It seems obvious to me that only a few people are here for the Life's Great Adventure and most are killing time until they kick the bucket.
It seems obvious to you. You might want to scrutinize your intuitions more closely, because unless you believe in some telos to history then this doesn't make sense. It also prompts me to wonder whether you might possess some of the cluster of traits attributable to diagnosed sociopaths (as that word is often very loaded, let me note that sociopathy seems to just be a normal part of human variation comprising about 3 percent of the population, most of them neither particularly-accomplished nor particularly dangerous to others); there are other factors I can think of that might tweak your intuitions thus, but it certainly enters the picture there.
Who do you think counts as someone here for "Life's Great Adventure?" How do you distinguish these people, and on what basis do you conclude that this explains the traits they display rather than something else (statistical normalization acting on population genetics, circumstantial factors, spandrels of history, meddling deities, them being the ones the Simulation is about, or almost anything else...)
As a virtue ethicist, I do believe in a moral telos of sorts. I believe that somebody who's here for Life's Great Adventure is working towards a greater good, exhibits a high level of self-discipline and shuns the kind of apathetic hedonism that characterises most of modern Western society. Generally I base my assessment on testimony.
Let it be noted, as an aside, that this is my first post on Less Wrong and my first attempt at original, non-mandatory writing for over a year.
I've been reading through the original sequences over the last few months as part of an attempt to get my mind into working order. (Other parts of this attempt include participating in Intro to AI and keeping a notebook.) The realization that spurred me to attempt this: I don't feel that living is good. The distinction which seemed terribly important to me at the time was that I didn't feel that death was bad, which is clearly not sensible. I don't have the resources to feel the pain of one death 155,000 times every day, which is why Torture v. Dust Specks is a nonsensical question to me and why I don't have a cached response for how to act on the knowledge of all those deaths.
The first time I read Torture v. Dust Specks, I started really thinking about why I bother trying to be rational. What's the point, if I still have to make nonsensical, kitschy statements like "Well, my brain thinks X but my heart feels Y," if I would not reflexively flip the switch and may even choose not to, and if I sometimes feel that a viable solution to overpopulation is more deaths?
I solved the lattermost with extraterrestrial settlement, but it's still, well, sketchy. My mind is clearly full of some pretty creepy thoughts, and rationality doesn't seem to be helping. I think about having that feeling and go eeugh, but the feelings are still there. So I pose the question: what does a person do to click that death is really, really bad?
The primary arguments I've heard for death are:
I think that overall, the fear most people have about signing up for cryonics/AI/living forever is that they do not understand it. This is probably true for me; it's probably why I don't grok that life is good, always. Moreover, it is probable that the depictions of death as not always bad with which I sympathize (e.g. 'Lord, what can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?) stem from the previously held to be absolute nature of death. That is, up until the last ~30 years, people have not been having cogent, non-hypothetical thoughts about how it might be possible to not die or what that might be like. Dying has always been a Big Bad but an inescapable one, and the human race has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.
So: now that I know I have and what I want, how do I use the former to get the latter?