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organization of information processing

What does this mean if nothing physical? You mean the structure of their code?

Until about a week ago, when I debated this with my friend Tom Hyde, it seemed incredibly obvious to me that wanting to be rich is rational but I could not explain why. Fundamentally I agree with Popper and Deutsch that all life is problem solving. Throwing a birthday party is solving a problem, and so is stopping an asteroid that is heading toward Earth. But is not having a mansion on Lake Como a problem? Is not being immortal a problem? How do we decide between these?

The lone scientist obsessed with some theoretical problem strikes most people as weird. How can someone toil for 30 years on a problem, living on a modest salary, without any desire to accumulate massive wealth? According to the Popperian view above, that is completely rational. The scientist is fully engrossed in problem solving.

If that is true, why am I and most people so drawn to solving my problem of not having a mansion on Lake Como, driving a Bugatti hypercar, or overlooking the skyline of NYC from a Billionaires’ Row apartment? Status plays a part, but I think I’d want these things even if nobody knew about them.

I think the two reasons are:

1. Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do. I can likely only experience these things with incredible wealth. They are a symbol of that repertoire. Some of my desires I know already, like the mansion. Most I don’t know yet. Future desires are unknowable, thus attaining wealth allows me to solve problems in the future I don’t know I’ll have.
   1. This is the antithesis to the famous fisherman story (a businessman advises a fisherman to scale up his business so he can retire and fish). The story contains the assumption that the fisherman already knows the problem he wants to solve. However, the fisherman might want to travel the world, build a school, research AI, explore space.
   2. Imagine a person 1000 years ago. They might only want better food, safer shelter, a healthy family, or perhaps a larger farm. But if they knew these things existed, they would desire flying across the Atlantic, playing table tennis, or listening to recorded music.
   3. There are clear limits to this theory. Just because I’m a septillionaire doesn’t mean I get a cure for cancer. The fundamental limitation remains the knowledge.
2. Beauty is accumulated knowledge. These experiences—the lake mansion, the hypercar, the best view of the most awe-inspiring skyline humanity has forged—are objects of incredible beauty. They are products of accumulated human knowledge. So desiring beauty is a form of desire to experience knowledge. Deutsch argues beauty is objective and improves like science. But beauty doesn’t look like a problem we need to solve. Why do we seek it out?

So how ambitious should you be? In the startup world there is this famous saying that “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do.” Bigger problems are riskier, but a bigger vision lets you raise more money and hire better people, which reduces the risk. So why not solve the problem people pay the most for? Or should you only be guided by curiosity, as that drive likely carries some latent knowledge about what society wants or where the most interesting gaps are? I don’t know. I suspect it is best to follow a mix of these strategies. Whatever the right mix is, I don’t think ambition is bounded.

The child who grows up knowing they will inherit several large companies might aim to build an even bigger one, while the child of, say, a cashier might aim to be a cashier. Each is working from a conjecture about what is within reach, formed from what they see the people around them do. It only gets criticized if the child asks whether they could do what someone like Elon Musk did, or something nobody has done before. That is why optimism matters for ambition. It says the only limit is what we don’t yet know.

Alexandr Wang recently said “Humans will dream bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems.” I think that is true. And one day kids will dream of owning several galaxies. We don’t yet know what we’d want after that. Human dreams, desire, and our future are infinite.

Yes, I think you misunderstood. I've been referring to continuity in the organization of information processing, not the physical substrate. Evolutionary continuity is relevant because humans and other animals share many mechanisms and processing structures, some of which may be relevant to sentience. That doesn't imply that evolution couldn't also produce fundamentally new cognitive capacities.

In fact, if a future MacBook became sentient, it would be very interesting to investigate its predecessors (probably) ONLY if they shared a sufficiently similar organization of information processing.

But we already know both current and future MacBooks will have von Neumann architecture. We already know it’s only different programming that could matter re: consciousness.

And that's exactly what I've been talking about: humans and other animals share evolved mechanisms with significant continuity in how information processing is organized.

I disagree. I think there’s an important break/jump in human evolution: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/the-neo-darwinian-theory-of-the-mind

… I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.

As I understood it, you argued that it mattered insofar as it was part of evolutionary continuity. Did I misunderstand you there?

I think you're still missing the distinction I've made. Initially, you invoked substrate independence as though it contradicted my argument, but I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.

As Tegmark explains in the article you linked, it's the organization of information processing that matters, not the material implementing it. And that's exactly what I've been talking about: humans and other animals share evolved mechanisms with significant continuity in how information processing is organized.

Your MacBook analogy doesn't address that. In fact, if a future MacBook became sentient, it would be very interesting to investigate its predecessors (probably) ONLY if they shared a sufficiently similar organization of information processing. If, instead, sentience arose through a fundamentally different program, those predecessors would be much less plausible candidates for sentience.

So when you conclude that it would be about software rather than hardware, you're arguing against a claim I never made.

… I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.

She’s unconscious for all of that! It shows the opposite.

Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity…

More needlessly complicated language.

What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?

Because nothing is missing in our explanations of how calculators, roombas, self-driving cars etc work. Consciousness doesn’t figure in our explanations of them. The information processing animals do is the same as that of calculators etc. So the same conclusion applies.

Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?

Because then it can be explained fully in terms of mindless execution of a pre-written computer program.

Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity…

More unnecessarily complicated language.

I think this leaves my central criticism unresolved: Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity, whereas my question is whether it can have subjective experiences without possessing that capacity.

Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?

This seems to depend on the very connection between universal creativity and sentience that is under dispute. What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?

And I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.

When she wakes up, however, what seems to change is her capacity for reflective awareness and understanding.

This idea (#5956) should be revised to be marked as a criticism.

Fixed. The discussion title now uses title case: ‘Immortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas Is Not Immoral’.

I recently spent a Sunday vibe coding an ai-image-gen micro-SaaS. The person that inspired me accused me of copying his product and threatened to damage my reputation. However, I improved on his idea by implementing several features his product didn’t have such as allowing for 7 multiple output styles, custom prompts, churn-prevention email follow-ups, and a landing page that better explains the product.

Most people hold fundamentally wrong ideas about morality. This includes thinking that copying business ideas or having CRISPR-edited super babies is immoral, that death is good, that the existence of billionaires is wrong, and that not helping others is immoral. They all spring from an avoidance of conflict: the conflict of ideas, the conflict of accepting not to exist, the conflict of envy, etc. This “morality” becomes destructive because it’s scared of the turning forces of evolution by evading conflict and adversity of any kind. It’s suffocating.

Morality is best explained by epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), not religion or intuition. With this lens morality is the knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for¹.

The most fundamental tenet of morality is to not remove the means of error-correction². Since error-correction is the only way our knowledge can improve.

If society hinders a scientist from inventing and distributing a cure for cancer, that is deeply immoral. Many regulations that restrict the freedom of people and their ideas are immoral.

Copying someone's business

The Samwer brothers famously copied Airbnb and other companies, but these companies provided the solution to people in different geographies or demographics, improving access to the solution.

Their Airbnb clone, Wimdu, largely failed because it was only a surface-level copy that didn’t innovate on any aspect of the business. It incentivized Airbnb to innovate on better host support, internationalization, trust infrastructure, and regulatory compliance.

Opening a lemonade stand two blocks from an existing one incentivizes both lemonade stand operators to improve their lemonade. Competition leads to innovation.

Now, why do most people believe that copying someone’s business is immoral?

I think the main reason is that people think ideas can be “stolen”. That is wrong. Ideas are non-rivalrous³. And everyone should be incentivized to reproduce them and correct their errors. Problems are solvable⁴, and there is an infinity of problems (people always want more). IP law is another way to incentivize people to innovate. Unfortunately, large companies like Amazon (with hundreds of people in their internal legal department working on IP law) exploit this system to prevent competition.

But isn't competition for losers?

Peter Thiel famously proclaimed this in his book Zero to One. In a demand-constrained market, this is true. Building another AI headshot app wouldn’t be a great idea if the demand for AI headshots were shrinking rapidly. It is not.

Even Founders Fund (Thiel’s venture firm) invested in companies with strong competition:

• Ramp: Launched two years after Brex; both grew quickly as financial operations digitalized.
• Spotify: Entered a crowded market (iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody) just as music streaming took off.
• Rippling: Entered HR/payroll after Gusto, ADP, and Paychex; succeeded by bundling HR, IT, and finance as businesses moved to the cloud.
• Postmates: Was started after Grubhub and Seamless, but grew fast as on-demand delivery became a habit.
• Icon.com: Was started after there were already countless AI ad generator platforms. As more people consume short-form video content and realistic AI-image and video generation becomes possible, demand for this kind of software explodes.

It would be stupid to claim these companies are immoral because they copied another business. Here are some other moral mistakes I have considered lately. They range from economics to biology to altruism.

Altruism

Helping can be immoral if it prevents people from learning to solve their own problems. It can also be immoral if the invested resources could have led to a greater error correction. Socialism, with its underlying philosophy of altruism, is the embodiment of this error. For example, the US government taxes the 343 million Americans ~$1.2 trillion per year (that’s ~$3,580 per person on avg.) to fund a public education system that is stuck in the 1800s. These people could have used the resources the state took from them to buy education services from private companies that have a clear profit incentive to improve their service. To quote my previous post, “They don’t care if the students hate school” nor if they end up in student debt.

Being immortal

Death is not the only reason that life is “precious”. There are better reasons.

The idea that the shortness of life is what gives it its “meaning” is wrong. Meaning is not zero-sum. I.e., your life doesn’t have a fixed amount of meaning that is reduced if you live longer. The opposite is true, a longer life leads to more meaningful experiences. Life is more like water when you’re thirsty than a rare diamond; its value comes from how much you can experience, not from being limited in quantity.

Life is not its own meaning. Meaning comes from the things you do and create. If your life is unbounded, so is the meaning you can create within it.

People wear seatbelts. Nobody says, “I want to get hit by a car, because my life will have more meaning if it ends sooner.” There’s nothing inherently meaningful about limitation or scarcity by itself. If that were true, a two-day life would be more meaningful than a 70-year life.

Some argue that meaningfulness of life is binary. But if knowing the exact day of your death feels terrifying, that shows that it’s not simply mortality that gives meaning, but the unpredictable and exciting adventure of living itself.

Even Christianity calls death an enemy from humanity’s fall, promising its end: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). In paradise, “death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4). It sees death as a problem to be solved, not a source of meaning.

Ultimately I think arguments that claim death is moral originated to cope with the fear of death. The thought that our existence suddenly stops. All the laughter, parties, friends, interesting conversation, sex, beautiful landscapes and skylines are suddenly taken from us, for eternity.

Nick Bostrom in his essay The Fable of the Dragon‑Tyrant calls this "deathist" ideology—the passive acceptance of what should be humanity's greatest enemy. My friend Arjun criticized other common arguments against immortality in his blog post.

Involuntary death isn’t a cosmic necessity; it’s a biological error, possibly the greatest error of all. And it’s one we may soon be able to fix. Just imagine the inventions we never experienced and how many more lives would flourish today if people like Euclid, Newton, Tesla, Marie Curie, or Alan Turing would still be alive.

CRISPER-edited Super Babies

Some people don’t like the idea of us playing God. But that is what we are now. We are as gods and might as well get good at it⁵.

Others claim that gene-editing super babies (to be free from disease or just smarter) would be an innovation that only the rich could afford, thereby creating a segregated society. The 1997 movie Gattaca is a dramatization of this claim.

That logic is wrong because it impedes the spread of an innovation (and error correction). The assumption that non-gene-improved people will be relegated to menial jobs is also wrong because there are many wealthy people with fun jobs who are low in IQ or disabled.

History shows that innovation disperses. Initially only the rich could afford better nutrition or computers. Should we have waited before allowing people to buy a computer until they are cheap enough for eight billion people to have their own? No.

Opposing gene-editing is like opposing antibiotics because not everyone could afford penicillin in 1928.

The technology is here. Using embryo selection or gene editing to have a super baby is a choice about your body and procreation. Some people don't think you should have this choice. But *it's not their choice to make. It's yours*.⁶

Billionaires

Some people claim billionaires shouldn’t exist. That is wrong. I'd even go so far as to say that not wanting to be a billionaire (or trillionaire) is wrong. Ambition is a consequence of optimism. In his Davos 2024 speech Javier Milei said:

Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral

We are like billionaires to people living 5000 years ago. If some of these people did not desire immense wealth, we’d probably still live in mud huts now. We're like iron age peasants to the people that will live 2000 years from now.

Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now.⁷

I think the disgust of the existence of billionaires likely stems from envy. But that response is wrong. What matters is not the relative, but the absolute wealth and well-being of people. In the future, inequality will become ever greater. Some people will own entire galaxies, while others will only own a continent on a single planet. Everyone will be immensely more wealthy.

Thanks for reading this. I’ll now continue playing the infinite game of capitalism.

Thanks to my friends for feedback on this essay: Tom Hyde, Milan Scharfe, Ben Chugg, Vaden Masrani, Maxime Desalle, Saketh, Jesse Ray Nichols, David Taurat, Logan Chipkin, Brian Chau, Remus

The Epistemology and Defence of Ambition

Until about a week ago it seemed incredibly obvious to me that wanting to be rich is rational but I could not explain why. Fundamentally I agree with Popper and Deutsch that all life is problem solving. But is not having a mansion on Lake Como a problem? Is not being immortal a problem? How do we decide between these?

The lone scientist obsessed with some theoretical problem strikes most people as weird. How can someone toil for 30 years on a problem, living on a modest salary, without any desire to accumulate massive wealth? According to the Popperian view above, that is completely rational. The scientist is fully engrossed in problem solving.

If that is true, why am I and most people so drawn to solving my problem of not having a mansion on Lake Como, driving a Bugatti hypercar, or overlooking the skyline of NYC from a Billionaires’ Row apartment? Status plays a part, but I think I’d want these things even if nobody knew about them.

I think the two reasons are:

1. Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do. I can likely only experience these things with incredible wealth. They are a symbol of that repertoire. Some of my desires I know already, like the mansion. Most I don’t know yet. Future desires are unknowable, thus attaining wealth allows me to solve problems in the future I don’t know I’ll have.
   1. This is the antithesis to the famous fisherman story (a businessman advises a fisherman to scale up his business so he can retire and fish). The story contains the assumption that the fisherman already knows the problem he wants to solve. The fisherman might want to travel the world, build a school, research AI, explore space.
   2. Imagine a person 1000 years ago. They might only want better food, safer shelter, a healthy family, or perhaps a larger farm. But if they knew these things existed, they would desire flying across the Atlantic, playing table tennis, or listening to recorded music.
   3. There are clear limits to this theory. Just because I’m a septillionaire doesn’t mean I get a cure for cancer. The fundamental limitation remains the knowledge.
2. Beauty is accumulated knowledge. These experiences—the lake mansion, the hypercar, the best view of the most beautiful skyline humanity has forged—are objects of incredible beauty. They are products of accumulated human knowledge. So desiring beauty is a form of desire to experience knowledge. Deutsch’s example is flowers: they evolved to attract insects, yet we find them beautiful too.

So how ambitious should you be? In the startup world there is this famous saying that “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do.” So why not solve the problem people pay the most for? Or should you only be guided by curiosity, as that drive likely carries some latent knowledge about what society wants or where the most interesting gaps are? I don’t know. This is a gap in my theory, and I’d love for someone to fill it. I suspect it is best to follow a mix of these strategies. Whatever the right mix is, I don’t think ambition has a ceiling.

Alexandr Wang recently said “Humans will dream bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems.” I think that is true. And one day kids will dream of owning several galaxies. We don’t yet know what we’d want after that. Human dreams, desire, and our future are infinite.

I recently spent a Sunday vibe coding an ai-image-gen micro-SaaS. The person that inspired me accused me of copying his product and threatened to damage my reputation. However, I improved on his idea by implementing several features his product didn’t have such as allowing for 7 multiple output styles, custom prompts, churn-prevention email follow-ups, and a landing page that better explains the product.

Most people hold fundamentally wrong ideas about morality. This includes thinking that copying business ideas or having CRISPR-edited super babies is immoral, that death is good, that the existence of billionaires is wrong, and that not helping others is immoral. They all spring from an avoidance of conflict: the conflict of ideas, the conflict of accepting not to exist, the conflict of envy, etc. This “morality” becomes destructive because it’s scared of the turning forces of evolution by evading conflict and adversity of any kind. It’s suffocating.

Morality is best explained by epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), not religion or intuition. With this lens morality is the knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for¹.

The most fundamental tenet of morality is to not remove the means of error-correction². Since error-correction is the only way our knowledge can improve.

If society hinders a scientist from inventing and distributing a cure for cancer, that is deeply immoral. Many regulations that restrict the freedom of people and their ideas are immoral.

Copying someone's business

The Samwer brothers famously copied Airbnb and other companies, but these companies provided the solution to people in different geographies or demographics, improving access to the solution.

Their Airbnb clone, Wimdu, largely failed because it was only a surface-level copy that didn’t innovate on any aspect of the business. It incentivized Airbnb to innovate on better host support, internationalization, trust infrastructure, and regulatory compliance.

Opening a lemonade stand two blocks from an existing one incentivizes both lemonade stand operators to improve their lemonade. Competition leads to innovation.

Now, why do most people believe that copying someone’s business is immoral?

I think the main reason is that people think ideas can be “stolen”. That is wrong. Ideas are non-rivalrous³. And everyone should be incentivized to reproduce them and correct their errors. Problems are solvable⁴, and there is an infinity of problems (people always want more). IP law is another way to incentivize people to innovate. Unfortunately, large companies like Amazon (with hundreds of people in their internal legal department working on IP law) exploit this system to prevent competition.

But isn't competition for losers?

Peter Thiel famously proclaimed this in his book Zero to One. In a demand-constrained market, this is true. Building another AI headshot app wouldn’t be a great idea if the demand for AI headshots were shrinking rapidly. It is not.

Even Founders Fund (Thiel’s venture firm) invested in companies with strong competition:

• Ramp: Launched two years after Brex; both grew quickly as financial operations digitalized.
• Spotify: Entered a crowded market (iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody) just as music streaming took off.
• Rippling: Entered HR/payroll after Gusto, ADP, and Paychex; succeeded by bundling HR, IT, and finance as businesses moved to the cloud.
• Postmates: Was started after Grubhub and Seamless, but grew fast as on-demand delivery became a habit.
• Icon.com: Was started after there were already countless AI ad generator platforms. As more people consume short-form video content and realistic AI-image and video generation becomes possible, demand for this kind of software explodes.

It would be stupid to claim these companies are immoral because they copied another business. Here are some other moral mistakes I have considered lately. They range from economics to biology to altruism.

Altruism

Helping can be immoral if it prevents people from learning to solve their own problems. It can also be immoral if the invested resources could have led to a greater error correction. Socialism, with its underlying philosophy of altruism, is the embodiment of this error. For example, the US government taxes the 343 million Americans ~$1.2 trillion per year (that’s ~$3,580 per person on avg.) to fund a public education system that is stuck in the 1800s. These people could have used the resources the state took from them to buy education services from private companies that have a clear profit incentive to improve their service. To quote my previous post, “They don’t care if the students hate school” nor if they end up in student debt.

Being immortal

Death is not the only reason that life is “precious”. There are better reasons.

The idea that the shortness of life is what gives it its “meaning” is wrong. Meaning is not zero-sum. I.e., your life doesn’t have a fixed amount of meaning that is reduced if you live longer. The opposite is true, a longer life leads to more meaningful experiences. Life is more like water when you’re thirsty than a rare diamond; its value comes from how much you can experience, not from being limited in quantity.

Life is not its own meaning. Meaning comes from the things you do and create. If your life is unbounded, so is the meaning you can create within it.

People wear seatbelts. Nobody says, “I want to get hit by a car, because my life will have more meaning if it ends sooner.” There’s nothing inherently meaningful about limitation or scarcity by itself. If that were true, a two-day life would be more meaningful than a 70-year life.

Some argue that meaningfulness of life is binary. But if knowing the exact day of your death feels terrifying, that shows that it’s not simply mortality that gives meaning, but the unpredictable and exciting adventure of living itself.

Even Christianity calls death an enemy from humanity’s fall, promising its end: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). In paradise, “death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4). It sees death as a problem to be solved, not a source of meaning.

Ultimately I think arguments that claim death is moral originated to cope with the fear of death. The thought that our existence suddenly stops. All the laughter, parties, friends, interesting conversation, sex, beautiful landscapes and skylines are suddenly taken from us, for eternity.

Nick Bostrom in his essay The Fable of the Dragon‑Tyrant calls this "deathist" ideology—the passive acceptance of what should be humanity's greatest enemy. My friend Arjun criticized other common arguments against immortality in his blog post.

Involuntary death isn’t a cosmic necessity; it’s a biological error, possibly the greatest error of all. And it’s one we may soon be able to fix. Just imagine the inventions we never experienced and how many more lives would flourish today if people like Euclid, Newton, Tesla, Marie Curie, or Alan Turing would still be alive.

CRISPER-edited Super Babies

Some people don’t like the idea of us playing God. But that is what we are now. We are as gods and might as well get good at it⁵.

Others claim that gene-editing super babies (to be free from disease or just smarter) would be an innovation that only the rich could afford, thereby creating a segregated society. The 1997 movie Gattaca is a dramatization of this claim.

That logic is wrong because it impedes the spread of an innovation (and error correction). The assumption that non-gene-improved people will be relegated to menial jobs is also wrong because there are many wealthy people with fun jobs who are low in IQ or disabled.

History shows that innovation disperses. Initially only the rich could afford better nutrition or computers. Should we have waited before allowing people to buy a computer until they are cheap enough for eight billion people to have their own? No.

Opposing gene-editing is like opposing antibiotics because not everyone could afford penicillin in 1928.

The technology is here. Using embryo selection or gene editing to have a super baby is a choice about your body and procreation. Some people don't think you should have this choice. But *it's not their choice to make. It's yours*.⁶

Billionaires

Some people claim billionaires shouldn’t exist. That is wrong. I'd even go so far as to say that not wanting to be a billionaire (or trillionaire) is wrong. Ambition is a consequence of optimism. In his Davos 2024 speech Javier Milei said:

Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral

We are like billionaires to people living 5000 years ago. If some of these people did not desire immense wealth, we’d probably still live in mud huts now. We're like iron age peasants to the people that will live 2000 years from now.

Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.⁷

I think the disgust of the existence of billionaires likely stems from envy. But that response is wrong. What matters is not the relative, but the absolute wealth and well-being of people. In the future, inequality will become ever greater. Some people will own entire galaxies, while others will only own a continent on a single planet. Everyone will be immensely more wealthy.

Thanks for reading this. I’ll now continue playing the infinite game of capitalism.

Thanks to my friends for feedback on this essay: Tom Hyde, Milan Scharfe, Ben Chugg, Vaden Masrani, Maxime Desalle, Saketh, Jesse Ray Nichols, David Taurat, Logan Chipkin, Brian Chau, Remus

The Epistemology and Defence of Ambition

Until about a week ago it seemed incredibly obvious to me that wanting to be rich is rational but I could not explain why. Fundamentally I agree with Popper and Deutsch that all life is problem solving. But is not having a mansion on Lake Como a problem? Is not being immortal a problem? How do we decide between these?

The lone scientist obsessed with some theoretical problem strikes most people as weird. How can someone toil for 30 years on a problem, living on a modest salary, without any desire to accumulate massive wealth? According to the simple Popperian view mentioned, that is completely rational. The scientist is fully engrossed in problem solving.

If that is true, why am I and most people so drawn to solving my problem of not having a mansion on Lake Como, driving a Bugatti hypercar, or overlooking the skyline of NYC from a Billionaires' Row apartment? Why am I so drawn to these problems? It can’t just be because they are status symbols. I’d want these things even if nobody knew about them.

I think the two reasons are:

1. Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do. I can likely only experience these things with incredible wealth. They are a symbol of that repertoire. Future desires are unknowable thus attaining wealth allows me to solve problems in the future I don’t know I’ll have.
   1. This is the antithesis to the famous fisherman story. The story contains the assumption that the fisherman already knows the problem he wants to solve. The fisherman might want to travel the world, build a school, research AI, explore space.
   2. Imagine a person 1000 years ago. They might only want better food, safer shelter, a healthy family, or perhaps a larger farm. But if they knew these things existed, they would desire flying across the Atlantic, playing table tennis, or listening to recorded music.
   3. There are clear limits to this theory. Just because I’m a septillionaire it does not give me a cure for cancer. The fundamental limitation remains the knowledge.
2. Beauty is accumulated knowledge. These experiences—the lake mansion, the hypercar, the best view of the most beautiful skyline humanity has forged—are objects of incredible beauty. They are products of accumulated human knowledge. So desiring beauty is a form of desire to experience knowledge.

So how ambitious should you be? In the startup world there is this famous saying that “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do.” So why not pick the bigger problem, since if you solve it society will reward you accordingly. Or should you only be guided by curiosity; as that drive likely carries some latent knowledge about what society wants? I don’t know. I suspect it is best to follow a mix of these strategies. Whatever the right mix is, I don't think ambition has a ceiling.

Alexandr Wang recently said “Humans will dream bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems.” I think that is true. And one day kids will dream of owning several galaxies. We don't yet know what we'd want after that. Human dreams, desire, and our future are infinite.

Good q. I think it would depend on the tests. For example, idea C could say: ‘Both A and B fail a test, but test 1 is more severe than test 2, so A is preferable.’

We have different degrees of awareness during different dreams, I agree. But we’re aware of them. With higher critical ability, we plausibly have more control over a dream – lower instead means passive observation.

It’s like watching a movie. I have no control over what happens in the movie, still I’m consciously aware of it. I could instead play a video game, where I do have some control over what happens, and which arguably requires more of a critical attitude. I don’t see how this refutes my stance.

Vincent is right that lucid dreaming is about having knowledge that one is dreaming. I was under the mistaken impression that lucid dreams are about control, but that’s not the case:

… a lucid dream is a type of dream wherein the dreamer knows that they are dreaming while in their dream.

… without awareness that one is dreaming.

I can be unaware that I’m dreaming but still be aware of the dream itself. Just like I can be unaware that someone’s utterances are lies but still aware of their utterances. The word ‘aware’ has more to do with knowledge here than with consciousness.

… because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.

I don’t think that’s right. There could be animal behavior I’d have serious trouble explaining.

People asked me about this at Conjecture Con. For example, if we took an animal out of the context in which it evolved, and put it in a new context it didn’t evolve for – that’s where animals bug out – but instead of bugging out, it behaved more like a human in an unknown situation and became reflective, actually seemed to understand what was going on, that would at least give me pause.

I can’t be more specific than that because it would depend in part on new knowledge the animal would have to create in that situation, and by definition I can’t predict new knowledge. But I’d know it when I see it.

That may not be completely satisfying, but it shows that it’s simply not true that any animal behavior “could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.” (Or rather, the implication that I could always explain any animal behavior away.)

To be as specific as I can though, video 15 in my series on animals and sleepwalkers shows the kind of thing I mean. The woman in the video is asleep while talking to her husband for most of the video, but toward the end she wakes up, and there’s something different in her eyes and about her attitude and responses. It’s hard to put into words, but again you know it when you see it.

… because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.

I don’t think that’s right. There could be animal behavior I’d have serious trouble explaining.

People asked me about this at Conjecture Con. For example, if we took an animal out of the context in which it evolved, and put it in a new context it didn’t evolve for – that’s where animals bug out – but instead of bugging out, it behaved more like a human in an unknown situation and became reflective, actually seemed to understand what was going on, that would at least give me pause.

I can’t be more specific than that because it would depend in part on new knowledge the animal would have to create in that situation, and by definition I can’t predict new knowledge. But I’d know it when I see it.

That may not be completely satisfying, but it shows that it’s simply not true that any animal behavior “could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.”

To be as specific as I can though, video 15 in my series on animals and sleepwalkers shows the kind of thing I mean. The woman in the video is asleep while talking to her husband for most of the video, but toward the end she wakes up, and there’s something different in her eyes and about her attitude and responses. It’s hard to put into words, but again you know it when you see it.