Oof, that's rough. If you want some TESCREAL stuff that's less yucky, then Robin Hanson's Age of Em nonfiction https://ageofem.com/ and Eliezer Yudkowsky's Three Worlds Collide novella https://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pdf are ok reads. But even if I always imagine any promise of paradise is a carrot dangled in front of gullible to continue a never ending grind, you've also shown it's crappy idea in and of itself.
Hey, have you ever seen The Good Place? That's a TV series morally illiterate people should watch. As a starter course in thinking about goodness. It starts with familiar sitcom structure, and builds from there... eventually they get to a pretty ok idea of heaven.
I *might* read Three World Collide, provided I can suppress my gag reflex. I'm willing to hear Yudkowsky out for as long as it takes me to read fifty-something pages, but everything I know about him makes my skin crawl.
My wife made me watch a few excerpts from The Good Place. It was kind of entertaining, I guess? I really need to have my arm twisted into watching more than one episode of anything, but maybe someday I'll look at a "best episodes" list and check out one or two of them.
An The Good Place starts as a sitcom in which characters learn a bit every episode, if you're not interested in long form getting to know characters, maybe just watch the trolley problem episode, and the Janet episode.
Man, Yudkowski was great, when I was a twenty something struggling to voice my own iconoclastic ideas. He is ground zero for the sort of thinking that lead to rococo's basilisk though. But there's no AI in Three Worlds, even though all his fiction becomes about the singularity if he goes on long enough.
So... removing meaning from the world made it anthropocentric? Like, now we rewrote the fabric of the universe, meaning of life, Heaven if you will, as exactly our way of life but without imperfection? Why is the tought of idling forever on christian heaven less ghastly than picturing us as an infinite swarm of children in Absolute Safe Capsules? Is it the cost and sacrifice needed to achieve that? Is the guilt of knowing that everything bad that happens will be our fault when we have the power to build Dyson spheres monthly?
Well, that doesn't matter as we wont be able to accelerate any further anyways.
- In a "disenchanted" world, there's no provision for the existence of the transcendent in any really meaningful sense, and in a technologized world, there's little reason to make contact with anything that isn't under human control. Anthropocentrism follows because we simply don't engage with much of anything that wasn't made by humans and for humans.
- Dante's idea of heaven is, to my mind, the Western approach to the more Eastern idea of becoming "one with everything." Death isn't the end: we dissolve into eternity, the world-soul, the Absolute, whatever you'd like to call it. We submit to the transcendent and are reintegrated into it.
Max Weber articulates the "disenchanted" perspective:
Now, this process of disenchantment, which has continued to exist in Occidental culture for millennia, and, in general, this 'progress,' to which science belongs as a link and motive force, do they have any meanings that go beyond the purely practical and technical? You will find this question raised in the most principled form in the works of Leo Tolstoi. He came to raise the question in a peculiar way. All his broodings increasingly revolved around the problem of whether or not death is a meaningful phenomenon. And his answer was: for civilized man death has no meaning. It has none because the individual life of civilized man, placed into an infinite 'progress,' according to its own imminent meaning should never come to an end; for there is always a further step ahead of one who stands in the march of progress. And no man who comes to die stands upon the peak which lies in infinity. Abraham, or some peasant of the past, died 'old and satiated with life' because he stood in the organic cycle of life; because his life, in terms of its meaning and on the eve of his days, had given to him what life had to offer; because for him there remained no puzzles he might wish to solve; and therefore he could have had 'enough' of life. Whereas civilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become 'tired of life' but not 'satiated with life.' He catches only the most minute part of what the life of the spirit brings forth ever anew, and what he seizes is always something provisional and not definitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence. And because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless; by its very 'progressiveness' it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness.
- The "cost and sacrifice" is a sticking point, sure—especially if policy and development are being guided by the idea that ensuring the existence of virtual "people" in the future is more important than making life more worth living in the here and now. The future isn't known and doesn't exist, and it's insidiously self-serving for tech billionaires and their hangers-on to presume to wield it as their own instrument.
I think the more "vulgar" forms of science fiction have one up on the more "philosophical" forms in this respect--I think what spacefaring transhuman demigods would do with their time is conquer and kill one another, devoting their Jupiter brains to devising ever deadlier weapons to reduce the habitable universe to clouds of debris in the dream that they, and not those other people, would at last rule it all. The lust for power and dominion would be their source of meaning.
You're right, and I don't much relish the idea that the culmination of human progress might be turning ourselves into the Borg. I don't think we'll know in our lifetimes whether TESCREAL set eventually has its way, but they're working against a fast-ticking clock.
Oof, that's rough. If you want some TESCREAL stuff that's less yucky, then Robin Hanson's Age of Em nonfiction https://ageofem.com/ and Eliezer Yudkowsky's Three Worlds Collide novella https://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pdf are ok reads. But even if I always imagine any promise of paradise is a carrot dangled in front of gullible to continue a never ending grind, you've also shown it's crappy idea in and of itself.
Hey, have you ever seen The Good Place? That's a TV series morally illiterate people should watch. As a starter course in thinking about goodness. It starts with familiar sitcom structure, and builds from there... eventually they get to a pretty ok idea of heaven.
I *might* read Three World Collide, provided I can suppress my gag reflex. I'm willing to hear Yudkowsky out for as long as it takes me to read fifty-something pages, but everything I know about him makes my skin crawl.
My wife made me watch a few excerpts from The Good Place. It was kind of entertaining, I guess? I really need to have my arm twisted into watching more than one episode of anything, but maybe someday I'll look at a "best episodes" list and check out one or two of them.
An The Good Place starts as a sitcom in which characters learn a bit every episode, if you're not interested in long form getting to know characters, maybe just watch the trolley problem episode, and the Janet episode.
Man, Yudkowski was great, when I was a twenty something struggling to voice my own iconoclastic ideas. He is ground zero for the sort of thinking that lead to rococo's basilisk though. But there's no AI in Three Worlds, even though all his fiction becomes about the singularity if he goes on long enough.
So... removing meaning from the world made it anthropocentric? Like, now we rewrote the fabric of the universe, meaning of life, Heaven if you will, as exactly our way of life but without imperfection? Why is the tought of idling forever on christian heaven less ghastly than picturing us as an infinite swarm of children in Absolute Safe Capsules? Is it the cost and sacrifice needed to achieve that? Is the guilt of knowing that everything bad that happens will be our fault when we have the power to build Dyson spheres monthly?
Well, that doesn't matter as we wont be able to accelerate any further anyways.
To some of your questions!
- In a "disenchanted" world, there's no provision for the existence of the transcendent in any really meaningful sense, and in a technologized world, there's little reason to make contact with anything that isn't under human control. Anthropocentrism follows because we simply don't engage with much of anything that wasn't made by humans and for humans.
- Dante's idea of heaven is, to my mind, the Western approach to the more Eastern idea of becoming "one with everything." Death isn't the end: we dissolve into eternity, the world-soul, the Absolute, whatever you'd like to call it. We submit to the transcendent and are reintegrated into it.
Max Weber articulates the "disenchanted" perspective:
Now, this process of disenchantment, which has continued to exist in Occidental culture for millennia, and, in general, this 'progress,' to which science belongs as a link and motive force, do they have any meanings that go beyond the purely practical and technical? You will find this question raised in the most principled form in the works of Leo Tolstoi. He came to raise the question in a peculiar way. All his broodings increasingly revolved around the problem of whether or not death is a meaningful phenomenon. And his answer was: for civilized man death has no meaning. It has none because the individual life of civilized man, placed into an infinite 'progress,' according to its own imminent meaning should never come to an end; for there is always a further step ahead of one who stands in the march of progress. And no man who comes to die stands upon the peak which lies in infinity. Abraham, or some peasant of the past, died 'old and satiated with life' because he stood in the organic cycle of life; because his life, in terms of its meaning and on the eve of his days, had given to him what life had to offer; because for him there remained no puzzles he might wish to solve; and therefore he could have had 'enough' of life. Whereas civilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become 'tired of life' but not 'satiated with life.' He catches only the most minute part of what the life of the spirit brings forth ever anew, and what he seizes is always something provisional and not definitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence. And because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless; by its very 'progressiveness' it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness.
- The "cost and sacrifice" is a sticking point, sure—especially if policy and development are being guided by the idea that ensuring the existence of virtual "people" in the future is more important than making life more worth living in the here and now. The future isn't known and doesn't exist, and it's insidiously self-serving for tech billionaires and their hangers-on to presume to wield it as their own instrument.
Thank you.
I think the more "vulgar" forms of science fiction have one up on the more "philosophical" forms in this respect--I think what spacefaring transhuman demigods would do with their time is conquer and kill one another, devoting their Jupiter brains to devising ever deadlier weapons to reduce the habitable universe to clouds of debris in the dream that they, and not those other people, would at last rule it all. The lust for power and dominion would be their source of meaning.
You're right, and I don't much relish the idea that the culmination of human progress might be turning ourselves into the Borg. I don't think we'll know in our lifetimes whether TESCREAL set eventually has its way, but they're working against a fast-ticking clock.
Not the Borg, but many separate Borg Collectives who all hate each other and enjoy hating each other above all.