I believe I and others here probably have a lot to learn from Chris, and arguments of the form “Chris confidently believes false thing X,” are not really a crux for me about this.
Would you kindly explain this? Because you think some of his world-models independently throw out great predictions, even if other models of his are dead wrong?
The main thing I got out of reading Bostrom’s Deep Utopia is a better appreciation of this “meaning of life” thing. I had never really understood what people meant by this, and always just rounded it off to people using lofty words for their given projects in life.
The book’s premise is that, after the aligned singularity, the robots will not just be better at doing all your work but also be better at doing all your leisure for you. E.g., you’d never study for fun in posthuman utopia, because you could instead just ask the local benevolent god to painlessly, seamlessly put all that wisdom in your head. In that regime, studying with books and problems for the purpose of learning and accomplishment is just masochism. If you’re into learning, just ask! And similarly for any psychological state you’re thinking of working towards.
So, in that regime, it’s effortless to get a hedonically optimal world, without any unendorsed suffering and with all the happiness anyone could want. Those things can just be put into everyone and everything’s heads directly—again, by the local benevolent-god authority. The only challenging values to satisfy are those that deal with being practically useful. If you think it’s important to be the first to discover a major theorem or be the individual who counterfactually helped someone, living in a posthuman utopia could make things harder in these respects, not easier. The robots can always leave you a preserve of unexplored math or unresolved evil… but this defeats the purpose of those values. It’s not practical benevolence if you had to ask for the danger to be left in place; it’s not a pioneering scientific discovery if the AI had to carefully avoid spoiling it for you.
Meaning is supposed to be one of these values: not a purely hedonic value, and not a value dealing only in your psychological states. A further value about the objective state of the world and your place in relation to it, wherein you do something practically significant by your lights. If that last bit can be construed as something having to do with your local patch of posthuman culture, then there can be plenty of meaning in the postinstrumental utopia! If that last bit is inextricably about your global, counterfactual practical importance by your lights, then you’ll have to live with all your “localistic” values satisfied but meaning mostly absent.
It helps to see this meaning thing if you frame it alongside all the other objectivistic “stretch goal” values you might have. Above and beyond your hedonic values, you might also think it good for you and others to have objectively interesting lives, accomplished and fulfilled lives, and consumingly purposeful lives. Meaning is one of these values, where above and beyond the joyful, rich experiences of posthuman life, you also want to play a significant practical role in the world. We might or might not be able to have lots of objective meaning in the AI utopia, depending on how objectivistic meaningfulness by your lights ends up being.