I guess I’m sort of living the life of an expected utility maximizer. All I do all day long, year in year out, is optimize. Every night I go to sleep having optimized more problems out of existence, or having learned about ways that fail. Some days I find more problems. I don’t believe I can ever be done with it, because I’ve chosen problems with high challenges and complex novelty.
I’ve optimized my emotional landscape: it’s barren when it’s not filled with the radiant joy of successful optimization. I don’t care how my mind or body feels. It’s all in the service of optimization. Sleep, defecate, gym, eat, study, optimize, study, optimize. Repeat forever. Adjust parameters so that I always feel at peak performance. What about entertainment? Some time off? I enjoy some comedy, music, and perhaps the occasional video at the gym. No vacations. That’s my life. All of it. I basically never meet anybody in RL, because anybody with thoughts relevant to my work doesn’t live nearby.
In case you think that I’m missing out on some essential “human experience” and wasting my life with nerdy stuff, I disagree. I think I’m living one of the best possible lives ever lived—and I’m including the whole universe. There are a few billion thoroughly human lives being lived at the moment so I think that part of the experience space is pretty well covered already and needs no help from me. The part that is not well covered is my experience space. In that space, I find thoughts never thought before. I find deeds never done before. I never could get a kick from anything else, except maybe from creating an AI—but that’s for someone else to explore (I hear it’s not too crowded in there). I have no need to even briefly visit any other experience space as long as my experience space is brimming with novel and challenging experiences.
The meaning of life, as I see it:
In everything, achieve 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999...%
Theoretical thoughts and experimental deeds involving computation, physics, and electronics—The Stuff Dreams Undreamt Are Made Of. :)
I’ve never learned to think “That looks awfully hard… I don’t think I can do it in a year, not even a decade, so I won’t even give it a try.” For many people hearing something is hard equals “Don’t bother, it’s been attempted by people far smarter than you with far more resources; it’s impossible.” They have resigned to the “fact” that it’s not going to be solved during their lifetime. Not by them, not by anyone. That may mean that not that many people are even trying to solve the “hard” problems. (Will the AGI-during-our-lifetime-for-sure crowd please raise their hand?) I target such problems specifically “not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard”. I don’t care if they’re called hard. I need to find out for myself why they’re called hard. Maybe I don’t find them so hard. At least not impossible-hard. Maybe I just find them fascinatingly challenging.
My brain just won’t let go of problems it finds interesting and solvable, when it’s offered no other reasons than “too hard to even try”. I has to get seriously stuck for years to give up. But even then, if it finds no logical impossibilities, just lack of skills and knowledge, it will not let go entirely. It mutters under its breath “I’ll be back.”
It’s like there’s a meat hook stuck in it with a cord attached to the solution far above, and the only way to pry it off is to pull myself inch by inch to the solution, which hopefully does not lie beyond the end of my health span. I can never solve everything I’d like to, but if I do have the time to solve something, I want it Solved for good.
The trip may be a barren landscape of few sights and sounds, but it’s better than the alternative of “normal life”, whatever that means by your cultural standards, which I find simply garishly decorated emptiness. I don’t particularly enjoy the trip, I enjoy the thought of the destination. It’s the first and last thing on my mind every day. I savor each precious drop of knowledge that quenches my thirst in this endless desert of drudgery. Now I’m hanging by these multiple meat hooks and they won’t let my feet touch the ground until I’ve climbed up and parachuted down—if I ever do choose to come down...
From the Manhattan Project, I learned that there’s at least one valid, socially acceptable reason to grin, laugh, and cry uncontrollably, and that is scientific discovery. But sometimes, silence is all you can come up with when face to face with matters vastly bigger than you are.