Entry
-
Your mind directs your choices. It would be easier if this director had admin rights.
NB: This is really just some ramblings of my own. But feel free to read.
I contend that we don't control the thoughts that come into our minds; they are a complex consequence of your current emotional state and quantum physics. You can't control your next thought without using your current one. It's impossible to predict with perfect accuracy your next thought.
Your objectives and habits are hardcoded consequences of experience and circumstance. To alter or reverse these would take systematic effort telling yourself that your goals are wrong. For instance; quitting smoking, abstaining from internet pornography, starting and sticking to an exercise routine, starting dieting, or to start going to church to save your soul. You laugh, but for the right reason - in my case; the irrefutable evidence of the afterlife and some religion - you would do it, or at least try. My inherently hedonistic lifestyle would make it very hard for me however.
At any rate, my point is this. We repeatedly make unsound choices based on settings in our brain that are really hard to override. And while - if we talk large scale repercussions for a minute - having the ability to change them yourself might be convenient at times, having everyone do it would be a disastrous idea; imagine the stability of society fading as people play with their master switches - maybe a certain setting makes you object to touching the switches again, eventually ensuring the smooth convergence of mankind into one bland personality type. No. To overcome ubiquitous challenges for mankind, we need to really work together, and feel each other. Governments can at best be held accountable and represent the interest of the constituency, and at worst allow individuals to exploit fallibilities of the system for their own good and at the cost of others. A global infallible government would be unthinkable as it represents such radically different expectations in terms of lifestyle changes as true equality gets the spotlight.
So for a prosperous future and a high stability of mankind, someone, or something, I propose a computerised hive mind, to control our goals for us - based on a perfect blend of scientific evidence for what behaviour patterns make us happy, and what common sacrifices are needed to survive our raiding of the earth. I.e. we need to effectively strip ourselves of what makes us human. We would work together to solve our problems, we would remain in love, never cheat, as the stability of mankind would necessitate keeping the switches set on love - if you have paedophilic urges or if there are no mates in your nearby area, you would be implored to exercise abstinence - but successfully. Bureaucratic systems would be rendered obsolete in the face of universal human morality.
Until we can create such a system, I believe we are but a global pathogen, a large scale disease, awaiting planetary extinction quite possibly caused by our own inability to work together. Until then, we will spend our lives mostly preoccupied with being better - in your personal metric - than our neighbours. Until then, we will live under the eye of God, whose outdated morality only continues to drive humanity into a wall, whose existence is unverifiable at best and illogical at worst. Until we realize that our existence is meaningless and purely incidental, we are not going to be able to effectively do the one thing that we ultimately all strive for on this earth; to make ourselves and/or others happy. If we can optimistically embrace this existential nihilism, we can work towards changing mankind for the better - and as you can see I do not put any limits on the type of change here. Failing that - obviously - get a mad scientist with a runaway budget to invent a God of a supercomputer to enable the singularity.
Until then, xkcd has my philosophy:
wow. other than about what specifically prompted this, feel free to ask/discuss.
