How might you go about learning whether happiness, consciousness, and other good human qualities are evolutionarily adaptive enough to survive in alien future scenarios?
You mean besides “do a helluva lot of neuroscience”? A lot of our good qualities are subjective, in the most basic sense of that word. We don’t even understand their physical basis well enough to predict whether (or which ones) significantly different physical systems will share. If you want to know whether robots can take your job, the question of whether machines can think is exactly as uninteresting as whether submarines can swim (h/t Dijkstra). If you want to know whether you can become a certain kind of robot, that’s a whole ’nother story.
In a way happiness is ingrained into specific personality types. My neighbour—next flat—is amazingly happy even after she locked herself out and I tried to break in for her. That happiness can only be duplicated with good drugs. Then there is attitude. I was in India [not as a 5 * tourist either] and found they were content [a bit less than happy] with their lives which compared to ours was a big obvious difference. Anyway it’s a moot point as the Scandinavians won that round globally the last time because—social democracy works and it is not socialism which a lot of the braindead insist it is. so will all this collapse in a sci fin Asimov type future? No. As cars replaced horse-cabbies and the underground trains created true mass transit happiness per se was-is not affected-effected. Nor to airoplanes instead of ancient clippers to travel across the seas. Personally I can’t wait for the future. I even dream about it. At times. People adjust as kids to their surroundings and take it from there. Anthropologists, social scientists, historians, journalists and writers and even real scientists have shown us that we can be happy whether living in the Stone Age [Australian aborigines] or high tech astronauts and everything in between.
That happiness can only be duplicated with good drugs.
What makes you say that. I suppose I may be one of those people who is just luckily happy (though, I doubt it. I used to be a very angry person), but in my experience you can train happiness.
How might you go about learning whether happiness, consciousness, and other good human qualities are evolutionarily adaptive enough to survive in alien future scenarios?
You mean besides “do a helluva lot of neuroscience”? A lot of our good qualities are subjective, in the most basic sense of that word. We don’t even understand their physical basis well enough to predict whether (or which ones) significantly different physical systems will share. If you want to know whether robots can take your job, the question of whether machines can think is exactly as uninteresting as whether submarines can swim (h/t Dijkstra). If you want to know whether you can become a certain kind of robot, that’s a whole ’nother story.
In a way happiness is ingrained into specific personality types. My neighbour—next flat—is amazingly happy even after she locked herself out and I tried to break in for her. That happiness can only be duplicated with good drugs. Then there is attitude. I was in India [not as a 5 * tourist either] and found they were content [a bit less than happy] with their lives which compared to ours was a big obvious difference. Anyway it’s a moot point as the Scandinavians won that round globally the last time because—social democracy works and it is not socialism which a lot of the braindead insist it is. so will all this collapse in a sci fin Asimov type future? No. As cars replaced horse-cabbies and the underground trains created true mass transit happiness per se was-is not affected-effected. Nor to airoplanes instead of ancient clippers to travel across the seas. Personally I can’t wait for the future. I even dream about it. At times. People adjust as kids to their surroundings and take it from there. Anthropologists, social scientists, historians, journalists and writers and even real scientists have shown us that we can be happy whether living in the Stone Age [Australian aborigines] or high tech astronauts and everything in between.
What makes you say that. I suppose I may be one of those people who is just luckily happy (though, I doubt it. I used to be a very angry person), but in my experience you can train happiness.
40%, give or take.