Comment by black_knight
3 days ago
Dreams and hopes are powerful weapons of suppression. Everyone is a millionaire just down on their luck at the moment…
In our advanced society, with incredible automation, we should _all_ have vastly more freedom and control over our time.
That attitude is the weapon of suppression. Yes, it's true that life isn't fair. But it's also true that people have agency and can make material improvements to their own quality of life through smart decisions and dedication. Of course most of us won't start the next Google, but that doesn't mean dreams and hope are bad in general.
We have no evidence that people have meanginful agency, or even agency at all. It is an assumption that to start with requires that the universe is not largely or entirely deterministic beyond what we can measure, but even in the case of some "hidden variable" that provides agency (try to even define it in a way that doesn't make it either deterministic, random, or a combination that implies no actual control) we have plenty of evidence that events outside our control ("life isn't fair") means that the vast majority of people, while they may make decisions - with or without agency - that will make material improvements - still are not able to get anywhere near a position that makes it meaningful in this context.
Dreams and hopes are great - I believe we have zero actual agency, but that doesn't mean I lie in bed despairing, because not doing the work and trying will still have negative effects whether I have agency over that decision or not.
But the point is that dreams and hopes are also often used to play up the idea that "anyone" can achieve something everyone clearly can't, and so for most people, their most ambitious dreams will never be reached, and so a better gamble for most people would be to work for a society that improves everyones odds at reaching at least some of them.
If you think you have no agency why do anything at all? You could choose to stop doing anything. Or you could decide that your partial knowledge(unrealised futures) gives you agency.
It's a matter of metacognition. Being able to compute possible futures gives you artificial agency at some level. At a meta level even if that compute can be deterministic at a higher level, but you should not care.
It's a nested universes system just like in type theory. The meta of the meta. Agency is only defined within a single universe at a time.
4 replies →
Honestly I don't disagree with anything you wrote, I don't think. It is worth remembering that if we were born in someone else's shoes, with their genes and their environment, we would literally be them and would act as they act. In that way, yes, agency is an illusion. Remembering this can help us to have empathy for others, potentially even those with whom we vehemently disagree.
But, as you said, we still all make decisions every day, and those decisions do affect our lives. So by acting as if we have agency, we can still have a positive impact, both on ourselves and others.
The attitude that we should all have access to more freedoms and that inequality has reached extreme levels is suppression? Then sign me up to be suppressed.
I am not saying we should be defeatist! I making the argument that it does not, and morally should not, have to be so that we all have to toil when we have such a wealth of technology.
How we go about changing this, I do not know, but everyone just playing along nicely in hope of one day being the one who strikes gold seems not to be working!
“Life isn’t fair, suck it up and get good!” is another form of suppression/delusion. Well, if life isn’t it fair, let us at least try to counteract that with cooperation. It seems to me that we have all the tools and technologies we need to make it a lot better.
This framing I'm on board with. The original comment took it too far for me, and even if not intended as defeatist I think could encourage that response. I'm all for people working not only to better their own conditions, but society as a whole.
This is very true but the path to that seems to require a weird optimization where it is concentrated among a few before being being widespread. Technologic improvements should help. Help decouple time and money.
Why though?
And when does this start being for everyone? We have had agricultural machines for ages, but I still have to pay an ever increasing part of my salary (and hence time here on earth) not to starve.
Because of asymmetry. Some people are more inclined toward certain things than others. People who are excellent at math are much more likely to be able to advance AI for instance. The goal of physical systems being to remain at rest/(humans included ;) the gradient of resources lean toward these people so that they can improve the technology allowing everyone to be able to conserve their energy (be lazy in a sense).