[ExI] The meaning of life (in transhumanism)

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Tue Feb 25 07:07:28 UTC 2014


On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 4:41 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> Thanks for your answers! Very thought provoking, and actually useful. Some
> observations:
>
> We are *way* naturalistic subjectivists on this list. I think Adrian was
> the only one even mentioning non-naturalistic sources of purpose, and
> objectivist ideas mentioned have mainly dealt with the nature of biological
> life and its purpose. In fact, many of the answers were pretty classic
> existentialism!
>

Sorry to jump in here late, but I have a slightly different answer. It does
sort of come up under the "life just is" heading, but here goes.

I tend to believe that we don't really have free will. However, we do seem
to have free will, and the concept seems useful to getting out of bed in
the morning. This, in turn, is useful to continuing to fuel the body that
hauls my brain and gonads around. This helps me to reproduce, which seems
to be a major point to this thing called "life". Now if you talk about the
meaning of the universe, that's quite different. But the meaning of "life"
is to produce more life, so this reproduction thingy seems pretty central
to the whole concept.

Now, what we do have is some sort of optimization function that we use to
decide what to do from moment to moment. For some reason, my optimization
function says, "type this drivel" rather than "go to bed", which seems like
it would make a lot more sense at this time of night. Why? Zeus if I know.

So the meaning of human life might be to run one's optimization function.
And if you want to get really tricky, then you can make whatever "choice"
there might be to optimize one's optimization function. One might refer to
this optimization as "acquiring wisdom".

Now, if acquiring wisdom is the meaning of human life, then in
transhumanism the goal could be stated as "acquire more wisdom than is
currently humanly possible."

So perhaps, if there is a meaning of life in a transhumanist sense, then
this might be it. Of course, you might not be acquiring the wisdom
yourself, so as a cyborgy type creature, you might be content to share your
wisdom-aquiring with say Google, or the world wide connected brainy thing
we seem to be using to send ASCII text to each other in an attempt at meme
spreading.

So another meaning of transhumanist life is to create something wiser than
homo sapiens. Or perhaps even to bring an end to homo sapiens and usher in
something with a better optimization function. It still won't have free
will, but I'd bet it will have the illusion of free will, or it will be
pretty damn useless at running it's optimization function. Or at least this
is what I would suppose.


> It is interesting to note that most answers did not directly jump into
> transhumanism, but were about general life philosophies. So at least around
> here it doesn't look like people base their sense of purpose on a
> transhumanist idea as the core value, but rather that one can choose a
> meaning, and we happen to have chosen transhumanist-aligned views. Of
> course, cause and effect may be mixed.
>

I hope my answer goes in that direction just a tiny bit.


> While most responses were individualistic or focused on enhancing the
> individual self, I also got a very relevant off-list response about
> non-individual goals. There seem to be an interesting tension between some
> of the me-centric subjective purposes of some transhumanists and the more
> other-regarding purposes of other transhumanists.
>

Indeed, group goals are sometimes quite counter to individualistic goals. I
don't need to refer to politics do I?

Happy navel pondering!

-Kelly
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