Excellent post, agree with every single line of it. It’s not depressing for me—I went through that depression earlier, after finally understanding evolution.
One nitpick—I find the question at the end of the text redundant.
We already know that all this world around us is just an enormous pattern arising out of physically determined interactions between particles, with no ‘essence of goodness’ or other fundamental forces of this kind.
So the answer to your question seems obvious to me—if we don’t like patterns we see around us (including us ourselves, no exceptions), all we need to do is to use physics to arrange particles into a certain pattern (for example superintelligence) that, in future, produces patterns desirable for us. That’s all.
Excellent post, agree with every single line of it. It’s not depressing for me—I went through that depression earlier, after finally understanding evolution.
One nitpick—I find the question at the end of the text redundant.
We already know that all this world around us is just an enormous pattern arising out of physically determined interactions between particles, with no ‘essence of goodness’ or other fundamental forces of this kind.
So the answer to your question seems obvious to me—if we don’t like patterns we see around us (including us ourselves, no exceptions), all we need to do is to use physics to arrange particles into a certain pattern (for example superintelligence) that, in future, produces patterns desirable for us. That’s all.
Eliezer, what’s your answer to the question?