:)

This perspective comes from an experience I had in a dream that pretty well changed my life forever onward from that point.

I had a dream that I was looking out at my city and to a lesser extent the world, and I saw everyone as an infinitely precious shard of light.

And, the feeling of love was so profound that I understood in that moment that it was the most important thing that there could be.

There wasn't really anywhere up to go from that experience, other than to experience that more fully from a perspective beyond my limited mortal mind.

I do think there's a sort of perspective difference between paradise and utopia. That is, utopianism seems to come from a sort of one dimensional utilitarianism, while the aim of paradise encompasses the highest possible wisdom grounded in experience to drive the beauty of creation done in the light of truth and goodness.

Yep...... sounds about right.

It's a game, that is the context.

Games train you in useful, transferable skills.

I disagree with the notion that one should replace their real life with an unreal life on the internet.

Additionally, I used to play WoW myself, and every time I did, I was always the least healthy and was more unhappy overall than ever.

Which is why I now seek to extract what is so enthralling about games like WoW and pull that into the real world, while not eliminating games or virtual experiences.

Like, imagine if we built ironforge under the Colorado rockies, and linked it up with Khazad dum! Heh. That would be physically possible with artificial superintelligence. Then we could drink beer under the mountain, swordfight and party after a day doing things like crafting real things that fit that environment.

It's just that I think there is real value in the real, and supposing that we are in a sort of matrix only motivates me to want to try to break past a layer in such a matrix.

Lots of "downvote because disagree" assholery, mainly.

Reddit just sucks. It's designed to make people mad and poison people's minds with rage and bandwagoning.

I do think paradise is achievable in the long term, but it is going to involve more paradigm shifts.

I think this is the problem.

It's not a forced positivity per se.

It's more of a "learning to drop the baggage of the past and move into a happier future."

Interesting take.

I've been moving in the opposite direction of VR on my personal spiritual end of things in that I'm not sure that what I am looking for would be found in VR or not.

Sounds more like the emptiness that Wittgenstein was alluding to when he more or less said that religion giving life after death doesn't actually solve the problem.

The fact of your utility is fake in VR.

Think about the contextual picture, not just the outcome.

Heh!

But do understand that the username came from a personal vision I've had forever, dreaming about AI and an age of abundance making it so that we are able to build amazing, beautiful monolithic structures, and live in harmony with nature, but with none of the drawbacks and disease!

Lately, I've also been noticing that there's a sort of "juiciness" to fantasy, and a lot of people seek it out in literature, and I've been trying to probe more fundamentally what that's about.

I think the mere fact of us being human with ancient roots stretching back billions of years is actually amazing. William Shatner's experience of grief looking at the earth from space also hit me. I used to be a huge space nerd, but I've started to really deeply love the earth.

There is so much beauty in nature, but we've contextualized it in this scientific rationalist way, so even when we're in nature, we're seeing atoms and things.

Basically, there should be an attempt to return a sort of magic to nature - the magic we now seek out in fantasy. This is an aesthetic movement, but for me it's also a spiritual one. But, I came up with the idea as an atheist, so it's totally compatible with secularism. Heh.

This is a solid answer.

I hope we can make the real world so good that VR, while it will have more variety, will not be able to fundamentally exceed real life when all things are considered.

I already addressed this in my post! Heh.

We don't know - and moreover, we don't even know that there is a physical reality outside of us in the first place. All external things may be virtual, and reality itself may be only made up of consciousness.

Just a fun little flip for you.

That said, we certainly need not assume that we're in a sort of matrix. Or, if we are, wouldn't it be better to use AI to jailbreak our own matrix?

> In VR everyone can be the king.

I support the right for people to make this choice, but I also do not endorse it as a choice in the way that I actually support widespread drug legalization, but I don't condone the use of hard drugs.

I believe it is psychologically unhealthy, and moreover, separating oneself from one's human form is going to carry a great many epistemological risks.

> Our experience of what red actually looks like is entirely our own and in no way can be compared.

I'm very well aware of qualia and a lot of the literature on it. Heh.

> Many people entertain the idea that quantum mechanics hints at a link between the subjective experience and the physical universe through various interpretations. I don't think lay-people (me included) should be adopting any of these interpretations as philosophical evidence.

Roger Penrose and the Wigner-von Neumann interpretation lol.

> do you consider panpsychism to be a valid idea?

It's not my favorite idea, hence why I mentioned a sort of inverse of panpsychism. Rather than consciousness "being everywhere," it is totally philosophically reasonable that consciousness exists nowhere at all, (even Descartes mentioned this, though that seems to be sorely neglected in the discussion of consciousness) since existence in space is not a requirement for consciousness. I.e. take the substance out of dualism in that case.

That said, an idea I dislike even more is emergentism - unless that emergentism references panpsychism. Why? Because emergentism ascribes more to emergence than emergence is capable of, a sort of logical jump to think that emergence means "fundamentally new phenomenon," which is just not the case. It ascribes magical qualities to emergence and is a way of completely avoiding the problem, and adds nothing to it.

> Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of subjective experiences of other humans as much as your own?

Yes. I am actually a former vegan, starting to maybe be winding back to vegetarianism, and this topic is fundamental to those choices.

Overall, I like the fact that you seem to have a solid grasp on this topic. :)

Not necessarily in a post AI world, though.

I.e. unlimited cheap, clean energy to grow crops underground in caverns built by robots that work for free. Or in space, and have fusion powered spacecraft.

In such a future, the least developed countries would have a standard of living beyond that of the wealthiest countries.

That level of abundance is also part of the singularity. Also, lots of planets to populate and terraform.

That's actually my point. Use your VR fantasies to guide what we should make our real world like. But keep making that vision better and better.

Well... think of it more like this. VR and the real world both offer you an infinite number if possible things to do post AI.

The fact that you yearn for VR points towards what you want.

Rather than defining what you want as a set of things, look at the meta picture and take the time learn what satisfies you fully.

I.e. fantasy realms are a common aim for people goinf after VR. So why don't we build Minas Tirith here, and have parties with roasted meat, bonfires, beer, music in a place like that in a post AI world!

I guess that is more where I am going. Like, we can make this world so good that from an enjoyment perspective, there's a contentedness to be had here that renders VR unnecessary if you have the mind to envision the possibilities.

I.e. if you want it in VR, ask what it is that you get out of that that you cannot ha e here, or isn't superceded or met by something here.

No need to mind upload either... you'll surely be able to go in and out of VR to experience certain impossible things.

We are still in a relatively shit spot, but part of that shittiness comes from the fact that we are societally acting like we live in the middle ages.

Resources are not comparatively scarce. The way we set things up is inefficient. I hope AI can help with bureaucracies - both public and private.

The source of meaning, in my view, is also the source of the concept of quantification itself. Heh.

Quantification has limited scope and purview. It gives a subjective sense of objectivity without being innately objective in itself.

Being a data guy.... people ask for numbers and think they mean something because they vaguely make sense..... I've seen PhDs with quantitatively heavy degrees make this error in business..................... "this number looks sort of like what I'm looking for therefore it makes sense."

People misjudge how deeply they are biased, and the bias is very very deep, for everyone, and if you want to be in as rational as possible, you MUST assume this is the case with yourself.

I think seeing the deep irrationality in so-called rationalists started also shifting my perspective a lot kn these topics.

Meaning in general is only possible through human connection. But, meaningful things aren't always intensely pleasurable - they're just painful when absent. I.e. death of a loved one.

There is just a lot we do not know and may be totally unknowable about identity and consciousness. I.e. we might just end up killing people with mind uploading, and we'd have no way of knowing.

There may be something real and important to our reality, and existing in it as it is. Take a look at the Wigner-von Neumann interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Also, just the hard problem of consciousness in general. Lots of people make a loooot of assumptions about a lot of topics.

As for meaning, it is something that can only be experienced. I.e. I could tell you I've seen a new color (hypothetically), and there would be no way to logically describe or quantify it.

Meaning works in that way. I'd also add... I have in this process of seeking meaning also experienced things that were something like seeing a new color.... i.e. seeing dark purple as a very bright color in a flash in my mind for a moment while listening to JS Bach.

Can't wait to delete yourself here and copy yourself over there?

And... its still all fake in the way that actually matters, with respect to being itself. It's fake struggle, fake effort.

I'm not saying VR is innately bad, but it's just the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure needs to be balanced.

Heh. I think you should read about what Tolkien was actually getting at with LotR. Especially themes like Sauruman ripping the forests down.

Well, maybe people would still choose to perish.

I think you make a lot of assumptions about reality that merely come from a subjective sense of objectivity (maybe your intuition for neural nets will help you see what I mean now that we have chat gpt and things like that to illustrate some ways that our intelligence may work).

And, we might very well build systems off of such biases, and the limitations of those biases might make a living clusterfuck nightmare.

Just having been down the nihilist Machiavellian road, learning as much as possible about human nature (which ironically was the path out of nihilism and rationalist naivete), I am indeed concerned about the direction this is all going.

I feel like I am seeing people not only fall for the same traps, but do a worse job at actually seeing their way around such traps within a rationalist framework.

Sociopaths are an interesting phenomenon - people without a lot of the social fabric programming, who end up being very good at manipulating or living in such a space.

IDK. People just don't understand how absolutely pitch black materialism is because they still choose variations of religious thinking to cover up the root nature of their true belief system, without noticing that this is what they are doing.

This is why the fact that a bunch of nihilisits are seeking some sort of escape or self-actualization through transhumanism terrifies the living shit out of me.

I am in touch with the absolutely lost pitch black parts of my soul and the brightest of brights. I understand the allure of power, sadism, control, dominion, lust, as well as the genuine religious drive that actually transcends those things.

I worry that my rights will be horrifically violated by people like you who choose to augment themselves with this technology without fully appreciating their inner nature.

I almost went down the completely opposite road. I am convinced that if I had gotten medication for ADHD sooner, I would have gone down this dark road and would have had the material resources to sustain and satisfy me through it to see myself as one of the wielders of this technology.

Yes, that is what I once pursued, and maybe you can still feel a little bit of my own rationalist arrogance somewhat talking down to people on this sub. But that's why I was choosing to go down such a route - I was getting tired of people with trivial minds for things like philosophy running the world.

And everything I've seen here as a supposed rebuttal or argument to any points here have been painfully trivial while coming from a place of equal arrogance........

More empty things. It's the empty pursuit of things, and you sacrifice your connection to the level of reality that you come from even if our world is virtual.

You can't have it all.

What points? Limited resources? What limits will we have in the real world with fusion reactors and AI all over the place?

Get my drift?

Or do you mean to deprive me of the right to live in the real world out of some sort of abstract utilitarianism.

Perhaps I glossed over this because I thought it was so incredibly basic that it was patently obvious, like pointing out the sky is blue, but I guess not...