Comment by maze-le | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maze-le | Hacker News Reader

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It is called existential anxiety, it shows that you are able to contemplate about your own insignificance in contrast to the grand scheme of things (universe, all of existence, etc.). We all have it on one level or another, I used to have it when looking into a dark cloudless night, realizing that all of the little dots I can see out there could technically be orbited by another planet that bears life, inhabited by millions or billions of other lifeforms that could be able to feel and think.

Usually it is nothing to worry about, except when you get obsessed by it and it starts to control aspects of your life because you build a worldview around it or try hard to avoid it or explain it away: then it is called an existential crisis. But what it really means is that the mind gets overwhelmed by the fact that the universe is orders of magnitudes more complex than what the self has ever encountered in our daily lifes. Our brains have evolved so that bipedal apes that migrated from forests into the steppes can survive and cooperate in groups. It was never meant to be confronted by questions of this dimension, but yet here we are.

You can make your peace with it, and embrace it. It can also be a source of endless curiosity, spirituality and creativity.

I remember learning the term "existential crisis" long before I ever experienced it. Then after floundering mentally for a long time, I suddenly connected the two, and the realization that so many other people throughout history have had the same exact feeling - so much so that there's a term for it which is almost a cliche - made me feel a lot better for some reason.

I decided to accept the Douglas Adams perspective: In an infinite universe, an infinite number of seemingly improbable things will inevitably happen, including a random number of particles ejected from astronomical explosions collecting together in one spot in such a way and for just enough time to create life as we know it, and for some of that life to think, "Why am I here?", before entropy rips all of it apart again a cosmic blink later. We exist because in an infinite universe, all things that can happen will happen, including you. There's even a universe in which a god did in fact create everything... which is an interesting question: How do we know if we're in that universe or not?

Have you heard of these somewhat disturbing concepts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit... ?

"Theoretically, over an extremely large but not infinite amount of time, by sheer chance atoms in a void could spontaneously come together in such a way as to assemble a functioning human brain."

That's fantastic.

It might be a bit preposterous to say what humans were meant to do or not to do, especially given that with a sample size of n = 1 we have humans actually wondering about such things.

Existential anxiety isn't per se about the relative size of self to the world but more about the inability to grasp and control the understanding of it. Pretty much everything living strives to "control" things, and in the case of human beings this applies to mental things too. Controlling things on a mental level is usually about understanding them, not necessarily about bending them to our will.

Anxiety is tied to a difficulty in dealing with perceived lack of control (over others, over our emotions, over the future..), and existential anxiety is an example of anxiety when it comes to existence. We simply don't know enough to say something that cements control.

Thankfully one of the coping mechanisms is humour, so I'll leave the reader with the very well known Douglas Adams bit:

“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

The sentence you object to was not thought of as a teleological dogma of what humanity is meant to do or not, but an evolutionary perspective of why our brains are not very well equipped to handle some questions and/or scales of such dimensions (maybe it wasn't the most apt expression -- I am not a native English speaker). The sensory and processing equipment that has evolved by giving early hominids the advantage to use tools and language stumbles somehow when it is confronted with the vastness of the universe -- it loses track of the local reference frame...

Interesting. I’ve had the exact opposite reaction. At times when I’d suffer from anxiety my most effective remedy would be to sit down outside and observe the stars until that deep feeling of insignificance from really seeing it all presented itself.

Somehow the perspective of my life just being a tiny sparkle in the grand scheme of things would render any stress moot.

The feeling of insignificance is merely one possible response of a range of arbitrary emotional responses. It has been made more prevalent by a cultural, existentialist meme. I choose wonder and amazement as my arbitrary emotional response. It is more satisfying. I hope that whatever superintelligence we create will speak to us about the answers it finds to these questions, and not choose to wipe us out instead.

There is no reason that a superintelligent AI cannot do the following: create superintelligent theories about the universe (using superintelligent intuition), create superintelligent tools to prove its superintelligent theories, leading to superintelligent empirical observation, ultimately producing the answer to the question of our existence far faster and far more eloquently than is predicted.

Perhaps insignificant was a poor choice of word. Did not mean to imply that in an exclusive sense. Rather inclusive, a tiny tiny part of something inspiring, as you put it, wonder and amazement. And, I would add, to underline the inclusive part: pride.

What GP is describing is not quite existential anxiety..

Not the dread of an insignificant existence, rather, the dread of an unending existence.

I am dreaded by how reality works and there is no way to explain any of it. If the reality has no ending or begining, how does it operate? The reality does follow some rules. How is is it enforced? Where does the rules run? How are the rules defined?

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