The Formula for Morality

I am you.

Throughout my life my personality will change. My taste buds will change. My opinions will change. My relationships will change. My daily activities will change. My skills will change.The particles composing my body will be replaced by new particles. As an adult, the difference between the five year old me and the modern me is likely greater than the difference between the modern me and most of my fellow adult males. Throughout my life everything about me will change, except that, so long as I am fit to be called myself, my mind will peer out into the universe around me, experience that universe, and be able to interact with that universe.

That constant part of my mind is the same constant part of your mind that exists in you.

In a sense, we are one being - sensory appendages of the same super organism composed of all feeling life.
All feeling life is defined by that same constant aspect of itself: that ability to experience,
interact, and alter that universe.

Therefore, from a certain point of view, an afterlife must exist...not the kind of afterlife
often believed in though. None of our individuality is carried with us to the next life
when we die, in this way. When my life ends, rather, I live on as you, and all other feeling
beings, as I am, in a sense, living as them while I live. I just don't feel like it.

You are my mortal afterlife. It is therefore in my interest to assist you for the same reasons I would desire to be assisted.

If humans go extinct, I will live on in the feeling brains of other organisms. If all organisms
go extinct, my soul will go dormant until new feeling life arises. If feeling life never
again arises the essence of what makes me me will live on in the past, and even then
I will remain immortal...because no matter what happens, the past will always have existed, and that is a kind of immortality.

My actions matter too, for the same reasons. There is no time limit on how long benevolence has assisted life, even after the life that has been assisted has ended.

In this way, we are less individuals than we are sensory appendages of the same organism. Your suffering harms me, and mine harms you. Your joy assists me, and mine assists you. I just don't realize it on an emotional level. I can't feel it.

But that's not the whole story. There's another side of the story - the side that insists, like a lone torchlight shining eternally through the void of space, screaming into a hurricane, "I AM ME! I AM NOT YOU! I AM ME!" and it'll continue screaming that no matter what the other side says. That's the side of us in charge of our emotions, the side of us that pushes atheletes to win medals and inspires astrophysicists to dream of burying their toes in Martian sands. This side of things does not emphasize maximizing benefits to all life. This side emphasizes things that are less easy to measure. I like to call this side of things, "The dragon" because it is a roaring, passionate, unconquerable beast.

So, we are simultaneously all part of each other, and not. Individuality is simultaneously an illusion, and not. How you choose to look a reality, whether seeing yourself as part of the greater whole, or an individual, or as one single person, or as an endless series of people, constantly dying and being replaced, mostly should depend on what makes you most comfortable, I think.

Imagine that I've cloned myself eight times and have the technology to rapidly age those clones to my current age, in terms of bodily condition. Imagine that I also have the ability to upload my memories and thought patters into all eight of those clones.
Imagine that I form a baseball team with my nine clones. During batting practice, one of the clones...or the original me...I'm not sure it matters which...is hit in the head, tragically, with a baseball and dies. Am I alive, or not?

And that's an example of how your perspective can radically alter the nature of reality. How "alive" you are, if you were the one hit with the ball who'd died, depends on your personal preferences. Whether or not you should make a billion clones of yourself
and upload your memories into all of them to be sure that at least one of them survives long enough to make more clones with its uploaded memories so that you retain immortality over billions of years depends, partly, on how much that would improve your mood...all those countless resources would serve the purpose of improving your mood.

But we feeling life forms have a more focused goal before us than mere whim. The suffering of others besides myself is of no greater or lesser importance than my own. The pleasure of others besides myself is of no greater or lesser importance than my own, and so it is in our best interest to build a society that maximizes pleasure and minimizes suffering...not just for ourselves, or humans, or nonhuman animals, or all currently existing life, but all life that will ever exist in our universe, and any other universes we have the ability to affect. All of the suffering and pleasure of that life is worthwhile for the same reason: It is felt.
Oh, the dragon will surely rebel from that plan. The dragon is responsible for our emotions, and our emotions tell us to be more individualistic and tribal than that...but the dragon is not a far-thinker. It doesn't understand concepts such as the "greater good," and strategies for achieving the greater good will often be better at making life better for the dragon than the dragon knows how to make life.

But only in some ways...because that dragon IS most of what we are. Without our passions and emotions we'd be stones. That dragon will get what IT wants regardless of
what are opinions about it are, oftentimes. There's just nothing that can stop it short of genetically engineering it away...or dying...and most people don't want to go the dying route, and we lack the technology to genetically engineer us into emotionless automatons, so the dragon controls us now, by and large.

We must acknowledge that the dragon exists, and that we can hear what it wants through our impulses, and we can control some of that, we can repress its impulses or
outsmart it, but it'll always get a lot of what it wants, even if it has to be sneaky about it. Our emotions are not something we can fully control.
And the dragon isn't an inherently evil creature anyway. Sometimes it's a friendly little adorable dragon, like a puppy with scales. Other times it's a ferocious mother dragon defending its young like any angered mother bear. Sometimes it wants to go dancing, and singing, and it gives us all the joys we find in life.
The dragon taught us to appreciate music, and good foods, and appreciate exciting stories. The dragon taught us about love, and art, and all sorts of wondrous things.

Therefore, because the dragon has such control over us...learning about new philosophic viewpoints will likely do little to alter our behavior. The dragon wants what it wants and it'll seldom change its mind...and even when it can be convinced to, how to do that convincing of your personal dragon is not something I'm likely to understand better than you.

Therefore, when we are thinking about how best to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering for all life, we should view whatever ideas we invent as more of a
useful strategy for leaders of society and people who lose little to nothing from acting on those ideas. Guilting people into "saving the world" doesn't appear to work. The dragon just responds, "No thanks," every time. Society has been attempting that since the dawn of time. It hasn't worked yet.

Therefore, I can possibly convince you to vote differently, or alter your plans as an elected leader, if I'm extremely lucky...which usually doesn't work out well either.
I'm almost certainly not going to be able to convince you to actually do anything that requires effort though.

We can educate each other though. We can give each other clearer worldviews...and I'm thinking that should be the primary goal of conversation. It appears to be the only
thing we can do.

Now on to a question: which life is more valuable? The life of a homeless person, or the life of a squirrel?

If most people don't perceive you as a danger to society, you're probably going to say that the homeless person's life is more valuable. The important question is why, though.

The following is a very important point: Everybody's happiness and suffering is equally important, but not everybody produces equal amounts of pleasure and suffering. For example:

Let's say I can spend ten dollars to buy the homeless person a good meal, or I can spend ten dollars to buy the squirrel lots of good meals, for many days. The squirrel
has the advantage here. At least so far, it appears that my money will go further in preventing the squirrel's suffering than preventing the homeless person's suffering.
However, the homeless person has a longer memory than the squirrel, so any suffering from hunger the homeless person experiences will likely echo on, causing more suffering than the squirrel going hungry, possibly evening things out.

The real important issues - the issues that make the difference, are none of the above though.They are, rather, the following points:

#1. Human society is held together by bonds of trust. The more we abandon each other, the more chances those bonds have of breaking down and collapsing society with it. We have to put humans before other organisms, because we live with our fellow humans in a way we don't live with other organisms. Yeah...you can have pets, but those pets aren't really part of our society.

#2. Humans are different from all other organisms in that we are the only species that is not trapped in a Darwinian cycle in which we grow until we collapse.
Everything else on the planet lacks the understanding of the world around it to plan for the future. When they gain more resources, they procreate which tends
to harm at least some other organisms, until their population collapses. Any benefits to helping any animals that are part of such a system are iffy.

Humans aren't that way. We have the ability to think about whether or not we should give birth, unlike all other organisms. We have the ability to exponentially improve ourselves given new resources. We have a kind of free will, through understanding, that no other organisms have, even if they have the ability to roll choices around in their minds and make decisions. Even if they do, they don't understand the world well enough to make much use of that.

And yeah...humans often don't put that ability to control our destiny into practice. And that means, the less actively we go about striving to control our destinies, the less valuable our lives become.

I've heard some people argue that we should behave like any other animal - expanding until we collapse and not worrying about the future. My response to such
mentalities is: Okay...so then why shouldn't I start hunting human beings for sport then? because if that's really the way we want to go, I would argue that our lives will become not much more valuable than the animals we hunt for food products.

More importantly...other people will see that connection too when times get rough. There is a reason to work towards the rebuilding of society if we have some kind of long term goal in mind that truly benefits us. If we're just like animals, on the other hand, that's how society, probably, plummets into free-fall as soon as times get rough, I'm thinking.

So what's the best long term goal for humanity? I would say that we're currently in a race. We're in the same race our ancestors have been running since the dawn of time. The difference is that now, rather than trying to store enough food to survive the winter, we're trying to survive as a civilization, and species, long enough for technology to solve our problems. We need as much time as possible to reach that point, so I'd argue we should be heavily focused on the future.

I don't see any events that could cause our extinction except for disease...so developing a system to deal with pandemics is something I'd see as a high priority.
I would suggest heavily investing in an international response team to halt fast-spreading or dangerous diseases before they become large. We also need some kind of system in place to deal quickly with pandemics once they become pandemics.

Other priorities would seem to be environmental issues, preparing for, or working towards preventing, a chain-reaction destruction of all satellites in orbit due to excessive space debris, and preparing for solar flares that could knock out our power grids. Another important issue to be concerned about is probably rising automation which would lead to far more power for corporations, and fewer jobs for regular people, most likely.

I don't see any point to worrying about colonizing Mars or any other celestial body outside of Earth for another century, at least. I'd prefer that society focus on improving Earth so that we can maintain civilization long enough to naturally develop the technology to colonize extraterrestrial environments.

How to improve Earth: Well, higher standards of living seem to slow procreation rates. It's quite damaging for third world nations to develop higher standards of living before they gain access to clean energy technology though. Therefore, I would advocate that we invest as much money as possible into developing fusion power, better batteries for solar and wind power, and other forms of cheap, clean energy so that the third world doesn't industrialize into coal. If they can industrialize in a clean way, and if we can all adopt cleaner ways of living (presumably through technology or simply running out of certain resources) once people's standards of living raise I'm hoping population growths over the world will naturally decrease and we'll have far fewer problems.

So what's the long, long term goal look like? I'd say rainbowed madness.

One possible way to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering seems, at least to me right now, like it would be to force everybody to exist, eternally, in tiny little cubicles in which they live forever in a semi-conscious, immobile state, perpetually being fed pleasure-creating chemicals from tubes in the back of their heads.

Another way could be trying to destroy all life.

Another way could be perpetually raising the average happiness of a group, and repeatedly purging that group of all its less happy citizens, and most other
life it comes across.

Another way could be perpetually creating more and more genetically engineered organisms designed to be as continuously happy as possible, regardless of
how much the additional work and resources required decreases the original creators' standards of living.

And yeah, another more boring way of maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering could be just wandering around helping people.

An that madness is why people tend to just shy away from this mental route...but I don't think that madness is a good reason to shy away from that mental route. It's merely a good reason to think about that mental route a bit more - to think about what would really benefit life forms, and that can be an interesting process.

Regarding the weirder possibilities described above...I think we can, more or less, filter out a few of them...possibly. For example, one disadvantage of perpetually
culling your society to end the lives of all except the happiest members to perpetually increase average happiness level is that, that creates a lot of potential worry,
and gets in the way of people's ability to plan for the future. It's hard to be convinced to make long term plans if your life might be extinguished at any moment.

One disadvantage of trying to destroy all life is that, that life will tend to get annoyed at that and try to destroy you right back, and then you won't be able to destroy all life.

One disadvantage of perpetually creating more and more genetically enginered euphoric persons is that life gains nothing from existing if it's not in existence already. It doesn't necessarily lose anything either (although that's debatable) but it doesn't gain anything. Therefore, the only reason to create new life is to assist existing life...seemingly making
endlessly creating more and more people appear to not be such a good idea.

One big, although debatable, flaw of all those weirder solutions I suggested is that...I don't think that just because you've experienced suffering in your life,does it makes your life
not worth living, necessarily. That's because I've had no interest in ending my life after every form of suffering I experience. Also, even during extreme moments of suffering,
I don't think that necessarily renders all of one's life not worth it...because after that suffering ends, it often won't feel like that made one's life not worth living, and feelings are about the way we have of distinguishing whether or not life is worth living for now.

Pondering those weirder solutions is something to go through with a fine-toothed comb, examining each carefully. The fact that they're weird doesn't mean there's no sensible
solution. It just means we may have to contemplate things a little more...think about what we really want out of life and the pros and cons of that.

So, the ideal future I envision is a heavily genetically engineered one in which humanity's descendants wander the universe destroying or radically genetically
altering feeling, non-tool-using life forms for their own benefit, but mostly leaving their fellow spacefaring tool users along. Their fellow spacefaring tool users
will know enough about the universe to, somewhat, make their own decisions. Most animals, on the other hand, don't even have the knowledge or mental capacity to
understand the concept of whether or not procreation would be the right or wrong thing to do. Most animals don't fear death. They don't understand it enough to. Death
is something neutral to them. Only suffering is a negative. Extinction is taking nothing away from them and they lack the level of understanding to realize whether or not
they want to be genetically altered, so it's up to humans to make that decision for them. We'll be better at understanding what's best for them than they are...so long as
we actually try.

I can quantify pleasure and suffering based on examining my feelings. I can think, "A paper cut hurts less than a shark bite," then estimate the amount of times the shark
bite hurts more than the paper cut so as to come up with some number of units of suffering to attribute both the paper cut and shark bite as having. I think this shows that
there are real, measurable units that make up pleasure and suffering. Therefore, because our goal is to maximize pleasure and suffering, what would measure that most accurately
would be some kind of meticulously checked math formula invented by some perfectly knwoledgeable mind trying to determine how to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering through that math formula.

I call that math formula the "Formula for Morality."