What I have learned in 20 years of consciousness

Not very much, to be honest

1. Research the big questions before the small ones

This seems like a rather obvious thing to do, but in practice a lot of people do not do this, for example if one wants to know what causes obesity, it would be best to examine the extent to which genes play a role in obesity. Based on twin studies, the heritability of obesity is somewhere between 40% and 80%, which is misinterpreted as supporting the view that it has to do with hereditary fat storage; a more plausible explanation is that obesity is caused by a large amount of past decisions with regard to food intake, which are downstream of values and personality traits, which are also partially heritable.

Prior to this, I annotated what I considered to be life’s most important questions in this order:

• Whether there is a true religion: I studied this when I was between the age of 13 and 15, and found that it was unlikely that there was. I plan to research this more in the future, as the conclusions I came to as a teenager and those I came to as a yong adult are quite different. It’s highly important because religion informs people’s views on a lot of other important questions: mortality, human nature, and whatnot.

• What is human nature: the extent to which humans are selfish, narcissistic, intelligent, introspective, or conscious, and the degree to which variance in these traits is caused by nature or nurture. The answer is that it depends on the individual trait — some traits like pigmentation are almost completely genetic, while political views are not that genetic. And underdiscussed aspect of this debate is that genetic variance matters more in the abstract because genes stay with people their entire lives, while environments come and go, so even if lack of success with mates at a given point may be due to the environment, in the long term the genes are the deciding factor.

• What should be our values: a haunted question. Reevaluating values is something that is indeed quite unintuitive. My underdeveloped theory at this point is that emotions are axiomatic in value, and that nothing else matters. Consider anhedonia, for example, everything becomes meaningless if you cannot enjoy it: exercise, friends, work, food, sleep… It really does take the value out of life. Every other value is either downstream of that or fake.

• Morality: some states of affairs are more valuable than others, but there is nothing that forces people to act morally, and in practice ethics is just signalling, as Hanson would say.

• Meaning of life: there is no overarching meaning to life, though that does not mean life is not worth living or meaningful in the abstract.

• Free will: does not exist. Free will defined as the will being an independent causal factor in the shaping of reality, that is. The critical question here is independent of what. Genes? Environmental factors? That’s impossible: both of these things clearly affect the choices people make. This is the logical answer — the problem is that people want to believe in free will because it gives them a sense of autonomy and stability in life, and because of the free will illusion: it’s just the most intuitive way to think about life.

I would say that I am a “Neecheean” in the sense that I agree with Nietzsche on basically all fundamental questions about life. Which is funny: I read some of him as a teenager and thought his opinions were interesting, but kind of ridiculous and incomprehensible. Now as an adult, Nietzsche’s thoughts just seem to be the model that fits reality as it presents to me the best. A lot of the reasons as to why I believe in my answers are clearly undeveloped, but I trust them anyway, as the model itself seems to fit very well.

2. Reason from first principles

Many people get roped into following the herd, and a guru if not. It’s very easy, due to genetic impulses to do this, but it can be overcome with effort. If you have an IQ above 115 and a certain personality type (high openness? high conscientiousness?) you are better off thinking for yourself; the conclusions you will come to will be more reliable than those that other people came to.

3. Rationalism is overrated.

Besides a cute looking Jewish boy and the girl reading this, all I see at the 2023 manifest conference (rationalist meetup) are nerds: typically a person who had some kind of physical or mental impediment growing up which caused them to internalize and become brains in vats.

Ad hominems aside, it doesn’t matter if you have pale skin, glases, unathletic, and are not physically attrative. Those things aren’t really that important in isolation. Rationalism is just bad. Human reasoning is far too complex and animalistic to be formalized logically and there is no reason as to why humans should optimize for the truth over the values that evolution gave them.

4. 90% of hard work is wasted

Take it from a conscientious person.

5. Conventional wisdom is usually true

Harvard students tend to be intelligent? Fast food is bad?

6. 4 main human goals

The ultimate goal is optimizing one’s emotional state.

There are 4 main ways humans try to achieve this: status, wealth, mating, and health.

7. The world is far more mediocre than one is born thinking it is

There are some exceptions to this rule: AI, physics, math, philosophy, and base civilization are legit. Normal people are decent at dating and social interactions. Entertainment is in a weird place where the creators are extremely good at optimizing for wealth and popularity but generally not good at optimizing for actual quality or value. This was less true before, but is generally quite true now.

8. Advice usually doesn’t work

Dynomight of all people has a nice post on this. This is something I was not born believing, but now have come to accept, for several reasons: people differ too much, paths to success vary, and there is a signalling component that goes advice that cannot be uncoupled.

9. Nietzsche is the best philosopher

10. There is nothing wrong with Machiavellianism

Boils into the “morality is fake” discussion, but consciously manipulating others and lying is something that people with a certain amount of self-awareness and drive will find themselves doing. That aside, betraying people you genuinely like is not worth it and honesty is usually the best strategy in most situations, even when it is uncomfortable. What matters is being able to understand when this does not apply.