| If the implicit goal of life were the enjoyment of it, the world would be a radically different place. A rational hedonic species would have a peaceful society, use some technology but only when it directly improved life, and would regulate things like economy and reproduction to keep them within strict limits and to keep any system from "running away." Preventing the emergence of any "Red Queen's race" would be a high priority. But that's not the world we live in, and that's not what we are. The implicit goal of life, as resulting from the nature of its embodiment as a self-replicating catalytic system, is the replication of genes, organisms, ideas, societies, and possibly eventually biospheres. Life makes life to make life. The runaway industrial/technological system has been driven by the implicit drive of various living systems to replicate. There are more humans today than ever before, and more ideas in human brains than ever before. The fact that this has been achieved at the expense of other living things is an artifact of the limited size of our biosphere, but run this system long enough and it's possible that it will lead to the full-scale replication of entire biospheres: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8JyvzU0CXU Over a long enough time span, life as a whole may come out ahead. When life gets to other biospheres what will it do? Replicate, diversify, evolve, and replicate more. Remember "grey goo" from 90s nanotechnology speculation? It already exists. It's you. Life is grey goo, and if nothing stops it it will eventually convert as much matter and energy in the universe into life as physically possible before heat death. Pleasure is an effect, not a cause. The things that please you do so because they've been wired that way to get you to survive and reproduce. Since humans are complex and social, our pleasures and motives are similarly complex. We experience pleasure from eating protein, fat, and sugar because it nourishes us. Socializing is pleasurable because we are semi-colonial organisms that depend on socializing for survival. Sex feels good because it leads to reproduction and in humans (and many other complex creatures) cements critical social bonds. Change some neurological wiring and you'd derive immense pleasure from sitting in front of a screen solving problems for 40 hours a week. There are a few non-neurotypical people who do. I am not necessarily arguing that this is all there is to existence or consciousness. We don't really know what consciousness is, and it may be a broader phenomenon somehow than biological life. But as far as biological embodied life is concerned, this is how it works. I'm also not arguing that no improvement to our condition is possible. Being intelligent and self-aware we have some ability to drive this thing. Yet nature to be commanded must be obeyed. Anything we do to improve things probably has to work with the overall thermodynamic direction of life, not against it. This is probably why all utopian ideologies that revolve around constraint and reaction eventually fail or are washed away by a tide of less conservative social phenomena. |