"I remember feeling like a person, and feeling like people were ontologically distinct from animals, and I don't know how it's possible to pick up the pieces after that illusion has gone.<\/p>\n
"I remember caring about parochial political concerns. I cared about gender equality, and educational freedom. And, and, I cared very badly about being respected for being intelligent. But now that I see that the latter was just a standard male primate status-seeking drive gone haywire\u2014or not<\/em> gone haywire, but functioning normally\u2014and that my less-obviously-selfish concerns were driven by idiosyncratic features of my own psychology that few others have any reason to care about\u2014none of it seems as compelling anymore.<\/p>\n "Then what is compelling? Well, I'm terrified of the pain of being physically hurt, so if I don't know what's real and I don't know what's right, I can always fall back on 'pain and suffering are bad.'<\/p>\n "But there has to be more to morality than that. I complained about how people in institutional contexts optimize for not-being-personally-blamed and no one is actually trying to do anything. But of course passive helplessness is the result when you don't have any goals except not-being-hurt.<\/p>\n "I want to be Innocent and Safe with Probability One<\/a>, but Probability One is an absurdity that can't exist. In a sufficiently large universe, random fluctuations in maximum entropy heat death form a Boltzmann brain Judeo-Christian God who will punish you for masturbating. But somehow I'm not worried about that.<\/p>\n "But I shouldn't be thinking<\/a> about any of this. I have my own life to tend to, and it looks great<\/em>; the rest of space and time will have to take care of itself. I seem to have memories of being in the save\/destroy\/take over the world<\/a> business, but now it seems more convenient to be agnostic about whether any of that actually happened."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" "I remember feeling like a person, and feeling like people were ontologically distinct from animals, and I don't know how it's possible to pick up the pieces after that illusion has gone. "I remember caring about parochial political concerns. I … Continue reading