[extropy-chat] Mayanism

[Anders Sandberg]

ilsa wrote:
>  Buddha gave 84 thousand suturas.  there is the first:  all
> life is suffering,

I sometimes consider myself to be a kind of Buddhist satanist (Mayanist?)
since I disagree with the first noble truth. As I see it, all life is
pleasure. And from this it follows that we ought to create more life, more
diversity, more *stuff*. As David Zindell put it:

"I am not interested in things getting better; what I want is more: more
human beings, more dreams, more history, more consciousness, more
suffering, more joy, more disease, more agony, more rapture, more
evolution, more life."

Of course, I do think we can make things better too. Unnecessary suffering
is ugly and boring. But hedonism or contentment is not the sole value.

>From a purely psychological perspective Buddhism clearly "gets it" in
terms of how to keep humans feeling good and mentally healthy. But that is
based on human mental architecture, how we deal with pain, attachments and
desires, and that may not generalize very well to other models of minds.


-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University