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Will_Newsome comments on Utopian hope versus reality - Less Wrong
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Right. I personally prefer the aesthetics and morals of the past, their sense of dignity, to the technological comforts of today. This is admittedly said in comfort, but I would never willingly trade away virtue for comfort, or fun. Like Hofstadter, I remain somewhat disgusted at the aesthetics of transhumanism, and think of myself as fundamentally opposed to what they stand for. And I remain annoyed that people who think superintelligence is possible still think death is something permanent. Yeah, it's bad, but you'll get to see them again after the resurrection if you don't end up in hell. Less Wrong, I ask you again: why do you worship the Fun god? Do you truly have no greater vision than the one produced by Eliezer's contemptible aesthetics? (Sorry Eliezer, but thank you for having the good sense to be meta about their significance.)
I suspect that if you articulated an equally concrete alternative and invited comparison, you'd discover that support for what is articulated in the Fun Theory sequence isn't nearly as strong as you imply here. But being concrete about it is the tricky part.
It's easy to endorse a Fun-based morality when we only think about it in the context of a vaguely defined post-scarcity environment, just as it's easy to endorse a God-based morality when we only think about it in the context of a vaguely defined eternity. As with most moral frameworks, the difficulty comes when we come back out of the clouds and try to apply it to our actual lives.
If you have succeeded in doing so with your own life and your preferred moral framework, I salute you. If you can articulate that moral framework and how it guides your choices, even better.
Only vaguely relatedly: personally, I think the primary danger of terms like "Fun," or "God's Will," or the various other words we've made up over the centuries to refer to the terminal value(s) that supposedly underlie all the values we know about is that talking about them too much makes it easy for us to believe they exist, even when we don't have much evidence supporting that belief. Since I'm pretty skeptical that any such thing exists, or that the closest analog to it that exists is coherent enough to make having a single word for it useful, my feelings about it are mixed.
When and where in the past are you talking about, and what do you mean by dignity?
All of the past up until roughly the dawn of rampant consumerism and advertising. I'm not very familiar with the relevant history but it seems to have been a gradual change starting largely around 1900.
Dignity, propriety, Christian morality, pagan virtue, noble savagery, bestial dharma... things that so many atheists, humanists, and transhumanists throw aside because they don't see why they're there. Conservatism. Chesterton. Monogamy. Applying good taste to the living of ones life, acting as if one were to be made a final cause, as if ones actions had a real effect on eternity. Having real principles. Self-restraint. Having a reason for existence greater than the temporary gratification of misunderstood desires, e.g. serving God or attaining enlightenment. Unsophisticated but rigorously applied common sense as opposed to elaborate rationalization or unreflective endorsement.
Actually caring deeply about what morality might be and how one should act on that knowledge.
What's bestial dharma? Google doesn't turn up anything useful.
I just made up the phrase, it's not a very good one. I meant basically how animals are at least true to their natures and instincts and don't pretend to be something they're not. Wolves have more of it than dogs. Chesterton talks about a similar phenomenon among humans when he talks about how pagans did what they did soulfully and authentically, as opposed to modern anti-Christians who only take up paganistic and heathenish ideals and practices more out of a sense of rebellion. I like how folk like Hofstadter and probably a lot postmodern lit geeks and analytic philosophers I don't know about manage to avoid the insincere orthodoxy versus inauthentic rebellion dilemma by jumping out of the system. I'm being vague. I get access to a real keyboard for the first time in weeks later today.
Could you elaborate? Do you use the terms "resurrection" and "hell" as they are usually understood?
"Usually understood" is a pretty tricky thing to pin down. The popular conceptions of these ideas are definitely not the same as the Catholics' conception, nor do the popular conceptions do justice to the amount of uncertainty that the Church freely admits to having. People seem to have a lot of trouble with words from a different literary genre than the one they're used to: they tend to either assume that words from different genre must either be designating entirely different things or the exact same thing, rather than differing but complementary and comparable designators of a shared underlying reality. So when I talk about "angels and demons" and "transhuman intelligences" as if they were very similar things people seem to suspect that some sort of word game or trickery is afoot wherein connotations will be unfairly snuck in. Given this epistemic situation I can't really honestly answer your question in a way that doesn't make me look transparently stupid or willfully obscurantist. I will say that when I think about resurrection I think about it in terms of superintellgience and quantum information theory rather than in terms of God and Revelations.
PS: Typed on iPhone keyboard, sorry for all the mistakes.