Braindump 3: purpose

What’s it all for? What’s the purpose of anything we do?

I envision a world of the far future where the line between reality and simulation is blurred; where even the lines between one person and another are not clear. Where worlds are spun up, entire lives simulated. Magical, fantasy worlds, worlds which we now only visit in dreams, worlds filled with meaning and narrative. Every possible life path and every possible state of consciousness explored. Beautiful creations and beatiful memories made. All the experiences you want to have, all the hobby projects you want to build. Ten subjective years spent exploring each fantasy, or a hundred, a thousand. Endless lives bursting with every possible configuration of joy, beauty, and meaning.

The purpose I see for consciousness in this universe is to experience beautiful things. The purpose for people in our era, then, is to some degree work towards making sure that humanity reaches this good future, and to some degree experience beautiful things ourselves, as individuals, and to help our contemporaries do the same.

I’m not sure there’s any way to dedicate your life purely to setting up humanity to survive and thrive in the very long run. Minimizing “existential risks” and so on. There are long-term oriented effective altruists who think along these lines. They make sure to “relax” and “have fun” occasionally so that they don’t “burn out”, but the utilitarian long-term work is primary. Maybe it works for them. I’m not yet at a point where I can see my life’s purpose in such abstract terms and find it motivating.

I’m trying to learn to feel into what a good direction to go in life is. Which direction virtue and joy lie. I try to keep the whole future arc of humanity in mind when navigating the space of possible actions, but I do navigate it by gut—I don’t feel I’m at a level where utilitarian calculations are useful.

Local-first approach. I’m learning how to find beauty, joy, and meaning for myself; then for my friends, my contemporaries, and then finally what we can do together for our descendants. People who have a pretty good setup in life already can jump straight into saving starving children in Africa and whatnot, but I’m not there yet, and my gut tells me skipping ahead would be motivationally unsustainable and unwise.

For some reason, only “real” beauty, joy, and meaning count to me. I’m not interested in putting a joy-inducing helmet on. And yes, I do see a difference between a perfect simulation and wireheading. But that’s a conversation for a future post.