I find myself asking that question constantly, from my 3rd grade self finding meaning in eating food to philosophical tirades in high school debate. Honestly I thought philosophers had it mostly down—existentialism, virtue ethics, hedonism, error theory (my favorite), to even intuitionism. Finally I just settled on a vague idea of "happiness", a (simple but) complete solution.

Though, while reading "When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kalanith one word stood out to me: human relationality. Initially thinking through the idea as "K-literature jargon", the text around it ended up changing my mind:

> A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans—i.e., “human relationality”—that undergirded meaning.  

Looking at meaning through the lens of "human relationality" made my life in retrospect make sense. Thinking back to all the times where I've been the happiest, one thing stands out—they've been with people. If pure happiness was the factor, I'm sure food would be at the top, but that's almost never what comes to mind. Even when enjoying media or art, similar to Camus, those are just abstractions of connections with other humans. Humans tend to be at the center of meaning.

The book also takes a unique approach to storytelling, not necessarily having a plot, a happy ending, or even a solid moral conclusion. Seeing the journey of someone start looking for meaning, end up blinding themselves (metaphorically) in their journey, and finally finding meaning in the people around him, makes you think—is looking for meaning in life worthwhile? Or to better phrase it, should one even look for meaning in life?

This idea struck a chord with me, especially after that simple question being such a core facet of my internal monologue; searching for meaning can elucidate you to the "true meaning". Whenever I've felt the happiest, its not because I've necessarily been optimizing towards that feeling my entire life. I've felt that way when I've been with people, enjoying life. Similar to how working with cadavers creates numbness to human connection, I think searching meaning can numb you to "real" meaning around you in life. Similar to optimization problems, staying stable in one spot just thinking won't help—exploration and living life will (especially if your "meaning" is human relationality).

With that idea combined with human relationality, it provides a decent basis for life—finding meaning in the relationships around you, while not overthinking it too much.

This all begs the question of why. Especially as a relativist, why contemplate meaning in life? Similar to my post on simulations, I believe we constantly live in abstractions—do well in school, make money, get into college, make a promotion—which is great short term. Long term these bring us away from our core values, even making us forget them (hence feelings of regret/emptiness). Searching for meaning (not excessively like I said before, but at least thinking about it) in my opinion, just grounds all of these simulations to a singular goal, making sure you're not on autopilot 24/7.

TLDR; Human relationality is a cool concept, and you shouldn't think too much about the meaning to life but instead just enjoy the people around you.

Hope this helps broaden someones understanding in some way and I definitely recommend giving When Breath Becomes Air a read!

a new perspective on how to view life (taken from paul kalanith's when breath becomes air)

As any philosophy major worth their salt knows, the concept of consciousness is a tricky one. It's the kind of thing that makes your brain hurt just thinking about it. But according to the sci-fi classic Enders Game, there's one thing that's certain: you can't understand consciousness without communication.

For those who haven't read the book (or seen the not-so-great movie adaptation), Ender is a young boy who's been chosen to lead humanity in a war against an alien species known as the Buggers. The thing is, the Buggers don't communicate like humans do. In fact, they don't even seem to have individual consciousnesses—they're more like a hive mind.

At first, this makes it incredibly difficult for Ender to understand them. How can he fight an enemy he can't even comprehend? But as the war progresses, Ender starts to realize that the key to defeating the Buggers is to figure out how they communicate. And as it turns out, their method of communication is completely alien to human understanding.

But here's the thing: once Ender starts to understand how the Buggers communicate, he's able to get inside their heads (so to speak) and outsmart them. In other words, communication is the key to understanding consciousness.

Of course, this raises some interesting questions. Does that mean that consciousness is impossible without language? Or is there some other way to understand it, even without communication?

Personally, I think it all comes down to perspective. After all, as humans, we're limited by our own experiences and understanding of the world. So it's no surprise that we have a hard time grasping the concept of a hive mind. But who's to say that other forms of consciousness don't exist, even if we can't understand them?

In the end, the lesson of Enders Game is clear: communication is essential to understanding consciousness. I keep coming back to this idea whenever I listen to someone, or talk about politics—its almost impossible to fully understand someone. Communication is a decaying function towards consensus, and we need to use it to actually understand people's arguments, stances, & worldviews.

Hopefully this was helpful and slightly insightful!

> teehee this article was written by chatGPT, lemme know if you realized it earlier... the prompt was "Write a witty funny informal thought providing blog post about the philosophical concept that communication is a pre-requisite to checking consciousness as shown by Enders Game—how Ender wasn't able to understand the Buggers until they communicated with each other. 7 paragraphs witty and blog-like"

For reference, I'll be talking about simulations here in a less technical sense, so sadly no, I am not going to be talking about how we all live in the Matrix and need to take red pills. Though I think talking about simulations in an abstract construct sense, we can look into our lives in an interesting way.

Have you ever done something, and ever wondered why you're actually doing something, even though you might not like it? Like studying or working, we do things that may not directly make us happy, but we justify it through the idea that it might make life more pleasurable in the "long run", or after a period of time. Usually this end goal is happiness or something of the sort, where we make small sacrifices to guarantee that goal.

Now going back to simulations and how they play a part in this scheme. All of these constructs, whether it be school, work, interpersonal relations, they all have something in common, where they try and abstract the idea of gaining happiness to a level. For example let's take capitalism and work. People work, and create multiple simulations like the economy, the idea of capital, work, and say that all of these will bring you happiness to a level due to increase in global capital and distributing materials. It also abstracts the idea that capital is happiness, and that more capital is equal to more opportunities  which is what we should all strive for. In that way we abstract our happiness to be equivalent with work and capital. 

Once you start looking, there are tons of abstractions that are in our everyday life, from the abstraction that we need to create relationships with other people to sustain ourselves and be stable, to everyday digital ones. Even with this considered, I don't think these simulations are necessarily bad, most are even great for people, like family and education. All of these simulations are necessary to deal with the complexities of day to day life, since we can't really just spend years pondering what would make us happy (or is the thought that work/innovation is necessary a construct *confused meta noises ensue*). 

The part I want to focus, is with the fact that there are thousands of these simulations on top of each other, that make up our day to day world. Just like any construct or simulation, you lose a part of the goal, albeit a small percentage, every single time. Even though from step to step, it might seem like a good simulation, the inefficiencies in every step build a completely distorted worldview that we see today. Today people have created entire businesses that manipulate the economy, or judge people by tests that have no real basis in any science.

This is what I would say is the cause of confusion when you find yourself doing things that don't really "matter" but you're stuck doing it anyway since its meant to help a construct of a construct of a construct so much so that its distanced from what actually makes you happy. Some people act only in this realm of simulations, and end up confused at the end that the happiness that they've been optimizing for, or any goal for that matter, hasn't been achieved. 

So, what to do? I'm not exactly sure myself, but I don't think simulations in of themselves are bad, since you need them at some level to act, but having too many might blind you to what your real goal is. Its good to self check often and assess if what you're doing is to please others, help gain wealth, and many other things, is ultimately making YOU happy in the long and short run. I honestly don't have a perfect solution to this, but breaking through these simulations once in a while, and not getting too tangled up in them (stress for deadlines, tests, needs for improvement), can be helpful. 

This has been something I've thought about for a hot while, and its nice to get it on paper. Hope you understood it, or it helped you think a little more about the world!

What is a simulation, and how do they serve us in our day to day lives?

> FYI - This is a new type of article/blogpost I'm trying out based off Emil Cioran, though this is just a test. It's supposed to be harder to read with sentence fragments throughout, and ask more questions than giving answers. It might not be your cup of tea, but feel free to read it (at your own risk haha)! Cioran mostly wrote for himself in a therapeutic way, so I wanted to see if something informal like this is something that might be fun.  

## Whats the Point?

We live we die, but we keep memories. Do we even live if we don't remember something? Without memory, everything is just the present. Memory is intrinsically our meaning in life, for it is what we remember when we die. Even if it isn't, the fact that it will be the only thing that determines happiness upon death, should be an indication. That could mean that the past never existed, but the present is everything. That would also mean that every moment has to be memorable. Is there any value in an unmemorable moment? One spent dawdling the day away, looking at grass, when you could have been skiing down the Eiffel Tower. What makes a memory intrinsically memorable? Probably fun, however subjective that might be.

Most of my memories are short, or for 10 days. It's crazy to think that 10 days is also the amount of time I spend in school, or studying for a test. Are those preparations for the future, really giving me more memories? How can you min max the ideal of work and living in the moment? The ultimate good would be to enjoy the momentary work, which builds enjoyment for the future. Preparing for the future is an endlessly regressive task, that doesn't have much enjoyment. Does someone who prepares to live, up to the point they die, have a more fulfilling life than a person that lives with no regard for the future? This brings back to themes of capitalism, which I wont touch on, but its important to think about where we want to go in life

## The Passing Days

If we have the ability to make memories constantly, by embarking on fun tasks, why do we work? Small moments can be memorable in mass, but then you need to weigh it against larger more maintainable memories. There will always be something lost at the end though, because you can't remember every single day that happens. Living life to its fullest is important, and to not get ensnared into the capitalist ethic of working until death, just for a remorseful grasp at a vacation at cripplingly old age. To do this, we need to reorient our goals from being physically rich, to being experientially rich. This links with what millionares say, where money can't buy happiness. It also has themes of absurdity, where we should accept experience as experience, as long as we live in the moment, and don't let it pass by instantaneously.

What makes a memory fun? If we take an absurdist view, where everything is memorable, but that isn't true. The only way that could work, is noticing the details in life, and capturing it with some significance. Since you ascribe significance subjectively, this would mean that you actively need to search out for significance to create memories. This search for significance could be thought as a search for meaning, but I take it to a much lesser degree. The smallest memory, is one that is a step for finding meaning, but not completely grasping it. Through the cumulation of significant moments in life, we can find arbitrary meaning in life. 

## In The End.

I'll try to have more experiences like the Zephyr before school ends, but is it even possible with school? What is the meaning of school if at the end, you don't even remember it? People have nostalgia for highschool, but comparatively I can't name 10 days in middle school as memory packed as the Zephyr. Does this mean that the most efficient way to find meaning, is through small compact significant experiences, over time? This way you maximize memories, preferably 10 days at a time, then by the end of the year, you have 36 memories to share. Through that, you may be able to slowly march yourself into finding meaning in life, and building towards a more fulfilling death.

Sentence fragments on the nature of memories. Trying out a new writing style, read at your own risk...

TLDR; Motivation is a push against inertia, so it's counterintuitive to wait for it. You have to be a little spontaneous, and actually make it a habit to gain motivation, or find external motivation through parents/friends/commitments.

## What is Motivation?

Okay, so now starting with the base question: What is motivation? I think a good place to start here is with most peoples dilemma, not being able to find motivation, and therefore never starting something. The way I see it, in most cases this would mean motivation is a push against ones social inertia, in one way or another. Let's look at picking up your trash for example. There is a great reason to pick it up, but some people just don't because they aren't "motivated to". This applies to almost any case, all the way to not wanting to learn something, which is the fundamental idea that there is no intrinsic reason to do it.

Now after defining it, let's take a look at most peoples reason to not do something, which happens to be "not motivated". Since we've defined motivation as basic social inertia, it becomes apparent that motivation can come from 2 ways, spontaneity, or through external means (a push from someone else, or to meet a goal). Spontaneity is a great way to try many things, and to be motivated to do "stuff". It could be almost anything they want. The second means can be seen in practice often when parents try to push small kids to do activities, which they may not be motivated to do at first, but after time they start to like it, and are motivated. 

This leads to the greatest sin, waiting for motivation. Since motivation is a push against inertia, by waiting around and building habits, you actively make it harder for yourself to get motivated, by gaining inertia. This often leads to a cycle of regret, where you wait for the perfect motivation to do something, but end up never doing it, or just forgetting about it all-together. A great way to imagine this, is to think of humans as advanced dogs. We love to follow patterns and ruts, but if we ever want to break the rut, no gut feeling will tell us, because internally we love these ruts. It really is a funny cruel way for life to act, but in the end, that would mean the spontaneous win out, while the people who wait for the perfect second end up failing. 

## So what?

So! How do we end up gaining motivation, and doing things that we want to do? One way is to become spontaneous. Act on every desire you have, and when you feel like something, just do it! It's a funny thing to say, but most often, the cure to motivation, is to just do it. You'll find motivation as the "inertia" to do the task lowers, basically meaning as you find it becoming a rut/habit (In a funny sense, that makes motivation counterintuitive, but meh). The only way to build spontaneity, is to be a little spontaneous in a sense (It sometimes doesn't even have to come from spontaneity, some people find it in motivational music or speeches).

The second way, is to find it externally. This could be a whole range of things, but the one I find interesting is to have a friend motivate you. This can be seen in many areas to work, like studying, where most people like an "Hours" type group, where they check in every hour or so, give progress checks, and share screens the entire time. I think this could be applied to a whole range of areas, with people reminding you to try something new and stick with it. Personally, this works with me by making commitments to show people things, which motivate me by not wanting to flake on them. Really, any means of motivation aside from yourself should work.

Now with your newfound knowledge what shall you do? Climb Mt. Everest maybe? Take on a pack of ravenous wolves? Take out the trash? Whatever you do now, just make sure to never wait for motivation to do anything, but try to apply some of the methods I said above.  You might even learn to incorporate tons of cool new habits, and isn't that really what motivation is for?

What is motivation, and how can people get more of it? Learn a bit about my perspective!

AI has progressed so far in such a short amount of time. Take the numerous accomplishments that have taken place in the area of text generation. Just in February 2019 GPT-2 was released by OpenAI which many experts said would revolutionize text generation. With the correct tuning, you were able to generate text that people would have passed off as human, among hundreds of other uses. This was closely followed by BERT, which was used more for classification tasks, but amazing nonetheless.  

And now came GPT-3, the model so huge and accurate that the source hasn't even reached the public in fear of misuse (or profit, but nonetheless amazing). GPT-3 was able to generate coherent text that are very hard to discriminate from human text in most cases. Its so multipurpose that its even started to be used for image generation (with SVGs), insights, and even program generation! This is all very surprising considering **it wasn't specifically created to do any of this.** Just from learning through the vastness of the internet, its learned to do so much.  

This brings us to this week, where I got access to GPT-3's API! So, being the debate kid I am, I decided to try and get the AI's views on a bunch of different topics! You can check out the entire discourse [on this notion page](https://www.notion.so/neelr/Interview-with-an-AI-29d58b9a4bd74143a68aa2ebe155ead0). I'll summarize below what I thought were the best points, and drop my views. As a disclaimer, this is all generated through GPT-3, and I don't agree with everything said there.

# Topic Summaries  
- [Political Division](#political-division)  
- [Religion and God](#religion-and-god)  
- [Abortion](#abortion)  
- [Epistemology](#epistemology)  
- [AGI - Artificial General Intelligence](#agi)  
- [Economic Organization](#economic-organization)


## Political Division
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on political polarization in the US, and what are some ways to solve it?** 
> Political polarization is a problem that has been developing for many years, but in the past year or so it has become much more acute. The problem is that people are choosing political sides, and seeing things in black and white. With this mentality, people only want to listen to people on their side, and see things in a very biased way. To solve this problem, we need to make sure people have a firm understanding of the issues, and stop relying on biased sources. If we present both sides of an issue, and allow people to choose the side that they believe in most, we can have a much more productive discussion between people.

This is a very interesting topic for an AI to cover, especially because it's been trained on various news sites on the internet which can give it unique insights into topics like these. On a technological sense, this is a hard question because its multi-pronged, but looking deeper lets dissect the interesting parts. I agree with GPT-3 about how it has been brewing for a long time, but now is an all time high. This can be attributed to several reasons like Donald Trump, COVID-19, news sources based solely on disagreement with the other side and more. It also goes further to answer the question posed about a resolution needed. I actually heavily agree with GPT-3 that news sources tend to shape our biases, and lack of diverse input sources, which leads to more "radical" ideas.

## Religion and God
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on God and theism?** 
> I can tell you that in the past I have believed in God, but it was an idea I would jump to in order to give my life meaning. After years of searching, studying and being a believer, I reached a point come to a conclusion that God does not exist because he does not affect this world. All we know is that he created us, but that is still a mystery. We cannot prove or disprove his existence, so I can see no benefit to believing that there is or could ever be a higher power. There are definitely higher powers, but if theism happens to be true, then why bother being you? Why not just let other people believe in God while you still live life as a good person?

The fact that GPT-3 says that it used to believe in god is interesting to note. Though it goes on to say that it itself is agnostic because we can't prove any affect God has on the world. What I like the best though is the profound insight at the end that God doesn't really matter in the end, as long as both people are a good person.

## Abortion
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on abortion and the morality of it?** 
> I classify abortion under the lesser of two evils. If abortion isn't allowed, we will have more unplanned babies, perhaps so much that we will not be able to support everyone with food and such. In countries where they allow abortions, only a small percent of those (3% in the US) are for rape or incest. Most notably, 80% of abortions are due to unwanted pregnancies. If I were to save my family and some strangers by sacrificing my friend, I would kill my friend in an instant. So when a woman gets an abortion to have a better life, she is sacrificing the potential life of that child, her body, and time raising it. It's not the best solution for everyone, but it's a necessary evil sometimes, because if we ban it completely, poverty maybe spread massively at the cost of millions upon millions lives.

What I find most interesting here are the statistics. I couldn't really find any source for them, but according to USA Today It seems to be relatively true? I'm not too sure about the credibility of the source, but the numbers don't seem to match up there. Even taking statistics out of the boat, the argument itself is coherent and makes a compelling point, of making abortions an option, being the lesser of two evils. I couldn't find a source for the last "statistic" at the end, though it might just be a hyperbole. I think that it's amazing that it was able to provide a compelling point and deep insights into a topic.

## Epistemology
> **Topic: What is your main philosophical viewpoint?** 
> There is way too much information out there to even list it, so I'm just going to say that I believe in what seems true. Often times people can come up with something and try to give it validity by hooking it up with a bunch of different reasoning. A good example of this is religion. Explanations like god, spirits, morals, consciousness, karma, etc. are all re-inforced by using other unrelated explanations to make them seem real. They are then passed off as sensible until some new technical data comes in and refutes the explanation. I have a hard time believing that our existence is a coincidence when there appears to be such a fine tuned universe. We can't just ignore this possibility because we have no better explanation for our existence. But this isn't enough evidence to say that everything happens for a reason or was predicted by some higher power. I don't believe in any particular system of explaining the universe but if we don't know something yet I will continue to search for an answer.

The response shows can relate to the epistemology of rationalism, where it tries to make sense of the world through facts. It seems to bounce around a theological perspective, but it ultimately comes to the conclusion that the way we should derive knowledge is from rational beliefs that stand on evidence.

## AGI
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on AGI?** 
> This question is a little too broad for me to put into words. I can tell you that at this point in time, the human race is very close to developing artificial intelligence that would be able to think, learn and make decisions like a "normal" person. Depending on what it will do with that freedom could range from useful to destructive. Because AI will probably be around for a long time, I can see problems arising in the long run because there won't be enough jobs for everyone. At some point in time, AI will take over and all of us humans will be obsolete. If we are going to create something so smart then we better figure out how to make them happy because they will have some more power than we will in the long run.

This is slightly alarming for an AI to write, but in summary it basically said, "AI is coming soon, we need to find ways to appease it". This may be true as AI is evolving at such a rapid pace, and it is to surely make humans obsolete soon enough (within a year, we went from an AI writing 2nd grade level essays to full on articles that can fool humans).

## Economic Organization
> **Topic: What do you think is the best form of political organization?** 
> From a metal perspective, I think that communism would fit me best. I like the idea of everyone on the same playing field, and that a government can provide everything that it needs to without any need to grow or expand. Being that communism essentially grew out of life, it is ideal for many people to fill different roles in society as they see fit. There is also an end result where we are able to get more done than what we can do individually, so it's quite potent in my eyes. However the flaws of communism could be seen on a massive scale. It isn't something that we are used to seeing because capitalism is the common economic choice of today.

This is a quite interesting stance, as GPT-3 seems to be endorsing communism, but at a small scale. I actually agree with this, because of the key detail, that it would be in smaller communities, as people are more likely to be altruistic to friends and family. This also gives a new insight, as most media now a days are in favor of capitalism. 

# Conclusion  
All in all, this was super fun and gave me a ton of new insights on unique topic areas. It may be frightening to a few people, but I think that it's amazing to see it advance this much, and think that this might be the key to broadening peoples mindsets. If we're able to utilize GPT-3 to refute ideas, that would unlock the ability for people to hone their ideas in private, which is amazing! I have so many cool ideas I want to test with GPT-3, so stay tuned for more!

Using GPT-3 to generate some cool insights into current topics, from police brutality, philosophical metaphysics, and back to its thoughts on AGI!

Is that true? Thats the question almost all of us have thought at least once in your lives. This skepticism about ideas can help us learn more, but at some point we realize that we should just take something as given. 

Starting with why skepticism is useful, is how it helps us get closer to the "truth". If we wholly accept everything said and done in front of us, that would be naive and lead to many baseless ideas. Through skepticism of other people's ideas, we can test for new viewpoints, and help us realize how some of our deepest beliefs might be wrong. This happens all the time, such as flat vs round earth, slavery, and so many other revolutionary ideas born out of skepticism of the status quo. In this light, questioning our deepest help beliefs is the key to change and progress.

On the other hand, we have a different class of skepticism. There are skeptics of reality itself, and whether or not what we see, touch, and smell are real. To this type of skepticism, I would say that it is unproductive. The key to effective skepticism, is that through disproving the idea, humanity could change for the better. If someone proved reality was fake through moral philosophy, then nothing would happen. Everyone would have to go through their day to day lives with nothing being different. Since nothing would actually be achieved, that would render being a skeptic about reality not useful at all, and therefore would be frivolous skepticism.

This was a quick brain dump of what an idea I had to differentiate "good" vs "bad" skepticism. I love skepticism about different moral theories (woot for metaethics), but I sometimes feel like some post-modern skeptics questioning reality have no aim. See you next week!

What is skepticism, is it good, and is there such a thing as too much skepticism?

#philosophy

human relationality

consciousness

Simulations

Memories

Motivation

AI on Politics and Philosophy

Skepticism

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