{"id":4153,"date":"2021-08-17T18:22:25","date_gmt":"2021-08-18T01:22:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/?p=4153"},"modified":"2021-08-17T18:22:25","modified_gmt":"2021-08-18T01:22:25","slug":"the-nature-of-reality-and-how-it-informs-decisions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/the-big-picture\/the-nature-of-reality-and-how-it-informs-decisions","title":{"rendered":"The nature of reality and how it informs decisions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, one of the things I occasionally feel resentment about is my desire to spend large numbers of hours exploring music combined with the recognition that the world almost certainly does not *need* these things (and the odds of me being better than anyone else at creating music are vanishingly small). One thing I have thought about is how my actions would be different if I *knew* the nature of the universe.<\/p>\n<p>In particular, if I knew that I was in a single-person video game style simulation, I wouldn&#8217;t be concerned about the needs of the world and just what I could get away with.. I work more than I need to to support myself, partially to help out other people and partially to hone my skills in the hopes that I can participate in either the singularity or the mass automation in such a way as to help increase the general freedom of humanity.<\/p>\n<p>But, I have to go with the assumption the reality that is presented to me is &#8220;real&#8221; and that the suffering of people is likewise real. On the other paw I am not willing to be completely selfless and give all my energy into things that advantage other people. So I try to balance out time to do the things I want to do (like exploring music and artificial neural networks) with things that the world will pay me to do because presumably it needs them done (system administration and a lot of not very exciting coding, mostly)<\/p>\n<p>Some of the possibilities as to &#8220;what&#8217;s going on&#8221; that have occured to me<\/p>\n<p>*) This whole thing could be a accidental side effect of some other system &#8211; our type of life inserts itself into entropy flow &#8211; we might even be moving from system to system, tapping different entropy flows, without us being aware of it. <\/p>\n<p>*) This could be the work of a creator or creators. That might *also* be us, or it might be a seperate, distinct entity. <\/p>\n<p>*) This might be a massive multiplayer simulation. In that case, it might be that the plot is driven by our decisions or it might be that the plot is on rails. <\/p>\n<p>Unlike other people I have met I tend to think the people I talk to are not me, so I tend to think whatever we&#8217;re in has some sort of networking or multiple participants. I do wish sometimes that I knew what the most efficient choices to make were in order to optimize for reducing the suffering of others, and then could do cost-benefit analysis of the various actions I am taking in order to find some sort of optimized path forward that contains adequate time of me doing the things I want to do for my own reasons vs helping others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, one of the things I occasionally feel resentment about is my desire to spend large numbers of hours exploring music combined with the recognition that the world almost certainly does not *need* these things (and the odds of me being better than anyone else at creating music are vanishingly small). One thing I have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4153"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4153"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4154,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4153\/revisions\/4154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}