The Puzzle | Hacker News Reader

The Puzzle

silence.bearblog.dev

9 pointsthejamesbox17 comments

There is a likely potential skill more valuable than any other: the ability to be happy regardless of your circumstances. You can try to change your circumstances, but this alone doesn’t guarantee happiness.

Intelligence can work against this skill. The more intelligent you are, the more problems you perceive around you. The more intelligent you are, the more imperfections you notice. This can make it harder to feel satisfied and happy.

You might try to find a rational solution for happiness by asking, "What is the universe’s purpose?" or "What is my purpose?" If you could answer these, maybe you’d find a path to happiness. Or if you knew that and you don't like that, maybe you couldn't be happy ever again.

But what is existence, really? For humans, it’s a shared illusion constructed by our senses. The universe, to us, is only what we can measure. We don’t know what’s truly real – reality is just a collective agreement. Even the mathematical proofs are based on the limitations of the language that we have created. How much is missing from this language, we don't know.

Maybe instead of solving the puzzle, we should focus on training ourselves to be happy. Maybe the happiness isn't our purpose, but if you are happy, it does not really matter that much. What if solving the puzzle would give you happiness? Okay. What then?

The closest thing to this vague description I can think of is The Sunset Limited[0]. Though that doesn't deal with not being able to contribute, or maybe it does in the sense that it's seen but unchanging. Another thought is that of Mozart's contemporary Salieri who could recognize greatness, but not produce it (according to the movie anyway).

Bleak views. A pragmatic measure could be to reduce suffering experienced in total, even if not one's own.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1510938/

What do you mean by "ideatic space" and "optimal ideatic equation" -- I'm not sure what "ideatic" means in these contexts.

(assuming the OP is the author of the blog)

Not the author and they do appear to be on the thread but...

I read "ideatic space" as notional/conceptual world configuration. The plausible world configuration which could be manifested. The challenge of many configurations of the world is that they require cooperation of the other people in the world. Sometimes the cooperation is "don't knock this over, I want to look at it" (e.g. an art installation) but they can be far more abstract involving final emotional spaces, social agreements, and other dimensions that might require bootstrapping or other coordinated shifts.

To be more concrete, imagine if we could all agree not to violate each other's rights (of property, privacy, etc.). We would no longer need locks, prisons, militaries, et cetera. This would reduce frictions, increasing time available and reducing those frustrations stemming from accidentally locking ourselves out. On a relative basis, we would have a lot of available capital and resources for further improving the human condition. Yet the level of trust and consensus is hard to imagine so many of us learn to live with "knives out"/"defenses up" so to speak and the frictional inefficient world configuration remains.

There are other possible interpretations but that was my highest probability hypothesis and the one with which I read. The author did some heavy lifting with the term but trying to completely express this sort of thing for a not-you audience can be exhausting and it seems they mean to target a subset.

That's an interesting one, "imagine if we could all agree not to violate each other's rights". Thing is, rights aren't fixed and absolute, unless stated so vaguely as to be useless, like "the right not to be coerced". It wouldn't just be a problem of trust and consensus, but of shared knowledge. I mean we'd have to have consensus about what our rights are, and more specifically, what constitutes a violation. Not to mention consensus about how reality is. So you get all these edge cases where clarification is needed, and that's why we have law courts: legal cases that set precedent are edge cases. Also, the situation, I mean culture, keeps changing, and we have to invent new rights to keep up. We're going to continue violating one another's rights so long as our mutual understanding is imperfect and so long as we're not a hive mind.

Not sure if this means we have to have locks, prisons, and militaries for all eternity.

Indeed. I tried a few phrasings before landing there and it's not satisfactory.

The underlying problem is that social knowing doesn't scale yet. A system which could solve the consensus problem to facilitate coordinated pockets of exploration of the possibility space would be required.

Does this system fly through the possibility space in the form of a giant cube and say "resistance is futile"? The weird part is that my gut says I should resist taking part, and presumably cause trouble and perpetuate fighting. Maybe being pugnacious is part of human purpose.

It would seem to do the opposite to me, allowing diversity and allowing exploration, though the theoretical maxima of reality might have something similar to say. A key feature of such a system would be having no notion of right/desirability/etc. but only identification/observation/clarification of what is.

To your end statement, is purpose defined or, through us, created? Hopefully your attachment to pugnaciousness serves you.

I assume you've tried eastern wisdom articulated by people like Alan Watts, Michael Signer, Tolle, etc?

Of course. It's not what I mean.

Hmm this is quite a puzzle then. I thought I recognized the hell you described and the heaven just out of reach. But you seem to be saying you and this Jewish professor and the 3hour sleep guy are unique humans. But when I listen to Watts or Tolle I always come back to how exactly the same we all are.

Hah something poetically meta about this. The "puzzle" that wants to be solved is YOU!

> Reflections.

> Home Blog

> 08 Feb, 2025

> The puzzle.

The puzzle seems to have something to do with AI, if my surmise is correct.

And this puzzle is…?

Unknown and unknowable. This is a philosophical and intellectual question that is very personal to the person feeling it. One might consider it akin to the meaning of life or why the universe exists.

I think is more than that. Rather, are we trapped into deterministic illusion where we don't have choice. For example, the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics is one theory and might make it possible. The described hell is the life we cannot change and the unknown portion whether we are in a such world or not.

"the scarcity of the universe" is an odd phrase. Typically there's thought to be exactly one, or else a very large number. I guess you meant something like "desolateness" or "barrenness"?

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