1) What Is “Benefit”?
- In this approach, benefit is anything that increases the success of a system.
- In biology, success is usually associated with survival, reproduction, and the transmission of behavioral strategies.
- For human beings, benefit also manifests as well-being, achieving goals, and fulfilling desires.
2) Primitive Life: Maximum Benefit Without “Awareness”
- The simplest forms of life do not “reason” about benefit.
- They act according to built-in algorithms (instinctive and automatic patterns) that have become evolutionarily established as useful.
3) The Human Being: Complex, Multilevel Benefit
- As cognitive complexity increases, benefit ceases to be merely biological.
- Abstract levels emerge: reputation, meaning, morality, ideas, creativity, and long-term projects.
- Thus, human benefit can appear “ephemeral,” but remains part of the overall logic of optimization.
4) Faith and Altruism Are Not Necessarily “Against Benefit”
- Faith, self-restraint, and self-sacrifice can function as strategies of psychological and social resilience.
- Altruism can be a form of extended benefit: family, community, country, humanity, planet.
- Non-egoistic motivation does not abolish the category of benefit; it changes its scale.
5) Reason and Emotions
- Reason makes it possible to choose strategies more accurately: to plan, compare costs and benefits, and work toward long-term objectives.
- Emotions are useful as fast regulators of behavior, but sometimes interfere with the optimal achievement of goals.
- The higher the level of reflection, the greater the chance of moving from impulse to considered benefit.
6) Why Human Intelligence Became an Evolutionary Advantage
- Humans did not become “intelligent all at once”: learning, the accumulation of knowledge, and the transmission of experience were decisive.
- Tools, cooperation, and culture multiplied the species’ adaptive capacities.
- In this sense, reason is a practical mechanism for survival and expanding control over the environment.
7) Key Conclusion
- Benefit is not necessarily narrow egoism.
- It can be personal and collective, short-term and long-term, material and symbolic.
- Even self-interest is merely a particular case of a more general principle: systems strive toward states of greater success.
8) The Boundary of the Argument
- Human beings think in human categories.
- Therefore, even when reasoning about “maximum intelligence,” we remain within human models for understanding benefit and goals.
Original
Benefit means usefulness. In fact, the less intelligent a creature is, the less useful it is both to others and to itself. And what is usefulness? Ultimately, usefulness is our well-being, the advancement of our desires and goals.
Take the most primitive forms of life: they strive for maximum benefit. But they do so not through reason, but through the algorithms of life, instincts.
Humans are an excellent and interesting example. We no longer have instincts, because we no longer need those constraints. We ourselves are capable of inventing something more complex. And our benefit is far more complex, sometimes even ephemeral because of our level of intelligence.
You probably think of faith as an example of renouncing benefit. But no, that is a terrible example. One way or another, it is a way of obtaining maximum benefit from one’s life so that one can rejoice afterward. Our desires will be fulfilled if we achieve maximum benefit.
If there is no benefit for you in your actions, you are most likely doing something wrong. And yes, your benefit can be very far from egocentric. Your benefit may, for example, come from the well-being of your family, country, planet, world, or anything at all.
Now imagine maximum intelligence. It would rise above our emotions, which often prevent us from obtaining that benefit. At a minimum, the goals could be entirely different.
And yes, this is rational existence. Let me put it this way: compared with other forms of life on our planet, our intelligence is high solely because of benefit. Do you think humans would have survived as a species if they had not become more intelligent? No. There are many examples of human species that were not Homo sapiens. And without the power we obtained through reason, we would have become extinct. It was precisely reason, not intelligence, that helped us. We were not extremely intelligent from the outset; we learned. And learning gave us a chance. We were able to make weapons and tools billions of times more powerful than natural ones. Our influence on life exceeds ordinary natural influence by so much that denying benefit as a part of rational existence is the quintessence of madness. Everything is driven by benefit; even self-interest is benefit, simply not for our particular individual.
And if you actually mean reason as awareness of relationships, I have already written about that.
And yes, once again, as I wrote earlier, I will repeat it. That is my logic. Neither I nor you nor anyone of the human race can think as something other than a human being.
