Comment by roadside_picnic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roadside_picnic | Hacker News Reader

roadside_picnic

I've been in the "doomer" camp for over a decade and been surprised how many things I thought were far off in the future have come to fruition earlier.

But, the one thing I always find interesting, philosophically, about believing the world-as-we-know-it is coming to an end is that all of the things people are concerned about will happen no matter what.

Being afraid of the end of the world is ultimately being afraid that we will lose the things we have, that our work will be lost to time and history, that ultimately we will return to a void and all of "this" will have been for nothing.

However, all of that is true either way. You will lose everything you've ever loved over time in life, all the work you've done will be lost to time, in the end all of your efforts will be for nothing and even that won't matter.

The "end of the world" scares people because it forces them to discard the normal tools they use combat these many existential anxieties, but the world continuing to go on doesn't actually resolve any of those anxieties.

For me the problem is managing the transition minimizing unnecessary suffering.

The world is inevitably going to end, our work isn't going to be forever preserved into the future and there will be no "end of history" until there are living humans.

The thing is that the world can end in many ways. My world can end in many ways. I'd rather pass on with a clear consciousness, with my faculties preserved more or less, and with a legacy of having at least tried to make the lives of other that tiny bit better, so I'm aware if I'm not vigilant I can spend my final days suffering from an avoidable disease or accident or regretting I wasted my life chasing a better tomorrow that never came while neglecting what I already have today.

This is virtually the same for all society. It's going to fade into oblivion, but it matters a great deal that the process is as gentle as possible for everyone involved.

I am reminded of Roy Scranton's essay Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene [1]

> I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure,” which commanded: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,” wrote Tsunetomo, “he gains freedom in the Way.”

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...

That's in line with the Stoics too. Memento Mori.

People like Ray Kurzweil, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Paul Christiano see a pathway out of this inevitability through technological singularity. In their vision humans are a seed to something greater, something noticeable on cosmic scales. In their vision, like early humans who emerged on the other end of genetic bottlenecks, today's humans will have a disproportionate effect on the future. According to the current models of cosmology heat death of universe in still inevitability but that's on a completely different timescale than human life.

Please don't take this to be dismissive of your comment, because that's not my intention, but...

I think people like Ray Kurzweil are essentially religious. Instead of a messiah and heaven, they think of salvation in terms of a singularity, immortality, or a way of ascension. It feels very religious to me, and as such, detached from reality and physical possibilities.

Yeah. He makes a good case for the computer side of upload being possible--and totally skips over the biological side, assuming it will be available on the same time frame.

Even if upload does not produce a singularity or the like it still is a huge step towards getting more time to address other issues and it makes interstellar solutions viable. But when we can read out the human mind remains an unknown.

'The world continuing to go on' is the status quo and has been for millenia at this point. Sure, the argument can be made that the world will end eventually, but if we do not have our reference timescale, what do we have? People aren't afraid that the world will eventually end (because 'eventually' should be thousands of years from now), people are afraid the world will end NOW, which does nullify your experience and efforts on the subjective human timescale. Life as we know it continuing to go on without ambiguity on our confidence to prevent world-ending events does resolve those anxieties.

If you have ever believed in the butterfly effect and if you believe that the world will keep marching on, then your actions undeniably do leave a permanent change to the world, forever after you are forgotten.

beautifully stated thank you

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