[Sunnybayes]

Originally Posted by ShiningLight

How can life be purposeless, yet purposeful at the same time? Well, because it GIVES YOU ALL the POWER! YOU give life meaning, YOU give life purpose. Yes, do whatever it is YOU "want, feel, are inspired" to do. If you want meaning in life create it, if you want purpose in life, then create that too.

I think the same too.

The point of life is to exists. That's about it. It just exists.

Life is just the boarder of chaos... like fractals, like the Mandelbrot set, its the boarder that makes everything absolutely beautiful. And the cool thing is that nature DOES work in fractals, like trees, like our cells that grow into our brain using fractal patterns of different layers of heirarchy, snow flakes... ect.

So maybe what it means to be human is that, in our current state, we are a certain parameter of chaos, we are a certain fractal dimension, like if we tune down the parameter, then we'd be rocks, and if we turned it up too high then we'd be gas... and we are just right at the boarder that makes everything absolutely beautiful.

Like the Mandelbrot set (google it if you don't know what I mean) in the middle is all darkness, if you go out too far then it escapes out to infinity, either extreme is not that cool but its the infinitesimally sharp boarder that makes things interesting...

And then as time goes on our fractal dimension is changing as our human nature changes throughout time.

You just have to decide if you want to live and have fun, live and feel like in you are in hell, or die.

I kinda think of life like the Olympics, yea people could cheat and take drugs, but it would not be natural, and it would not be a challenge.

The first answer that popped into my mind was, "Create the most amount of happiness for the most amount of people." This answer, however, caused me great distress. To me, this invariably led to the solution of each individual choosing to be drugged until death. This way, we would all literally be happy every remaining second of our lives. This solution is clearly not optimal.

Well, you could just directly plug in a stimulating wire to your brain pleasure's centers and then be hooked up toward sustainment for however long.

I think pleasure is natures way to keep you what you are doing, because if something feels good why change?

But there are different things keeping us from reaching that point.

And then there is... how much of the body do you actually need to feel like you are in pleasure?

What kind of technology do we need to keep our bodies alive forever?

Who is going to not be "plugged in" to keep up maintenance, like power plants, and growing food?

Is our planet reaching a tipping point in the climate so that we would not be able to exist for much longer?

Maybe we should be sure that we are going to be able to exists. All these flung out goals have the same basic problems at first that need to be solved.

Where are we going to go when the sun decides to give out on us? Who's going to wake us up?

What are we going to do when protons start to decay in the 10 to the power of whatever years?

Who's going to keep the catastrophic space rocks away while we are all cozy?

Are we going to freak ourselves out by doing all this weird stuff so that we should have a choice or not to do it?

Are we going to decide as a society that we should agree that we keep our chaotic parameter the same and not cheat in life, like athletes agree to only be natural in contest?

And of course we should have a choice or not if we want to be plugged into it or not. I mean... I think I would want the challenge... yea I could cheat... maybe it feels good to cheat... and maybe if i was plugged in then I would not care that I was cheating, or maybe I'd want to play the game of life with other people first, maybe I'd want variety.

But the reason that humans want variety is that variety gives shots of pleasure as we create new invariant representations that is able to learn that new variety, so then why not just cut to the chase and just cause the pleasure and screw variety???

And then again we have to decide... since we are humans, do we want to exists as humans with our unique chaotic parameter or do we want to exists as blobs of feeling good computational goo (yea, that sounds really sick and scary, but if you were a blob of feeling good computational goo then you would be like "man this is life " , I think since we are run by physics, and if we had enough energy through like solar power or something, then we are going to tend toward the feeling good computational goo.

But then again, maybe we would be like... well... that's cheating, so lets just all agree to stick with our unique human chaotic fractal dimension / parameter as long as we possibly can until the heat death of the universe starts to really take its toll, and as that happens then we'd decide to shift our chaotic parameter as neccessary to survive and "live good lives" in whatever form that might be... but that we decide to keep our current human state as long as possible... because after all the point of life is to exists and that the reason that sharks have not changed form is because the form of sharks is good enough for its environment... and our minds obviously revolve around how our bodies are built so if we change our physical representations then we change our minds.

lol..., just making this up on the spot, so then maybe the battle between conservatives and liberals will be should we maximize the rate of our chaotic parameter or keep the choatic parameter the same for as long as possible.

However, I have not been able to come up with a solution that can maximize both at the same time.

Well, find out what in nature causes the subjective feeling of pleasure, build things that can maintain that... and then prevent catastrophes so that we can exists long into the heat death of the universe, in some form or another... it seems to me that our chaotic parameter would edge toward the "gas" edge of chaos... but then again, maybe we'd tend toward the "rock" limit of chaos because black holes and white dwarves are the things that are going to be lasting the longest naturally.

But first we need to make sure that we don't blow ourselves up with nukes, and that we keep our climate in check, and that there's not some funky disease that comes and gets us.

I think what's going to unite the world is the "common enemy" of climate change.

Oh yea... and I'm not the only weirdo with these thoughts. I have not checked the intenet, but I've read the book "The Age of Spiritual Machines"

Amazon listing: Amazon.com: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence: Books: Ray Kurzweil

here's a webpage about it

The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil

It gives an outline of technological change up to this point and then it he guesses:

By the year 2099
There is a strong trend toward a merger of human thinking with the world of machine intelligence that the human species initially created.

There is no longer any clear distinction between humans and computers.

Most conscious entities do not have a permanent physical presence.

Machine-based intelligences derived from extended models of human intelligence claim to be human, although their brains are not based on carbon-based cellular processes, but rather electronic and photonic equivalents. Most of these intelligences are not tied to a specific computational processing unit. The number of software-based humans vastly exceeds those still using native neuron-cell-based computation.

Even among those human intelligences still using carbon-based neurons, there is ubiquitous use of neural-implant technology, which provides enormous augmentation of human perceptual and cognitive abilities. Humans who do not utilize such implants are unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues with those who do.

Because most information is published using standard assimilated knowledge protocols, information can be instantly understood. The goal of education, and of intelligent beings, is discovering new knowledge to learn.

Femtoengineering (engineering at the scale of femtometers or one thousandth of a trillionth of a meter) proposals are controversial.

Life expectancy is no longer a viable term in relation to intelligent beings.

Some many millenniums hence . . .
Intelligent beings consider the fate of the Universe.

It also talks about the law of time and chaos and also of the exponential increase of technology. But before we get there, we'd better make sure that we aren't screwing things up right now.