Tag: meaning of life

Is this all there is?

The holidays are over; normal life is resumed. We are heading towards Blue Monday, the third Monday in January, the alleged day of the year on which most people tend to be most miserable, and for which there is no scientific evidence at all. (I’m happy to be proved wrong.) Nevertheless there is a sense that people are ground down by the lack of sunlight at this time of year, the absence of anything to look forwards to after Christmas, with work or school to resume as normal, and perhaps left to reflect on having spent money over Christmas that they didn’t really have on things they didn’t really want. What can cheer us up?

I enjoy Christmas, but as I said in my previous post I don’t make too big a thing of it, or overdo things. Even so I am left feeling both a bit empty apart and full of dread. The rest of the year stretches ahead. Maybe I’ll go away a few times. I might enjoy a few days in the sun in summer. I might finish writing a book or two. But soon the days will start shortening again, and then it will be my birthday. Another year since the last one. And not long after that it will be Christmas again. A year nearer old age, a year nearer infirmity, a year closer to death. And so the cycle repeats.

People tell me that this is a negative, depressive way of looking at things, to which I say: this is exactly what it means to be depressed! “Normal” people often appear to think that a person who says they’re depressed won’t have any symptoms.

I realise too that I am luckier than most: I’m in relatively good health, I achieve some fulfilment in my work, and I’m not struggling to eke out a tough existence doing a biring repetitive job (which is one of the things I dread most in the world). That knowledge doesn’t help. I feel lonely and I feel alone, an alien on the sidelines watching everyone else enjoying life and finding meaning in mundane things, helping giving their children a good life, or comfort in their God.

I can’t even imagine what meaning there could be to make up for the grind of everyday life. THIS is all there is.

An interesting seeming paradox then is my Kurzweilian obsession with life extension. I don’t think there is in fact a paradox: who wants to go to a football match if you know it’s going to be abandoned because of a water-logged pitch after ten minutes? Part of my ennui is because it hardly seems worth starting anything if I’m going to be dead in forty years. (Again, please don’t tell me this is crazy messed up thinking.) I’ve got to rush to finish writing my book on consciousness and the next one on weather and psychology because bits will start falling off me in a few years. So yes please, sign me up for freezing my head, having my blood vessels cleaned by nanobots, neural implants, and uploading my intellect to cyberspace. To paraphrase Woody Allen, I don’t want to become immortal just through my work, I want to become immortal through not dying. Life extension would give my life real meaning.

Scientific progress in the quest for eternal life is one of the few things that stops me from killing myself at this time of year.

 

 

 

 

 

The future is bleak (updated)

As regular readers will know, I am obsessed with death, and I do not understand why everyone else isn’t too. What could be more depressing than the knowledge that it is all going to end for each of us relatively soon, and that eternal annihilation is all that lies in wait for us, whatever we do?

As regular readers will know, I am obsessed with death, and I do not understand why everyone else isn’t too. What could be more depressing than the knowledge that it is all going to end for each of us relatively soon, and that eternal annihilation is all that lies in wait for us, whatever we do? I saw a very old gent in the café last week, and he was enjoying his coffee and smiling beatifically at all around him. Was he perhaps just simple, I wondered? Why isn’t he petrified by the imminence of his extinction? I spoke to my therapist about it, and she pointed out that perhaps he was just enjoying his remaining time (how, I wondered), and was practising radical acceptance of his situation rather than thinking so catastrophically. It’s true that it seems to me that most people I talk to just don’t to give a damn about their own death. And I agree that it is bizarre that I am so afraid of dying that the existential despair sometimes almost drives me to suicide.

On the other hand, in a way I am glad I am not young in these troubled times. Life must surely be much more worrying and stressful for people in their teens and twenties than it was for me, in the good old simple days before pocket calculators. There is so much pressure on you to do this and that, so much political presence and political correctness in your lives, “free space” that are really prisons, with mobile phone cameras you can be in the public eye all the time in an instant, you have social media contributing to enormous peer pressure and perpetuating your simplest most honest mistakes for eternity. And then after working your way through university while building up enormous debts you might struggle to find a good job – or any job at all. But then there’s plenty else to worry about; the end of the world is near for you. I doubt if many of the young today will die a natural death. The things below worry me, and I think I’m rational to be scared by them, even if I am a nutter; they would terrify me if I were any younger, and probably just immobilise me with fear. Or drive me to suicide.

Terrorism. Surely top of anyone’s list of worries? I worry about being personally involved every time I fly or catch a train, drive over a bridge, or visit London, but I’m sure I’m not worrying enough. They will find a way to get to us in places and ways I can’t imagine. And that’s just in the short term. Surely in the long run terrorists will acquire biological and nuclear weapons; we only have to wait long enough for the worst to happen. So in a hundred, too hundred, three hundred years, whatever, they will lay waste to London, Paris, New York, and doubtless many other places. It’s just a matter of time. Verdict: grim.

Russia. Now even as a proud liberal I’m more pro-Russian than most people I know. I appreciate its geography and history, and therefore that they feel threats many of us can’t imagine. I can see why they needed Crimea as west Ukraine headed in the direction of even more west; Sevastopol is their only warm water port, and not a particularly good one at that. I also am a great admirer of Mr Putin, and have my own ambition to be photographed naked holding a machine gun one day. Oh those Russians. And if Russia doesn’t scare you, what about China or India? And the Middle East isn’t going to become a happy place anytime soon. Apologies to all my readers living in those countries; you’re probably worried about us (as well as each other). Yes, the geopolitical situation keeps me awake at nights. Scary.

Viruses, biological, and chemical warfare. We don’t even need people actively searching for ways to kill us; accidents and mistakes will happen. But why people would want to unleash a virus that is just as likely to kill them in the end as kill us in the short term is a mystery to me, but that’s nihilism for you. Perhaps they’re just hoping for a little local mega-tragedy. But if the terrorists don’t get us first then nature surely will; new viruses are always appearing and mutating, and even good-old fashioned bacteria are becoming increasingly antibiotic resistant. Eventually something really bad is bound to turn up. Yes, a pandemic such as the Great Plague of 2026 will wipe most of us out, probably in an unimaginably horrible way. Boils on the brain or something. Time to prep! Frightening.

Nuclear explosions. See also under terrorism. With a new cold war round the corner, and rogue states acquiring weapons, surely it can only be a matter of time before something happens somewhere. And if countries somehow manage to restrain from throwing their nukes at each other, and if mad men (and men they always are) don’t take charge of the arsenal, mistakes will happen; we’ve come surprisingly close to accidental nuclear war before. Within the next millennium it’s almost certain to happen. Megadeaths will leave humanity looking like the worst kind of survival disaster movie. I expect to see a double flash most days. Horrifying.

Nanotechnology. Now we get to future technologies that most people don’t worry about much at the moment – but they should. Nanotechnology means lots of very tiny things that may be able to replicate and might turn out not to be that controllable. Nanobots crawling around your veins and arteries scraping away cholesterol and plaque sounds wonderful, until as a result of some coding error they start scraping away at your artery walls too. Who you going to call? Perhaps we should retrain the unemployed (everyone – see worry below) as Botbusters. And nanobots munching away on rubbish and plastic bags turning them into compost is an excellent idea, until by mistake they decide that everything organic, including humans, is there to be munched on as well. Disturbing.

The disappearance of work. Jobs are disappearing all the time. Those that can be are being outsourced to countries where the wages are much lower and where they don’t have troubling legislation such as a minimum wage. Computers and online resources are claiming many other jobs – when was the last time you went to a travel agent? Robots already do much manual labour in garages, and I see that they are now taking over the jobs of at least some surgeons. What will be left for us to do in a few decades? A few high tech jobs; some teaching; creative work; maybe. Politicians, for sure. The overall effect will be to reduce the availability of work and so drive wages down. But there is a problem here that I don’t think has been much thought about: the owners of most of the computers and robots are making products for people to buy. But what will happen when the people can’t afford to buy anything because they have no money because the robots took their jobs? The whole system will collapse. We will be reduced to a nation of people working in coffee shops so that we can earn just about enough to go and buy coffee in another coffee shop in our breaks. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about starting out on a career just now. Unsettling.

AI and robots. I have recently finished reading Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, which talks about the threat posed by the development of artificial intelligence (and the associated robotics industry). Apparently the average prediction by “experts” of when we will develop an artificial intelligence with intellectual abilities greater than that of a human is 2040. Now of course as a professor of cognitive psychology I foresee all sorts of difficulties: our intellectual abilities and our consciousness arise because we develop from  birth, endowed with genes that prepare our brains and intellect for life that have been honed by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, grounded in the world, surrounded by other people, and with five sensory inputs (with feedback). I think 2040 is very optimistic. But I don’t see that as “in principle” argument against the development of super-intelligent conscious artificial intelligence – just that it’s more difficult than many people image. It isn’t merely a question of developing a computer with enough megaflops. Some might be surprised that I accept the idea of a conscious computer so easily, but if it has the right stuff, I don’t that it’s possible, I think it’s inevitable. You can’t have a zombie that acts as though it’s indistinguishable from a conscious being but isn’t conscious. (More on this topic in my forthcoming book, The Science of Consciousness, due to be published in 2017.) But what reason do we have to suppose that when we develop a real AI that it will be friendly towards us? Might we not instead face a Terminator-like future where the missiles are fired and machines turn on the remaining few? I don’t find there to be much comfort in ideas such as those proposed by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that if we programme machines with his three laws of robotics (“a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”; “a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law”; “a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws”) that all will be well. Humans live by laws, and they do a lot of people no good at all. People can’t even manage to drive without using their mobile phone. Why should a super-intelligent AI, with its own personality, life history, and at least the delusion of free will, feel obliged to do whatever we do them? We act in accordance with our own best interests (or at least think we do), so why shouldn’t an AI? I see disaster down the line. And will AIs suffer from existential despair? Will they worry about the power supply being switched off? And will they act to stop that happening? And then we’re assuming that intelligent AIs which have their own goals and personalities will be sane. Humans aren’t, so why should artificial humans? Why shouldn’t an AI become traumatised, or suffer from depression, or anxiety, or even personality disorder? Doesn’t mental illness come with the territory of being conscious? What would a psychopathic super-intelligent AI connected to the internet do? Or a suicidally depressed AI in charge of nuclear weapons contemplate? Alarming.

The network of things. My central heating is connected to the web, so when I’m in California I can play with turning the heating up to 30C back home. My pressure cooker is already pretty smart, but presumably the next generation will be networkable, so I will be able to cook my beans at a swipe of my iPhone from anywhere in the world. There are already robot vacuum cleaners, and fridges that check what you put in and take out and order food automatically for you. What happens if your fridge goes haywire and refuses to open, or if it orders a million toilet rolls instead of a nice piece of cheddar? Will you starve to death? So if terrorists, Russians, germs, the plague, nukes, tiny things, and robots don’t get you, your fridge probably will. Terrifying.

… To which I add a few weeks later:

Genetic engineering. How could I possibly overlook this one? I foresee nothing but trouble. Bring on the Daleks. Worrying.

Social media and surveillance. Isn’t Britain already the most watched society in the world? Aren’t there many calls of many people who should know better to monitor the press and curtail freedom of speech? Don’t we already have libel laws so draconian that people flock here from other more liberal counties (e.g. the USA) to press their grievances? I have just finished reading David Eggers’ “The circle”; although I think it is a flawed novel in some minor ways, it is immensely readable and thought provoking. With our obsessive use of social media, our pursuit of fame without effort and the idolisation of celebrities, and our ignorance of how our liberties are being eroded, we are sleepwalking to the sort of disaster chronicled in “The circle”. China is apparently working on a scheme that sounds like it should be left in science fiction where citizens accrue points for “good citizenship” (see this BBC article for example) – well, you can guess the sort of thing that makes you a worse citizen than your neighbours, and some of the possible consequences. Scores in the first instance might affect your credit worthiness or enable you to jump a queue for a good flat. But you can imagine a society where our Facebook posts and blogs are monitored, and all of a sudden things happen like your bin is “accidentally” not emptied one week. Or you get carted off to a gulag at dawn. Perhaps we already are monitored in this way and it was no accident that my supermarket home delivery last week didn’t include macadamia nuts. Thought provoking.

And then if we do somehow manage as a species to survive all that, and colonise space avoiding the doom of the solar system, we will eventually face the heat death of the universe. Surely anyone rational should all be very depressed.

Mens sana in corpore sano

chives

 

It’s under a hundred days to go now before my official “retirement” date and when my life as a full-time writer begins. I’ve made the big change – or at least the decision to make the big change – that I hope will lead to a more satisfying and mentally healthier life, and now it’s time to look at smaller changes I can make. I’ve already taken up exercise in a big way and been going to the gym regularly for some months now; I’m pleased – and surprised by myself – that I’ve stuck to it. I’ve reduced my medication gradually without too many ill effects. I have now sorted out my life, to some extent, and my depression is in abeyance, at least for now. I have identified a purpose – writing, in the first instance on consciousness. I now need to go further and tweak my mental and physical well-being. I also face many years (I hope) “post-work”, and I want them to be healthy, happy years. I can already feel a bit of arthritis in the fingers of my left hand, and I still feel more tired than I would like. I am at last doing enough exercise, so what else can I change for a better life?The obvious answer is diet.
Now I don’t think my diet is too bad – as I have coeliac (celiac) disease (I don’t like the phrase “I am celiac”, identifying myself with the disease), I already avoid gluten and wheat and too much dairy. I am fortunate in not particularly liking the taste of sugar, and avoid processed food. What else can be done for a better diet and hence better life? We are after all what we eat Note that I am using the word “diet” in a loose sense to refer to everything we eat, not specifically a means of calorie restriction.
Unfortunately the world of improving your health through diet is a nightmare. It used to be so straightforward: eat with the pyramid of a little fat, lots of complex starches, fruits, and vegetables, and avoid saturated fat, while doing moderate or more exercise three to five times a week.We can say with some certainty what is bad: smoking, too much alcohol, no exercise at all, processed food, sugar, modified sugars, trans and hydrogenated fats, and too many calories. But then things get very confusing. It’s pretty much agreed that leafy green vegetables are good for us (although opinion is divided on whether they are better lightly cooked or raw). But here is the list of some of the disputed foods:

– carbohydrates: much loved by “official” dieticians, treated with great suspicion by many food movements (e.g. Paleo, Primal, to a lesser extent South Beach). I’m assuming we’re talking about good carbs (no crisps, no cakes) that you get directly from vegetables. Sweet potato seems to be the healthiest.
– grains: many are a no-no already when you cut out gluten, but things like rice are disputed. I don’t like them much anyway.
– fruit: you thought you were on safe ground, but many are very high in sugars, particularly fructose, and Paleo and Primal limit their intake. Best fruit: berries.
– nuts: high in calories and oils and many have the wrong Omega 3:6 ratio.
– oily fish: generally agreed to be good, but some worry that they’re a source of contaminants, heavy metals, and colourings: wild or organic are best (if you can get them!).
– meat: disliked by many diets, but preferred in Paleo and Primal, particularly grass-fed and organic (again if you can get it).- saturated fat: despised in the traditional diet, but desired as a major source of calories in Paleo and Primal.
-mushrooms: full of fibre and vitamins – but argued by some to aggravate intestinal yeast infections. Is this anything more than superstitious thinking?
– garlic: how can garlic be evil? The Bulletproof diet says avoid because of its mind-altering properties.
– omega 3 oils (fish oil): as long as they’re heavy metal free, although the extent to which they are beneficial to adults remains disputed by some scientists.
– organic or not: surely it’s got to be better to eat stuff that’s free from pesticides and herbicides? Some scientists have argued it makes no difference.
– alcohol: preferably as red wine, a little is generally thought to be good by many.

What is most problematic is whether most of our calories should be coming from carbohydrates, or from fat, oils, and protein. Will fat kill us, or stave off the heart attack? It’s a high-stakes game.
But in the end, as my finger hurts and my back hurts and I decide to skip that glass of wine and measure out a nice, I sometimes just despair at the confusion. It’s difficult being an anti-ageing biohacker.

Nulla dies sine linea

 

sun rays

 

I have to finish the first draft of my book on consciousness by the start of November. I want to leave about two months for rewriting, clarifying, and improving the style. That means. 1339 words a day every day before 1 September to reach my target 160,000 words. (My writing software of choice, Scrivener, will automatically calculate the daily target based on your deadline and target length, and keep track of your daily writing total against the daily target.) There are probably going to be some days when something goes wrong and I can’t write, so I should be aiming for about 1500 words a day. I don’t know whether that sounds a lot or little to you; most days I have to read and think to be able to write those words, and I have to keep track of citations (not included in the total) as I go.

It would be easier if I didn’t have a day job too. Fitting writing in spare moments is difficult and stressful. Whoever thought that a writer has an easy life? At the very least it requires great discipline and great dedication.

When writing like this it is difficult to fit much else in to life. The mundane tasks are piling up. I really should wash the car, clear the vegetable patch, and change my energy suppliers, but such things always come last.

But the end is in sight. I finish the day job on 31 July. As of today that’s exactly 100 days.

Hopefully then things will be easier. But then there are these things called “holidays”. No wonder holidays can be among the most stressful of life events! Holidays for the writer and depressed person are interesting things. Words don’t get written unless you’re at the computer (or typewriter, or even with a notepad and pencil), and totals don’t wait for holidays. I suppose all self-employed people have the same problem – can we afford to take a break? It is though I think more challenging for writers facing a deadline. My current plan is never to stop writing, and write even in holidays and on Christmas day.

I suppose there is with every task a point at which it sometime becomes a chore, no matter how important the job and no matter how enjoyable it usually is. We just have to push on through.

A long time ago, Apelles the painter said:

Nulla dies sine linea.

Not a day without a line. The same applies to writers too. Even depressed writers. And setting some task for the day ahead, however small, and if possible doing it is of great help to depressed people in general.