The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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Bonfire of the Insecurities
Next week is the traditional moment for new starts, new resolutions, improving ourselves. Let’s take this moment going in to talk about all the weird little things we worry about in life. The nagging mosquitoes that prick at us when we aren’t aware. Admit, and exorcise.
— My wife is extremely successful, and I do all I can to support her, but I worry sometimes I’ll end up like a penny-ante version of one of those 19th century art adjacent women who get biographies in the NYT Book Review as the muse and aide to a famous artist but her own works are all lost. I love her for who she is and I’m proud of her and I want her to be great at what she does, but in some circles I’m already more Mrs. FiveHour’s husband, even if I’m equally professionally successful in my own circles. I worry how I will succeed as a husband without compromising my self-respect in the long term.
— I’m a jack of all trades and a master of none, and I worry that I’m wasting my potential at anything through a desire to be well rounded. In general my aspiration is to be Heinlein’s Competent Man, but what if I’m just making myself universally INcompetent? I can’t stand the idea of being bad at anything, and that might keep me from ever being great at anything.
— I want to spend more time with my parents, more time with close friends, more time by myself, more time with my wife, more time with my dog, more time traveling, more time at home. Somehow there’s never enough.
— What opportunities have I missed? What will I miss if I don’t wake up and smell the coffee?
These are all absurd and minor in the grand scheme of things, but it’s what I need to be honest and acknowledge before moving forward.
This is primarily why I long so much for immortality and am so confused by those who don't or even actively shun it. I want nothing as much as time, to use wisely, to waste, to share and I want it all at a leisurely pace with plenty of time to recount stories with good friends and family. What better dream is there?
There isn't an absolute difference between one person and another person - the only thing that matters is just the physical effects of a person's life and their experiences. So if you have one person who dies, and another person is born, that isn't clearly better than just one person who doesn't die - one person dying is bad, but the second person being born is great! This is how animals have propagated over millions of years, why having children is 'based', and why immortality isn't more important than having more children. Also, if evolution continues apace or gene editing etc, future descendants will have more deep, capable lives than we do. How this combines with AI is unclear though.
There of course is though. Especially the difference between oneself and another which can be told just by perspective.
It is quite a bit different to the person who died. I'm not totally deaf to this intuition that unborn people deserve moral consideration but the actual living take priority and we're dancing between the individual and societal level frame. It very well may be ideal for society that people be killed off at the age of 55 to make more room for the productive young. But society isn't a death pact, it's an arrangement to enrich the lives of its constituents. A society that uses and disposes of its members on the grounds that it's healthier for the society is an abomination, it is the bad end, it is the boot stomping on your face, and the face of your children, forever.
We may owe things to future generations, I even think that we do, but our lives are owed to no one.
Why does this have any particular moral weight? Again keep in mind i'm not endorsing non-particular universalism, i.e. "a random (poor, black) person matters as much as your life" - just arguing that 'you' is not an important particular, even though all the specifics of that experience can be. If humans in 500k bc were capable of 'halting evolution' and living forever, we'd still be them, and be much dumber as a result.
Society can be many things! Why not future people?
On the grounds that it's better for the future members! And this is the tradeoff that nature and evolution made, and it brought us to where we are - 'much longer lives' is entirely biologically plausible, but the evolutionary pressure for success and power means that sexual reproduction and evolving generations was much more useful.
also the obvious "AI rapidly becoming more powerful and impactful than humans makes this mostly a debate of principle"
Because you're proposing it's morally neutral to grind up your loved ones and reconstitute them into new people. I do not think this is a morally neutral act.
I don't mean to be the annoying fallacy quoting guy but this is just the naturalistic fallacy. We also got here but untold millennia of rape, enslavement, murder and cruelty. It says nothing of how things ought to be.
What does 'morally neutral' mean? I'd expect killing to be bad because it terminates a human experience, with all the complexity and ends that entails, but - that's why it's bad! What is there to morality other than ... matter, causation, people, and their lives and experiences? If you're getting - for everyone - a less [great,deep,beautiful,anything] experience in exchange for less overall death (and less birth), what's actually being gained? Again, the analogy is 'human genes frozen forever in 300k BC'. You're preserving "what is", because ... of what? But in another sense "what is", the current status quo, is death and birth and evolution. Imagine refusing an organ transplant, or rejecting 'wound healing', because that's replacing old tissue with new tissue!
I'm claiming the old state of 'nature' gave us a concrete benefit that 'everyone lives forever' would have prevented, and that (again, absent AI) would be lost if implemented today too.
Tangential bits: Mental changes necessary to upgrade a 95iq person to a 130iq person are invasive enough the differences between that, 'that person living forever at 95iq', and 'they die and a new 130iq person is born' are very strange. And there probably is """value""" in particularly smart or capable people living a lot longer than they do today.
ofc i'm aware this is not a position many other than me hold, and it's one that opposes most existing philosophical tendencies
It means this that you said earlier "So if you have one person who dies, and another person is born, that isn't clearly better than just one person who doesn't die" If one state of affairs isn't clearly better then the other then it amounts to it being morally neutral whether people die so long as the number of people stay constant. I think this is a very strange thing to think so if you want to disavow the idea I won't blame you.
Killing is just induced dying. Dying does exactly every bad thing killing does by your justification for opposing it.
This is charitably giving your life for the sake of people who don't even exist and won't resemble you. Would you sacrifice the life of every human to improve the lives of aliens in a far off galaxy that will never know you existed? For ants and polar bears? Perhaps some exotic utilitarian would demand this but I don't know why anyone would find it convincing and even less the types of people who seem to deny that they're actually giving up something incredibly valuable to this aim. Will you at least admit that aging, decaying and dying slowly in your own filth is a tremendous cost that you are stoically willing to pay for these future people?
I have great respect for people who have found causes that they are willing to sacrifice everything, even their lives for, but I can't help but think this view has it backwards, a felt need to justify sacrificing ones life hopeless groping for a justification.
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