No Compassion, no Sense

July 14, 2021 Empathy - Compassion No Comments

In search of sense in the most general way, I come to Compassion. Even intelligence makes no sense without it.

What’s the meaning of it all?

God is an easy solution. Believe in one or another, and you get meaningfulness for free. However, the solution is so easy that we find a thousand of them. The success shows the failure. There being a thousand shows that it’s too easy to be true.

There might be one religion but not many.

That leaves us with the question: What is the sense of life, of humanity, of all the striving and effort, the progress and the backlash?

Selfish genes

One view points to our genes as carriers of a self-fulfilling line of continuity and progress in the sense that the most successful organisms are the ones whose genes are carried into the future.

Our very own idea of making sense comes from this genetic line that discovered intelligence as a new domain in which to spread its tentacles. That makes us the result of a mindless mechanism ― hardly uplifting.

In my view, fortunately, it doesn’t stop here. Darwinistic genes may have brought us where we are. This by no means obliges us to go further down this road. Our genes have given us the choice in many respects, including where we want to see further meaningfulness within the genetic landscape.

We may choose something very different, maybe something more universal. Genes have pushed us. Now, we may be drawn.

Knowledge

Some see the further goal in an accumulation of knowledge (intelligence).

I don’t know about you. Knowledge doesn’t fulfill me. We may have all conceivable knowledge and put it in a box. That’s good to have. I wouldn’t mind. Also, I wouldn’t care if that knowledge would only serve itself.

There is ‘what’ and ‘how’ in knowledge, but no further ‘why.’

I see ‘why’ eventually in only one thing, which is the following.

Big-c Compassion

[see: “Compassion, basically“]

This doesn’t seem arbitrary to me: to diminish suffering and foster growth. It includes the total person and the striving for rationality and depth.

Compassion is also self-contained in that it goes to all sentient – therefore possibly Compassionate – beings. Nevertheless, this is self-containment that includes ‘the other’ most generally. It is all-encompassing self-containment, therefore, having as purpose everything because of the purpose of itself.

One cannot put Compassion in a box without the outside being part of the inside. Since this is not possible, there is no end to Compassion. May this also be our one religion?

Compassionate A.I.

in the path towards artificial intelligence, we should strive towards Compassion before the intelligence itself. This is the main idea of my book: [see: “The Journey Towards Compassionate A.I.”]

That’s better for humanity.

It’s also better for future super-A.I. Otherwise, it may fall into an existential abyss. it would probably find out about Compassion by itself, but this is not certain.

It may be humanity’s biggest gift for the future.