Through a painful process, I have created a philosophy to help me resist the temptation to abdicate personal responsibility, a tendency that is unusually strong with me. I'm looking for criticism of these ideas.

1. Reverse causation. I have found that it is much easier to motivate myself to do things if I adopt a rather unusual outlook on the nature of time. Instead of thinking that past events cause future events, think of future events as causing past events. This has the effect of bringing the future into conscious immediacy. For example, instead of "my present abdication will cause future dissatisfaction," say, "I am already dissatisfied in the future. That is the cause of my present abdication". As in, instead of "polluting nature will lead to the future extinction of humanity," say, "Humanity is already extinct in the future. That is why we pollute nature today."

Note that this is not a claim about physics, only semantics. However, I think this semantics is perfectly compatible with physics, since the only physical law that is temporally asymmetrical is the one about increasing entropy, and that can be trivially reworded for compatibility with this semantics.

2. Satisfaction. This theory argues that the goal of life is satisfaction. Satisfaction has 3 components:

a. Enjoyment. I agree with the French charlatan Lacan to an extent. Enjoyment and pleasure are mutually independent. That is to say, it is possible for something to be only enjoyable, only pleasurable, both or neither. I also agree with the Lacanian argument that it is the process that brings the object of pleasure within our possession that we enjoy more than the object that brings us pleasure.

b. Pleasure. Despite what I just said, the pure pursuit of Lacanian surplus enjoyment can be horrifying approaches that tell us to sacrifice all that we have to obtain some kind of obscene enjoyment out of life. This is why I think a life without pleasure, only enjoyment, will not be satisfactory to rational beings.

c. Fun. I also distinguish fun as either a specially important category of pleasure, or a distinct component of what rational beings imagine a satisfactory life as having included in it. There are many kinds of fun, but I will argue about the kind of fun that an idealized spectator at a civilized Colosseum might have: Watching for the outcomes of fairly matched opponents contending against one another by mutually agreed rules.

3. Responsibility. These are the main arguments for this theory.

I am arguing that assignment of responsibility is a part of human biology. All your thoughts take the form of assigning responsibilities to various things. For example, logic is represented in terms of truth functions and math is represented in terms of mathematical functions. The concept of the function is based on the idea of one thing depending on another. This is, at its root, an assignment of responsibility. Without responsibility, there is neither math nor logic.

It follows that if you abdicate personal responsibility, then you must assign responsibility for the successes and/or failures that are important to you to entities that are not yourself to the extent that you engage in formal reasoning. I claim that this approach inevitably leads to motivated reasoning. For example, when we attribute important successes to something other than ourselves, we are often tempted to write apologia intended to vindicate that thing from negative statements that may be made about it. On the other hand, people who write apologia to vindicate themselves with the same degree of shamelessness have more pressing problems than the abdication of personal responsibility. Similarly, we are tempted to refute positive statements about things to which we attribute our woes.

Motivated reasoning chips away at our natural curiosity to see which things are better at securing what ends in a fair way. Loss of curiosity in the present prefigures life losing its interest in the future. This is synonymous with a decrease in fun, which prefigures future dissatisfaction.

The kinds of contentions that we should be curious about given future satisfaction include rational hypotheses, people, projects, and so on.

4. Consolidation. Let's backtrack. By abdicating personal responsibility, you lose the motivation to assess merits and demerits fairly. That happens in the present because life will lose its zest in the future. But assuming personal responsibility is hard! No problem. That is the sacrifice which ought to constitute your obscene enjoyment deriving from the hardships of reaching the goal.

Moreover, the standards of fairness that curiosity presupposes are a source of pleasure in and of themselves. Their absence also prefigures the loss of pleasure that comes from enduring injustice. By abdicating responsibility, you miss out on enjoyment. By losing fairness, your pleasures become erratic. Without fair competition, life loses interest.

In case the above arguments were not clearly delineated, here is a formula representing some of the dependencies argued for:

responsibility(enjoyment(satisfaction), fairness(pleasure(satisfaction)), curiosity(fun(satisfaction)));

Here, a <function> in the present prefigures its <arguments> in the future. That is, read parentheses () as "prefigures" and commas , as "and" in the sense of a logical conjunction.