Apr 14, 2023 07:39 PM
(This post was last modified: Apr 14, 2023 07:46 PM by Yazata.)
Elon explains his philosophy and what motivates him. (He's worth $184 billion and still works 12 hour days, 7 days a week. Why?)
He says that he had an existential crisis as a youth and set out seeking the meaning of existence. He read all the religious texts he could get his hands on but didn't find any of them convincing. He tried philosophers and warns teenagers to be careful reading German philosophers (who won't do anything to help a kid's depression).
Then he read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which he describes as an existential philosophy book disguised as humor, disguised as science fiction. (He's probably right.)
In that book, the Earth turns out to be a giant computer trying to solve "the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything". After many years of calculating, the super planet-sized computer announces the answer is '42'.
And Elon had kind of an epiphany. As he sees it, the universe is the Answer. It just is, it's what's real, it exists. The problem that all intelligent life faces, the really really hard problem, is to discover the right questions to ask, the questions that the universe is indeed the answer to. So the issue isn't so much finding the answer (it's right here, there, and everywhere), as it is formulating the questions that the answer is the answer to.
I assume that's why he studied physics. I don't think that it satisfied him either. But he'd found his meaning, his purpose, as a seeker. I don't think that Elon thinks that he will ever discover the right questions to ask, the questions that the universe is the answer to, but he thinks that humanity (the only intelligence that we currently know of in the universe) might have the potential to someday do exactly that.
So Elon's big purpose now is to ensure the survival of the human race (his environmental sustainability interests [Tesla]), to ensure that humanity retains the intellectual liberty to freely pose questions [Twitter] and to help give humanity the broader perspective that expanding out into the universe (interplanetary and eventually interstellar) might help provide [SpaceX]. And perhaps even to fuse the best features of human cognition with the incredible memory, sorting and searching abilities of computers [neuralink].
https://twitter.com/teslaownersSV/status...4323152896
I like this, because it's very congruent with my own sense that we are surrounded by mysteries at every moment. When we examine any belief in detail, we will find that we can't justify it or explain it. (I'm not a foundationalist, we just sort of float...suspended by faith) The goal of philosophers here in our finite lives seems to be to expand the intellectual vocabulary so to speak, to broaden the stock of concepts that we can bring to bear on reality. Improving how we conceptualize things isn't so different from figuring out what questions to ask about them, I guess. Two sides of the same coin.
He says that he had an existential crisis as a youth and set out seeking the meaning of existence. He read all the religious texts he could get his hands on but didn't find any of them convincing. He tried philosophers and warns teenagers to be careful reading German philosophers (who won't do anything to help a kid's depression).
Then he read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which he describes as an existential philosophy book disguised as humor, disguised as science fiction. (He's probably right.)
In that book, the Earth turns out to be a giant computer trying to solve "the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything". After many years of calculating, the super planet-sized computer announces the answer is '42'.
And Elon had kind of an epiphany. As he sees it, the universe is the Answer. It just is, it's what's real, it exists. The problem that all intelligent life faces, the really really hard problem, is to discover the right questions to ask, the questions that the universe is indeed the answer to. So the issue isn't so much finding the answer (it's right here, there, and everywhere), as it is formulating the questions that the answer is the answer to.
I assume that's why he studied physics. I don't think that it satisfied him either. But he'd found his meaning, his purpose, as a seeker. I don't think that Elon thinks that he will ever discover the right questions to ask, the questions that the universe is the answer to, but he thinks that humanity (the only intelligence that we currently know of in the universe) might have the potential to someday do exactly that.
So Elon's big purpose now is to ensure the survival of the human race (his environmental sustainability interests [Tesla]), to ensure that humanity retains the intellectual liberty to freely pose questions [Twitter] and to help give humanity the broader perspective that expanding out into the universe (interplanetary and eventually interstellar) might help provide [SpaceX]. And perhaps even to fuse the best features of human cognition with the incredible memory, sorting and searching abilities of computers [neuralink].
https://twitter.com/teslaownersSV/status...4323152896
I like this, because it's very congruent with my own sense that we are surrounded by mysteries at every moment. When we examine any belief in detail, we will find that we can't justify it or explain it. (I'm not a foundationalist, we just sort of float...suspended by faith) The goal of philosophers here in our finite lives seems to be to expand the intellectual vocabulary so to speak, to broaden the stock of concepts that we can bring to bear on reality. Improving how we conceptualize things isn't so different from figuring out what questions to ask about them, I guess. Two sides of the same coin.
