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[A1CR]

In this message, long-time CRONie Dean speaks philosophically about his motivation for practicing CR, and generally about why he chooses to do the things he does. He's got an unusual perspective that other CRONies may not share, but it is always interesting to see what makes others tick.

Another CRONie wrote:

> If I had to define quality, it would depend heavily upon intelligence
> (complexity). That is the reason that I think you should (usually) value
> the life of other humans more than, for example, insects whose lives
> you sometimes go out of your way to spare, and why you should usually
> value an insect more than, for example, a bacterium. I know you mentioned
> that "cuteness" (mentioned by another CRONie) is not a factor in your decision
> of how to allocate your efforts among organisms, and I am curious what
> your criteria are. (Do you also make efforts to avoiding killing
bacteria?)
>
> I think a predominant consideration in such matters should be the amount
> of unique complexity you would be destroying. For example, killing an
> insect whose information contents is almost entirely duplicated among
> numerous others insects (because they share the same DNA, and the amount
> of unique information stored in the memory of the insect is small), should
> be less harmful that destroying the last instance of that information

I think we share many of the same thoughts in regard to choices for action.
You ask for how I decide to allocate my limited resources, and upon
introspection, found that I too make decisions based on complexity. Here are
some of my thoughts (from my journal) on my motivations and choices:

Entropy is always increasing in the universe, but we can locally oppose this
increase, (e.g. maintain our very orderly body) by increasing the total
system wide disorder. We do this by eating for example. The things we eat
(plants and animals) have a substantial amount of order associated w/ them,
and by eating them we hurry them towards a state of disorder, increasing
their entropy while using the nutrients they contain to preserve our own
degree of order.

My motivation for veganism is to eat low on the food change, eat organisms
that have relatively less order/complexity to them, that don't have (much if
any) sentience, in order to minimize my negative impact on life. The idea is
to maintain my own order while minimizing the total increase in disorder
resulting from my presence.

Another example of maintaining local order at the expense increased global
entropy is my use of a treadmill to keep my own physical well-being (my
muscles) in "order", at the expense of all the electricity required to run
my treadmill, which traces its origin back to burning fossil fuel or nuclear
energy, which involve creating more entropy when it is transformed to
generate electricity.

One idea of how to live one's life is to strive to minimize entropy in the
universe. Could one's actions be judged from an entropy perspective?

It seems to me the biggest problem w/ such an approach is how to weigh
degrees of order/complexity against each other. Planting a field of grass
turns lots of disordered dirt into much more ordered stalks of grass. How
does this act compare w/ helping feed a few birds, or helping a single
person, which are much more complex, but smaller in total scale (or mass)
than the grass?

Other CRONie, I also like your idea of maximizing unique information. It
would seem intuitive that destroying something unique (like the last
individual in a species) should be avoided much more strongly than
destroying something very redundant. Of course, this would seem to make it
less of a crime to kill an identical twin than an only child - which I'm not
sure many would agree with...

On the flip slide, creating *new* unique information has value in my eye. So
for example, we CRONies exercising our freakish degree of self-discipline to
learn more about aging and the human body's reaction to calorie restriction
has intrinsic merit in my eyes, regardless of (or in addition to) its
outcome for us as individuals. In fact, as I've said before, doing
something *different* from others, particularly something different w/ the
potential to help others on a grand scale if it pans out well (e.g. CRON), is
important to me. In fact, trying something different and seeing what happens
is probably my prime motivation for CRON at this point. I enjoy the adventure
of it, and the potential benefits such exploration may hold for myself and
others.

Thanks for providing me w/ the opportunity to think about and share my views
on this topic.

Take care!

--Dean