There is no heaven, no hell, no God or gods, no Devil, no afterlife, no reincarnation. The soul is an ordering, an arrangement of pathways in the brain, not a thing itself. It is as much a thing as the flame on a candle. When you die your soul ceases to exist.
Your soul was created by your body gradually, for the purpose of making your body useful. Your body was created by your parents. If you want to know why your body exists, go ask them. They might have had a reason. They may have a plan for your life too. They aren't omniscient, and they aren't infallible, but they are more experienced than you, and they have similar abilities, so you should take what they have to say seriously.
The universe operates by the laws of physics. It's as old as science says it is (13 billion years old). It doesn't think, and it doesn't care. But we do think and we do care.
I think intelligent actions are the best and most important thing in the universe. I want to have more of them. The universe has no purpose. Life has purpose, but usually isn't very intelligent. People both have purpose and intelligence. Computers can apply intelligence far better than humans, but they only do exactly what people tell them to do, and they don't tell themselves what to do, they have intelligence without purpose.
It is an honor for me to be granted control of my body. I should make my body accomplish as much as it can in the approximately 80 years it will exist. I should change who I am if I'm not controlling my body as well as it could be controlled. I should allow other people to control their own actions too, as best as they are able to, because I want everyone to succeed, and if they have the same philosophy as I do, they need to be able to control their actions in order to succeed.
The abstraction of a soul is a good one. If we could separate the soul from the body, so the soul could live forever and jump from one body to another, that would be a good thing. And the soul can be broken down into memories, plans, habits, goals, the time and energy to think, the right to take action, and so forth. All those might get separated someday. But today a body is one indivisible package of all those things and bodies only last about 80 years.
Parents out there, you get to choose what children to create, mostly by who you marry and whether you have kids and which if any you abort and how many kids and to some degree by how you raise them. A good rule of thumb is that if your parents went to the effort of raising n children, they deserve 2n grandchildren, so you and your siblings can decide amongst yourselves how to get that done. Some will have no kids and some will have many. If you're doing OK financially and you're willing to raise kids, then you're probably the one who should be having more than two kids. Also, if you have kids at all, have at least two kids: two isn't that much more work than one, but it is twice the benefit. The kids entertain each other and learn from each other. I do genealogy and it's very common to see one child, then one grandchild, then nothing, but when parents have two or more children it's rare to see the line die out.
Your body was created first, along with its potential abilities and inclinations. Your soul was created gradually by the body and the long arduous experience known as childhood. The main goal of childhood is to produce an able body and a soul who can make good use of that body. The question "how come I have the body I have?" is backwards, because the body comes first. The real question is why your body developed the soul it has, and whether that soul could improve its habits to make better use of that body.
Marriage is a contract to stay together the 20 years it takes to have and raise a child. Raising children requires buy-in from both parents. If partners disagree on whether they want children, that's definitely grounds for divorce. Before children or after children, marriage is more a strong form of going steady. Although, if your partner becomes incapable in old age, you do have an obligation to take care of them.
I think race, family, inheritance is important. I think races are an effort to develop special abilities. Most bad things about people can be found in all races, but Kenyans are often unusually good long distance runners, and European Jews are often unusually good thinkers. I'm Welsh ... good at singing ... but nobody likes my voice. Hum. Your children will inherit some of your abilities, though probably not your goals. Marrying for desired traits is also a good idea, often more valuable than marrying by race.
My impression is the difference in people in the same culture is usually mostly genetic. The difference between the same person with upbringings in different cultures would be more than the difference between two unrelated people in the same culture due to genetics, and so would the difference due to a bad upbringing and good upbringing in the same culture. But I suspect the difference between two good upbringings in the same culture is less than the difference between siblings due to genetics.
Should we be keeping the same population, or growing the human race, or perhaps shrinking the human race? I think that decision can be made on a person-by-person basis. Do you feel you're doing OK, or does the world have a shortage of you, or would the world rather have fewer of you? I personally have always found that the world has a severe shortage of Bob. And I had three children, which isn't nearly enough to meet the demand I see for Bobs. And none of them inherited my essential Bobness, so it's unlikely that this viewpoint makes sense in practice anyhow. If the world would be better off with fewer of you, killing yourself is not the thing to do, the thing to do is not have children and use the extra money on your other goals.
Abortion is not nearly as bad as killing a person, but it's worse than killing a kitten. There are times abortion is the right choice. Usually when the child can't ever become an able body and mind no matter how much you invest so you're best off a cutting your losses and trying again on a different body. Or that you don't have the will or resources to bring a child to completion. (Do try to avoid pregnancy in the first place if you know you'll abort if pregnancy happens.)
Christianity says the entire worth of a person is present at conception, so abortion is full-fledged murder. I strongly disagree. All the potential is there in eggs and sperms. They are easy to come by, and I don't believe destroying eggs or sperm is murder either. If a child is aborted or dies early, it's mostly the work the parents have invested so far that is lost. Children are owned 100% by the parents at conception and 100% by the child at age 19, and linearly interpolate in between (for example 50/50 at age 9). The body is the thing, souls are an emergent effect of bodies. Another risk of abortion is that instead of trying again, you'll give up or be unable to conceive again. If a couple has the time and money and energy to raise two children, then whether they have abortions doesn't matter much itself. What matters is if they actually raise two children to adulthood.
America talks about abortion in terms of first trimester, second, third. I think they came to that mostly based on how adorable the baby is at each stage. America currently says abortions in the first trimester are OK for any reason, in the second it's still allowed but quite frowned upon, and in the third only if there are medical issues. I find that acceptable. It's not the only set of rules I'd find acceptable but it's one of them. Since having an abortion is fairly bad and worse the later you do it, if you have an abortion you should as soon as possible, and you almost always know if you are pregnant by the second trimester. By my philosophy, the mother's life is almost always worth much more than the baby's even during the third trimeter.
America keeps pushing to make abortion entirely illegal. The justification for that is religious philosophy. Making abortion illegal would violate separation of church and state. The cost can be 20 years of the parents' lives, and a child who knows they are unwanted. This is all clearly predictable at pregnancy, and easily avoidable if abortion is legal. I'm not sure if the nation disallowing abortion is more or less evil than the nation drafting 20-year-old children and getting them killed in wars. They seem pretty close. Having abortion legal shouldn't just be a court interpretation, it should be clearly spelled out in laws.
Making abortion legal isn't enough. There are four cases for whether the man/woman want to keep it: Y/Y, Y/N, N/Y, N/N. The Y/Y everyone agrees they're allowed to keep it. Y/N and N/N would be fixed by having abortion legal, and allowing the woman to decide (the man can go find another partner if he wants a child). But N/Y remains, where the woman wants the child and the man doesn't, the man is trapped into supporting it. This is unfair to men. There should be a way for the man to not support the child if they say from the start they don't want to. It would help if men had to publicly commit from the start whether they want the child. That contract already exists: it's called marriage. If they get their wife pregnant, and the wife wants to keep the baby, the men are stuck with raising it or alimony just as today. That leaves pregnancies outside of marriage. You can't let the men go with no consequences, because men biologically want sex and will be irresponsible if there are no consequences. Yet it's asymmetric (with the case of the woman not wanting the baby but the man wanting it) if you don't let the men get out of it, with a consequence roughly as severe as getting an abortion. If the woman is willing to have an abortion, the guy should pay for it. If she isn't, a relatively small fine ($10,000, to the state, not the woman) or about a hundred hours of community service (like picking up road trash) seems about right, then the unmarried man would have no further obligations. If the woman is getting an abortion only because the man won't raise the kid and she can't raise it on her own, so be it. Raising a child should be a project entered by all parties willingly.
There is no Karma (Karma is like a cosmic bank account where you eventually get what you give). At least not in the sense of being carried forward from previous lives. There were no previous lives, although you do carry a little bit of a reputation from your family and race. The closest thing to Karma is money. Your bank account is a measure of society's respect for you: it says society is willing to do this much work at your request. Money isn't very close today, though. Hard work doesn't earn enough, and stocks give money that is unearned. We should adjust fiscal laws to make money act more like Karma (tax stocks more and tax hard work less).
Reputation is also somewhat like Karma, except that
Money doesn't matter, as long as you have enough. Grades don't matter, as long as they're A's. When you are falling short, yes they matter. They're tablestakes. Try to keep in the zone where they don't matter so that you can have more interesting goals. Would it be OK for everyone to get all A's? Probably not. Usually there's more to be taught than there is time to teach it, so if everyone got all A's then the teachers would increase the amount of course material until not everyone got A's. Would it be OK for everyone to be rich?
The goal is to be rich and keep working anyways.
It's important you get paid for your work regardless, because that proves the work you're doing is worthwhile to at least whoever is paying you. Otherwise there's a good chance it's not actually worthwhile. Also, a lot of paid jobs aren't worth doing. They're either competition with other jobs such that both jobs cancel each other out, or they're some boss playing dominance games on you. It's hard to get out of those jobs if the alternative is starving. Being rich means you can get out of those jobs. But not all jobs are pointless. The trash has to be collected, the young and old and sick have to be cared for even if they're obnoxious, and I highly value continuing to improve science and technology.
Would it be OK for everyone to be rich? Dunno, would enough work still get done? "Rich" is defined as you could stop working now and you could continue with a reasonable standard of living for the rest of your life. That's about $40,000/year per person in the US. Some people would keep working anyhow, I would, but I think most wouldn't. There has to be enough work done to keep the world running and improving. If everyone acted like me that way then yes everyone would be rich and all the needed work would get done and the world would be a better place than it is today.
The way to be rich is to have a stock account, have over $800,000 per person invested 100% in QQQ, and withdraw no more than 5% per year. The way to become rich is the same, except don't withdraw from the account and add to it instead, and you can start with $0. The 7% to 9% average yearly growth rate from QQQ means it doubles in value every 10 years, so you only have to add $200,000 and it takes 20 years to become rich. How do you persuade someone to save enough to become rich and keep working even after they are rich? I don't know. Most people stop being productive once they are rich, which is very unfortunate for the world, especially when the people are competent. Is it a good idea to start babies with a $100,000 QQQ account so they'll be rich by age 30? No, they'll never learn to work or manage money. Setting up small accounts for children once they finish their education is good though, so that by default they have an account set up the right way. They still have to control their spending and fund most of it themselves for it to make them rich.
Could a family purely live off the stock market? Suppose babies are funded at birth, buy their own house, and never work. How much do babies need to be funded at birth to have $50,000 per year to live off of? The answer varies, often around $3 million, and depends strongly on the rate of returns from stocks and the price of a house and how many kids they have. They wouldn't go to college. They'd live with their parents rent-free as long as possible. It doesn't matter how soon or how late they have babies, at least if they only have two, as long as generations are consistent about it. Babies would be funded by inheritance from dying grandparents or great-grandparents. If everyone did this, then inflation would make it fall apart, because demand for people doing work would exceed supply. But if enough people worked anyhow (half? two-thirds?), everyone could do it. And that's the goal, everyone be rich and work anyhow. What sort of culture would persuade these people to be productive? Do such families already exist?
The amount of work people have to do to keep society going keeps decreasing due to capitalism and improving technology. Eventually the curves will cross so that everyone can be rich and enough people will keep working anyhow. We're not very close.
Every relationship has an account balance. What benefit I get, minus what effort I put in. I want to continue relationships with a positive account balance. I imagine other people also have account balances for me. I try to keep my balance positive with others, but that means effort on my part. I don't have any close friends because I haven't been able to justify the effort.
Giving and receiving is not zero sum. I dislike Christmas. Gifts almost always cost the giver more than the receiver values the gift, making it a net loss. At work though, if someone tells me the magic incantation for making the software environment do what I want, that costs them little and I value it a lot. I put a bunch of effort into hash functions a long time ago, but now when people use my hash functions, it costs me nothing extra for one more person to use it, and they get a significant benefit. So I do have positive-positive relationships at work and with hobbies.
I imagine good friends, happy marriages, productive work groups are where the account balance is positive on both sides. What each person gets in those relationships is valued more than the effort they give. Both parties are motivated to continue and grow the relationship. I don't think it has to be equally positive on both sides, one a lot positive and one a little is OK. Both-negative relationships are shunned by both parties, which is good. One-sided relationships, it's up to the loser to cut it off. Or to reduce their effort (or increase their benefit) so that it's either positive-positive, or increase the other's costs (or decrease their benefit) so it is negative-negative. The winner won't fix things. They are benefitting from it. In fact the winner will be hurt by ending or adjusting the relationship. Most individual exchanges are one-sided, though, so you should not object to individual exchanges being one-sided. A positive-positive relationship will probably look like a series of one-sided exchanges in both directions.
By the logic, it should not hurt to explicitly tell people what you value and dislike in their relationship with you. And it also seems like trying to make everyone like you would be bad, because it breeds one-sided relationships. It would be better to make sure casual acquaintances who you see as having a negative balance also value you negatively. And you should end or renegotiate all relationships that aren't positive-positive.
Positive-positive relationships not only exist, theoretically they're possible between almost any two people if they both try. If it costs Alice the same to produce A as B but costs Bob more to produce A than B and both A and B need to be produced, then you get a positive-positive trade by Bob producing B for Alice and Alice producing A for Bob. That works for any two people with different capabilities. And there are lots of things that are positive-positive trades even for people with proportional capabilities. For example if you both want a park cleaned, and you do it together, it gets cleaned with less effort than if either of you did it on your own and you both get a clean park. Answering a question is often positive for both parties. For couples, sex may be positive for both parties. One thing that can block positive-positive relationships is change plus a contract. Parties may be required by the contract to do things that are now much more negative than they used to be.
This relationship account balance philosophy is fairly new to me, and I suspect some of its conclusions are wrong because it is missing some big pieces, but I am not sure yet. Obligations, future possibilities, and rare events for example. I'll spend some time evaluating other people's behaviors and relationships against it to see whether it holds up or falls apart.
My philosophy is basically utilitarian: maximize universal goodness. That isn't everyone's philosophy, it isn't even a very common philosophy. But it's mine. About half of the control I have over the world is over myself, so doing good for myself is a big part of it. I have to protect myself from selfish people: they could control me for their personal benefit so I can't cause as much good as I could if I were in control. I protect myself by adding more rules: do no more than twice my share (unless I really want to do more), and (unless I really want to) only take actions that help me as well as the rest of the world. Those extra rules usually aren't very restrictive.
Requiring both global and personal utility is symbiotic. Improving global utility requires understanding utility from diverse perspectives, and if one or more of those perspectives are ones you know in detail for personal utility, you do a better job at global utility. At work I find the way to make good interfaces is to work both sides of the problem, allowing you to make both sides happy with clear simple rules in between. It can help personal utility, too, if you are making allies instead of enemies by getting what you want.
Your most precious resource is time. Make good use of time. Keep a list of good uses of time around, so that whatever the situation you find yourself in, you can quickly find a good way to use the time and situation. I keep my list ordered by bang for the buck. I can convert just about any goodness to dollars, to make things comparable. Bang for the buck is dollars divided by time. The time things take is often not very related to how much they are worth. So bang for the buck (worth/time) often values short tasks highest, because they're dividing by a small amount of time.
Sometimes at work I'm given projects I call boss projects or carpet changing. They take a lot of time. And their value is not proportional to their time, so when I'm assigned them I get very low bang for the buck for a long time. Or sometimes they're big and have negative value. I hate those. At work, I model the benefit of my possible projects all the way up through the management chain and to value delivered to the rest of the world. It takes just one manager in the chain to flip goals to something of no or negative value. Sometimes it helps in pitching a project to be able to explain the ROI (return on investment, bang for the buck) to the corporation and world in general.
It's better to measure your impact by people-hours you affect, rather than how long your work stays relevant. Aiming for the future still works, it's just not the only way to succeed. By person-hours, pleasing 1 million people for an hour is about equal to pleasing one person for a hundred years (because there are about 10000 hours in a year an 100*10000 is 1 million).
One of the easiest ways to be useful is to be the best in the world at something. This is almost always possible if you pick an obscure enough field for yourself. I've found a good strategy is to start with a concrete obscure solvable problem, then conquer neighboring fields. If you're the best in the world for just a short time, that can be OK, provided you have wide impact during your reign. (Web pages are great for getting the word out.)
I'm a crowd-avoider. Both literally and figuratively. If lots of people are going the same direction as me, I automatically doublecheck if I could be doing something else. Sometimes having a common goal is unavoidable (like getting kids to school on time), but when it is avoidable I avoid it.
I don't find getting money very rewarding. Neither is buying or having things. Although, getting new interesting things and learning how they work is rewarding. Controlling or punishing other people is anti-rewarding, it makes the world worse. Eating cookies I find rewarding. Accomplishing things, oddly, isn't that rewarding, it's kind of anticlimactic. What I find most rewarding is having accomplished things in the past, and seeing those thing get used. It doesn't matter if people know I did it, but it does matter that people use what I built. They have to be choosing to use it, it's no good if I force them to use what I built.
A lot of people are concerned with controlling others, or punishing others, or competing with others for a prize, or having a higher rank than others. I hate these dominance games. They destroy existing value or prevent value from being generated. I don't want to control anyone and I don't want anyone controlling me.
Living for the moment is good in the sense of paying attention to what you are experiencing. However, I spend a lot of time speculating about what could happen and making plans for how I would deal with it. I can weigh different paths by adding up their probabilistic ROI and the highest one wins. I'm an engineer. I speculate how to do something in such detail that I can actually do it, then I actually do it. That is what I do.
I try to stay at least two steps away from disaster: one step away is too much risk for me. I don't find taking risks rewarding. I don't ski. I worry about more disasters than most people because most people worry about things one step away but I worry about things two or more steps away, and there are more disasters two steps away than one step away. My response to worrying is to plan how to deal with the situation. And plans don't always work out in reality, so I have extra plans for what if the plans don't work at various points. Worrying is useful for me. I worry more than most people, for good reason, and my possible futures are varied and exciting. I get enough of an adrenaline rush from considering and planning around disasters. I don't need to experience them directly.
I find myself more reliable than other people. When I make plans, the most likely point for them to fail is where they require other people's cooperation. Plans that don't involve other people work better. I want other people to use what I build, which requires their cooperation, but building things and making them an option that other people can find doesn't require any cooperation.
Driving, yeesh. So many ways to get killed and mangled and kill other people. My driving philosophy is "no contest". That means, before I get in a situation where it's a contest between me and another driver about who will go first, I have to arrange so it's predecided, either I clearly win or I clearly lose. Many people like winning so I slightly favor losing, but I have to decide it per encounter. When I'm on the freeway I like to see how big a gap I can have ahead and behind me. I really like slowing down slightly after a herd of cars has passed me, opening up a big gap ahead as well as behind.
Actually, my actual life has disasters at work and at home constantly. I don't cause them ... it's more that I am a responsible person so responsibility seeks me out. Emergencies don't phase me much. I find it very hard to get panicked about anything that's actually happened. I don't know quite why that is. One boss told me my give-a-damn was busted. When I'm handed a disaster, my response is, "Oh, that's an interesting situation. It's not my fault that it happened, right, I was planning ahead as best I could. But given this unexpected set of circumstances, let's see what we can do about it." Every now and then I do cause an emergency, and I'm extra diligent about cleaning those up, even if they are small.
Although I'm mostly about planning ahead and accumulating long-term good, opportunities are unpredictable. I keep a list of things that would be good to do, but I don't decide what to do next until that moment, to see what the current situation offers. My calendar is very empty, in the sense of having no fixed events, but I've got more than a lifetime of things to do and I'm always busy. My idea of excitement is having lots of plans available, spotting an opportunity, and changing directions on a dime to execute a well-thought-through plan that I didn't know if I'd ever use.
My life is divided into work, and home, and research. Work, I do predictably useful things that require effort and ingenuity and are nearly certain to succeed and give a little impact. Home, I've got family to raise as best I can. Research, I do speculative projects with big possible impact and usually no expected monetary gain. At the moment home is so busy it's mostly preventing research, and my job is a vacation from home. My life is unbalanced. But it's always been unbalanced, in different ways over time. And the balance will change again. Perhaps it is balanced, but only over a very long period of time.
I don't have much defense. I rely on laws and police to keep me safe. And I keep on the good side of the laws. I keep on other people's good side too, as much as I can, in hopes that they deem me worth keeping around. If someone was attacking me, I wouldn't know what to do. That isn't a situation I've planned much, other than to call the police. I'd also have no idea what to do if I was actually being bad. I count on approving of my beliefs and actions.
This approach to life could be described as being afraid of everything. There's some truth to that. I think it's more that it plays to my inherent strengths and weaknesses: I have slow reflexes, I'm good at thinking (slowly), listening is hard, I have a high error rate.
I like to make abstractions, then do math and logic on them. But abstractions are incomplete. They try to whittle reality down to what is important. You can do valid logic on abstractions, but there's always a chance that the most important part got ignored. That said, it's surprising how often abstraction seems to work, given how hugely detailed reality really is. And even when the important part got thrown away, the abstractions and the logic on them remain valid for the bit that the abstraction captured.
The way to make an important decision is you list the factors and assign them importance, list the possibilities and assign them probabilities, and you maximize goodness by summing probability*(importance*goodness) for each possibility and choosing the highest sum. Include all the factors the outcomes affect, even ones irrelevant to your goals. Use a calculator, because people are bad at probabilities. If the results don't make intuitive sense, that means you've got some of the inputs wrong. Fiddle with the inputs (importance, probability, goodness, and your intuition) until the numbers look believable and the sums match your intuition. If you can't get them to match, usually your intuition is including something important that you're leaving out.