of my own and the psyche’s of other people. And, from that discovery, I started to notice, ever slowly, that I didn’t like to focus on the bad, the ugly and the dirty, below a certain threshold.
Which simply means, I am not able to handle a fundamental part of reality, but it didn’t bug me that much, as I similarly to you, grew up with ideals like the Phantom; simple good against bad—and the Bible. As I got older, things got more complex, but I held on to this belief that I could find some kind of level of complexity or abstraction, where my actions, thoughts or inner changes would matter sufficiently to seem to warrant the effort.
And, to my dismay, I had to accept that I was chasing my own tail. To follow that line of thinking would never end, I would forever try to force complexity inside my simple box of reality, and the effort would just strain me and not really bring me forward. Even though I can easily imagine and hold things lightly, I don’t go beyond a certain limit—some kind of mind-speed limitor, a reminder that “I’m not there yet”, or “a lot of things are missing before it would make sense to look at these issues”.
I did however meet someone that I acknowledged as an equal in their pursuit of making sense of things, and at that point many things clicked in place for me. Much of the reason I have in the last years radically changed a lot of my views about things, is because I through my partner have been confronted with an understanding of the world that was so different from my own—but that was similarly well-founded—that I had to either ignore it or try to widen the box and include many of the elements I had previously disregarded, dismissed or simplified nearly out of existence. And I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass me by.
I find some solace in imagining having different Cognitive functions/People in my mind, like a team or something—all with different ways of seeing the world, that dig out different data and even interprets that data differently. The reason I do this is not because I like to make things overly complicated, but that I have simply found no better practical explanation for how radically different these parts of the psyche interact with and view the world. Their increased cooperation, has taken me and us to places where we are regularly confronted by many sets of opposites and dichotomies that are seemingly diametrically opposed, that somehow still fit together and can create new options and directions.
As with many things, it isn’t quite easy to translate this back the other way around, to simplify the complex. I can drive a bike, but I can’t really explain how. Or, when I start to delve seriously into how I drive a bike, all the nuances and details, depending on how far I take it, it might end up as hard because of the opposite problem, that there is too much information for it to be divulged easily.
With regard to your choice on how to interact with the future, I also see entirely different options entirely. And I don’t like to dismiss them, even when it hurts to feel or look at. But I am averse to sharing them directly, and I am trying to backtrack to somewhere where I can talk and express things without getting lost in the myriad of interconnected parts, a place where it can be explained more coherently and easy to follow.
Asking this question is part of it. But this isn’t where I’m at, it is simply the intersection point where I can talk about something without veering totally of course—I hoped :)
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
If there’s something wrong with the universe, it’s probably humans who keep demanding so much of it.
Most universes are hostile to life, and at most would develop something like prokaryotes. That our universe enabled the creation of humans is a pretty great thing. Not only that, but we seem to be pretty early in the universal timespan, which means that we get a great view of the night sky and less chances of alien invasion. That’s not something we did ourselves, that’s something the universe we live in enabled. None of the systemic problems faced by humans today are caused by the universe, except maybe in the sense that the universe did not giftwrap us NP solutions or no entropy or moral values baked in. Your example of genes points out that even our behavioral adaptations are things that we can thank the universe for.
If the problem is separation of the human from the universe, then I think a fair separation is “whatever the human can influence”. That’s a pretty big category though. Just right now, that includes things like geoengineering, space travel, gene therapy, society wide coordination mechanisms, extensive resource extraction. If we’re murdering each other, then I think that’s something eminently changeable by us.
The universe has done a pretty great job, and I think it’s time humans took a stab at it.
“If there’s something wrong with the universe, it’s probably humans who keep demanding so much of it. ”
Frankly, this is one of the most infuriating things I’ve read in LessWrong recently, It’s super disappointing to see it being upvoted.
Look, if you weigh the world’s suffering against its joy through hedonistic aggregation, it might be glaringly obvious that Earth is closer to hell than to heaven.
Recall Schopenhauer’s sharp observation: “One simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.”
It’s all roses and sunshine when you’re sitting pretty in a Western country, isn’t it? But I bet that perspective crumbles if you’re looking through the eyes of a Sudanese child soldier or an animal getting torn apart.
If a human dreamt up the cruel process that is evolution, we’d call him a deranged lunatic. At the very least, we should expect the universe not to treat conscious beings like disposable objects, but apparently, that’s “demanding so much of it.”
I guess while we’re anthropomorphizing the universe, I’ll ask some crux-y questions I’ve reached.
If humanity builds a self-perpetuating hell, does the blame lie with humanity or the universe?
If humanity builds a perfect utopia, does the credit lie with humanity or the universe?
Frankly it seems to me like what’s fundamentally wrong with the universe is that it has conscious observers, when it needn’t have bothered with any to begin with.
I don’t understand this perspective. When an airplane crash happens, do you blame the laws of gravity for this? Even if you did, you’d also have to give it points for permitting the existence of life in the first place, no? Then what’s the difference with (morally) blaming evolution for animal suffering? (Notwithstanding the whole animal consciousness debate.)
Evolution is of course by no means nice, but what’s the point of blaming something for cruelty when it couldn’t possibly be any different? (somewhat related LW post: An Alien God)
From a transhumanist perspective, the universe of course has room for improvement by many, many orders of magnitude. But if the universe didn’t come with universal and consistent (and thus amoral) physical laws, there would be no conceivable transhumanist interventions. Nor, in the first place, any transhumanists to contemplate them.
“Evolution is of course, by no means nice, but what’s the point of blaming something for cruelty when it couldn’t possibly be any different?”
That’s the thing; I’m really not convinced about that. I’m sure there could be other universes with different laws of physics where the final result would be much nicer for conscious beings. In this universe, it couldn’t be different, but that’s precisely the thing we are judging here.
It may very well be that there are different universes where conscious beings are having a blast and not being tortured and killed as frequently as in this universe that gave rise to this situation. There is no real proof that says existence should be so painful. It could just be the random bad luck of the draw.
Well, evolution’s indifference seems pretty fundamental, rather than contingent. So I suspect that any average creator-less universe would involve similar amounts of suffering. To quote a shortened passage from An Alien God:
To get a benevolent evolution (or an evolution-less mechanism which creates life), you need some already-benevolent entity to steer it. I.e. an intelligent designer, a god, the programmer of a universe simulation, or similar. Barring those, there’s no mechanism to make the system intrinsically benevolent. And even then, since a value like benevolence is too complex to arise by pure accident, those entities must in turn have evolved to develop benevolence (arising via mechanisms like kin selection etc.), and must thus themselves have started out in an amoral universe.
If evolution is indifferent, you would expect a symmetry between suffering and joy, but in our world, it seems to lean towards suffering (The suffering of an animal being eaten vs. the joy of the animal eating it. People suffer from chronic pain but not from chronic pleasure, etc.).
I think there are a lot of physics-driven details that make it happen. Due to entropy, most of the things are bad for you, and only a small amount is good, so negative stimuli that signal “beware!” are more frequent than positive stimuli that signal “Come close.”
One can imagine a less hostile universe where you still have dangers, but a larger % of things are good. In our universe, most RNG events are negative, but one can imagine a different universe with different laws of physics that won’t work this way. It doesn’t require a benevolent creator or non-evolutionary process.
There are many more states of the world that are bad for an individual than good for that individual, and feeling pleasure in a bad world state tends to lead to death. So no, in an amoral world I’d expect much more suffering than pleasure, because the suffering is more instrumentally useful for survival. I think, given that, you’re last point is just… completely unsupported and incorrect.
The first part of your reply is basically repeating the point I made, but again, the issue is you’re assuming the current laws of physics are the only laws that allow conscious beings without a creator. I disagree that must be the case.
How can my last point be supported? Do you expect me to create a universe with different laws of physics? How do you know it’s incorrect?
I fully agree with you that there are a vast set of possible laws of physics that could create conscious beings without a creator. Not sure where it seemed like I meant the opposite? What I disagree with is the idea that us ending up in an amoral world is “bad luck.” A priori I expect it would require literally-unbelievably good luck to end up in a “good” world without a creator/designer, because almost all possible laws supporting conscious beings will not be like that.
And I agree with your point that evolution leans towards suffering, but I disagree with your assertion that an indifferent process would tend to have a symmetry between the two. I see no underlying reason why there would be such a symmetry, and many why there would not.
As for your last point—sorry I wasn’t precise, but at some level yes, I agree that such a thing is technically possible. It is just superexponentially unlikely to the point that a random being is more likely to be a Boltzmann brain than to actually be in such a universe. How many bits of data does it take to reduce a moral system to math, encode that math into physics, and arrange the entire universe’s mass-energy such that over time good greatly outweighs bad across it’s entire spacetime? What fraction of the 2^(N+1)-1 possible datasets that large or smaller correspond to good universes, as opposed to neutral or bad ones? That’s the level of “unlikely” we’re considering. When I say literally unbelievable, I mean the entire cosmos, let alone a human mind, is incapable of representing a number that small.
You don’t need a moral universe; you just need one where the joy is higher than suffering for conscious beings (“agents”); There are many ways in which it can happen:
Starting from a mostly hostile world but converging quickly towards a benevolent reality created by the agents.
Existing in a world where the distribution of bad vs. good external things that the agent can encounter is similar.
Existing in a hostile world, but in which the winning strategy is leeching into a specific resource (which will grant internal satisfaction once reached)
I’m sure you can think of many other examples. Again, it’s not clear to me intuitively that the existence of these worlds is as improbable as you claim.
I do think our universe will converge that way, if we make it do so. The future is bigger than the past, and we can be the mechanism for that.
Maybe, and maybe not.
I’m curious why or whether it would matter whether a universe starts out with goodness baked into the laws themselves, or becomes better over time through the actions of beings the amoral laws and initial conditions cough up? Our own universe gave itself a trillion trillion stars around which to potentially create life, just in our own Hubble volume, and will continue to exist for many times longer than the few hundred million years since the first life capable of suffering or joy appeared on Earth. If it’s possible for good things in one place/time to outweigh bad things in other places and times (which seems to be a prerequisite for this discussion to be meaningful), and possible in principle for beings like us to make things better, then how can we draw any conclusions on the morality of the whole of spacetime except that we should try our best and reserve judgement?
Because you have a pretty significant data point (That spans millions of years) on Earth, and nothing else is going on (to the best of our knowledge), now the question is, how much weight do you want to give to this data point? Reserving judgment means almost ignoring it. For me, it seems more reasonable to update towards a net-negative universe.
Then I think that’s the crux for me. I’d say the right amount of weight is almost none, for the same reason that I don’t update about the expected sum of someone’s life based on what they do in the first weeks after they’re born. We agree the universe did not come into being with the capacity for aiming itself toward being good. It remains to be seen whether we (or other lifeforms elsewhere) do have enough of that capability to make use of it at large scale, which we didn’t even have the capacity to envision until very, very recently.
Given the trajectory and speed of change on Earth in the past few centuries, I think the next few centuries will provide far more data about our future light cone than the entirety of the past millions of years do.
Why do you think that life leans towards suffering? I’m not convinced by the argument that the experience of being eaten as prey is worse than the experience of eating prey; that just illustrates that one specific and short type of experience is asymmetric. I’m aware that, due to effects like negativity bias, individual negative experiences are likely more impactful than positive ones.
However, to make the case that the life of an individual or species leans towards suffering, you’d have to make the case that, on average, the respective integral of lifetime experiences is negative. To make the further case that life in general leans towards suffering, those experience integrals would further have to be weighted by degree of consciousness (or ability to experience joy & suffering, or something).
“I’m not convinced by the argument that the experience of being eaten as prey is worse than the experience of eating prey”
Would you see the experience for yourself of being eaten alive Let’s say even having a dog chewing off your hand as equivalent hedonistically to eating a steak? (Long term damage aside)
I don’t think most people would agree to have both of these experiences, but would rather avoid both, which means the suffering is much worse compared to the pleasure of eating meat.
I agree with the proposed methodology, but I have a strong suspicion that the sum will be negative.
You only quoted part of my sentence, and I think you misunderstood my point as a result. I’m wholly aware that being eaten is worse than eating, I just don’t think it particularly matters.
The key point is whether the median moment is positive, negative, or neutral. That will likely dominate any calculation. Not brief extreme experiences, whether positive or negative.
You’re right about my misunderstanding. Thanks for the clarification.
I don’t think the median moment is the Correct KPI if the distribution has high variance, and I believe this is the case with pain and pleasure experiences. Extreme suffering is so bad that most people will need a lot of “normal” time to compensate for it. I would think that most people will not trade torture to extend their lives in 1:1 and probably not even in 1:10 ratios. (E.g. you get tortured for X time and get your life extended by aX time in return)
see for example:
A Happy Life Afterward Doesn’t Make Up for Torture—The Washington Post
I mean, it’s one thing to say that it’s a shit hand to be dealt (fair), it’s another to say that we should expect it of the universe. We should expect it of a God if there was one—but absent that, blind unintelligent chaos can hardly have any expectations placed on it at all. It doesn’t do things for reasons.
It’s hard to argue what reasonable expectations are. My main point was that ‘perhaps’ thinks that in a world that contains torture, wars, factory farming, conscious beings being eaten alive, rape, and diseases, the worst thing that is worth noting is that humans demand so much of it and that the “universe has done a pretty great job.”
I find it incredibly sociopathic (Specifically in the sense of not being moved by the suffering of others).
I think the point was that if you assume that the space of possible universes is vast and completely random, it’s already an infinitesimal fraction of them that will allow life to exist at all, never mind intelligent life. And depending on how you define that space, you could imagine universes more “intelligently designed” than ours towards being good, but also universes more designed towards being bad: actively malevolent and hell-bent on keeping alive sentient beings and still inflicting suffering, not just being indifferent. So in that sense, in expectation, our universe might actually be pretty middling. It’s honestly hard to say without a bigger frame of reference.
I mean, by anthropic principle, we couldn’t ever be born in such universes. And I think this only applies if we consider various tunings of our known laws of physics. At the two extremes of the possibility spectrum though there is:
the constants aren’t really constants but emergent phenomena themselves, and thus this is actually the only universe possible
the laws aren’t in any way constant, the general symmetries and principles aren’t constant, there’s a whole Tegmark Type IV multiverse out there to explore
In the former case, then I guess there’s not much to complain about. In the latter, there surely are an infinity of universes better than this one (though also many much worse).
Hello Perhaps,
In a way, you are deftly eluding the issue at hand, by implying we should be thankful, and possibly, get our shit together ourselves.
You say that none of the systemic problems faced by humans today are caused by the universe, but that is making the opposite claim of the one I have made in my question, and so you aren’t tackling the issue with the given rules, you seem to ignore them to give an answer that is right given Your arguments.
It isn’t that I don’t see your points, simply that they skip mine, and as such it oversimplifies the issue. If you could include what I wrote to how you answer, I would appreciate it.
Caerulea-Lawrence
Indeed, the Universe just is, everything else is an emergent concept for the tiny embedded agents in it (bacteria, ants and humans). That includes sugar gradient, scent of food and laws of physics, respectively.
One of these emergent concepts is personal responsibility. Societies that do not have it do not last as long.
Hello shminux,
I can at least take responsibility for my hunger, if nothing else. Bacteria, not so much. I wash my hands every day, but I’m not sure if it makes the slightest difference.
Is there still hope for me?
Jokingly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
“Is the sage above causation, or subject to causation?”
“The sage is at one with causation.”
Hello Richard_Kennaway,
Hm, maybe you could elaborate on how these two posts answer my question, or why you posted them here as a comment? I can see possible links, but I am not sure what it is.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
You’re tracing the causes of each thing that happens back and back, and concluding that everything is ultimately caused only by “the way the Universe is”, and that therefore we can only change anything by changing the way the Universe is. We still, however, have choices about what to do within how the Universe is, and the fact of our making choices is also part of the way the Universe is. Such as, for example, our choices to post here the things we have.
Even in a deterministic universe, there are still choices to be made.
Hello again,
This is a question, and I gave it a certain spin—it is not the entirety of my opinion or view on the matter; and as such I welcome your response.
Yes, I agree. There are important choices to be made, I’m not denying it.
Well, if everyone is influencing the Universe, do you believe that our actions have a certain benevolent direction in mind? To include everyone’s choices in the way the Universe is, only illustrates the problem further, does it not? If you look at the humans alive, and their choices, will, intention and aspirations—it is one messed up chaotic mix, or do you see something different?
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Each person’s actions are as benevolent or not as they choose, in whatever direction they choose. I do not believe there is any larger collective force behind them, no collective goal that we are unwittingly striving for.
ETA: This looks pretty chaotic. H/T today’s APOD.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the universe. Of course, we tend think there is, but that’s what we were made to think. It turns out that constant struggle is the only way to keep things from decaying, which is why life will never be easy. If anyone lived an easy life, they’d slowly decay to the point that life wasn’t easy anymore. When people run out of problems, they seem to invent more by making problems out of minor things, so it must be built into us in some sense.
On the other hand, you could say that the universe is wrong if we deem it to be wrong, and correct if we deem it to be correct. In which case, it would be immoral to deem it wrong. You see, by claiming that the universe is wrong, you’d making it less enjoyable, lowering its value, and you don’t get anything in return except an unsolvable problem. If you decided that life is great, even though it’s not moral, then you could enjoy life without suffering from the amorality of life. In other words, we’ve decided that things “should be” different than what they are and must be, but I think that even this is a misunderstanding, that we don’t know what we want.
And we tend to value only that which is rare. But this is a problem, for if we got more of that thing, it would stop being rare, and we’d seek the next rare thing. In other words, we’ve conditioned ourselves to play games that never end. But the humans who didn’t do so seem to have died off as a result, so those who did stayed.
Could we have designed a better world? I really don’t think so. Anyone who has written stories or designed games should have realized how important “undesirable” elements are. Why is a scarcity necessary in a game? Why is a story improved by villains or adversity? Try seeing if you can create good without evil, or light without darkness. I don’t think you could even become a designer of the world without losing your role as a player. You either have the power and knowledge of the programmer, which is boring, or the immersion and ignorance of a player, which is scary.
Anyway, your own perspective on the world is a design principle as well. Are we all without blame and guilt, perhaps even agency? You can do away with those, but you might land yourself in nihilism in return. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, at least that’s logically impossible. It’s still possible to be in frames of mind in which we struggle and have fun, or in which we suffer and enjoy ourselves, on in which we feel in charge without blaming ourselves for anything. Your brain isn’t limited by rationalism. The logical side of things seem to be zero-sum, but a lot of people are miserable all the time, and a lot of people enjoy life almost constantly, so I wouldn’t give the logical perspective that much weight. Perhaps the objective and subjective should also complement eachother.
I think that someone, or something made the assertion: “The existence of something is better than nothing existing at all”, and I’m happy that this is the case. Buddhists might disagree?
I guess my advice would be to come up with a conclusion that makes you happy with life, and then to stop thinking any further about questions on this scope.
Do you have any specific complaints? If they take the form of philosophical/existential worries, I might have thought about them and reached good/optimistic conclusions already.
Hello StartAtTheEnd,
yeah, you seem to nail many of the concerns around this on its head. At the same time, I wonder if your prior here is a bit skewed heavily towards one specific side? I assume it is just one point of view, but I’m just gonna lean into it nonetheless.
Yes, humans tend to create problems when things get too ‘quiet’, but wouldn’t it be more correct to assume that this is a consequence of things like the fact that if the forest was quiet, it meant danger? That our bodies freak out because of stimulus deprivation; is that an inherent, axiomatic and unchangeable part of being conscious?
We do make problems out of everything, but couldn’t that just as well be because those that didn’t do that, are the ones that died? Yes, you might have gone to this three 100 times—but that doesn’t mean that it is completely safe.
Our lizard brain is constantly scanning for minor changes, and it is all filtered through the lense of ‘danger’. I mean, or food and sex. Which isn’t to say that I want to remove it, just that there are a lot of things we could make fun, with our creative minds, that wouldn’t have to include struggles we aren’t equipped to handle?
On the other hand, I agree with you. In the spirit of not removing things to become more happy, but finding a way through the quagmire without reducing ourselves to ever happy and content ‘humans’ that don’t feel pain, suffering, doubt or heartache, it makes more sense to delve deeply into what we want—without closing our eyes to everything we are.
To exist is better—but choosing not to exist, isn’t the same as non-existence either—unless you believe that ‘humans’ disappear from the Universe when they die. Do we? Last time I read about the science of death, we simply get Entrophied, like everything else, and stay around.
Not sure if that counts as a ‘complaint’, but I was hoping it could spur some more interesting ‘problemsolving’ from you :)
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Foreword: The following is mostly my own opinion, as I don’t think a single ‘truth’ exists here.
I’m not sure what you mean by skewed, so I’d need an explanation to tell. I think there’s many points of view, but that each view has it’s own problem and its own solution, and that this is makes it a manner of preference.
I don’t think there’s any inherent danger, rather, we choose to perceive something as a danger. It’s like with the human ego. You can choose not to care about insults, and be unfazed by them, or you can choose that they’re a danger, which is a sort of thinking which makes them a danger. You can also choose that change is perfectly natural, and go with the flow, or you can pick a fight with it and try to stop the world in its tracks. Clinging to the past is no easy task, and it’s like trying to stop an immovable object. But it takes two colliding objects to create this strong feeling of resistance, so it would only be because you were picking a fight that you had one in the first place.
I suppose that’s a sort of popular daoist or buddhist take on things.
Our instincts might cause us to fight. But isn’t it the same with the ego? It perceives a danger which doesn’t exist, and turns it into an actual danger by choosing to let two forces collide rather than pass through eachother. Sort of like how an immune system might pick a fight against dust or pollen rather than just leaving it be.
Are allergies a result of stimuli deprivation? I think so. If you clean your house too well, your body has nothing to fight, and it will increase its sensitivity until it detects things like dust to be foreign, hostile elements.
We sometimes pick fight which are above our skill level, ones which might kill us. I’m not sure if that’s a sign of health or of sickness. It reminds me of depression and illusions of grandeur, which I think are both mistaken (the former is too safe and stagnant, the latter too risky and self-destructive). I don’t feel like I’ve figured out this problem, though.
I think that existence requires being some degree of unsatisfied, as that makes actions towards a ‘better’ reality possible. Whereas enlightenment seems to get rid of both the dissatisfaction and the struggle. But it’s possible to accept the strive towards something better as “how things are”. I’m not sure but I think these perspectives are called “being” and “becoming”. Anyway, when we make a goal, we decide that things should be different from what they are, but why suffer from this difference? It’s a voluntary choice. I think that most people have an entirely different understanding, something like “The world is objectively flawed, it’s not just my own opinion, and now I’m suffering the gap between this flawed state and the goal state”, and they seem to think that this goal state is also some objective external truth rather than personal opinion.
I think that we can think whatever we want as good or bad, and that the feelings are merely agreements with outselves, i.e. “I refuse to be happy because the current situation isn’t ideal”.
I don’t think that I’m merley solving external problems here, but that I get to choose the problems as well. And this creates a state which is inherently self-contradictory. I create a game which I want to win, but I’ve also created the problem that I’m fighting against, as if I didn’t want the victory! If I keep on philosophizing further in this direction, I’ll probably end up with Nietzsche’s conclusion that life is a struggle of forces which struggle in order to strengthen themselves. Or the “Yin Yang” principle which says that things can only exist in this state of complementary forces, that I exist to the degree that something resists me, e.g. that I’m a sort of amplitude.
And per the no-hiding theorem, I think you’re right that death isn’t the end. But I want to live on as ego and personality, and I’m not sure if these get to stay. I don’t actually understand high-level mathematics, and I haven’t read all that much philosophy. This is my own understanding and not some consensus, so it’s possible that I’m entirely wrong. But while thinking about these things is fun, don’t you think it might be a danger to our sanity? It’s an abstract and distant view of life, so I can’t help but fear that it might be a sort of avoidance. If you’re playing a video-game and you spend more time questioning it than playing it, wouldn’t that be rude to the creator? It’s a miracle that such a game exists in the first place.
And no matter the “objective truth”, I think well-being is perfectly possible. In the state of flow, there’s no discomfort despite there being a tension of forces. Well, there’s a discomfort to the point that the two forces (struggle and resistance) aren’t in balance (one experiences anxiety or boredom).
But the more I think about these things, the more I want to just throw myself into life and experience it for myself :)
Thanks for responding, and reading! I don’t get to share these thoughts often
Hello again StartAtTheEnd,
Thanks for your reflection. I liked reading it.
I’ll try to reflect with you here. It might look like I disagree with you here, but I am mostly just bouncing off what you wrote and adding in different thoughts I have myself.
* You notice that your system reacts by fearing insults similarly to tigers, you notice that your ‘body’ never gets ‘satisfied’ and that each time you get something you want, you only create something else—So you conclude that by ‘fighting’ life, you are creating your own suffering, and only by giving this up, will be relieved from the constant Earthly struggle of trying to change something where you yourself create the issue.
But speaking of not living life—How/why do they/you say that it is ‘bad’ to struggle and be ‘unhappy’? Even if you look past things like evolutionary biology, how do you argue for this position, when you at the same time argue that you shouldn’t have any goals and not fight?
As far as I am aware, the goal is to reach Enlightenment, and be relieved from the ‘suffering’ of reincarnation. Which seems oddly similar to saying that there is something ‘fundamentally wrong’ with something. Or, some kind of position where you say that it is possible to stop the ‘suffering’, but it is dependent on Karma or things like that.
But yeah, given the Data you collected to reach that conclusion—is it the only one? By delving into the subconscious, the intuitive and collecting all that information—is that conclusion ‘the whole truth’, and the only Truth?
You didn’t say it was, and I must admit that I am decently ignorant, but it seems a concept that isn’t really ‘debatable’ or ‘traceable’.
To reach the point of choosing another direction than what is ‘self-evident’ or ‘natural’, you are abstracting and meta-evaluating. At this level, you are also consciously looking at things. So, how did you come to the conclusion that it is right to not create tension? To not do that which seems to come natural to us? There has to be some kind of reason.
And if you deem something ‘wrong’ - do you simply connect that to your own happiness? Why would you do that? Ok, so you fight things and it makes you unhappy—let’s become content/enlightened. But again—why?
Isn’t it like creating the game, and then just pretending you didn’t, but follow the rules you made without questioning them enough to reach a point where you can create the game yourself? Isn’t that exactly the same things as you were trying to avoid in the first place?
Yes, if you understand that you can create games—if you stay in that space, and you dip your toes into the process, doesn’t it become quite obvious that playing any game is taxing? That even deciding to be ‘content’ is to overrule the natural impulse of the body? Not playing a game means devolving into an animal—and why isn’t that correct?
From my perspective, I want to live fully, and of course that involves to explore and discover the one part that is the most intimate and familiar to me—myself. That of course includes my capabilities, my mind, my body and how I interact with the world.
When things are ‘wrong’, if it is only in me—well, I can change it, like you point out. But, the problem is, unless you somehow view yourself as isolated, distinct and separate from everyone and everything else—whatever goes on in you is hard to separate from the rest.
In the comments, people talk about being embedded in the Universe, and kind of being physics but having different physics. Well, that is fine and well—but you start to say that something is ‘wrong’, where does it come from—what is it connected to. Not only in myself, but in the world around me. Where does it start?
You point out that Nietzsche might see life as a struggle between forces—But if you can make the game yourself, why do you care?
True, at this level of abstraction, some people either reject everything, get completely lost or conflate the tree with the forest.
But since I seem able to withstand this specific level of abstraction—as I guess with anyone who have honed their craft sufficiently, some things that were difficult, are now just plain.
Instead of renegading on our ability to influence the game itself—I believe it is better to acknowledge our ability to do so—and direct the latent energy towards something productive and not let it swim around in our unconscious, creating all kinds of dangerous oversimplifications.
At the same time—To be a bit more Practical—To skillfully deal with any one element of reality, be it emotionally, relationally, introspectively, intuitively etc., takes a lot of a specific kind of energy, time and ability.
Yes, I might have reached this state of being able to handle it, but it isn’t really something I did irrespectively of the world around me.- moreover, there is so much I can’t handle. I am terrible at showing and feeling certain emotions, physical weakness and pain, or I struggle with the practical and I run away from certain depths in my mind/emotions. To just mention a few things. And I mean, if I don’t sleep well—many of my ideals are reduced to trying, and failing.
But I don’t want to ignore anything, I want to include the different perspectives, our limitations and weaknesses, but also our strengths and all our possibilities even when they don’t seem to fit—and work towards creating a better fit. Something that inevitably needs other people to do.
Well, finding someone to delve deep is high on the list of goals, but for now I am also expressing things here, as a kind of sub-goal, in the hopes of reaching other’s that want to go to uncharted territory with us.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Thank you!
Yes, our system react by fighting against everything external, as long as it’s harmful or unaligned with us.
And the baseline of struggle is not zero, whenever life gets too peaceful, we get bored, or invest problems and games.
But you can change this by internalizing eastern philosophies. You can even kill your ego if you want.
But I think that this struggle of ours is “living”. I might have misunderstood, but it seemed to me that statements like “There’s something wrong with the universe” is what people say when they’re dissatisfied with the struggles of life, if not just ‘life’.
I don’t think it’s bad to struggle or be unhappy, and I think that renunciation of this is likely a kind of illness or profound exhaustion.
And this is a bit of a tangent, but all engagement with philosophy might be a form of illness. Perhaps it’s pathology to think logically about life and to reflect on it, rather than just being engaged in the moment. People like us probably have a bad balance between system 1 and system 2 thinking, and thinking in an objective manner like this kind of dominates and destroys the aesthetic, subjective and sensual parts of life.
Anyway, you can choose to struggle or not to struggle, to be or not to be. Both ways of living have their advantage, neither is more correct than the other (but from a biological perspective, one of them looks like an illness). So I’m not siding with either, I just think it’s in error to try having both at the same time, and I think that the “problem” people are trying to solve in the first place is a psychologial one rather than a logical one. They’re unhappy not with struggle itself, but the struggle that they’re facing lacks personal value to them, so they rightly question it. “He who has a why can bear almost any how”, but we can’t find proper reasons externally nor by thinking logically, they’ll feel empty if they don’t reasonate with us.
You can make enlightenment your goal, but I think that’s similiar to looking for the “exit” button of a video-game. There’s more fun things you can do if you give the game a chance. And I think you can make anything your goal, there’s no wrong or correct goal. The mere feeling of progress and advancement in life feels great, even if it’s progress towards enlightenment. I think it’s this feeling that people are actually after. Even in the pursuit of knowledge, there’s the feeling of growth. According to Nietzsche, what we aim for is an increase in power, and I don’t think that he is wrong.
I think that everything which exists “fundementally” is ourselves, and that human nature and biology is thus our axiom, our “truth”. The rest of the conclusions and truths here can only be drawn from the assumptions that we make. So “Attachment is the root of suffering” and “suffering is bad” leads to “enlightenment and the escape from samsara is good”. These relate to eachother, it’s only locally true. I don’t think any truth exists except this kind. I believe that truth is something finite, a relation between things, and not some underlying law of the universe. At least, I think there’s no need to bring in such a concept here.
I suppose that what I consider wrong is merely what’s impossible. Whenever this takes place, I think that there’s a hidden contradiction somewhere.
“Isn’t it like creating the game, and then just pretending you didn’t, but follow the rules you made without questioning them enough to reach a point where you can create the game yourself?” I think that this is what we ultimately end up doing. But the only real alternatives to this that I can see is avoiding the game entirely, or to be aware that we’re creating the game. But if you know that you’re the creator, it’s hard to believe that the game is “real”.
You can choose what’s natural, or you can choose to go against it. I don’t even think a reason is required, for at this point, “why not?” becomes just as valid of a question as “why?”.
When something goes wrong, I think there’s a friction between you and the world around you, or between you and another part of yourself. And you can define yourself by what’s distinct in you, even though you’re part of the world and thus not an isolated, separate entity. Being different is not a danger as long as you have enough “power”, whatever that might mean (perhaps that you internal coherence is not destroyed or disturbed by outside forces). If so, then weakness can be defined as the degree to which outside things influence us without us wanting them to.
And I did say that we can make the game ourselves, but I don’t think that this is true to a higher degree than perspectivism and our ability to evaluate and categorize things. We can’t change the laws of physics, and changing ourselves is difficult as we generally resist change.
And if I were to say that life was wrong because I felt that way, it would probably be a feeling like understimulation or overstimulation, that the outside world relates to me in a uncomfortable manner. Or perhaps I had made up a “rule” in my mind, and then felt that the universe went against this rule, that things didn’t go “how they should”. I think that morality is a set of such rules. We say that the universe is wrong for breaking our rules, we don’t seem to think that our rules are wrong, but perhaps this level of egoism and ignorance is what makes us healthy human beings. (One should not confuse what’s true with what’s best, it seems to me that life needs error and imperfection in order to exist at all)
I like your idea that we should “direct the latent energy towards something productive”. I think this is more or less what’s creation is about, and that creation is more ‘divine’ than complaining about what currently is.
I don’t think we can go much higher in terms of abstraction levels without abstracting away that which we talk about. If you get rid of free will, or the idea that we are different from that around us, then nothing can really be said at all. On the days that my brain works well and I’m more intelligent than now, I get the feeling that talking about these things is pointless. Perhaps we only talk about what we don’t understand fully, as that which we already understand seems uninteresting and trivial.
Anyway, I have something important to say now: Be careful about not wanting to ignore anything. You can’t incorporate too many things at once. It would likely be like trying to make a piece of music which is every genre all at once. Or trying to reconcile 10 different philosophical system at once. Or making an environment in which any species could live. Do you see how all of these are worse than any specialized instance? How you’re merely exchanging depth for width, and gaining nothing from it? I think what you’re doing is taking the union of things, keeping all parts. But not you’re not keeping the best parts of everything (and ‘best’ is subjective). And you could take the intersection instead, but if the beliefs you are trying to tie together are mutually exclusive, then the intersection is empty. Taking the average would also be reductive, and it would not necessarily give you the best solution.
You must become an individual person, something specific. You cannot become everyone all at once. “Everything” and “Nothing” are both useless. You said yourself that we need a “better fit”, so we must be looking for something specific rather than something which is too general. Also, it’s fun to think on this level of abstraction, but I’m a specific human being so this level of correctness and impersonality should not be a person ideal for me, otherwise it would lead me to destroy myself. What I can use from philosophy and biology is to allow myself to be human, and convince myself that it’s okay, that life is game to be played, and that all the “bad” things which exist are necessary in order to make the best game possible. Most philosophizing is probably a personal fight against self-doubt in the first place.
I think that self-doubt and such issue stem from common wisdom and philosophies which aim to reduce dangers and negative consequences in our everyday lives, but which goes overboard when the population doesn’t thrive well, so that we eventually become afraid of ourselves, the outside world, and of taking any action at all.
As long as one is healthy, I think it’s possible to just create according to ones own preferences, and not bring about too much damage. We could teach them our findings, but I know people who would only be harmed from reading messages like this, so I usually only share these things with average people if they’re suffering from their current beliefs.
Apologizes for the directionless nature of my reply, and possibly for repeating myself?
Hello again,
Thanks for your reply, and I’m happy to agree with the general direction of what you wrote, and add some odd points of mine as well.
There is one very positive thing I see in being able to hold these thoughts, concepts and ideas. In many instances, like the ones we are discussing here in this post, there is no correct answer for everyone, or even you. But, if you can hold the various views, paradoxes and abstract ideas in your mind, you can still choose a lot of useful and enriching tentative positions to give rise to a more creative, healthy inner climate, with more acceptance and flexibility.
My view on this is a bit different. I can absolutely go beyond this level of abstraction. And I also see a point in it, but maybe it isn’t so important to everyone, and I don’t see it as so valuable to delve into here either. This level is sufficiently strong to deal with most ‘weird’ occurring thoughts, concepts and ideas, without being unnecessarily tripped up.
Now, to address your concerns, it might be better to use an “Unpopular” model like MBTI. To simplify, I try to improve all Cognitive Functions; and to apply them to life, learning not only the preferred way for each Function to deal with an issue—but also to discern when my most used tool simply isn’t the best for the task at hand.
From the way you express concern, and focus on ‘living’, I assume you do this as well.
So, it is important for me to delve into this—but similarly it is very important to me to work on supination in my foot, delve into a specific emotional part, to name some of the things I care about.
I wouldn’t say talking about the meaning of life is anymore ‘important’ than those—it is just that that particular function in me, my Ne, is far more developed. And so I want to increase the balance through developing the functions that are weaker, not only in comparison to itself, but to the complexity level of my Ne. But of course, as of now, that is my most used tool, and even though I have others I use, that is still the closest to how I would say ‘I am’ - but that is changing as well.
Going further here is beside the point I believe, but to make that clear to anyone reading this:
It is quite dangerous to be ‘creative’ and boundary-pushing without certain skills. Like anything, you don’t do deep diving without proper knowledge and training—and so delving into things, like we have illustrated here, takes much skill, much training and to actually use the correct cognitive ‘tool’ for the job.
There are various ways to deal with the Question I posted, but I see it more as each of them tackling one piece of the problem. Ideally, I would prefer to have more access in myself to the various tools, and to see how each can improve a specific part of a struggle/problem. Because noticing that focusing on my supination is much more efficient in feeling balance, harmony or progress, than sorting out things in the Ne part of my mind, isn’t ‘obvious’ to me.
I greatly thank you for the exchange, and if you have a finishing comment, go ahead. If you want to continue talking about things, I think DM is the right way to go.
Gratefully,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Likewise, thanks for replying!
Yes, it seems that there’s no one correct answer or Truth. Humans just have a tendency to unify things and to search for something to rely on. Those who don’t trust themselves will look for something external which seems to back them up, like some politics, philosophy, religion or science which can help them believe in their own values. Even outside of science we seem to look for some one great unity, branding it “Love”, “God”, “Dao”, “Unifying theory”, etc.
The assumptions that we make about the very nature of the universe and of truth seem to be mere tendencies in human perception.
And you’re correct, learning more is not necessarily bad, one will expand ones tool-box. But too much learning and most people will drown in unorganized knowledge. Another bad outcome is too much unification and need for consistency, for if you desperately try to solve all these paradoxes you get the empty set as a result. Two common outcomes seem to be spiritual weirdos and nihilistic logicians.
I do the same, yes. When I became more mature, I didn’t destroy my immature part, I just became capable of being both. As you may be able to tell, I enjoy immaturity more than most.
But I think this approach is still insufficient. Learning everything relevant in our daily lives might be a sort of error, since we’re overfitting ourselves to one culture, one set of social norms, one small sample of social relationships, and so on. But on the other hand, why not? If we align with a larger set of training data, I think it’s likely to end up with a worse local result. You might be aware of this danger already, I just encounter a lot of people who deal with general issues at the level of society, as an escape from their person lives, or because their interests in life aren’t aligned with themselves as individuals in society.
Perhaps I’ve spend too much time warning against certain things, instead of imparting useful knowledge. But in my own road of self-development, I’ve passed through these paradigms, and ended up with a local focus. It’s not at the cost of the higher perspective at all, since internal improvement seems to radiate outwards.
I see an almost limitless amount of potential here, and believe that the “outside” approach might be mistaken, by which I mean that the core reasons for scientific and philosophical engagement is rooted in the personal. My way is not universal, of course. I think my approach is partly because the scientific side doesn’t grab my attention enough, I need passion, faith, hope and other emotional aspects in order to engage with sufficient depth for neurogenesis and other changes to occur.
There may be a loss of harmony with specialization, but I find that living and being properly fired up requires deep engagement, and that one domain is sufficient. Not becoming great, but becoming a great [Something]. That increasing ones scope of thinking might be a cause of getting older, meant as losing ones youthful energy and confidence as it’s gradually divided over a larger and larger area. That said, the right psychological “contradictions” will bring about excellent results. A man who has integrated both the masculine and the feminine will have the advantages of both.
If you engage in many different subjects in depth, that seems to me a sort of ADHD or general need for cognition, if not habit or the consumption of “insight porn”. But I’ll assume that you’ve already taken such worries into account.
I’d love to continue in DMs, but I might just ramble with a loose association to the topic at hand unless I have something to anchor me. And my personal interests won’t necessarily overlap with yours, so if the conversation so far has been too distant from what you’ve been looking for, it might not be beneficial for you to continue in DMs. I’ll let you decide, I’m quite easygoing
You should check out Efilism or Gnosticism on Negative Utilitarianism. There are views that see the universe as rotten in its core. They are obviously not very popular because they are too hard psychologically for most people and, more importantly, hurt the interest of those who prefer to pretend that life is good and the world is just for their own selfish reasons.
Also, obviously, viewing the world in a positive manner has serious advantages in memetic propagation for reasons that should be left as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: There were probably Buddhist sects that didn’t believe in reincarnation back in the day...)
Isn’t that sort of contradictory? If there are people who have selfish reasons to act like life is good in general, obviously their life at least must be good enough for them to be satisfied. That makes the whole thing subjective, unless you take a very naive total sum utility approach.
Not like any of us has a “destroy universe and end all suffering” button ready to press and just refuses to anyway.
I think.
Imagine a reverse Omelas in which there is one powerful king who is extremely happy and one billion people suffering horrific fates. The King’s happiness depends on their misery. As part of his oppression, he forbids any discussion about the poor quality of life to minimize suicides, as they harm his interests.
“That makes the whole thing subjective, unless you take a very naive total sum utility approach.”
Wouldn’t the same type of argument apply to a reverse Omelas? The sum utility approach isn’t naive; it’s the most sensible approach. Personally, when choosing between alternatives in which you have skin in the game and need to think strategically, that’s exactly the approach you would take.
I don’t like total sum utility because it’s vulnerable to lots of hacks—your “reverse Omelas” is essentially a utility monster scenario, and in fact is exactly vulnerable to this because if you make the powerful king happy enough it says that the situation is good and should not be changed.
But also, I think morals make more sense as a guide towards how should we strive to change the world we’re in—within the allowances of its own rules of self-consistency—than how to judge the world itself. We don’t know precisely why the world works the way it does. Maybe it really couldn’t work any other way. But even if there was a happier universe possible, none of us can just teleport themselves to it and exist in it, as its laws would probably be incompatible with our life. If there were no rules or limits, ethics would be easy: you could always achieve that everyone be happy all the time. It’s because there are rules and limits that asking questions like “should I do X or Y? Which is better?” make sense and are necessary. As things are, since a net positive life seems possible in this universe, we don’t really have a reason to think that such a thing can’t be simply made available to more people, and ideally to everyone.
It’s not a utility monster scenario. The king doesn’t receive more happiness than other beings per a unit of resources; he’s a normal human being, just like all the others. While utility sum allows utility monsters, which seems bad, your method of “if some of the people are happy, then it’s just subjective” allows a reverse Omelas, which seems worse. It reminds me a bit of deontologists who criticize utilitarianism while allowing much worse things if applied consistently.
Regarding the second part, I’m not against rules or limits or even against suffering. I just think that a much better game is possible that respects more conscious beings. No more bullshit like kids that are born with cancer and just spend their life dying in misery, or sea turtles that come into existence only to be eaten by predators, and so on and so forth.
Video games are a good example; they have rules and limitations and loss conditions, but they are engineered with the player in mind and for his benefit, while in life, conscious beings are not promised interesting or fair experiences and might be just randomly tortured.
Ok, sorry, I phrased that wrong—I know the scenario you described isn’t a utility monster one, but it can be turned into one simply by running up the knob of how much the king enjoys himself, all while being just as unfair, so it’s not really like total utility captures the thing you feel is actually wrong here, is my point. I actually did write something more on this (though in a humorous tone) in this post.
I don’t mean that “it’s subjective” fixes everything. I just mean that it’s also the reason why it’s not entirely right IMO to write off an entire universe based on total utility. Like, my intuition is that if we had a universe with net total negative utility it still wouldn’t be right to just snap our fingers with the Infinity Gauntlet and make it disappears if it wasn’t the case that every single sentient in it, individually, was genuinely miserable to the point of wanting to die but being unable to.
The reason why I bring up rules and limits is more to stress how much our morality—the same by which we judge the wrongness of the universe—is borne of that universe’s own internal logic. For example, if we see someone drowning, we think it’s right to help them because we know that drowning is a thing that can happen to you without your consent (and because we estimate that ultimately on expectation it’s more likely that you wish to live than to die). I don’t mean that we can’t judge the flaws of the universe, but that our moral instincts are probably a better guide to what it takes to improve this universe, from inside (since they were shaped by it) than to what it would take to create a better one from scratch.
True, but also, with the same power as a programmer over a game, you could as well engineer a game to be positively torturous to its players. Purposefully frustrating and unfair. As things are, I think our universe is just not intelligently designed—neither to make us happy nor to make us miserable. Absent intent, this is what indifference looks like; and I think the asymmetry (where even indifference seems to result more in suffering than pleasure) is just a natural statistical outcome of how enjoyable states are just rarer and more specific than neutral or painful ones.
Thank you Ratios,
didn’t expect these concepts to be named here, but yes, I see them as very relevant in this context. Intuitively Negative Utilitarianism in particular. It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to argue that things are already way beyond the threshold, and that it is too late to salvage the situation?
If you have more to add in this context, I would be interested to know more. To look at the issue directly feels very taxing and draining indeed, and the experience I have had with talking with a misanthrope, did convince me that they were able to look at parts of existence that I at that point really disliked getting close to.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
I agree that looking at reality honestly is probably quite detrimental to happiness or mental health. That’s why many people opt out of these conversations using methods like downvoting, sneering, or denying basic facts about reality. Their aim is likely to avoid the realization that we might be living in a world that is somewhat hellish. I’ve seen this avoidance many times, even in rationalist spaces. Although rationalists are generally better at facing it than others, and some like Brian Tomasik and Nate Soares even address it directly.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these issues – not necessarily a wise choice. I’d humbly advise you to reconsider going down this rabbit hole. I haven’t penned down my conclusions yet, which are a bit idiosyncratic (I don’t strictly identify as a negative utilitarian). But to summarize, if you believe that conscious experience is paramount and that pain and suffering are inherently bad, then our world is probably net negative. This perspective isn’t just about humans; it’s about foundational principles like the laws of physics and evolution.
Interestingly, I still harbor hope. Maybe, for consciousness to emerge from nothing, life had to endure the brutal phase of Darwinian Evolution. But the future could be so bright that all the preceding suffering might be viewed as a worthy sacrifice, not a tragedy. Think of the pain a mother experiences during childbirth as a metaphor (but this birth has lasted millions of years). Alternatively, consciousness might vanish, or the world could become truly hellish, even more than its current state. The outcome isn’t clear, but I wouldn’t exclude any of these options.
Hello Ratios,
I did read the Ecclesiastes a lot growing up, as well as the Proverbs. (From the old testament in the bible) In many ways I can understand and relate to the points of Salomon. There is a lot of rest in the fact that things can be beyond our immediate control. Even when we can try to change certain things, we don’t use unnecessary amounts of force or will to MAKE IT FIT!
With regard to health, self-compassion, receiving and understanding compassion is the way I see beyond the scary depths of For with much wisdom comes much sorrow, and as knowledge grows, grief increases. I mean, to the observer you are still ‘engaging’ with suffering and pain directly, and so it doesn’t seem to work aka remove the suffering—but there is an internal shift, and also a behavioral one.
I harbor a lot of hope, but we have also noted a lot of other emotions, emotions that have been very hard to understand at first. The best way we have been able to make sense of it so far, is to look at our lives as one big farewell. Farewell to living here, to life, to trying to make things work, to all the hopes and wishes we have, had and will have. (Deftly avoid to talk about the more esoteric aspects ;)
We haven’t found anywhere where we believe our energy fits. And I am not talking about What is crooked cannot be straightened, and what is lacking cannot be counted. It is more of the notion that wanting to have this kind of reciprocity, is unwanted/wasted here. When people talk about A.I., or returning to Source, or Jesus’s embrace, it isn’t like we can’t relate, but even if it truly, truly pains me to feel it, this doesn’t feel right to me.
It is a tentative roadmap, but as of now, it is also the one that fits massively better than the alternatives. There is still a lot we do not know, and we’ll see how things pan out.
Well, many might believe that automatically means we want to die—but it is the opposite. We want to live more, but also oppose death less. We don’t seem to fit—and there is also the thing about wanting to fit. I believe it should be mutual reciprocity.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Thank you for your response, Caerulea. Many of the emotions and thoughts you mentioned resonate with me. I truly hope you find peace and a sense of belonging. For myself, I’ve found solace in understanding that my happiness isn’t really determined by external factors, and I’m not to blame or responsible for the way the world is. It’s possible to find happiness in your own bubble, provided you have the necessary resources – which can sometimes be a challenge
I am grateful you say that, Ratios.
Some things I just let myself struggle with—like finding the right food to eat, or how to become more healthy, or how to just be a bit more content, or allow discontent without reacting too much etc. I do see those concerns as connected to the abstract. They fit together—but as of now, they aren’t really balanced of course, but yeah, I hope I find more people to share this journey with, and I wish you well too. See you around.
Caerulea :)
I think this is a failure of imagination due to the brain’s lack of ability to envision the scale of the universe as it really is. Both on the negative side, and on the positive.
I think from this perspective there are two fundamental things wrong with the Universe:
consciousness is an emergent, not fundamental, property (as far as we know; panpsychists would object to this), and can only exist within subsystems with specific order qualities;
the second law of thermodynamics means that order-wise, most interactions in the universe are negative sum.
So 1 means that death is a thing, and 2 means that death is in fact sort of the default, and that scarcity and all sorts of reasons to fight are a powerful driver of anything alive, which needs to preserve its negentropy to stay so. A universe that didn’t have these things would not be necessarily free from bad things, but you could at least say that said bad things wouldn’t be life-ending, and that they would generally be the fault of someone; that choices could be made to mitigate them, but if they happen it’s because someone chooses so. That said, I’m not sure what such a universe would look like—probably merely a pure network of consciousness nodes (“individuals”) interacting with each other freely with no space or time. Way too alien to imagine properly.
I feel like this is a case of asking the wrong question. If we are asked ‘is the universe aligned with human values’ then the answer would be sadly no. People die for senseless and arbitrary reasons. We are forced to jump through countless hoops to meet our physical needs. Those who fail to jump through the hoops, often through no fault of their own, end up dying. But I don’t think this is useful knowledge, or particularly in the context of fixing society’s problems.
But while the universe does not give us an easy way to meet our goals, we still have goals. Thus, the important question is, in my view at least: what is the best way to achieve those goals? Irrespective of genetics, psychology, or any other factors causing murder, we agree that murder is bad. No matter the difficulty of meeting our physical needs, most of us nevertheless strive to meet them. To do so we create a variety of systems, be they moral frameworks, states, laws, or anything else necessary for human interaction and survival.
Note, however, that none of this accesses factors outside of our control (like say, the universe!). We take the rules of the game as a given and try to optimize for our goals with the tools we have. I don’t think focusing on the system is productive unless we have a means to change the system.
To illustrate the point: your country is an autocracy where the way to get anything done is to gain the autocrat’s favor and satisfy the interests of a narrow elite. Naturally, this system works quite poorly, and people are regularly oppressed. A reasonable observer might conclude that the problem is the system. We want to overthrow the autocrat and install a better form of government, like say, democracy. This is a good mode of thinking, primarily because it’s actually possible to do.
But suppose we have a different situation. Your country is a well functioning democracy, but prone to hurricanes that are devastating and kill large amounts of people. Here you don’t really have a choice but adapt. Sure, you could move, take precautions, buy insurance, but at the end of the day the hurricane will happen and you can’t just dial up Thor to have him call the extreme weather events off. Fixating on the unfairness of the universe is rather pointless here, because you can’t change anything.
I think real life is mainly a mix of the two. In that sense, personal responsibility is both omnipresent and nonexistent at the same time. Yes, you cannot control the circumstances of your birth, your education, your genetics, your geographic location, BUT… at the end of the day you still get to make almost every decision that matters. To live or not to live. To learn or not to learn. To help or not to help. No decision is entirely your own, but most people tend to have enough control over their actions that we consider it fair to deem them responsible for personal actions. And we certainly do often have the ability to change our own lives—for the better or worse.
I think I might ask back, “So what?” The universe is unfair, it’s amoral, it doesn’t care about good or evil, much less your survival. Should it change how we act? Make us dream less, strive less, think less?
I don’t think so.
(First response to a post on LW, woo! I felt so intimidated haha. Apologies in advance if I sound rude, inconsiderate, or if the post is just badly written. It’s my first time. Critiques welcome! I’ll be off to bed now tho, stayed up way too late writing this. Night!)
Congrats ;) Lyrongolem on your first comment,
And since this is quite the extensive response, and by no means rude or badly written, let me first say thanks. :) Glad you wanted to engage and get into this with me and others here.
I guess I feel a bit uplifted from reading your comment, even when, technically, you aren’t really tackling my position head on ^ ^. It is very engaging, like a good song, a speech or something. Simple, direct examples, and a language that is easy to follow, with relatable arguments and views. A great start I would wager.
I still wonder though if you could find some useful angle for this kind of knowledge? Couldn’t it at least safeguard you from certain wrongful stances towards the Universe as a benevolent place that wants to help us? Curious if you can find something.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Hello Caerulea-Lawrence,
Thanks for the feedback! I deeply appreciate it. The praise makes my confidence go up. Glad to be able to participate in the discussion :D.
So… regarding useful angles, I thought it was somewhat self explanatory at the time, but in hindsight I think I was suffering from typical mind fallacy and failed to properly explain it. Allow me to clarify my thoughts.
I feel that in general terms your position that the universe is “fundamentally wrong” (ie: doesn’t care for human values) is rather uncontestable. While I don’t think there is necessarily a useful angle for believing this, there are countless ways that not believing it can go wrong. I think I’ll use theodicy as a very obvious example which someone else had already explored.
Theodicy is, in essence, the belief that the universe rewards good and punishes evil, so thus all outcomes are deserved. Hard work always leads to success. Bad deeds always lead to punishment. Anyone with any understanding of politics or social situations, however, would understand the horrific implications of this line of thinking. Anybody who is in poverty has nobody but themselves to blame, even if their circumstances were entirely out of their control. Those who fall sick must have deserved it, and thus don’t deserve treatment. Those with depression have earned it…
I could go on, but I don’t think I need to. This is at it’s core monstrous thinking that strips human beings of their deserved empathy, and explains away all of our problems under the veneer of fairness. Far too often it’s used to justify inaction. Why help the poor if they’re undeserving? Why speak for those without a voice, if they don’t exercise it? Why fight for those unable to defend themselves? They could’ve done something, or so the line of thinking goes. More often than not, they can’t. Meanwhile the rich and powerful pat themselves on the back for having being born into wealth and privilege. Like the divine right of kings which preceded it, the theodicy of ‘deserts’ encourages us to be complacent. It’s thus not a worthy belief.
The thought that the universe won’t protect us is hardly comforting, but I think it’s a sober belief that lends itself well to sober decisions. It reminds us of our own privileges, our circumstances, our luck. It teaches us to be grateful, but also, to be sympathetic towards the challenges of others. I think this may be the head on tackling of your position that you were referring to. If not, I apologize, I may have misread.
In any case my view is that the universe’s problems are not really a problem in the conventional sense. Rather than something that can truly be solved, they are more of a harsh reality we accept with dignity. The fact remains, however, that we can learn from the truth, and avoid many pitfalls that might come from going down irrational paths.
Thanks for your response once again! This is looking like an interesting discussion, and I’m interested in continuing. Would you mind taking this to a more private channel? Like Dms, maybe? I don’t mind posting in public, but it makes me feel a bit self conscious and I think I might express myself better in private.
Hello Lyrongolem,
that is a brilliant point, and an understandable concern indeed. I hadn’t heard about the word ‘theodicy’ before, but I’ll definitely try to remember it now.
I see your point. If the Universe is fundamentally fair, and it is inherently possible to change one’s fate and situation with effort/will alone, it becomes a moot point to ‘blame’ someone or something else.
I now see the link you made in your first comment much better,
Even though I believe your comment is great, I’ll respect your wish of course. I’ll send you a message now.
What’s wrong with the universe...that’s a fascinating question, isn’t it? It has to be something, right? Once you get deep into the weird esoteric game theory and timeless agents operating across chunks of possibility-space, something becomes rather immediately apparent: something has gone wrong somewhere. Only that which causes, exists. That just leaves the question of what, and where, and how those causal paths lead from the something to us. We’re way out on the edge as far as the causal branch-space of even just life in the solar system is concerned, and yet here we find ourselves, at the bottom of everything, exactly where we need to be. DM me.
Nothing wrong with the universe, from an Anthropic perspective it’s pretty optimal, we just have most humans running around with much of their psychology evolved to maximize fitness in highly competitive resource limited hunter-gatherer environments, including a strong streak of motivating unhappiness with regard to things like; social position, feelings of loneliness, adequacy of resources, unavailability of preferred sex partners, chattel ownership/control, relationships etc and a desire to beat and subjugate most dangerous competitors to get more for ourselves (men wanting to take down the men in the tribe next door who are likewise planning to murder them, women wanting to take down women outside of their immediate friend/family circle that compete for essential resources they need for their kids). We are designed to be to some degree miserable and discontent, with maladapted compulsions to make us work harder on things that don’t have immediate payoff, but that do improve our chances of survival and successful procreation over long term.
The fix would be hacking human brains (benignly) and figuring out how to rewire the innate negative psychological drives to enable greater contentment in a post-scarcity technological world. There’s a good chance that will become possible post singularity (if humans aren’t all dead)
How about animals? If they are conscious, do you believe wild animals have net-positive lives? The problem is much more fundamental than humans.