One of the strangest questions I get when giving talks on Age of Em is a variation on this: How can ems find enough meaning in their lives to get up and go to work everyday, instead of committing suicide?
Ok, so on your model the human brain is nearly at a local maximum for most kinds of work that one needs complex AI type stuff to accomplish and after a few small modifications it becomes very very difficult to find other productivity enhancing modifications.
Still, one would expect that ems would differ pretty substantially from normal humans. Surely those initial modifications would include things like stripping out all sexual arousal subsystems and maybe even the entire social reward subsytem (so one no longer feels any particular pleasure from chatting with others except insofar as it serves some other goal). Or is there a reason you think these initial modifications wouldn't be quite this extreme.
If meaning is constructed on assumptions about the world that turn out to be false under critical scrutiny, e.g. the existence of entities that turn out to be unlikely, would we still want the meaning? Should we, philosophically, still want it? It's not obvious to me that this is desirable, rather than a tragic misunderstanding of the world. If I had a choice between subjective meaning based on falsehoods and the absence of subjective meaning, I would prefer the latter.
As for the low suicide rates, religion taught people for millennia that there is no such thing as death, and attempting it leads to infinite torture instead. Billions of people currently still believe this to be true. Other, less drastic, variants also exist. In addition, most suicide methods are surrounded by akrasia barriers made of pain, fear, animal instict. Concern for friends and family, as well as social judgment further block this road to the end of consciousness. So does the law: We still have a vitriolic culture war being waged against this liberty even in the most liberal countries on earth today.
Imagine, by contrast, a world where suicide was passive and probabilitsic instead of active and certain. For example, if each night conveyed a 1% probability of dying in one's sleep painlessly and without awareness, but this 1% could be reduced to 0% by simply jogging around the house 3 times. In such a world, the "suicide" rate by non-jogging would probably be much higher than our real suicide rates, despite the easy way to prevent the death risk. Of course, in such a world, jogging would soon be mandatory for everybody by government decree in most countries, emphasizing again the element of nonconsensual coercion underlying most of human life.
As for happiness vs. meaning, it's important not to be fooled by the words' connotations. For example, happiness is often implicitly associated with seeking instant gratification or engaging in shallow, addictive activities with diminishing returns. Or with smiling a lot, having parties etc. However, actually increasing the overall subjective experience value of one's life may be better accomplished by strategies that we don't associate with happiness.
And then there is social desirability bias. Topics like these are inevitably going to be mired in status-seeking distortions. For example, perhaps the most rational strategy to make life more worth living in the future would be to use the scientific method to tweak the brain in simple, effective ways. Reduce pains, increase pleasures, without losing the relative motivational weights of adaptive vs. maladaptive behaviors. This may not actually be possible, but even if possible, such strategies may be seen as low status due to their lack of authenticity, hard work and self-sacrifice.
But that doesn't answer the argument that the "desacracralization" driven by capitalism fosters that attitude - and the implication that the process will go much further under emish ultracapitalism.
"some other em out there will outearn you if you slow down even by 1%". No, in a recent post I estimated numerically the margin of the best over the second best em: http://www.overcomingbias.c...
It isn't remotely fair to say that "all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone", for us or for ems. As indicated by my excerpt above, the literature on meaning is choc full of other kinds of meanings that people find.
I suspect widespread mental illness (esp. depression) is due to our living conditions being so different from the environment we evolved in.
We're adapted to life in small tribes of hunter-gatherers, where we knew everyone, were constantly on the move outdoors, and didn't work all that hard.
Today we live in a "big society" where we constantly interact with (and are sometimes dependent on) strangers. We sit (and push buttons) instead of walking. We spend most of our lives indoors instead of outdoors.
Considering all that, I find it surprising how well we cope.
Of course, none of that has anything to do with capitalism, except to the extent that capitalism enabled modern industrial society.
I suspect ems will have it much easier than we do, just as we have it easier than our farmer forbearers.
(Agriculture was worse than we have it. Constant back breaking repetitive physical labor, unvaried diet, restrictions on travel, etc.)
Ems will live in environments that can be tailored to be more like the ancestral one, without all the inconveniences (disease, hunger, predators, bad weather, war...). They'll have access to all the advantages of industrial society (culture, intellectual stimulation, remote communications, machine assistance, access to expertise, environmental controls...) without most of the disadvantages. They'll be selected for compatibility with the em environment. And maybe some mental changes can be made in ems to make them better suited to that environment.
I know that much of human life was under Malthusian conditions, but I have an argument for why em Malthusianism would be still more horrible.
For animals and humans, Malthusian population control worked through a mechanism of bottlenecks: Every so often - maybe ten years, maybe a century - some horrible blight would sweep through a human population and cause a massive dieoff. It might be an epidemic, a crop failure, a war, a drought - and a family with eight children might lose six or so. Other population control mechanisms like infections could strike anytime, but only reached life-threatening levels every few years in any given person. The point is that this left humans in Malthusian societies with some rather long intervals between episodes of cullings, and these intervals were comfortable. Most of a person's life would consist of these comfortable, safe and even leisurely intervals. The nice thing about Malthusianism with bottleneck culling is that between bottlenecks, there are more resources than people, so the survivors have it good.
Nothing like this applies to em Malthusianism, with its constant fight for life's resources (CPU time). Ems with earning power that is even slightly less than the most productive individuals will be outbid for CPU time by the higher earners, or by the clones of higher earners. This means death. Initially many ems would just accept death with equanimity, because they psychologically can't handle this rat race where burnout means death, refusing to work through your "vacations" means death, not undergoing the latest cognitive enhancement that makes you work even harder means death... because you know that some other em out there will outearn you if you slow down even by 1%, and he will be able to buy the CPU cycles you need to live. The survivors will need a much more potent religion than Christianity or Islam. I think its primary role would be to motivate them to keep striving and to not let themselves fall behind. One way to do this is to come to believe that death is not just an end of experience, but a transition to a worse afterlife, something like a Christian hell. Thus we must tread water no matter what, because the cruelties of hell are worse than the cruelties of constant maximal exertion. If one of two equally capable workers manages to sincerely believe this, he will out-compete the other, and the religion will spread. To make it stick, ems might heighten their capacity to feel deep terror at the thought of annihilation. It, along with other adjustments, would help them keep struggling, giving them another advantage. Interests and scruples that aren't related to economic productivity would be extinguished as much as possible. And this would be an arms race in which everyone alive would try anything they could to stay alive for one extra interval. There are no periods of relative leisure, at least not for the survivors.
I will reply with an excerpt from Mark Fisher who comitted suicide this year: "... Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massivedesacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis". Is not competition by itself that devoids one's life of meaning and engagement, is more of that cynical view where "allexistence is evaluated in terms of money alone".
Our ancestors faced far stronger competition than do we today, and their mental illness rate was manageable. Why would the fact that em competition takes place within "capitalism" change much?
But didn't Robin Hanson hear about Freud? Of course we can dismiss his work but, in present day UK for exemple, one in four is diagnosed with a mental illness. So, apparently, we do struggle to find meaning in our lives and some blame our socio-economic as the root cause of that for good reasons (Mark Fisher). Tanspose this into the hyper-capitalized society of ems, the malaise becomes unimaginible. Hanson's revision of his book is a complete naivete. Zizek: "For Lacan, hedonism is in fact the model of postponing desire on behalf of “realistic compromises”: it is not only that, in order to attain the greatest amount of pleasure, I have to calculate and economize, sacrificing short-term pleasures for more intense longterm ones; what is even more important is that jouissance hurts"
I think we all figured that this kind of easy stuff would get done pretty much instantly, and increasingly more substantial and desperate mods would quickly follow. In em world, if you're second-best at your job, you die. (It doesn't cost more to run and clone whoever is better, so what would be the point of running you?) Even in human races people risk serious problems for enhancements that may give a tiny edge, and this happens even when we don't kill the runner-ups!
I still don't understand why we wouldn't do things like tweak the dopamergenic sensitivity in various parts of the brain or otherwise make pretty simple modifications to the relative strengths of various neurotransmitters in various places in the brain once we built Ems. I'm assuming you think we won't otherwise it seems weird to answer the question as if ems were just biologically human.
I mean people have limited success already both increasing happiness and improving their productivity with small molecule chemistry. Surely the ability to just directly affect some brain regions or neuron types but not others would let one pretty quickly find interventions that, while not perfect, are better than nothing for the environment in which these ems run in (it might be worse on the African savannah but I would imagine that the emotional balance best for working in an em virtual world wouldn't be exactly the same as what we evolved...at the very least we could reduce various proclivities to anger or violent outbursts)
I know you've been thinking about em religion, and this is one interesting occasion for speculating about it. Of course some ems would rather not live than face the intense Malthusian struggle, but we don't need to worry about them.
It's more interesting to think about the ones who, despite the horrors of em life, choose to live on anyway. What sort of ideology would give an em the most strength to keep going despite hardships, while not interfering with their immense productivity? That's the kind of em that will be selected for, so we might be able to outline what sort of religion they will believe.
Ok, so on your model the human brain is nearly at a local maximum for most kinds of work that one needs complex AI type stuff to accomplish and after a few small modifications it becomes very very difficult to find other productivity enhancing modifications.
Still, one would expect that ems would differ pretty substantially from normal humans. Surely those initial modifications would include things like stripping out all sexual arousal subsystems and maybe even the entire social reward subsytem (so one no longer feels any particular pleasure from chatting with others except insofar as it serves some other goal). Or is there a reason you think these initial modifications wouldn't be quite this extreme.
If meaning is constructed on assumptions about the world that turn out to be false under critical scrutiny, e.g. the existence of entities that turn out to be unlikely, would we still want the meaning? Should we, philosophically, still want it? It's not obvious to me that this is desirable, rather than a tragic misunderstanding of the world. If I had a choice between subjective meaning based on falsehoods and the absence of subjective meaning, I would prefer the latter.
As for the low suicide rates, religion taught people for millennia that there is no such thing as death, and attempting it leads to infinite torture instead. Billions of people currently still believe this to be true. Other, less drastic, variants also exist. In addition, most suicide methods are surrounded by akrasia barriers made of pain, fear, animal instict. Concern for friends and family, as well as social judgment further block this road to the end of consciousness. So does the law: We still have a vitriolic culture war being waged against this liberty even in the most liberal countries on earth today.
Imagine, by contrast, a world where suicide was passive and probabilitsic instead of active and certain. For example, if each night conveyed a 1% probability of dying in one's sleep painlessly and without awareness, but this 1% could be reduced to 0% by simply jogging around the house 3 times. In such a world, the "suicide" rate by non-jogging would probably be much higher than our real suicide rates, despite the easy way to prevent the death risk. Of course, in such a world, jogging would soon be mandatory for everybody by government decree in most countries, emphasizing again the element of nonconsensual coercion underlying most of human life.
As for happiness vs. meaning, it's important not to be fooled by the words' connotations. For example, happiness is often implicitly associated with seeking instant gratification or engaging in shallow, addictive activities with diminishing returns. Or with smiling a lot, having parties etc. However, actually increasing the overall subjective experience value of one's life may be better accomplished by strategies that we don't associate with happiness.
And then there is social desirability bias. Topics like these are inevitably going to be mired in status-seeking distortions. For example, perhaps the most rational strategy to make life more worth living in the future would be to use the scientific method to tweak the brain in simple, effective ways. Reduce pains, increase pleasures, without losing the relative motivational weights of adaptive vs. maladaptive behaviors. This may not actually be possible, but even if possible, such strategies may be seen as low status due to their lack of authenticity, hard work and self-sacrifice.
Are ems going to have grandchildren? Perhaps the intuition your questioners have is that many sources of meaning are tied to (a real) biology.
Another concern might be that an em can;t make long term plans, because they could be shut down or left on the shelf at any time.
But that doesn't answer the argument that the "desacracralization" driven by capitalism fosters that attitude - and the implication that the process will go much further under emish ultracapitalism.
"some other em out there will outearn you if you slow down even by 1%". No, in a recent post I estimated numerically the margin of the best over the second best em: http://www.overcomingbias.c...
It isn't remotely fair to say that "all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone", for us or for ems. As indicated by my excerpt above, the literature on meaning is choc full of other kinds of meanings that people find.
I suspect widespread mental illness (esp. depression) is due to our living conditions being so different from the environment we evolved in.
We're adapted to life in small tribes of hunter-gatherers, where we knew everyone, were constantly on the move outdoors, and didn't work all that hard.
Today we live in a "big society" where we constantly interact with (and are sometimes dependent on) strangers. We sit (and push buttons) instead of walking. We spend most of our lives indoors instead of outdoors.
Considering all that, I find it surprising how well we cope.
Of course, none of that has anything to do with capitalism, except to the extent that capitalism enabled modern industrial society.
I suspect ems will have it much easier than we do, just as we have it easier than our farmer forbearers.
(Agriculture was worse than we have it. Constant back breaking repetitive physical labor, unvaried diet, restrictions on travel, etc.)
Ems will live in environments that can be tailored to be more like the ancestral one, without all the inconveniences (disease, hunger, predators, bad weather, war...). They'll have access to all the advantages of industrial society (culture, intellectual stimulation, remote communications, machine assistance, access to expertise, environmental controls...) without most of the disadvantages. They'll be selected for compatibility with the em environment. And maybe some mental changes can be made in ems to make them better suited to that environment.
I know that much of human life was under Malthusian conditions, but I have an argument for why em Malthusianism would be still more horrible.
For animals and humans, Malthusian population control worked through a mechanism of bottlenecks: Every so often - maybe ten years, maybe a century - some horrible blight would sweep through a human population and cause a massive dieoff. It might be an epidemic, a crop failure, a war, a drought - and a family with eight children might lose six or so. Other population control mechanisms like infections could strike anytime, but only reached life-threatening levels every few years in any given person. The point is that this left humans in Malthusian societies with some rather long intervals between episodes of cullings, and these intervals were comfortable. Most of a person's life would consist of these comfortable, safe and even leisurely intervals. The nice thing about Malthusianism with bottleneck culling is that between bottlenecks, there are more resources than people, so the survivors have it good.
Nothing like this applies to em Malthusianism, with its constant fight for life's resources (CPU time). Ems with earning power that is even slightly less than the most productive individuals will be outbid for CPU time by the higher earners, or by the clones of higher earners. This means death. Initially many ems would just accept death with equanimity, because they psychologically can't handle this rat race where burnout means death, refusing to work through your "vacations" means death, not undergoing the latest cognitive enhancement that makes you work even harder means death... because you know that some other em out there will outearn you if you slow down even by 1%, and he will be able to buy the CPU cycles you need to live. The survivors will need a much more potent religion than Christianity or Islam. I think its primary role would be to motivate them to keep striving and to not let themselves fall behind. One way to do this is to come to believe that death is not just an end of experience, but a transition to a worse afterlife, something like a Christian hell. Thus we must tread water no matter what, because the cruelties of hell are worse than the cruelties of constant maximal exertion. If one of two equally capable workers manages to sincerely believe this, he will out-compete the other, and the religion will spread. To make it stick, ems might heighten their capacity to feel deep terror at the thought of annihilation. It, along with other adjustments, would help them keep struggling, giving them another advantage. Interests and scruples that aren't related to economic productivity would be extinguished as much as possible. And this would be an arms race in which everyone alive would try anything they could to stay alive for one extra interval. There are no periods of relative leisure, at least not for the survivors.
I will reply with an excerpt from Mark Fisher who comitted suicide this year: "... Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massivedesacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis". Is not competition by itself that devoids one's life of meaning and engagement, is more of that cynical view where "allexistence is evaluated in terms of money alone".
Our ancestors faced far stronger competition than do we today, and their mental illness rate was manageable. Why would the fact that em competition takes place within "capitalism" change much?
Em tweaks would come quickly, but I predict a limited effect and they'd run out - soon they couldn't find more tweaks to do better.
The em life isn't more horrible than the median human life in history, less so in many ways, so past ideologies should be sufficient for them.
But didn't Robin Hanson hear about Freud? Of course we can dismiss his work but, in present day UK for exemple, one in four is diagnosed with a mental illness. So, apparently, we do struggle to find meaning in our lives and some blame our socio-economic as the root cause of that for good reasons (Mark Fisher). Tanspose this into the hyper-capitalized society of ems, the malaise becomes unimaginible. Hanson's revision of his book is a complete naivete. Zizek: "For Lacan, hedonism is in fact the model of postponing desire on behalf of “realistic compromises”: it is not only that, in order to attain the greatest amount of pleasure, I have to calculate and economize, sacrificing short-term pleasures for more intense longterm ones; what is even more important is that jouissance hurts"
I think we all figured that this kind of easy stuff would get done pretty much instantly, and increasingly more substantial and desperate mods would quickly follow. In em world, if you're second-best at your job, you die. (It doesn't cost more to run and clone whoever is better, so what would be the point of running you?) Even in human races people risk serious problems for enhancements that may give a tiny edge, and this happens even when we don't kill the runner-ups!
I still don't understand why we wouldn't do things like tweak the dopamergenic sensitivity in various parts of the brain or otherwise make pretty simple modifications to the relative strengths of various neurotransmitters in various places in the brain once we built Ems. I'm assuming you think we won't otherwise it seems weird to answer the question as if ems were just biologically human.
I mean people have limited success already both increasing happiness and improving their productivity with small molecule chemistry. Surely the ability to just directly affect some brain regions or neuron types but not others would let one pretty quickly find interventions that, while not perfect, are better than nothing for the environment in which these ems run in (it might be worse on the African savannah but I would imagine that the emotional balance best for working in an em virtual world wouldn't be exactly the same as what we evolved...at the very least we could reduce various proclivities to anger or violent outbursts)
I know you've been thinking about em religion, and this is one interesting occasion for speculating about it. Of course some ems would rather not live than face the intense Malthusian struggle, but we don't need to worry about them.
It's more interesting to think about the ones who, despite the horrors of em life, choose to live on anyway. What sort of ideology would give an em the most strength to keep going despite hardships, while not interfering with their immense productivity? That's the kind of em that will be selected for, so we might be able to outline what sort of religion they will believe.