[ExI] The meaning of life revisited

Anders Sandberg anders at aleph.se
Sat Jun 14 21:39:31 UTC 2014


BillK <pharos at gmail.com> , 14/6/2014 4:49 PM:
How much of life is housekeeping? 
i.e. just surviving can take up a lot of time and resources. 
 
Possibly it is only in fairly recent times that humans have had the 
luxury of spare time to wonder about the meaning of life. Even now I 
suspect a quite small percentage have this luxury. 
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a good approximation: meaning-searching mainly happens when we got survival, safety, and social network fixed. We certainly have moments when we think even when scrounging for food or trying to impress people, but active pursuit of deep meaning is a bit of a luxury. Of course, really religious people actually skip the other parts to focus on the things they think are important, becoming monks and whatnot. 
But there is another aspect of housekeeping: how much of life is actual thought, and how much is just chatbot-like stimulus-response patterns? After spending a week talking Turing tests I suspect most of our time is in chatbot mode. This makes sense: thinking is expensive and slow, while well-learned responses can be cheap and fast. And most thinking moments are about housekeeping (how should I handle my family? what job would pay better?) rather than wonder or meaning-searching. 
So when we get richer and freer in the future, the amount of actual thinking about meaning in the average person might not go up much. Certainly people will do more high status "searching" showing that they are deep, creative and individual, but most don't care that much about figuring out what it is all about. You need to have a pretty high need for cognition to care about The Meaning rather than a meaning. But it is fun to be in that state!

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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