I like to think that progress is about maximizing global satisfaction. But then really hard questions follow
- Who are included in "global"?, every human being?, every conscious mammal?. Do we all get the same weight?
- (Assuming last answer is all human beings) How should we come to a consensus?. How do we coordinate to achieve our agreed goals?
If you think this is all too subjective, should we stop pouring resources into philosophy and arts?
I think this questions deserve at least some studying
Do we exist just to eat, shit, and breed?
Hopefully our civilisation is concerned with more than just the cold necessities of life: a civilisation that lets us do with our minds what we will. Circuses and Netflix have more meaning than bread: bread is merely a low level dependency in the skill tree.
I think there is a lot of bollox to our liberal humanities: but who am I to judge what others choose to put their minds to? Edit: the small percentage of gold produced is what matters, not the large percentage of load bearing ore. There can be a lot of worthwhile waste.
Disclaimer: I am Engineer, not Word Rotator.
As someone who values the liberal humanities, I wish "support for philosophy and the arts" were implicitly understood as support for leisure time for people in general, rather than funding special arts programming or individual institution-pleasers. If arts and philosophy are not flourishing as they should be, it is not because the Kennedy Center (or whatever) needs any more money, but because people can't afford basic needs like housing without spending all their time working, and so have no time for it.
we exist because we eat, shit, and breed. But that will end too.
We are just an expression of processes in the unfolding universe.
Engineering projects like Apollo or Manhattan succeded by taking the theory invented by a few madmen and making the entire effort to the end product. Instead we now have projects like the Human brain project (EU) and the Brain initiative that don't seem to have a defined goal, and no clear incentives. The HBP used to be about building an artificial brain, as ambitious as it sounds. Instead, petty politics and meddling led to the project becoming a project salad with very little to show. AFAIK the Brain initiative has not done better.
The article itself is another example of weak incentives. We don't need to invent another field called "progress studies" in order to make progress. That's only making the problem worse.