When the Dalai Lama dies, I hear they search for a child who is presumed to be his reincarnation.
Whether or not you believe in reincarnation, if a person dies, there is still a child out there who is most similar in personality to the deceased, by some measure. If it was straightforward to find that person, we could hand on to them everything the deceased collected in their life: objects and advice and perhaps even connections with people.
Usually a person’s things are given to their family, who somewhat appreciate it, but often mostly for the financial and sentimental value, rather than because it contains exactly the collection of photographs of birds that they most want.
Relatedly, I feel like it’s taking me ages to figure out how to be a well-functioning person, and if someone very similar to me had already spent a lifetime working it out, it would be great to have that data.
It seems like evolution could have programmed us to listen to those most like us (our parents usually?) but instead made us seek to mimic those with high status.
It would be mighty convenient if, as well as our ancestors' physical things, we could also inherit their wisdom as if a physical thing.
Unfortunately, it appears that wisdom is usually gained through some kind of suffering: while one may not know the future in detail, it is wisdom if you can see what kinds of things will maybe generally turn out well for you and which things probably won't.
This problem, the transfer of wisdom, is one I think about a lot. If it was personality that was all, then the Dalai Lama boy reincarnation would be sufficient, but wisdom appears to be only reliably transferred by personal suffering. In an ideal world, we would like to minimise suffering, but it appears that some amount is necessary or we won't know how to create an ideal world. And the transfer of wisdom is largely what is lacking in today's society as we lose the knowledge of how to build things in the real world.
Returning to the topic, it would be wonderful if we could have such a practical connection with past lives and thus gain their wisdom without introducing any new suffering. I think that's a potential of videogames, for people with empathy. Can we gain in our Wisdom attribute by playing the right role in a role-playing game? But if all the world's a stage, isn't that just life? So clearly we can gain wisdom through playing roles in games.
If you are struggling to be a well-functioning person: that is a struggle I sympathise with deeply. It is hard to be well-functioning in such an absurd world as this. Almost everyone is almost entirely wrong almost all the time. Yet things somehow work anyway.
At the moment, my torturous existence consists of "organising my notes." I am putting together a damn notes app that isn't shit, so I can put my thoughts into a computer in a better way than Markdown text and make a personal website. And I'd love to write a longer comment here about ways of being and this scaling wisdom problem, but my laptop is running out of battery and I need to recharge. I feel like there are so many things competing for my attention that I just need to wind down a bit and make sure I'm not crazy.
Hopefully I'll be done with that in a couple weeks and I can get onto the interesting stuff. I've been quite impressed with Lumo, Proton's AI, to the point where normal search now feels impoverished.
The immensity of the frustration I feel when I look at the state of software today cannot be overstated. I just want one good, non-shit program. It'll be helpful for both writing and life admin and a lot of other crap. It will help organise information for a human on a computer. This is what I'm spending my battery on at the moment because I believe it will lead to a much more organised approach to digitising my notes, writing articles, essays, and even videos and audio. It will help me be a better person, I believe. Then, of course, I wish to share that experience with you and with everyone.