What is the purpose of Life
How do we know what we want?
Let’s say someone I respect came to me and says, “I have looked everywhere, and I have found the ultimate purpose of life. Life is all about having fun, meet girls, play video games, have a lot of flow and occasionally help someone out”. I suspect I would quite well agree with him.
Let’s say someone I respect came to me and says, “I have looked everywhere, and I have found the ultimate purpose of life. It’s all about killing babies”. I would wonder, what on earth is up with this guy.
Hmmm, it seems that in both cases, I look at what the person is saying and judge it. I seem to be judging everything with something inside me. But it is the ultimate purpose man, shouldn’t you be doing it anyway? Well as right as that may seem, I can never bring myself to kill babies. Period.
Some of the solution is already in your head. It’s clear to you you shouldn’t kill babies. It’s not clear to me how much a human life is worth. etcetera.
There was once a point of time when we believed blacks were supposed to be slaves, women are not meant to drive or vote, that Vaishnavism and Vishnu were everything, Gays are blasphemous, but it seems like we have turned around, a full 180.
The nice thing about the solution inside the head (the SITH) is that it is open to updation, based upon reason, evidence, and hard thinking. It’s not like those religious fanatics. “Black people are just like us, it is not fair to treat them that way just because of their race, they look just like us, they feel pain just like we do, we don’t like to see pain then why?”, “Women can drive, why opress them, everyone shall be free to do what they wan’t unless it comes to the point of one killing another”,”Why are gays bad because the bible says so? Why would you believe something you have no evidence to substantiate with, some ideology that is torn into pieces by science and basic reasoning!”, “Gays, blacks, Transgenders, for no fault of theirs don a particular character, why blame them and torture them for who they are? Everyone should be free, it is what we want for ourselves, and we wouldn’t want to be bullied as a result of our race, sexual orientation etcetera.”
Such seems to be the SITH and its capability to update. Granted it doesn’t know everything and a good number of things are probably wrong. But not everything, not yet. This only goes to show that we need to constantly check our SITH, reason with our SITH using our SITH, and update our SITH. Until a few years back I believed in religion and marriage. It seemed like a good idea to my then SITH, that going with the herd was the right move, for lack of any better alternative paths. But once I was shown other paths, the SITH readily accepted this and updated its documentation, because changing what needs to be done based on evidence is classic SITH.
We don’t seem to know what is right, right off the bat. We don’t know our position on many matters. For example, which type of activities to go for, EA activities or non-EA activities? And it appears that we have to puzzle out ‘what we want’ with the different clues that we have.
To sum up:
It(SITH) is like a rough map of some terrain. Initially, it just marks out some hills and a river (“Don’t kill me, I won’t kill you. Let’s hunt together”). Nothing is to scale. There are vast parts unmarked (“how to treat women, blacks, gays, etc.”). Then, as we gain more and more knowledge, we fill in the vaguer parts of the map (“Ah! Black people are basically just like me. It is wrong to treat them like slaves”)
Imagine a life where you didn’t need to puzzle anything out, you just had to be, and what you needed to do just came to you automatically? Well we have that life. Hurray! But unfortunately the software that does that is outdated. Its called Heuristics and Biases (H&Bs). It was written for the stone ages and is not ideal to make decisions in this day and age. For example, the importance of a task according to some of the H&Bs unfortunately lies on its availability. When you see couples parading the city, you feel that you would also like to be a couple. But until then life was just fine. The perceived importance of a task depending on availability seems to be not a good idea. If something is a good idea, it better be a good idea always.
What are H&B’s
The SITH is your everything, it is your moral compass, it is the one that judges every action you take. We haven’t fully explored the SITH. It will take a while before we catch up to the game and figure out the main parts of what we would want to do in life. Maybe its not fully possible with our limited resources. There seem to be a billion SITH laws (statements from SITH) and a billion facts. Our Heuristics and biases exactly are in place to tackle the magnitude of the problem due to the limited ram we have, except that they don’t. It is easy to observe the failure of the H&Bs. The following is the synopsis.
When we go to a football stadium and we sing the song and watch the match along with the 50k people, it feels amazing. Watching the match at home in mute for example would suck, who does that? Bursting crackers feels amazing, the catch is it only feels amazing when others are bursting it along with you. Looking at many such examples, it is possible to conclude the existence of Social proof, a heuristic which informs us via feelings, how we need to act in different settings
Social conditioning is the sociological process of training individuals in a society to respond in a manner generally approved by the society in general and peer groups within society.
The very idea of being in a religious community, among your religious peers, makes it hard for you to do anything against the group.
A proposed health program to save the lives of Rwandan refugees garnered far higher support when it promised to save 4,500 lives in a camp of 11,000 refugees, rather than 4,500 in a camp of 250,000.
How does it matter what the camp size is, if you seem to want to save lives in the first place. Granted it looks small, but so what? Introducing Scope Insensitivity.
Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group.
How can it be significantly better to have 1,329,342,410 happy children than 1,329,342,409, but then somewhat worse to have seven more at 1,329,342,417?
It seems that the SITH is all you got, along with some very power tools such as science, to understand and realize what it is that you really you want.
Spoiler: But the game goes as follows. Your H&Bs will probably always direct you in the way they are capable of. You will want to badly have a girlfriend, you will want to badly have sex, you will want to badly hang with girls, you will want to take the vacation you “deserve”, you will want to badly be social, spend your money on xboxes, bicycles and traveling based on what H&Bs see around you. But then you still need to listen to the SITH.
We see that we have potential feelings from H&B to distract us, we see that the SITH has gone wrong in the past. How do we know what we come up with now is the right thing? Surely we don’t want to make the mistakes we did in the past. How do I know what the SITH says is the ultimate fucking truth.
This seems to be a 2 fold answer.
As far as I can imagine this is as far as we can go:
The obvious choice isn’t always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don’t stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don’t feel guilty about keeping it. Oh, sure, everyone thinks two plus two is four, everyone says two plus two is four, and in the mere mundane drudgery of everyday life everyone behaves as if two plus two is four, but what does two plus two really, ultimately equal? As near as I can figure, four. It’s still four even if I intone the question in a solemn, portentous tone of voice. Too simple, you say? Maybe, on this occasion, life doesn’t need to be complicated. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? -Eleizer on Truth
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Somethings you just can’t be convinced about. Somethings just totally come from within.
How to convince people 101
You can’t.
Achilles: All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human. This implies Socrates is mortal.
Socrates: What? How did you get that? What magic is this?
Achilles: ‘All humans are mortal’ is a rule. ‘Socrates is a human’ being a fact. Now substituting ‘Socrates’ in the rule, you get Socrates is mortal.
Socrates: It appears that you’re using a third rule, “if All humans are mortal, and if Socrates is a human then Socrates is mortal”. What magic is this?
Achilles: Try stabbing yourself, and you will die. Try stabbing any human and he will die. Look at the evidence bro!
Socrates: Ah what is this new rule that you have launched now. “ If all humans are mortal, and if Socrates is a human, then Socrates is mortal, if we stab many humans and they die”. What magic is this? What is the culture?
Socrates can never be convinced, unless he accepts one of the magic statements made by Achilles
Corollary: You can’t convince an infinitely smart dog about Modes Ponens. You can’t convince an infinitely powerful computer about Modes Ponens.
What does it mean for us
You: People are suffering and dying in south Sudan. We should help them.
Socrates: Fact- “People are suffering and dying in south Sudan”. Magic- “We should help them”
The point is: You cannot be convinced about any of the following rules as well. But you believ it. It comes from within. Its what makes us not an empty rock.
If A => B is accepted, then if A happens, then B can be inferred. (intellectual rule) Look at evidence to decide what the reality will be like (intellectual rule) When people are suffering we should help them (value rule) When you see a drowning baby you should save it, irrespective of getting your clothes dirty
These will be referred to as primary/basic rules. The SITH seems to judge these primary rules and accepts it without questions.
Since no one can convince me for/against any of the basic/primary rules, it appears as though I always had it. The SITH already comes with these rules. ‘Father’(evolution) probably gave it to me, just like he gave me certain characteristics with my genes! And a person who does not have it cannot be convinced in favor of it (Socrates). And a person who has it (me), cannot be convinced against it. No amount of questions reasoning can ever convince you for or against it.
Understanding the rules better
It is my contention that most people have the above stated basic/primary rules. One, Without the rule of modes ponens, communication as such would suffer. Two, The idea of evidence is found everywhere, right from science to religion. Three, We constantly live in a world where there is so much pain and sorrow, and people who can, try to help even random people, because somehow they feel the sorrow. Everyone seems to have the same basic rules but we see only glimpses of it, or things going wrong in its usage.
Evidence based understanding is one of our primary rules and can be found everywhere. It’s in science, it’s in religion. But there is a catch, the understanding of evidence seems to differ between the different patrons. And leads to distinguishably different results as ones resultant beliefs. As a result we have Flat Earthers and their counterparts Globians. We have theists and Atheists. Despite the fact that we have the same basic/primary rules, our understanding of the usage of some of the other rules somehow got twisted. From which we fill in the blanks about what the derived rules might be. Other similar topics where these examples come from believers in astrology, homeopathy, ghosts aka paranormal activity etc… vs their corresponding non-believers.
If the same kid was brought up in a different part of the world other than with terrorists, there is a high chance he would not be a terrorist. Social proof, social conditioning are no joke. The kid would have completely different world views based on where he comes from. When you see from a high level, you see that the kid is same, but his surroundings make him understand his SITH very differently. If you are not taught the scientific way of understanding things, which means to trust evidence of repeatable and reproducible experiments only, then higher chance of you being fucked and getting dragged into random ideologies for no better reason other than things like Social proof. However, it appears to be possible that everyone can come to similar ideas in the end, if only they followed a rigorous, scientific process of understanding themselves, and the things around them; Even terrorists. When you are ready for change, when evidence strongly points that your understanding is wrong, when you look to understand your rules better, I guess, you begin to uncover more of your SITH. Change is hard, change is painful, but certainly change is possible. We can definitely do it. So many people have done it.
Most people have the same/similar basic/primary rules, the difference comes in understanding and using them as we saw with the FE example.
What are lives worth to you?
“When you see a random person walking on the street and a car is about to hit him, you know what you are going to do. Don’t worry there are enough people metaphorically on the street and a car is about to hit them, you know what you need to do?”
The basic questions that arises when someone tells you this is, why is this logic sound? But I don’t feel like giving money! Convince me that I should give money?
Reflecting on our rules: 2 things we need to remember are,
- People cannot be convinced about their true basic values
- You don’t feel guilty about keeping an obvious-seeming answer which still seems obvious after it goes through quite some interrogation.
It’s better that all of us suffer a little than any of us suffer a lot -Imaginary Bob from this TED talk
Man, this resonates big time with my SITH. What a divine saying. This was said by the CEO of a company in the time of recession. Amazing. But why stop with companies, why not go beyond. Why not we all “suffer” a little so that any of us doesn’t suffer a lot. I say “suffer” in quotes because I suspect its not all going to be that bad for the “sufferers”.
Luck and meritocracy
You have been very lucky to be in a state like this. It just happened that you don’t have to fight for food, water, shelter and my oh my, health care. It’s not a meritocratic society. Not everyone is born with the same silver spoon as you. You cannot blame it on the people completely, saying they are lazy and don’t want to develop themselves. It’s not that simple, and what about the child that is just born with no food water shelter and my oh my, health care. How is he supposed to fend for itself?
You can’t ask the poor people to die or by inaction leave them to their fate. Free market will decide my ASS. Somepeople worked for you to have a good life. You need to be the “somepeople”, who will help others get the good life.
Death is wrong Mexico is right now in crazy pain due to the earthquake. I was watching a video where rescue workers were working round the clock to save lives, pull them out of debri. Too many people have died. The numbers don’t tell you anything via feeling. But when you see a video with a kid who is still alive trapped in the debri, you gasp. You imagine the trauma the kid might be undergoing. You worry that the random kid makes it out safe, and by extension every kid. Syria, South Sudan, and any other location where there is pain or death, whether or not translated well enough as pain by our feeling to us, is wrong and should be avoided at all costs.
Everyone is family
You don’t stop crying when it is a pig even. You weep at pain. You weep when the pig fucking shouts in pain, when being manhandled, or choked to death. Everyone is family. Extending that, it doesn’t matter if someone is Indian or a Pakistani. Death is still death. Man-made boundaries, patriotism, can all suck it. It seems stupid to fight against each other. We are all in this together.
3rd world problems > 1st world problems
Whether I have an uber cool social status or not, if more deaths can be stopped, if acid attack victims can live a more normal life, if old people feel less lonely, if children can be given a decent chance to live, we consider these as GOOD. Why? SITH. There are so many 3rd world problems that need to be solved; Poverty, hunger and death, to begin with. There are so many 1st world problems that need to be solved; Getting a girlfriend, not possessing latest xbox gear etc… When I see people dying, I can’t but think of anything else. Death of someone, pain of someone is such a strong emotion, than the joy of having a girlfriend at that particular moment. When you are faced with the option of saving a life from being hit by the train or having a girlfriend, I would imagine we would in the moment choose to save the life.
The same experiment crumbles, when we have 10k $ on one side of the scale and death of another unknown man, on the other side. I immediately imagine a young man, who has hardly seen money in his life and has a lot of debt. And I see him making a run with the money, not thinking about the life that is at stake. But this is not the case with me or so many other folk. We are well off. I suspect I immediately imagine that I have a lot of debts, and that this 10k$ will help me to get to a better life. But it won’t. Furthermore, I suspect understanding of money is rather hyped. For example, “More money somehow seems to mean more prosperity”, “More money is awesome, imagine the things we can do with it”. We constantly judge people by how much money they make, by assessing their house, their car, their way of living. Like somehow more money implies amazing things. So I want to take money out of the picture and substitute it with exactly what it can do for you. Ultimately you plan to buy stuff with the 10k right? What is the best stuff you could buy? A 1000 Euro bike + lifetime supply of Xbox games? Well what if we have a lifetime membership of xbox games (worth more than 10k) on one side and a life hanging by a thread on the other side?
What if we increased the amount of money to 1 million euros worth of stuff vs a human life to save. Let’s assume that this one million euros worth of stuff can be used on everything else other than saving lives in any way possible because apparently that is not your intention for now. It appears that if all money can do is buy stuff; big house, jewels, games, babes, friendship even, earliest retirement, constant vacations, then when I am asked the question 10k$ of stuff or a life, then the solution is clear.
Now taking the whole discussion one step further. What if I had to pay 10k$ from your own fucking pocket to save that fucking life. If you make a lot of money, and if all money can do is buy stuff, and all stuff is not comparable to the worth of a fucking life, then? Better yet, imagine that the life you are going to save is the life of that baby girl stuck in the pile of debris barely breathing. GOD comes to you and says, pussy for the rest of your life vs saving that baby doll?
Material pleasures
Consumerism has its high, but it doesn’t last, novelty wears off pretty quick. I remember my cousin who bought a mother fucking BMW saying this to me, “ First month was cool, I was pretty excited that I was going to get one, but after that, well… Nothing much.”. I agreed with him.
Instead of spending money on pleasurable activities, it seems worthy to spend on people who need it the most.
Everyone wants to help There is enough evidence I think that people want to help others, whether they know the person or not. Look at the fb pages: Humans of Bombay, ‘Humans of Newyork,’milaap’. See what this guy did during the holocaust. And this guy muhammed example. Fund-raisers have never gotten over this quick. Humans of Bombay boasts about getting Fund-raisers being over in < 1 hr. People want to help. People are highly appreciative of people who want to help. Of course there is a catch. What wins at fundraisers seems to be the presentation , the emotional arousal, likes and other silly things. A life is not seen plainly for its value, owing to the H&Bs. But we can calculate it.
We have 7 billion people on the earth. There is value to saving lives. We weep our fucking eye out right? We are never going to say, “Oh there are 7 billion people, let someone die”. Every life that is to be saved cannot magically be valued at some arbitraty number. It has to be valued the same. The value is understood looking at child stuck in the debri in in Mexico. That life we seem to understand. The value of all life shall be values atleast the same.
Given the option of choosing great lives for everyone, or great life for only me and my parents, what would you choose? What would anybody choose? What would you want? What would anyone want?
Everyone seems to want to help. But they are trusting the emotional stimulation. No God will help all those kids who couldn’t get the necessary coverage on media, to get their sad-ass lives saved.
Then who?
Cant trust them feelings - circular We can’t trust them circular feelings. One moment, we feel sad about the people dieing and the next moment we are back to other 1st world problems. We will get no where if we go by them. Our current SITH seems to be the only thing we have, in combination with heavy reasoning and using science to see clearly the actual SITH.
Realize that EA objects or not, both sides need convincing I keep thinking that EA needs convincing. Yes, But so does every other non-EA activity I indulge in. Get it?
Fending for themselves
How can I knowingly give up on all the people who are suffering, so as to tend to some of my first world problems; leaving people who can’t fend for themselves, people who are in no position to fend for themselves, to fend for themselves. And all of this knowing that there are not many people who are actually doing stuff to help them out. Most of the people busy with making money to buy another car, another house and saving for generations and generations. It is quite clear, that we need to step up. Is it still unclear, what the purpose of life is?
What would I be doing when there is a fire? There is a motherfucking metaphorical fire now. What would I be doing if I had an invincible suit that can go into the fire and bring people out safely? I have a the metaphorical invincible suit. Granted it’s not going to be as dramatic as the life of a firefighter. People are not going to be clapping for you at the end of an epic save. Are we in here for the glamor? It seems the right thing to do, at least as far as my SITH goes in agreeing about this, that I should pay up as much as I can, spend less on retarded stuff and work more on saving lives.
I applaud and weep and feel amazed with all the things that superheros do. The only thing that differentiates them from normal folk is that they give shit to feelings, they do what they need to do.
I will judge the motherfucking hell out of the BATMAN, if he did squat for their city, staying in his million dollar home, pretending to not see their city burn. What the fuck is the motherfucking point of going behind Rachel, when the motherfucking city needs him and him alone. Does that motherfucker not see his fucking duty towards the motherfucking people.
But that’s the point of Batman… he can be the outcast. He can make the choice no one else can face. The right choice.
Beyond this, its the leap of faith for me. I cannot be convinced.
The obvious choice isn’t always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don’t stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don’t feel guilty about keeping it.
The obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious.
Finale
Imagine a meat factory, the shutdown button is to your right. Animals one by one are are being gruesomely tortured and fed to the machines.
Option A) Hit the shutdown button. option B) I need to know exactly what is the worth of the hand. Only then I will take action. Everything has to come from outside. You cant trust anything that comes from inside.
PNN
Appendix: Answer to all other questions(not edited multiple times, read at your own risk)
- Don’t we think the life of ants is pointless? Anything that we do is just carrying on some legacy left over by some random process. Why not just do random things?
Yes ants life seems pointless. And so will our lives to some higher being. Yes it seems like carrying on the legacy of some random process.
But what happens when you see your friend eating an ice cream and walking, a car is approaching him fast and he is not facing the car?
We will still go save him. We will still continue to cry when we look at what happens in South Sudan or for that matter when pain is inflicted on people. We will still hope to save as many lives as we can. * Insert above section here*.
It appears that our actions whether we hear from the question or not, seems to be the same. Its all about the SITH. If the answer to the question says that life is pointless and that we need to give up and start killing people or even kill ourselves, the SITH will laugh. SITH will not agree with this. SITH is everything SITH is all. We cannot get a solution from outside. It has to appeal with the SITH, else you cannot do it. It has to be something like, “ Life might seem pointless, but who cares for the English, at the end of the day, we still seem to care about lives. Period.”
Look in terms of the impact. What is the impact you hope to see having answered this question or having not answered this question!
- What should we do in life, in general? Should we do random things, save lives, or kill ourselves, or just go by our circular preferences?
#PNN
- Or why not do things that make you only happy for example? Women, sports, food etc…
Its seems possible to live a happy life, but what about all the people dying? What about the judging of BATMAN for not doing his work. I can think. I can hide in a closet, and quite successfully mind my business, but for all the reasons stated in the above section, I think the answer is clear.
- How do you know your understanding is the best? At some point it is about faith right? How dare you say paranormal activity is fake?
Paranormal activity like religion has no scientific basis, i.e., you cannot have repeatable, reproducible results. So chapter over for that.
Yes it seems to be faith after a point. As we saw earlier, you cannot be convinced. But the evidence is strong. I guess I choose that with the evidence I have, I jump to the right side.
You can’t do anything more. You go as far as your wits take you. You ultimately judge everything with the SITH. You need to be the voice of the helpless. If not you who? and for all the above reasons in the previous section, I think there is only one thing to do.