Elon Musk: Expanding Consciousness to Understand the Universe

Elon Musk: I found meaning in the idea that we should preserve and expand consciousness, and explore the universe.

“When I was a teenager, I had an existential crisis to try to figure out what's the meaning of life. There didn't seem to be any meaning. For me, at least, the religious texts that I read, all of them that I get my hands on, did not seem convincing.

Then I started reading philosophers. Be careful of reading German philosophers as a teenager. It's definitely not going to help with your depression.

Reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, as an adult, it's much more manageable. But as a kid, you're like, whoa... I was just struggling to find meaning in life here.

And then, I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and basically what Douglas Adams was saying is that we don't really know what the right questions are to ask.

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Earth is a big computer, and its goal is to answer the question what's the meaning of life? And Earth comes up with the answer 42.

In that book, which is really an existential philosophy book disguised as humor, they come to the conclusion that the real problem is trying to formulate the question.

And to really have the right question, you need a much bigger computer than Earth.

One way of characterizing this would be to say the universe is the answer, what is the question? What are the questions?

The more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, the better we can understand what questions to ask about the answer, that is the universe.

The more we can expand consciousness, become a multiplanet species, ultimately a multistellar species, we have a chance of figuring out what the hell's going on.

This is why I think we should have more humans and more biological and digital consciousness. And why we should become a multiplanet species and a multistellar species so that we can understand the nature of the universe.

In order for that to occur, we have to make sure that things are good on Earth. We don't want Earth to disappear. So, sustainable energy is important for ensuring the long-term viability of Earth. And making life multiplanetary is important for extending consciousness.

Ultimately, we want to go and visit other star systems to see if there are alien civilizations there that perhaps still exist or perhaps died out millions of years ago.”

June 14, 2022