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Philosophy of Everything

On "morality derived from space colonization"

Moved back to https://philosophy.mihvoi.ro/2017/03/on-morality-derived-from-space.html

 "Morality derived from space colonization" defines as the highest "Good" the survival of humans in case of an eventual global Earth cataclysm. I believe that such goal (humanity preservation) is likely to be acceptable for many people, but why only by space colonization?

There are arguments that an event that could destroy human life on Earth is likely to happen. We don't need to go until Sun depletion, it is more likely that a big enough asteroid will fall in the next thousands of years. Even without this, life of Earth might be threatened by local events like nuclear accidents, major climate change (it happened before). Even destructive diseases might not be contained in a certain Earth region. If not this, we might also face resource depletion if the population continues to grow.

Morality derived from space colonization

Moved back to https://philosophy.mihvoi.ro/2015/10/morality-derived-from-space-colonization.html

 I claim that most of the modern moral problems can be translated into "does this increases the likelihood of space colonization for humans?" This covers both traditional religious-based moral and more modern secular moral. You should take it with a grain of salt, of course ;), but let's see how it goes...

The seed and the terrain

Moved back to https://philosophy.mihvoi.ro/2022/08/the-seed-and-terrain.html

 What is more important to have a plant, the seed or the terrain?

If the terrain lacks the needed nutrients or energy source (like sunlight), most plants would not grow. Still, a good terrain is not enough to obtain the desired plants. While uncultivated terrains mostly grow weeds, even for that you need some kind of seeds brought by wind.

Life is very compressible

Moved back to https://philosophy.mihvoi.ro/2019/02/life-is-very-compressible.html

An information representation (or string) s is very compressible if the size of it's smallest possible compression K(s) is very small compared with it's observed size(s). The smallest compression size K(s) is the Kolmogorov complexity. We can define the compress-ibility C(s) of a string s to be the smallest compression K(s) divided by the size of the original representation size(s):

C(s) = K(s) / Size(s) - lower is better

Devil's offer - about the meaning of life

Moved back to https://philosophy.mihvoi.ro/2020/08/devils-offer.html

Imagine that humanity is offered the following deal:

• All living humans will enjoy 100 more years of healthy and happy life, finished by a peaceful death in sleep. Immediately after signing the deal, humans will forget the deal and will not worry about this "deadline".
  

• If you sign the deal, no human will even experience any suffering. As life will be extended to 100 years from now regardless of the starting age, no human will even witness the death of another human. Even old people would enjoy a healthy and happy life, becoming physically young again and regaining their mental capacity - without losing their experience.
  

• Each life will be full of accomplishments, not only by material welfare, but also with most spiritual accomplishments that a human can reasonably expect. Children will still be born, parents will still be happy about them - even more so, because all would go smooth with no worries and no accidents.

• People would live happily and without any worry until the "deadline", that will be a peaceful end of the whole humanity.
  

 

Would you take the above deal?

A secular concept of Hell

Moved back to https://philosophy.mihvoi.ro/2020/03/hell.html

Being burned in hell for an eternity is not the worst that can happen. 

Even worse than this, for me, is to be entirely washed out from Existence.

Burning in hell looks pretty painful indeed, but it still contains a glimpse of hope. After eons of suffering, a redemption is still possible, potentially. Suffering from burns is still a property of Life, something that suffers must exist and must somewhat live. There is still something that exists in the burning hell...

Even worse than this, for me, is to disappear, gradually, then totally, from Existence. The eternal void is more frightening that any eternal pain. The eternal void does not leave any glimpse of hope for a better future. The eternal void is no future at all.

* * *

Philosophers and theologians are still arguing about where the existence of a human being begins. Is it at conception? Is is at birth? Is is somewhere between these marks, like when the nervous system reaches a certain state? Any given point in time seems arbitrary when compared with the situation just before and after the chosen point. There is nothing particularly different between the state before and after. Conception can fail after days without knowing it. There is not such a huge difference, morally, between breathing with your lungs and breathing with your mother's lungs. However, when we zoom out, there is a big difference between a small cell and a living human.

There is a continuum of gradual changes, each building on the previous, that goes toward a mature living human. At any point something might go wrong. Each step is not terribly different from the step before. But there is a direction, there is a potentiality toward realizing something that reaches the level when we cannot dispute it to be a human being.

I say that we gradually become more human as we grow. At a given time in our life we reach our maximum human potential. There are ups and downs, sometimes we are more close to our potential, some other times we just live to pass the days. At the end of our life, most people will start to gradually disappear from existence. Sometimes people are talking about old people, in their presence, like they are not there. This is a sad sign of starting to not exist.

But one's existence is not totally ended when dying. There may be siblings that inherits a part of the characteristics of the passed away. There might be something left in the culture by that individual. There are people that were positively touched by that human. It's hard to not matter at all for the life of the next generation. Even if someone does not do anything in it's life, there is a stream of humanity that connects him to all the other humans - by it's ancestors. A part of him/she will still continue to live as long as humanity endures.

* * *

A rock can occupy a space. A rock can be at a given place, at a certain point in time. However, in order to exist, there must be an observer of that rock, someone that conceptualizes that it exists.

The absolute non-Existence for a human must also contain the destruction of any observer that can conceptualize even that him/she must have existed, sometime in the past. The absolute non-Existence is the total destruction of the human race. This is The Hell we should strive to avoid.


See also: On "morality derived from space colonization"

What is the meaning of life?

Moved back to https://philosophy.mihvoi.ro/2014/08/the-meaning-of-human-life-for-me-now.html

 If there is a meaning of life, then this meaning should only be achievable as long as life exists. You could still believe in a meaning "after life", however I personally find it unlikely. If the meaning would be only after life, the very existence of this life would be a bit... meaningless ;)

I personally don't believe in a "life after death", at least not as a continuing existence of the person. I would be more willing to accept a kind of fuzzy "life after death" by informational replication and resulted impact on society (like in "live by your good deeds")

You may disagree with this view; however this does not change much the situation. We are stuck with a life, what could we do with it in a meaningful way? What is a bigger goal that transcends our individual existences?

Well, I am not a prophet, we can find new meanings in the next hundreds years. However, I think we can find a direction that will be close to optimal for any future meanings we may find. Also, I think I could articulate a meaning of life that is in sync with most of our current moral and religious beliefs. In the same time, it could be a beacon that could clarify a bit the priorities of our society in today's days.

Like in a game of chess, except for very special cases, there are no great moves. However, there are many bad and very bad moves. It's hard to find the optimum path, however you can use guidelines and strategies that are increasing the chance of success.

The answer is not 42! It is 50!

For me, it seems reasonable to have as humanity medium term goal to preserve human kind. Two thousandths years ago the means of doing this were more simple: procreate and collaborate in finding food and fighting enemies. For a good collaboration we had to follow some rules: do not steal, do not kill (our people). An even better synergy was obtained by collaboration strategies like "help your neighbor" and "forgive the ones that offended you".

In today's times, we can see a bit further. We know that the Earth will not be our host forever. Way before the sun will deplete, most likely, there will be another major cataclysm that will make life impossible on Earth for human, a big asteroid for example. Even before that, we could self-destroy by on atomic or biologic accident.

Time is ticking; we need to find a way to move to another planet as we still can. Cheap fossil energy will not be here forever. Probably the need to shift the energy paradigm will come first. The challenge will be huge, at this stage we cannot feed all people on Earth without consuming huge amounts of energy. Even if we find a way to live by low scale agriculture, this will not help us fly when the asteroid will come. We will likely need a tremendous quantity of energy for extending life on another planet. We need to wisely use the fossil energy that we have now for creating a new energy paradigm. And we need to do this without collapsing the society structure, I don't know if we have time for a new "Dark age".

By the way, how would you estimate the time for using all known oil reserves at the current rate of consumption? The answer is 50! Just 50 years! Actually 3 years ago the estimation was around 40, now it's 53, it changes with time. Even if it's 100 years, fact is that the oil crisis will be in our lifetime, because the oil price will increase way before depletion. Time is ticking, tick, tock...

Conclusion:
In any event, seems like a good goal for humanity to save himself from extinction by extending life to another planet. This goal does not sound so great to be called "The meaning of life", but it is a prerequisite for any better "meaning of life" we can find in time.

I will come back with details about how this humanity goal is in sync with most of our common moral codes and religious beliefs and what may be deprecated.

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P.S. This is the hard one! Normally it should be like the aim of the journey, not the start. I started with this because I will probably touch a lot of subject that seem unrelated, one with each other. They will be probably related with what is above.

About me: 

I work as a software engineer and, in my personal life, I like to think about psychology, economy and philosophy issues. I will put here my reflections and findings. Often, they will be only speculations and, sometimes, they may be proven to be mistaken ;) I hope I will learn something from you too.

I am not a native English speaker. If the meaning of the phrase is really affected, please give me a note, otherwise just please excuse my language mistakes ;)

Is there a meaning of life?

Moved to https://philosophy.mihvoi.ro/2014/06/is-there-meaning-of-life.html

You have an intuition on this, even if you cannot articulate it probably. Every major vector of our existence is derived somehow from this intuition: why we make children, why we try to preserve our existence, why we help others, why we don't kill each other.

I would postulate that our everyday moral code can be derived from this intuition on "the meaning of life". The major religions captured it in slightly different ways; however there seems to be something more unifying behind various religious dogmas. I believe there is something very convergent in the intuition that we each have about the meaning of life.

---

But wait; is there really a meaning of life?

I would answer this by paraphrasing the Descartes's quote "I think, therefore I am". If there would not be any meaning of life, then there would be no meaning in everything we could do. The answer to this question would be meaningless too. If there is no meaning, it does not matter if we answer this question right. It does not matter if our life is happy or we live the worst sufferings we could imagine. Actually, the life would not exist at all; it would be only a strange atom vibration and no one to notice it.

Secular Philosophy of Everything

Philosophy of Life

Is there a meaning of life?
What is the meaning of life?
A secular concept of Hell
Devil's offer - about the meaning of life
Life is very compressible
The seed and the terrain

Philosophy of Morality

Morality derived from space colonization
On "morality derived from space colonization"
On morality applied to animals
Evil as striving for a local maximum
Morality and killing
Punishment is not really about free will
On "Metaphysics of Quality" of Robert M. Pirsig

Philosophy of Religion

The God concept
A secular God
Is Your God so small?

Philosophy of Knowledge

On Intelligent life forms
Knowledge is all about prediction
How can we all be right even when we believe incompatible things
We only have models, not knowledge
On Knowledge and beliefs
About consciousness

Philosophy of Universe

We believe in a compressible Universe
Genetic code (DNA) is not enough
DNA and the fabric of the Universe
Reflections on the entropy of Life
Lenses of the Universe

Philosophy of Economy

The Economy theory - goods and money
Debt gives value to money
On jobs and welfare
On layoffs
Why Bitcoin will fail
The Capitalism theory

Philosophy of Information

Intuition and neural networks
Mathematical incompletness and life
Sorting is computationally harder than playing chess
Shortest program that prints the play "Othello" by William Shakespeare
Can a computer (or human) simulate itself?
Kolmogorov complexity - short, informal introduction
Why Kolmogorov complexity is not computable - root cause and an example
P=NP is undecidable (conjecture)

Philosophy of Mathematics

Irrational numbers
On Russel's Paradox



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