Techno-Puritanism / The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI

TPG 26.4 · 17,132 words · 1.3 hr read · Step 1: Define Your Objective Function

What Has Inherent Value?

An Overview of What People Choose to Maximize with their Objective Functions

To establish your objective function, you must make a judgment call about what does and does not have intrinsic value, as your values are what your objective function is meant to maximize.

There are five broad categories people fall into when determining what does or does not have intrinsic value:

  1. Nothing has intrinsic value
  2. Something has innate, intrinsic value
  3. Something has intrinsic value, but they don’t know what
  4. Religious tradition determines what has intrinsic value
  5. Desired self-perception determines what has intrinsic value

Finally, we will review proclivities, things that you may want in your life even though you recognize they have no intrinsic value.

Nothing has Intrinsic Value

Many conclude that nothing has intrinsic value. The arguments in favor of this belief are so simplistic and apparent they do not warrant enumeration.

The core argument against this category of belief system is that if there is even the tiniest possibility that anything might have intrinsic value, it is best to go forward assuming that thing does have intrinsic value.

Consider the following thought experiment:

You have just survived a plane crash in the desert. You have no idea where you are or whether civilization is close by or entirely out of reach. You can see nothing on the horizon but sand. You know for an absolute fact that no search parties will come to save you (perhaps in this thought experiment there are laws against saving people from plane crashes or entering the desert you crashed in).[[33]](#_ftn33) What is the most logical course of action if your goal is staying alive? Is it just to stay at the crash site, where you know you will die, or is it worth traveling in any random direction in the hope of finding something? If you choose to move, you are still likely to die, but there is also a probability—albeit a small one—that you will find water, food, or even a small camp, and will survive. What do you do: stay put and die, or leave the crash site to see what you might find?

In the above thought experiment it is only logical to stay with the plane if you are absolutely certain that doing so would not decrease your probability of surviving (assuming you are optimizing for survival, which to digest the above thought experiment with intellectual honesty, you must assume). Because we know that staying with the plane has a 0% probability of survival, it only is logical to stay with the plane if you are certain there is also a 0% probability of survival no matter which direction you might take. (A known 0% chance of survival no matter what you do is very different from a hypothesized 0% chance of survival.)

Similarly, it is only logical to live your life assuming nothing has intrinsic value if you are categorically certain nothing has intrinsic value. If you live life assuming nothing has intrinsic value, there is a 0% possibility your existence will have had any meaning or value. If, however, there is even a slight chance that something might have intrinsic value, no matter how slight that chance might be, that thing is worth pursuit.

There are four exceptions to the above argument:

  1. An individual could offer some iteration of the “Pascal’s Mugging” counter argument, which we discuss below.
  2. An individual could argue that the analogy is flawed, as even by living as if nothing has value an individual still might stumble into a meaningful life. While this is true, unless we have access to no meaningful information about what does or does not have value, the probability of living a life of value will always be higher when attempting to do so.

To hold this counter argument, you must believe that we have no way to infer what may have intrinsic value. A person making this argument would also have to hold that preventing suffering is just as likely to maximize intrinsic value as maximizing the number of things painted purple.

In short, to hold the belief that nothing has intrinsic value, it is not enough to think it is very likely that nothing has intrinsic value. You have concluded with certainty, through a logical thought process, that nothing has intrinsic value.

People who choose to believe they are certain nothing has intrinsic value typically choose one of the following objective functions:

Pascal’s Mugging

A mugger steps out in front of you and tells you that if you don’t send him all your money, he will open a dimensional portal and kill a random person. Push back and he then threatens to kill a hundred people, then a thousand, then a million. By the above logic, at some point even the slight possibility he follows through should logically become enough to motivate you to give him your money because that slight probability is being multiplied by all the potential lives lost. Common sense would suggest that line of reasoning is ridiculous . . . or at least that is how the Pascal’s Mugging thought experiment goes.

While this thought experiment is meant to show the flaw in utility maximization, it kind of sucks for three reasons:

Considerations if you decide you believe nothing has intrinsic value

Even if you decide nothing has intrinsic value, you must still define an objective function for yourself. Deciding that “nothing matters” doesn’t absolve you from the logical imperative to be intentional in whatever you do decide to focus on in life and how you pursue it.

Something Has Innate Intrinsic Value

In this section, we will discuss intrinsic values that may exist as part of an individual’s objective function independent of religious traditions.

While these values are independent from religious traditions, they are not exclusively atheist. For example, a Christian may think human suffering is intrinsically bad, independent of what his or her religious tradition says (in fact, the classic paradox, which asks: “How does suffering exist in a world with a good God?” presumes that even religious individuals believe suffering is inherently of negative value independent of religious tradition).

How does something become imbued with intrinsic value?

Before we can delve into various things an individual may believe have intrinsic value, we will take a quick detour to discuss the two core ways a thing may be imbued with intrinsic value. We can conclude something has either absolute intrinsic value or relative intrinsic value.

Absolute Intrinsic Value

Something of absolute intrinsic value is something that has value regardless of the perspective of the entity deciding whether it has value (in this case that entity is you). Something of absolute intrinsic value has value somehow imbued into its very nature. This is the way we normally think about the concept of intrinsic value. The classic example of something with absolute intrinsic value would be a deity (God, Allah, Yahweh, etc.).

Relative Intrinsic Value

Something with relative intrinsic value gains value through the nature of its relationship to the entity deciding whether it has value (in this case, that entity is you).

Most relative intrinsic value arguments are versions of the same base argument.

While this may seem like a simple argument, it can manifest itself in a plethora of ways depending on how you define “yourself” and “good.”

By extending the definition of yourself or by focusing on aspects of yourself, you can come to wildly different conclusions about what has intrinsic value. For example, at its broadest interpretation, you may say:

While the relative intrinsic value argument may seem strong, it can be discounted out of hand if you categorically reject the argument that an entity has intrinsic value from its own perspective (i.e., that you have intrinsic value from the perspective of yourself).

Positive Personal Emotions

Maximizing positive personal emotions is most individuals’ “default” intrinsic value. To some extent, the pursuit of happiness is an aspect of almost everyone’s objective function, whether or not one sees it as having objective value.

Humans evolved[[34]](#_ftn34) emotions as a tool for controlling behavior—thus emotions are quite powerful. You feel something as a positive emotion (whether it be love, lust, or a sense of accomplishment from a job well done) because humans who experienced these emotions in the past had a higher probability of surviving long enough to reproduce and raise children who in turn survived and reproduced. Whether they be love, envy, or the joy from a job well done, all emotions exist for this one reason.

At their core, emotions are neurological states. They exist as a specific configuration of neural pathways and levels of neurotransmitters. We even currently have the technology to directly induce complicated emotions through chemicals or direct stimulation of parts of the brain (See: transcranial magnetic stimulation, a.k.a. TMS).

These two facts alone are enough to convince many that positive feelings are too trivial to have intrinsic value. The fact that emotions are mechanical, chemically induced states meant to help us pass on our genes certainly makes it difficult to believe that any specific individual’s positive emotional states are of absolute intrinsic value.

That said, it is not incredibly difficult to conclude that from a relative perspective, positive feelings have inherent value. If we are our minds and our minds perceive certain states as being superior to others, those states may have intrinsic value to us.

There is a tendency among those who by default conclude that personal positive emotions have intrinsic value to rank some emotions as having more intrinsic value than others. Specifically, they elevate emotions that require significant effort to achieve and/or lead us to become better members of society, such as love and the satisfaction we get from accomplishing difficult tasks (as opposed to positive emotions we get from eating, sex, sleeping in, etc.).

For individuals who feel this way, it is useful to determine whether it is the emotions themselves that have value, whether true value lies in the struggle to achieve these emotions, or whether the value of these emotions lies in beneficial results for society. This can be achieved by returning to the thought experiment we engaged earlier:

You are given the option to spend the rest of your life in a tube that enables you to live twice as long as you would outside of the tube. The tube pumps your brain full of the chemicals necessary to constantly feel whatever emotional state it is that you value the most (or whatever series of emotions you think has the most value in exactly the amounts you deem as having the most value). This tube will better serve an objective function to maximize positive feelings than any life you could live independently. Will you choose to live in the tube, even though it means foregoing normal life and leaving everyone you have known? (The tube would be able to maximize the feelings you got from the interactions you used to have with these individuals.)

It is easy to dodge the intent of this question by claiming that the emotions wouldn’t feel so good over time, or the emotions wouldn’t be “real” and thus do not count. Do not do this. These sorts of cheating answers rob you of a learning experience that helps you understand what you really believe about the world. The intention of this thought experiment is to determine whether positive personal emotions really are what you want to maximize with your life, or if there is something that matters more (not to determine whether you actually want to live in a tube).

If you have trouble with the above scenario and do not understand why, ask yourself: If you had a button that would prevent you from ever feeling a negative feeling again, would you press it? If your reaction is “no,” because negative feelings are useful for some reason, focus on whatever that reason is. Does this reason have a deeper intrinsic value to it than the experience of positive personal emotions? If you feel this reason is more important to you than not ever having to feel a negative emotion again, then you are tacitly admitting to yourself there is something more valuable to you than your emotional state. Why is it more important?

You may try to dodge the intent of the question with some platitude about how negative emotions make positive emotions sweeter. However, such an assertion is really just saying that negative emotions help one more effectively maximize the experience of positive emotions, in which case, we ask you to attempt the same thought experiment with the concession that somehow this button will amplify the experience of positive emotions to offset this effect.

Considerations if you decide you believe that positive personal emotions have intrinsic value

Even if you decide to dedicate your life to maximizing positive personal emotions, allowing your emotions to drag you around like a dog on a leash is a terrible method for maximizing your positive emotions.

Those seeking to maximize a positive state must remain aware that chasing elevated emotional states in the moment will almost always lead to a lower overall emotional state in the long run. Sometimes this is obvious. Were you to sit around all day eating Doritos, drinking Mountain Dew, and indulging in your hobby, you may feel great in the short run, but after a few days of this you would feel gross and awful. This is a feeling anyone who has been unemployed or taken a long vacation knows all too well: You think having all the free time in the world to do something you enjoy in the moment will feel great, but once you have that time, that happiness fades and the activity becomes routine.

Much of the lost luster of short-term pleasures is due to overlay states. These states are discussed in chapter three, which explores ways to maximize desired emotional states. Many of the emotional states we chase are also heavily romanticized by mainstream culture (hence our interest in them) and pursuing them leads to less satisfaction than one would expect based on the hype.

Let us examine the worst offender here—love—to demonstrate this point. First, we should acknowledge that (if you assume a scientific perspective) love evolved to facilitate long-term pair bonding and increase the likelihood that an individual will protect and raise viable children. In other words, people in the past who felt love were more likely to have kids who survived long enough to reproduce themselves. Because of this, your body will begin to feel love for anyone that your body, on an animalistic level, believes has the potential to become your long-term partner.

Your body is not the best matchmaker. It can even be tricked into falling in love. For example, studies conducted by Author Aran demonstrated a simple experimental task could be used to cause two individuals to fall in love in under an hour (this task was so effective that some of Author’s test subjects, who had never met before the experiment, eventually married).

If you want to maximize the amount of love you will feel in your life, allowing a feeling of love to guide your choices about a lifelong partner is a poor strategy. In a 2012 study, happiness and love ratings after ten years of marriage were equal to those of arranged marriages; however, divorce rates in love marriages are 40-50% while divorce rates in arranged marriages are 4-6%. When you adjust for survivorship bias, you are more likely to maximize the love you feel in your life by letting someone else—who is not operating under the influence of love—choose who you marry. In an ideal scenario, you will decide for yourself who you marry without allowing the decision to be influenced by love. Just be aware that evidence indicates you have a higher probability of living a life with more love in it if you do not allow love to influence major life decisions, such as who you choose to marry. (If you enjoy this topic, please check out the sequel to this book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships—it digs into it a lot deeper.)

Finally, we have a lot of control over our emotional states. If you genuinely believe that positive emotions have inherent value in your life, then you have a moral imperative to not allow yourself to feel sad when it is within your control (i.e., pretty much any time you are not clinically depressed, in which case it would then be your moral imperative to seek clinical treatment). This means that whenever you throw yourself a personal pity party, it is your moral obligation to catch yourself and find a way to be happy about your situation. (Later in the book we explore data demonstrating the amount of emotional control people really have along with methods for improving emotional control.)

Deciding that your objective function is to maximize your emotional state is not the same as deciding that your objective function is to take the path of least resistance in life—the path your brain will try to push you towards. Maximizing an emotional state takes a lot of work and willpower. Nevertheless, by combining cold logic and repeated effort with willpower, it is remarkably possible to live a life of near constant bliss, assuming this is something you decide has inherent value. This topic will be covered in detail within Chapter 3.

Note: We do not include the path of least resistance in our lists of potential objective functions. The only argument we could think to justify it is that consciously experiencing life is inherently negative and nothing has positive value, hence one should do everything in one’s power to consciously experience as little of life as possible. We don’t think anyone genuinely holds that belief.

Distributed Positive Emotions

When asked in public what has intrinsic value, many people reflexively refer to distributed positive emotions—that is, making as many people happy (or content, satisfied, not in pain, etc.) as possible.

A claim that distributed positive emotional experiences have inherent value is built on the premise that a positive emotional state in a human has intrinsic value and thus there is intrinsic value in distributing positive emotions. Because of this, any criticism that may be levied against someone believing personal positive emotions are of intrinsic value can also be levied at an individual who believes distributing positive emotional states has value. This includes the accusation that positive emotional states only encourage organisms to survive and breed and that ultimately a positive emotional state is no more than a neurochemical slurry (and not something of intrinsic value).

Typically, the reason someone ends up believing that distributive positive emotions have intrinsic value is they ascribe absolute value to positive emotional states, leaving their own mental state in a non-privileged position (e.g., because they believe something about positive emotional states imbues them with intrinsic value, they must believe that positive emotions experienced by others are as valuable as positive emotions in themselves). However, an absolute perspective on positive emotions having intrinsic value forces one to decide what categories of entities’ positive emotional states have intrinsic value and justify the lines one draws. Deciding whether the emotional states of cows, dogs, humans, the severely mentally disabled, aliens, artificially intelligent machines, etc., have inherent value is not as easy as it may at first seem.

Does a cow’s positive emotional state have the same value as that of a human? Does a worm having its reward pathways activated have the same value as a cow being in a state of positive emotion? If you ascribe a cow or a worm’s positive emotional state as having a lower value than that of a human, how do you justify this? If you justify it by saying that positive emotions scale in value based on the cognitive capacity of the entity experiencing the emotion, then you must believe that babies and disabled humans born with a lower cognitive capacity are of lower priority when one distributes positive emotional states.

One common way people answer this line of questioning is by claiming that there is a threshold of cognitive capacity and once an entity is over that threshold, it has equal value to all other entities above that threshold. In other words, once an animal is above a certain level of intelligence, it has equal rights to positive emotions as all other animals above that threshold of intelligence. If you hold this position, where do you place this intelligence threshold and why do you place it there?

Is the intelligence threshold set at the lowest limit of human cognitive capacity? If so, then you would believe some non-human apes have exactly equal value to their emotional states as humans, as the smartest non-human apes are certainly at an intelligence range higher than that of the most cognitively impaired adult humans. Also, it is suspiciously convenient that the cut off would be at the lower levels of your own species intelligence levels. Are you certain you are not allowing modern notions of political correctness to taint your perceptions of what has intrinsic value?

If you accept the above argument and conclude that the happiness of a non-human ape is of the exact same value as the happiness of a human, given that it is cheaper to maintain the happiness of a chimpanzee, is it not more cost and resource effective to keep large regions dedicated to chimpanzee farms in which they are kept as happy as possible? Such farms would be more efficient than programs to help needy humans, as ten chimpanzees can be given a great life at the cost of giving one human an average one.

However, if you don’t use a threshold after which all things happiness have equal value, but instead use a sliding scale tied to some variable with which things with more of variable X have more intrinsic value when experiencing happiness (i.e., you hold that the value of an animal or person’s emotional state scales based on something like its level of intelligence, cognitive capacity, or capacity for experiencing emotions), then consider the following thought experiment:

Would the happiness of aliens who were significantly smarter than humans (or had more of whatever X variable is) be of higher value than the happiness of humans? If a massively more intelligent species came to earth, would it be within their right to treat the human population in the same way we regard indigenous species when cutting down their habitat to grow more food in order to increase human happiness? If humans went to war with this alien species because they were exterminating us, would it not be your moral obligation to fight for the aliens?

An alternative thought experiment could go:

If you could build a super intelligent AI and design it to experience nothing but extremely high levels of positive emotions, would that satisfy your objective function?

The above problems can be escaped by taking a relative—rather than absolute—perspective when making an argument for the value of positive emotions. Specifically, an individual would either argue that entities like themselves have intrinsic value from their perspective or that they are part of a larger entity defined as the human race. This allows an individual to easily say that because the aliens are different from them, they care less about their positive emotional states and that the emotional states of animals that are more closely related to them are more valuable than those of species that are further removed. An individual holding this perspective likely also believes that their family’s happiness is of higher value than individuals who are not as closely related to them.

A thought experiment that can be used to test whether you believe that distributed positive emotional states have value from a relative perspective might be:

If you could press a button that put all humans (or whatever group you consider worthy of positive emotions) into tubes that would double their lifespans and ensure they only felt happy emotions until they died, would you press that button?

If you do not press the button, is it because you believe that others may not want to live life in a happiness tube? Ultimately, you may conclude that self-determination is something with greater intrinsic value than distributive happiness.

Consider this question from a slightly different angle: If someone does not want to feel a positive emotional state, is there value in forcing one upon them? If you truly believe that distributive positive emotional states have inherent value, it should not matter what others want.

One must also ask: Does the positive mental state of an entity that you believe is immoral hold value equal to the positive mental state of a person you deem to be moral or morally neutral? For example, does the happiness of a serial killer on death row have value equal to that of an innocent, starving child in Africa? You could argue that entities that take happiness from others are less deserving of happiness themselves, but why would that be the case? Would it not be better to just kill any entity that took happiness from others instead of bothering to deny it happiness?

This brings us to our final question: Per your logic, is it best to kill an entity that will feel no positive emotions for the rest of its existence? What if any positive emotions felt by this entity will be vastly outweighed by negative emotions? What if this entity will feel mostly positive emotions, but cause so much sadness to others that it has a net negative effect on the world’s happiness?

Considerations if you decide you believe that distributive positive emotions have intrinsic value

If you decide that distributed positive emotions have inherent value, as discussed above, you will need to decide whose happiness matters.

To summarize the most common choices are:

It can seem fussy to focus as much as we do on questions regarding whose emotional experiences matter and why (e.g., whether the experience of animals matters). However, these questions have monumental real-world implications. After formulating your position on the question, “when does the emotional state of others matter and why?” we would ask you to focus on the implications of your answer to the wellbeing of human babies. Does your answer suggest that it is worse for a human baby to feel pain than a pig? Is it worse for a human baby to feel pain than a human adult? Based on your explanation when does a human feeling pain first matter in their development (e.g., at what stage does a fetus’ emotional state matter and why)?

As you can see, if you decide positive emotional states have value, it is crucial to clearly identify what entities’ happiness matters and why. Based on how you answer such questions, you may find yourself living as the client of a government committing genocide on an unprecedented level (either to animals or fetuses) and knowing whether you are living under such a government is not a trivial question.

Limiting Extreme Negative Emotions

You may choose to dismiss the arguments against maximizing positive emotions by claiming that you are striving for a more restrained state of happiness. This involves arguing that while maximizing positive emotional states may lack intrinsic value, you are at least certain there is something intrinsically bad about suffering (e.g., a child starving to death), and therefore there is intrinsic value in preventing it.

If you feel inclined to agree with this perspective, then all the arguments and challenges above should be considered, but in a restrained state (i.e., pleasantness pods instead of happiness tubes).

The following thought experiment can help define your stance on this belief:

If suffering is of intrinsic negative value, is it not best to sterilize the populations of countries with high levels of suffering? If you had a button that would sterilize the entire population of the three countries with the most suffering, would you push that button? Pushing this button would certainly drastically decrease future suffering in that region (in terms of the number of people suffering), so if you choose not to push it, you will guarantee the suffering for hundreds of thousands of people. What if the button did more? Would you push the button if it painlessly killed the entire population of the three countries with the most suffering? Remember: By doing this, you would eliminate more suffering from the world in a second than you could in an entire normal lifetime.

Do not attempt to dodge the question to avoid making a choice. You either get to push the button or not push the button with the understanding that any unhappiness caused by your pushing the button will be less than the unhappiness experienced if you don’t. In this scenario, helping them in any other way is not a choice available to you.

If you cannot bring yourself to push the button, is it because you see more value in having a human being be alive and in great pain than not alive at all? In this case, should you not optimize for the number of people (or animals if you value their suffering) you can have living in a region regardless of the suffering that causes? (i.e., If you believe that something being alive yet in suffering has more value than something not being alive, then your objective function would be to maximize the size of the population not to minimize suffering.)

Alternatively, you may not be able to push the button because you see self-determination as more valuable than an absence of suffering, in which case your objective function should be about the maximization of self-determination rather than the reduction of human suffering (as you view it as a strictly superior intrinsic value).

Considerations if you decide you believe that limiting extreme negative emotions has intrinsic value

Whether you believe suffering has intrinsic negative value or general positive emotions have intrinsic positive value, it is important to consider whether you ascribe equal value to the happiness of an individual alive today and the happiness of an individual in the future. This decision is crucial as it will influence the ideology you adopt (remember, in this book ideologies are defined as hypotheses on how to maximize your objective function).

For example, if the happiness of people yet to be born is of equal value to the happiness of people alive today, your efforts are almost always going to be better spent advancing technology than helping individuals who are suffering today. Better technology helps the potentially infinite stream of humans yet to be born, whereas any action to help someone today will likely only help one individual or a comparatively small population.

A question that can help ferret out if you really believe this is to ask yourself:

If you knew that humans would exist for at least another few millennia at current (or greater) population levels, would you push a button that would cause 50% of the world’s population to live in chattel slavery for the rest of their lives if it decreased the number of future generations that live in extreme suffering by 10% each generation going forward?

One question we focused on in this section was: “Is it better for a person to live a life of suffering or not live at all?” A related question worth thinking through is: “Why does it matter if someone dies?”

If someone dies without feeling any pain, why is that a bad thing? Is it worse to kill someone painlessly or to torture someone for decades? What if, instead of decades, you torture someone for half an hour? The answers to questions like this greatly affect your position on fixing the world’s greatest problems, such as poverty and hunger.

Freedom / Liberty / Self Determination

People who believe freedom has inherent value hold the ability of a conscious entity to do “what it wants” above all else.

Many people arrive at freedom as the thing of highest intrinsic value after realizing they cannot completely follow-through with one of the hard questions associated with another value, which would make it their moral imperative to impose this other value system on others against their will (like forcing happiness on other people).

The argument for self-determination mirrors the argument for general positive emotions except it makes the concession that general emotional states (such as happiness) either do not matter or matter less than one’s ability to freely act on one’s emotional state at any given time.

Anyone choosing to work freedom into their objective function will have to draw some careful boundaries before proceeding. What is “freedom,” anyway?

Consider the life of an Emirati living in the UAE. He has no fear of abject poverty given the generous government welfare system, but he can’t watch porn, drink alcohol, or say whatever he wants in public (we are obviously oversimplifying the laws of the country for the sake of making an argument). Is this Emirati more free than a man living in the United States, who can watch porn, drink alcohol, and say what he wants, but is restrained by the bounds of poverty?

What aspects of freedom have intrinsic value?

Why do those aspects have intrinsic value?

If your answer is ever another intrinsic value (e.g., “The fact that freedom makes people happier gives it intrinsic value”), then freedom is not of intrinsic value to you. In such cases, freedom is instead a hypothesis about maximizing something else of intrinsic value.

To test your belief that freedom has intrinsic value, ask yourself:

If you could press a button that would make the world’s population 15% less happy but 10% more free (by whatever metric you define freedom) would you?

If you find yourself arguing that doing so would rob people of the ability to make the decision themselves, you reveal that you are not actually driven by a fundamental belief in freedom (as this button would unquestionably make people freer), but rather a fundamental distaste for making decisions that affect other people.

Considerations if you decide you believe that freedom has inherent value

If you conclude freedom has intrinsic value, you will need to think carefully about your hypothesis in order to identify how best to achieve it. There are wildly different political ideologies regarding freedom that all claim that their method maximizes it, and that all other ideologies make the situation worse. It is specifically meaningful to consider questions of how much wealth an individual needs to achieve meaningful freedom and whether more powerful or less powerful governing entities are better at ensuring freedom.

Immortality / Continued Existence

There is an innate human desire not to die. From an evolutionary perspective, this is not surprising; humans that didn’t have this drive would have died at much higher frequencies. Given how ingrained not wanting to die is into our subconscious, it is also not surprising that so many people conclude that some form of continuing their own existence has intrinsic value.

The argument used to come to this conclusion is almost always a relative argument and typically goes something like: “From my perspective, I have intrinsic value, thus creating more of myself in the future is a thing of intrinsic value.”

This intrinsic value is unique in the vast number of contradictory forms in which it might manifest. A good thought experiment for beginning to explore this is the Ship of Theseus:

Theseus sails his ship around the Aegean Sea for many years and during his journey replaces any old planks that might be starting to rot or show signs of damage. After many months of travel, Theseus has replaced so many planks of his ship that none of the original planks remain. Is this still the same ship?

What if, during the voyage, someone had been following Theseus’ ship and gathering the old boards as they were discarded? What if this person rebuilt a ship that looked exactly like the Theseus’ original ship, using the boards from the original ship? Which of the two ships is the real ship?

Consider that if you compare yourself today with yourself at the age of seven, you likely have almost none of the same cells, are made up of entirely different matter, and hold almost none of the same ideas. How you think about this thought experiment has implications on what “you” and “continued existence” mean to you.

We will take this opportunity to briefly discuss some of the ways people interpret themselves:

You are your consciousness through time

In this interpretation, you are your conscious mind and seek to prolong your own conscious life as long as possible—either by downloading yourself into a computer, preserving your own body as long as possible, or freezing your brain in the hopes of someday resurrecting it. While these may sound like far-fetched ideas, they are common amongst rationalist and human+ communities.

The core issue faced by these ideologies is how much of “you” is even maintained in your consciousness over time. Given how radically we will change our beliefs throughout our lives, can we confidently assert that we, today, will be closer to whatever we become four hundred years from now than our grandchildren?

Is it really so bad that you get to remix your genetics with any individual you choose, then give the new version of yourself whatever childhood you want, thereby granting the new-and-improved “you” an opportunity to reinterpret reality with all of your guidance but none of your already-ingrained biases and flaws?

Consider the following thought experiment:

Today you are given the option to live forever and given a button that will make you feel whatever emotional state you want whenever you want, but you must get in a luxurious spaceship that will be shot into empty space with no hope of finding anything. Would you take this deal?

If you would not take this deal, why not?

Is it that you want to be able to interact with the world as an entity living as long as you can? Is it that you want to make some sort of impact on the world? If this is the case, are your resources really being optimally spent on living longer?

You are your body

In this case, “you” are defined as a bundle of genes (and not individual cells, as obviously your body itself is regularly recycled on a cellular level). To maximize your existence, you must strive to maximize the prevalence of your genetic material in the future. The core challenges to this come from the question: Is the conscious entity reading this book and making these decisions, really your body (that bundle of genes), or is your conscience not beholden to your body?

If your conscious is not beholden to your body, it makes more sense to see yourself as your ideas rather than your genetics. A tough question to ask if you believe the “you are your body” version is whether you would kill yourself today if it allowed you to spread 5% of your genetic material to everyone born in the next generation.

You are the current snapshot of your conscious mind

In this interpretation, you see yourself as a bundle of ideas trying to spread. In this case, you are the current state of your consciousness and what it contains, and the more you spread the ideas your consciousness contains, the closer you get to immortality.

You may strive for this by convincing people of what you believe on an individual basis or by trying to create great works of art that move other people to see the world more like you do.

The core problem with this intrinsic value is it makes you resistant to new ideas. After all, if “you” are your current set of beliefs about the world and it is these beliefs you want to spread, you must also believe that the destruction or replacement of any of those beliefs involves some form of death, as by letting go of some ideas and accepting new ones, “you” will become less “you.”

The hard question for this belief system is:

If, by pressing a button that would kill your body painfully and immediately, you could transfer 5% of what you believe about the world to every human alive, would you press that button?

You are the story others use to contextualize you within their lives

Within the formative days of Western culture, one of the most valuable things an individual could strive for was “kleos,” which is basically glory as remembered in stories. Many still hold a similar belief: That the truest form of immortality is to have the story others tell about you last forever. This belief makes sense if you conceptualize the “self” not from an individual perspective, but from the perspective of others. This version holds that so long as the idea of us plays a role in the stories people tell, retell, and hold in their memories, we never really die.

From its earliest days, this belief was plagued with the obvious question: “Does it matter if you are remembered for having a positive or negative impact?” Consider individuals like Herostratus, a Greek arsonist who destroyed one of the Seven Wonders of the World just to preserve his name in the annals of history.

Even if you could be remembered in a favorable manner, is that enough? The hard question to ask yourself is:

Would you sacrifice your life for something that had near zero real impact on history, but left you remembered in a positive light for the next 500 years? (The charge of the light brigade for instance.)

Your Purpose

Some individuals believe that any entity acting out its purpose has objective value. With purpose being defined as what something was created to do.

An excellent demonstration of this concept is in the TV show Rick and Morty in which Rick, a mad scientist and inventor, is sitting at a dining table with his family and a robot he made to pass the butter.

Butter-passing robot: “What is my purpose?”

Rick: “You pass butter.”

Butter-passing robot: (looking horrified down at its hands) “Oh my God.”

Rick: “Yeah, welcome to the club.”

Depending on how you contextualize what you are, your purpose may be so blindingly obvious and so simplistic that it is almost impossible to see as a thing of intrinsic value.

For example, if you are your body, your purpose is to procreate and maximize the spread of your genetic material. Your body and brain in a very real way exist for the purpose of spreading your genetic material within this worldview. Alternatively, if you are your current bundle of beliefs about the world and you think that a belief’s purpose is to be spread, then spreading your beliefs is your purpose.

However, if you contextualize yourself as your mind or “mental substrate”—as opposed to the ideas your mind contains—you may conclude that your purpose as an entity is to test various ideas against each other.

It appears that a major evolutionary advantage in the human species is our ability to:

  1. Make up various mental models or receive them from others (e.g., technology, lessons, or traditions passed down from generation to generation)
  2. Test different mental models against each other
  3. Discard faulty mental models without having to die

In other words, for spiders to “learn” how to spin better webs, the spiders that spin webs poorly must die, and the ones that make better webs will survive, reproduce, and thereby pass their genes. For a human to learn how to build a better house, he only needs to test various ideas against each other about how he may go about building a house and discard the inferior ideas. Our mental landscapes exist to allow ideas to compete.

If we view ourselves as our mental landscapes rather than our bodies or ideas, our “purpose” may be to optimize our minds to be the best possible battleground where ideas are tested and only the best survive.

If you contextualize yourself as your mind / mental substrate, ask yourself:

If you fulfill your purpose perfectly, but are neither remembered nor liked upon your death, have you lived a good life?

Considerations if you decide you believe your purpose has intrinsic value

While success metrics for someone who believes they are their body and their purpose is to spread their genes is fairly straightforward, it is harder to pin down exactly what “a good mental substrate for ideas” does on a day-to-day basis. If you seek to maximize the extent to which your mind weighs new ideas against each other and ensures the fittest ideas win, what should your long-term goals be? Is it important that you share those ideas with others? Could you move effectively towards your personal objective function by striving to ensure that other minds are working and processing ideas effectively, or must your mind process everything on its own to get “credit”?

To Have an Impact on History

When someone asks you on your deathbed what your life amounted to, there is an innate pull to want to be able to answer that your life mattered—that regardless of whether history remembers you, it mattered that you were born and existed.

From a logical perspective, this inclination comes from the assumption that an entity’s value comes from how much it interacts with the flow of history and that an entity that does not interact with the flow of history does not matter. The hard question to ask oneself to determine if one really believes this is:

If it is your interaction with history that imbues you with intrinsic value, would you sacrifice your life and the lives of all your relatives today—even if no one remembered you existed—so long as doing so guaranteed that you made a positive, lasting, novel impact on world history?

If you are not willing to make such a sacrifice and instead believe it is how history remembers you that matters, it is likely you are more inclined towards the objective function focused around attempting to obtain a type of immortality.

Considerations if you decide you believe that having an impact on world history has intrinsic value

Most who hold this intrinsic value believe that for it to be fulfilled, the impact one has on the world must be either positive or novel. They often also (incorrectly) conclude that the easier of those two features be ensuring their impact is novel. It is surprisingly difficult to leave a novel impact on world history.

There are few innovations one can develop, or feats one can achieve, that will not otherwise be achieved by someone else within a 50-year span. For example, most politicians outside of maybe a handful of world leaders are only surfing waves of sentiment. If these politicians had not become the public figures representing a particular zeitgeist to the world, approximately equal people would have taken their places.

This is even more difficult when you consider that most figures in world history that have had a novel impact have had a negative impact. It is much easier to be radically wrong than it is to be radically right.

It is therefore worth considering whether it matters if your influence on history is novel. If novelty matters, what can you achieve in your life that is novel? What can you do that will otherwise not be done this century?

Fairness/Equality

Many social primates have an instinctive inclination towards fairness. In one particularly vivid demonstration of this, scientists “paid” a Capuchin monkey to perform a task for cucumbers. The monkey was perfectly happy with its payment until it was exposed to another Capuchin who he saw was getting grapes for performing the same task. Upon seeing his colleague get better pay for equal work, this first monkey becomes clearly enraged.

Some people go so far as positing that our inclination towards fairness is more than a lower-order emotional pathway like lust and believe it to be imbued with intrinsic value, the typical argument being that if we feel a universal inclination toward fairness, it must have intrinsic value. While fairness is a relatively rare intrinsic value for someone to hold (typically, individuals only see fairness as an ideology for achieving distributed positive emotions), it is highly valued in modern Western society due to its utility in maintaining social order and its ability to signal virtue through social media platforms (virtue signaling—that is, showing off how virtuous one is—about fairness is uniquely unlikely to carry a social cost, while most other forms of virtue signaling can. Thus, fairness is used more often in virtue signaling due to its low social cost, which in turn increases its prevalence as a value within our culture).

If you believe fairness or equality to hold intrinsic value, questions you must ask yourself to test this belief should tease out whether you really just see fairness as a tool for distributing positive emotions, which would effectively make fairness an ideology (within the definitions used in this book), or whether you believe that fairness itself has value. The traditional hard question for this intrinsic belief is: Would you choose a society in which happiness and wealth are distributed equally, or a society in which everyone has more, but a few individuals have much, much more? A person who believes fairness has intrinsic value would prefer a society in which everyone had less happiness and wealth so long as what they had was equal.

Considerations if you decide you believe that fairness/equality has intrinsic value

It is much harder to define fairness than one may think.

Suppose a professor brings a cake to class and decides to split it fairly amongst the students of the class.[[35]](#_ftn35) Does she:

• Split the cake into exactly equal pieces and distribute those?

• Give more cake to the hungrier students?

• Give more cake to the students who want the cake the most?

• Give more cake to the students who work the hardest?

• Give more cake to the students who come to class every day and exclude students who only showed up on that day hearing there would be cake?

• Give more cake to students from disadvantaged backgrounds?

• Not give any cake to the student who she saw murder an old lady with a rock?

• Give more cake to the students who would appreciate the cake the most?

• Give more cake to the students who would not be able to afford cake outside of class?

• Give more cake to male students because their daily caloric needs are higher on average?

• Give less cake to the students who bring a piece of cake to class every day?

• Give more cake to the nicest and most generous students?

• Give more cake to the students who have been having a bad week?

If you hold fairness/equality to be something of intrinsic value, the way you answer this question matters a lot to the way you choose to expend your one life in pursuit of fairness. Simple answers like, “to each according to their needs,” often leave more room for interpretation than one may think.

Personal Improvement

People who believe personal improvement has intrinsic value define personal improvement in many ways, but generally argue that if you are a thing, there is intrinsic value in being the best possible version of that thing (be that “thing” the ultimate human, athlete, parent, salesperson, etc.).

The core difficulty with this intrinsic value is it lends itself very well to being a crutch to enable base addictions, whether the addiction be exercise, winning, or recognition.

The hard question to ask yourself about this belief is:

If you could be granted, with zero effort and maintenance, perfection at whatever aspect of yourself you are trying to improve, would you take it?

If you would refuse this offer, it is not the end state of perfection that you value, but rather the struggle for improvement (or perhaps you are just an addict trying to justify a thoughtless path in life).

If you agreed to the above offer for effortless perfection at whatever type of personal improvement you value, what would you do next? Why would that next thing be worth doing? Why is the next thing of less intrinsic value than improving yourself (e.g., why did you need to be perfect before dedicating yourself to this next task)?

If what you are trying to achieve is knowledge, change the question to:

At the press of a button, you can achieve perfect knowledge. The catch: you cannot disseminate it. Will you press the button?

If you would not press this button, ask yourself why it is important to disseminate knowledge. If you believe knowledge has value for its own sake, would you disseminate the knowledge if no one who received it could act on it?

Considerations if you decide you believe that personal improvement has intrinsic value

It is important to define two aspects of your goal if you chose this intrinsic value.

First, what specific aspects of your life have you chosen to perfect and why? When answering this question, it is useful to keep in mind all of the aspects of yourself you can work on perfecting, such as being perfect at your current job, being the perfect parent, or being the perfect friend/spouse/child/etc.

Second, are you striving for absolute perfection or relative perfection? In other words, do you want to be the best you can be or just better than others? Does the success of those around you in any way diminish your own accomplishments?

The Struggle

The struggle is the default intrinsic value for most with “Type A” personalities.

While almost nobody immediately concludes the struggle has intrinsic value, many arguments against other potential things of intrinsic value can lead people to believe the struggle for something, anything, imbues that thing with intrinsic value.

This realization comes when one recognizes that if one can get what one was striving for without work, it would lose all value—whether that be personal positive emotions or knowledge.

In this case, the intrinsic value of a thing increases the more you suffer to achieve it. An individual that believes this would say, “you must have intrinsic value relative to yourself and thus you can imbue other things with intrinsic value by sacrificing part of yourself for something else.”

Still, this argument is a little flimsy, as it would only be arrived at by someone trying to justify their existing lifestyle rather than approaching the question of purpose a priori. Someone taking the a priori perspective would have stopped at existence having intrinsic value and would not have proceeded to create the additional special rule where you can imbue other things with value by sacrificing part of yourself.

Moreover, it is suspiciously convenient that humans are biologically susceptible to assigning higher value to more expensive things (for example, research shows a person will be happier owning a $5000 jacket than they would a $50 jacket even if they are the exact same jacket). Our susceptibility to this fallacy could be causing us to feel that things only have value if they are difficult to obtain.

It is important to recognize that even though “the struggle” can feel costly, a life of struggle can often be the path of least resistance. By losing ourselves in “the struggle,” we can avoid having to think about why we are doing what we are doing and face the tough choices about what our life means to us.

This does not mean that “the struggle” lacks intrinsic value; it simply makes it a hazardous conclusion. If you decide “the struggle” has intrinsic value to you, please ensure that you are not just choosing it to avoid thinking.

Considerations if you decide you believe that the struggle has intrinsic value

Maximizing the struggle is difficult not just because it requires struggle. Is it worth throwing in pointless challenges to increase the difficulty of achieving a task? Does greater difficulty give any task greater value? Does the struggle still have value if it becomes routine?

Art and Inspiring Others

The argument typically used by those who dedicate their life to artistic endeavors is that there is intrinsic value in intellectually inspiring others. If this is your inclination, the first question you must ask yourself is: Did you choose to believe this to justify your lifestyle and self-image as an artist?

A good way to make this differentiation is to ask yourself:

Is it the inspiration of others or the creation of art itself that has intrinsic value?

If there is intrinsic value in inspiring others, then sharing a great book with two people who wouldn’t have otherwise read it is twice as valuable as creating a great book that inspires one person. In this case, your time will almost always be better spent promoting great works as opposed to creating them yourself unless you are already a famous artist.

If you think the creation of art itself has intrinsic value regardless of the effects of the art on humans, ask yourself:

Is all art of equal value? Can the value of a piece of art be judged to be higher than the value of another if its effect on others does not matter?

If you hold that all art is of identical value, ask yourself:

Could you better maximize your objective function by quickly creating as many simple drawings as possible to increase the amount of “art” you produce?

If not, why not?

Considerations if you decide you believe inspiring others has intrinsic value

What exactly defines art? What kind of inspiration has value?

For example, does producing a critically acclaimed reality TV show satisfy your objective function better than creating one masterfully executed YouTube video with only a few hundred views?

Perhaps the most important question one has to answer when pursuing this path is what percent of your time and effort should be dedicated to creating your art and what percent is dedicated to promoting your art.

Experience Maximization

Some believe that intrinsic value lies in the diversity of one’s experience. This means one’s objective function should be to maximize novel stimuli through efforts ranging from travel to sexual experimentation or trying every type of drug one can in order to maximize the diversity conscious states one experiences.

The argument used to justify this intrinsic value is: What I experience has intrinsic value, but this value is not tied to the positivity of the emotions the experience leads me to feel. Instead, experiences have value based on their novelty. Even a positive experience loses all value as it becomes routine.

The hard question for this intrinsic value is:

Would you be willing to trade your life to experience the lives of every living human if doing so meant you would not be able to interact with the world while experiencing these lives?

Considerations if you decide you believe that experience maximization has intrinsic value

Maximizing experiences is an interesting objective function in that it is uniquely obtainable for almost anyone. Traveling the world can easily be done with even very low amounts of money by taking jobs for a year or so in each place one stops with the added benefit that these jobs can be quite diverse as well (if degrading and strenuous).

The most difficult aspect of this intrinsic value stems not from living in a way that maximizes it, but from overcoming the complacency inherent in the human condition that prevents us from even beginning to try something if doing so means defying social norms and venturing into new territory.

Protect and Promote the Growth of Human Civilization

Some conclude that the protection and development of human civilization has intrinsic value. This can result from one of three stances.

In the first two stances, either a person decides their purpose as a human being is to promote human interests, or a person sees himself as not an isolated entity, but rather a small part of a larger collective whole. Essentially such a person believes that they are just a small part of a larger entity, which represents the “real them.” For example, if such a person were a blood cell in a guy named Carl and they were asked what they were, they would say, “I am Carl and what is good for Carl is good for me.”

This argument can be thought of as similar to the argument for self-improvement, but instead of seeing yourself as primarily an isolated entity, you see yourself as a small part of a larger entity.

In the third case, someone believes humanity is imbued by intrinsic value through some particular trait (typically the complexity of our culture and the intelligence of the members within it).

You can differentiate individuals who believe that human civilization has absolute rather than relative intrinsic value by asking:

If you believe that human civilization has relative intrinsic value, you should have no problem saying you would instead fight to protect humanity, but should you believe, humans have absolute intrinsic value based on some set of human accomplishments, you would be obligated to fight on behalf of the invading species. The “hard question” for individuals who have the more common relative perspective is:

Would you kill yourself today if it moved human civilization forward technologically and culturally one year?

Considerations if you decide you believe that protecting and promoting the growth of human civilization has intrinsic value

What exactly does growth mean in this context? How can you dedicate your life and resources to best move humanity in a “forward” direction?

To a large extent, this answer is mediated by the probability you see of humanity being wiped out in the near future. Even if you see a threat as having a 1% chance of wiping out our species in the next half century or so, it would be logical to dedicate your life to neutralizing that threat.

If you think instead that there are no real threats to the survival of our species, you must then decide whether to spend effort on technological or social progress. If you spend time on social progress, how do you determine what positive social progress is? If “positive social progress” is making other people feel good, should your objective function not be to maximize positive distributed emotions?

Accumulation of Knowledge as a Species

Some conclude that there is inherent value in accumulating and distributing knowledge about the nature of the universe.

Typically, this is tied to a belief that as conscious entities, we can only increase our own intrinsic values through the spread of information. Difficult questions to ask yourself to determine if you really hold this value are:

Would you sacrifice yourself to add some bit of knowledge to the human dataset if (1) that knowledge would not have otherwise been added but (2) it is of no practical value?

-And-

If you could press a button and it would give all humans absolute knowledge, would you press it?

Nature and Biodiversity

There is something viscerally upsetting to the collective Western consciousness about the destruction of large swaths of habitat and species. While some individuals frame the upsetting nature of this destruction as being related to some other intrinsic value (“Think of all the medicine that might not be made now that we lost the rare plants from which it might be derived!”), others believe nature has intrinsic value in and of itself.

These individuals typically place value on biodiversity specifically. They fight significantly harder to protect endangered populations in contrast to common species.

The most difficult challenge for any individual who believes that biodiversity has intrinsic value is that the very visceral assumptions that lead us to hold these beliefs do not lead us down the logical path to actually maximize biodiversity.

If all life holds value, the continuation of life is of intrinsic value, and our goal is to maximize biodiversity—then shouldn’t we be putting our effort into seeding other planets with anything we can get to grow on them in an effort to create new, lush biomes?

Even if this path of seeding other planets with life only has a fraction of a percent probability of working, the potential upside of a biome as lush and diverse as earth is so much greater than the upside of almost any conceivable conservation effort on planet earth itself that such efforts are trivialized.

You may argue that the biome in which our species evolved has a higher relative value to us than any biome on another planet, but in this argument is the admission that our biome only has value because it is the biome in which humans exist, which most people who hold this intrinsic value would find disconcerting.

Considerations if you decide you believe that nature and biodiversity have intrinsic value

What is the best way to maximize biodiversity in the universe?

Even if you believe that existing species within our own biome have some unique value, is your time not always better spent trying to protect small insects and plants that require less support and can be maintained more easily? Is there value in developing methods to catalog the genetic material in our world so it can be recreated later if future humans decide it still has value?

The Continuation of the Universe

For some, existence itself is a thing of intrinsic value and perhaps logically the thing of ultimate intrinsic value. After all, if all the deeds you perform in your life are ultimately futile in the face of the heat death of the universe (the mainstream belief in physics that the universe is expanding at an increasingly rapid speed and will eventually be so spread out that atoms will almost never interact with each other, being miles apart).

This view logically leads an individual to dedicate one’s life to somehow preventing the heat death of the universe, as without external intervention, the heat death of the universe is both inevitable and the single most inherently negative thing that could happen.

Within our lifetime this dedication typically takes the form of preventing the early death of our species and advancing physics and technology in general as fast as possible. In future ages in which we have a better understanding of physics, this intrinsic value may lead to radically different behavior.

The hard question one can ask oneself to determine if one really believes existence has intrinsic value is:

What if we learn that we can “reset” the universe (and that it has been reset before), but we can only do it sometime in the next ten years? Would you pull the trigger to make that reset happen and erase all of human civilization?

Considerations if you decide you believe that the continuation of the universe has intrinsic value

This intrinsic value is unique in that it may not be physically possible. It may turn out that the universe ending in heat death (or some other way) is a categorical imperative of physics.

Assuming that it is possible to avoid the heat death of the universe, there are many questions still left open about what is required to maximize this value.

Let us explore four potential scenarios for you to decide at which point the action has intrinsic value:

  1. We can split off a new universe from our own, but the laws of physics in it are different in such a way that life will never come to exist in it.
  2. We can split off a new universe from our own but are not able to transfer any information about our universe into it.
  3. We can split off a new universe from our own and are able to transfer information into it.
  4. We can split off a new universe from our own and are able to move a colony of our own species to it.

Some also argue that we are inside a simulation that would render this whole intrinsic value moot (reportedly Elon Musk is a big fan of this argument). The argument goes: If a simulation complex enough to model human society is possible to build, it is likely that hundreds if not thousands of them will be built at some point. If thousands of such simulations will be built, it is more likely we are living in one than not.

However, if you believe this objective function and conclude that we cannot know whether we are in a simulation, it is your moral imperative to assume we are not, as whatever a simulated person does is irrelevant anyway, and you know for a fact there is a chance you are not in a simulation.

Maximizing Lucidity / Enlightenment

The belief that lucidity (or enlightenment) has intrinsic value surfaces in several religious traditions as well as numerous new-age philosophical movements. Those who believe lucidity has inherent value make it their objective function to maximize the amount of time they, and others, spend lucid (that is to say: not on autopilot, tending to their various worldly and bodily distractions). This is often attempted through regular and prolonged meditation, mindfulness, and/or prayer.

When not derived through a religious dogma, this belief is sometimes arrived at by an individual who initially believed maximizing the time they were alive had intrinsic value, but ultimately decides that different states of consciousness have different levels of intrinsic value. If you were to spend your entire life on autopilot just reacting to stimuli, your life, per this objective function, would have no intrinsic value.

The hard question for those who believe that lucidity is a thing of intrinsic value is: Would you live the rest of your existence in a tube unable to interact with the world or feel happiness if doing so maximized your ability to maintain full control over your consciousness?

Considerations if you decide you believe that maximizing lucidity has intrinsic value

The vast majority of those who dedicate a large portion of their lives to maximizing lucidity do not pursue lucidity because they believe it has intrinsic value. Instead, such individuals have an ideology (a hypothesis about how the world works) that maximizing lucidity gives them access to some form of supernatural power whether this power be a closeness to God or the ability to influence their reincarnation. These people should focus less on lucidity and more on their ultimate objective function.

However, if you genuinely believe that the lucidity itself is your goal there are a number of interesting nuances to clarify. Are moments of lucidity still valuable to you if your resulting reflections on the world are wrong? What if your lucidity-generated conclusions are correct, but based on bad information? For example, Deepak Chopra has almost certainly spent more time reflecting on life than you, but he also has a poor understanding of even basic theoretical physics and neuroscience. Has Deepak Chopra lived a life of more intrinsic value than yours?

If you decide you believe that moments of lucidity that lead to a fundamentally incorrect actions, revelations, or views about what action you should take are less valuable than moments of lucidity that lead to correct conclusions, what about great thinkers of the past who based their now obviously-wrong conclusions on the science of the time? Did they live lives of less value than someone maximizing lucidity today? Since future individuals will almost certainly view us the same way, would your life not strictly be better spent advancing human science, so you can increase your (or our species’ collective) ability to reflect intelligently on life?

Value Uncertainty

Value uncertainty comes from the belief that something has intrinsic value, but either you do not know what it is yet or you believe it is impossible to ever truly determine what has intrinsic value. While there are far fewer flavors of value uncertainty than there are flavors of independent values, value uncertainty represents a much more common way of viewing the world. We will quickly detail a few objective functions that can arise from being uncertain about what holds inherent value.

The Search

Some individuals see value uncertainty as simply a stage in their development towards discovering what has intrinsic value. These individuals are in the process of searching for what they believe is true about the world. Essentially, these individuals build their objective function around building a better objective function.

Having had at least one phase in your life in which you are in the process of “the search” is extremely helpful later. Likewise, it is healthy to always have some aspect of the search built into your objective function, no matter how confident you may be that you found something of intrinsic value. Having had a period of complete dedication to this mindset may make you more receptive to new, better, potentially objective function-changing information should it arise.

Covering Your Bases

An individual selecting this objective function attempts to maximize as many things of likely intrinsic value as they can. This typically manifests itself as an individual dedicating their objective function toward pushing forward technological progress, as this benefits almost every likely objective of intrinsic value.

It is easy to underplay the benefits of technology but consider that today even someone in the bottom 30% of the U.S. population lives a significantly better life than kings did just a few centuries ago (not living in constant pain, getting to eat a wide variety of non-spoiled food most of the year, varied and high-quality entertainment on demand, etc.).

Essentially, such a person says: I don’t know what has value, but if I attempt to maximize all potential things of value simultaneously, I will probably get something right.

Focus on What Society Says is Good

While defaulting to what society says is good is a common objective function for people who are uncertain about what holds objective value, this is one of the few objective functions that is patently wrong. An individual who defaults to this objective function trusts social consensus over logical, reasonable thought.

Keep in mind that society has many other reasons to frame ideas as “good” outside of the best interest of the individuals who make up that society. For example, bad ideas may be framed as being good in the name of social cohesion or the benefit of a powerful ruling class or “intellectual” elite. In addition, some ideas spread very easily on social media regardless of how sound the logic behind them is, as they can be used to virtue signal (such as those ideas involved in politically correct culture). This results in such ideas being more commonly held in modern society than ideas that cannot be used to virtue signal.

Focus on Personal Proclivities

In this case, people default to focusing on whatever they have a personal proclivity towards (typically personal happiness) with the assumption that if they cannot determine with certainty exactly what has intrinsic value, it is not worth pursuing anything.

Religious Intrinsic Values

The goal of this guide is not to talk anyone out of a religion.

We are in a difficult position, as the first step of our framework is to clarify your objective function and determine why you have chosen that objective function by questioning and clarifying your core beliefs. However, there is a deep cultural sensitivity towards a religious individual being asked to question and justify their beliefs. Moreover, there is a deep sensitivity for a non-clergy member to discuss the implications of objective functions derived from religious beliefs. For these reasons, we will keep our discussion of religiously derived objective functions relatively generic, with a focus on those most common in U.S. culture. We will nevertheless ask you to honestly question your beliefs.

When a steel sword is made, it is repeatedly heated until soft, then quenched in a cold liquid. This process is called tempering. Blades are tempered to increase the toughness, impact resistance, and elasticity of the metal while decreasing its brittleness, a trait it gains by being overly rigid. By heating your beliefs through honest questioning—by genuinely considering you may be wrong—then quenching the beliefs in a world that will make their truth self-evident, you remove their brittleness and make them even tougher.

If you do not allow your faith to be tested with novel lines of questioning, it may atrophy and become weak, brittle, and unable to respond to genuine threats. Thus, when addressing challenges to your belief system, it is best to avoid the natural tendency to immediately dismiss them, thinking to yourself: “This person is wrong, and I just need to explain how.” Instead, ask yourself: “Is this person wrong, or am I wrong?”

A person who becomes defensive or angry when asked to strengthen their beliefs by questioning them is someone with an underlying fear that if they questioned their beliefs, they may abandon them. Such people have only superficial faith.

We encourage you to approach challenges to your belief system from an unbiased perspective and use logic and an imaginary opponent’s perspective to come to a well-considered, consistent, and compelling conclusion. In addition to strengthening your faith, this approach can make you more effective at sharing your religious views.

Religious beliefs in this guide are divided into four categories: Hard Belief Systems, Soft Belief Systems, Personal Belief Systems, and Self-Image-Based Belief Systems.

Hard Religious Belief Systems

This guide defines a hard belief system as any religious belief system that strongly adheres to a cohesive religious tradition. Almost all these belief systems have been refined by thousands of great minds over the ages, resulting in a large cohesive body of interconnected beliefs about the world that are represented by religious traditions like Southern Baptism, Mahayana Buddhism, Sunni Islam, and Orthodox Judaism.

The most important question anyone with a strong belief system must ask themselves is: Why do I adhere to my particular belief system and none of the other similar (but mutually exclusive) systems that exist?

This question becomes uniquely poignant when you just happen to believe the religion into which you were born or the predominant religion within your local culture. It would be a remarkable coincidence that the religious tradition prominent in your community at the time of your birth just so happens to be the one correct tradition.

When developing your argument as to why you believe your particular religious tradition as opposed to another, it is important that you not rely on arguments that a party arguing from the opposite perspective could also use in good faith.

Imagine you are asking a Christian why they are a Christian and not a Muslim. This Christian may say: “I am a Christian and not a Muslim because when I ask God in my prayers, He tells me that I chose correctly.”

This is not a very strong argument, as millions of Muslims around the world would use the exact same argument when explaining why they are not Christian. They would believe this argument just as strongly as this Christian. When they pray and ask God what they should believe, He tells them to be Muslim.

This Christian also cannot use the argument that countries that are predominantly Christian are more technologically advanced, stable, and treat minorities and women “better.” While this may arguably be true today, it is undebatable that for parts of the Middle Ages, the Islamic world was both technologically and culturally more progressive.

Were this Christian to adhere to this line of reasoning, they are arguing that, had they had been born in the Middle Ages, they would have been Muslim, which they obviously believe to be the wrong religion. Therefore, condemning the current culture in regions where various religions are predominant is not an effective method for judging the inherent truth of a belief system.

This Christian could argue that they know Christianity is the correct system because Jesus either was closer to God than Muhammad or that Jesus performed more miracles than Muhammad. However, if they rely on this argument, they are tacitly accepting that if someone on earth today started performing better miracles than Jesus and also claimed to be God, they will dismiss the Bible in favor of this new person’s teachings.

Alternatively, this Christian could argue they are Christian either because Christianity fulfilled a prophecy provided in earlier religious teachings or that Christian prophecy has been historically predictive of future events. However, in each of these cases, Muslims can claim the same thing: that Muhammad was prophesied in the New Testament and that the Koran has predicted future events.

Anyone justifying their faith with either of these criteria tacitly admits that if an even more predictive historical text were to be found, they would choose it over the Bible as a source of truth, or, should a person in our time fulfill the prophecies in an old religious text more perfectly than Jesus, they would accept this person as a higher source of authority (if that is what those older texts predicted they would be). Such an individual would also need some metric for quantifying the unique predictive capacity of their chosen religious tradition and would need to study other religious traditions’ predictions to ensure they don’t “out prophesize” them based on said metric.

In other words, a person cannot claim their religion is uniquely predictive if they haven’t studied the veracity of predictions in other religions or criticisms of the claimed predictions within their own religion.

In addition to knowing why you believe your religious tradition is more correct than vastly different traditions, you should also know why your tradition is the correct one when contrasted with more similar traditions. It is easy to avoid thinking through this topic and say, “I believe what is in my religious text,” but remember that for almost every mainstream religious tradition, there are multiple sects with significantly different views of the world that would all make the same claim. Calvinists, Quakers, Puritans, and Baptists, for example, would all claim that they simply believe what is in the Bible, yet they come to very different conclusions.

If you take the hard religious tradition path in life, it is crucial to ensure you are following the correct tradition. Truth isn’t a team sport. Examining related-yet-different sects is not about finding ways to argue that the sect in which you grew up (or is popular in your community) is correct; it is about using the cognitive abilities a higher power gave you to come as close to the truth as possible. You must take time to understand the different ways people throughout history have interpreted the text you know is true, so you can come to the truest possible interpretation of it. Getting this question correct is quite literally the single most important thing you will ever do.

As with other aspects of applied pragmatic thought, it is a shame that our current society provides no good unbiased resources to help you make this determination. Any religious authority figure or community has a vested interest in delivering information to you in a way that guides you toward their sect’s interpretation of religious scripture—not out of malice, but because after years of meditating on the topic, they obviously believe their particular sect is correct, just as hundreds of thousands of equally intelligent and well-meaning scholars of the same texts have come to different conclusions.

While this book doesn’t have the space to delineate how all of the world’s various religious sects differentiate themselves and explain the philosophical, interpretational, and historic (often political) reasons for those differences, this book can guide you as you perform this exploration yourself. Given that most readers of this book who follow a hard religious path will follow one of the Abrahamic religions (due to the language in which it is published and the geography in which it is distributed), we will use them as a model.

On our website (Pragmatist.Guide/Religion-Tree [or if you can copy and paste, http://pragmatist.guide/Religion-Tree/ ]) is a tree that can serve as a very rough map for exploring how the different sects of the Abrahamic religions relate to each other. It would be impossible to create a 100% accurate map; the map provided is only meant to serve as a rough reference point. The best way to use this map is to start at the base branch that contains the last human (or entity on earth) that you believe shared divinely inspired teaching and then begin to work your way forward, tracing how various groups interpreted those teachings.

As you work your way along the tree, perform research to understand why the people of each sect had a different interpretation of the teachings than you do. Think through what specific historical factors may have led them to misinterpret the meaning behind specific aspects of your religious tradition and note similarities between those historical factors and ones that may have influenced the genesis of your own tradition. It is natural to have a blind spot to missteps in our own belief systems, but by spotting missteps in similar but related traditions, we can better mark areas of our own belief system that require more careful scrutiny.

This investigation will not be an easy or quick task, but if it gets you closer to truth, it is patently worth your effort. Sometimes this task may be as simple as clarifying why you believe the canon of religious texts you follow to be correct (such as coming to an understanding of why the Gnostic Gospels are dismissed by modern Christians and the more mainstream canon is accepted).

This task may be as complicated as parsing out elements of truth from a historical political or power struggle within a religious organization that resulted in different sects that ultimately interpret the same texts quite differently. You may find yourself agreeing with elements of each interpretation when you dig into the logic behind these differences. In other instances, you may be delighted to find a small element to truth in an interpretation of the religious texts that is no longer common for reasons other than the truth of said interpretation (such as the difficulty proselytizing the predestination of the Calvinists or the celibacy of the Shakers).

Do not be tempted to formulate arguments that make it easy to end on the branch of the tree that dominates your local culture and social groups. You are seeking the truth, not arguments that allow you to maintain the status quo.

Just as anyone with a strong belief system needs to have a good reason for knowing why they are a member of their tradition as opposed to any of the other traditions, someone who subscribes to a strong belief system should be clear about what that belief system says has intrinsic value, what their objective function should be, and what ideologies (hypothesis for maximizing those values) the tradition supports.

In a similar vein, keep in mind that while a hard religious belief system may inform your objective function, it does not always spell it out. For example, it may not be clear just from religious texts how important converting people to your faith is when contrasted with acting in a way your deity would approve of or contributing to make the spiritual lives of those already faithful richer. Would you carry out an unethical action if it helped you convert someone and benefit them for eternity? Having a clear understanding of your objective function in the context of your faith is still an important task.

Soft Religious Belief Systems

This guide defines soft belief systems as any religious belief system that loosely adheres to a cohesive religious tradition. Often soft belief systems take a religious tradition and alter it to make it better conform to mainstream social trends.

Soft belief systems are defined by statements like: “I am Jewish, but I believe that all religions are different ways of looking at the same truth” and “I am Christian, but I believe you go to Heaven no matter what you believe so long as you are a good person.”

While there are many logical reasons to gravitate towards softer interpretations of mainstream traditions, soft belief systems run the risk of being forms of self-image-based belief systems in which you allow your self-image to define what you believe about the world (e.g., I am a good person, a good person wouldn’t believe that their nice, gay, and Hindu friends are going to Hell; therefore, my religion doesn’t say my friends are going to Hell).

Additionally, an individual with a soft belief system should reflect on whether what he believes is simply the path of least resistance in life allowing him to believe that he is going to Heaven (or whatever reward their tradition offers) without having to make any major costly changes to his daily behavior or how he interacts with people of other faiths.

The core question you must be able to answer if you hold a soft belief system is:

Why are some aspects of the tradition true while others are false? More specifically: what logic or common characteristic allows you to toss out certain parts of a religious tradition?

You should be uniquely suspicious of a common characteristic if it relies on a modern western interpretation of morality, as it would be a remarkable coincidence if you just happen to be born into the culture with the correct interpretation of morality. Consider that what is moral has varied widely throughout history as is evidenced by the fact that you even feel your religion needs a “morality update,” as said religion was obviously considered moral within the time and culture it was created.

Personal Religious Belief Systems

Personal belief systems are at least in theory not heavily influenced by any religious tradition. In these belief systems, through some logical argument, you have built your own beliefs about the nature of the supernatural world and what it wants from you. The most common belief system in this category (in the Western world) is some form of Deism; therefore, we will focus on questions related to Deism below.

Due to the fact that Deism is not a mainstream belief system within our culture, most individuals who are Deists have put some thought into their beliefs about God, as they had to turn away from another tradition to become Deist, and therefore it is difficult to bring up a challenge to their belief system that they would not have seriously thought about already, but that is still generic/broad enough to have a place within this guide.

If you identify as a Deist, think through what evidence you have that the deity is not perfectly evil instead of perfectly good.

Almost all evidence typically used to prove that God is good could also be used to prove God is evil. For example, you could argue that God created the pleasant things in life so that bad things in life would hurt more (as opposed to arguing that God created the bad things in life to increase the value of the positive things).

Additionally, the many different mutually exclusive revelations of God that have followers who, when they pray to God, believe He tells them they are following the right path seems to be direct evidence for a God that is lying to at least one group (assuming you see supernatural signs and communication as evidence of God). Would a perfectly evil God not reveal himself in slightly different mutually exclusive ways across regions to increase the amount of conflict and hatred in the world?

Again, you could argue that it is in the nature of an all-powerful deity to be perfectly good, but there is no apparent form of this argument that could not be twisted to say that it is in the nature of an all-powerful deity to be perfectly evil. Some would counter this argument by saying evil is just the absence of good, so such an entity couldn’t be maximally evil, but again, such an argument could easily be twisted to say good is just the absence of evil, hence a maximally powerful entity would have to be maximally evil.

Finally, you could just argue that God defines what is good—therefore, whatever He does must be good, but this feels like a hollow argument. Being a good entity has no value if anything you do gets defined as good.

If you end up deciding that God does exist, but that he is a maximally evil entity, or that you cannot be certain if He is good or evil, then your objective function would change significantly. (Like everything else in this guide, this is just a thought experiment meant to challenge a person’s belief system. We are not actually arguing that God exists and that he is evil.)

As with every potential belief system, we encourage you to clarify exactly what your personal belief system states is right and wrong and make clear conclusions about what that belief system dictates you should maximize with your life. To determine this, look towards whatever source of evidence you viewed to be strong enough to justify building your own supernatural belief system.

Personalized Hard Religious Systems

While unusual, these religious systems are extremely interesting to contemplate. In such systems, a person believes everything contained in a certain religious dogma is true except for the implications that the dogma claims those things imply.

For example, someone may that believe the Bible or Quran is a 100% accurate record but based on that record conclude that God is a petty, malevolent entity. Such a person may even believe God is being honest when He says He loves all humans, but that God’s love is more like the love of an abusive partner who threatens to torture you if you don’t love him back. Such conclusions might lead someone to come up with fascinatingly unique objective functions.

Such belief systems are rare to the point of essentially not existing within most Western religious traditions but are increasingly common among the Eastern tree of religions as interpreted by Westerners. For example, one could believe everything taught in traditional schools of Buddhism is accurate but conclude that Siddhārtha Gautama was wrong in his assessment that ending the cycle of suffering and rebirth was the correct aim based on that information. Such an individual may disagree with the assessment that the suffering caused by attachment is more intrinsically negative than the positive emotional state they are able to experience. Alternately, someone may disagree that suffering is inherent to the human condition, and if suffering is not an inherent part of life, the four noble truths are not truths. With these lines of thinking, some rather exotic objective functions (exploiting the concept of reincarnation) might arise.

A person who holds one of these unique interpretations of a hard religious system must be able to explain how no major group in history ever came to hold such beliefs when they had access to the exact same information. The major religions have been systematically obsessed over by the greatest minds in human history, and yet they did not come to the conclusions you did. Why? What knowledge, perspective, or information could you possibly have access to that they lacked?

Self-Image-Based Belief Systems

Our first instinct when thinking through belief systems is to first decide what “type of person” we are and then “choose” whatever belief system that “type of person” would believe. When this train of logic is approached with even the slightest amount of incredulity, it reveals itself as patently wrong and destructive.

Some belief systems are primarily driven by the way an individual wants to think about himself and not by any sort of logical pathway or tradition. Essentially an individual first decides a bunch of generic positive things about themselves such as: “I am a good, powerful, counter-cultural, spiritual, person” and then designs or shops for a belief system that allows them to best maintain these beliefs about themselves.

These belief systems are best personified in the perpetual archetype of the high school Wiccan or the Evil Eye Chuunibyou[[36]](#_ftn36), but are also common in many new age belief systems. Obviously, an individual would never admit to themselves why they hold these beliefs while they still hold them, but enough of us have passed through these phases ourselves to recognize the pattern.

It is not worth expending effort trying to tease out the logic behind these types of belief structures, as by definition they are not based on logic. If these belief systems were logical, they would fall into one of the other categories.

Almost any belief system can fall into this category if arrived at by asking: “What kind of belief system would someone like me choose?” For example, if someone were a nihilist because he identifies with the goth subculture, then their nihilism should be categorized as a self-image-based belief system instead of genuine nihilism.

This is the only belief system category we will openly condemn (however, we like to think we can retain the claim of being unbiased, as this is not a condemnation of any specific belief system. Any belief system can be arrived at from a non-self-image-based perspective). We advocate (1) determining what you believe is true about the world and (2) leveraging those beliefs to develop your self-image. Self-image-derived belief systems follow the exact opposite order: (1) determining how you want to see yourself and (2) shopping for a belief system that validates that self-image.

Essentially, when choosing your core beliefs about the world (whether they incorporate a religious tradition), it is crucial to remember that you are not shopping for the pre-packaged framework that best fits your personality, existing lifestyle, or desired public image. You are searching for what you think is most likely to be true.

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