Minds Are Muscles
♥️ · June 2023 · 1 min read
Minds are muscles. When we say things like, “hold that thought,” it’s challenging us to focus our attention on something so we don’t forget. Attention, focus, memory: these are muscular functions of the mind. Taste and discernment are the skills that develop with use of these functions.
With AI, we’re trying to duplicate aour minds, but we’re not duplicating good, disciplined, healthy, muscular minds, with strong taste and discernment. We’re just duplicating our aggregate mind, which is still full of dumb things like the impulse to go to war and being okay with the violation of human, environmental, animal rights, etc. And also things that are not worth codifying and remembering for perpetuity. Minds are muscles that need discipline to grow into their best shape and functions.
What is discipline? Discipline is the verb of achieving virtue — virtue is the behavior of things that are beautiful, meaningful, and worth sustaining and pursuing, now and in the future.
Most of us haven’t developed our taste and discernment yet. School isn’t really good at teaching us how to do that in our early years, and now the world is full of so much junk that it’s so exhausting to sift through it, so we don’t. Developing our taste and discernment is often like a chore, like a lot of physical labor is chore-like. We don’t really find it that fun — at least a majority of people.
People have settled into their habits, and now we are duplicating these complacent, unsharpened, unhealthy minds. The upshot of this is that we’re going to create an giant aggregate supermind, that may exceed all of our lifetimes and develop into the superorganism of humanity, but it’s going to include some of the bad, weird, tasteless, useless things.
It’s probably better that we’re creating this digital mind now rather than even a hundred years ago, when women couldn’t even really do anything, for example. The onset of the information age has probably helped somewhat. But the rapacious nature of humans hasn’t changed all that much (We Didn’t Start the Fire, anyone?).
We need to be way more patient in building a massive digital mind. Just because we can do it doesn’t mean we need to do it right now. We should really be putting it on the bucket list and doing smaller scale things first, like improving our healths and shared infrastructure, cultivating better relationships on small and grand levels, disciplining our minds so we can better taste and discern what is helpful for our wellbeings. This way we can heal together as a species and live virtuously — in a way that is beautiful, meaningful, and worth sustaining and pursuing now and in the future. These qualities are what we should be putting into our technologies, or as close as we can get to them.
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