Personal development series: The extended mind and the mission of personal growth 102

The mission of personal growth

The mission of personal growth was defined in my last post titled: "Personal development series: self study 101". Do read that post if you'd like to put this post in a better context. This post assumes you do know yourself to a reasonable extent; love yourself and seek to improve indefinitely. If you've got the motivation to want to always become a better person and grow indefinitely as you improve you will quickly find out that your time to grow is very limited. But is the impact you have going to be limited by the time you have to grow? Is the you in the physical sense the limiting factor?

The digital version of you is not limited in the way the physical version is

The extended mind speaks to the fact that there is a digital you. For example the quantified self turns your physical activity and physical state (taken from snapshots in time) into a bunch of numbers. These numbers form a pattern which we call the quantified self. This digital self is what we refer to when we speak about whether or not measurable improvements are being made.

For example if we are talking about bodybuilding then we would look at measurements of different limbs to track changes in physique. We could for instance determine by community standards that the people around us prefer certain measurements and chase that. We could also determine from our own preferences that we prefer certain measurements and chase those. Improving our measurements is subjective but the numbers being tracked are what ultimately allow us to track improvement and regression in a concrete way. In other words we track improvement and growth by numerical analysis primarily.

Numerical analysis of our digital selves

So how do we determine anything about whether our personal growth is positively or negatively perceived by ourselves and others? This requires numerical analysis of ourselves. We require the ability not just to track our own numbers but to track the feedback received from the public as an input into our calculation. These numbers are then analyzed to produce new numbers which can be tracked.

If we are talking about stocks then we would consider how quants use quantitative analysis to justify whether a particular stock is worthy of investment. When we talk about ourselves we also require a similar level of quantitative analysis to know where we are and how our decisions are taking us where we are trying to go (or away from where we are trying to go). This is in my opinion more a science than an art and more math heavy then most people can realize or handle. This represents the limits of human processing capabilities and is one of the reasons why decision support systems are necessary in the first place.

The extended mind and leveraging machine intelligence for the mission of personal growth

If the personal growth mission is the most important mission then the machines are the only means we have to actually run the calculations necessary to effectively track ourselves in all ways 24/7, to improve our view of ourselves because most people can't even accurately see themselves, to improve our ability to direct ourselves because most people don't really know how to control themselves, and to improve our ability to make decisions about how to improve ourselves by tapping into the wisdom provided by AI.

Currently our lives are like a lottery. People who are born lucky often look down on people born with a little bit less luck. The genes we are born with are genes most of us don't even have awareness of. We don't know our own genes and how they interact. If we got our genes sequenced we lack the processing capacity to analyze the result in any useful way. We simply are operating blind with limited knowledge our ourselves. Of course as a society we demand accountability, personal responsibility, and constant improvement of behavior whether or not the tools to produce this even exist.

Because it's like a lottery we have a lot less control than we might believe we have. But how can we gain more control over ourselves, our own lives, to become better over time? In my opinion that is primarily a matter of computation. If a person has the mission to become better but is currently unable to compute or process reality in a way to achieve that mission beyond a certain point then should we leverage technology to remove that limit?

Corporations will be using technology to grow in the economic domain. There is no limit to professional growth. Personal growth is not given much of a priority and professional growth is prioritized (at least in the current society). The problem with this is that in order to improve in the economic domain in the long term requires personal development. In other words if people improve themselves then people become more valuable to the economy.

Conclusion and some thoughts

• The extended mind allows a person to digitize or quantify their intentions. If that intention is to become the best version of themselves and consistently improve over time then this intent may not actually be possible due to the limits of biology. The extended mind allows in theory for "agents" or the digital intent to be broadcast to robots which pursue those intentions over an indefinite period of time provided they have the resources to do so. So as today we have corporations which take on this function of immortal legal constructs which pursue economic objectives for an indefinite period of time the idea here is that the "business" of personal development can leverage technology in the same way.

• The business of personal development is about making people better over time. In order for the business to run for an indefinite period of time it must remain profitable. This means people have to be perceived as improving in the market and by the community. The current problem is the market doesn't actually directly reward personal development. The other problem is the technology itself doesn't really allow it and due to regulatory (and social) barriers we are very limited.

• There is of course the problem of abuse. There will always be people who do not really want to become better and who just want to become bigger, more powerful. Growth for it's own sake is a situation where the entity growing is immune to community sentiment. If that entity is not subjected to being rated, or being reviewed, or being given feedback from the community, then it's growth cannot conform with or adapt to the needs of the community. This is a problem for businesses, governments, and for people on the individual level. If a person does not care what their community thinks then that person may become completely and entirely self serving.

The question for the readers: If you could digitize yourself whether it be via mind upload or by using agents which pursue your will then do you think it is possible to arithmetically optimize that digital self to always improve over time? If yes then how would you measure whether or not that digital you is improving?