there are enough stars in the universe to give every unit of plankton its own dyson swarm made of computronium instantiating its owner's subjective individual utopia. (if there aren't as per current astronomy models, just wait one or two more iterations of "wow, this new telescope is seeing light from further out than we thought the universe was wide! again!")
good for the ones whose preference is competing for status. those who want to be God Emperor Of Everything can be uploaded into their personal godly realm.
In which they wont be the god emperor of anything, there will be countless god emperors too... What good is a dominion that is the size sand grains in relative terms.
as good as perfection if they chose to forget they're in a sim. gods, it's like not everyone has spent two decades thinking around this so as to have a precomputed and cached response to every obvious objection or something
Gods, this issue is a 24 century one not two 2 decades. You are not addressing the issue, have you ever competed olympically? Do you think anyone can create a substitute for you then ask you to look into the man in black mind deleter so you can live the fantasy of olympics? I experienced olympics, nothing you do can give me that.
Directly related, love, which has been an experience more magical than olympics for me, cant be conferred to %90+ of people in the false world, the chatbot sexbot epidemic, its a sign of malaise not wellness.
you still only experienced your experiences through your own sensorium. given perfect vr and mind editing, you can get to subjectively live anything you want.
Certainly, I could be going through such an experience right now in fact. But when asked, current me, I will say I will only derive meaning if it is real in the sense I am not in a pod alongside millions of humans who are in similar pods and I am so vain as to simulate people that are not real to be around me.
Second this, I'm interested too. Olympians are a breed apart - I was a regionally competitive powerlifter when I was younger, and one of my friends and mentors was a former Olympic qualifier in hurdles.
Even 15 years past his competitive prime, he could casually power clean 405+ for reps, at the 181 weight class.
I think for most people it doesn't matter that some hypothetically higher status individual exists if you never interact with them and people around you don't talk about them.
What matters is the people you interact with and focus on, so only competing within your deliberately isolated community is viable.
So you can make everyone who wants it high status by creating a bunch of super chill humanlike minds that aren't interested in pursuing zero sum status competitions.
Yeah 'Look to Windward' in particular deals well with these questions. No spoilers: Outsiders are confused to see purposeful extreme danger seeking behaviour by the Culture (for example, lava surfing with no life backup) and enduring creativity and art. He does get around some of the contradictions by introducing the concept of 'subliming' (graduating into the energy plane? the next dimension up?) for those who reach a certain level of singularity, which is a bit of a cop out.
There was an interesting bit about the Culture *not* subliming unlike other cultures that had reached the same point.
I think Banks was sort of making the point that the Culture was hanging around specifically to interfere with other civilizations, in a "big frog in a small pond" sense. There was some feeling (or at least I got this feeling) that they were being a bit childish as a result.
Also, one of the only places of real intense competition is being accepted into the Culture's various outreach efforts--Contact, Special Circumstances, and then the weirder branches of Contact that deal with the sublimed, the extinct, hegemonizing swarms, etc.
Yeah, the lava surfing is interesting, as well as the "disposables" who (unlike almost all Culture citizens) aren't backed up, so if they die, they're gone forever instead of having a slightly-before-death version of themselves wake up in a new body a week later.
I thought it was because it seemed like most of the outside civilizations had an anti-AI bias and the Minds would prefer to not lie or mislead about what they are when possible so they left as much of the diplomacy and intrigue to the humans as they were confident that the best of them could not fuck up (with the help of a super intelligent Ai companion, of course)
I think the Culture novels cheat, by only focusing on the tiny minority of humans whom the Minds pick for lives of meaning and danger in galactic political intrigue as Contact and Special Circumstances agents.
Good point. I wonder what we'd really think of the full hedonists, if they were the focus of a slice-of-life-in-the-Culture book. Would we be jealous? Contemptuous? Would we only find them sympathetic insofar as they have struggles to confront (with status, etc)?
Independently of all that, I think the book would probably suck. Then again, tastes differ, some people love slice of life.
I've always wondered what a story set in a post-scarcity utopia in the style of a wholesome sitcom would be like. You could have conflict in the form of wacky social farces where the stakes are things like the strengthening or weakening of a friendship, and where the well-aligned ASIs don't resolve things because they think the amusing anecdotes being generated will be more valuable to the people involved than the risks to social ties. I feel like that could make for some pretty fun narratives.
It would resemble a PG Wodehouse novel or any number of other stories about rich people getting into romantic etc hijinks. Bertie Wooster doesn't actually live in a post-scarcity society, but he might as well given that he can easily acquire anything he desires and doesn't need to engage in any economically useful activity. (It helps that his imagination is pretty limited, which stops him desiring anything outside his immediate lifestyle.) And Jeeves is like a superintelligent mostly-aligned AI.
There's a sense in which even modern middle class people live in something approximating a post-scarcity utopia. Sure, things aren't actually post-scarce but it's not like I'm feeling scarcity on a day to day basis. The things I actually need to consume are a tiny fraction of my earnings, and the only thing I own that's actually expensive is a pure positional good (a large block of land in a nice suburb close to a major city). The dramas that afflict my daily life are extremely low stakes and small scale, which is why my life would make a lousy book.
You do see those folks in various places. They're going to parties, taking part in orgies, competing to get to attend some exclusive event, playing competitive games, raising families, traveling, sightseeing, learning to play almost-impossible musical pieces[1], etc.
Most Culture humanoids and drones are just hanging out being the idle rich. A handful bend themselves into a pretzel to become missionaries or spies or archaeologists or ambassadors to other civilizations.
Think of someone in our world who is born to great wealth and privilege. Most will live lives of ease and luxury, but some small subset will get PhDs in math, or join the military and end up as Navy Seals, or become Olympic athletes. A few will devote themselves to public service, maybe working in the State Dept or getting elected to Congress.
yea I always assumed the fast majority of culture citizens are just wired-headed or an equivalent, but that still leaves billions of others to tell stories about (though even most of those billions do not do anything meaningful, so you're just left with culture agents)
My impression of the Culture novels (especially "Player of Games" and "Hydrogen Sonata") was that the humans in the settings are essentially pets of AI Minds. They are cherished pets who lead fulfilling lives and are generally happy; but they have virtually no effect on anything important (beyound the choice of their next vacation destination and other such things). And maybe this is indeed the best that we humans can hope for...
Yep. A few do useful or dangerous things for the Culture, but they are extremely rare. In _Remember Phlebas_, we learn about a tiny subset of humanoids who are basically superpredictors, with insights that even Minds find useful without fully understanding why. Most of the stories feature humanoids involved in Contact or Special Circumstances, or foreigner interacting with the Culture in various ways (friendly or not). I think it is hard to write an interesting story about life in a utopia.
Less cynically put, relations between humans would become the only true source of limitation and meaning. In this sense, the life of upper middle-class professionals in the developed world is probably closer to utopia than it is to primitive agriculture. The most significant physical needs are all addressed and (other than being blinded by death), we are mostly preoccupied with our own internal fulfillment and relations to one another. The Jane Austen books about gentry interacting are basically just about people interacting and vying for status and affection from one another. Utopia would allow an out from this via simulated relationships, but the knowledge that they are a simulation would probably leave people unsatisfied. In the end, we all crave an Other to see and to know us.
1) The Culture cycle (I can't speak to Matter/Surface Detail/Hydrogen Sonata) is *depressing*. It's what, 4/7 "lolno this was all a Culture scheme with clarketech waiting in the wings, the suspense was illusory", 1/7 "you died not knowing your entire life was a scheme", and 2/7 "nothing is accomplished and one of the main characters dies for no reason". I think Excession's the only one without an ending that screams "bleak and meaningless", and even then it's bittersweet rather than happy because of the Excession's judgement.
2) The Culture is not a stable state. The primary source of meaning in the Culture is Contact, which both a) requires there to be non-Culture civilisations, b) assimilates non-Culture civilisations into the Culture. As was IIRC pointed out at some point, this is fundamentally a paradox; sooner or later, either they'll bite off more than they can chew and get destroyed (as is implied to have happened by the end of Look to Windward), or they'll assimilate everyone and have nothing more to do.
The difference being that the Cultures overminds are sentient, they have goals and agendas of their own, that they cannot immediately satisfy for themselves. This means that the Culture Minds are not in the scenario given above, they are in a world much like ours. This gives humans leverage if they can find a way to contribute to those goals.
An interesting implication of this line of thinking is that the Culture's Minds might not want to change human nature and culture very much, because that might eliminate our usefulness. Puppets can't come up with new ideas.
It's just that the AI:s anyone interacts with are the ones that have been designed (or self-designed) to not just instantly ascend into the ecstacy of higher mathematics.
> Why did I come across Deep Utopia this month? Why did I write this review? Why are you reading it? What are you trying to tell yourself?
You came across it because you have been spiraling around fundamental questions of meaning and existence which most philosophers across almost all cultures of human history have considered important, but current thought leaders consider stupid and wrong and possibly evil. You’re smart enough to see the zeitgeist is largely insane, humble enough to know that pursuit of the truth is hard, but not yet courageous enough to take the reputational risk of asking the reasonable question, “what if all those wisdom traditions are just different maps of the same underlying reality?” and then attempting to try and let your internal map of value converge to this territory using the methods of rationality.
I personally am trying to convince myself it’s worth my time to keep pestering you about this 😂
Cat, a lifeform specialized in detecting small prey animals and catching them: *sees a mouse, chases it, catches, eats it*
Human: “Wow evolution has made such a great hunter, look at it! Amazing!”
Cat: *sees a laser pointer dot, frantically tries to catch it but cannot, as it is just light*
Human: “lol too optimised for wanting to catch things am I right”
***
ACT II
Human, a lifeform specialized in using and making tools and seeing if tools are good for different tasks: *sees a knife* “Aha! Someone made this sharp tool to cut things. I see, it’s really good for that!”
Human: *looks at his own body* “Who made this?? What were they thinking? There’s some bigger hidden meaning behind this right? What am I made for… What is the purpose of my mortal life? Am I good? Am I bad? Is there a God? I keep looking for my destiny but alas, I can’t figure it out….”
People tend to view raising their children to be the most meaningful part of their lives. So I figured existential crises to be a side effect of meaningfulness for guiding us to have and raise children. But tool use in general makes more sense.
Regardless of tool use, I agree that people who have lived with and without children say the most meaningful part of their whole life was raising their children.
So I was bemused that in the OP it was framed as difficult to think of a lifestyle that makes "A unique positive contribution? An interesting contribution? One that directly affects the lives of lots of non-supernatural non-dead people?"
Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. I think another part of it is just that most people don't understand the difference between terminal and instrumental goals. Instrumental goals have to promote some higher end to be meaningful, while terminal goals don't. So when people who don't conceptualize those as difference notice that their terminal goals don't promote any higher end, they have a little panic attack and flail around for something for their values to "mean".
I also think that a lot of memes have evolved to take advantage of that misunderstanding to manipulate people into believing that propagating the meme is the "higher end" that they're searching for- which might help explain why something as simple and fundamental to the human experience as the difference between means and ends which aren't also means isn't really common knowledge.
there are no ends. there are no terminal goals. each of us in a bunch of thermostats measuring varied (and more or less mutually incompatible/contradictory/trading-off) environmental variables and inner felt senses, trying to optimise all of them at the same time.
Sure, but that just means that we have a ton of little terminal goals rather than a few big ones, don't you think?
I mean, if a means is a goal intended to promote some other goal, than barring an infinite regress, that has to bottom out at some target that's not itself a means to an end. And even if that target is in reality some very specific, unnamed pattern of neural activity, it does seem like we can usually roughly model it as something like "I value this smell for its own sake" or "I value this instinctive feeling of gaining status for its own sake", etc.
Could you expand on that? I'm not sure I understand what you mean there.
It sounds like you may be arguing that our goals bottom out on incoherent preferences- valuing A over B over C over A. But if that's the case, wouldn't our most basic drives be vulnerable to a Dutch book/money pump strategy? Like, charge someone to trade A for B, then B for C, then C for A and so on?
I agree with you. Enjoying a good meal, a friendly touch, entertainment, a comfortable temperature are all little terminal goals. In Sophia's terminology, those are all little thermostats. Personally, I'm happy with that. When the little terminal goals conflict, we need to decide how to weight them, and those are personal preferences, and I'm happy with that.
Human, sees a knife: Aha! Someone made this sharp tool to cut things. I see, it's really good for that!
Human, looks at own body: Aha! Someone made this all-purpose tool to do all sorts of things. I see, it's really good for that!
It's very interesting to take the human instinct to find purpose and point to the human body as an example of that instinct failing. Obviously there is quite a lot to learn from our own bodies, and even quite a lot to learn specifically from asking what the purpose is of different physical traits. The nature of the creator of those traits (whether God or evolution) is irrelevant; the traits themselves have purpose by any reasonable definition of the word, and divining that purpose is fruitful.
If that's the case, then I think we would have to conclude that they're very bad and inaccurate mapmakers.
This is something I invested a whole lot of my time and energy into when I was younger, exploring and comparing different religious traditions, and while I found that in some respects, where people tended to believe that their religious traditions were unique, they were quite similar (patterns of reasoning, standards and forms of evidence, explaining cosmic scale events with dynamics relatable to human experience,) in other respects where people imagined they might be universal and connect to some underlying spiritual truth (ethics, cosmology, humans' place and purpose in reality) they were wildly different and in some cases probably irreconcilable. My conclusion was that if we supposed there was any real underlying spiritual reality, we could not trust any existing religious traditions to tell us anything about it.
Meaning is a communal activity; it arises from deep connections between things, as evidenced from, eg, frequent repetition or by reference to these things in many different contexts. Religion and ritual give obvious examples, but they’re not the only examples. You don’t need to actually believe in Christianity, or like Shakespeare, to get meaning from a society where KJV and Shakespearean language and allusions are used repeatedly.
Our current malaise is the result of “too much” choice in all our culture, meaning we no longer have these shared concepts, and the resultant deep repetition and communal meaning - we all watch different movies, read different books, listen to different music, even speak different Englishes.
I see no way to fix this. Even attempts to fix it lead to their own problems - eg much of NIMBYism is obsessive preservationism, which in turn results from a desperate attempt to keep the lived environment unchanging as one thing, at least *something*, that we have as a common shared experience…
This is the whole reason I keep reading Scott, to see if the same soul that wrote "Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person Said" will finally be brave enough to walk the untrod path and not simply describe what a man who has never walked it imagines it must be like to do so
The way I think of utopia is that we, compared to the best possible world, suffer from a vast and suffocating shortfall of competence, and our thinking about problems is indelibly marked by it. Consider: sports as a skill will be more solved in utopia, but so will *sports-creation*, game-creation, challenge-creation and so on. If you imagine objectively solving soccer or weightlifting, you're only upgrading one side of the scale.
That's a good point. Similar to how Catan is an objectively better family game night than Monopoly. For a long time Catan didn't exist, so family game nights were more about one of the few games that did exist but were objectively inferior.
Yes, because ten turns of people rolling dice and nothing happening is riveting. At least in Monopoly -something- interesting happens every turn, even if it's just variance in how many more turns until you pass Go.
Catan is not an objectively better game, but it is a -different- game, which, in the era in which it came out, was enough. Today there are a wide variety of genuinely good games! And a whole lot of stuff that stretches the definition of "board game" in interesting ways - technically Concept is a board game with rules, but I've never met anybody who actually followed all of the rules, because the central gameplay loop is far more interesting than the rules dictating who wins the game.
I've never played Catan but I've played plenty of Monopoly and it's not hard to imagine an objectively better game than Monopoly.
The last game of Monopoly I played would never have ended, we got to the point where all properties are owned and nobody has all of one colour. And nobody was willing to trade properties to let someone else have all of one colour. So we all just kept going round the board getting slowly richer at roughly the same rate.
What is hard to imagine is how such an objectively terrible game got so popular. I've heard that it's better if you play by the rules and don't skip the auctions, but if that's true, that just makes it worse. Monopoly was around before Catan, but house ruled Monopoly was not around before official Monopoly, so how did the objectively worse game win out?
I've never played it with auctions (or money for free parking, which I understand is also a common house rule).
But then again, in my (family's) experience everyone almost always buys any property they land on immediately, so it doesn't come up.
Monopoly is the victory of concept over gameplay. The *idea* of Monopoly is fun, (especially for kids, for whom the idea of having *thousands* of dollars is a joy in itself). It's just that the rules were laid down before anyone properly understood board game design.
Lack of competition, at a time when the only multiplayer family boardgames that existed were Monopoly and Scrabble.
Monopoly was *meant* to be boring and frustrating and whatever. It was originally part of a matched set, with the other side of the board being a cooperative game focused on building a (not very deep) socialist utopia, and the socialist designer tried to make that part fun and the capitalist part unfun.
She failed, because whatever the reality of capitalism, people really really like to fantasize about being triumphant billionaires, People would have had *more* fun playing a well-designed game about people trying to get rich, but they had *some* fun playing the "hey, you're not supposed to be enjoying that" version.
A bunch of greedy capitalists noticed, and bought the rights, and started selling the pro-capitalist version that people wanted to play. Which gave it the critical first-mover advantage; anyone proposing an alternative would be trying to sell it into a market where Monopoly is the default Family Game, and everybody knows the rules, and bringing out some new objectively-superior boardgame is like showing up for RPG night with a bunch of Conspicuously Not Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks.
There's a reason the new class of objectively superior boardgames is often called "Eurogames". Lizzie Magie and Parker Brothers poisoned the well for good boardgames in the United States; we had to wait until Europe recovered from WWII, developed its own native boardgaming tradition, and finally managed to catch the attention of nerdy-but-not-hopelessly-isolated Americans.
The game those greedy capitalists sold isn't the original monopoly. They tried to modify it to make it more fun. Maybe they succeeded, and the original was even worse.
Between Monopoly and Scrabble, Scrabble wins by a long shot.
And yet there are reasonably objective standards one can articulate as to why Settlers of Catan is objectively superior to Monopoly as a tool for entertaining social interaction. Things like no player elimination, no player quasi-elimination where they're locked into a position where they can't realistically win but are expected to play on, and a much shorter endgame once a high-probability victor emerges. You're basically always playing a game you can reasonably hope to win, until someone else wins and you congratulate them and go do something else.
I suppose these aren't *absolutely* objective criteria on account of their being somewhere a masochistic gamer who'd rather spend an hour playing out a losing position in a game of Monopoly.
Also, there's more social interaction baked into the rules, and the competition isn't as blatantly zero-sum adversarial.
I came here to say this. A large facet of what makes games fun is exploring the knowledge space and generally experiencing exciting scenarios. Especially with friends. There is a vast vast set of game rules undiscovered. Soccer and Football are poorly designed compared to what's possible (whatever your goal)
(Put differently: we will solve exactly all problems that we want solved. For problems that we do not want solved, we will instead replace them with far more fiendish problems of a challenge and scale hitherto unimagined.)
gonna read the post in full, just signposting my starting position as "solving All The Problems would be absolutely fully good, any trade-off can instantly solvable in under five seconds of thought, this is blindingly obvious. given transhumanistan tech it's trivial to think of uploading or full-immersing people into a vr shard with others compatible with them. whoever wants hardships could get them conveniently instantiated for themselves and anyone else with the same suffering kink who wants to share it with them. This Is Not Hard."
I think there's a related question which *is* hard, though, namely, how do you (or anyone else) *know* you have, in fact, Solved All The Problems.
Ra comes to mind (https://qntm.org/ra) as a piece of fiction that considers this.
Actually-in-fact Solving All The Problems strikes me as similar to approaching zero in the denominator: the amount of contact with reality required to Solve All The Problems increases as your standards for "solving" do. And there's an upper limit on the amount of contact you *can* have with reality - when it comes to prophecy, you can pick accurate, complete, or timely, but not all three.
> whoever wants hardships could get them conveniently instantiated for themselves
Only real hardship is ultimately meaningful. Virtual hardship like only meaningful in the sense that it prepares you and is a proxy for real hardship. Remove real hardship, and the "just make virtual hardship" solution disappears.
This problem only increases as transhumanism level increases, because more intelligent and more reflective transhuman-agents will more readily realize that their taste for games and learning and training and so forth is just the way Natural Selection used to make us prepare for the real challenges (like kittens play-hunting), making the loss of those even more tragic. They will, on an intellectual level, quickly realize how pointless it is — and after the intellect, emotions will follow.
If simulations didn't work for hardship then things like sports wouldn't be so popular. You have an group of people (professional athletes) who manage to be extremely high status just by virtue of socially prestigious success at a zero sum competition. This is as clear of evidence as any that anything can provide a sense of meaning if it's seen as important within one's social environment
In Stirling and Pournelle's _Go Tell the Spartans_, there is a very rich and well-connected character who goes off to a frontier world to take part in a revolution, basically for the adventure. He reflects early in the story that safaris and mountain climbing and such (danger for its own sake) was unsatisfying, whereas danger and adventure while trying to do something very hard and important was very satisfying.
Honestly I think people really overemphasize the importance of genuine danger. People confuse what is enjoyable to read, with what's enjoyable to experience firsthand.
Generally I think people would overall enjoy simulations with no risk of death more, precisely because you aren't stressed out by the possibility of death!
Similarly I think most of the thrill of say extreme sports comes from the feeling of danger not actual danger. So most people are wired such that I think they'd greatly prefer the thrill in a safe context.
After all few people would enjoy a rollercoaster more just by virtue of knowing it's unsafe!
I think you have never tried extreme sports. I can tell you first hand, that the fun of surfing definitely lies in the technical limitation of the situation making it dangerous to attempt rescues, but the outcome is clearly coupled with your decisions. So that the good outcome very strongly depends on your actions, giving the actions meaning.
The rollercoaster example doesn't work, because supposedly the rollercoaster being more unsafe would be unconnected to the actions of the riders.
>the fun of surfing definitely lies in the technical limitation of the situation making it dangerous to attempt rescues
If people developed some really effective swimming robots, I doubt the majority of surfers would think that somehow detracted from the fun. To the contrary I'd expect such safeguards to make things more fun because you could do things that would otherwise probably get you killed if you did them long enough.
There's people who throw their parachute out of a plane and jump after it, so I certainly believe some people want real risk. However, the rarity of the practice doesn't indicate that's not still super rare.
All the evidence I'm aware of seems to suggest that even among thrill seekers people want the feeling of danger not necessarily real danger. It's just that RN those two things heavily correlate.
These ideas have been explored many times over in science fiction - I was surprised not to see any mention of The Culture, Star Trek, or Cory Doctorow.
Culture novels tend to be a bit internally inconsistent about this but generally in a world with transhuman self modification, perfect chemical bliss, and perfectly benevolent omnipotent AI, people tend to have a great time for a few centuries partying it up and then go into increasingly long periods of hibernation. Same with Doctorow's novels.
But why would they get bored enough to go into those hibernations if they can just hack their brains/erase their memories to not be bored? If it is impossible then the utopia is not deep enough.
One thing that always seemed hugely irksome about the Culture is how suboptimally it seems like the humans supposedly perfect lives are.
In a better utopia I'd expect humanlike minds to first experience every kind of simulated adventure. With the NPCS in the simulations being a mix of mostly characters put on by an AGI DM/GM, and a few newly created minds (always created so they're happy and glad to have been made).
Then once people can no longer be entertained by this (after probably a *very* long time) they would grow up more, so they can now appreciate totally new things. In the same way that you can already appreciate things as an adult which you couldn't as a young child. So the setting's superintelligences shouldn't be this aloof other species, they should be what everyone eventually becomes!
My sense is that there's massive variation in this. There's a guy in one of the books who is about as old as the Culture--he just decided not to let himself die. People know about him and think his choice is kinda weird, but he seems to get along fine in Culture society. There are people who get bored and have themselves Stored for a period of time, or until some event happens, or maybe permanently on the assumption that the Culture will Sublime sooner or later and then they'll be pulled in as part of the process. There's a very weird guy who hates being around other people, and so gets a "job" as the one humanoid in an asteroid in deep space that is a hidden emergency weapons cache. There are people who like having kids and have a huge number, and others who have none. There's not really a problem either way--the Culture doesn't need humans to do any work so a falling population isn't a problem; the Culture has vast resources so accomodating another few billion humans is no big deal.
I, too, would love a longform SSC/ACX review of the King Follett Discourse. Someone ought to make it happen! Paging TracingWoodgrains & Adam S. Miller for a collaboration here?
Interested in your argument that if there are no longer unmet needs there would be no further reason to pray. In the Jewish formulation, "bakasha/request" is only one type of prayer. "Hallel/praise" is another, which I don't see becoming obsolete under these conditions. If the provable nature of God turns out to be something like "the One who incarnates in infinite forms and whose desire to Be and to be forgotten, sought, found and known breathes existence into being" - would that not warrant and inspire endless praise no matter how many new forms existence/incarnation might take or the degree to which our own work participates in creation?
"And around the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind: 7 the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like an eagle in flight. 8 And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say,
“Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty,
who was and is and is to come!”
9 And whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to him who is seated on the throne, who lives forever and ever, 10 the twenty-four elders fall down before him who is seated on the throne and worship him who lives forever and ever. They cast their crowns before the throne, saying,
I am rather puzzled that you want to “endlessly praise” a God who blatantly shows that he does not have a clue that might is not identical to right.
He comes out quite flat-footed in this regard in his famous answer to Job; here is a taste of the type of “argument” he uses when Job complains that there is no proportionate relationship between the size of Job’s sins and the size of the punishment God has metered out (including killing all of Job’s sons):
“Dress for action[a] like a man;
I will question you, and you make it known to me.
8 Will you even put me in the wrong?
Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?
9 Have you an arm like God,
and can you thunder with a voice like his?
… God goes on to state that since he not only is stronger than Job, but can also create more stuff than him, Job should shut the hell up.
…Which he does, since Job is not stupid or suicidal.
God then rewards him by, among other things, giving him the same number of sons that he has killed. It is apparent that God thinks that as long as the number is the same, no harm has been done.
To quote the philosopher Peter Wessel Zappfe in his 600 page doctorate thesis “On the Tragic”: “In his answer to Job God comes across as a cosmic caveman, almost sympathetic in his total ignorance of what moral questions are about.”
I'm not sure where you got the idea that my conception of the divine is the vengeful male warmonger described in books written by mortal men... What's praiseworthy is not how things are but that they are- existence as a miracle and gift not because its laws are just but because it Is, and we are, and we get to experience sense perception and agency, and do with them what we choose
Sorry about that, theological references to any of the three Abrahamic religions (here: Judaism), always triggers my Job's book reflex. A holy book in all three religions.
A great text, by the way, so don't get me wrong - the book of Job is right up there with Ecclesiastes.
I like the idea. Match God's power (the old human dream), or show similar ability to create impressive stuff (super-AIs?) and He will take us more seriously.
Thank you. Angels already live in Deep Utopia and this is how they spend their time. Alternatively, if there is no personal God to praise, pull an Aristotle and contemplate the impersonal one.
Amen
there are enough stars in the universe to give every unit of plankton its own dyson swarm made of computronium instantiating its owner's subjective individual utopia. (if there aren't as per current astronomy models, just wait one or two more iterations of "wow, this new telescope is seeing light from further out than we thought the universe was wide! again!")
IMO Iain M. Banks's Culture novels deal with this pretty well. We'll still compete for status even if we no longer need to compete for resources
good for the ones whose preference is competing for status. those who want to be God Emperor Of Everything can be uploaded into their personal godly realm.
In which they wont be the god emperor of anything, there will be countless god emperors too... What good is a dominion that is the size sand grains in relative terms.
as good as perfection if they chose to forget they're in a sim. gods, it's like not everyone has spent two decades thinking around this so as to have a precomputed and cached response to every obvious objection or something
Gods, this issue is a 24 century one not two 2 decades. You are not addressing the issue, have you ever competed olympically? Do you think anyone can create a substitute for you then ask you to look into the man in black mind deleter so you can live the fantasy of olympics? I experienced olympics, nothing you do can give me that.
Directly related, love, which has been an experience more magical than olympics for me, cant be conferred to %90+ of people in the false world, the chatbot sexbot epidemic, its a sign of malaise not wellness.
you still only experienced your experiences through your own sensorium. given perfect vr and mind editing, you can get to subjectively live anything you want.
Certainly, I could be going through such an experience right now in fact. But when asked, current me, I will say I will only derive meaning if it is real in the sense I am not in a pod alongside millions of humans who are in similar pods and I am so vain as to simulate people that are not real to be around me.
Corollary: I’m not sure there’s any way to prove I’m not already a 30th century epicurean in the middle of an ill-advised VR “dopamine fast”.
That's interesting. What did you compete in? What was the experience like?
Second this, I'm interested too. Olympians are a breed apart - I was a regionally competitive powerlifter when I was younger, and one of my friends and mentors was a former Olympic qualifier in hurdles.
Even 15 years past his competitive prime, he could casually power clean 405+ for reps, at the 181 weight class.
Obviously in a couple of decades lovebots are coming.
G. K. Chesterton
The Holy of Holies
‘Elder father, though thine eyes
Shine with hoary mysteries,
Canst thou tell what in the heart
Of a cowslip blossom lies?
‘Smaller than all lives that be,
Secret as the deepest sea,
Stands a little house of seeds,
Like an elfin’s granary.
‘Speller of the stones and weeds,
Skilled in Nature’s crafts and creeds,
Tell me what is in the heart
Of the smallest of the seeds.’
‘God Almighty, and with Him
Cherubim and Seraphim,
Filling all eternity—
Adonai Elohim.’
I think for most people it doesn't matter that some hypothetically higher status individual exists if you never interact with them and people around you don't talk about them.
What matters is the people you interact with and focus on, so only competing within your deliberately isolated community is viable.
So you can make everyone who wants it high status by creating a bunch of super chill humanlike minds that aren't interested in pursuing zero sum status competitions.
Yeah 'Look to Windward' in particular deals well with these questions. No spoilers: Outsiders are confused to see purposeful extreme danger seeking behaviour by the Culture (for example, lava surfing with no life backup) and enduring creativity and art. He does get around some of the contradictions by introducing the concept of 'subliming' (graduating into the energy plane? the next dimension up?) for those who reach a certain level of singularity, which is a bit of a cop out.
There was an interesting bit about the Culture *not* subliming unlike other cultures that had reached the same point.
I think Banks was sort of making the point that the Culture was hanging around specifically to interfere with other civilizations, in a "big frog in a small pond" sense. There was some feeling (or at least I got this feeling) that they were being a bit childish as a result.
Also, one of the only places of real intense competition is being accepted into the Culture's various outreach efforts--Contact, Special Circumstances, and then the weirder branches of Contact that deal with the sublimed, the extinct, hegemonizing swarms, etc.
Yeah, the lava surfing is interesting, as well as the "disposables" who (unlike almost all Culture citizens) aren't backed up, so if they die, they're gone forever instead of having a slightly-before-death version of themselves wake up in a new body a week later.
So *that's* why Contact/SC still uses humans, it's the Culture's entertainment complex for the ones that need real risk and real meaning.
Unless I'm misremembering, I think that's stated explicitly at one point in the series.
I wouldn't be too surprised, though I'd expect Banks to speak it from the mouth of someone cynical who suspects it but can't know. A Horza type.
I thought it was because it seemed like most of the outside civilizations had an anti-AI bias and the Minds would prefer to not lie or mislead about what they are when possible so they left as much of the diplomacy and intrigue to the humans as they were confident that the best of them could not fuck up (with the help of a super intelligent Ai companion, of course)
Much like in Star Trek, which also adds real status for Starfleet (Contact and especially Special Circumstances are for weirdos, though).
I think I'd rather play Louis XIV Simulator 2124 and just wirehead the status directly, thank you very much
I think the Culture novels cheat, by only focusing on the tiny minority of humans whom the Minds pick for lives of meaning and danger in galactic political intrigue as Contact and Special Circumstances agents.
Good point. I wonder what we'd really think of the full hedonists, if they were the focus of a slice-of-life-in-the-Culture book. Would we be jealous? Contemptuous? Would we only find them sympathetic insofar as they have struggles to confront (with status, etc)?
Independently of all that, I think the book would probably suck. Then again, tastes differ, some people love slice of life.
I've always wondered what a story set in a post-scarcity utopia in the style of a wholesome sitcom would be like. You could have conflict in the form of wacky social farces where the stakes are things like the strengthening or weakening of a friendship, and where the well-aligned ASIs don't resolve things because they think the amusing anecdotes being generated will be more valuable to the people involved than the risks to social ties. I feel like that could make for some pretty fun narratives.
It would resemble a PG Wodehouse novel or any number of other stories about rich people getting into romantic etc hijinks. Bertie Wooster doesn't actually live in a post-scarcity society, but he might as well given that he can easily acquire anything he desires and doesn't need to engage in any economically useful activity. (It helps that his imagination is pretty limited, which stops him desiring anything outside his immediate lifestyle.) And Jeeves is like a superintelligent mostly-aligned AI.
There's a sense in which even modern middle class people live in something approximating a post-scarcity utopia. Sure, things aren't actually post-scarce but it's not like I'm feeling scarcity on a day to day basis. The things I actually need to consume are a tiny fraction of my earnings, and the only thing I own that's actually expensive is a pure positional good (a large block of land in a nice suburb close to a major city). The dramas that afflict my daily life are extremely low stakes and small scale, which is why my life would make a lousy book.
>And Jeeves is like a superintelligent mostly-aligned AI.
AskJeeves? It was an early search engine.
You do see those folks in various places. They're going to parties, taking part in orgies, competing to get to attend some exclusive event, playing competitive games, raising families, traveling, sightseeing, learning to play almost-impossible musical pieces[1], etc.
Most Culture humanoids and drones are just hanging out being the idle rich. A handful bend themselves into a pretzel to become missionaries or spies or archaeologists or ambassadors to other civilizations.
Think of someone in our world who is born to great wealth and privilege. Most will live lives of ease and luxury, but some small subset will get PhDs in math, or join the military and end up as Navy Seals, or become Olympic athletes. A few will devote themselves to public service, maybe working in the State Dept or getting elected to Congress.
[1] Though she wasn't from the Culture.
yea I always assumed the fast majority of culture citizens are just wired-headed or an equivalent, but that still leaves billions of others to tell stories about (though even most of those billions do not do anything meaningful, so you're just left with culture agents)
My impression of the Culture novels (especially "Player of Games" and "Hydrogen Sonata") was that the humans in the settings are essentially pets of AI Minds. They are cherished pets who lead fulfilling lives and are generally happy; but they have virtually no effect on anything important (beyound the choice of their next vacation destination and other such things). And maybe this is indeed the best that we humans can hope for...
Yep. A few do useful or dangerous things for the Culture, but they are extremely rare. In _Remember Phlebas_, we learn about a tiny subset of humanoids who are basically superpredictors, with insights that even Minds find useful without fully understanding why. Most of the stories feature humanoids involved in Contact or Special Circumstances, or foreigner interacting with the Culture in various ways (friendly or not). I think it is hard to write an interesting story about life in a utopia.
Less cynically put, relations between humans would become the only true source of limitation and meaning. In this sense, the life of upper middle-class professionals in the developed world is probably closer to utopia than it is to primitive agriculture. The most significant physical needs are all addressed and (other than being blinded by death), we are mostly preoccupied with our own internal fulfillment and relations to one another. The Jane Austen books about gentry interacting are basically just about people interacting and vying for status and affection from one another. Utopia would allow an out from this via simulated relationships, but the knowledge that they are a simulation would probably leave people unsatisfied. In the end, we all crave an Other to see and to know us.
Well, no, they don't.
1) The Culture cycle (I can't speak to Matter/Surface Detail/Hydrogen Sonata) is *depressing*. It's what, 4/7 "lolno this was all a Culture scheme with clarketech waiting in the wings, the suspense was illusory", 1/7 "you died not knowing your entire life was a scheme", and 2/7 "nothing is accomplished and one of the main characters dies for no reason". I think Excession's the only one without an ending that screams "bleak and meaningless", and even then it's bittersweet rather than happy because of the Excession's judgement.
2) The Culture is not a stable state. The primary source of meaning in the Culture is Contact, which both a) requires there to be non-Culture civilisations, b) assimilates non-Culture civilisations into the Culture. As was IIRC pointed out at some point, this is fundamentally a paradox; sooner or later, either they'll bite off more than they can chew and get destroyed (as is implied to have happened by the end of Look to Windward), or they'll assimilate everyone and have nothing more to do.
Disagree. Culture is the win condition of our species.
The difference being that the Cultures overminds are sentient, they have goals and agendas of their own, that they cannot immediately satisfy for themselves. This means that the Culture Minds are not in the scenario given above, they are in a world much like ours. This gives humans leverage if they can find a way to contribute to those goals.
An interesting implication of this line of thinking is that the Culture's Minds might not want to change human nature and culture very much, because that might eliminate our usefulness. Puppets can't come up with new ideas.
Or I mean, they _can_., and _do_
It's just that the AI:s anyone interacts with are the ones that have been designed (or self-designed) to not just instantly ascend into the ecstacy of higher mathematics.
> Why did I come across Deep Utopia this month? Why did I write this review? Why are you reading it? What are you trying to tell yourself?
You came across it because you have been spiraling around fundamental questions of meaning and existence which most philosophers across almost all cultures of human history have considered important, but current thought leaders consider stupid and wrong and possibly evil. You’re smart enough to see the zeitgeist is largely insane, humble enough to know that pursuit of the truth is hard, but not yet courageous enough to take the reputational risk of asking the reasonable question, “what if all those wisdom traditions are just different maps of the same underlying reality?” and then attempting to try and let your internal map of value converge to this territory using the methods of rationality.
I personally am trying to convince myself it’s worth my time to keep pestering you about this 😂
i found this on years ago on the interwebs:
A PLAY ABOUT MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING IN TWO ACTS
ACT I
Cat, a lifeform specialized in detecting small prey animals and catching them: *sees a mouse, chases it, catches, eats it*
Human: “Wow evolution has made such a great hunter, look at it! Amazing!”
Cat: *sees a laser pointer dot, frantically tries to catch it but cannot, as it is just light*
Human: “lol too optimised for wanting to catch things am I right”
***
ACT II
Human, a lifeform specialized in using and making tools and seeing if tools are good for different tasks: *sees a knife* “Aha! Someone made this sharp tool to cut things. I see, it’s really good for that!”
Human: *looks at his own body* “Who made this?? What were they thinking? There’s some bigger hidden meaning behind this right? What am I made for… What is the purpose of my mortal life? Am I good? Am I bad? Is there a God? I keep looking for my destiny but alas, I can’t figure it out….”
People tend to view raising their children to be the most meaningful part of their lives. So I figured existential crises to be a side effect of meaningfulness for guiding us to have and raise children. But tool use in general makes more sense.
Regardless of tool use, I agree that people who have lived with and without children say the most meaningful part of their whole life was raising their children.
So I was bemused that in the OP it was framed as difficult to think of a lifestyle that makes "A unique positive contribution? An interesting contribution? One that directly affects the lives of lots of non-supernatural non-dead people?"
Parenting, obviously.
You seem ripe for Bokononism.
In the Books of Bokonon, Bokonon urges us to sing with him:
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly,
Man got to sit and wonder: Why, why, why?
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land,
Man got to tell himself he understand.
Love it! Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
History, read it and weep.
Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. I think another part of it is just that most people don't understand the difference between terminal and instrumental goals. Instrumental goals have to promote some higher end to be meaningful, while terminal goals don't. So when people who don't conceptualize those as difference notice that their terminal goals don't promote any higher end, they have a little panic attack and flail around for something for their values to "mean".
I also think that a lot of memes have evolved to take advantage of that misunderstanding to manipulate people into believing that propagating the meme is the "higher end" that they're searching for- which might help explain why something as simple and fundamental to the human experience as the difference between means and ends which aren't also means isn't really common knowledge.
there are no ends. there are no terminal goals. each of us in a bunch of thermostats measuring varied (and more or less mutually incompatible/contradictory/trading-off) environmental variables and inner felt senses, trying to optimise all of them at the same time.
Sure, but that just means that we have a ton of little terminal goals rather than a few big ones, don't you think?
I mean, if a means is a goal intended to promote some other goal, than barring an infinite regress, that has to bottom out at some target that's not itself a means to an end. And even if that target is in reality some very specific, unnamed pattern of neural activity, it does seem like we can usually roughly model it as something like "I value this smell for its own sake" or "I value this instinctive feeling of gaining status for its own sake", etc.
it is an infinite regress. on an oscillating circuit. there is no The Target.
a recentish scottpost ends with basically that as a placeholding conclusion. when i read it i thought "yup, scott's beginning to Get It"
Could you expand on that? I'm not sure I understand what you mean there.
It sounds like you may be arguing that our goals bottom out on incoherent preferences- valuing A over B over C over A. But if that's the case, wouldn't our most basic drives be vulnerable to a Dutch book/money pump strategy? Like, charge someone to trade A for B, then B for C, then C for A and so on?
I agree with you. Enjoying a good meal, a friendly touch, entertainment, a comfortable temperature are all little terminal goals. In Sophia's terminology, those are all little thermostats. Personally, I'm happy with that. When the little terminal goals conflict, we need to decide how to weight them, and those are personal preferences, and I'm happy with that.
I think you might instead say "I don't believe there are ends", because it's epistemologically defensible.
Human, sees a knife: Aha! Someone made this sharp tool to cut things. I see, it's really good for that!
Human, looks at own body: Aha! Someone made this all-purpose tool to do all sorts of things. I see, it's really good for that!
It's very interesting to take the human instinct to find purpose and point to the human body as an example of that instinct failing. Obviously there is quite a lot to learn from our own bodies, and even quite a lot to learn specifically from asking what the purpose is of different physical traits. The nature of the creator of those traits (whether God or evolution) is irrelevant; the traits themselves have purpose by any reasonable definition of the word, and divining that purpose is fruitful.
If that's the case, then I think we would have to conclude that they're very bad and inaccurate mapmakers.
This is something I invested a whole lot of my time and energy into when I was younger, exploring and comparing different religious traditions, and while I found that in some respects, where people tended to believe that their religious traditions were unique, they were quite similar (patterns of reasoning, standards and forms of evidence, explaining cosmic scale events with dynamics relatable to human experience,) in other respects where people imagined they might be universal and connect to some underlying spiritual truth (ethics, cosmology, humans' place and purpose in reality) they were wildly different and in some cases probably irreconcilable. My conclusion was that if we supposed there was any real underlying spiritual reality, we could not trust any existing religious traditions to tell us anything about it.
Meaning is a communal activity; it arises from deep connections between things, as evidenced from, eg, frequent repetition or by reference to these things in many different contexts. Religion and ritual give obvious examples, but they’re not the only examples. You don’t need to actually believe in Christianity, or like Shakespeare, to get meaning from a society where KJV and Shakespearean language and allusions are used repeatedly.
Our current malaise is the result of “too much” choice in all our culture, meaning we no longer have these shared concepts, and the resultant deep repetition and communal meaning - we all watch different movies, read different books, listen to different music, even speak different Englishes.
I see no way to fix this. Even attempts to fix it lead to their own problems - eg much of NIMBYism is obsessive preservationism, which in turn results from a desperate attempt to keep the lived environment unchanging as one thing, at least *something*, that we have as a common shared experience…
10 points to house Apxhard. This is a valuable service you're attempting, even if it doesn't pan out.
This is the whole reason I keep reading Scott, to see if the same soul that wrote "Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person Said" will finally be brave enough to walk the untrod path and not simply describe what a man who has never walked it imagines it must be like to do so
Could you be clearer about what exactly you are trying to say? What is "the untrod path"?
I agree.
If courageous partners in truth-seeking is what you're looking for, please check out my comment above. Ctrl+F "ydydy".
The way I think of utopia is that we, compared to the best possible world, suffer from a vast and suffocating shortfall of competence, and our thinking about problems is indelibly marked by it. Consider: sports as a skill will be more solved in utopia, but so will *sports-creation*, game-creation, challenge-creation and so on. If you imagine objectively solving soccer or weightlifting, you're only upgrading one side of the scale.
That's a good point. Similar to how Catan is an objectively better family game night than Monopoly. For a long time Catan didn't exist, so family game nights were more about one of the few games that did exist but were objectively inferior.
Yes, because ten turns of people rolling dice and nothing happening is riveting. At least in Monopoly -something- interesting happens every turn, even if it's just variance in how many more turns until you pass Go.
Catan is not an objectively better game, but it is a -different- game, which, in the era in which it came out, was enough. Today there are a wide variety of genuinely good games! And a whole lot of stuff that stretches the definition of "board game" in interesting ways - technically Concept is a board game with rules, but I've never met anybody who actually followed all of the rules, because the central gameplay loop is far more interesting than the rules dictating who wins the game.
I've never played Catan but I've played plenty of Monopoly and it's not hard to imagine an objectively better game than Monopoly.
The last game of Monopoly I played would never have ended, we got to the point where all properties are owned and nobody has all of one colour. And nobody was willing to trade properties to let someone else have all of one colour. So we all just kept going round the board getting slowly richer at roughly the same rate.
What is hard to imagine is how such an objectively terrible game got so popular. I've heard that it's better if you play by the rules and don't skip the auctions, but if that's true, that just makes it worse. Monopoly was around before Catan, but house ruled Monopoly was not around before official Monopoly, so how did the objectively worse game win out?
I've never played it with auctions (or money for free parking, which I understand is also a common house rule).
But then again, in my (family's) experience everyone almost always buys any property they land on immediately, so it doesn't come up.
Monopoly is the victory of concept over gameplay. The *idea* of Monopoly is fun, (especially for kids, for whom the idea of having *thousands* of dollars is a joy in itself). It's just that the rules were laid down before anyone properly understood board game design.
Lack of competition, at a time when the only multiplayer family boardgames that existed were Monopoly and Scrabble.
Monopoly was *meant* to be boring and frustrating and whatever. It was originally part of a matched set, with the other side of the board being a cooperative game focused on building a (not very deep) socialist utopia, and the socialist designer tried to make that part fun and the capitalist part unfun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)#History
She failed, because whatever the reality of capitalism, people really really like to fantasize about being triumphant billionaires, People would have had *more* fun playing a well-designed game about people trying to get rich, but they had *some* fun playing the "hey, you're not supposed to be enjoying that" version.
A bunch of greedy capitalists noticed, and bought the rights, and started selling the pro-capitalist version that people wanted to play. Which gave it the critical first-mover advantage; anyone proposing an alternative would be trying to sell it into a market where Monopoly is the default Family Game, and everybody knows the rules, and bringing out some new objectively-superior boardgame is like showing up for RPG night with a bunch of Conspicuously Not Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks.
There's a reason the new class of objectively superior boardgames is often called "Eurogames". Lizzie Magie and Parker Brothers poisoned the well for good boardgames in the United States; we had to wait until Europe recovered from WWII, developed its own native boardgaming tradition, and finally managed to catch the attention of nerdy-but-not-hopelessly-isolated Americans.
The game those greedy capitalists sold isn't the original monopoly. They tried to modify it to make it more fun. Maybe they succeeded, and the original was even worse.
Between Monopoly and Scrabble, Scrabble wins by a long shot.
I’ve not idea what Catan is, nor am I a huge fan of monopoly but your use of “objectively better” has soured me on whatever Catan is.
And yet there are reasonably objective standards one can articulate as to why Settlers of Catan is objectively superior to Monopoly as a tool for entertaining social interaction. Things like no player elimination, no player quasi-elimination where they're locked into a position where they can't realistically win but are expected to play on, and a much shorter endgame once a high-probability victor emerges. You're basically always playing a game you can reasonably hope to win, until someone else wins and you congratulate them and go do something else.
I suppose these aren't *absolutely* objective criteria on account of their being somewhere a masochistic gamer who'd rather spend an hour playing out a losing position in a game of Monopoly.
Also, there's more social interaction baked into the rules, and the competition isn't as blatantly zero-sum adversarial.
I came here to say this. A large facet of what makes games fun is exploring the knowledge space and generally experiencing exciting scenarios. Especially with friends. There is a vast vast set of game rules undiscovered. Soccer and Football are poorly designed compared to what's possible (whatever your goal)
(Put differently: we will solve exactly all problems that we want solved. For problems that we do not want solved, we will instead replace them with far more fiendish problems of a challenge and scale hitherto unimagined.)
gonna read the post in full, just signposting my starting position as "solving All The Problems would be absolutely fully good, any trade-off can instantly solvable in under five seconds of thought, this is blindingly obvious. given transhumanistan tech it's trivial to think of uploading or full-immersing people into a vr shard with others compatible with them. whoever wants hardships could get them conveniently instantiated for themselves and anyone else with the same suffering kink who wants to share it with them. This Is Not Hard."
aight, that was short. yeah, nothing in there that's not solved a dozen times over in FiO.
What is FiO?
Friendship is Optimal
I think there's a related question which *is* hard, though, namely, how do you (or anyone else) *know* you have, in fact, Solved All The Problems.
Ra comes to mind (https://qntm.org/ra) as a piece of fiction that considers this.
Actually-in-fact Solving All The Problems strikes me as similar to approaching zero in the denominator: the amount of contact with reality required to Solve All The Problems increases as your standards for "solving" do. And there's an upper limit on the amount of contact you *can* have with reality - when it comes to prophecy, you can pick accurate, complete, or timely, but not all three.
> any trade-off can instantly solvable in under five seconds of thought
Only after the mind upgrades. For us un-upgraded humans it's quite a bit harder.
Though doing better than our current civilization is trivial. Utopia isn't going to be a dystopia.
Agreed.
> whoever wants hardships could get them conveniently instantiated for themselves
Only real hardship is ultimately meaningful. Virtual hardship like only meaningful in the sense that it prepares you and is a proxy for real hardship. Remove real hardship, and the "just make virtual hardship" solution disappears.
This problem only increases as transhumanism level increases, because more intelligent and more reflective transhuman-agents will more readily realize that their taste for games and learning and training and so forth is just the way Natural Selection used to make us prepare for the real challenges (like kittens play-hunting), making the loss of those even more tragic. They will, on an intellectual level, quickly realize how pointless it is — and after the intellect, emotions will follow.
If simulations didn't work for hardship then things like sports wouldn't be so popular. You have an group of people (professional athletes) who manage to be extremely high status just by virtue of socially prestigious success at a zero sum competition. This is as clear of evidence as any that anything can provide a sense of meaning if it's seen as important within one's social environment
In Stirling and Pournelle's _Go Tell the Spartans_, there is a very rich and well-connected character who goes off to a frontier world to take part in a revolution, basically for the adventure. He reflects early in the story that safaris and mountain climbing and such (danger for its own sake) was unsatisfying, whereas danger and adventure while trying to do something very hard and important was very satisfying.
Honestly I think people really overemphasize the importance of genuine danger. People confuse what is enjoyable to read, with what's enjoyable to experience firsthand.
Generally I think people would overall enjoy simulations with no risk of death more, precisely because you aren't stressed out by the possibility of death!
Similarly I think most of the thrill of say extreme sports comes from the feeling of danger not actual danger. So most people are wired such that I think they'd greatly prefer the thrill in a safe context.
After all few people would enjoy a rollercoaster more just by virtue of knowing it's unsafe!
I think you have never tried extreme sports. I can tell you first hand, that the fun of surfing definitely lies in the technical limitation of the situation making it dangerous to attempt rescues, but the outcome is clearly coupled with your decisions. So that the good outcome very strongly depends on your actions, giving the actions meaning.
The rollercoaster example doesn't work, because supposedly the rollercoaster being more unsafe would be unconnected to the actions of the riders.
>the fun of surfing definitely lies in the technical limitation of the situation making it dangerous to attempt rescues
If people developed some really effective swimming robots, I doubt the majority of surfers would think that somehow detracted from the fun. To the contrary I'd expect such safeguards to make things more fun because you could do things that would otherwise probably get you killed if you did them long enough.
There's people who throw their parachute out of a plane and jump after it, so I certainly believe some people want real risk. However, the rarity of the practice doesn't indicate that's not still super rare.
All the evidence I'm aware of seems to suggest that even among thrill seekers people want the feeling of danger not necessarily real danger. It's just that RN those two things heavily correlate.
These ideas have been explored many times over in science fiction - I was surprised not to see any mention of The Culture, Star Trek, or Cory Doctorow.
Culture novels tend to be a bit internally inconsistent about this but generally in a world with transhuman self modification, perfect chemical bliss, and perfectly benevolent omnipotent AI, people tend to have a great time for a few centuries partying it up and then go into increasingly long periods of hibernation. Same with Doctorow's novels.
But why would they get bored enough to go into those hibernations if they can just hack their brains/erase their memories to not be bored? If it is impossible then the utopia is not deep enough.
In The Culture, such things are considered gauche.
Erasing memories is pretty much like dying.
Not trying to pick on you but I confess I am charmed by the notion of omnipoet AI.
One thing that always seemed hugely irksome about the Culture is how suboptimally it seems like the humans supposedly perfect lives are.
In a better utopia I'd expect humanlike minds to first experience every kind of simulated adventure. With the NPCS in the simulations being a mix of mostly characters put on by an AGI DM/GM, and a few newly created minds (always created so they're happy and glad to have been made).
Then once people can no longer be entertained by this (after probably a *very* long time) they would grow up more, so they can now appreciate totally new things. In the same way that you can already appreciate things as an adult which you couldn't as a young child. So the setting's superintelligences shouldn't be this aloof other species, they should be what everyone eventually becomes!
My sense is that there's massive variation in this. There's a guy in one of the books who is about as old as the Culture--he just decided not to let himself die. People know about him and think his choice is kinda weird, but he seems to get along fine in Culture society. There are people who get bored and have themselves Stored for a period of time, or until some event happens, or maybe permanently on the assumption that the Culture will Sublime sooner or later and then they'll be pulled in as part of the process. There's a very weird guy who hates being around other people, and so gets a "job" as the one humanoid in an asteroid in deep space that is a hidden emergency weapons cache. There are people who like having kids and have a huge number, and others who have none. There's not really a problem either way--the Culture doesn't need humans to do any work so a falling population isn't a problem; the Culture has vast resources so accomodating another few billion humans is no big deal.
theology, like poetry, is in a sadly fallen state today
Hilariously, taking Scott's penultimate paragraph on its face, everything necessarily comes back to Mormon cosmology.
i would rather read that review!
I, too, would love a longform SSC/ACX review of the King Follett Discourse. Someone ought to make it happen! Paging TracingWoodgrains & Adam S. Miller for a collaboration here?
Interested in your argument that if there are no longer unmet needs there would be no further reason to pray. In the Jewish formulation, "bakasha/request" is only one type of prayer. "Hallel/praise" is another, which I don't see becoming obsolete under these conditions. If the provable nature of God turns out to be something like "the One who incarnates in infinite forms and whose desire to Be and to be forgotten, sought, found and known breathes existence into being" - would that not warrant and inspire endless praise no matter how many new forms existence/incarnation might take or the degree to which our own work participates in creation?
Revelation 4: 6 - 11
"And around the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind: 7 the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like an eagle in flight. 8 And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say,
“Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty,
who was and is and is to come!”
9 And whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to him who is seated on the throne, who lives forever and ever, 10 the twenty-four elders fall down before him who is seated on the throne and worship him who lives forever and ever. They cast their crowns before the throne, saying,
11 “Worthy are you, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they existed and were created.”
See also the Trisagion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisagion
And by Dead Can Dance, The Host of Seraphim:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hThAlY3Q2Kw
I am rather puzzled that you want to “endlessly praise” a God who blatantly shows that he does not have a clue that might is not identical to right.
He comes out quite flat-footed in this regard in his famous answer to Job; here is a taste of the type of “argument” he uses when Job complains that there is no proportionate relationship between the size of Job’s sins and the size of the punishment God has metered out (including killing all of Job’s sons):
“Dress for action[a] like a man;
I will question you, and you make it known to me.
8 Will you even put me in the wrong?
Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?
9 Have you an arm like God,
and can you thunder with a voice like his?
… God goes on to state that since he not only is stronger than Job, but can also create more stuff than him, Job should shut the hell up.
…Which he does, since Job is not stupid or suicidal.
God then rewards him by, among other things, giving him the same number of sons that he has killed. It is apparent that God thinks that as long as the number is the same, no harm has been done.
To quote the philosopher Peter Wessel Zappfe in his 600 page doctorate thesis “On the Tragic”: “In his answer to Job God comes across as a cosmic caveman, almost sympathetic in his total ignorance of what moral questions are about.”
I'm not sure where you got the idea that my conception of the divine is the vengeful male warmonger described in books written by mortal men... What's praiseworthy is not how things are but that they are- existence as a miracle and gift not because its laws are just but because it Is, and we are, and we get to experience sense perception and agency, and do with them what we choose
Sorry about that, theological references to any of the three Abrahamic religions (here: Judaism), always triggers my Job's book reflex. A holy book in all three religions.
A great text, by the way, so don't get me wrong - the book of Job is right up there with Ecclesiastes.
Presumably once we're powerful enough to keep leviathans as pets, he'll give us a real answer.
I like the idea. Match God's power (the old human dream), or show similar ability to create impressive stuff (super-AIs?) and He will take us more seriously.
Thank you. Angels already live in Deep Utopia and this is how they spend their time. Alternatively, if there is no personal God to praise, pull an Aristotle and contemplate the impersonal one.
These are basically solved problems.
If we solved the problem of death, life would lose its perspective.
bioconservative cishumanism is a self-solving problem. in the distant future i'll think, with a jaded tinge of sadness, of those who chose to end.
At least we won't have to stick around to have you be all jaded tinges at us, which pleases me too, so we'll both get the happy futures we desire!
Love the optimism. Could do without the sneer.
As a non-bipolar heterophile biped, I resemble that remark.