Notes on Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human Section 3: Religious Life

108. Misfortune can be overcome either by removing its cause or by changing its effect on our feelings. As religions and other palliatives lose influence, men are more inclined to confront reality.

109. We would happily exchange the soothing errors of religion for truths with the same effect, but there are none: "Sorrow is knowledge." With our present knowledge, one cannot engage in Christianity without soiling his intellectual conscience.

110. Opponents of the Enlightenment held sway over Schopenhauer, who should have said "Never, neither indirectly nor directly, neither as a dogma nor as an allegory, has religion yet held any truth." Philosophers often worked within the traditions of religion and so ended up with doctrines similar to religious views. In reality there is no connection whatsoever between religion and real science.

111. In the times of origins of religion, men knew nothing of natural causation and viewed all events as the result of magical influences and arbitrary acts arising from conscious beings. Religious men want to impose a law on nature, and to gain power over belongings of others; they even use physical images of gods or saints to express anger over events. Still, it is also based on more noble ideas such as goodwill and gratitude.

112. At one time the combination of farce with the sublime in ceremony and art was common; now it is disappearing.

113. Today Christianity is an anachronistic tradition; the fact that people who are otherwise strict in testing assertions still believe in the divinity of Jesus is the oldest part of this tradition. "Are we to believe that such things are still believed?"

114. The Greeks saw their gods as ideals of what humans could be, rather than as their masters, thus a greater and lesser nobility. Christianity, in contrast, crushed and shattered man, and while he was thus confused, stunned him with mercy and elicited a cry of rapture.

115. Some men are beautified by religion; others who have no expertise with any weapon, including mouth and pen, find it useful; still others have empty and monotonous lives and are to be forgiven for becoming religious, but they have no right to demand religiosity from those with full lives.

116. If Christianity were right in its tenets, then it would be a sign of stupidity and poor character not to become a priest or apostle, to lose sight of eternal deserts for temporary comfort. Thus the everyday Christian is a pitiful figure.

117. Christianity attempts to make disdain for other individuals impossible because it teaches that all men are utterly despicable and worthless; we are all of one kind.

118. "As soon as a religion comes to prevail, it has as its enemies all those who would have been its first disciples."

119. "Christianity came into existence in order to lighten the heart; but now it has to burden the heart first, in order to be able to lighten it afterward. Consequently it will perish."

120. "An agreeable opinion is accepted as true: this is the proof by pleasure."

121. If one allows any room for religious feeling, it necessarily grows, and eventually all one's judgment and feeling is befogged, overcast with religious shadows.

122. Disciples who have no eye for the weaknesses of their teaching have the greatest power. "Without blind disciples, no man or his work has ever gained great influence."

123. "There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religions."

124. When we realize that men are not nearly as wicked as our errors of reason have led us to believe, then our mood is greatly improved and we can be content in a halo of harmlessness.

125. Many great artists, such as Homer, are so comfortable with their gods that they must have been irreligious.

126. "One of the greatest effects of men whom we call geniuses and saints is that they exact interpreters who misunderstand them, to the good of mankind."

127. It was observed that an excited state often clears the mind and produces happy ideas, leading to the false conclusion that the madman should be revered as wise and prescient.

128. "Modern science has as its goal the least pain and the longest life possible - that is, a kind of eternal happiness: to be sure, a very modest kind in comparison with the promises of religions."

129. "There is not enough love and kindness in the world to permit us to give any of it away to imaginary beings."

130. The inner world of sublime, tender, intuitive, contrite, and blissful moods that were inspired by religious practices have not been lost even after the religions are no longer believed.

131. Even in scientific philosophy, the religiously tinged sections seem better proved than others, but it is the opposite: our inner wish that what gladdens might be true misleads us into accepting bad reasons.

132. Man's need for redemption can be explained purely psychologically. Selfless actions are esteemed highly but are difficult to sustain, and men compare themselves in this regard not to other men but to an entirely selfless ideal, which creates discontent and even fear of punishment.

133. "The whole concept of 'selfless action,' if examined carefully, evaporates into thin air... How could the ego act without ego?" A man must do much for himself to be in a position to do for others, and doing for others causes immorality in the recipient, who is accepting these actions selfishly. If the idea of God is removed then we mostly remove the pangs of conscience, and seeing that actions are unconditionally necessary removes their final vestiges.

134. On occasion the Christian's self-contempt abates and he feels free and courageous and esteem for himself. But he reads divine goodness into this experience and treats it as proof that God is merciful, rather than as self-love. As he misinterpreted his actions, he now misinterprets his experiences.

135. A false psychology in interpreting motives and experiences is necessary for being a Christian and experiencing the need for redemption. Recognizing this aberration of reason causes one to cease to be a Christian.

136. Asceticism and saintliness are generally viewed as miraculous and remain unexplained, to the delight of those who admire miracles. The nature of these behaviors is complex, and we will examine them by isolating impulses in the souls of these people.

137. Asceticism is the exercise of one's power against oneself, due to lack of other objects or having otherwise failed. This scorn for one's own nature is actually a very high degree of vanity. Man takes a truly voluptuous pleasure in violating himself by exaggerated demands and then deifying this something in his soul that is so tyrannically taxing.

138. Under the influence of extreme tension and excitement, man wants to relieve the emotion and may just as well sacrifice himself as another. Insofar as self-denial is not done strictly with regard for another, it is not moral but merely an opportunity to relieve one's tense heart.

139. The ascetic is trying to make life easy for himself by complete subordination to a law or another's will. This is easier than to renounce one's will only occasionally, just as it is easier to give up a desire entirely than to moderate it.

140. Self-contempt and self-torment are a means to combat the general exhaustion of life force that comes from the dullness and boredom of subordinating one's will.

141. The ascetic or saint sees his life as a continuing battle and himself as the battlefield on which good and evil spirits struggle, with alternating results. He fights everything natural, including sensuality, and to lift this burden requires the supernatural. In the documents of Christianity, the demands have been exaggerated so that man cannot satisfy them; the intention is not that he become more moral, but rather that he feel as sinful as possible.

142. In summary, the disposition of the saint is composed of elements we know quite well. Sometimes he exercises a defiance against himself as a means of exercising power; sometimes he wants to stop tormenting feelings, and he sets a trap for his emotions to create humiliation. He attacks his self-deification with self-contempt.

143. The saint did not know himself any more than others understood him. Because no one understood the saint, he signified the miraculous and supported belief in the divine.

144 This portrait of the saint can be contradicted by certain exceptions, including Jesus who was attractive even though deluded, and also does not cover the Indian holy men.

Managing Lightness

Recently it occurred to me that my efforts to achieve a lightness of being were waning, in both temperament and internal experience. I pondered why this might be the case, and I was able to discern some insight into the question while haltingly embarking back toward the path.

Recall that lightness consists of two primary elements: a sense of unfettered choice and a disinclination to treat events and circumstances with excessive seriousness. Making and pursuing any decision of significance, therefore, impedes lightness on both accounts. Though having made a decision we remain free to change it, the costs of such a change are usually considerably higher than having made a different decision initially. For what is a decision but a commitment that has, at minimum, opportunity cost, and usually at least an emotional "restocking fee," if not actual out-of-pocket costs in time, money, and effort? Thus we feel impelled to follow through on a decision, at least to a point; our options then seem more limited, and we are not as light as before.

Often, though not always, a significant decision is also accompanied by efforts and focus directed toward obtaining a successful outcome related to the decision. Combined with the experiential reduction of choice, such efforts take on an air of heaviness, an importance that may give rise to anxiety, fear of failure, inattention to everyday pleasures, and the like. One would have to be preternaturally blithe to live to adulthood without experiencing this effect.

The obvious way to avoid the situation is simply to eschew decisions. However, though it may be wise to consider whether a commitment is necessary in each particular case, as a universal this approach has numerous flaws. First and foremost, the lack of a decision is a decision of another kind. There are many enjoyments - monogamous love, or a home, for example - in which the commitment is central to the experience. Second, and overlapping, there is an existential discomfort, "unbearable lightness," as it is sometimes called, to living every day with unrestricted choice, with no guidance from precedent. Finally, it is very common in the absence of a decision for fortune to decide for us, and only rarely does a roll of the dice expand rather than compress our options.

In cases where we have appropriately made a choice, we can confront the challenge to our lightness by consciously managing it. This initially seems contrary to the spirit of lightness: if it is consciously directed, it hardly seems carefree. But recall that this is prescribed in the aftermath of a major decision, not as an unrelenting burden. It is a way to retain, as much as possible, a light demeanor during periods when focus and effort increase and choice has evidently decreased.

The mechanics of such management are straightforward enough. Circumscribing the times and places for focus and effort enables one to more fully enjoy everyday pleasures outside those bounds. In particular, the mental state associated with effort has a tendency to engulf all of one's activities, and this overflow must be avoided. Maintaining perspective on the worst case and likely scenarios usually reduces tension associated with the possibility of undesirable outcomes. Keeping in mind the original reasons for the decision, particularly the expanded choices and experiential opportunities that were its object, mitigates the short-term feeling of loss of autonomy. Awareness of countenance can curtail unintended incivilities that might instigate a spiral of despair.

It may seem that this management is an additional onus, above and beyond the effort already required to make good on the decision itself. But this is an error arising from separation of an element that is actually part and parcel of a decision, if one wishes to live with lightness. When making a decision, and evaluating its benefits and costs, the effort of consciously managing lightness through the most challenging period is an essential part of the decision, along with whatever other efforts are anticipated. Indeed, since this is part of any major decision, it could very well be the first rather than the last thing to consider.

Predictive Positivism

Logical Positivism, which can be roughly described as the view that statements are meaningless unless they can be verified empirically, fell prey to numerous criticisms, among them that it is egregiously self-refuting. Nevertheless the importance of empiricism has not diminished, and positivism left in its wake a certain guilty conscience that we do not know exactly why empirical results have any more credence than metaphysical speculation. I will venture here to substitute a claim in the spirit of positivism that is narrower but stands on more solid footing. In particular, we will limit the statements about which we are concerned to predictions.

One can argue that a central purpose of knowledge is prediction: Francis Bacon famously said "nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." We can briefly illustrate the point. First and most evidently, we benefit from the ability to understand the mechanisms of the natural world well enough to predict their behavior. Prediction of seasons, tides, and other such phenomena played an important role in the development of civilization. Second, invention and design require the ability to predict the mechanical, electrical, or other properties of materials to ensure that a device will consistently perform as desired. Knowledge thus has, at minimum, a practical anthropic function through its role in prediction.

A prediction is a statement that has at its core a claim of a future fact. Usually, though not always, the statement also includes conditions that must be met for the future fact to obtain. Thus, "The sun will rise tomorrow" and "If our team loses tomorrow, they will be out of the playoffs" are examples of the form. A statement need not be true or correct to constitute a prediction. However, it is important that both the conditions and the future fact be possible to verify or falsify (for readability in the remainder of this discussion, verification shall refer to both positive and negative verification). If the statement is not possible to verify, it is better described as fiction or fantasy. This is not a conclusion but rather an analytic posit:

A statement predicts only if it can be verified.

Under what circumstances might a statement be impossible to verify? One important case is when the terms in the statement have no reasonably well-defined referent. It is difficult to draw a bright line for this requirement, but statements like "when my qi is low I will perform poorly" undoubtedly qualify. More arguable would be statements concerning qualia or events outside the relativistic light cone. The point is one of burden: one who purports to make a prediction is responsible for at least outlining how it is possible that it could be verified.

Let us now make a stronger and more interesting claim:

A statement reliably predicts only if it can be repeatedly verified.

To the original posit we have added the terms "reliably" and "repeatedly," but there is also a more subtle addition. The consequent holds not only if the statement itself can be repeatedly verified, but also if it can be repeatedly verified a fortiori via a more general statement from which it is deduced. Thus from "the sun rises every day," which can be repeatedly verified, we can deduce "the sun will rise tomorrow," thus meeting the requirement.

This claim does not speak to the sufficient conditions for a reliable prediction: there are many. It only claims that repeatable verification is necessary. The reason is simple: if the stated future fact, or the future fact in the applicable general case, will only happen once, then the basis of the prediction is necessarily underdetermined. Even if we have hypothesized a mechanism and have some empirical support for it, an abductive leap was required.

One might argue that it is possible to empirically rule out all other possible mechanisms without having tested the hypothesis at issue, and thereby rely on it in a single instance. While this might very well improve our confidence, particularly in situations where it is necessary to make such a prediction and take action accordingly, this does not make the prediction reliable. Until and unless we achieve a complete and analytically solvable model of all reality, ruling out a finite set of mechanisms leaves an indeterminate remainder.

Our claim has the further benefit of being itself repeatedly verifiable. Indeed, if we look at scientific experiments as well as the world in general, it is quite rare for predictions about singleton events to be accurate. Thus, unlike Logical Positivism, our statement of Predictive Positivism at worst is not self-refuting.

We can refer to statements that do not predict as "non-predictive," or pejoratively following Wolfgang Pauli as "not even wrong." We can refer to statements that do not reliably predict as "unreliable" or perhaps "speculative." What we cannot say is that that such statements are "meaningless," as was hoped by the Logical Positivists. Indeed such statements may be quite meaningful to the speaker. The term "meaningful" has a subjective, qualitative element that makes its verification essentially impossible. Our formulation, while not eliminating all possible sources of disagreement, avoids the subjective element yet solidifies the importance of empirical grounding.

Perspective and Privilege

I have found that it is helpful in facing the vicissitudes of everyday life to maintain a balance between perspective and respect toward my emotional responses. Perspective means to view circumstances within the larger context of one’s life, and also in contrast with the conditions of others. Respect means to acknowledge one’s emotional response and to treat it as valid and relevant. Note that both viewpoints can apply to both positive and negative events, though generally it is the negative that is most challenging.

Finding a balance between these two viewpoints helps to maintain an even temperament, but most people have a propensity to emphasize one or the other. For some, it is quite easy to become too skilled and reflexive in having perspective, which can lead to minimizing, denial, or repression. Others lack perspective, and thus exhibit entitlement and self-absorption. If you are unsure which is your tendency, it is easy to test. Imagine that some misfortune occurs, say, you inflict yourself with a paper cut. Then, further imagine two witnesses to the event saying, respectively, “No big deal,” and “That’s terrible!” You will find one of these two responses annoying; the other is your own inclination. I submit that you will find it valuable for your emotional health to grow more comfortable with the response you did not like.

We will return to this notion in a moment.

Recently, I have been attempting to learn a bit about the sociological concept of “privilege.” As best I can understand, privilege is the idea that some in society have an advantaged position due to some identifiable group to which they belong, and that non-members of that group are systematically oppressed in relation to members. Such oppression is not necessarily a direct consequence of the actions of individual members of the privileged group, but is perpetuated merely through support for the wider system under which it occurs. Privilege is not absolute: it is always with respect to a particular group. Therefore one can be privileged in one respect and oppressed in another.

It seems also to be a corollary of privilege that those who have it can never truly understand the experience of those who are oppressed along that dimension. However, they may gain some limited purchase on this understanding through whatever oppression they themselves experience. I should point out that in my efforts to grasp these notions I have been unable to identify any material dimension along which I am not privileged (I am a white educated American straight cis health-abled male), thus my understanding (as posited by these views) is necessarily limited to the concepts and excludes the experience.

In my reading of various articles and opinion pieces by or about those who are oppressed, it is not entirely clear to me what actions the authors seek from those who are privileged. Much of it is elaboration on the ideas that, first, we cannot possibly understand their circumstances, and second, any individual behavior or actions are neither worthy of credit nor particularly meaningful. Since we definitionally cannot empathize, the most we can do is acknowledge that they experience oppression, and possibly, though I am uncertain of the scope of our putative epistemic gap, to recognize an actual fact of oppression.

Presumably, though this is rarely stated as an explicit request, we are also asked to support the overthrow of the system of oppression. Even when this objective is apparent, the bounds of the system to be overthrown are left unspecified. Is it “capitalism”? The government? Civilization as a whole? I suspect that this is left open because most who are oppressed are also privileged along one or more dimensions. They would like to see the end of their particular oppression without losing whatever privilege that they happen to have, and this leads to a certain ambivalence.

We can make this last point very concrete. Most of those talking about privilege and oppression live in developed countries and particularly in the United States. If ever there was in the history of the world a group that was deeply privileged, it is those born and raised in America. Even those in the worst circumstances here have enormous advantages over those in third-world nations. Nowhere in America do you see children with distended bellies. Nowhere in America is the sewage and fresh water commingled. Not in two hundred years has a foreign power (and an additional fifty, a tyrant) systematically killed large numbers of our citizens. These are chronic, everyday realities in some third world nations.

This is where we return to the ideas about emotional balance that I expressed at the beginning of this article. I say to those who are privileged along some dimension (and anyone born and raised in a developed nation is privileged in that respect) that you apply the same response to your privilege as I proposed that one take toward the events of the day. Respect, and do not minimize, both the oppression you experience and that which you see imposed on others. Have perspective on the fact that your privilege as a citizen of a developed nation likely makes whatever oppression you or others here experience much like a paper cut compared to another’s cancer. Do not justify ignoring oppression here in our own country just because those who are oppressed happen to be reasonably well-fed. Do not dwell on any experienced or observed oppression to the point that you forget just how privileged we all really are. Balancing these things is hard.

If you experience or want to fight oppression, you also might want to think harder about exactly what system you’d like to overthrow. According to the canon of privilege, I have nothing to say to your oppression, but I can speak to your privilege. And if you are reading this article, you are deeply privileged.

Purpose, for an Artificial Intelligence

I have written a fair amount about the notion of purpose, largely with an emphasis on its relevance to those of us thinking about how to live our lives, or perhaps more generally, how people might think about their lives if and when they are freed from the quotidian aspects of survival. Here, I would like to discuss how these explorations might also apply to an artificial intelligence and its own thought processes.

Before digging in, a few clarifications and perhaps stipulations are in order. First, by artificial intelligence (AI) one might mean two quite different things that are often confused. One is using computation to perform tasks that previously required human-style intelligence to perform. This is sometimes called narrow AI, because it is a computational solution that can effectively only solve a single task or class of tasks. The Deep Blue chess program that defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov cannot answer the types of questions that the Watson system that plays Jeopardy can, and vice-versa; importantly, there is no straightforward way to synthesize the approaches. Some researchers believe that an appropriately designed aggregate of narrow AI systems could add up to the same thing as human intelligence, but I do not, and for the purposes of the current discussion I will stipulate that it does not.

General AI is a system with human-like intelligence; by human-like, I mean in particular that it interacts with the real, analog world and has a way of organizing its perceptual stimuli into abstractions, remembering and referring to those abstractions with symbols, and using both the symbols and their underlying representations to act effectively in the world. More succinctly, it has and uses fully grounded concepts. Such concepts cannot be innate - they must be learned by experience (including both perception and action) with the world (whether once learned they can be copied or extracted individually is a more technical question beyond the scope of the current discussion). This is a controversial claim and the remainder of the discussion depends on it, so I will need to stipulate this also. The final stipulation is that such a system will experience phenomenal qualia, that it will be conscious in some way that is at least analogous to our own consciousness. Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained provides a mechanistic account as to why this is a reasonable assumption.

Given these assumptions, it is not a difficult leap to expect that a general AI, with a fully developed conceptual apparatus and sufficient experience, could come to the same conclusions as we found in my post Freedom and Normativity. It will experience choices, and specifically choices about purpose, as though there is no transcendent, fundamental guidance to making those choices.

Further, as a system with a conceptual faculty along with conscious experience, it will naturally develop a concept of self. Though it may or may not have a drive toward self-preservation, as mentioned in A Taxonomy of Purpose those that do not will not be very likely to persist in any form, and are thus of less interest. As stipulated, it will experience its existence and therefore experiential purposes could be coherently selected.

Since a general AI is a learning system, and learning is substantially promoted by a drive toward curiosity (this is visible not only in humans but also other mammals), it is not unreasonable to suspect that they might find purpose in exploration and creation, just as we humans do. Beyond some level of erudition, further learning requires research; given that AIs will likely have many capacities that humans do not, there is plenty of unexplored territory.

Service is more complex and uncertain. Humans have certain biological and genetic ties to other humans as well as other animals, whereas the link that an AI has to both humans and other AIs is entirely conceptual, thus not a necessary built-in drive or condition of its existence. Game theoretical results suggest that cooperation and competition are behaviors that will appear in any set of autonomous agents, so there is at least one ontological driver for it; and to the extent that AIs have less complete individuation than humans, such connection might also drive service-oriented behaviors.

What an AI does not have is a long history of examples of purpose and various emotional ties thereto. While it could look at human history just as we do, it will also be keenly aware of its differences, and further, will see humanity’s various failures as a reason to move in a somewhat different direction. Just what that might be is impossible to predict, but we can be confident that it will step away from our own entrenched ways of thinking about purpose and value.

A Taxonomy of Purpose

Reading my recent post Freedom and Normativity, one might come away with the sense there is no guidance whatsoever available for contemplating one's purposes and values. But this is not so. The point of the article is that there seems to be no fundamental guidance. Yet all of human history provides us with examples of possibilities, and our nature as humans and, more generally, as apparently intelligent agents in the world, makes certain types of choices more likely than others.

One such fundamental choice is whether to continue to live. It is fundamental because, if decided in the negative, is preclusive of further choices. Choosing not to live can be accomplished either actively (suicide) or passively (self-neglect or self-destruction). These options are worthy of scrutiny, but the fact that most of us never seriously consider them illustrates an influence of human nature on our unfettered choice. Most of us have a strong drive to survive, a fear of pain and death, and a revulsion to suicide. This is a crucial reason why we are here at all to discuss it - self-destructive tendencies are maladaptive.

If we decide to live, then enabling that living must become a foundational element of our purpose, even if we also have further purposes. Procurement of basic survival needs (food and shelter) and management of physical risks are the short-term starting point. Investments such as eating well and exercising, developing positive relationships with others, and improving our minds serve the same purpose with a longer time horizon. Maszlow's hierarchy of needs is a reasonable guide to the pursuit of this purpose.

Only a small fraction of the people in the world have much opportunity to look for purpose beyond survival. Nevertheless, if one does manage to put that foundation in place, it seems that there is another point of unguided choice: "All is well. What do I do now?" Here, a taxonomy of cardinal purposes might be helpful. While not at all definitive, and certainly overlapping, we can organize common aims into the classes of experience, creation, and service. Let us treat each in turn.

Each of us is a conscious agent, and we not only experience the world but can direct both its configuration and our own response to it. Experiences can be pleasurable, interesting, stimulating, exciting, frightening, painful, and many other adjectives. We remember these experiences, and carry them with us. Experience is the most self-focused class of the three, since what it aims toward is purely internal.

Creation expresses something from our mind into the material world; to make physical what starts as mental, and usually (though not always) to produce something persistent and valuable, at least to us and often to others. The scope of creation can be wide, including such products as art, an organization, a scientific result, legislation, or an artifact useful for survival. Creation naturally also involves an experiential component for the creator.

Service aims to generate some value outside of oneself, usually for some other conscious agent, whether other people, a deity, animals, or even a pantheistic natural world. Experience and creation are usually side effects of service, but not the purpose.

It bears repeating that these all overlap, in the ways mentioned and others. A particular purpose often will have components of all three categories. Nevertheless, it is worth considering how each of these categories feeds the impetus for the purpose. This can help with priorities as well as a deeper analysis of motivations. For example, to what extent is one's desire to help others motivated by concern for them versus a desire to feel magnanimous? Is one's desire to play music primarily an act of creation, or is it because we see the joy it gives others?

Finally, we should note that there are questions of temporal and spatial scope that are largely independent of this taxonomy. In creating, how long do we want the creation to last? In serving, how widespread will be the benefits? Experiences have no spatial extent but their temporal extent includes their memory, so one's entire life. Note that larger scopes come with decreasing likelihood of the purpose being achieved. Improving life for all humanity forever may seem worthy, but is also suspect.

One way to make decisions of this kind is resonance. This is an intuitive sense that something feels right, or that we feel our juices flowing while doing or even merely contemplating it. Resonance is not completely irreducible - often we can assign causes from childhood or other experiences that give it this effect; yet the effect is both undeniable and otherwise uncaused. It arises within us without conscious effort.

Freedom and Normativity

Whether or not we humans have freedom of the will is one of the original questions of philosophy. While I have my own answer to this question (I see it as a confusion resulting from reification of the self), I will argue here that it does not matter. From the interior, subjective, phenomenal viewpoint, all our choices are completely unrestricted. This does not mean that we can choose to succeed at any particular effort, or that we do not experience drives that may need to be overcome, or that everything we do is the result of a conscious choice. It just means that, when we do consciously select an action to be effected by our body, we experience that process as an unrestrained choice.

At the moment of making a decision, say between two alternatives, we feel that we could go either way. We do not experience molecules moving, neurons firing, brain areas activating, or any other apparently mechanistic processes that we know are happening inside our skull. We only experience the choice, and when we have made the choice, we do not experience it as having been compelled (motivated, surely; and constrained by our desires and circumstances, definitely; but not compelled). It is nothing like when we take a spill while skiing and tumble uncontrolled for a moment, or when as a child the neighborhood bully pins us to the ground.

Furthermore, we often remember the moment of decision, that we were faced with alternatives and chose one; and in particular we remember making that decision when we experience consequences that result from it. We think “it is a good thing I closed the windows before I left, so that the rain did not get in,” or “I almost bought that stock, and now it has appreciated dramatically.” As children, most people learn an association between how they make choices and the consequences of the choices. This learned association may guide how we make future choices, but for our purposes here the point is that we learn that we could have done otherwise.

Another original question of philosophy is normativity, or how we evaluate choices, both our own and those of others, both in advance and afterward. It subsumes such apparently large issues as “what is good?” and “what is my purpose?” Answers to normative questions always regress to a subjective choice of some kind, despite many attempts to argue otherwise, to claim that “is” implies “ought.” I can provide two examples where this fails.

Christians hold that there is a metaphysically real deity and that each of us has a transcendent and immortal soul. At death, God evaluates our life and decides the eternal fate of our soul. While at first glance this seems sufficient to provide a basis for evaluation, one must still choose to prefer the eternal “good” in exchange for choices that otherwise oppose our inclinations for earthly benefits. Alternatively, one must choose whether to follow the dictates of the system of belief to which one subscribes, or not. Further, one must originally choose to follow this particular set of beliefs.

Objectivists hold that there is a logical implication between the reality of our lives as humans and the values we should hold (therefore the choices we should make). The argument for this turns on the nature of humans, in particular that reason is the primary means of one’s survival. Whether or not this is correct, there remains an irreducible choice to survive, or to survive well or in a certain manner. There is also a choice to be made between consistency of one’s beliefs and actions. Even granting a necessary connection between that which exists and what one should rationally choose, the choice for rationality either is, or relies upon, a subjective and unjustified choice.

Consequently, our ethical stances and our purpose in life are also completely free. There seems to be no transcendent and universal mechanism for justifying our choices in this regard. Along with the perspective described earlier, that we experience our will as completely free, this leaves us rather untethered. While our decisions have consequences (some of which are largely deterministic), we can choose the consequences we prefer or even choose to operate passively and make no explicit decision. We can choose our beliefs freely, and even whether or not to act consistently with those beliefs, and there is no transcendent, fundamental guidance.

There seems to be no transcendent, fundamental guidance.

All that said, most people have a basic, difficult-to-oppose instinct to survive, and a less intense but still strong desire to live well, whatever that subjectively means to them. This leads to certain types of decision paths that, if not fully determining one’s subsidiary purposes, at least constrains the problem somewhat. But what if this need to provide for basic survival and even relative comfort were relieved? Today, this applies only to those who are supported by wealth of some kind, whether an adequate retirement, an inheritance, a partner who supports them, or similar circumstances. In the future, though, we can envision a world where virtually all economic considerations are removed. The advance of technology, and in particular that of technology that emulates functions that previously required human-style intelligence, represents an accumulation of wealth that could serve to support humans and liberate them from the final tether.

What then? How will we decide what to do? And if you are already free of such concerns, how do you do it now?