Understanding Everything | Hacker News Reader

Understanding Everything

shimmeringvoid.substack.com

84 pointsbfollington31 comments

> Well, one of the core measures of a well-designed game (for a given player) is the felt experience of immersion, or flow. Specifically, an immersive game should hold the player in the flow channel at all times.

In life, that's not the case. We sometimes choose to do things that are frustrating or boring, because they must be done. Because they're worth doing. Not everything needs to be entertainment.

> Instead, I want to play an infinite game

That's why I came to believe in reincarnation, actually.

Life on its own can seem pretty meaningless -- you can try to learn all you want, achieve your wildest dreams, and then we all die and in a few centuries will be utterly forgotten.

A bit like how a single game of rock, paper, scissors is not especially interesting. There's no real strategy to a single game.

But repeated rock, paper, scissors, there are tournaments in that, computer engines, there are several strategies and ways to exploit other strategies. The "optimal" play (always random) is guaranteed to end in the middle of the pack. There's much more to think about.

So I choose to assume reincarnation exist (with no possible way to communicatie between lives). And now what I do in this life may influence my next one. Everything has more meaning, just by a simple assumption.

>exist (with no possible way to communicate between lives) ...what I do in this life may influence my next one.

Could you please clarify what you mean by this? If there is no communication in either direction, in what way does one life affect the next?

Karma?

I suppose genes would fit the bill? Environment can affect gene expression so how we nurture our current environment could affect the genes of future generations. Might be a stretch, I’m not a geneticist or biologist.

A person today could build something to be used by a person tomorrow.

If you don’t have memories of your current life, can you meaningfully be said to be the same consciousness at all?

Also I’m really happy/jealous that you’ve found meaning, but I’d like to softly express some incredulity at picking a view of the universe based on what feels good or seems the most meaningful. Don’t you ever doubt it, because you’re not basing it on any evidence or reason?

> Life on its own can seem pretty meaningless -- you can try to learn all you want, achieve your wildest dreams, and then we all die and in a few centuries will be utterly forgotten.

Does something only have meaning when it will be remembered for <arbitrary period of time> ?

I don't consider this to describe a meaningless life:

> “To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

(btw, although generally ascribed to Emerson, it was not in fact written by him)

That sounds nice, but you’re really just engaging in the life long human tradition of death denialism. Avoiding the finitude of your life may seem like a nice philosophy, but it may ultimately be giving you reasons to not make the most of this life.

In existentialism, we embrace the knowledge that our lives have no extrinsic meaning, and acknowledge that the only meaning that can be found is by living a worthwhile life. Meaning is subjective. The universe does not give a shit about your craving for meaning or purpose.

After being a father, now I see life as a recursion, a recursion to pass on life. On micro-scale, it means being good parents, to pass on accumulated wisdom, or the lack of, to children. Then scale the recursion to extended family, community and maybe whole humanity. I've internalised the feeling that things that help the recursion are things worth doing, and the smaller the scale, the stronger the feeling is.

The reproduction of life can never be meaningful by itself, in part because a single life is already countless moments and the problem is the same.

I think what you perhaps want to point at is the opposite: the fact that _a_ life is finite and therefore things worth doing/things that are meaningful look beyond that - and the wider they look the more meaningful they can be.

"therefore things worth doing/things that are meaningful look beyond that - and the wider they look the more meaningful they can be."

Are "meaningful things" qualified by the persistence of their consequence?

Not necessarily, so I wrote „wide“. By wide I mean wide in space and conceptually this also extends to wide in time. So there is are multiple positions in space at the current time and likewise there are multiple positions in the future and they all equivalently can be touched or not.

I'm also a strong believer in recursion being a key feature of living processes and intelligence..! A book you might like: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691145471/th...

I subscribe to this theory as well. Another earlier book about the topic is I Am A Strangle Loop by Douglas Hofstadter[0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123471.I_Am_a_Strange_Lo...

The typo (Strange -> Strangle) gives this comment a very surreal vibe.

You have to wonder if that is how reincarnation concept came about. People seeing themselves in children or anyone knowing you see the same.

I don't have any children I wish I did both to pass on the family line and to see myself (and wife if I had one) in my children.

I exist because I want to exist. I want to exist because I exist.

Trying to do what evolution does but on purpose is like going downstairs to help gravity.

> I want to understand everything (…and how it all fits together.)

I have this personality trait too. I suspect it was very beneficial in evolutionary times, when it was possible to learn everything that was known and then start using that knowledge. But in the modern world it becomes a bit of a personality flaw: you just learn and learn and learn, and then you die. :)

I have the feeling that AI is going to help us get better at connecting different ideas AND be able to implement the connection without having to be a master in every field

And if you like learning, you die happy :)

On the topic of “thinking is analogy”, the book “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is an excellent and foundational read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By

"A physicist is a person that wants to know everything while learning as little as possible". The universe is the ultimate infinite game.

I felt similar for decades. To anyone else who does, I recommend studying economics. It's not about money, really. It's the study of choice.

Understanding is a purely artificial/subjective concept. "Understanding" only exists if there is a conscious observer, and "understanding" means whatever that observer wants it to mean. A lot of people have found full understanding in religion. It takes off a lot of the stress from not understanding.

You may call this understanding of understanding meta-understanding.

Understanding is a word developed by humans, for humans. Of course it only exists because there's a conscious observer. That's the people who use and received the Word.

That's no reason/excuse to describe it as purely subjective.

We can all understand that objectively the Earth exists and (to a level or standard) one can be said to objectively understand the Earth and it's existence.

Understanding relativism makes no sense, because the majority of the topics we wish to understand objectively exist and are empirically/scientifically provable.

You didn't take the stress off understanding, you gave up and mangled the meaning of the word in the process.

Please don't do that.

> Understanding is a purely artificial/subjective concept.

Not necessarily. It can be mathematically defined as the ability predict the future, i.e. to assign (relatively) high probability to events that occur.

I think you can understand how for example an engine works, in a way which couldn’t be described as subjective or artificial. You might have a shallow or deep understanding of this depending on your profession. People who are religious tend to talk about belief rather than understanding. I don’t suppose many Christians claim to understand God’s mind or his will, quite the opposite. Also, claiming to know God’s will as zealots do is not the same as understanding it.

> "Understanding" only exists if there is a conscious observer, and "understanding" means whatever that observer wants it to mean. A lot of people have found full understanding in religion. It takes off a lot of the stress from not understanding.

The same is very (but certainly not identically) true of science or most any ideology/framework, from the perspective of the average civilian.

The Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle puzzled over the same observations.

Aristotle called your topic “First Philosophy” because it studies the primary substance that underlies everything.

This piece is highly aligned with my way of thinking about learning as I wrote in Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. Exciting to see another buccaneer’s take on things.

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