Though in practice the reason we have Jesus is so we can ask “What would Jesus do?”, which is easier to answer than “What would the ideal rational agent with unlimited computational resources do?”.
In Stoicism, we call this type of person a sage. It is actually a very practical concept to make use of. During before-sleep meditation, I’ll playback my entire day in fast-forward mentally, but alongside me I imagine a semi-transparent sage-me and I “watch” as our two paths diverge (with the sage-me living a perfectly virtuous life and me falling far short).
Interesting; I am annoyed and relieved that no Stoic seems to have nominated any particular historical person as a sage.
I don’t think I could pull off that kind of meditation, due to my having too much structural uncertainty about ethics and meta-ethics. What’s that Borges quote? “I have known that thing the Greeks knew not—uncertainty.”
I notice that like LessWrong the Stoics are big on Logos and instrumental rationality and related ethics but their (meta-)physics and theology strike me as fuzzy and underdeveloped.
In Stoicism, we call this type of person a sage. It is actually a very practical concept to make use of. During before-sleep meditation, I’ll playback my entire day in fast-forward mentally, but alongside me I imagine a semi-transparent sage-me and I “watch” as our two paths diverge (with the sage-me living a perfectly virtuous life and me falling far short).
Interesting; I am annoyed and relieved that no Stoic seems to have nominated any particular historical person as a sage.
I don’t think I could pull off that kind of meditation, due to my having too much structural uncertainty about ethics and meta-ethics. What’s that Borges quote? “I have known that thing the Greeks knew not—uncertainty.”
BTW random LW people here is the SEP on Stoicism.
I notice that like LessWrong the Stoics are big on Logos and instrumental rationality and related ethics but their (meta-)physics and theology strike me as fuzzy and underdeveloped.