And I’m not quite sure why
Over the last year, I’ve found myself having to rationalise and step myself through the logical process of seeing people—as well as animals—running away from danger, or doing things to preserve their lives. It stopped naturally occurring to me that people want to be alive; I’ve had to remind myself over and over that people don’t want to die, and reexplain the biological and neurological mechanisms underlying our survival instincts in order to convince myself that people are supposed to want to treasure their lives.
Perhaps too much exposure to violence in media is to blame. After all, people dying in the millions—even in mass-produced films (even those allegedly for young audiences)—is nothing worth more than a couple of seconds of screen time and an occasional “oops”. Perhaps this taking light of life has had a gradual consequence on my own perception of it, where it’s become difficult to be emotionally aroused even when seeing real death tolls from our present world.
But perhaps it is not a media-induced desensitisation of death that is to blame. Perhaps, with some level of irony, this is all the long-term consequence of my abandonment of traditional values and morals in favour of personal ones, guided by my necessarily-limited understanding of nihilism and what it entails for my personal philosophy; perhaps this is just its natural conclusion—perhaps this is the end of the path I have chosen—or, at least, part of it. After all, life itself is intrinsically meaningless, so it makes sense that it has no intrinsic value, right?
Not exactly. As Sean Carroll writes:
“The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it.”
Sean Carroll, The Big Picture
Just because life has no intrinsic meaning does not mean it does not have any value, and my morals have, so far, largely coincided mostly with the many traditional, long-standing ones shared amongst the many cultures and religions of our past and present (all the morals in the world are worth far more for their commonalities than their differences).
There is no reason I should not be valuing life, and there is no reason I should have to find myself being walked through the process of the survival instincts that lead people to want—desperately and above all else—to live.
To see everyone as biomechanical, lumbering collections of particles hardly different from rocks, merely changing assuming this state over an insignificant blip in the lifetime of the universe is hardly relevant. Should this transient, incredible chance event be taken as an anomaly? Or should it, perhaps rightfully, be taken as a miracle to be treasured?
Lately, one might argue that it’s become harder and harder to take the latter stance, with the third, more cynical explanation dealing with our youth, and their mindless staggering towards a future of irrelevant quality—where it becomes difficult for one to even consider the possibility that they actually value their own lives, doing whatever they please with little regard for their present or future; they spend their lives immersed in the very dystopian AI nightmare discussed in the famous waitbutwhy article:
For example, what if we try to align an AI system’s values with our own and give it the goal, “Make people happy”? Once it becomes smart enough, it figures out that it can most effectively achieve this goal by implanting electrodes inside people’s brains and stimulating their pleasure centers. Then it realizes it can increase efficiency by shutting down other parts of the brain, leaving all people as happy-feeling unconscious vegetables. If the command had been “Maximize human happiness,” it may have done away with humans all together in favor of manufacturing huge vats of human brain mass in an optimally happy state. We’d be screaming Wait that’s not what we meant! as it came for us, but it would be too late. The system wouldn’t let anyone get in the way of its goal.
Tim Urban, 2015
One may look around and wonder if we are already living in this dystopia, with current AI designed precisely to maximise our attention and engagement—draw us away from our lives and into our devices, where we spend every waking moment completely immersed in their goals. The goal of these AI models was, at first, to maximise user engagement; to get users to stay on their website or application, and to market products or ideas to them in order to increase sales, influence political views, or both. Their goal is a simple question: “How do I maximise screen time?”‘; “How do I get users to never click off my site?”
Over time, backed by psychological research, the design of AI has been steered towards stimulating our pleasure centres and leaving us always coming back for more. With the onslaught of variable rewards; the endless scrolling and refresh cycles, the dramatic clickbait and emotionally stimulating titles, and the loud and attention-grabbing sounds and visual effects—their goal is not far from the nightmare Tim Urban had already envisioned back in 2015. Granted, advertisers and market research companies have already been trying to do this for years, but the introduction of AI has, according to James Williams’s “Stand Out of Our Light“, taken all of this to unprecedented levels.
What does this mean for us? We have essentially asked AI to “make people happy”, and the consequence is a generation of digital device-dependent zombies who are already on the verge of “shutting down other parts of their brains”, wanting nothing more than the stimulation of their pleasure centres; that endless dopamine rush. Have we no longer become worried because we’ve lost? Have we already become absorbed into its goals—living our lives based on the goals of others rather than our own?
One may wonder if the youth of today are still capable of thought, reason, or even emotion; if they are still capable of feeling; if they still possess any semblance of curiosity—about themselves; about the world. One may even wonder if our current classification of living things is insufficient for those living in limbo between life and death.
Conclusion
Perhaps, the combination of wanton violence being trivialised and brushed aside in mass media along with the mindless, lifeless youth have been the strongest contributors to forgetting that life—at least in the way it is now being widely presented—is supposed to have intrinsic value.
Now, it’s almost as if an individual’s life matters less than the part they play in some abstract, online, tribalistic collective. Advocating for the individual—advocating for the value of developing one’s own thoughts, opinions, and emotions—has become seen as uncomfortable and frowned upon.
If it has become the norm to let others decide what one should think, feel, and do—for others to decide what one should be based on some petty internet points, then perhaps individual lives really have become meaningless, and perhaps what I’ve been seeing was not the consequence of nihilism or disillusionment, but rather the simple observation of reality as it stands now.