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C00002 00002	advice[e81,jmc]		Advice to Earthmen
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advice[e81,jmc]		Advice to Earthmen

	This is advice on how to live and how to avoid doing harm
and how to sometimes do some good.  We call it "Advice to Earthmen",
because the advice given depends heavily on what we Earthmen are
like, rather than how we might be.

	What are we Earthmen (and women) like?

	1. We have evolved biologically from some kind of ape in the
course of a few million years.  This is a rather short time biologically,
so in many respects we're rather like apes.

	2. Our society has evolved culturally over a few tens of thousands
of years.

	3. The era of rapid change in technology is only a few hundred
years old.

	4. According to the theory of evolution, natural selection has
resulted in biological traits suitable for surviving and reproducing
in the kind of culture that existed (say) 100,000 years ago.  While
evolution presumably would select traits suitable for maximal reproduction
in our present culture, there hasn't been time, and our present culture
is a rapidly moving target from the point of view of biological evolution.

	5. People want to live what they consider to be good lives,
and this article consists of advice toward that end.  However, it seems
unlikely to me that any such trait has evolved biologically.  Therefore,
we must regard the biological basis of our notions of happiness, what
goals are worth pursuing, our ability to pursue them, and virtue as
biological accidents.  In so far as these notions are culturally
determined, there has been cultural evolution.  Groups that instill
suitable notions in their members survive better as groups.

	However, we are limited by our biology, and these limitations
are rather unrelated to our present circumstances.

	6. Here are some of the characteristics of human motivation.

	We are motivated by hunger, thirst, fear, sex, sleepiness,
boredom, the desire to be at the right temperature, etc.  These
direct motivations are episodic.  We eat when hungry, and when we
aren't hungry hunger doesn't motivate us.  We put on a sweater or
turn up the thermostat when cold and reverse these actions when hot.

	We are also motivated by
anticipation of future needs and motivations.  We
distinguish hunger as a motivation from the motivation to store
food for the winter.  However, these separate anticipatory motivations
are often merged.  Thus in modern society, we can act so as to have
money in the future without dividing the motivation into providing
for future food or for future shelter.

	We also often desire happiness, even without having a
definite idea of what happiness is.  It is important to understand
that our motivational mechanism permits attaching desire to a name
even when the name isn't the name of something definite.  Wanting
happiness sometimes leads to preferring one action to another, but
we often are unable to decide which of two states of affairs
better fits the happiness goal.  This is quite apart from our
additional uncertainty about the effects of different courses
of action in bringing about the goals.

	We find our difficulties in deciding on goals distressing.
One of our goals seems to be the metagoal of wanting a consistent
goal structure.  A full goal structure would provide a total ordering
of possible future histories so that deciding which course of action
to take would be an intellectual decision problem.

	This desire for a full goal structure is quite strong, but
involves two difficulties.  In the first place, we can't formulate
it satisfactorily.  In the second place, when a person does formulate
some approximate goal structure, he finds that his human nature
prevents fully adhering to it in his actions.  Namely, we evolved
as animals with episodic motivations.  We never evolved the ability
to adhere to a single plan for a whole lifetime.  The old fashioned
folk psychology name for this phenomenon is lack of will power.