The whole idea of a “physical explanation” dissolves when we add in a supernatural element. For example, imagine God says, “The speed of light is temporarily no longer the fundamental speed limit of the Universe” and then speedy zoomies the stars far far away in just 6000 years. Is that a “physical explanation?” Yes, in that the physical bodies followed all the rules that existed. You could “explain away” literally anything.

Is mental disengagement considered an adaptive or maladaptive strategy? Can’t tell from the article.

I think that’s a bad definition of value. Is child labor valuable? No. No amount of coal or whatever is ever going to make up for the horror of living in a society that could treat its children that way. Even in purely utilitarian terms, child labor is just not valuable. There’s an externality to cruelty that has to be factored in.

If capitalism funnels resources towards band-aids instead of cures (and I get that you might not buy that point yet), then it’s not “dedicating Agency towards problems that generate the most Value.” It is overwhelmingly more valuable for society if diabetes is cured. Imagine all the diabetics currently chained to their dead-end jobs because they can’t afford private insurance getting to start their own businesses and compete.

The problem I have with this argument overall is the extreme flattening of everything into binaries. If you get the capital, you’re Europe. Otherwise, you’re Venezuela. It just doesn’t fit with how these achievements actually get done. Like somebody had to pay for government-subsidized education. And we are ALL richer for it. Every single one of us is better off for having a better informed electorate. Competition is better now that the poor have the education to compete with the rich. There are amazing benefits to public health when everybody has to take chemistry or biology or whatever.

Did we have to SOLVE SCARCITY to outlaw child labor or get public education? No, this “we’ll get around to it later when capitalism fixes everything” rhetoric is just too convenient. It fails to interrogate whether capitalism is actually fixing those things and overlooks the grey areas in between where we can make marginal progress.

I’m not talking about insulin. There is sometimes an incentive under capitalism to shift research money towards developing band-aid products that can be sold repeatedly. The OP made an extremely broad claim that requires way more evidence than is available. For capitalism to literally solve scarcity, there can be exactly zero counter examples. If even a single problem is more profitable to band-aid than to fix, his whole starry-eyed prediction fails.

At some point, when we ignore things like barriers to entry and imperfect competition, we stop talking about reality and start wishing. I can’t build a pharmaceutical lab in my garage. That’s just not how capitalism works. Even with zero regulation, we’d still have barriers to entry that create imperfect competition. Is it possible that regulations are one of many complex factors causing the insulin market to be semi-monopolistic? Sure. But even if the incentives were perfect, there is a wealth of literature in behavioral economics that suggests incentives are not destiny. This is a classic problem where creating a dedicated program whose priority can be long-term public good and not short-term profit can boost a weakness in our current system.

> “A land flowing with milk and honey—desalination and carbon-capture fed by the unlimited energy of Solar-Wind-Battery systems. Agriculture and supply-chain-infrastructure powered by end-to-end automation. Disease and disability mitigated by the confluence of gene-editing and robotics—the possibilities are endless, and the list goes on and on.

> “That itself, is what could be called Utopia; the coming world of our next century—and any and all who disagree are either deeply pessimistic or simply uninformed…

Capitalism isn’t going to give us a utopia. For one, capitalism only puts resources towards towards problems that can be monetized. For example, there is a huge incentive not to cure diabetes. Insulin is extremely cheap to produce and diabetics have no real choice but to buy. It’s not “stupid” or “uninformed” to suggest that utopia is not right around the capitalist bend or even just that there might be some slight tweaks that could get us there faster.

I think it really comes down to this Dionysian/Apollonian argument. The idea that anybody who suggests compassion is just some envious charlatan who is by definition weaker than some super competent ubermensch is just so full of assumptions. The causal reasoning as to how these resentful leaders with their forgiveness - barf! - and selflessness - yuck! - turn society into Swiss cheese deserves criticism.

I don’t think the results are bad. I think good results are necessary but not sufficient for a meaningful project.

I’m talking about access to political power. I think Musk’s project is inherently illegitimate if it inherits the human rights abuses and disenfranchisement from an extremely hierarchical system. That’s not to say that all hierarchy necessarily creates human rights abuses. The key words are “deeply” and “extreme.”

I honestly do not believe he’s making the world a better place. I don’t share the assumption that the feudal lord’s investment into the hoe project can be plausibly interpreted as some kind of charitable sacrifice. Any account as to whether he’s doing a good thing for the world must ask “Why is he giving orders at all?” “Why did he get to decide what kind of society would be good for the rest of us?” “Is he building a world that replicates our current abuses?” That kind of arbitrary exercise of power isn’t some deeply reflective sacrifice. It’s just narcissism.

I think this “thing good = meaning” argument misses the value of the mission.

Imagine a feudalist lord who owns a castle. He orders his serf to build this new invention called “the hoe.” It’s amazing. It revolutionizes farming, feeds a bunch of people, yadda yadda.

Should I use that feudal lord as an examplar for the meaningful life? No, he did good stuff to perpetuate a system that is awful. Also, he didn’t do jack shit. He’s not a hoe engineer. He just owned stuff and gave orders and raked in the profit.

For crying out loud, we might as well use Trump as the example of the reflective philosopher out there carefully crafting a meaningful life like a work of art just because he instinctively grabbed at power like an especially selfish toddler.

I’m not asking “What about my share?” so much as “Is this actually a good future for humanity?”

No, the answer is so obviously no. This is the society we get when we let great-men tech-fetishist hypercapitalists define our future.

You wanna get to space? Me too. But what will space be when we get there? A “progress” that treats exploitation as the cost of doing business may get us to space… but it brings the dystopia with us.

If this is true, it contradicts OP’s thesis that we can rule out happiness as meaningful.

Also, do we really believe this about meaning being entirely subjective? I forget the name of the philosopher, but I remember from intro to philosophy the counter-example of a man who finds meaning in eating his own shit and watching paint dry and torturing babies. There is a big difference between “I can’t prove an objective, universal meaning” and “baby torture is literally identically meaningful as striving to cure cancer.”

Elon Musk as the example of a meaningful life. Uh-huh.

If we include narcissism as a meaningful pursuit, we might as well include happiness. Being an oligarch of a deeply unequal society is not meaningful. If the meaning of your life is to build a better society, then we actually have to ask: What kind of a society?

I am deeply skeptical of this doe-eyed “multi-planet, beyond-the-stars society” poetic waxing. These billionaires are adopting the language of democracy (“We” are going to the stars, “we” are gonna live in the future) but you aren’t invited on the arc. And even if you were, you would be the janitor. Because “more stuff” solves nothing when you replicate the same social problems that got us in this crisis in the first place.