Let me tell you what our purpose is: consciousness. It's to have good conscious experiences. I think we'll soon achieve a pretty good understanding of meaning

Let me tell you what our purpose is: consciousness. It's to have good conscious experiences. I think we'll soon achieve a pretty good understanding of meaning that we haven't acknowledge in a long time. I think philosophy has been misleading us into thinking purpose/meaning/motivation is not philosophically tractable. But once you acknowledge it's a property of consciousness (which I think is understandable to be a new insight, given we have finally come to terms with being amazing neural machines ourselves), I think it's a matter of studying information and neural experiences, together with a broader view (of survival, sustainability, and ethics) to have a pretty good idea of what it means to have a good life. My current hypothesis is as follows: (1) Richness/Depth of experience; (2) Some kind of notion of beauty; (3) A well-functioning motivation system (which we associate with 'happiness'/'satisfaction'/etc. (4) Sustainability and ethics: ensuring all sentient beings through time and space share this wealth. I hope we can approach a formal theory of ethics and meaning soon. I hope to form a community around discussing and organizing this knowledge (I am notoriously bad with promises though, so if anyone can please help, and join in). Imagine we had a "Super Declaration of [Lifeform] Human Rights", nearly-universally accepted, to guide us! (I think Effective Altruism is a nice step in this direction)