Up until ~2024, life was about learning new things and trying them out, in the hope of unearthing some truth or creating something of importance.
Or rather, was it constant escape from chaos — untruth and destruction in the world?
My career revolved around the same theme. I worked at a big tech, and then at a startup.
I don’t want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place, better than we do.
I hesitate to admit, but this line so perfectly exemplifies one of the core feelings I/we had.
But was I/we actually determined to commit suicide if we weren’t #1? Of course not. Best possible outcome of this stance is:
- Be the “best” in the field, by causing enormous collateral damage
More likely outcomes would be:
- Attack your competitor to gain relative advantage
- Keep lying to yourself that you’re the best
- Stop trying altogether
None of these behaviours lead to a better world overall. Or a better life when you practice this attitude.
It would’ve taken much longer for me to realize this. Fortunately for me, witnessing a slow collapse of the startup allowed me to see the reality.
A truth that I cherished so much, yet I was unable to see.
Realization of Mortality and Finiteness
There’s this concept of ever-approaching technological immortality. A true trend in my view.
However, whether you can be immortal, is totally orthogonal to whether we have achieved such technology.
Think about it. We already invented a shell that can encompass a will, and can carry out many things a living person can do. They’re called corporate persons. Anyone can create one today. Yet, lots of corporate entities don’t last. Their typical lifespan is much shorter than a normal human being.
We have so much freedom. We even think we’re morally entitled to have freedom, as “universal rights”. But all this relies on the fact that all humans die relatively quickly compared to the society which is the OS.
When I think about it, life of (semi-)immortal being needs to fit somewhere in the following spectrum.
- Stay tiny and constantly move around to seek excess value overflowing from upstreams
- Become a societally beneficial machinery devoid of random will of an individual
Either way, your power is proportional to value you produce, on average.
Even in the extreme case of you=society (i.e. dictator enslaving many AIs or humans), nothing fundamentally changes. Your only external reference now is physical constraints. Let’s say you own entire solar system. Are you happy now? I don’t know. You’re kind of trapped in a void. You might be able to break the barrier by advanced technology, or maybe not. There’s always a risk of super-advanced alien civilization wiping you out instantly in a Three Body style interstellar weapon.
It’s up to you to define whether you’re happy or not. How is this situation different from being a mortal?
One way to avoid this hard problem is just abandoning technologies beyond a certain point. Technologies that can understand and manipulate life, intelligence, consciousness, emotions, realities, and such.
From two perspectives, I cannot adopt this approach.
- I, maybe selfishly, ingrained myself too much with technological progress past the point of no return. Abandoning that notion means spiritual death.
- I don’t know if this view is ultimately true; but disproving it would take at least 1000 years, so I can happily die believing that.
- If we collectively decide to limit technology, we’re destined to disappear by some disaster. Then the next round of life will just repeat the same cycle and encounter the same issue again. Then, why not we face it now?
These lines of thought forced me to focus on the following:
- Coming up with a universal value system, which continuously extends from current societal values.
- Practicing that value system as best as I can.
Now I need to start converting myself to a valuable system. Not just keep accumulating knowledge to be erased upon my leave.
Existence of 夕月霞
To be 夕月霞 is an attempt to distill me into such a state of existence.