Your best future self

Update. Crossposted from Facebook. Epistemic status is still 'poetry'.

About a year ago, I was having a very hard time, and felt alone. I had reasons I didn't want to talk to friends about it. Even if I could have, having to fully articulate everything going on at the time felt hard, and I was already stretched to my limits.

I wasn't sure what to do, so I prayed to my best-possible-future-self. My best future self already knew what I was dealing with (because he was there), and he was older and stronger and wiser than me. He couldn't tell me what to do, but he could sit with me, and be empathetically present.

It was nice and comforting.

...

I'm currently dealing with a host things that are at least as difficult as what I was dealing with then. I've had to grieve several things and learn to process traumas and learn to orient in very confusing domains. I'm allocating most of my time towards making sure that I'm okay, and becoming more internally aligned with myself.

One of the things going on is that I've identified multiple better-future-selves, who are stronger on different axes. Epic Level Hero-Soldier Ray. Epic Level Small-Village-Priest Ray. Epic Level Solstice-Pope-Ray. Epic Level University-Administrator-Ray. They have different properties, and might or might not be mutually exclusive with each other. But, one of the things I'm doing these days is fleshing out my understanding of them, so I can put on different hats of more experienced versions of myself and ask "hey, what would you do here?"

Having to decide which of those future selves to make 'real' is part of what's stressful these days.

...

Today is a bit of a lull, as I recover a bit. I considered praying to some future selves again. Less out of desperate need, more out of desire for kinship.

And I realized:

I am older, and stronger, and wiser now, than I was a year ago. I'm older and stronger and wiser enough that I feel comfortable paying back the "Future Self Prayer Debt" I set in motion.

So, I sat for a bit, and listened to my past self's prayers. And I didn't say anything, but I sat with him, warmly and empathetically present.

I thought about the advice I *might* have wanted to give him. It wasn't a necessary part of the exchange, but seemed like what past-self would have wanted me to be doing. I wasn't quite sure what advice I'd give. There are some particular lessons about grieving I've learned that I could hypothetically pass back if the flow of causality went that way.

I think I'm maybe another 6 months away from knowing the most directly relevant advice I could possibly have said. I tuned in with newer possible future selves about that.

But mostly, I just sat, and remembered.

And, that felt nice. I'm not even my past self's best-possible-future self. I'm just me. And I feel good, that even in my current chaotic situation, I had the strength and calm to sit back and listen.

I think you have a lot more sympathy for your past self than I have for my past self. That guy was a real asshole. And the effort required to overcome his flaws often turned out to be not that much; things could have gone so much faster if he'd been braver, more strategic, more long-term oriented, and above all spent more time understanding the world rather than looking for clever exploits.

By the same token, you can pray to Elua, the deity of human flourishing. Ey exist in about the same senses your ideal future-self exists: (i) ey exist somewhere in the multiverse (because the multiverse contains anything that can be imagined) and ey exist with some probability in the future (because maybe we will create a superintelligent AI that will make it real) (ii) ey exist inside you to the extent you feel motivated by making the world better (iii) we can decide to believe in em together.

It probably sounds like I'm being ironic, but actually I'm serious. I'm just worried that talking about this too much will make us sound crazy, and also about some people taking it too seriously and actually going crazy.

I liked this piece quite a lot. Thanks for writing it.

I am conflicted about this post. On the one hand, it smells like new-agey nonsense. I worry that posts like this could hurt the credibility of rationalists trying to spread other non-obvious ideas into the mainstream.

On the other hand, even if the only mechanism of this idea is the placebo effect, it’s an emotionally satisfying story to trigger that effect. As someone who grew up with strong religious beliefs, I can appreciate it as... something more than mere art.

Ultimately it’s not obvious to me if this post was supposed to convey a genuine psychological insight, and was just unclear, or if it’s more metaphorical and I’m being too pedantic?

This comment is probably confusing, but I think that merely reflects my own confusion here.

I have mixed feelings about this post.  On the one hand, it's a new, interesting idea.  You say it's helpful to you, and it wouldn't be entirely surprising if it's helpful to a great many readers.  This could be a very good thing.  

On the other hand, there's a tendency among rationalists these days to turn to religion, or to the closest thing to religion we can make ourselves believe in.  For a while there were a great many posts about meditation and enlightenment, for instance, and if we look at common eregores in the community, we find multiple.  Azathoth, God of Evolution.  Moloch, God of Prisoners' Dilemmas.  Cthulhu, God of Memetics and Monotonically Increasing Progressivism.  Bruce, God of Self-Sabotage.  This can be entertaining, and perhaps motivating.  Yet I cannot shake the feeling that we're taking a serious risk in trying to create something too closely akin to religion.  As the saying goes, what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?  We're quite certain that e.g. Islam is founded on lies, with more lies built up to try to protect the initial deceptions.  Do you really want to mimic such a thing?  A tradition created without a connection to actual reality is unlikely to have any value.  

I won't say that you shouldn't pray to your future self, if you find doing so beneficial, and you yourself say this isn't your usual subject matter.  But be careful.  It's far too easy to create religious-style errors even if you do not consciously believe in your rituals.  

I had a very similar thought a while back, but was thinking more of best possible current versions of myself.

You said this:

I think your coherent, extrapolated self may know things you don't know, and may have learned that some of your goals were misguided. Because your ability to communicate with them is bottlenecked on your current skills and beliefs, I can't vouch for the advice they might give.

I called it "Coherent Extrapolated Niplav", where I was sort-of having a conversation with CEN, and since it was CEN, it was also sympathetic to me (after all, my best guess is that if I was smarter, thought longer etc., I'd be sympathetic to other people's problems!).