Infinity test
What will, should and can we do, infinitely?
Recently a good friend asked me a simple, yet profound question.
“Then what?”
He works at the intersection between neuroscience, philosophy and AI, and I was telling him how I’d love to double down on my social and environmental impact, my lifelong mission.
Initially, my lifelong mission came from my childhood, growing up in Myanmar and Brazil, seeing poverty everywhere and experiencing extreme weather events. I naively thought to myself: what good can I do in the world?
Being exposed to effective altruism in university then took me on a path towards more scalable, long-term impact. What can we do to improve the sum of all existing and future lives?
Today, having worked in impact investing for over a decade, my recent hypothesis has shifted to a binary one. What few things make or break our lives in the long-term?
But what he asked was far beyond that.
Once we solve all the social and environmental problems one day, then what do we do?
His hypothesis is truth seeking and play. Once we solve for suffering and death, we won’t have any problem whatsoever. Then, we can at last spend our time on searching for the ultimate truth, while engaging in playful activities.
Infinity test
But as I continue to ponder upon my response for this, I cannot help but to wonder:
What will, should and can we do, infinitely?
The ultimate infinity test.
Longevity is great.
But abundance lowers value. Our time, and even life itself, risk losing any value.
But let’s presume we can solve for that as well by some form of neural intervention.
Then what?
Even play, we will eventually be bored. Kids love playing, but even kids reach a threshold at one point.
Can we create infinite number of plays for us all to play infinitely? Perhaps.
But then again, abundance lowers value. With infinite number of plays, each play will be less fun.
Plus, why pursue fun when we can also presumably add pleasure directly to our brain?
Infinity test essentially brings anything finite to zero. Whether it’s valuable for a day or a century, anything finite is closer to nothing than infinite. So the only valuable thing is what will stay infinite.
So what activity has indefinite value?
Regenerativity
For any activity to be infinity-proof, it must have
(i) zero rate of decay: must have non-diminishing return,
(ii) non-extractive: must not exhaust resources,
(iii) repeatability: must maintain biologically, cognitively, and socially.
Most of our activities fail at least one of them.
Play, pleasure and novelty all decay.
Status, fame and growth-at-all-costs are exhaustive.
Even achievements and problem solving are finite and thus unrepeatable.
The only thing that scales infinitely is regenerative. Activities that regenerate the capacity to continue doing them.
It’s not a linear activity, but rather oscillation. Infinite homeostasis.
Breathing in and out.
Eating and moving.
Exercising and sleeping.
Socializing and being alone.
Playing and being bored.
Imagining and questioning.
Being shocked and stabilizing.
Generating and regenerating.
Preparing for an infinite life today
If we have a non-zero chance of not dying (and we really may be the first generation to have such possibility), we must prepare ourselves for the infinite future. Because the consequence is infinite, it far outweighs any finite cost of preparation (Pascal’s wager).
I used to love asking myself and others this simple question to separate atelic and transactional activities:
What would I do if I only had one more year to live?
But infinity test gives a different perspective. It’s not what we’d do with limited resources. It is, what we’d do with unlimited resources.
And when we remove the (soon-to-be) artificial cap on life, the difference between atelic and transactional activities become heaven and hell.
The infinity test reveals what is truly valuable in our lives.
Are our lives truly resilient in extreme conditions of infinity?
The ultimate stress test for humanity.
So let us ask ourselves:
What would I do if I had to do it forever?
That’s it for today. If this resonated, share it with those interested in living infinitely. And if you haven’t yet, subscribe to keep exploring deep thoughts.
With Love,
Koshu
"What would I do if I had to do it forever?"
There's a hidden assumption in your argument that activities are isolated from other considerations, and these would indeed be inherently limited by our biology (hence why one of your 3 constraints is always violated).
But perhaps:
1) Activities performed in pursuit of a higher purpose can be fulfilling.
2) Higher purpose can be found in identifying and overcoming limits.
3) Limits are unbounded in an infinite universe.
Therefore, there is an infinite supply of fulfilling activities (and maybe truth-seeking is one).