I had a secular upbringing. I'm not disappointed that the universe has no meaning (i.e., purpose given by a creator) but I do sometimes find it frustrating to be in the situation of being an optimizer who doesn't know what it is they're supposed to optimize.
It is as if a capricious creator-god made a hodge-podge of heuristics and underdetermined and conflicting preferences, and as an afterthought endowed it with the desire to have a comprehendible set of values.
I'm sure anyone who's really thought about the problem of extrapolating volition has been rather frustrated with this at some point. Not only is it uselessly difficult to figure out what we want, it's incredibly difficult to figure out how to design something that figures out what we want, and this chain of dependencies ends up requiring vast knowledge of mathematics, psychology, philosophy, cosmology, and other fields that any sane agent just shouldn't need to have mastered in order to introspect on the question of "In the end, what am I trying to do?".
I liked this post.
I needed a few solid years of good strong individualist pep-talks before I was at all ready to be an adult.
"Non serviam,"
"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine,"
"Listen to the fools reproach! It is a kingly title!"
"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."
"Truth forever on the scaffold/ Wrong forever on the throne,"
and so on. (This song is in the same vein. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZnV6hKhFDs)
There's a cluster of writers (generally science fiction, libertarian, and atheist, with a little Tom Paine and Blake and Joyce in the mix) who were really good at inspiring me to be less automatically servile, more willing to stand for things on my own, less excessively guilty. I actually knew some people who were like that in real life, and would say things to the effect that they'd rather die on their feet than live on their knees. Wonderful folks.
As time ...
SarahC:
There's a cluster of writers (generally science fiction, libertarian, and atheist, with a little Tom Paine and Blake and Joyce in the mix) who were really good at inspiring me to be less automatically servile, more willing to stand for things on my own, less excessively guilty. I actually knew some people who were like that in real life, and would say things to the effect that they'd rather die on their feet than live on their knees.
Trouble is, there are things in life where being servile and shutting up about your complaints is the only sane thing to do, and standing up for yourself would be a self-destructive act. Someone who consistently lives by the principle you cite will almost inevitably end up prematurely dead or in prison.
Of course, in many cases you'll benefit from standing up for yourself, and in fact, the willingness to do so is one of the main things that sets successful people apart from losers. However, the problem is not only how to tell these cases apart in practice (which can be very difficult by itself), but also how to manage inconsistent attitudes that you're supposed to have. Ideally, you'd like to suppress your aversion against servility in situat...
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation an...
"What is the meaning of life?" is a question that should be dissolved on sight.
Some questions can be dissolved. Others need to be replaced, lest they leave a gaping hole. I would suggest replacing that question with this one:
What meanings have you given to your life?
The reason "What is the meaning of life" is such a hard question is because it includes part of a wrong answer right in the question. We should instead ask, what is a meaning of life, because there is no reason to think there is only one. Or if we insist on there being only one, then we have to narrow it down to, say, what is the meaning of my life.
Perhaps spending years on my knees weakened my ability to choose and complete my own goals.
When you choose your own goals, by what criteria should you decide they're worthy? Some criteria meant to satisfy some higher goal, right? If you had a highest goal (and I'm not sure humans are even really capable of it, but assuming we are), how could you have chosen it? By what criteria could you decide that it was a good or bad goal, given that evaluation of the worth of anything at all is only meaningful in respect to some goal or other?
Saying "this is...
I'm another one raised in a secular household, since you asked. Not an especially atheistic one, just apathetic to the concept of religion. I don't feel like I'm missing a purpose; on the contrary, it gives me the freedom to choose one, with no one to answer to about my choice. I find it somewhat alien that people are willing to accept a purpose which is handed to them by someone who had it handed to them by someone else .... and it bothers me that I don't understand it, because that prevents me from communicating intelligently about it. This is why I don'...
- Evo Psych: Our instincts were formed in an ancient time when not knowing the social norms and kow-towing to the political leaders resulted in literal and/or genetic extinction. Perhaps altruistic humans who served causes other than our own were more likely to survive Savannah politics.
I find the case that post-agricultural humans are the result of selection pressures for neoteny to be fairly convincing: The 10,000 Year Explosion (a short, good book on recent human evolution) talks about this some I believe. Many have remarked that humans in general ar...
most humans want nothing more than to surrender to a powerful force... I worry man is a domesticated species.
Seeking a powerful benefactor, who provides guidance and protection, is simply about the self-interest of the seeker. There is a rational will to power at work even in a slave seeking a master.
In a human life, parents are the original powerful force, and religion and politics are largely about finding a substitute for this relationship.
A human being starts out unapologetically selfish. They may not understand much about reality, but they have ...
But no matter the cause, "What is the meaning of life?" is a question that should be dissolved on sight.
I usually replace it with "What do I want?"
I think, in my case at least, Misplaced Life Dissatisfaction is the main cause of existential angst. I've noticed a strong positive correlation between how happy I am at a given moment and how satisfied I am with my purpose in life (or lack thereof). There is a causal link, but it works the opposite way from what I first assumed: sadness makes me angsty, not the other way around. This despite the fact that my logical reasons for being angsty were just as valid no matter whether I was feeling good or not.
As with all biases, identifying the problem doesn't get rid of it, but it helps.
I really like this post. It touches on two topics that I am very interested in:
How society shapes our values (domesticates us)
and
What should we value (what is the meaning of life?)
I find the majority of discussions extremely narrow, focusing on details while rarely attempting to provide perspective. Like doing science without a theory, just performing lots of specific experiments without context or purpose.
1 Why are things the way they are and why do we value the things we value? A social and psychological focus, Less Wrong touches on these issues but ap...
By the way, here's how 30 users of one of the world's smartest Q&A sites answered the "meaning of life" question: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-meaning-of-life
(Quora is mostly entrepreneur types at the moment and the epistemic rationality is well below LW-level.)
What is the meaning of life?
My usual response is that it is a category mistake (a type mismatch, for the CS nerds), or to interpret the question as:
What is the meaning of "life"?
I can think of several possible explanations:
An explanation that I've more or less settled on, if it is true that my constitution requires a certain kind of "meaning" that doesn't exist, is that a core component of my personality in charge of evaluating goals and my progress towards them simply doesn't allow terminating goals.
It seems like a tool with some usefulness that eventually hijacked my mind. Since this component is more meta it feels more conscious than other components (more like the 'I' of my mind).
Emphasizing the importance of ev...
On a trivial level, the meaning of the word meaning is just "that which one intends to convey by language", the meaning of something is it's definition, it's essence.
But we don't take the question to mean something trivial, such as "what is the definition of life?"
So the deepness comes from connotation, for meaning is something that implies purposeful intent. So really it is the question of a creator in disguise.
Or we take the connotation of purpose to imply we are the agent both conveying and interpreting meaning, and it is thus us wh...
It's ironic that, not only do we fail to consciously represent our creator's purpose, we also fail to consciously represent a coherent picture of our own fragmented purposes. We typically act like confused servants to a crowd of waxing and waning drives. If you understand this state of affairs, then you can use the full power of conscious thought and achieve your true purposes better than you otherwise would have. You can strive to be a knowledgeable and effective servant to a crowd of waxing and waning drives.
From my LW-inspired blog post: What Is My Purpose?
I just remembered what this article somewhat triggered in my mind:
An addition to the evo-psych account:
If reason is primarily optimized for arguing about right and wrong, we shouldn't be surprised if this leads to some characteristic biases when we try (or think we try) to use it for truth-seeking. In particular, we tend to be more successful in argument if the ethical principles we state are more general, less based on personal preference, and more widely agreed upon, and so we'd expect to see a bias in favor of these characteristics. Carried to its extreme, this would lead us to characterize our moral framework as univ...
I had a secular upbringing and was never really disappointed nor frustrated that the universe supplies no inherent purpose. These days I'm frustrated (but I turn that frustration into active thinking about the problem of extrapolated volition, which hasn't led anywhere at all useful but ya never know). That said, probably like a lot of people, I got into one or two small philosophical happy death spirals around first Buddhism and then Secular-Buddho-Epicureanism between the ages of, I dunno, 13-16, leading me to think that the 'meaning of life' was somethi...
Context creates meaning and in its absence there is no meaning. To discuss meaning we also need to discuss context.
Perplexed suggests a personalized context.
What meanings have you given to your life?
When the Mormon missionaries visit my home, we often invite them in. Once I was asked, "If you don't believe in God, then what is the meaning of life?".
After talking with them, I could see that what they meant was purpose. Their beliefs gave them purpose and direction. They knew what they needed to do, and acting on those beliefs gave them comfort...
I've long been of the opinion that (high truth probability that) we evolved into a Slave Race during the Neolithic. Republics are an accident of history, when a bunch of Noble Savage throwbacks come into power purely by accident, and build a system to keep people free. 50 years later the mutants start infiltrating it, and we go back to feudalism, our natural form of governance.
I was educated as an atheist. Maybe, be cause it was under communism, when I was born and raised.
The almost single good thing I attribute to the communism today. Good thing, non the less.
Building instrumental rationality may not be the reason why we're on this planet, but it it is the reason we're on this website.
NO. IT. ISN'T!
I reversed my upvote when I noticed this comment. That claim is making a factually incorrect assertion to me about myself and also thrusting a normative presumption at the community at large. I always vote down such claims, no matter how good the rest of the post or comment is.
(Incidentally, apart from that final sentence your post applied to epistemic rationality at least as much as it applied to instrumental rationality.)
Thanks for the feedback. You make a good point. That was me trying to be a good writer instead of a good thinker. Thank you for holding me to high standards.
As someone who was raised atheist in the liberal-scientific-secular-buddhist crowd, it has always seemed fundamental to me that there are amazing experiences like friendship and romance and poetry that have nothing at all to do with God but are just inherently worth pursuing.
My parents were not antireligious or militant atheists, and they have described themselves many times as spiritual. But the natural world and human desires seem to have simply won out in terms of being the best models for pursuing happiness and purpose.
It's not enough to find a meaningful cause. These monkeys want to look in the stars and see their lives' purpose described in explicit detail. They expect to comb through ancient writings and suddenly discover an edict reading "the meaning of life is to collect as many paperclips as possible" and then happily go about their lives as imperfect, yet fulfilled paperclip maximizers.
It seems likely that people really do have a biological (not memetic) god or authority figure-shaped hole in their lives (on top of naturally making way too many Type I...
It's a very complex topic, but to put it as succinctly as possible, the key difference is between self-declared atheists who truly appear as such, and those who insist on their atheism, but various quasi-religious elements are nevertheless clearly discernible in their lives and worldviews (to the point where I would dispute whether it makes sense to exclude them from the general definition of "religion").
Overall, my impression is that among the atheists found in North America, those of the latter kind are far more frequent and prominent compared to the post-Communist Eastern Europe, with Western Europe being somewhere in-between, but closer to North America. (Of course, these large geographical regions contain parts of greatly different religiosity, but what I write tends to be true for the local atheists found there regardless of their percentage in the local population.) Why this is so, and what exact quasi-religious elements are commonly seen among different sorts of self-declared non-religious people, are complex and fascinating questions, which are however difficult to discuss because they touch on many ideologically sensitive issues.
When I read people's writings o...
What could instrumental rationality mean without reference to a set of terminal goals (or equivalently: intrinsic values, preferences, a utility function)? Given that we seem to have value uncertainty, asking "What is the meaning of life?" seems perfectly reasonable (as long as one doesn't assume that there must be an answer). There is no reason why we couldn't have been designed by some creator to serve the creator's purposes. I'm not sure if it makes sense to be disappointed when that turns out not to be the case (as seems likely at this point), but it certainly doesn't make the value uncertainty problem any easier.
I am not Buddhist but I like the epistemic rationality of Buddhism. It provides a purpose for life and a how-to guide that seems to get to the core of the human condition.
I agree, it's potent stuff, especially when combined with modern tools like CBT: you can see how a strong rationalist might grow up on science, Buddhism, and CBT alone.
In my experience rationalists generally come from the Liberal-Scientific-Secular-Buddhist crowd or the Libertarian-Techno-Furutist-Objectivist crowd, and the old Liberals and the old Libertarians tend to eye each others' origin stories with a cocked eyebrow. I of course still think my old team was the better, more Enlightened one.
Fifteen thousand years ago, our ancestors bred dogs to serve man. In merely 150 centuries, we shaped collies to herd our sheep and pekingese to sit in our emperor's sleeves. Wild wolves can't understand us, but we teach their domesticated counterparts tricks for fun. And, most importantly of all, dogs get emotional pleasure out of serving their master. When my family's terrier runs to the kennel, she does so with blissful, self-reinforcing obedience.
When I hear amateur philosophers ponder the meaning of life, I worry humans suffer from the same embarrassing shortcoming.
It's not enough to find a meaningful cause. These monkeys want to look in the stars and see their lives' purpose described in explicit detail. They expect to comb through ancient writings and suddenly discover an edict reading "the meaning of life is to collect as many paperclips as possible" and then happily go about their lives as imperfect, yet fulfilled paperclip maximizers.
I'd expect us to shout "life is without mandated meaning!" with lungs full of joy. There are no rules we have to follow, only the consequences we choose for us and our fellow humans. Huzzah!
But most humans want nothing more than to surrender to a powerful force. See Augustine's conception of freedom, the definition of the word Islam, or Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies." When they can't find one overwhelming enough, they furrow their brow and declare with frustration that life has no meaning.
This is part denunciation and part confession. At times, I've felt the same way. I worry man is a domesticated species.
I can think of several possible explanations:
1. Evo Psych
Our instincts were formed in an ancient time when not knowing the social norms and kow-towing to the political leaders resulted in literal and/or genetic extinction. Perhaps altruistic humans who served causes other than our own were more likely to survive Savannah politics.
2. Signaling
Perhaps we want to signal our capability to put our nose to the grindstone and work for your great cause. Hire me!
3. Memetic Hijacking
Growing up, I was often told to publicly proclaim things like "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you." Perhaps spending years on my knees weakened my ability to choose and complete my own goals.
4. Misplaced Life Dissatisfaction
Perhaps it's easier for an unemployed loser to lament the meaninglessness of life than to actually fix his problems.
The first theory seems plausible. Humans choke to avoid looking too good and standing out from the pack. Our history is full of bows, genuflects and salutes for genocidal a-holes and early death for the noble rebels.
The second seems less likely. Most similar signaling makes people appear as happy, productive workers, not miserable, tortured artists.
The third and fourth explanations fit well with my experiences. My existential angst didn't fade until I purged my brain's religious cobwebs and started improving my life. These things happened at about the same time, so I can't tell whether three or four fits better.
I'd welcome anecdotes in the comments, especially from people raised in a secular environment. If you don't grow up expecting the universe to have meaning, are you ever dissappointed to find it is meaningless?
But no matter the cause, "What is the meaning of life?" is a question that should be dissolved on sight. It reduces humanity to blinding subservience and is an enemy to our instrumental rationality.
Building instrumental rationality may not be the reason why we're on this planet, but it it is the reason we're on this website.