There should be a name to the phenomenon that humans seem to become crushingly depressed once they start to grasp the big picture dynamics of the system they're encapsulated within. I think it's an effect that we're not quite prepared for as we reach closer and closer to science dotting all its i's.
It's as if childhood primes us to think that life is all about figuring out what the heck is going on around us, and as a consequence some of us go into something science-y, but then we reach a certain stage in adulthood where we feel like we have a pretty good rough closed form solution to the problem, and now the journey all of a sudden seems empty and without purpose and we just keep going with the lives 16-year old selves planned out for us, with too much cost sunk to pivot. I almost suspect the end-state of science is not some sort of blissful state where we feel like we understand everything, but an utter dread and feeling of emptiness at no longer having a purpose.
I had a dream where I was in a coma for 20 years, woke up, and found that AI was now able to trivially answer even the most difficult research questions I could imagine. In my dream I visited my old workplace, and found that while the CEO was still there the ease at which questions could be answered made the humans more supervisers than researchers.
For some time in my dream I was lost, not sure what my value was as a human being without my skills that I've spent decades refining.
Then I remembered that humans have inherent value, that I am not my work, and went to a park to meditate and teach karate. It made me think, in my dream, how even if a machine could teach karate better, I was not doing it for society -- I was doing it for myself.
Realizing that you are not your work, and are not defined by your work; that humans have inherent value and you have every right to simply be happy when the opportunity arises; that the Puritan virtues of work are an illusion, and that humans should follow their passion; that the illusion of the necessity of work often prevents people from ever discovering their passion in the first place.
It was probably my best dream, and I approach life quite differently now. I think when I feel like I have a closed form solution, it is much the same spirit as an AI that will solve your problems for you.
Personally, understanding the "big picture dynamics" of systems is kind of an intellectual porn for me. I loved doing that for as long as I remembered. It always came with the sense of control - understanding the systems means you could tweak it to your liking, if you so desired.
Finally realizing that the system in which we live is basically uncontrollable by an individual within it has blindsided me. So many interesting things happening, so many interesting things that need to be done still, and yet all you and I get to be are observers and consumers of whatever the system happens to spit out.
The trick for me is realizing that P doesn't easily equal NP, which means that solving satisfaction problems is a challenging thing to do. But everyone knows when it has been solved. Lots of people have an idea of what should happen, few know how to do it. If you find that for some reason you're uniquely qualified to produce some process, you can figure out if it solves someone's problem. Then other people can share their resources which they are uniquely qualified to make, and their problems are then solvable in P time, while they would have to do the NP task of learning how you do your thing. Then you as an individual have a lot of leverage because any change you make to your system, everyone will have to use, provided it's a verifiable improvement.
I haven't given up on thinking I might be able to influence the system. Specifically, I hope my volunteer work on snowdrift.coop can move the needle a bit.
https://wiki.snowdrift.coop is probably the best introduction right now; the main site is in the process of being updated.
There should be a name to the phenomenon that humans seem to become crushingly depressed once they start to grasp the big picture dynamics of the system they're encapsulated within.
I don’t think “existential angst” fits. As the name implies, you get that just by existing and being trapped by the limitations of being a mortal human.
You’re talking about the specific meaninglessness of modern work. Marx suggests that capitalism affords us some real freedoms, but at the cost of our feeling of purpose and solidarity. And, Marxists would argue, this makes us easier to exploit.
Marx and his inheritors failed to produce systems that solved this problem, and maybe that indicates that the problem is deeper than just forms of ownership and control.
But as a problem description, I think he was onto something.
This feeling is because in our current stage of development, we are very primitive spiritually. Some of us don't even believe we have a soul. That it is all meaningless. Science in its current form also looks at our material world and concludes the same. Nasa tells us we are just a speck of crap in a giant space as well, with no beginning or end.
You guys talk about boxes. Well there are huge ones for the mind, carefully constructed to be believable for the masses. Too complicated to understand, they require you to put beliefs in people with credentials, who will repeat to you what they found in the books they were given, or the math they got shown.
If you want to understand your purpose here, you have to step outside of scientific thinking to start with, and that's a huge problem for almost everybody. You have to look at origins of the matrix we are living in, the illuminati, the Egyptians, book of the dead, the occult.
The Aeon of Horus is here: and its first flower may well be this: that, freed of the obsession of the doom of the Ego in Death, and of the limitation of the Mind by Reason, the best men again set out with eager eyes upon the Path of the Wise, the mountain track of the goat, and then the untrodden Ridge, that leads to the ice-gleaming pinnacles of Mastery!
It's as if childhood primes us to think that life is all about figuring out what the heck is going on around us, and as a consequence some of us go into something science-y, but then we reach a certain stage in adulthood where we feel like we have a pretty good rough closed form solution to the problem, and now the journey all of a sudden seems empty and without purpose and we just keep going with the lives 16-year old selves planned out for us, with too much cost sunk to pivot. I almost suspect the end-state of science is not some sort of blissful state where we feel like we understand everything, but an utter dread and feeling of emptiness at no longer having a purpose.