[extropy-chat] Mayanism

[The Avantguardian]

--- Anders Sandberg <asa at nada.kth.se> wrote:

> 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*.

It has been my observation that there seems to be a
definite limit to how good life can get. Perhaps it is
a corollary to the law of diminishing returns. In any
case, one can have billions of dollars, all the toys
one could buy, an entourage of followers, and feast
daily upon caviar and champagne and still be ridden
with angst and ennui. On the other hand, there does
not seem to be a limit on how bad life can get as
there are numerous possible circumstances in life so
horrible that the oblivion of death would be a
blessing. So I think Mayanism is a fairy-tale but then
again that was what Buddha said in the first place.

>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."

Then perhaps David Zindell ought to move to Shanghai
where he can share a one bedroom flat with twelve
room-mates and wrestle for the phone. :)
 
> 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.

Contentment is warm and fuzzy and all but I don't see
it having much true value. All true progress is driven
by discontent while all contentment does is sit on its
ass or worse yet actively oppose progress. Perhaps in
this regard suffering itself attains value.



Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does." - Richard Feynman on QM

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