From: Strata Rose Chalup (strata@virtual.net)
Date: Wed Aug 16 2000 - 21:01:12 PDT
> http://www.singinst.org/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
>
> and give a response.
The much shorter form:
Humans experience things and form goals, without direction. Sometimes
the results suck.
Machine intelligences could experience things and form goals, without
direction but maybe with a little nudge in what somebody thinks is the
"right" direction. Magically, results would suck less.
Bzzt.
If I were trying to solve the problem of human happiness, I would go
about it differently. That may or may not be the problem they are
trying to solve, only the problem that I *think* they are trying to
solve.
If we were to accept for the purposes of argument that unhappiness was
usually a result of random inputs to a goal-directed system, I don't
think the solution would be to build a separate goal-directed system
with slightly less random inputs. The solution would be to try to offer
humans at all life stages a wide range of tools which had been
demonstrated to work for some humans to reprogram themselves for more
happiness.
Initial researches into this from a personal standpoint have led me to
believe that happiness requires certain frameworks of "meaning" for most
people in most cultures. By giving people too many tools for
reprogramming themselves and no guidance onto the ontology of happiness,
you increase the risk that people will delete important parts of the OS
and then try to run "./happiness". The FAQ correctly picks up that many
people feel unhappy and unfulfilled, but misses IMHO a lot of the cause
which is that the set of personal and cultural experiences a person had
in their life did not create enough of a runtime environment for
"./happiness" or "./fulfillment".
I REALLY gotta get back to work. Anybody who is in the Seattle or SFBay
area and wants to shoot the breeze over this one in person, lemme know
and we can try to get together. In Seattle now, will be in SFBay area
Sept 1 through 15 approx, maybe longer.
And no, I'm not happy or fulfilled all the time, duh, it doesn't work
that way. I do have so many things that I want to do or enjoy doing
that I can't possibly do them all. And I do at times get stuck in a
nasty loop that prevents me from doing any of them, but I have learned
various ways to ^C out of it, which don't always work. That's life!
Live it!
_SRC
-- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Strata Rose Chalup [strata@knownow.com] | strata@virtual.net, KF6NBZ Director of Network Operations | VirtualNet Consulting KnowNow, Inc [http://www.knownow.com] | http://www.virtual.net/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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