This makes Robin Hanson’s depiction of future brain emulation societies pretty bleak if the basic happiness structure of human minds isn’t changed drastically. In his prediction, emulations (ems) will mostly live at near subsistence level and will have to work almost solely on heteronomous goals given by a manager that can probably compel you to provide extreme degrees of cognitive transparency.
Even in modern Western society, there’s a big problem with heteronomous goals. I think this is one area where self-hacking is extremely important. I’m planning to write a post one of these days about how I self-hacked and went from absolutely hating writing software to a point where I routinely get in the “flow” while writing code and feel happy. Even still, I would describe myself as ‘hating’ software, but if a manager assigns tasks that require writing lots of software, it doesn’t negatively affect me any more.
Given how much happiness depends on autonomous goals, our society that compels us to do heteronomous tasks that we typically don’t care about and don’t enjoy and would not do other than that we need the money seems quite backwards. And yet few would agree that life would be better in alternatively organized societies (especially when pressed to consider all the daily innovations we take for granted, akin to Don Boudreaux’s “Cleaned By Capitalism” posts).
This is very puzzling. It explains why so many people are banging down the door to be underpaid/overworked grad students. The dream of almost all goals being autonomous (tenured research faculty at prestigious college) is almost lifestyle masturbation compared to what most people experience.
This makes Robin Hanson’s depiction of future brain emulation societies pretty bleak if the basic happiness structure of human minds isn’t changed drastically. In his prediction, emulations (ems) will mostly live at near subsistence level and will have to work almost solely on heteronomous goals given by a manager that can probably compel you to provide extreme degrees of cognitive transparency.
Even in modern Western society, there’s a big problem with heteronomous goals. I think this is one area where self-hacking is extremely important. I’m planning to write a post one of these days about how I self-hacked and went from absolutely hating writing software to a point where I routinely get in the “flow” while writing code and feel happy. Even still, I would describe myself as ‘hating’ software, but if a manager assigns tasks that require writing lots of software, it doesn’t negatively affect me any more.
Given how much happiness depends on autonomous goals, our society that compels us to do heteronomous tasks that we typically don’t care about and don’t enjoy and would not do other than that we need the money seems quite backwards. And yet few would agree that life would be better in alternatively organized societies (especially when pressed to consider all the daily innovations we take for granted, akin to Don Boudreaux’s “Cleaned By Capitalism” posts).
This is very puzzling. It explains why so many people are banging down the door to be underpaid/overworked grad students. The dream of almost all goals being autonomous (tenured research faculty at prestigious college) is almost lifestyle masturbation compared to what most people experience.