Higher Purpose

One wonders if it is possible to make finding one's purpose in life one's purpose in life. At least the logical paradoxes would be briefly amusing.

we must adapt ourselves to live here, not somewhere else.

I try to explain this when I get called a racist for not wanting to go to a poor/predominantly black and latino neighborhood. I have a high preference for a world in which race doesn't make a bit of difference. However today, in this world I am 2 orders of magnitude more likely to have a crime perpetrated against me in said neighborhood.

I also bring this up when people respond to my ideas with unlikely sinking ship/rescue raft ethical scenarios. There are enough regular problems that need solving. As the world becomes more gentle we can start putting more effort into the edge cases.

And again with global warming. I'd love to live in a world in which a .3% change in radiation absorption was our most pressing concern. However in this world we could save many more lives and species by refocusing our money and efforts.

Of course it is. That's philosophy right there :->

Perhaps a webpage should be written that attempts to persuade smart egotists that if they want to accumulate wealth for the long-term future, it would be rational to choose "good guy points" as that wealth, instead of e.g. money.

Since if our civilization doesn't self-destruct, we will end up spending billions of years in a Happy World where there are no more "good guy points" available to accumulate. It will be the ultimate scarce resource, in a world where very few things are scarce. Accumulating money instead of "good guy points" seems stupid to me, if one is thinking for the long-term.

I'll also note here, that during billions of years of Happy Life, historians will certainly study every last detail of the very limited amount of pre-utopia history that the world experienced. We'll probably see fine-tuned High Score tables of how many "good guy points" each surviving individual has collected. (This study of history will be made substantially easier once we have the technology to extract the memories of every willing person into the public domain.)

"I try to explain this when I get called a racist for not wanting to go to a poor/predominantly black and latino neighborhood. I have a high preference for a world in which race doesn't make a bit of difference. However today, in this world I am 2 orders of magnitude more likely to have a crime perpetrated against me in said neighborhood."

This bit of haphazard reasoning could be more focused: what neighborhood the commentator leaves to enter a predominantly poor or minority neighborhood (itself a hazy conflation), the time of day, the type of crime, frequency of of crime reported in said hood, etc. Information is available to more accurately predict whether one might be the victim of a crime, but I'm not sure the commentator has that information in his/her head as a motivator for the decision in real time.

This makes eudaimonist egoism seem simpler, more elegant by comparison. I don't need a stream of victims now, and I won't need them post-Singularity.

Come buy your doohicky today, because at these prices, supplies won't last for long!

Daniel Dennett's standard response to the question "What's the secret of happiness" is "The secret of happiness is to find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it."

I think that this avoids Eliezer's criticism that "you can't deliberately pursue 'a purpose that takes you outside yourself', in order to take yourself outside yourself. That's still all about you." Something can be more important than you and yet include you. Depending on your values, the future of the human race itself could serve as an example. It would seem also to be still an available "hedonic accessory" in any eutopia that includes humanity in some form.

I read a lot of this type of stuff back in the 1990s. Your "purpose" doesn't need to be spiritual or altruistic or even helpful to others, all that is necessary is that it keeps you from dwelling on yourself and your own problems> Serious study, if it is interesting enough to you and difficult enough to really engage your attention is more than enough to gain you the benefits of a "purpose".

Perhaps a webpage should be written that attempts to persuade smart egotists that if they want to accumulate wealth for the long-term future, it would be rational to choose "good guy points" as that wealth, instead of e.g. money.

For an egoist with a low discount rate and broad enough self-concept to make transhumanity appealing, even this may be unnecessary to make Singularitarianism highly attractive. I suspect that the idea of benefiting yourself by helping everyone including yourself is unintuitive enough, though, to make this far less apparent than it could be.

Eliezer: For some reason this seems to me to bring a lot of things together very concisely, but doesn't seem to require too much background reading. I expect I will send people here.

Nazgul, Justin: Also of important is the actual rate and risk. If the original crime rate is quite low, two orders of magnitude more is still probably not enough risk to rationally pass on something of value. (Say, visiting a friend in said neighborhood.)

I've mostly heard this kind of argument from people who drive cars.

"There would never be another Gandhi, another Mandela, another Aung San Suu Kyi—and yes, that was a kind of loss, but would any great leader have sentenced humanity to eternal misery, for the sake of providing a suitable backdrop for eternal heroism? Well, some of them would have. But the down-trodden themselves had better things to do." —from "Border Guards"

Altruism doesn't only mean preventing suffering. It also means increasing happiness. If all suffering were ended, altruists will still have purpose in providing creativity, novelty, happiness, etc. Suffering then becomes not experience unthinkable levels of insert_positive_emotion_here and philanthropists will be devoted to ensure that all sentient entities experience all they can. The post-singularity Make-a-Wish foundation would experience rapid growth and expand their services as well as volunteers as they operate full-time with repeat customers.

And here we verge on Zen, because you can't deliberately pursue "a purpose that takes you outside yourself", in order to take yourself outside yourself. That's still all about you.

No, I mean, this looks reasonable. It probably gets at a higher truth of some sort. But it's the same mistake as thinking that a scientific hypothesis can't be true because it was inspired by an irrational belief. It shouldn't matter where you came up with your hypotheses--it only matters if it fits the evidence with the best explanation (and, ideally, makes the most falsifiable predictions that turn out to be true). Just because, for example, the drug company profits if everyone thinks their drug cures disease X doesn't mean that the drug doesn't actually cure disease X.

Just because my present self has an altruistic purpose only because my past self found pleasure in thinking that it would be an altruist in the future doesn't detract from my present self's actual altruism. (This is purely hypothetical, I am actually purely selfish across all time, space and possibility)

Come up with a spending plan for a trillion dollar stimulus package that suddenly lands in the collective lap of transhumanists and singularitarians. What goals would a trillion bucks solve? Anything?

What exactly will you do if someone decides to drop you a mountain of money, no strings attached? Can you spend a trillion usefully?

I see no problem letting altruism become obsolete.

I look at Causes as hedonic accessories from a different point of view: Given the history of how many Causes have turned out to contain purple kool-aid, I look at the problem as not so much "how can we carefully select rationally desirable Causes" but more nearly "How can we bypass this part of the human mental landscape altogether - preferably aquiring the hedonic gains of adopting a Cause, while skipping the hazards, both to oneself and to those around one, of actually adopting one."

If all the money (and effort) humanity currently wastes on making better killing machines was rerouted to causes that (currenly only) transhumanists and singularitarians - and the bulk of future humanity - care about, what would happen? What is the upper bound of funds above which adding more wouldn't make a difference? Where do you hit severely diminishing returns and have to say enough is enough?

Do you have a list "If only we had practically unlimited money we would..."? I'd like to see one.

After a great deal of navel-gazing, I have realised that I actually get pleasure from serving others. However, such pleasure need not be rescuing them from harm. If no-one is at threat from harm, it might be by entertaining them. My evolved highly social capacity to get pleasure from service will not be unsatisfiable. This can still be "all about me"- I get genuine pleasure, I get social interaction, I get increasing wisdom as I learn what works to "serve others" and what does not.

I might learn to accept what achievements I can make- not creating the perfect FAI, not even singing better than anyone else, merely singing something simple acceptably and giving transient pleasure to one other person.

The Zen arguments, spiritual growth, all that stuff is only relevant if one wants to be a Good person. I do not, I think I am good enough, already.

Higher Purpose =/= Altruism towards other people. At least not necessarily. I know this was implicitly mentioned in the whole "Truth or Art or Freedom" line, but considering that altruism connected with charity is one of the few places where we descend into signalling races here, I thought it important to emphasise that.

I'd rather an arbitrary person want to be a good person because it makes em feel good than spend all of eir free time and money on video games because they are fun. I think this post is too hard on people from the former group. After all, they're doing something good rather than something else!

"The external world is just a stream of victims for you to rescue." I do not see a big problem with this, as I agree with the last point that this not pure but still useful, except when are considering equality and majority/minority dynamic. Does a high purpose need to be "pure"? Are humans really completely capable of that? Does it make sense if humans are capable of that from a sociology perspective? To me, the key is to ensure a system that effectively incentivize humans to extend compassion.

I do think a lot of high purposes come from adverse experiences, and by that adverse experience, such as rape/sexual assault, this person would understand a bit more of what the challenges are, how miserable it is, and it makes sense for this person to be personally invested in this clause and make contributions to it.