Excellent point by Worley. Since I have assumed the role on this blog of pointing out that happiness is not the meaning of life, let me hasten to add that happiness is a very useful barometer. Whether you are happier on average now than you were 10 years ago is for example probably a more reliable barometer of whether your life is on a better track than it was 10 years ago than change in financial net worth over those 10 years (though net worth is an important barometer too). And the one situation in which happiness is least likely to steer you wrong is when you use your wife’s happiness as a barometer for how good a job you are doing as a husband.
The object of the game of life is not just to become more rational but rather to become more rational, more ethical and more loving. “Being loving” is defined as helping those close to you to become more rational, ethical and loving. This is the way we maximize the ethics and the rationality of every intelligent agent in our reach, which, if it is not the purpose of life, is a sufficiently good approximation for most people. (Singularity scientists however will probably need a more sophisticated definition of the purpose of life.)
By “ethics” I mean simply the sincere desire to do good and to avoid doing evil. (I freely admit I do not have a formula or algorithm that allows a person to tell good from evil in any situation). I bring the concept of ethics into this little exposition because I want to suggest that it unethical to increase the rationality of an unethical person. By doing so, you are increasing his capacity to do evil. That suggestion goes against the egalitarianism that is such a central part of our ethical culture: the conventional ethical wisdom is that every human is equally deserving of loving treatment. I want to suggest that that is wrong and that although the majority of us could stand to become much more loving, it is also true that we should direct our love as much as possible towards ethical people and away from unethical people.
I end with a warning. Rationality only becomes powerful when it is combined with knowledge. If you wish to be rational about physics or space travel, it is easy to find accurate knowledge to help you, but it is much more difficult to find accurate knowledge about how to become more loving: in that domain, the accurate knowledge is mixed with a much larger amount of false information. And as has been said here before, most psychologists are idiots.
Excellent point by Worley. Since I have assumed the role on this blog of pointing out that happiness is not the meaning of life, let me hasten to add that happiness is a very useful barometer. Whether you are happier on average now than you were 10 years ago is for example probably a more reliable barometer of whether your life is on a better track than it was 10 years ago than change in financial net worth over those 10 years (though net worth is an important barometer too). And the one situation in which happiness is least likely to steer you wrong is when you use your wife’s happiness as a barometer for how good a job you are doing as a husband.
The object of the game of life is not just to become more rational but rather to become more rational, more ethical and more loving. “Being loving” is defined as helping those close to you to become more rational, ethical and loving. This is the way we maximize the ethics and the rationality of every intelligent agent in our reach, which, if it is not the purpose of life, is a sufficiently good approximation for most people. (Singularity scientists however will probably need a more sophisticated definition of the purpose of life.)
By “ethics” I mean simply the sincere desire to do good and to avoid doing evil. (I freely admit I do not have a formula or algorithm that allows a person to tell good from evil in any situation). I bring the concept of ethics into this little exposition because I want to suggest that it unethical to increase the rationality of an unethical person. By doing so, you are increasing his capacity to do evil. That suggestion goes against the egalitarianism that is such a central part of our ethical culture: the conventional ethical wisdom is that every human is equally deserving of loving treatment. I want to suggest that that is wrong and that although the majority of us could stand to become much more loving, it is also true that we should direct our love as much as possible towards ethical people and away from unethical people.
I end with a warning. Rationality only becomes powerful when it is combined with knowledge. If you wish to be rational about physics or space travel, it is easy to find accurate knowledge to help you, but it is much more difficult to find accurate knowledge about how to become more loving: in that domain, the accurate knowledge is mixed with a much larger amount of false information. And as has been said here before, most psychologists are idiots.