If you ask people how much of an income would be “enough” for them, they generally pick (so I have heard) about 10 times their present income, whatever their present income is. This is the largest amount they can imagine being able to spend. They cannot imagine how anyone could need more and think they are wrong to want more.
To a homeless person on the streets, paradise is a house of their own and a steady job. To someone with the house and the job, paradise is a big house and a pile of cash to retire on. To someone with the big house and the pile, maybe some of them do just laze around, a mere two utopias up from living on the streets, especially if they’re peasants with a huge lottery prize, but I think most of the people at that level do use their lives more purposefully. The utopia above that level might be daydreaming of being CEO of a major conglomerate, with underlings to do all the work, and spending their life flying around to parties on tropical islands in a private jet. But people at that level don’t live like that either. Elon Musk is three or four utopias up from living on the streets, and he spends his time doing big things, not lazing in luxury.
When people imagine utopia, their imagination generally goes no further than imagining away the things in their life that they don’t like, that they can imagine being gone, and imagining more of the things that they do like, that they can imagine having. And what they can imagine goes no further that what they see around them. But having more wealth and using it brings new possibilities, good and bad, that the poorer person never knew existed. The more you know, do, and experience, the more you discover there is to know, do, and experience.
The concept of a final “utopia” is a distraction. Reach the next utopia above ours and there will still be things worth doing. If the sequence does end somewhere, I hope that we climb up through as many utopias as it takes to find out.
We value new experiences now because without that prospect we’d be bored, but is there any reason why new experiences necessarily forms part of a future with entirely different forms of life? There could be alien species that value experiences the more they repeat them; to them, new experiences may be seen as unnecessary (I think that’s unlikely under evolutionary mechanisms, but not under sentient design).
My point was that we value new experiences. Future forms of life, like humans after we can alter our preferences at root level, might not find that preference as necessary. So we could reach a level where we don’t have to worry about bad possibilities, and call it “paradise”.
If you ask people how much of an income would be “enough” for them, they generally pick (so I have heard) about 10 times their present income, whatever their present income is. This is the largest amount they can imagine being able to spend. They cannot imagine how anyone could need more and think they are wrong to want more.
To a homeless person on the streets, paradise is a house of their own and a steady job. To someone with the house and the job, paradise is a big house and a pile of cash to retire on. To someone with the big house and the pile, maybe some of them do just laze around, a mere two utopias up from living on the streets, especially if they’re peasants with a huge lottery prize, but I think most of the people at that level do use their lives more purposefully. The utopia above that level might be daydreaming of being CEO of a major conglomerate, with underlings to do all the work, and spending their life flying around to parties on tropical islands in a private jet. But people at that level don’t live like that either. Elon Musk is three or four utopias up from living on the streets, and he spends his time doing big things, not lazing in luxury.
When people imagine utopia, their imagination generally goes no further than imagining away the things in their life that they don’t like, that they can imagine being gone, and imagining more of the things that they do like, that they can imagine having. And what they can imagine goes no further that what they see around them. But having more wealth and using it brings new possibilities, good and bad, that the poorer person never knew existed. The more you know, do, and experience, the more you discover there is to know, do, and experience.
The concept of a final “utopia” is a distraction. Reach the next utopia above ours and there will still be things worth doing. If the sequence does end somewhere, I hope that we climb up through as many utopias as it takes to find out.
We value new experiences now because without that prospect we’d be bored, but is there any reason why new experiences necessarily forms part of a future with entirely different forms of life? There could be alien species that value experiences the more they repeat them; to them, new experiences may be seen as unnecessary (I think that’s unlikely under evolutionary mechanisms, but not under sentient design).
I’m not interested in the values of hypothetical aliens, especially those dreamt up only to provide imaginary counterexamples.
My point was that we value new experiences. Future forms of life, like humans after we can alter our preferences at root level, might not find that preference as necessary. So we could reach a level where we don’t have to worry about bad possibilities, and call it “paradise”.