One creates nested default groups to make moral judgements and decisions. These groups become the contexts in which to apply principles or analysis to decide, and the final decisions comes from the group which wins when its contextual relevance is given supremacy. For example, if we discuss whether to kill someone is wrong, the universal contextual answer is, "It is wrong." Or perhaps, the universal answer is unknown or is both right and wrong together, and the context of an environment filled with humans, the context of humanity, makes killing wrong. Looking further inward, killing in accordance with the death penalty is right, if we accept that laws are the societally accepted moral framework relevant in a given time and place. If the individual executioner has inside knowledge about the inmate's innocence which was known to be excluded from the legal process, the killing becomes wrong again. So, how does the executioner make the decision.
The spectrum of default groups must reach from the context of the individual to that of the universe. In between the two extremes, there are several natural intermediates: earth, life, animal life, humanity, jurisdictions of law, companies, families, tribes, etc. The time-limited process of making a decision must be imperfect.
Monday, November 28, 2016
Sunday, November 6, 2016
Do We Care about the Future?
I often wonder what others would think about various thought experiments I run in my head. In particular, how would the various potential futures I contemplate rank in terms of desirability. Given that each of our ideal futures has a unique composition of features, what would be some of the common trends? Could we agree on any goals at all? And if not, could we agree on a process for determining the goals even if we can't all agree on what they are? There are so many people that don't even speak the same languages that I do; what do they want? Where do we agree and disagree?
Additionally, I'm curious about the prospect of global visions for humanity, rather than today's focus on the meager expression and internal agreement in nation-states. While there is clear, if ineffectual process for guiding nations, the international community's process is certainly less developed. In considering potential futures on this scale, it strikes me that I find some of them very displeasurable.
***
Specks of light dotting the night sky gleamed meagerly in the distance. As the cool artificial breeze of the Martian domes brushed gently against Kaiya's cheeks, she couldn't help but wonder what became of her grandmother's friend's grandchildren. Her Terran peers' parents lost the technology for communicating with the colony Mars over two decades ago now. As the population surpassed one million in 2081, just a few years ago, the celebration was bittersweet, unshared with so many friends from humanity's home world.
***
Do others fear cataclysmic rifts in our species as I do? The Martian example is particularly illustrative for its physical divide, but techno-socioeconomic partitions scare me just as much.
Already, we see segregated communities around the globe - in the Arab States, Nigeria and the United States and elsewhere - stratified greatly along economic lines. When groups with money tend to see positively reinforcing feedback loops that grant them privilege to compounding gains, they stand positioned to run away with our global civilization's power and control. Even now, elites often control laws or have the money to evade them. The top tier of human society stands apart from the rest.
Technology also feeds into the feedback loops. Technology can be adopted first by elites. They know about it first, and they can afford it. If technology Z is build on Y which is built on X and so on, and if an elite group gains access to Z before anyone outside the group has access to A, it may well be fair to say that the elite group has sufficiently separated itself from the rest of humanity. The specific technology could further reinforce this idea. For example, genetic control of our offspring down to the level of individual base pairs and epigenetic fingerprinting would be a game changer in terms of our evolution as a species. Evolved intelligence where humans are integrated with AI in a manner that gives some individuals orders of magnitude more cognitive processing power might also render the unprivileged people powerless and obsolete.
If we really care about human inclusion, equality and the value of individual human lives, we soon must contemplate the implications of technology, resource distribution and economic stratification on the development of our species. Extrapolating backwards the idea of inclusivity in the face of such major technological progress of our potential future, are we in the right place today? While I think we are still largely okay - it's been less than a generation since cell phones and the internet became common - I do worry about the next generation. What if 10% of the world is still without cellphones in 2030? That would mean that many children in developed nations have parents that grew up with cell phones while 1 of every 10 humans couldn't even get one then.
More broadly though, my question is about whether or not we are, as a species, simply alright with that prospect. Do we even care? If we have 9 billion people and the top 7 billion don't really notice when the bottom 2 billion suffer, why would we change? And if the top 10 million can simply ignore or even subjugate the rest of the 9 billion, would there be enough impetus within the elites to prevent it? If your children are part of the future mainstream, if you are, do you care?
Thursday, November 3, 2016
Who I am
I'm Grant Robert Smith. I'm Zyzzyx of Nal. Actually, that's an alter ego name that I use internally in several ways. Nal is sort of like my word for God. It's a portmanteau of nothing and all - the combination of opposites into a single foundational concept that underpins my conception of the universe. You could take and restate Nal however you like, which is kind of what I think of when you look at the myriad conceptions that individuals have of the notion of God. For me, it commonly appears as 'Doubt everything except and including this.' Or, 'We know nothing for certain, and this we certainly know.' It is the juxtaposition or combination of nothing and everything, doubt and certainty, whatever you want.
Ok, you may be thinking, "That's nice, but it's kind of not saying anything at all." To which I would respond that this is precisely the point. Because on top of this foundational concept (or without or next to or however you prefer), you can build the rest of your conception of reality. For better or worse, our existence seems to have a decent amount of consistency to it, which leads mostly to conceptions mirroring the universe itself. "Cogito ergo sum," as Descartes put it. And then you have science or fantasy. You have fate or free will. You have chaos or morality. These are inclusive 'or's and not intended as opposites. Build a worldview however you like, but be warned that you may not like the world you view.
How I do it
Balance. More specifically, I think of balancing truth and positivity. That consistency of experience I mentioned before comes in use for our small and limited minds. The fact that we can make predictions based on past experience and causal relationships is quite nice. So, I hold the truth in high regard. While you observe a rock hurdling toward you, it might feel nice - for a bit - to have the unshakable belief that 'the rock will be stopped by your mind powers, and that it will fall to the ground before it strikes your face.' This sort of positivity is almost certainly unwarranted. Here, the physical reality is simple and predictable to a degree that positivity should play no part in the matter. On the other hand, positivity is great when reasonable doubt enters the picture. The unshakable belief that 'I will have a pleasant interaction when I go up and talk to a stranger' is hence more reasonable. Obviously, it's not going to be true 100% of the time, but it's still reasonable. It's reasonable because it's going to be true some of the time and because the potential harms of its falseness are negligible.
While this is a simple and reasonable place to start, it's not much of a worldview yet. Truth alone is enough to create most of my view on the world since I exist not in a vacuum but in an observable space. I hope I'm quoting my friend Shane Golden correctly as saying, "I am, now, in this place." Or, incorporating my brother's idea of 'mutually shared experience,' one could rephrase it as, "We are, here, now." This is the basic acceptance of a shared universe with consistency across local observation of space and time. Truth begets physicalism which begets science which begets more truth, and it appears trivial to simply accept the majority of that which is and of that which you hear and see and feel and smell and so on and so on. I even largely extend this acceptance of truth to that which I read and that which people tell me, so long as it's consistent. And, even when inconsistencies arise, it's easy enough to take Occam's Razor approach, the simplest explanation, assuming best intentions and greatest positivity when explanations are comparably simple.
Good intentions and positivity only seem to matter when I start adding the key ingredient - meaning - to existence. The choice to give meaning to existence is logically arbitrary, but almost universally intrinsic in the context of existing in the first place. If I think I am, here, now, in this place without meaning, I can logically justify anything. I can subsequently create meaning in a bubble surrounded by meaninglessness and derive whatever moral framework I want. To some extent, we all do this. It's necessary because we have limited capacity. We can only process so much information, and we can only observe so much of the universe. But, anytime we make an arbitrary bubble without ever thinking about it's context or questioning it, we risk losing our connection with the truth. In turn, we lose true consistency between the universe and our conception thereof. It will still appear to be consistent because the inconstancy is covered in meaninglessness, hidden outside the bubble of meaning we have defined for ourselves. But the truth and our inconsistency are there, lurking in the meaninglessness beyond our bubble of spatiotemporal relevancy.
Instead, I choose meaning, always. Plus, meaning just feels better than meaningless. It seems like a nicely balanced take on truth and positivity. And with meaning, comes morality. Actually, morality requires there to be context and for that context to include other human beings or comparably intelligent forms with which to interact and reason about morality. But since that's pretty much a given, we all have morality in some sense, even if we don't always recognize it as such, especially in others. I'd guess most people define their personal worldview and morality from the inside out, from where they're positioned in the universe. I do this too, and at the same time, I define it from the outside in. What do things look like for the entirety of the universe? Obviously the answer is beyond my capacity, but it's an important question for me in defining my morality. I do my best to take into account all possible context, from where we come and to where we will go. Personally, this thought process comes from a place of decision making. My morality stems from trying to decide how to spend my time and what to do with my life.
In making decisions, I started with what I felt like are the biggest ones. The things that an individual chooses with greatest impact on the universe are what to do with your life's work and wether to have children (since it's going to be a big part of someone's life to raise that child). Because children additionally have a propagating effect of potentially creating more children, that decision seems to have a high chance of being more impactful on the universe over time than even what to do with one's life's work. So first, I decided not to have children. We have enough people for the planet; if I want to raise children, I'll adopt. Plus, humans are evolving faster based on technology than biology, so it's not like genetic propagation matters much. Second, I decided what to do in the 60 or so years I had left to live. This turned out to be a much more difficult decision making process. Apparently I started with the same question as Elon Musk ("What will most affect the future of humanity?"), but I was trying to pin it down to a single answer rather than a list of topics.
I guess as a side note, the rest of my morality, like how to treat people and what laws should be and all that "simple" stuff is taken on a case by case basis within the context of where I want humanity to go with itself in the future. I'll get back to this later because in deciding what to do with my life, I ended up coming up first with a framework for combining goals and desires with inevitabilities and physical trends. This in turn led to a method for deciding what laws should be. And, the remainder comes from evaluating the local context from the inside out (e.i. being nice to people around you) and from balancing contexts against one another based on the consequences.
Ok, you may be thinking, "That's nice, but it's kind of not saying anything at all." To which I would respond that this is precisely the point. Because on top of this foundational concept (or without or next to or however you prefer), you can build the rest of your conception of reality. For better or worse, our existence seems to have a decent amount of consistency to it, which leads mostly to conceptions mirroring the universe itself. "Cogito ergo sum," as Descartes put it. And then you have science or fantasy. You have fate or free will. You have chaos or morality. These are inclusive 'or's and not intended as opposites. Build a worldview however you like, but be warned that you may not like the world you view.
How I do it
Balance. More specifically, I think of balancing truth and positivity. That consistency of experience I mentioned before comes in use for our small and limited minds. The fact that we can make predictions based on past experience and causal relationships is quite nice. So, I hold the truth in high regard. While you observe a rock hurdling toward you, it might feel nice - for a bit - to have the unshakable belief that 'the rock will be stopped by your mind powers, and that it will fall to the ground before it strikes your face.' This sort of positivity is almost certainly unwarranted. Here, the physical reality is simple and predictable to a degree that positivity should play no part in the matter. On the other hand, positivity is great when reasonable doubt enters the picture. The unshakable belief that 'I will have a pleasant interaction when I go up and talk to a stranger' is hence more reasonable. Obviously, it's not going to be true 100% of the time, but it's still reasonable. It's reasonable because it's going to be true some of the time and because the potential harms of its falseness are negligible.
While this is a simple and reasonable place to start, it's not much of a worldview yet. Truth alone is enough to create most of my view on the world since I exist not in a vacuum but in an observable space. I hope I'm quoting my friend Shane Golden correctly as saying, "I am, now, in this place." Or, incorporating my brother's idea of 'mutually shared experience,' one could rephrase it as, "We are, here, now." This is the basic acceptance of a shared universe with consistency across local observation of space and time. Truth begets physicalism which begets science which begets more truth, and it appears trivial to simply accept the majority of that which is and of that which you hear and see and feel and smell and so on and so on. I even largely extend this acceptance of truth to that which I read and that which people tell me, so long as it's consistent. And, even when inconsistencies arise, it's easy enough to take Occam's Razor approach, the simplest explanation, assuming best intentions and greatest positivity when explanations are comparably simple.
Good intentions and positivity only seem to matter when I start adding the key ingredient - meaning - to existence. The choice to give meaning to existence is logically arbitrary, but almost universally intrinsic in the context of existing in the first place. If I think I am, here, now, in this place without meaning, I can logically justify anything. I can subsequently create meaning in a bubble surrounded by meaninglessness and derive whatever moral framework I want. To some extent, we all do this. It's necessary because we have limited capacity. We can only process so much information, and we can only observe so much of the universe. But, anytime we make an arbitrary bubble without ever thinking about it's context or questioning it, we risk losing our connection with the truth. In turn, we lose true consistency between the universe and our conception thereof. It will still appear to be consistent because the inconstancy is covered in meaninglessness, hidden outside the bubble of meaning we have defined for ourselves. But the truth and our inconsistency are there, lurking in the meaninglessness beyond our bubble of spatiotemporal relevancy.
Instead, I choose meaning, always. Plus, meaning just feels better than meaningless. It seems like a nicely balanced take on truth and positivity. And with meaning, comes morality. Actually, morality requires there to be context and for that context to include other human beings or comparably intelligent forms with which to interact and reason about morality. But since that's pretty much a given, we all have morality in some sense, even if we don't always recognize it as such, especially in others. I'd guess most people define their personal worldview and morality from the inside out, from where they're positioned in the universe. I do this too, and at the same time, I define it from the outside in. What do things look like for the entirety of the universe? Obviously the answer is beyond my capacity, but it's an important question for me in defining my morality. I do my best to take into account all possible context, from where we come and to where we will go. Personally, this thought process comes from a place of decision making. My morality stems from trying to decide how to spend my time and what to do with my life.
In making decisions, I started with what I felt like are the biggest ones. The things that an individual chooses with greatest impact on the universe are what to do with your life's work and wether to have children (since it's going to be a big part of someone's life to raise that child). Because children additionally have a propagating effect of potentially creating more children, that decision seems to have a high chance of being more impactful on the universe over time than even what to do with one's life's work. So first, I decided not to have children. We have enough people for the planet; if I want to raise children, I'll adopt. Plus, humans are evolving faster based on technology than biology, so it's not like genetic propagation matters much. Second, I decided what to do in the 60 or so years I had left to live. This turned out to be a much more difficult decision making process. Apparently I started with the same question as Elon Musk ("What will most affect the future of humanity?"), but I was trying to pin it down to a single answer rather than a list of topics.
I guess as a side note, the rest of my morality, like how to treat people and what laws should be and all that "simple" stuff is taken on a case by case basis within the context of where I want humanity to go with itself in the future. I'll get back to this later because in deciding what to do with my life, I ended up coming up first with a framework for combining goals and desires with inevitabilities and physical trends. This in turn led to a method for deciding what laws should be. And, the remainder comes from evaluating the local context from the inside out (e.i. being nice to people around you) and from balancing contexts against one another based on the consequences.
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