In a large world

There is a category of claims and questions that beautifully illustrates my way of looking at the world.

“There exists a person who can learn to juggle five balls in an hour.”

The claim “There exists a video over a minute long that over 80 percent of the world’s people have seen” gives even an adult pause.

Over 99.9 percent of the world’s population lives in an environment where some language is used.

One of their defining features is globality. Settling and answering them can’t be done just by examining things closely with a magnifying glass or with a clever experimental setup. They concern the whole world, and so they invite more expansive thinking.

Another is their childlike naturalness and simplicity. Elder brother’s wisdoms in the dim of the children’s room late on a summer evening, when neither one wants to sleep.

It is possible for people to fly in the sky like birds.

One can build cities on top of clouds.

There are people living on other planets too.

The kind you ponder while sitting in the shade of a tree on a warm summer day.

We grew up believing we could learn how to fly
We came from the earth, but we belong to the sky

There exist people who can’t work a job.

All people die someday.

The kind you ponder as a child in bed at night, crying as the summer vacation comes to an end.

And forget.

Starvation might sound like a joke here, but I really did have pretty much this kind of worldview.

A few years ago someone said to me, “A person I know became a biologist to solve the problem of aging, so that afterwards there’d be time for anything else.”

I remember exactly what I thought after this:

“Weird guy.”

“Well, that actually kind of makes–”, and right after

“Of course that won’t work.”

Today, a decade later, we met in London. It was among the first days of summer. The sky was a cloudless blue. We sat in a park under a tree. The sun and the branches cast patterns of light and shadow on the ground. Perfect, like in Pantheon, like in Everloom.

We talked about decision theory. We played counterfactual mugging poker with paper slips that happened to be in my backpack from Aumann’s agreement game. Eyes shining, I told him how it illustrates one of the most significant things I’ve learned in my adult life – how “there exists” more than one world.

We talked about the lifespan dilemma and arbitrarily long lifespans. I described how my own epistemic state regarding reality corresponds to the St. Petersburg paradox, as Paul Christiano has put it. Reality may be very large.

We marveled at attitudes toward immortality as a peculiar anthropological phenomenon: On one hand, if you ask people directly, most are in favor of indefinite health and life. On the other hand, in conversation people often argue against it, or aging researchers defensively explain how the goal is only to avoid diseases, not death. In the AI context, people want AIs to solve problems, but somehow this topic hasn’t risen to more attention there either.

He told me, aghast, how he had brought up death as the biggest problem to his friends, and how they simply weren’t interested. I brought up Richard Ngo’s note that the cultural memetic spread of anti-death ideology is probably strongly tied to its realism. We are probably now at that point in history where the dissonance is at its strongest. I also brought up my own reaction back then, a decade ago.

I did not bring up a certain third thought I had in mind: people rarely think about global claims and questions. They seldom come up in everyday life. Pondering one is a distinctive and often difficult cognitive task.

Pondering still deeper existential questions is presumably rarer still.

I don’t know why I came to think that. It is strange that I knew very little about where I was, but nevertheless thought about it only rarely, and when I did I fixated on trivialities such as how quickly someone could learn to juggle. At no point did I wonder how this place came to be or how large it is, at no point did I ask myself how or why I had woken up here.

Maybe conversations like these will become more common as the topics grow more timely. At least for me, this was a pleasant way to spend a summer Saturday afternoon in the final moments of Ancient Earth.