<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt">On Monday, November 12, 2012 7:47 PM Anders Sandberg <anders@aleph.se> wrote:<br><div><div>> I'm more of an Epicurean, myself. Stoics might have got the psychology<br>> part roughly right (it is interesting to compare it to findings in happiness<br>> studies), but they did not seem to have that much fun. I think we can have<br>> a far more hedonistic tranquillity.<br>><br>> The problem with Stoicism and Epicureanism is that they still don't bind together<br>> people much. Sure, they are not against human fellowship, but it is not the<br>> main focus.<br><br>Continuing on the Rand riff, have you read "Epicurean Pleasure and the Objectivist Good" by Peter Saint-Andre? It's at: http://stpeter.im/writings/rand/epicurus.html<br><br>This doesn't really get into human fellowship. His earlier paper does a tiny bit:
http://stpeter.im/writings/rand/apfloe.html That one, though, is more just straight forward Rand stuff and not Epicurus.<br><br>> Maybe the solution is just to tweak the social distance system with neurotech<br>> and artificially enlarge the empathic circle of concern to cover most of humanity.<br>> Some interesting free rider issues, but I suspect the reciprocal altruism network<br>> effects could outweigh those - and there are few things scarier than billions of<br>> caring people. Which of course shows the problem with this approach.<br><br>I imagine some of the free rider stuff might fall by the wayside simply because changing the neurotech will change the incentives for it. The thing I would fear, of course, is caring resulting in a total loss of autonomy, but I reckon that's the horror scenario and not the most likely outcome.<br><br>Regards,<br><br>Dan<br> </div> </div> </div></body></html>