(and mine: DP on meta-ethics)
Andrei
1. I'm a strict negative utilitarian, so I favour policy initiatives to create a biosphere genetically underpinned by gradients of bliss. For sure, one can do fanciful thought-experiments with a different outcome. If the world had an OFF button or vacuum phase-transition switch, I'd press it. Likewise a button to trigger a utilitronium shockwave. Likewise I'd press a notional button to eradicate experience below hedonic zero and create a bland Huxleyean Brave New World. But this “What if…” stuff is idle philosophising. Any serious proposals to phase out suffering must be a) technically feasible b) sociologically realistic. In other words, any NU blueprint must accommodate fanatical life lovers, not just secular Buddhists like me. For a start, most people implicitly believe in enduring metaphysical egos. The idea that they won't be around to enjoy lots of good stuff in future is disappointing - or worse. Therefore, other things being equal, any proposal that curtails the greatest possible opportunity for sentient life to flourish is anti-NU. NUs want to abolish even the faintest hint of disappointment.
2. You’re right: if consent were universal, then intrusive monitoring of women's bodies wouldn't amount to a totalitarian global state in an offensive sense. But in practice, the nature of selection pressure means that many women (and men) will continue to want to have babies. In any case, most women will recoil at having their bodies intrusively surveilled by AI and/or state. Some men won’t want vasectomies. It's not going to happen.
3. Just as the distinction between human and transhuman is partly conventional (but not arbitrary), the same is true of advanced transhumans and proto-posthumans. Light genetic tweaking will give way to full-blown genome editing. Crude neuroprostheses will give way to cyborgisation (though not under that rebarbative label and not cyborgisation to the point of complete Kurzweilian fusion - IMO posthuman minds will retain a biological neuronal core.
What do you think about David Pearce's negative utilitarianism?
Many thanks Anon. According to NU, what is the ultimate scope of our moral responsibilities? I’m (very) tentatively a Rare Earther, i.e. I suspect we’re alone within our cosmological horizon. But if I’m mistaken, and if pain-ridden Darwinian life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, then the technical feasibility of cosmic rescue missions must be weighed - as you say. Alas other scenarios are possible too. If interstellar travel is ever feasible, then a darker possibility is that Earth-originating life may end up spreading suffering rather than preventing it (cf. Longtermism in the Effective Altruist movement).
[on worship]
Autre temps, autres moeurs...
Worship in Ancient Egypt
("The Culture Where Men Masturbate in Public as an Act of Worship. It was believed that doing so would bring about an abundance of water and a great harvest")
[on nonhuman animals]
Humane Hancock is awesome...
Youtube and mp4
We discuss transhumanism, the abolitionist project and the prospect of reprogramming the biosphere to engineer the well-being of all sentience.
Arhx, unlike extinction, "compassionate conservation" is a potentially politically saleable solution to the problem of suffering. Life based on gradients of bliss is a potentially politically saleable solution to the problem of suffering. Even if one thinks Darwinian life on Earth is sinister and evil beyond belief, message-discipline is probably wise - otherwise one risks alienating allies.
But Darwinian life is evil beyond imagination...
Male and female killers
Autonomous killer robots equipped with bionic limbs - we need an ethical debate:
Vulture gets bionic leg
("Lifesaving surgery gives a rare bird a leg up")
"Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are its tormented souls."
(Schopenhauer)
Automated real-time translation is needed between human and nonhuman animals...
The Challenges of Animal Translation
Stephen the ancient Buddhist idea that (crudely speaking) equates suffering with desire fits well with a mesostriatal dopaminergic “wanting”
account of suffering. It's the opposite of the now outdated idea that
intracranial self-stimulation involves direct activation of the
"pleasure centres". But if ICSS were inherently unpleasant, as a
desire=suffering story suggests, then human and nonhuman animals
wouldn't do it. Unfortunately, the "suffering circuit" in the brain is
poorly understood (as scientists say when they don't understand
something). Proposals that the dorsal posterior insula is the brain's
"pain centre" haven't withstood critical scrutiny.
Reversible brain expansion...
Fish brains get bigger when they have to think harder
("and shrink when they are in less challenging environments, studies find")
[on effective altruism]
Effective altruism: should elite hyperthymics be encouraged to become
sperm donors? Alas raising global hedonic set-point averages via
“designer babies” is still a futuristic fantasy.
Sperm donors on Facebook
("The Sperm Kings Have a Problem: Too Much Demand. Many people want a pandemic baby, but some sperm banks are running low. So women are joining unregulated Facebook groups to find willing donors, no middleman required.")
Can't we sponsor bouts of intense pleasure to raise money for charity instead?
The 'martyrdom effect'
("Why your pain boosts a charity's gain")
Longtermism? It would be sad if all these wonderful digital civilisations turn out to be figments of the human imagination. Sceptics (like me) don’t believe in the existence of digital people any more than we do in souls. And this disbelief isn’t carbon chauvinism. Classical Turing machines running on an organic substrate can’t support phenomenally-bound subjects of experience any more than their silicon counterparts. So I hope EAs focus on existing sources of human and nonhuman animal suffering. IMO, our biggest obligation to future generations is to ensure they aren’t born to suffer like us.
Genes, not organisms, have evolutionary longevity - one reason why "longtermist" EAs should focus on germline engineering.
An idea with bite
("The ‘selfish gene’ persists for the reason all good scientific metaphors do: it remains a sharp tool for clear thinking")
[on a genetically planned society]
from IAI’s festival, HowTheLightGetsIn. Not entirely a meeting of minds...
A genetically planned society?
("Theodore Dalrymple, David Pearce and Güneş Taylor on designer babies")
All babies should be CRISPR babies
He Jiankui should not be villainised
WHO defines health as 'a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing". So countless genetic enhancements are "legitimately" therapeutic on the WHO's own definition. Ironically, the WHO constitution (recently reaffirmed) is a eugenics manifesto - it's the only way health as so defined could ever be engineered.
But you are an untested genetic experiment...
[on non-materialist physicalism]
Schrödinger’s Neurons
Jan, let's assume physicalism. Except at exotic energy regimes, the mathematical framework of modern physics (the Standard Model plus GR) is effectively complete. There's no empirical evidence for quantum fields of insentience. Their existence is a metaphysical assumption. If this assumption is true, then not just the organisation, but also the intrinsic nature of the world's fundamental fields differs inside and outside one's head. The metaphysical assumption leads to the Hard Problem of consciousness. You ought not to exist. Scientists and scientifically-minded academic philosophers alike have seized on the euphemism. “Hard Problem" suggests that subjective experience is a troublesome anomaly to be resolved within the conceptual scheme of scientific materialism rather than its empirical falsification.
So what if we drop the metaphysical assumption and instead embrace the principle of mediocrity? The “fire” in the equations of QFT, i.e. the intrinsic nature of the physical, is actually experiential?
Any good scientific theory should (1) explain all the empirical successes of the old theory, (2) resolve its failures and anomalies and (3) be amenable to (dis)confirmation by making novel, precise, experimentally falsifiable predictions.
Non-materialist physicalism satisfies these three criteria. It's also intuitively crazy. I don’t know if non-materialist physicalism is true.
Facundo, natural selection can't create anything. It can only select. Imagine if we were to construct from scratch a type-identical molecular copy of you. Your namesake would have exactly the same thoughts, feelings, perceptual experiences and "memories". In other words, your kind of thoughts, feelings, perceptual experiences and memories are an intrinsic property of matter and energy. Evolution has harnessed such properties - "chosen" options from a menu. But it didn't create the menu.
Most of us struggle with constitutive panpsychism because the
conjecture makes the minimal “psychon” of experience absurdly small.
But the absurdity gets even worse. If experience discloses the
intrinsic nature of the physical, then absurdly short-lived physical
processes in the CNS are experiential too, for example sub-femtosecond
coherent superpositions of distributed neuronal feature-processors -
edge-detectors, motion-detectors, colour-mediating neurons and so
forth. At sufficiently fine-grained temporal resolutions, there is no
“combination problem” for panpsychism because (assuming the unitary
Schrodinger dynamics) there are no decohered classical neurons, just
individual “cat states”.
Intuitively, of course, this kind of ontological unity is irrelevant.
We’re looking for a perfect structural match on a timescale of
milliseconds, not quantum exotica on a time-scale of femtoseconds!
Maybe so.
But if what today’s crude neuroscanning suggests is phenomenal binding
by synchrony - a mere restatement of the combination problem - is
actually coherent superposition, then the non-classical interference
signature will tell us.
In other words, the solution to the combination problem will be
settled by interferometry not philosophy.
Absurd, as I said, but I still think the conjecture is worth
experimentally falsifying.
What are the implications of imaginary numbers for non-materialist physicalism?
Imaginary numbers are "real"
A Post-Galilean Science of Consciousness by Philip Goff
Tom, Phil Goff used to dismiss non-materialist physicalism. The big challenge will be how Goff proposes to solve the binding/combination problem that previously led him to reject the physicalistic idealism he now defends (just not under that name!). Will his "post-Galilean science of consciousness" eventually settle on neuronal superpositions?
We shall see…
I think the conceivability argument underplays the mystery.
(1) If physicists and chemists understand the properties of matter and energy, i.e. QFT describes fields of insentience, then zombies aren't just physically conceivable, but physically necessary.
So assume (1) is false. QFT describes fields of sentience.
(2) If neuroscientists understand the brain, i.e. nervous systems are made up of discrete, decohered membrane-bound classical neurons, then microexperiential zombies aren't just physically conceivable, but physically necessary.
But what if physicists, chemists and neuroscientists are all wrong?
Dropping assumptions (1) and (2) leads to an empirically adequate scientific account of reality with vast explanatory and predictive power, i.e. non-materialist physicalism. P-zombies are unphysical. Microexperiential zombies are unphysical.
I don't know if non-materialist physicalism is true. But the alternative, i.e. "materialist" physicalism, strikes me as metaphysics, not science.
I'm afraid I can't vouch for the fidelity of the translation:
Non-materialist physicalism in Russian
Craig, you know I'm with you about the inadequacy of scientific materialism. Uniquely among the worlds’ belief systems, materialism has the distinction of being inconsistent with the entirety of the empirical evidence. But science gets something right: hence the Standard Model and modern technological civilization. I don’t properly understand your position: you are also rejecting non-materialist physicalism and the intrinsic nature argument. If the "fire" in the equations of QFT is non-experiential, then how can we ever hope to close Levine’s "explanatory gap"?
I'm floundering...
Craig, the difference between us is I accept the mathematical straitjacket of physics as a constraint on all that exists. Sure, in dreams and tomorrow's immersive VR, one can cast aside the shackles of physical law. But as far as I can tell, mathematical physics holds the key to basement reality - and the formalism describes patterns of qualia.
Rupert, I start from the uncontroversial premise that science should be consistent with the empirical ("relating to experience") evidence. So any scientific story the world should at a minimum (1) solve or dissolve the Hard Problem, i.e. explain why we aren’t zombies, (2) solve the binding problem, i.e. explain why we aren't micro-experiential zombies, (3) solve the problem of causal efficacy, i.e. explain how consciousness has the causal-functional power to pose questions about its existence; and (4) solve the problem of our experience of definite outcomes, aka the Measurement Problem in QM.
Given unlimited computational resources (i.e. forgetting that "information is physical"), a classical Turing machine (or a vast lookup table) could presumably functionally simulate our behaviour. But if physicalism is true, i.e. no "strong" emergence", then neither classical system would be a phenomenally bound subject of experience.
In a nutshell, I explore the quantum-theoretic version of the intrinsic nature argument. Non-materialist physicalism purportedly solves (1) to (4). In my (very!) tentative view, only the fact that the superposition principle of quantum mechanics never breaks down enables you empirically to simulate a world where it does. Your definite experience of everything from, say, a live cat, or a spin-up electron that has passed though Stern-Gerlach device (etc) is itself a (neuronal) superposition. The vehicle of our minds is inescapably quantum, the subjective content is classical. Crudely, you and the phenomenal world-simulation run by your CNS are what a quantum mind feels like from the inside:
What is quantum mind
Crazy stuff, yes, but experimentally falsifiable - if anyone ever thinks the conjecture worth falsifying!
Quantum mind (Wikipedia)
[on gradients of bliss]
Life based on gradients of superhuman bliss will be good:
DP interviewed by Bold Conjectures:
But would a utilitronium shockwave be best?
Utilitarianism.com
[on empathy]
“A person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.”
(Daniel Carnegie)
Murine empathy puts some humans to shame:
Empathetic mice
("Researchers identify mouse brain pathways active during feelings of empathy")
[on lucid dreaming]
I can philosophise in my sleep but not do maths:
Lucid dreamers who do maths
("Lucid dreamers can answer questions and even do MATHS while they're snoozing")
The skilled lucid dreamer can distinguish between his empirical skull
and his transcendental skull, his empirical friends & family and his
transcendental friends & family (etc). And he can draw exactly the
same distinction during waking consciousness...
Everyday dreamworlds
[on love]
Do troubled couples need relationship counselling or gene therapy?
Or both?
The genetics of marriage satisfaction
("Couples with the CD38 CC genetic variant reported higher levels of trust and marriage satisfaction")
Can today's cruel affective psychosis become an engineering discipline?
How long does it take to fall in love?
“70% of women say zodiac compatibility – information like a potential partner’s birth chart and star sign – is important to them.”
Can your dating life really be written in the stars?
("More of us than ever are dating by our star signs, so here's how zodiac compatibility became the ultimate prerequisite for finding love")
[on coffee, freedom and identity]
Large, black, no sugar:
Coffee and identity
("The Psychological Insight From a $2.95 Cup of Coffee. Every small purchase choice gives us a glimpse of our hidden self-identity.")
Is the fundamental distinction between “me” conceived as an enduring entity that began last century and everyone else or instead between this particular here-and-now and all the others?
Closed, empty and open individualism
If true, I should be sprinting across the Himalayas?
Coffee drinking and your genetic code
("Espresso, latte or decaf? Genetic code drives your desire for coffee")
Coffee drinkers are at risk of longer lives:
Coffee and longevity
[on the naturalisation of Heaven]
The Naturalisation of Heaven
("The Lotus Eaters Happiness & Motivation")
Wow, thanks, a lot to unpack.
The lotus-eaters of Greek mythology sound blissed out on opioids:
The Lotus Eaters (Wikipedia)
It's one conception of heaven - though not a vision I advocate.
Transhuman software entities? I nowhere discuss their mental status because IMO phenomenal binding is non-algorithmic and non-classical. Minds are a biological phenomenon:
Phenomenal Binding
The rank theory of depression? Yes it's incomplete. One dark possibility I entertain is that human and non-human animals' depressive behaviour can be part of the "extended phenotype" of conspecifics and rivals.
Drugs? I'm sceptical of claims of enlightenment too:
Psychedelic Psychosis
In posthuman paradise when suffering is impossible, perhaps we’ll explore psychedelia. Until then, I think the risks are too great. Darwinian minds are too dark.
DP on the Biohappiness Revolution
Humanity Unshackled & mp3.
Kent, yes, it's counterintuitive. After all, we sometimes contrast a life of "empty hedonism" with soulful struggle. Nonetheless, I was making an empirical prediction. Life based on gradients of bliss will seem intensely meaningful by its very nature. Even today, no one says, "I feel blissfully happy, but my life feels empty and meaningless". Or compare the abnormally intense feelings of meaning, purpose and significance experienced by people in the grip of euphoric mania. Hyperthymia is its non-pathological guise. Conversely, low mood tends to drain life of meaning - which shades into the nihilistic despair of clinical depression. Crudely, happiness is the engine of meaning. Super-happiness will imbue life with a sense of super-significance. Or to quote a wise philosopher, take care of happiness and the meaning of life will take care of itself.
The Director-General of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has said that universal health coverage is a "Rights Issue". If we take the WHO conception of health seriously, then universal access must entail a right of all prospective parents to preimplantation genetic screening and counselling and (soon) genome editing services. But I don't personally have any contact with Dr Ghebreyesus or the WHO bureaucracy. Maybe we could write an open letter?
Opioid addiction makes us human:
Opioids and social primates
("A mu-opioid feedback model of human social behavior")
[on why anything exists]
Why does anything exist?
("Why Does Anything Exist? Zero Ontology, Physical Information, and Pure Awareness")
"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", said evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky. If we truly understood why anything exists, then everything we think we know might be recast in an unimaginably new light too. Compare waking up from a dream.
"We note that the collection of all possible descriptions has zero complexity, or information content. This is a consequence of algorithmic information theory, the fundamental theory of computer science. There is a mathematical equivalence between the Everything, as represented by this collection of all possible descriptions and Nothing, a state of no information.
Russell Standish in “Theory of Nothing” (2006)
Quoted in:
Why does anything exist?
"nothingness is theory-dependent."
"Can we define nothing in a way that suppresses all forms of existence?"
"The existence of properties appears inescapable."
Did the Big Bang really "create information"?
The Big Bang also has an information paradox
Or conserve its absence? (cf. "no collapse" QM).
What explains this existential catastrophe? Another exploration of a zero ontology:
Why does anything exist?
"We can come to better understand a proposition by studying its opposite"
(Jason Turner. Ontological Nihilism (2010))
I borrow this quote from Karl Svozil's essay in "Non-Being: New Essays on the Metaphysics of Nonexistence" (2021) (priced at $0.00?).
Biotech can create minds with a superhuman sense of meaning, purpose and significance.
I'm sceptical we'll find meaning in the stars...
Stephen Weinberg's pointless universe
Are the Hard Problem of consciousness and the riddle of existence two mysteries or one? I don't know! Reality baffles me. But my best guess is that a single physical principle explains both why we're here and the properties of our minds. Only the ubiquity of the superposition principle of unitary-only quantum mechanics is consistent with the information content of reality = 0. Maybe we're living in the quantum version of the Library of Babel. And only the ubiquity of the superposition principle of unitary-only quantum mechanics can explain one's subjective experience of definite outcomes. For phenomenal binding is classically impossible. Only the fact that the superposition principle of QM never breaks down allows us to run phenomenal world-simulations where it does:
Yes, crazy stuff - but experimentally falsifiable.
[on olfactory syntax]
Avant-garde philosophers or demented glue-sniffers?
Should the study of mind be an experimental discipline...
("What would it be like to have a scent-based medium of thought, with grammar, generative syntax, subclauses, and intentionality? How do we go about exploring the full state-space of scents (or any other qualia variety)")
[on The Hedonistic Imperative]
"El placer es el objeto, el deber y el fin de todos los seres razonables."
(Voltaire)
Todos deberíamos ser más razonables.
Some Utilitarian Memes
I wonder how many people today know that pain-free
surgery was once controversial: Utopian Surgery.
Perhaps the same will one day be true
of pain-free life.
A world teeming with diverse, phenomenally-bound consciousness but lacking in hedonic tone wouldn't matter any more than a barren world of zombies or micro-experiential zombies. In my view, what really matters are states of the pleasure-pain axis. Evolution has "encephalised" emotion. Encephalisation makes other things seem to matter inherently, even though they matter only derivatively.
Naturally, this perspective is disputed.
The Daily Trip:
To End All Suffering
with David Pearce.
No Damascene conversions promised. And the mp4.
The Hedonistic Imperative
("How good is good?
Viscom, I'm sorry if I came across as dogmatic. I take seriously the possibility that bacteria might undergo a micro-pinprick of unpleasantness in response to noxious stimuli. When I said "Bacteria don't suffer", I was just making the (I‘d assumed fairly uncontroversial) point that such hypothetical unpleasantness didn’t reach the threshold of suffering. The threshold above which a (micro-)pinprick becomes outright suffering may be conventional, but it's not arbitrary. In my view, humans should take extraordinary steps to help even the humblest minds. Hence high-tech Jainism (mp4). But right now, if a human or nonhuman animal is sick with a bacterial infection, then we should use antibiotics to treat it. In cases of severe and irreconcilable conflict of interest, the interests of the most sentient beings should come first. IMO.
[on censorship]
Angela Merkel attacks Twitter over Trump ban
It's complicated.
(1) Does Facebook - mission statement “To Bring The World Closer Together” - have an obligation to retain e.g. hate-groups or instead to promote friendliness in accordance with its raison d'être? Most people on this wall might not use FB for its original purpose, but many millions of people still do.
(2) Do the big social media companies have an obligation to give a platform to users promoting not just obnoxious views but violent insurrection? Imagine if the leader of the losing party in a German election incited his followers to storm the Bundestag, leading to death or injuries to members of Bundestagspolizei. Would we believe that e.g. Twitter had an obligation to keep the insurrectionists so they could incite further lawlessness?
[on base-coding babies]
Imagine a world where all new sentience is base-coded and all prospective parents learn coding skills.
One can dream...
Based-coded babies
I wonder if the parents involved knew that He was really trying to create smart babies and was using HIV protection as a cover? Either way, I hope the debate broadens. Chronic mental and physical pain blight as many lives as the conditions mentioned in the target article.
[on sleep]
"Six hours' sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool."
(Napoleon)
Medical science says otherwise...
Sleep Well
("The new science of sleep: Everything we know about how it affects your health and brain")
Why a regular sleep schedule matters:
Irregular Sleep
("Irregular sleep schedules connected to bad moods and depression, study shows")
See too:
Sleep and immunity
Good sleep is vital to physical, cognitive & emotional health:
World Sleep Day
("Meet Matthew Walker, the man who can make you (sleep) better in bed")
I'm torn between my love of sleep and love of coffee:
Plants that change our consciousness
[on the extended mind hypothesis]
Where does the mind stop?
The extended mind
Thanks to evolution, each of us runs a phenomenal world-simulation that takes the guise of one's external surroundings ("The brain is wider than the sky..." etc). Technology allows our minds to extend beyond our virtual empirical skulls into our phenomenal world-simulations. But a mind can't burrow through its physical "transcendental" skull. Just as a tripping LSD user may "become one" with his virtual world, likewise high-tech gadgets enable a drug-naive subject to extend his virtual body and self-module into his virtual environment. But we're still skull-bound.
[on idealism]
Does panpsychism imply mathematical entities are conscious?
Dino, first, apologies - I skipped the boring preliminaries of defining our terms. I define "physicalism" as the conjecture that no element of reality is missing from the formalism of (tomorrow's) physics. If we assume that the "fire" in the equations is non-experiential, then we have materialist physicalism. If the “fire” is experiential, we have idealist physicalism. Both are constrained by the mathematical straightjacket of QFT (and general relativity). Both are realist, i.e. the world predates the existence of phenomenally-bound biological minds. But IMO only physicalist idealism is consistent with the empirical evidence. For what it's worth, the approach I explore just transposes the mathematical formalism of a materialist physicalist like Sean Carroll (cf. "Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space")
Hilbert space fundamentalism makes my head hurt; but I don't see how our minds are explicable without it.
Bernardo Kastrup is an idealist who attacks physicalism. Perhaps the two positions are best combined. Experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical. Quantum field theory describes fields of sentience.
Mysterianism? Taking psychedelics can make one sceptical we'll ever understand consciousness in any deep way. But we can still crack the Hard problem if it's an artefact of materialist metaphysics.
Eliminativism? I share with eliminativists a belief that only the physical is real. But eliminative materialists misconstrue the nature of the physical - and hence are forced to disavow their own minds.
It’s worth distinguishing between idealism that dispenses altogether with a physical substrate and idealism that proposes that subjectivity is the essence of the physical, i.e. non-materialist physicalism. For what it’s worth, I take seriously the conjecture that the “fire” in the equations is experiential. But I don’t see any evidence for universal mind or higher spiritual truth.
[on science]
"Not all falsifiable claims, then, are scientific, and not all scientific claims are falsifiable."
Trusting science
("Why 'Trusting the Science' Is Complicated")
See too:
Replication Crisis
("Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science by Stuart Ritchie.")
"The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”
Was Feynman right? Non-empirical physics:
String theory, Einstein, and the identity of physics
("Theory assessment in absence of the empirical")
A more radical approach to empirical adequacy:
Post-materialist science
Could wiping out Homo sapiens destroy reality?
Is human consciousness creating reality?
IMO, no - any more than chicken consciousness is creating reality. Yes, each of us runs a skull-bound egocentric world-simulation. More speculatively, if the intrinsic nature argument is sound, then physical reality may itself be experiential. But physical reality existed before life and mind - and will outlast us.
[on general intelligence?]
"It seems that for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential."
(Hans Asperger)
Alex, there are some cognitive tasks at which most chimps outperform most
humans, just as there are some cognitive tasks at which most high-AQ
Ashkenazim outperform most low-AQ empaths. But the assumption that
prowess in “mind-blind” STEM tasks exhausts general intelligence is as
blinkered as the peahen’s assumption that the most spectacular peacock
tails exhaust the nature of beauty.
It ain’t so!
Smart chimps
("Chimps Outplay Humans in Brain Games. There are ways that chimpanzees are more intelligent than us")
Ernie, when you think of human cognitive deficiencies, do you think of limitations of logico-linguistic reasoning ability, or "IQ", or perhaps our cognitive biases (cf. Cognitive biases), or maybe simply the inability of most of us to become true polymaths as distinct from specialists or superficial generalists? In my view, there are sources of ignorance much deeper:
Alien state-spaces
Faith in scientific rationalism rarely survives a full-blown encounter with the empirical method. The "fire" in the equations is beyond human comprehension:
Psychedelic Therapy Needs to Confront the Mystical
Adam, if Rare Earthism is misconceived, then our responsibilities may be wider than supposed. As you know, I think “AGI” is a misnomer. Classical computers are invincibly ignorant of the nature of sentience. Not least, digital zombies will never understand the pain-pleasure axis and the nature of (dis)value. Despite their invincible ignorance, it’s striking how many scenarios for a notional "intelligence explosion" perfectly align – whether through accident or design - with the values of neo-Buddhism / NU.
Max, sceptics could turn that argument on its head.
Prowess in supposedly "specialised” social cognition enables gifted mind-readers to explore problems in diverse cognitive domains that humans haven’t evolved to tackle - domains where a high AQ/”IQ“ can be a disadvantage. Take investigation of the vast, exotic state-spaces of consciousness opened up by novel designer drugs. Evolution didn’t equip us for the challenge of exploring psychedelia. Unfortunately, the elevated testosterone function of high AQ/”IQ” folk impairs not just social cognition, but also introspection (cf. the extreme male brain theory of autism spectrum disorders). A specialised, supposedly "general" autistic style of thinking is a handicap in these new cognitive domains. High AQ/”IQ” folk, with their different mental operating system from neurotypicals, struggle to understand both their own mental states and the minds of others. It's no coincidence that some high AQ/”IQ” folk are eliminativists, i.e. they don't recognise even the existence of their own consciousness, or the minds of others, or the rich diversity of alien space-spaces of experience.
I’d stress: autistic mathematical geniuses and inventors should be celebrated!
But as far as I can tell, high AQ/”IQ” is a hypermasculine cognitive style, not the essence of general intelligence. Not least, IQ doesn’t test the computational quality of your world-simulation.
Testosterone poisoning can be toxic
Testosterone and impaired generosity
but perhaps only high-AQ hyper-systematisers can save the world.
Predictions? Mind-blind "IQ" tests measure only the autistic component of general intelligence. Such tests are inherently sexist, ethnocentric and culturally biased (cf. the “extreme male brain” theory of autism spectrum disorders). As might be expected, males from the ethnic group with the highest incidence of Aspergers record the highest "IQ" scores. But I've never seen any systematic study (rather than anecdotes) of the strength of the AQ/"IQ" correlation in members of other ethnic groups. Lots of complications would need taking into account with such a study (e.g. the effects of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, endemic racism, poor nutrition, prevalence of breastfeeding versus bottle-feeding, etc).
Alternatively (and this is my view), the notion of an innate scalar brainforce called “IQ” is pseudoscience and best retired.
General intelligence embraces the computational power of one's entire real-time world-simulation. Introspective prowess, social cognition, perspective-taking ability, co-operative problem-solving skills, facility at switching between empathetic and systematizing cognitive styles (etc) are implicated - and much more. Unfortunately, there are poorly understood neurological tradeoffs between the autistic intellectual style measured by misnamed "IQ" tests and other cognitive abilities. High testosterone function also promotes competitive status-seeking and a hyper-masculine conception of “success” - that is then used notionally to validate “IQ” tests...
Right-wing ideological attitudes, "anti-wokeism" and prejudice are negatively correlated with (so-called) IQ.
But the reasons are complex...
Right-wing cognition
("New study sheds light on the link between right-wing ideology, cognitive performance, and motivation")
Maximilian, agreed, a nerdish propensity to systematize can sometimes be good societally too as well as in STEM disciplines. The danger is when the nerd’s conception of intelligence ("IQ") gets harnessed by ethno-nationalists to our baser appetites and a tribalist mentality of "us” versus "them". Either way, the capacity for co-operative problem-solving is critical for the human species to navigate the next few centuries. "IQ" tests miss it and so implicitly disvalue it.
[on DMT entities]
What happens when you question DMT entities?
"I believe that to varying degrees they are genuinely conscious agents that the brain is simulating alongside our own."
DMT entities are manifestations of one's own mind. So too are virtual people one meets in everyday life. The difference is that the zombies of one's acquaintance are the avatars of real sentient beings that exist independently of one's world-simulation. DMT entities are not the avatars of sentient beings.
Adam, I guess the question to ask is how would one test this hypothesis. For instance, if I’m worried that you could be a figment of my imagination, I could ask you to solve some tricky calculation for which I’d need a calculator. With the aid of a calculator, you oblige. I then check the result. You’re real! A DMT entity couldn’t do this, ever…
Josh, forgive me for playing the role of killjoy. But the human mind-brain simply doesn't have the right architecture to perform calculations that a pocket calculator can do in milliseconds. Adam can use a calculator and by telling me the answer, which I can verify, I can know that I'm not dreaming (etc) - Adam has an existence independent of my mind and its world-simulation – and the hidden depths of my innumerate subconscious. DMT-induced entities can't do this. The calculator example could be multiplied.
Of course, there are possible rebuttals to any sceptical analysis. But explanations soon become contrived and conspiratorial - which is not to say they are definitely false.
[on infinitesimal ethics?]
The appalling possibility we are living in a multiverse should be
distinguished from the still more appalling idea of physically
realised infinities - although some multiverse scenarios assume the
latter. Even if reality is finite - I’m not convinced the idea of
physically realised infinities makes sense - the world is still
intuitively unimaginably big; one sometimes reads expressions like
“virtually infinite”. But any finite number is infinitesimally small
compared to an notional infinite multiverse.
Infinitesimal ethics?
It’s still an appalling prospect.
[on the Hedonistic Imperative]
A Critique of HI
Felix, yes, I could be hopelessly wrong about timescales. In HI (1995), I predicted that the world's last experience below hedonic zero would be several centuries from now - and it's still my best guess. If Singularitarians and "hard take-off" prophets are correct - or if there is a sea-change in our attitude to the problem of suffering - then maybe a hundred-year timescale would be feasible. But compare the media hysteria over the first CRISPR babies in China, or the title of David Attenborough’s latest Nature "documentary" - Our Perfect Planet - which captures the depth of popular status quo bias about the living world. Pessimistically, maybe thousands rather than hundreds of years of suffering lie ahead. I don't know – and I don’t trust my intuitions either.
Perhaps I’ll take Conundrum's critique one point at a time.
1. "Humans are selfish"
Yes, Humans are selfish, vain, narcissistic, self-aggrandising and zillions more vices besides. But most of us are not malevolent. Sure, humans can sometimes be spiteful - whether to rivals in love, enemies in war, or opponents on a football pitch. There also exists a tiny minority of sadists and even serial killers. Yet most of us tend to be callous, not cruel. We aren’t mirror-touch synaesthetes, but the majority of people don't enjoy witnessing suffering - often it distresses us. So if and when a safe, effective therapy is developed that enables an architecture of mind based on information-sensitive gradients of bliss AND its global distribution is as feasible as, say, the new COVID vaccines, how will most people respond? Will they want the superior new architecture just for themselves and their "tribe"? Or for everyone? I predict most people will be supportive and universalist. I call this, rather grandly, the Principle of Weak Benevolence, aka “no skin off my nose”. Compare how if a beggar asks for money, most people will ignore the request, but if a stranger says they are lost and wants directions, most people will oblige. This trivial example of weak benevolence could be multiplied indefinitely. Tomorrow’s biotech promises to make life based on gradients of bliss equally trivial - that’s the very nature of information-based technologies. Moreover, humans are prone to virtue signalling – and what better way to signal one’s virtue than support for universal happiness? My benevolence is bigger than yours!
Our task is to make the price of benevolence utterly trivial or non-existent.
OK, but what about corporations? After all, corporations are not people; they are amoral and legally obliged to maximise shareholder returns.
Yet once again, corporations virtue-signal too – and their carefully burnished halo contributes to the value of their brands. For instance, how much of Apple’s two-trillion dollar plus valuation derives from brand equity?
Anyhow, I’m sounding like an optimist. I'm not: IMO words can’t do justice to the evil of Darwinian life and the viciously nasty surprises it probably still has in store. But I don’t see human selfishness as an insurmountable obstacle to the abolitionist project.
2. Diversity
Will a reproductive revolution of designer babies lead to more genetic and phenotypic diversity or less? And is diversity inherently good or bad? Today, every child born using traditional sexual reproduction is a unique - barring identical twins, triplets etc - and untested genetic experiment. In some ways, genetic diversity will indeed soon diminish. Consider the two thousand or so disease-causing alleles of the cystic fibrosis gene. In a world of ubiquitous designer babies, selection pressure against all disease-causing alleles will be intense. Good! In some notional (Chinese-run?) state-run eugenics program, entire genomes might be standardised too. Yet my working assumption is that Western liberal democracy will prevail. Reproductive decisions will remain in the hands of prospective parents – probably with AI-assisted professional counselling. What hedonic range, hedonic set-points and pain-thresholds will most prospective parents want for their kids? I reckon selection pressure will intensify for the creation of ever happier kids in a recursive cycle of self-improvement. This intensifying selection pressure needn't entail reduced overall genetic or phenotypic diversity. For a start, happier people are responsive to a broader range of rewarding stimuli than depressives. Crudely, happiness promotes behavioural diversity; depression suppresses it. Depressives get “stuck in a rut”. And genome-editing can potentially create more genetic diversity, too, not less. This is because all sorts of new genes and allelic combinations can be created that could never have arisen under a regime of natural selection; their notional creation would entail crossing forbidden “fitness gaps”. Needless to say, I’ve no crystal ball. But we shouldn’t imagine transhumans as genetic identikit clones. Indeed, perhaps we may see an explosion of genetic, psychological and behavioural diversity to rival the Cambrian. My only moderately confident prediction is that hedonically sub-zero states will become biologically impossible. Selection pressure against the nastier genes of Darwinian life will soon be ferocious...
3. Autonomy
The negative utilitarian may be sceptical that unethical behaviour can exist in a world without experience below hedonic zero - as distinct from the functional analogues of unethical behaviour. But let's stick to a more conventional ethic than NU. Let's further assume that no moral enhancement technologies or their genetic counterparts) become widespread in future, just hedonic uplift. Will radical hedonic enrichment leave us vulnerable to personal or sexual violation: simply too happy to care?
I'm sceptical.
OK, take sexual coercion.
[“Consider a particular example. A person desiring sexual relations with another could pursue this activity even without consent of the other person. Maybe that person wouldn’t even be able to deny the advances, as that would require having a negative attitude towards the proposal. The only tool she’ll have is the gradient of bliss. Either she will be blissfully violated or the insistent romantic would have to be controlled away by an implant in his brain, as he himself would be unable to simulate potential negative experience from his victim’s point of view nor would he be capable of predicting negative consequences that could fall on him. Gradients of bliss won’t inform him it’s wrong to impose on someone. In the world where people see and experience only gradients of bliss, consent would not exist. No one would think of asking for consent, and no one could deny giving implicit consent. What this suggest is that the preference architecture would have to be rewritten and maybe supplanted by brain implants that would tell us what to want and not to want at any given moment.”]
Who are the most common victims of sexual exploitation and violence today? Depressed, downtrodden women who don't have the self-confidence to leave an abusive partner ("he only hits me because he loves me") are more vulnerable to abuse than emotionally robust self-confident women with healthy self-esteem. Other things being equal, raising hedonic tone makes people more emotionally self-sufficient and less willing to be bossed around. More generally, (super)happy people are more likely to be active citizens than depressives. Low mood is associated with weakness, subordination and defeat. Good mood is empowering. Let’s go for it.
4. Conflict:
“Julio Cabrera explains that moral life is impossible, for it’s too often the case that realizing a project of one person necessitates preventing other people from achieving their goals. Cabrera calls this inevitable fact of social life the moral impediment. So, if there are inherent conflicts when people aim for contrary objectives, then how would happy humans deal with this? Will they be programmed to want the same things, not to step on each other’s toes?”
One of the many beauties of hedonic recalibration is how conflicting preferences are sidestepped. Yes, Darwinian life is riddled with irreconcilable conflicts. So-called preference utilitarianism is a contradiction-in-terms for social primates. Whether in football, chess, politics, or mating and dating, no one can have everything they want - not even close/. All traditional utopian dreams founder accordingly.
Optionally, at least, all such dramas (and more) can play out in a civilisation with a hedonic range of +5 to +15 – or indeed a hedonic +70 to +100. But critically, such conflict can be drained of the poison of hedonically sub-zero states. Future conflict won't matter ethically in the same way as now – even though some people may be (hyper-)motivated to pursue their sometimes conflicting goals. So whereas I might dream of social life as an idealised version of being perpetually "loved up" on MDMA, the real-life biohappiness revolution may take a very different course…
5. “Electronic shepherds”
Conundrum writes:
"Without being sensitive to various negative stimuli and social signals, people wouldn’t be motivated to keep their hygiene, to sleep, to drink and eat. Without fear, what would stop them from walking into an incoming bus? Pearce imagines that gradients of bliss should overtake the motivational system. However, in our daily lives we don’t do the most pleasurable things all the time. We often choose to do things that give us less satisfaction. But when we can rely only on the gradients of bliss, what would stop anyone from doing something less pleasurable like going into the traffic and blissfully dying? The solution to this would take the form of electronic prostheses—implants in the brain that would recognize the dangers and take control of our volition and behavior to steer us into safety. These electronic shepherds, as I like to call them, would de facto control our lives, making us into very passive experience machines, unable to rebel. Pearce has a response to this attack at the ready. Supposedly the implants could be deactivated. But how a person swimming in the soup of bliss could recognize when to switch off the electronic shepherd and when to switch it back on? And after switching off the implant, what’s left to stop anyone from violating an innocent person, when the perpetrator is chasing a higher level of bliss like a junkie?”
Transhumanist speculation about a civilisation based on gradients of superhuman bliss as sci-fi. Consider instead today’s extreme hyperthymics – the global hedonic elite. (Recall that hyperthymia isn’t unipolar mania or bipolar disorder - pathologies of mind that can cause all manner of disaster). The elite 0.01% don’t manifest the signs and symptoms described in Conundrum’s quote above. Depressives are more likely to manifest self-neglect. Simply ratcheting up hedonic set-points to the level of today’s hedonic elite would massively enhance average quality of life. World-wide hyperthymia would be a godsend. Of course, there are still pitfalls. “Count no man happy until he is dead” (Solon), as the Greeks used to say. And I worry about cognitive bias. Truly happy people struggle to grasp the sheer enormity of suffering and the urgency of its abolition. But none of these pitfalls strikes me as fatal...
6. Extinction risk
“One of the most well-known critics of the technological society is Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. He’s been writing articles and books on the dangers and detrimental effects of technology for decades. In his magnum opus Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, Kaczynski makes a reasoned case that the progress of technology will lead to extinction of complex life on Earth…”
Will advanced technology lead to human extinction?
Yes – but IMO not in some dire, apocalyptic sense. Take AI, which has currently superseded WMD in the rationalist community as the biggest threat to human civilisation: DP on the Intelligence Explosion. As far as I can tell, everything that AI can do can be incorporated on embedded neurochips so that you can do it too – and much more. Mankind’s successors won’t be insentient machines, but our genetically rewritten and AI-augmented descendants. OK, this response scarcely begins to get to grips with the risks posed by advanced technology. But surely these challenges are not peculiar to HI? A civilisation based entirely on gradients of intelligent bliss will grapple with the revolutionary potential of artificial intelligence no less than today’s misery-ridden Darwinian regime.
7. Danger of System Malfunction:
If we do phase out the biology of suffering, could it ever recur? The most extreme example of recurrence would be an advanced civilisation that chooses to recreate Darwinian life in its entirety in the guise of running an ancestor-simulation. Elsewhere I’ve outlined why I believe that ancestor-simulations (and digital sentience - Ancestor simulations and digital war gaming) are both technically and sociologically infeasible. Let’s here stick to the near-term future. Could a genetic mutation arise that generates hedonically sub-zero states again?
So long as we are mindful of the risk, a whole arsenal of fail-safe prevention mechanisms can be introduced. I presume we’ll map out the neurobiological contours of the Evil Zone, i.e. the molecular signature of experience below hedonic zero, and construct multiple molecular ring-fences around it. Half a dozen dangerous mutations would then simultaneously need to arise to penetrate the Evil Zone. And regardless of your favoured scenario of the future, some kind of global panopticon probably lies ahead. Genomes can be monitored. Privacy-protection is relevant to (trans)humans, not to a mouse or a mollusk. We’re not going to run out of computer power. In a Darwinian world, ubiquitous surveillance can be sinister. But to safeguard the molecular foundations of paradise, I don’t see a problem with “AI nannies” for humbler lifeforms any more than for human toddlers. The price of perpetual happiness may not be eternal vigilance; but let's assume otherwise. Surely it’s a price worth paying.
I guess Conundrum would respond that the risk of recurrence still exists. From the perspective of suffering-focused ethics, we should “walk away from Omelas”. But this objection takes us back to practical politics. Life-denying political prescriptions such as naïve versions of negative utilitarianism, “strong” antinatalism, efilism, world-destructionism (etc) are at best a distraction. At worst, their advocacy alienates a vast swathe of life-lovers who could otherwise be powerful allies:
Benevolent World Exploders
See too:
Destroying Humanity
But the only realistic way I know to destroy Darwinian malware is gene-editing.
8. Conclusion.
Conundrum writes:
“the whole abolitionist project is inherently doomed to failure”
Given the state of the world today, I can understand this sentiment. And if you contemplate just how socially marginal we are, the whole project can seem a pipedream. But imagine if – as is quite possible sooner or later – a larger-than-life billionaire or world-famous media-personality decides to make the cause his own. The example I often give is Elon Musk. Imagine if instead of building ten-trillion-dollar colony on Mars, Elon were proposing an equally ambitious and expensive project to reprogram the biosphere. Would a Hundred-Year Plan to phase out the biology of suffering still seem so ridiculously far-fetched? And whether the abolitionist project takes a hundred, a thousand, or even ten-thousand years, I just don’t see any alternative. Life-denying solutions to the problem of suffering won’t fly – politically, socially, or demographically. They are a dead-end. Knowledge of their futility isn’t enough to suppress antinatalist or benevolent world-exploder fantasies about terminating the whole Darwinian horror-show. Occasionally, I have intrusive thoughts myself. Yet intellectually, we should recognise that such fantasies are sterile escapism. They won’t solve the problem of suffering.
By contrast, a biohappiness revolution can work – it’s just a monumental political, social and technical challenge:
Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering?
From Fond Thinker
Can biotechnology end suffering?
("What if the hospital offered you the chance to make a few DNA tweaks that could ensure your children will live happily ever after?")
Robert, Jo Cameron's (almost) unique double mutation is associated with a demonstrable loss of nociceptive function. Opting for the single FAAH mutation would be more cautious.
I've previously focused on SCN9A ("the volume knob for pain") because SCN9A has dozens of different alleles conferring different degrees of pain tolerance.
Marsili syndrome is interesting too.
Is Marsili syndrome associated with an unusual zest for life? Physical and mental pain/well-being are intimately linked, so I'd love to see more research into the comparative psychological health of people with high pain tolerance.
[on euthanasia]
Darren, it all boils down to what kind of safeguards and who decides. At one extreme, the assisted right to die could be made extraordinarily difficult to exercise. At the other extreme, if there were walk-in clinics where anyone could be administered - or self-administer - a Brompton cocktail, then tens of millions of people world-wide would presumably exit each year - as distinct from the annual 850,000 or so who take their own lives today.
What's the right "balance"? I don't know. My partial cop-out of an answer is that we should be taking extraordinary steps to make sure no one wants to die, including direct reward pathway stimulation in case of refractory depression and neuropathic pain.
[on transhumanism in Turkish]
Transhumanist ideas are somewhat controversial in Turkey. An English translation of my CINS magazine interview (pdf) is uploaded below:
Insanlik icin en buyuk tehdit transhumanizm degil, bizzat insan dogasidir
("The greatest threat to humanity is not transhumanism, but human nature itself")
[on The Hedonistic Imperative in Italian]
The language of paradise won't necessarily be the Queen's English:
L Paradiso Della Tecnica e L'ecosistema post-Darwiniano che verrà
See too:
Il Progetto Abolizionista
[on COVID, racism and xenophobia]
Any advanced civilisation would find the differences between members
of human ethnic groups are trivial compared to what unites us. Alas,
one of the traits that unites us is a shared predisposition to racism
and xenophobia during epidemics and pandemics.
Epidemics and pandemics can exacerbate xenophobia, bigotry
[on panpsychism]
Post-materialist science? Unlike Christof Koch, I don’t see how
integrated information theory (IIT) solves the combination problem.
But I’m sympathetic to consciousness fundamentalism. Only the physical
is real. But perhaps the intrinsic nature of the physical isn’t what
materialists suppose...
Is consciousness everywhere?
Integrated Information Theory
What is a quantum field?
Dale, traditional property-dualist panpsychism is unfalsifiable. The traditional materialist assumption that consciousness is absent from the world's fundamental fields is unfalsifiable too. However, the physicalist version of panpsychism as expressed in the intrinsic nature argument is not just falsifiable but - on the face of it - false. For there is apparently only a partial structural mismatch between our minds and the brain. We should at most be 86 billion “pixels” of neuronal mind-dust. Consequently, David Chalmers makes the case we must consider dualism. But the dualist must show not merely that no perfect structural march exists in four-dimensional space-time, but also that no perfect structural match exists in the fundamental high-dimensional space required by the dynamics of the wavefunction. Classical space-time can't simply be assumed. Reality is quantum to the core. Taking quantum mechanics seriously means we must consider configuration-space realism (cf. Alyssa Ney: The World in the Wave Function)
or Hilbert-space realism. My best guess is that molecular matter-wave interferometry will yield a perfect match.
Dale A revision of physics? Plenty of consciousness researchers believe so. But two kinds of revision should be distinguished. The most common is that consciousness is somehow implicated in the “collapse of the wavefunction”, i.e. some kind of modification or supplementation of the unitary Schrödinger dynamics. I’m sceptical. However, if the intrinsic nature argument is correct, we can be formally conservative. Quantum field theory describes fields of sentience. The entire mathematical apparatus of modern physics must be transposed – or rather, we simply drop fields of insentience as metaphysical gunk akin to luminiferous aether.
The intrinsic nature argument heralds is a revolution of ontology, not dynamics.
Quantum minds
EM field theories of consciousness
Stuart, simply transposing the entire mathematical apparatus of modern physics onto an experiential ontology is elegant - though I don't know if it's true. I normally assume wavefunction monism: the wavefunction is a field in a high-dimensional space rather than in the three-dimensional space of electromagnetic fields. If fields of experience are fundamental, then their subjective texture is presumably insanely minimal. I can see why it's tempting to use terms like "proto-conscious" or "unconscious", but I'm not sure this phraseology is strictly intelligible.
Brian, let’s consider just the physicalist version of panpsychism.
Experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical.
Consciousness in the world outside your head is as minimal and
uninteresting as when you are dreamlessly asleep. Such fields of
primordial what-it’s-likeness are not bound into minds. Their
behaviour is described by exactly the same formalism of orthodox
quantum field theory. What happens when you wake up? On the orthodox
materialist view, consciousness is created ex nihilo. Hence the
so-called Hard Problem. By contrast, if constitutive panpsychism /
non-materialist physicalism is true, then “waking up” doesn’t change
the intrinsic nature of the world’s fundamental fields of
what-it’s-likeness. Rather, they are locally reorganised into the
phenomenal world-simulation your mind is now running. I’m interested
in how such phenomenal binding is possible.
A critique of "bonding" solutions to the phenomenal binding/combination problem:
Against phenomenal bonding
By contrast, quantum superpositions are individual states, despite their multiple components. “Cat states” have an ontological unity. Therefore, if (1) constitutive panpsychism / non-materialist physicalism is true; and (2) quantum mechanics is complete, then phenomenal binding in the CNS is guaranteed at temporally fine-grained resolutions.
I won't believe it until I see the interference signature!
And the relevance to HI?
Well, only subjects of experience with a phenomenally-bound pleasure-pain axis matter. Only minds have moral status. Artificial digital zombies like programmable digital computers are just useful tools – even as they increasingly outperform sentient beings in multiple cognitive domains:
Digital zombies
Disclaimer: I could very well be mistaken. Believers in digital minds would say so. But it’s an empirical question, not “just” philosophy.
Tom, I wouldn’t personally use the term “noise” here. If a single-celled animal has micro-experiences, then they may have a micro-functional role. By contrast, even if the 1s and 0s of a classical digital computer were micro-experiences, they would still be functionally incidental to the execution of the program - irrelevant implementation details.
QRI's Andres Gomez Emilsson...
Digital sentience: can digital computers ever "wake up"
The binding problem is also relevant to everything from the prospects of "mind uploading" to full-spectrum artificial general intelligence to the Simulation Hypothesis to s(uffering)-risks. Regulars here know my scepticism about digital minds but Andrés's background is (very!) different.
Facundo, you propose "autistic realism". High AQ/IQ folk do indeed tend to experience their own minds differently. Andrés groks the autistic mind-set as well as anyone – as the introductory section on his mathematical journey indicates. But I've never met anyone as good at switching cognitive style as appropriate.
Everett's relative state interpretation of QM might also be called the no-information interpretation. For whenever one seems to have created information ex nihilo - for example, by observing a live cat or detecting a spin-up electron - the information content of reality remains 0. The superposition principle never breaks down. See Andrés' introduction to a zero ontology:
A Zero Ontology
Care is needed with remarks such as "we all see the same exact classical world". Each of us instantiates a phenomenal world-simulation; none of us “observes" our extra-cranial surroundings (cf. poet Emily Dickinson's "The brain is wider than the sky..."). So-called perception is a misnomer; “perception” is a genetically adaptive psychosis. The content of your phenomenal world-simulation is indeed classical, but the vehicle is non-classical. "Cat states" mediate your experience of classicality and an external world; phenomenally-bound observation would be physically impossible for a pack of classical neurons. By contrast, the operation of classical Turing machines depends on effectively decohered 1s and 0s and logic gates. So digital computers are micro-experiential zombies. On pain of magic, digital zombies can't "wake up".
Or at least that's my best guess!
I won't believe any of this craziness until it's (dis)confirmed by interferometry.
Alan, traditional idealists, animists and panpsychists overpopulate the world with minds. Naively, one might suppose that non-materialist physicalism too is the recipe for digital awakening and conscious AI. But as Andrés outlines in the video, classical computers can't solve the binding problem. Phenomenal binding is non-algorithmic. Yet binding has been harnessed by natural selection to create throwaway world-simulations like the external reality you're experiencing right now.
The Real Problem(s) withPanpsychism
I'd have to differ with Anil Seth.
First, constitutive panpsychism in the form of non-materialist physicalism makes novel predictions. For a start, and in defiance of appearances, there must be a perfect structural match between the contents of our minds / world-simulations and the CNS – ultimately with fundamental physics:
Predictions of consciousness fundamentalism
If no such structural match exists, then dualism is true and constitutive panpsychism is false.
Second, if constitutive panpsychism is true, then consciousness per se has no function - it's the essence of the physical. However, phenomenally-bound consciousness most certainly does play a functional role in biological minds, not least in underpinning our egocentric world-simulations.
"Panpsychism explains nothing", says Anil Seth.
On the contrary, unlike materialism, constitutive panpsychism / non-materialist physicalism explains the empirical (“relating to experience”) evidence. It has stunning predictive power. It's falsifiable.
Is it true?
I don't know.
Jacob Bell on the intrinsic nature argument:
A Panpsychist Problem
("Is the intrinsic nature argument confused or unqualified?")
The recently-revived intrinsic nature argument can be traced to Bertrand Russell, who noted how the physical sciences describe only structural-relational properties of Nature, not essences. Russell was also a critic of the doctrine of internal relations popular among idealists. However, if the wavefunction monism of modern physics is correct (i.e. no "dynamical collapse" of the wavefunction), then reality is a single object, the universal wavefunction: Wavefunction monism
If so, all relations are internal relations. My best guess is that the subjective properties of what you are experiencing right now are determined by everything else in reality in the same way that the properties of the number, say, 42, are fixed by its relationship to every other number.
Anil Seth above claims that constitutive panpsychism can't explain the subjective texture (“what it feels like”) of any particular experience. In default of a cosmic Rosetta stone, neither can I. But perhaps the arbitrariness of these textures is illusory. I conjecture that the values of experience as encoded in the solutions to the world’s master equation cancel out to zero in an informationless zero ontology.
Wild speculation?
Yes.
Maximilian, I'm not a micro-experiential zombie - not unless I'm dreamlessly asleep, at any rate. So I know that phenomenally-bound consciousness exists. I assume that you experience multiple dynamical perceptual objects populating a world-simulation too.
Could classical Turing machines generate such phenomenally-bound experiences?
Well, notionally replace their 1s and 0s with discrete pixels of experience. Execute the program. Complexity of code and speed of execution make no difference. If physicalism is true, the upshot is still a micro-experiential zombie.
Explaining how organic nervous systems achieve such a seemingly impossible feat is trickier. Naively, we should at most be micro-experiential zombies too – just a bunch of decohered, membrane-bound neurons communicating across synapses.
However, I explore the implications of the intrinsic nature argument:
The intrinsic nature argument
The mathematical model is just the superposition principle of QM
Quantum superposition
and the
Schrödinger equation
of (unmodified and unsupplemented) quantum mechanics. In other words, I'm not proposing any new physics.
Superpositions of distributed neuronal feature-processors (edge-detectors, motion-detectors, colour-mediating neurons etc) in the CNS must exist on pain of a breakdown of the unitary Schrödinger dynamics. Critically, superpositions ("cat states") are individual states, not aggregates of discrete classical components in need of binding.
The reason that most scientists would be sceptical if not dismissive that neuronal superpositions could explain phenomenal binding is their effective lifetime in the warm, wet CNS - not milliseconds but femtoseconds or less (cf. Quantum Mind (Wikipedia).
I find the conjecture hard to believe too!
But my best guess is that interferometry will reveal a perfect structural match - not in four-dimensional space-time, but the fundamental high-dimensional space required by the dynamics of the wavefunction.
See e.g. Alyssa Ney:
The World in the Wave Function
[on the intrinsic nature argument and objective value]
Vignesh, Is Heaven better than hell? Or is this just a subjective value-judgement, neither true nor false? Most scientific rationalists believe that only the physical is real. Naively, there is no place in a scientific ontology for objective moral values. Hence antirealism about value and moral nihilism. In this FB group, we support the anti-suffering "team", but our “team” is no more right or wrong than a different “team” that supports rape, torture and child abuse.
I agree only the physical is real.
But what do we mean by "physical"?
Presumably whatever the equations of physics describe. If the equations describe fields of insentience, then we get materialist physicalism and The Hard Problem. Materialist physicalism fails the test of empirical adequacy.
By contrast, non-materialist physicalism offers an empirically adequate alternative: experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical. Most of the controversy around the intrinsic nature argument centres on whether it solves the Hard Problem of consciousness - or is simply insane. But the intrinsic nature argument has implications for ethics too. On this account, agony and despair are disvaluable by their very nature. The badness of agony is self-intimating – it’s an objective property of some physical states that they are disvaluable to the subject.
So what about ethical disagreement?
Within this framework, disputes derive from ignorance. Evolution does not promote an impartial “view from nowhere”, but rather egocentric virtual worlds that differ primarily in the identity of their protagonist.
I say a bit more e.g.
DP on meta-ethics
Can one logically derive an "is" from an "ought" or an "ought" from an "is"? Anti-realists believe the answer is self-evidently "no". Value realists like me argue yes; but the nature of hybrid states that combine elements of the normative and descriptive is still puzzling.
Do you believe in some version of the "Boo-Hurrah" theory of ethics?
Boo to the Boo-Hurrahs
("How four Oxford women transformed philosophy. Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley took on the male consensus — and revolutionised modern ethics")
Or does the pain-pleasure axis disclose the world's inbuilt axis of (dis)value?
Or something else?!
Zarathustra, we can speculate about unimaginably alien phenomenal colours. But not colours that aren’t coloured. Likewise with (dis)value. We can speculate about unimaginably alien value systems. But if we talk about anything that isn’t directly or indirectly parasitic on the pain-pleasure axis, then are we still talking about (dis)value? Or something different?
David, the mind-dependence of (dis)value undercuts its objective nature only on the assumption that mental states aren’t objective features of the physical universe. You give the example of moral disagreement. Does the fact that, say, rivals in love and war wish each other harm show there is no objectivity to (dis)value, i.e. it’s just stance-relative? No, such differences of judgement reflect our epistemological and semantic limitations. Our minds don’t commune with each other. So we can’t access each other’s (dis)valuable experience. For evolutionary reasons, we each run egocentric world-simulations. By contrast, a God-like superintelligence who could impartially access and weigh all first-person perspectives would act accordingly, banishing all sources of disvalue. Modern science suggests we adopt “the view nowhere” - perhaps better described as the view from everywhere, or the point of view of the universe.
Loïs, Wikipedia conflates the robust, the objective and the mind-independent. The pain-pleasure axis - as distinct from, say, the colour spectrum - discloses the world’s intrinsic metric of (dis)value. If I’m in agony and despair, then this is (objectively) a disvaluable state of the physical universe - regardless of whether anyone else thinks so or not. If someone fails to recognise its objective badness, then they are ignorant and/or mistaken. If I were alone in the universe, then (dis)value would exist, but not morality. However, other sentient beings exist too. Science says I’m not ontologically special. So I should try to minimise the (objectively) disvaluable states of other sentient beings as though they were my own. If I had God-like (or Borg-like) knowledge, I would do so; but of course I don’t.
David, I can’t “prove” anything beyond solipsism-of-the-here-now. But the badness of suffering comes close. Evolution via natural selection has “encephalised” our emotions in complex ways. So the sovereignty of the pain-pleasure axis is often disguised. But the masochist you mention derives intensely rewarding endogenous opioids from activities that would otherwise be painful or humiliating, So masochists haven’t transcended the axis of (dis)value. Neither has the ascetic.
Lance, among secular rationalists, science is generally reckoned our best theory of reality. So some rationalists feel they must give up objective (dis)value for the same reason they think they must abandon e.g. consciousness (cf. eliminativism), determinate meaning and reference (cf. Quine), definite outcomes (cf. Wigner's friend etc) and so forth. Naively, it's true, the ontology of science, ultimately physics, has no place for objective (dis)value. But as far as I can tell, materialism (as distinct from physicalism) is false. The pain-pleasure axis discloses the world’s intrinsic axis of (dis)value. On this story, posthuman Heaven really will be better than Darwinian Hell.
Lance, the badness of my agony and despair is primitive. I can't define this normative aspect in terms of anything else - any more than I can define redness. This isn't like claiming, say, God speaking to me is primitive. Any such claim alludes to something outside my experience itself. For sure, passing from my inherently disvaluable state to the badness of suffering for anyone, anywhere takes philosophical work. But so does going beyond the contents of one's here-and-now to the multiverse of modern science.
Lance, I may be mistaken about everything beyond the contents of my here-and-now. Epistemic humility aside, consider a normally life-loving person who would destroy themselves and the world in order to make their suffering stop. It's not just that they intensely dislike their suffering. Suffering has a coercive force, a normative aspect, that is ultimately impossible to resist. The universal wavefunction is unimaginably sinister. Oh how I long for ignorance and oblivion - which must be the ultimate aspiration of any utilitarian, classical and negative alike.
Lance, there is a key difference. Minds can be engineered either to value or disvalue nachos or miscellaneous intentional objects. By contrast, minds can’t be engineered to value agony and despair. The pain-pleasure axis discloses the world’s inbuilt axis of (dis)value: it's not a contingent feature of evolution.
David, a majority of professional philosophers (which I'm not) are value realists of some description. So if professional expertise has any weight at all, then realism should be taken seriously - even if we go on to reject it. At any rate, I have disvaluable experiences, just as I have red experiences. So I know they are part of the fabric of reality. This is a stance-independent fact, trivial or otherwise. If anyone doesn't recognize their self-intimatingly disvaluable nature, this failure is a function of their epistemological limitations. I assume failure cuts both ways. In short, one can have a conditioned preference to disvalue or value nachos, but not to disvalue or value despair.
"All mathematics is tautology", said Wittgenstein, but this doesn't mean what mathematicians do is necessarily trivial. Likewise with explicating (dis)value. The existence of "mixed" states (Thích Quảng Đức), the radically different ways evolution has encephalised states of the pleasure-pain axis, and the fact each of us runs an egocentric world-simulation rather than accesses a shared public world (etc) complicates any analysis of (dis)value. But states of pure agony and despair are disvaluable. This normative aspect is built into the nature of the experience itself. You say, "They certainly do not reveal anything about value or disvalue that inheres in the world at large". But minds are objective features of physical reality. Mind-dependent doesn't mean ontologically second-rate.
David, the Borg (and the real-life Hogan sisters) know something the rest of us don't. Valuing the despair of one's "enemies" is misperception. Given access to fourth-millennium technology, yes, someone might choose not to mild-meld for fear of subverting their own values. But refusniks would be choosing ignorance rather than expressing disagreement in full knowledge.
You say, "Of course we do not value what we disvalue. But that doesn’t tell us that any particular situation must be disvalued." But( dis)value realism, at least of the kind I defend, isn't about contingent intentional objects (like nachos), but rather the pain-pleasure axis itself, the engine of (dis)value.
Max, yes, the suffering-focused / abolitionist camp would do well to avoid tying the theory to any meta-ethical position. That said, the normative aspect of agony is built into the nature of the experience itself. The is-ought gap is an artefact of language.
Alternatively, heaven really is better than hell; the pain-pleasure axis discloses the nature of (dis)value; and we should abolish suffering though science.
[Why is Aeon publishing this garbage? Is there really nothing morally wrong with torture, rape and child abuse? The writer of this poisonous nonsense is apparently a “professor of moral philosophy” - mercifully now retired]
Forget Morality by Ronnie de Sousa
("Moral philosophy is bogus, a mere substitute for God that licenses ugly emotions. Here are five reasons to reject it")
Loïs, you say, "I think that I don't want to stop pain for its own sake, but instead because of how it hinders my other projects and desires."
Wouldn't it be more apt to say you do want to stop pain for its own sake, but the thought of being functionally unable to accomplish your other projects and desires fills you with greater pain?
Objective badness?
For reasons we do not understand, some states of reality are inherently, self-intimatingly bad. This disvaluable nature is a subjective state - a recipe for confusion given the distinct meanings of “subjective”. But disvaluable states are objectively real. They have spatio-temporal location. Their inherent badness doesn’t depend on the stance of anyone beyond the victim. By the same token, their first-person nature doesn’t demote them to second-class ontological status.
Mistaken?
OK, let’s say that the pain or humiliation of someone who has crossed me gives me satisfaction. Seeing him on the pavement after treading on a banana skin amuses me. Insofar as I mistakenly fail to recognise his suffering as inherently bad, I’m a perceptual naïve realist with a magical theory of reference confusing my mental state of satisfaction with affairs in my world-simulation with an objective, inherently disvaluable state in the external world.
(Dis)value and morality are often conflated. But whereas (IMO) the disvalue of suffering is self-intimating, the same can't be said of morality.
Can Hell really give rise to Paradise? And what is the upper limit to disvalue?
What is the upper limit of value?
by Anders Sandberg and David Manheim
[on the intrinsic nature argument and consciousness]
First, yes, "Galileo's Error certainly covers a lot of ground. But my understanding was is that Phil Goff believes that the intrinsic nature argument
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#IntrNatuArgu
essentially (dis)solves the Hard Problem - a view he previously disowned:
.
Goff’s view is now (as I far as I can tell) non-materialist physicalism:
Physicalistic panpsychism
Yes, a few materialists reject the need for the "fire" in the equations; and there are complications, notably entangled states in QM. But (rightly or wrongly) I assumed that most materialists accept there is something the equations describe. Otherwise, all we have is an uninterpreted mathematical formalism. I've also assumed (rightly or wrongly) the reason that most materialists wouldn't say that QFT describes fields of insentience is that it's trivially obvious that the world's fundamental quantum fields are non-experiential. On that assumption, drawing a distinction between materialism and physicalism can seem pedantic.
But it's not:
Physicalism versus materialism
The ancestor of what we now know as the intrinsic nature argument is Russell’s neutral monism. Indeed, it’s sometimes known as "constitutive Russellian monism" - enough to make most non-philosophers rush for the exits!
If non-materialist physicalism / constitutive panpsychism is true, then the solutions to the equations of QFT encode the textures of consciousness - from a red rose to everything else. We lack a cosmic Rosetta stone to “read off” the textures of consciousness from the solutions to the equations. But that's not because any "element of reality" is missing from the formalism of physics.
If non-materialist physicalism is true, then experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical. If so, we already have a potential solution to the binding / combination problem. As standardly posed, the binding / combination problem assumes discrete, decohered classical neurons. But if conscious fundamentalism is true, then all physical states are conscious states. And at sufficiently fine-grained temporal resolutions, the mind/brain isn't an aggregate of classical neurons, but individual superpositions of neuronal edge-detectors, motion detectors, colour-mediating neurons and so forth. My guess is interferometry will reveal a perfect structural match between these individual superpositions and what you're experiencing right now. Intuitively, for sure, such quantum superpositions are irrelevant to our minds. Their effective lifetime in the warm, wet CNS is femtoseconds or less. So intuitively, they’re not consciousness, let alone our well-ordered virtual worlds of experience. But if non-materialist physicalism is true, then such superpositions are phenomenally-bound conscious states. If they aren't, i.e. such superpositions are non-experiential, then non-materialist physicalism is false.
I’ve probably lost you a few moves ago. But the intrinsic nature argument has implications for the nature of the physical world not just at the level of the very small, but also the very short-lived.
[on depression]
Try to have an early night:
Want to reduce your depression risk? Wake up an hour earlier
("Waking up just one hour earlier could reduce a person's risk of major depression by 23%, suggests a sweeping new genetic study published May 26 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.")
Will low mood be cured by designer drugs, intravenous gene therapy or brain-computer interfaces?
The case for BCIs:
BCIs may cure low mood?
Nesbit, you say drugs "tackle the symptoms not the cause". Drugs are just a "crutch". Compare, say, Type 1 diabetes. Taking insulin doesn't cure the underlying biological-genetic root of the problem. Insulin is just a crutch. Gene therapy will offer a permanent cure. Likewise mental health.
Depressive realism? Maybe, but also a risk of steeper cognitive decline...
Happiness in early adulthood may protect against dementia
("Depressive symptoms increase risk for cognitive impairment")
Bodywide genetic upgrades should be matched by a genetic "vaccine" against physical and mental pain:
Superhero vaccines for bodywide genetic upgrades
More evidence for the inflammatory theory of depression:
Neuroglia and mood
("Immune cells found in the brain are behind the depression experienced in inflammation")
Aging and depression are a bigger planetary scourge than COVID. Conversely, mood enhancement can be rejuvenating.
Major depressive disorder causes brain aging
("The functional MRI is a promising aging clock.")
There are intimate links between optimism and longevity. It’s a medical miracle some of us still walk the Earth.
Optimism and longevity
("Optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in 2 epidemiologic cohorts of men and women")
Urgently needs replicating:
Nitrous oxide ("laughing gas") as an antidepressant
("low doses of 'laughing gas' could be fast, effective treatment for severe depression")
Nitrous oxide is an antagonist of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) glutamate receptors.
Study shows adaptive brain response to stress
("and its absence in people with depression")
But hedonic uplift is a better recipe for mental health than blown minds.
The ketamine blew my mind
("Can psychedelics cure addiction and depression?)
The mood-lifting properties of lactate, not to be confused with lactose:
The antidepressant power of lactate
But unlike ignorance and error, known bias can be corrigible.
The Up Side of Being Down
("Depressive Realism and Analyst Forecast Accuracy")
[on 'quantum cognition']
Thanks Josh. OK, I confess I still very sceptical of "quantum cognition" in its current guise:
Quantum cognition (Wikipedia)
Superposition in quantum mechanics has a precisely defined technical meaning:
Quantum superposition (Wikipedia)
So does the Born rule:
The Born rule (Wikipedia)
It's not clear to me that invoking the language of QM to explain human decision-making is offering anything more than suggestive (or misleading?) metaphor and analogy.
That said, regulars here know I take quantum mind seriously:
Quantum Mind
IMO phenomenal binding is classically impossible:
Phenomenal binding is non-classical
But the conjecture – true or false - that our minds and the world-simulations we run consist entirely of neuronal "cat states" (superpositions) is meant quite literally and falsifiably. Your experience of a definite outcome in accordance with the Born rule is itself a neuronal superposition.
Yes, crazy.
[on psychedelics and higher dimensions]
"The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight."
(Joseph Campbell)
Getting high with the most high
("Entheogens in the Old Testament")
Dan, most people are implicitly perceptual direct realists. On psychedelics, the boundaries between one's self-module and the (rest of one's virtual) world may partly dissolve. So if the experience is enjoyable, the direct realist psychedelic user may speak mystically of "becoming one with the cosmos". Alternatively, you might take a dissociative anaesthetic and undergo an out-of-body experience. If perceptual direct realism were true, then on ketamine the experience of gazing down on one's physical body would disprove monistic physicalism.
I should add that IMO it's impossible to overstate the intellectual significance of psychedelics. The drug-naïve are profoundly ignorant in ways they can never grasp...
Experiencing higher dimensions
Thanks Andres! Some folk need DMT to experience higher dimensions; I use coffee. We should distinguish between the (normally) four-dimensional content of our world-simulations and their ridiculously high-dimensional vehicle. If the medium of our minds were four-dimensional, too, then we'd be micro-experiential zombies (cf. the binding problem), not unified subjects. Only the existence of higher dimensions allows you to undergo the illusory experience of low-dimensional macroscopic objects in classical space-time. According to the version of wavefunction realism that I explore, we are all physical fields of sentience in a (very) high-dimensional space. The amplitude and phase values of the wavefunction evolve in accordance with (a relativistic version of) the Schrödinger equation, i.e. no new physics. Crazy stuff - I don't know if it's true:
Quantum minds
Higher dimensions = Everett’s multiverse. In fairness, not all Everettians believe in configuration space or Hilbert space realism. David Wallace argues against wavefuction realism in favour of “spacetime state realism”. But if we reject higher dimensions and wavefunction realism, then local realism is untenable
Nonlocality (Wikipedia)
(Actually there are loopholes - "Superdeterminism: A Guide for the Perplexed".) However, my own scepticism about low-dimensional space-time stems from everyday phenomenal binding. Classical fields and classical space-time are the recipe for micro-experiential zombies.
Saying “Everett” threatens this effect on me:
Thinking yourself to death
("Inside psychogenic death, the phenomenon of "thinking" yourself to death. Those with dysexistential syndrome can literally will themselves to die. Medicine is just starting to understand")
I even use (technically accurate) euphemisms like “unitary-only QM”.
Adam, in my view, the "weirdness" of entanglement AND our phenomenally-bound minds and their world simulations becomes intelligible if we take the math at face value - rather than simply instrumentally as a tool for generating predictions. (Quantum theory is often said to be empirically adequate, but that's not so - if the mathematical machinery of QFT described fields of insentience, we'd be zombies.)
As you remark, other accounts of higher dimensions aren't concerned with an Everettian multiverse.
MDMA often induces a sense of heightened authenticity ("this is the real me") - albeit a very rose-tinted authenticity. So calling MDMA a "psychedelic" can mislead...
Academic Centers Start to Take Psychedelics Seriously
("You're not sticking your neck out as much as you would 10 years ago," one director says)
[on past suffering]
Adam, Alexey Turchin has written a very interesting paper "Back to the Future:
Curing Past Suffering and S-Risks via Indexical Uncertainty, Acausal Trade and Domination in The Multiverse – or Time Travel". As you might guess, I'm pessimistic - I intend to send Alexey a critique. But such intuitively crazy ideas just illustrate the risk of premature defeatism and of getting indiscriminately "blissed out" after we have eradicated suffering on Earth. Ratcheting up hedonic range and hedonic set-points will be wiser.
Can superintelligences have a false theory of personal identity? If enduring metaphysical egos are just a human fiction (cf. Ultra-Parfittianism), then the prospect that advanced superintelligences could share such a human misconception is vanishingly low. Moreover, what does one mean by "superintelligence"? A full-spectrum superintelligence can presumably access all first-person perspectives and act accordingly. Just as an intelligent mirror-touch synaesthete couldn’t wantonly harm you – harming you would be like harming himself – the all-round “mind-reading” powers of superintelligence will presumably vastly surpass human mirror-touch synaesthetes. So full-spectrum superintelligences won’t be Super-Aspergers. That said, I don't discount s-risks: DP on suffering risks. But (IMO) s-risks derive from biological humans, not insentient digital computers. I'm guessing that you'd argue instead that digital computers could one day become sentient. After all, Turing machines are substrate-neutral, and it is commonly believed that the conscious human mind-brain could be emulated via a Turing machine. But in my view, classical computers cannot solve the phenomenal binding/combination problem (cf. binding-problem.com). Phenomenal binding is immensely adaptive for animal minds. It's the key to our evolutionary success. Binding is too difficult for classical Turing machines – even if their 1s and 0s were fancifully replaced by discrete micro-pixels of experience. Complexity of code or speed of execution make no difference to their zombie status. At most, the upshot is a micro-experiential zombie. Now OK, unless you’re seriously troubled by the binding problem, I don’t remotely expect you to be persuaded by my tentative solution (cf. Quantum Mind). But the answer one gives to the binding problem has profound implications for the future of intelligent life in the universe. Moreover, Everett naturalised modality. There are no effectively decohered “branches” of the multiverse where classical digital computers are phenomenally-bound subjects of experience, let alone malevolent machine superintelligences. A classical digital computer has no understanding of the pleasure-pain axis or phenomenal consciousness of any kind. Everett’s one-and-only multiverse is very different from Tegmark’s hypothetical “Level IV" multiverse. If “Level IV" were real, then yes, so too (presumably) would be atypical evil super-AIs that torture folk. But Tegmark is assuming mathematical platonism rather than nominalism: DP on mathematics.
I’d love to think you are right that intelligent moral agents can somehow eradicate past suffering. But my working assumption is something like Jan-Markus Schwindt’s "Nothing happens in the Universe of the Everett Interpretation".
Let’s I hope I’m wrong.
(cf. The logic of experimental tests, particularly of Everettian quantum theory)
Victor, fascinating. Thanks. I didn’t know this (Schrödinger drawing a quantum brain/phenomenal binding link in his book What is Life?) Schrödinger also anticipates Everett (a jocular allusion in his 1952 Dublin lecture) AND the causally time-symmetric two-state vector formalism too – back in 1931 - but he seems to have lacked the courage of his convictions. Of course, the opposite problem is taking one's ideas too seriously and ending up as just another crank. Actually, a fair number of researchers have briefly wondered whether two classically impossible kinds of holism could be linked - QM and the unity of our minds. The expert consensus is no. The timescales are wrong by many orders of magnitude - scores of milliseconds versus less than femtoseconds. Decoherence is insanely powerful. But if one takes the intrinsic nature argument seriously, then the "dynamical timescales" objection of Tegmark et al. against quantum mind isn't decisive.
Only experiment, i.e. interferometry, can settle the issue.
Dirk, it's not hard to program a digital computer rigged with a speech synthesiser to emit sounds we interpret as claiming it's a phenomenally bound subject of experience racked by existential angst.
It's a zombie.
If p-zombies or micro-experiential zombies were only an epistemological worry - just a version of the ancient sceptical Problem of Other Minds - then they wouldn’t be especially interesting. I don't think p-zombies or micro-experiential zombies are really feasible; they will turn out to be unphysical. But if physicists and chemists really understood the properties of matter and energy, then all of us would be p-zombies. And if not p-zombies, then micro-experiential zombies. The spectre of zombies and micro-experiential zombies highlights the failure of science to explain subjective experience - the only empirical evidence one can ever access. It’s not hyperbole to say that scientific materialism is inconsistent with the entirety(!) of the empirical evidence.
How faithfully could an insentient connectionist system or a programmable digital computer emulate human behaviour - the by-product of a phenomenally-bound subject of experience? I don't know. I don’t think anyone knows. But connectionist systems and programmable digital computers are not spontaneously going to start talking about their non-existent consciousness minds - though they could be programmed or “trained up” to persuade credulous humans otherwise.
[on alexigents]
"That’s why Brachman and her colleagues are identifying novel alexigents [resilience-enhancers], knowing that any new compound will be more expensive and much slower to make it through FDA approval to market."
A vaccine against suffering?
("A scientist explores: What if we could inoculate people against depression and trauma?")
[on rationality]
“I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking." (Einstein)
But testing your ideas should be boringly rational.
Smart thinking
("Can ‘smart thinking’ books really give you the edge?")
The rationalist community is still work-in-progress...
CFAR and MIRI
[on veganism]
Steve, if a meat-based diet were associated with slimmer waistlines, longer lifespans and higher intelligence scores, then veganism would call for heroic self-sacrifice. It's not! And for better or worse, the Earth could support more humans if we all switch to veganism. For it's more energetically efficient to feed humans directly with a plant-based diet than to feed grain and soya products to factory-farmed nonhuman animals whom humans then butcher. Such are the thermodynamics of a food chain.
Ariel, here's my worry. Yes, one can take an antirealist stance. There isn't really anything morally wrong with rape, murder, child abuse, burning witches, etc. Morality is ultimately no different from supporting one's football team. But I think both of us want to create a world with less suffering, human and nonhuman. Meat eaters, naturally, cast around for rationalizations for what they do. So I worry that starting the debate with a philosophical discussion about meta-ethics is a gift to the rationalizers. By analogy, imagine if any discussion on ways to reduce rape or child abuse had to begin with meta-ethical analysis of the status of normative judgements...
[on psychology]
Some kinds of psychosis are genetically adaptive and quasi-hardwired:
How to recognise the signs of Main Character Syndrome
But see
Why You May Need a Healthy Dose of “Main Character Syndrome”
and most importantly
Are you the centre of the universe?
In Praise of Emodiversity:
Obscure words for rare feelings
("In Search of Obscure Words for Even Rarer Feelings.
The More Emotions We Can Name, The Better Off We'll Be")
Not as trivial as it sounds...
The power of "We"
("Choosing the right pronoun can be the ultimate power move")
Should we conserve “mixed emotions”?
Or aim for information-sensitive gradients of pure bliss?
A sad kind of happiness
("The Role Of Mixed Emotions In Our Lives")
Humans, especially male humans, are addicted to competitive zero-sum games - another reason to aim for hedonic uplift rather than trying to reconcile the logically irreconcilable.
How to to deal with the agony of defeat
Is self-confidence sexy? Or anxiety?
Are You More Attractive When You're Nervous?
("Research reveals how anxiety impacts interpersonal attraction")
Do you have an inner voice? And what's it like?
How inner voices arise is unknown.
Into the Void
("Meet the people who have unusual – or non-existent – inner voices")
Do you bounce back like a yo-yo or a pancake?
How Well Do You Bounce Back from an Upsetting Experience?
("New research shows the role of personality in overcoming a negative experience")
Mean Open Individualists are rare.
What Is It That Makes Some People Just Plain Mean?
("New research shows how to identify and deal with those high in meanness")
Closed, empty, and open individualism
How to build a consciousness detector?
Deletion or loss-of-function mutations of the maternally-inherited UBE3A gene causes extreme happiness. Should people with “happy puppet syndrome” be pitied or envied?
Angelman Syndrome
I've long been curious about the inner life of eliminative materialists. Alas its most outspoken advocate on this thread has been FB banned - though not for his eliminativism.
Does everyone have an inner monologue?
(note the author's use of "intentionality" differs from the philosophical sense of term which refers to aboutness, i.e. the object-directedness of thought)
Social status and status-anxiety is insidious - another reason to re-engineer everyone’s reward circuitry…
Schadenfreude
("A psychologist explains why we love to see others fail. Ever laughed when your frenemy made a fool of themselves in public? Here's why you're not alone")
"Priming a common group membership may be a more powerful driver for inducing pro-social motivation than increasing empathy"
Sentient beings should help each other.
Empathetic rats
Can we build a world where it's safe to be super-nice?
Is It Possible to Be Too Nice?
("New research suggests why the nicest people aren’t necessarily the happiest")
Trust your gut?
Gut instincts
("Going with your gut can result in better decision-making than using detailed data methods, study shows")
Attractive meat eaters?
Dating bad boys
But it's complicated...
Vegetarians are more empathetic
For evolutionary reasons, some women find low intellectual and moral calibre a turn-off.
Roll on post-Darwinian relationships...
Why Familiarity Really Does Breed Contempt
("Familiarity breeds contempt, according to psychologists: on average, we like other people less the more we know about them")
Hard-headedness or toxic masculinity?
It depends...
Men make more extreme choices and decisions
("Men are more likely to make extreme choices and decisions than women, according to new research on economic decision-making, led by an international team of scientists")
Alas a low AQ isn't always enough to avert disaster.
Little Disagreements Can Ruin Even the Best of Relationships
("The Princeton authors propose that behind this polarizing tendency is the idea of 'naïve realism'...
New research shows what leads trivial matters to destroy close relationships")
“Everyone has an invisible sign hanging from their neck saying, ‘Make me feel important.’ Never forget this message when working with people.”
(Mary Kay Ash)
Do you freely express any status-lowering views?
When prestige matters more than truth
("Highly Educated People Have Lower Opinions of Others")
Can Facebook save us from the cult of busyness?
The Cult of Busyness
("A life of leisure was once the aspiration of the upper class. But now, bragging about busyness is how people indicate their status. Could a pandemic change the way busyness is glorified?")
Who gets a dedicated neuron in your head?
Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks
“Reality continues to ruin my life.”
(Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes)
The implications of "representational drift" are many and varied...
Representational drift
How well do you deal with "fleeting frustrations"?
Fleeting Frustrations?
("How your brain turns fleeting frustrations into long-term negativity")
“Forever is composed of nows.”
(Emily Dickinson)
What would you choose?
The most meaningful moments
Are humans the virus of the earth?
"The notion of recalibrating the happiness scale overlooks the “sadder but wiser” effect"
Kim, I’d be the first to assert (a predisposition to) superior insight of depressive realists! But unlike ignorance, known bias can be corrected. Thus if you’re smart and know you have rose-tinted spectacles, then you take your optimism bias into account when deliberating. The functional analogues of “sadder but wiser” can be conserved - minus the ghastly raw feels.
If Darwinian social life were a drug, it would be illegal...
Why we hate-follow people on social media
("From politicians to influencers, school friends to colleagues, people are increasingly using their social media platform to keep their friends close - but their enemies closer")
“The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.”
(Oscar Wilde)
Human motives are often impure. But it’s better to be a do-gooder than a do-badder…
Why are we so uncharitable to those doing good deeds?
("From veganism to fundraising, psychologists have found acts of altruism often attract mistrust and even anger")
It’s painful to say, but IMO raising default hedonic tone and hedonic set-points is the key to progress in psychiatric medicine, not psychedelia.
The Psychedelic Revolution Is Coming.
("Psychiatry May Never Be the Same. Psilocybin and MDMA are poised to be the hottest new therapeutics since Prozac. Universities want in, and so does Wall Street. Some worry a push to loosen access could bring unintended consequences.")
Low-dose MDMA isn't really a psychedelic in the sense of psilocybin. And I think MDMA does have a potential psychotherapeutic role. But the people best able to appreciate psychedelics are the psychologically healthiest. I'm sceptical that psychedelics can safely and reliably offer a route to emotional wellness for depressed and/or anxious people.
[on the DP credo]
Interview with DP (mp4)
on physics, philosophy and stuff.
by Philosophical Spaces
And on the abolitionist project / biohappiness revolution:
Universal basic income, healthcare and housing are preconditions of a civilised society. So are benign versions of the SCN9A and FAAH gene. The reason I typically talk more about the latter than the former is that the biological-genetic basis of (un)happiness is neglected - even among transhumanists and effective altruists.
What are your philosophical positions in a paragraph?
1. Facundo, you are right: the intrinsic/extrinsic division is artificial. All one ever knows directly, including what the perceptual naïve realist conceives as physical objects in his local surroundings, are the phenomenal properties of one’s own mind. Thanks to evolution, countless other world-simulations exist, each with a differing protagonist. If non-materialist ("idealist") physicalism is true, then there is no Hard Problem of consciousness because the world's fundamental fields are experiential; but in the abiotic universe, fields of experience as described by the mathematical formalism of quantum field theory aren't phenomenally bound into world-simulations. On this conjecture, primordial experience is around 13.8 billion years old; but our minds are around 540(?) million years old. I say a bit more here:
What is your opinion on Philip Goff's ‘Galileo’s error’?
2. "hedonic zero" is simply experience that is neither good nor bad: emotionally neutral experience that lacks hedonic tone. "Mixed states" complicate any calculus. Evolution via natural selection has “encephalised” pain and pleasure so we believe all sorts of things inherently matter beyond states of the pleasure-pain axis. But their mattering is derivative. Could there be another axis of (dis)value? If so, then some kind of meta-axis of (dis)value would be needed as a metric to govern trade-offs with states of the pleasure-pain axis. I'm unconvinced.
3. Naively, pain and pleasure are symmetrical. Hence the appeal of classical utilitarianism (cf. utilitarianism.com). On the face of it, classical utilitarianism offers the best way to naturalise (dis)value. But in another sense, pain and pleasure are morally incommensurable. Worse, it’s not clear (to me) how to regulate trade-offs even within the pain-pleasure axis because “more is different” – qualitatively different. Alas, I don’t know the right answer.
Don't ask...
Gradients of bliss podcast (mp3)
Abolishing suffering via biotech:
Podcast, Youtube
Trippy (with thanks to Max Freeman. I was touched)
[on plant (in)sentience]
Consciousness = subjective experience, qualia, raw feels, the "what-it's-likeness" of experience.
binding = the ability of animals with nervous systems to generate feature-bound perceptual objects (local binding) populating a unitary world-simulation (global binding, aka the unity of perception and the unity of the self). When we're awake, the phenomenal world-simulations of human and nonhumans animals are updated in almost real time ("perception"). When we dream, they are autonomous. When we’re dreamlessly asleep, phenomenal binding is absent.
Members of the plant kingdom did not evolve energetically costly nervous systems and hence the ability to run phenomenally-bound world-simulations because they are sessile - they lack the capacity for rapid, self-propelled motion. (Anomalies like carnivorous plants don't alter this fact; a Venus fly-trap has "trigger hairs", not a central nervous system.)
Many information-processing systems that lack phenomenal binding can still track features of their internal and external environment. Such systems range from your PC desktop to a termite colony to the financial markets to nation-states to the root vegetables that we eat. If monistic physicalism is true and “strong” emergence is hokum, such systems don’t have a hive mind.
"But you can't prove an uprooted carrot doesn't experience agony!" says the concerned meat-eater.
No.
[on Longtermism]
In its short history, the EA movement has passed from effective ways to tackle (human and nonhuman animal) suffering to AI safety (an imminent machine "Intelligence Explosion" might turn us into paperclips) to "Longtermism"
Against Longtermism by Vaden Masrani
I think our biggest responsibility to future generations is to make sure they aren't born to suffer like us.
[on clean energy]
The case for nuclear power
Civil nuclear power programs have typically been used as cover for military activities. Their international extension would presumably make nuclear war more likely. The climatic effects of nuclear war could be catastrophic - quite aside from the direct human casualties. How should we weigh the comparative risk-reward ratios?
(not a rhetorical question - I don't know.)
[on emotion]
“Be guided, above all, by your emotions”
- Paul Dirac (!)
An astonishing quote from the great physicist. I disagree with Dirac. But one’s conception of reality is inseparable from one’s emotional make-up:
Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking
(by Leonard Mlodinow)
[on The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas]
Would you walk away from Omelas?
And what does “walking away from Omelas” entail?
Long-time HI supporter Cynthia Stewart asked me a question on the role
of fiction in philosophy:
Do you recommend any fiction to help inform one's philosophy?
Cynthia, normally my answer would be a qualified "no". It's better to set out one's premises and chain of reasoning explicitly so they can be critiqued. Does one's argument contain suppressed premises, hidden presuppositions or background assumptions that could cast doubt on one's conclusions? A novel or an allegory doesn’t lend itself to rigorous scrutiny in the same way. From this perspective, fiction has only a supplementary role to play in philosophy.
However, I make a few exceptions. Here is one. First some context. As you know, I advocate that humans abolish the biology of suffering throughout the living world and replace today's misery and malaise with life based on gradients of intelligent bliss. However, some otherwise sympathetic people are surprised - and even appalled – when they learn I’m negative utilitarian (NU). Negative utilitarians believe that our overriding moral obligation is to minimise and prevent suffering. Mitigating or preventing suffering ethically outweighs creating any amount of pleasure. It's not necessary to be a negative utilitarian to sign up to the abolitionist project; but that’s my own rationale. Ethically, all the superhuman bliss ahead that transhumanists anticipate is just the icing on the cake. Alas, “normal” people tend to be aghast or dismissive if they learn you are a negative utilitarian because NU seems to have the following counterintuitive implication. Hypothetically, if it were possible painlessly to destroy the world, then we should press the metaphorical OFF switch in order to prevent more suffering. Indeed, NU seems to have an even more counterintuitive implication. As we know, the real world has atrocious suffering, but an NU would (hypothetically) painlessly destroy the world to avert even a trivial amount of distress. Most people recoil from the idea of retiring life on Earth to prevent even unimaginably vast suffering, let alone so as to prevent a "trivial" amount. Negative utilitarianism is offensive to common sense.
However, consider Ursula Le Guin’s work of philosophical fiction, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973). Le Guin’s fable tells the story of Omelas, a city of marvellous delights whose existence depends - for unspecified reasons - on the torment of a single child in a basement. The citizens of Omelas know about this abused child. But the child’s horrific existence doesn’t stop them having a wonderful time. And indeed, on the Benthamite felicific calculus of classical utilitarianism, why not? Compared to the immensity and rich diversity of pleasures that Omelas offers, the torment of a single child is a mere pinprick in the grand scheme of things. Yet in Ursula le Guin’s fable, a small minority of citizens don't consider the price worth paying. So they walk away from Omelas. Hence the title.
I hope that our glorious transhuman future holds fabulous delights – Omelas Plus. I work towards that end. But like any negative utilitarian, I would still unhesitatingly "walk away from Omelas” if ever the opportunity arose. What’s more, a great many people who read Ursula Guin’s Fable say they would walk away too. Would you? Even readers who report they wouldn't walk away rarely condemn readers who say they’d exit rather than be complicit in the abuse of a child.
Back In the real world, what does it mean - and what might it mean in future - to "walk away from Omelas”?
The answer to this question is controversial (cf. The dubious philosophy of blowing up the universe). The genius of Ursula Le Guin’s allegory lies in how a piece of philosophical fiction inspires debate on a topic otherwise beyond the pale. Limitations of the human mind mean that treatises of academic philosophy can only go so far.
Johan, although Smart's reply to Popper is often wrongly reckoned the reductio ad absurdum of NU, it's the Pinprick Argument that really seems devastating. OK, maybe there's no more reason to expect a true theory of ethics to respect common sense than quantum physics. But the idea of destroying paradise just to avoid a pinprick feels too crazy for words. I used to chat about it with Nick Bostrom - a severe critic of NU - but I don't know who first made the objection to NU ethics. It's kind of obvious, but that's no reason not to properly credit it.
"Oh the gift that God could give us, to see ourselves as others see us."
(Robert Burns)
DP dissected
I've just chatted to the author, the philosopher and 80K Hours webmaster Peter Hartree. What credence would you assign to (1) classical utilitarianism? (2) negative utilitarianism? (3) anti-realism?
SOS.
Contacting aliens could end life on Earth
("Attempting to communicate with extraterrestrials, if they exist, could be extremely dangerous for us")
"Alien apocalypse" might give sensitive souls sleepless nights! Instead, I'd probably quote Richard Bach ("What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly”) or some equally sententious fluff.
Do we think there is any serious risk of a notional button-presser doing harm - defined as causing a lot of suffering - rather than wasting time that would be better spent collaborating with life lovers on (non-apocalyptic) suffering reduction?
Maximising bliss can be as apocalyptic as minimising suffering.
Drugs, robots and the pursuit of pleasure
("why experts are worried about AIs becoming addicts")
[on wireheading]
Will the biohappiness revolution be driven by novel genes, drugs or electrodes?
Push-button joy:
Deep brain stimulation
("In research first, jolts from a customized brain implant provided immediate relief to a severely depressed patient, scientists say")
Having kids destined for a lifetime of negative thoughts raises thorny ethical questions.
Brain zapping
("A brain implant that zaps away negative thoughts raises thorny ethical questions
Salon spoke to philosophers about "deep brain stimulation," a novel technology to treat depression")
Shortcuts to paradise can be more tempting than reprogramming the biosphere.
The future of wireheading
("What are the ethics of an implant that delivers pleasure directly into your brain?")
[on abolitionism in The Times]
Post-Darwinian life will be based on gradients of transhuman bliss.
Sentient beings should weep only tears of joy.
It's going to be a long struggle. James Marriott in The Times (July 29):
If we want to live we have to suffer and weep
("Only the modern mind could long for a life without anxiety, envy, sadness and boredom")
[abolitionists also want to abolish paywalls]
The 200+ comments section fills in any missing numbers from
HI Bingo
And what about nonhuman animals and small children? Unlike adult humans, humble intellects can't even partially rationalise their suffering.
Andrei, "abolitionism" is sometimes used by animal advocates for American legal scholar Gary Francione's admirable view that all sentient beings have the basic right not to be treated as the property of others. But abolitionism in the broader sense refers to complete abolition of all experience below hedonic zero. As far as I know, the first person to recognise that an architecture of mind based entirely on gradients of bliss was feasible was Lewis Mancini back in 1990. "Riley-Day Syndrome, Brain Stimulation and the Genetic Engineering of a World Without Pain":
Riley-Day Syndrome, Brain Stimulation and the Genetic Engineering of a World Without Pain
I tracked Lewis down a few years ago to congratulate him - he didn't even use a computer.
[on the (bio)intelligence explosion]
A minority view among transhumanists:
Will a biological singularity arrive first?
But IMO digital zombies aren't going to wake up and replace us.
Full-spectrum superintelligence will be our descendants:
The Intelligence Explosion &
The Great Replacement
Our friends at MIRI argue otherwise:
"Intelligence Explosion FAQ"
Eddie, you say "the problem with a "biological singularity" is that the rate of improvement to intelligence is much lower than what is possible with computers". This argument would be compelling if Turing machine functionalism were true. A John von Neumann is a lot smarter and quicker at problem-solving than the village idiot, but even a super-von Neumann couldn't compete with the logico-mathematical prowess of a modern digital computer. However, von Neumann (and the village idiot) can perform cognitive tasks impossible for a digital zombie in virtue of being phenomenally-bound subjects of experience. IMO our successors will also be our descendants: genetically-enhanced superhumans with embedded neurochips.
[on antiaging]
On antiaging pills
("New study finds most adults would not take a life extension pill, even if it existed")
Strong prediction: if radical life-extension pills were readily available, almost everyone would take them.
Adaptive preference formation
For serious life-extensionists only:
Long-lived castrates
("New research shows that castration of male sheep delays aging of DNA compared to intact males")
Would you rather grow a new head or new body? (both in my case)
Sea Slugs
("Scientists discover slug that can decapitate itself, grow new body
The bizarre discovery could pave the way for advances in regenerative medicine for humans")
[on psychological hedonism]
“All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.”
(Blaise Pascal)
But the full story is indeed more complicated
Two types of psychological hedonism
[on Transvision 2021]
Transvision Madrid
Alas the route to posthuman paradise has speed-bumps:
mp4 (video) & PDF
The transhumanist movement doesn't lack diversity...
El futuro es hoy, según 400 expertos
[on anxiety]
Taking regular vigorous exercise is still normally wiser than taking pills:
Anxiety effectively treated with exercise
("Both moderate and strenuous exercise alleviate symptoms of anxiety, even when the disorder is chronic, a new study shows.")
[on pain]
Edging towards the mainstream:
Life Without Pain - "How the people who NEVER feel pain could transform medicine: A new book reveals how scientists hope to harness this superhuman condition") One-off intravenous gene therapy (cf. CRISPR infusion) could give human and nonhuman animals Jo Cameron's benign double FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutation - or anything else we choose.
The link between physical and psychological pain
But do humans have the wisdom to engineer a happy biosphere?
Let's get this right.
Is the WHO proposing a whistleblowing mechanism to prevent...the only way to underwrite good health as defined in its founding constitution?
WHO proposes whistleblower mechanism
Of course gene editing can (and will) be used for many purposes beyond ending suffering.
An intimate connection:
Social and physical pain
("The pain of social disconnection: examining the shared neural underpinnings of physical and social pain")
"Widely assumed human pain more painful than other species. But pain’s Darwinian purpose is warning: 'Don’t do that again. Next time it might kill you.' So perhaps the more intelligent the species the less pain needed to ram warning home. Animals might suffer more than us."
(Richard Dawkins)
Richard Dawkins on Twitter
So will a superintelligent species switch to a more civilised pain-free signalling system and rescue the others?
Pain versus nociception:
How your brain creates pain
Life on Earth needs a more civilised signalling system:
The cure for pain (Wired)
Biotech can make suffering optional - but not without a political, social and
biological-genetic revolution:
The eradication of suffering (Wikipedia)
Robert, crudely, if mu opioids are the recipe for pure bliss, then opioids plus dopaminergics are the recipe for bliss plus hypermotivation. Needless to say, I'm not advocating "speedballing". But today's drugs of abuse illustrate that extreme well-being can be combined with extreme motivation to overcome challenges.
See too
Killing pain
("New Brain Implant Automatically Detects and Kills Pain in Real Time")
Sentient life deserves a more civilised signalling system, but a biohappiness revolution calls for political as well as biohacking genius.
Why emotional pain hurts
("'Hurt feelings' is more than a metaphor")
Acetaminophen is a subtle mood-brightener and anxiolytic that reduces rejection-sensitivity.
However...
Acetaminophen increases risk-taking
("The Most Common Pain Relief Drug in The World Induces Risky Behavior, Study Finds")
How to defeat chronic pain?
Short-term:
1) Conolidine is natural, so it can't be patented, but orally active blockers of the ACKR3 receptor are extremely promising painkillers, mood-brighteners and anxiolytics:
Conolidine to treat chronic pain
A natural painkiller
but (apparently) without the abuse potential of traditional opioids. Drug companies are now researching patentable analogues of conolidine.
Medium-term:
2) Somatic gene therapy targeting the FAAH and FAAH-OUT genes could (potentially) give existing pain-ridden humans Jo Cameron's extraordinarily high pain threshold and resistance to anxiety and depression:
Hedonic Gene Therapy
Medium-to-long-term:
3) Universal access to preimplantation genetic screening and counselling would allow all prospective parents to choose a benign, functional, "low pain" version of the critical SCN9A gene ("the volume knob for pain") for their future children, turning pain from a (sometimes) hellish nightmare to a useful signalling-mechanism - and at worst a mere annoyance.
[on opioids]
Sharks and other fish have a pleasure-pain axis just like mammals. Their minds run virtual world-simulations too.
Tropical fish fiend for opioids, too
("Addicted zebrafish seek out hydrocodone thousands of times per hour")
Opioid addiction makes fools of us all:
The course of true love...
("Turkish woman, 20, marries boyfriend who threw acid in her face leaving her disfigured and almost blind after his early release from prison")
Disastrous, I fear:
Why a Columbia Neuroscientist Acknowledged Using Heroin
("Carl Hart felt he had to ‘come out of the closet.’ He knew there’d be downsides.")
We are all born opioid addicts, but the way to tackle our endogenous opioid addiction isn't by taking heroin.
What's the best recipe for universal love?
Opioids Feel Like Love
("That’s Why They’re Deadly in Tough Times")
Ven Graham, an MDMA-like civilization would be different from an opioidergic civilization, so to speak, presumably a function of MDMA's action on pro-social oxytocin. The link between MDMA and opioid function is a bit of a puzzle. The rewarding properties of MDMA are preserved in mu-opioid receptor knockout mice, but enjoyment is blunted by naltrindole, a selective delta-opioid receptor antagonist. Mice shouldn't be deprived of mu-opioid receptors, but I'd like to see more studies done with consenting humans.
A more orthodox approach:
Sunlight and mood
("Scientists examine the effect of daylength on the brain’s opioid system")
The sinister kappa receptor:
Kappa Opioid Receptors Drive a Tonic Aversive Component of Chronic Pain
“The moment that I took that first Percocet, it did something to my brain,” he said. “If I could design myself, and feel how I wanted to feel, that was it. Immediately, I was like okay with myself. I was at peace on the inside.”
Deep brain stimulation for addiction
Poppy seed and coca tea might be an interesting cocktail.
Poppyseed tea addiction
Coca tea
A mood-brightening pain-reliever without tolerance?
Conolidine
("The natural analgesic conolidine targets the newly identified opioid scavenger ACKR3/CXCR7")
"The atypical chemokine receptor ACKR3 has recently been reported to act as an opioid scavenger with unique negative regulatory properties towards different families of opioid peptides. Here, we show that conolidine, a natural analgesic alkaloid used in traditional Chinese medicine, targets ACKR3, thereby providing additional proof of a correlation between ACKR3 and pain modulation and opening alternative therapeutic avenues for the treatment of chronic pain."
[on cryptocurrencies]
Time to launch hedonium?
walletbuilders.com
("Start a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin without any knowledge of programming")
Denationalised money
A magic money tree?! If the supply of cryptocurrencies were finite, then one could talk of their scarcity value. But it’s unlimited! Moreover, just as with MLM schemes, it’s the folk at the bottom of the pyramid will suffer. But this time it’s different? It always is…
Billionaire John Paulson Warns Cryptocurrencies Will Be Worthless
Hamster Power
A hamster has been trading cryptocurrencies in a cage rigged to automatically buy and sell tokens since June - and it's currently outperforming the S&P 500")
Greg, yes - perhaps there will be a winner. (Feel free to test my integrity by lobbing a few thousand ETH my way.) After all, there are now zillions of g-tlds, but the dot. com domain extension still rules. Possibly I'm over-reacting to being given the hard sell for various ponzicoins. But whereas some people can afford to lose a lot of money, one hears of other folk losing their savings.
I should stress that the davecoin will be different!
Edward, obviously, it's complicated. Strictly speaking, crypto is neither a ponzi nor a MLM. And in any case, one can use a ponzi or a MLM to do good deeds. Bernie Madoff was a generous charitable donor. The mania has some way still to run, but it will all end in tears.
One moral quandary for EA organizations is if they accept morally compromised funding, then it then becomes very hard to call out what's going on.
See too:
Worldcoin is a dystopian nightmare
Craig Wright’s firm really is called “Tulip Trading Ltd”.
Tulip Trading files lawsuit
William, I promise I hold dark views of nationalism and nation states. I was just highlighting the hyperinflationary growth of cryptocurrencies compared to the stable number of state-backed fiat. One also needs to guard against motivated cognition. If one owns crypto-"assets", then one will only be human if one hypes their value, sucking more people in (FOMO).
Despite my serious reservations, I'm not trying to set myself up as a Financial Consultant. And I'm not a Certified Cryptocurrency Expert™ (CCE)...
Certified Cryptocurrency Expert
What should be done with this thread if some crypto-zillionaire wants to donate to HI?
How to donate crypto
("Bitcoin, ETH, and other cryptocurrencies can make your giving go farther. Plus: 15 nonprofit orgs that accept crypto")
Are you ready to be tokenized?
What Happens When You’re the Investment
("Social capital is becoming economic capital")
But some first-wave transhumanists aren't yet sold on crypto.
What happens when the Fed turns off the taps?
The Transhumanist Case for Crypto
[on extraterrestrials]
SOS:
Physicist warns that contacting aliens could end all life on Earth
("Attempting to communicate with extraterrestrials, if they exist, could be extremely dangerous for us")
Presumably an advanced civilisation will be a better judge than human toddlers of the optimal configuration of matter and energy. Alas I fear we're alone in our Hubble volume. But distress signals won't go amiss.
[on the world's oldest person?]
Jeanne/Yvonne Calment (Wikipedia)
Did Jeanne Calment live to be 122?
It's not just the Russians! I used to believe; but I now lean towards scepticism. The most common source of inflated longevity claims in otherwise well-documented cases is identity substitution. Identity substitution has already twice tripped up Guinness validators - the Joubert & Izumi cases. Ruling out an identity switch in an era of mass-photography ought to be straightforward. Therefore the selective destruction of photographic and documentary evidence by Calment's heir, reportedly on her instructions, is a very unfortunate coincidence.
The case may be genuine. But if we agree with the scientific maxim that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (ECREE), then is a nagging scepticism here unreasonable?
It's regrettable the debate has become so politicised.
The selective destruction of evidence could be entirely innocent. On the other hand, if Yvonne Calment usurped her mother's identity for financial reasons, then exposure would mean Raffray's heirs had a claim against the Calment estate ("In life, one sometimes makes bad deals" - Jeanne/Yvonne Calment). My view? Well, I’m not sure it’s relevant for Wikipedia purposes. Let’s just say financial chicanery among humans is extremely common, whereas living into one’s thirteenth decade is vanishingly rare.
How would we respond if a publicity-loving, supposedly 120-year-old Russian claimant to World's Oldest Person instructed selective destruction of documentary and photographic evidence? We'd probably be rather sceptical of the extraordinary longevity claim - especially if the claimant and her family had a financial incentive to fib about her identity and age. Patriotic Russians would probably dismiss Western "conspiracy theorists". They’d tell us top Russian validators had authenticated the case. Perhaps they'd be right! But consider the comparative frequency of living into one’s thirteenth decade and misrepresentation for monetary gain. I hate being cynical, but if we're Bayesian rationalists, then a verdict of "not proven" would be wise.
[on terraforming]
Most animals in the wild starve to death at a very early age. Even if one is a classical utilitarian (cf. Utilitarianism.com), one shouldn't advocate creating Darwinian ecosystems. However, mastery of the pleasure-pain axis will allow the creation of happy biospheres without experience below hedonic zero - with multiple fail-safe mechanisms to prevent accidents.
What about sub-paradisiacal biospheres that still have a "small" amount of suffering?
Well, NUs will always "walk away from Omelas".
However well-meaning, EA that promotes creating pain-ridden Darwinian ecosystems elsewhere will have turned into an Effective Harm movement. Let's hope it never happens. Mercifully, the technical obstacles to terraforming planets in other solar systems are several orders of magnitude harder than messing around here.
Ekaterina, if EA focuses on the possibility of "cosmic rescue missions", then all well and good! My own Rare Earthism and scepticism about interstellar travel may be misplaced. However, Longtermism in EA is often equated with its classical utilitarian version. This is more worrying.
[on gender]
AI thinks I have an 84% likelihood of being female...
The Gender Continuum Test
("Do people of different genders actually have different personalities?")
[on insect sentience]
Insect sentience
("why insects are more sensitive than they seem")
I guess the "good" news is that IF our successors decide systematically to help insects, then - as small fast-breeders - they are easier and cheaper to help with tunable synthetic gene drives than large vertebrates.
[on moral grandstanding]
Moral grandstanding, signalling, or simply finding suffering in others personally distressing...so long as the problem of suffering gets fixed, I'm not worried:
Moral grandstanding
("The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk")
Lance, no doubt so. But conversely, in some cases, and to some limited extent, professed moral anti-realism may be motivated by a desire to signal one's intellectual superiority over others. In academia and in scientifically educated circles, saying one is a moral realist makes one sound naïve and unsophisticated.
"Why are some people drawn towards moral realism, and some aren't?"
Compare consciousness realism. Just as some folk think that scientific materialism forces them to disavow their own consciousness, likewise the existence of (dis)value is naively inconsistent with the scientific world-picture. Not so. Consciousness and (dis)value are indeed inconsistent with an ontology of materialism, but they are objective features of reality. Admittedly, the normative aspect of states of the pain-pleasure axis can’t be semantically unpacked in terms of anything more primitive, but then neither can, e.g. the colourful aspect of phenomenal redness. It’s still an objective feature of existence.
Some moral realists also reject physicalism. I don’t: I think materialists have an impoverished understanding of the nature of the physical.
David, I believe that Socrates’ claim that nobody does wrong knowingly, but rather only though ignorance is essentially correct. This claim obviously faces many objections, ranging from the antirealist objection to objective (dis)value to the existence of people who revel in their own wickedness.
Borg values? Just as the physicist aspires to the "view from nowhere" rather than the skull-bound egocentric world-simulation his mind is running, likewise a philosopher may aspire to the perspective of the Borg, so to speak. In both cases, inability to do so fully in practice is a function of ignorance.
Zarathustra, IMO alien sentience in other Hubble volumes will have a pain-pleasure axis of (dis)value like us. Digital zombies lack such an axis of (dis)value. Nothing intrinsically matters to classical Turing machines. Only phenomenally-bound minds can experience non-trivial (dis)value. How we do so is a big mystery:
Biological Minds and QM
Matthias, yes, if (dis)value can be naturalized, classical utilitarianism is intuitively the easiest and indeed the only way to do it. If suffering is self-intimatingly bad, then pleasure is self-intimatingly good - and only our epistemological limitations stop us adopting a God’s-eye-view and acting accordingly. Let’s maximise value and turn the world into pure bliss. However, I was highlighting an asymmetry. The normative aspect of raw suffering is built into the experience itself, whereas the classical utilitarian prescription that insentient matter - or a contented mind - should be converted into maximally valuable hedonium is a judgement imposed from outside.
[on sugar]
Not so sweet...
Sugar May Be Stealing Your Happiness
("Sugar isn’t just a cause of metabolic disease. Mental health is another casualty")
[on cosmology]
Our universe seems sinisterly fine-tuned for the existence of suffering.
Evidence for the Devil? Or Everett?
Exploring The Universe That Wasn’t
("How slight differences could have forever changed our cosmic history")
[on intellectual debt]
Utopian Pharmacology
by
Dr. James R. Fransisco (sic)
(with thanks to Salomé Gilles)
My jaw dropped slightly...
I see there's even a "second edition":
The free original, written in my deathless prose, is at:
Utopian Pharmacology by David Pearce (2003, 2020)
Salomé got in touch wanting to cite Utopian Pharmacology in her dissertation. She was confused that the entire text was apparently authored by "Dr Fransisco".
The last person overtly to, um, "borrow" my work was
Plagiarism by British Drug Tzar, but the late Prof. Iverson lifted only six paragraphs. This fellow seems to have taken plagiarism to a whole new league!
Cynthia, thank you. The goddess of MDMA might not approve of litigation! And perhaps the fellow is an Open Individualist raising money for a worthy cause.
Open Individualism
Darren, in the USA, big-name academics often offload stuff to their postgrads, but they normally rewrite borrowed material rather than lift it verbatim. I guess our late drug tzar wasn't aware of archive.org. I dropped OUP a line - mainly because I was worried someone might think I'd plagiarised the illustrious professor rather than the other way round.
ShaNe, I'll be more worried when people don't think I'm worth plagiarising any more, but it's still... disconcerting.
[on illusionism]
Illusionism (Wikipedia)
Illusionism/eliminative materialism/anti-realism about consciousness are huge impediments to scientific knowledge. How can we hope systematically to investigate and understand alien states-spaces of consciousness - compare taking high-dose LSD, ketamine and DMT, ideally not at the same time - if we're in denial about the existence of consciousness itself? What do people like Sasha Shulgin (and our friends at QRI) spend their lives researching?
However, my biggest worry is ethical. If one finds consciousness an intellectual embarrassment (the “Hard Problem”), then one is likely to downplay its existence in others too. Compare the appalling way humans treat nonhuman animals in factory-farms and slaughterhouses. Meat-eaters already tend to minimise non-human animals minds. Illusionism offers an incentive to disregard their suffering altogether.
Perhaps part of the problem, ironically, is Descartes and the Cogito. If one starts with introspective self-awareness, then one is focusing on consciousness at its most thin, subtle and elusive. The phenomenology of logico-linguistic thinking (and solving equations, writing computer code, etc) is so rarefied that some materialists - not me, alas - manage to convince themselves it doesn’t exist. But whether one is dreaming or awake, consciousness is one's entire phenomenal world-simulation. The mind-independent external world is a (strong!) theoretical inference; it’s not a given. Illusionists tend to be (implicitly) perceptual direct realists rather than inferential realists.
IMO, post-materialist science will be physicalist – an extension of the Standard Model. But the intrinsic nature of the physical – the “fire” in the equations – isn’t the gunk of materialist metaphysics.
There is a fundamental difference between being dreamlessly asleep and being awake. The difference is not just behavioural. When you wake up, an entire phenomenal world-simulation boots up too, with your body-image at its centre. And it’s all consciousness - you'll never directly know anything else beyond your mind and the conscious world-simulation it runs. The existence of this empirical evidence is a scientific mystery. For if the world's fundamental quantum fields are non-experiential, then consciousness shouldn't exist (the Hard Problem). If neuroscientists are correct that nervous systems are aggregates of discrete classical nerve cells, then you should be (at most) a micro-experiential zombie (the Binding Problem). If physics is causally closed and effectively complete, then consciousness shouldn't have the causal-functional power to e.g. discuss its own existence (the Problem of Causal Efficacy). There are other mysteries too (e.g. the Palette Problem), and I could discuss possible solutions, notably the newly fashionable intrinsic nature argument and non-materialist physicalism. But "illusionists" / antirealists / eliminativists deny the very existence of the empirical evidence that most of us are trying to explain:
The Consciousness Deniers
If a denialist tells me he has no place for my consciousness in his theory of the world, then I’m tempted to respond: so much the worse for your theory of the world. But perhaps more fruitful is to focus on testability. Everyone with a theory of consciousness – or its absence – should be asked what genuinely novel, precise, experimentally falsifiable predictions their theory makes:
Predictions
And if “None”, they should say so explicitly.
Rémy, Yes, all the options seem incredible. Does the intrinsic nature of the world's fundamental quantum fields differ inside and outside one's head? No, say illusionists / anti-realists. Consciousness doesn't exist anywhere! No, say consciousness fundamentalists. Consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical. Non-materialist physicalism transposes the entire mathematical machinery of quantum field theory onto an idealist ontology - what Galen Strawson calls "real materialism". What makes human and nonhuman animal minds different from the abiotic universe is non-psychotic phenomenal binding. Your CNS is running an egocentric world-simulation in the guise of an external world.
The sane option is neither of the above. Like life, consciousness (weakly, non-spookily) emerges from the underlying physics. Yet if so, no one has the slightest idea why or how water is turned into wine: emergentism is a non-theory. But at least emergentism doesn't deny what most of us find undeniable, namely one's own conscious mind.
Rob the problem with illusionism isn't that it's weird. Reality may be weirder than we can conceive. Rather, illusionism denies the only thing one ever directly knows. Maybe the oasis is a mirage; maybe the voices are really inside my head; maybe I'm dreaming; maybe I'm a Boltzmann brain - and maybe consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical - all of these possibilities are seriously weird, but they are "just" radical reinterpretations of the empirical evidence. Illusionism / antirealism about consciousness denies the empirical evidence itself.
I simply don’t know how to parse the claim that my pain is an illusion.
We're both physicalists, impressed by the power of science. But only one version of physicalism is consistent with the empirical evidence. Only one version of physicalism faces no explanatory gap. Only one version of physicalism explains the success of science AND one's own conscious mind. Yes, non-materialist physicalism is intuitively crazy. But unlike its materialist cousin, it’s not demonstrably false. So it's my working assumption.
Here’s a defence from a former critic:
Panpsychism is not in conflict with physics
Bill, suggestions that eliminativists might be p-zombies are normally spoken in jest. But (just occasionally) I wonder if conceivably they might actually be true!
It’s not subjectively like anything to be dreamlessly asleep. But by day, one is a phenomenally bound subject of experience: a mind and the egocentric world-simulation it runs.
On standard materialist physicalist assumptions, minds should be impossible.
Influenced by the https://www.quora.com/In-what-ways-is-a-brain-similar-to-a-computer">computer metaphor of mind, some materialists try to redefine mind in terms of information processing rather than phenomenology.
But the Hard Problem is the phenomenology: on materialist premises, it shouldn’t exist, and neither should you!
Kuhn's Incommensurability Thesis could be applied just as well to consciousness realists and denialists. We're talking past each other. All I've ever known, directly, has been my own consciousness. On balance, I don't think I'm a Boltzmann brain (etc). So I infer the existence of an external environment populated by billions of other skull-bound virtual worlds - some of which belong to eliminativists who misconstrue the nature of their own minds. minds.
[on brains and AI]
Fascinating:
Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong
("Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong faster than an AI. Hundreds of thousands of brain cells in a dish are being taught to play Pong by responding to pulses of electricity – and can improve their performance more quickly than an AI can")
[on music]
"Philosophy is the highest music."
(Plato)
Not if you've ever read an analytic philosophy journal.
What Your Music Taste Reveals About You
("Psychologists have found correlations between these sounds and character traits.")
Has lockdown changed our musical taste?
Feeling Lonely? Turn up the Volume!
("Summary: Lonely and socially isolated people prefer higher volume sounds, such as loud music or background noise, compared to those who feel socially accepted, a new study reports.")
[on abortion]
Rupetrt, extremely premature babies (born after 21-22 weeks' gestation) are clearly conscious. If consciousness depended on neocortical function, maybe 15-16 weeks would be a credible estimate; but neocortical chauvinism is false. Maybe six or seven weeks?? The neural plate forms as early as 16 days after conception. We are really asking about the approximate age of the earliest phenomenally-bound experiences; and the basis of phenomenal binding is not scientifically understood.
Artificial wombs will transform the abortion debate. But the arguments can feel surreal. Pigs and other nonhuman animals whom humans factory-farm and slaughter are as sentient and sapient as toddlers. Many "pro-life" advocates eat meat. Pigs matter far more than a human foetus - though ideally we should protect the interests of both. Likewise human and nonhuman animal mothers.
[on AI risk]
DP in the Philippines.
We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI
("A proposal to ban AI research by treating it like human-animal hybrids")
"Even the best current AIs, like GPT-3, are not in the Strong category yet, although they may be getting close"
Hokum. GPT-3 is no closer to machine consciousness than an abacus. Sentience-unfriendly intelligence is humanity - not least our treatment of our fellow creatures as though they were insentient biomass.
We can understand digital computers but they can't understand us. Transformative AI and AGI are different beasts. Yes, AI will transform human civilization. But AGI is a pipedream. Classical Turing machines and connectionist systems are functionally incapable of solving the phenomenal binding problem. Phenomenal binding has underpinned the extraordinary evolutionary success of biological minds over the past c. 540 million years. By way of example, imagine trying to live on the African savannah if you simultaneously had, say, integrative agnosia, simultanagnosia, akinetopsia and schizophrenia. You'd starve or get eaten. Digital computers aren't going to become phenomenally-bound subjects of experience with a pleasure-pain axis. In my view, the future belongs to genetically rewritten, AI-augmented biological minds, not digital zombies.
May digital zombies have Buddhist utility functions.
Can a Machine Learn Morality?
Secular Buddhists should presumably welcome the prospect of AGI that turns us into the equivalent of paperclips. No misalignment of values there: the problem of suffering would be solved! But digital zombies are not going to inherit the Earth. We need to tackle the biological-genetic roots of suffering.
AI is a useful tool (cf. DeepMind’s AlphaFold protein structure program).
MIRI/Eliezer's perspective is different:
AGI interventions
Maximilian, whether digital zombies could ever pose a threat to humanity is a legitimate question. But that's not Strong AI in the sense of intelligent machine consciousness. Could hypothetical zombie AGI do something worse to sentience than today’s regime of factory-farming, slaughterhouses and mass asphyxiation, i.e. the fishing “industry”?
It's fun sci-fi. But I've never come across a technically or sociologically credible scenario. IMO, we should focus on creating sentience-friendly biological intelligence.
Are "paperclippers" an autistic worry
Matthew, in essence, yes. Phenomenal binding is (1) insanely computationally powerful and 2) impossible on pain of magic for a classical Turing machine or connectionist system. General intelligence is a function of your mind and its entire phenomenal world-simulation.
What I don't even begin to grasp is what sentient humans, transhumans and posthumans will be able to do with embedded "narrow" AI.
AGI with a Buddhist utility function might seek the true vacuum, but alas I'm sceptical of AGI.
False Vacua
("What if the Universe lives in a false vacuum state?")
The wisdom of zombies?
No. AI is neither sapient nor sentient, and full-spectrum AGI is a pipedream. But zombie AI is a (sometimes) useful tool that will revolutionise life in the cosmos.
Genocidal bliss?
("Ethical AI Trained on Reddit Posts Said Genocide Is OK If It Makes People Happy.
Fed by Reddit and Mechanical Turks, the algorithmic morality spinner is a dangerous and stupid use of technology")
[I'm a functionalist, just not a Turing machine functionalist:
Does consciousness serve any useful purpose?]
Blissful extinction = nirvana? However, to keep life lovers on board the abolitionist project, we need to maintain message-discipline.
[on hyperthymia, hypomania and mania]
Secular scientific rationalism can be a sign of masked depression. But posthumans will (probably!) be hyperthymic rather than hypermanic.
Manic hyper-religiosity
("An Atheist Neuroscientist Finds Faith in Bipolar Mania.
Why does bipolar mania cause hyper-religiosity, even in a nonbeliever like me?")
Posthuman life will be of superhuman intensity.
Manic Vividness
("Like Seeing Colors for the First Time: Superheroes and Mania. Why did bipolar mania give me "supernatural" senses?")
[on academia]
One's unacknowledged intellectual debts to others are vast; but one rarely contemplates their nature and extent compared to unacknowledged intellectual debts to oneself.
Citations and the ethics of credit
("A philosopher putting together resources for a professionalization seminar for graduate students in his department writes in with concerns about the 'ethics of credit' in philosophy")
[on trans]
Trans 2021
("High schoolers may be more gender-diverse than previously thought, new study says")
a bit like having a real tail I guess. What will it mean to be a real transhuman?
Where is manhood most precarious?
I learned some new words (and concepts!) today:
Glossary of Must-Know Gender Identity Terms
Fox News will love this one...
Omnisexual vs Pansexual
[on epiphenomenalism]
The Ghost in the Machine
("Is It Time to Give Up on Consciousness as ‘the Ghost in the Machine’?)
If subjective experience has no causal power, then it can't inspire discussion of its properties - or even existence.
The causal power of experience
Free will (as distinct from the phenomenology of volition) is most likely impossible. But it's unclear what it would mean to say consciousness is an illusion. Alas, agony is not illusory:
Consciousness is no illusion
The perceptual naive realist believes he is directly acquainted with his local physical environment. This feat of magic would be highly adaptive, but it's not physically possible. By contrast, running a real-time phenomenally-bound world-simulation that masquerades as the external environment is both adaptive and physically feasible -although not if the brain is a pack of classical neurons:
The brain in consciousness
[on social media]
Should we worry more about people with too many desires or too few? And desires that are too strong or too weak?
Addiction, Health and Technology
(Silkie Carlo, Bernadka Dubicka & David Pearce debate)
"Tech companies are orchestrating our addiction and they need to be stopped" (SK)
versus
"The problem grows with no regulation and young people are the most at risk" (BD)
versus
"Addiction and suffering are not caused by technology" (DP)
How will you be immortalised?
Urban Dictionary Names
("What Is the Urban Dictionary Name Trend? How To Find Yours")
[on mind melding]
The Hogan sisters are unique...
Split brains and combining minds
Lovely video. Awesome. Thanks Adrian. There are immense technical obstacles to building a pan-species hive-mind, but the alternative is hard-wired ignorance as now.
Can someone debunk solipsism?
[on the foundations of QM]
The universality of the superposition principle and the experience of
definite outcomes are in conflict only if the subject (the “observer”)
confuses the vehicle of observation with its content.
Is the past (and future) there when nobody looks?
[on conspiracy theories]
“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory."
The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.
The world is rudderless.”
(Alan Moore)
Can intelligent moral agents ever design a rudder?
Conspiratorial
("Disagreeable people found to be more prone to conspiracy theories")
[on a vaccine for mental health]
The Biohappiness Revolution
("A Vaccine for Mental Health")
Intro (mp4). A great one for conspiracy theorists (cf.
Vaccine passports anybody?
Actually, I'll be tackling the implications of CRISPR infusions for superhappiness, superlongevity and superintelligence. But Alex Jones would have a field day!
Adam, unlike traditional environmentalist approaches to reducing suffering, the biological-genetic strategy is inherently longtermist. Germline engineering tackles future potential suffering. I’d planned to focus on the novel use of CRISPR infusion to help existing sentience. But my usual stuff on designer babies can be viewed through a longtermist lens. Presumably it's easier to minimise the amount of suffering in our forward light-cone than to maximise the theoretical upper bound of the abundance of happiness.
Hedonic justice is neglected:
Genetics matters
("Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?
The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything.")
And unlike genetic enhancements that enable the bearers to compete in a socio-economic rat race, hedonic uplift is not zero-sum. But will progressives have the courage to embrace genetic reform?
Tim, perhaps the biggest strength of classical utilitarianism is that CU is the most obvious way to naturalise (dis)value. Some of its implications are repugnant. But the onus is on those of us who reject a symmetry theory of (dis)value to justify our rejection. I agree that the bliss of pleasure-optimised minds is qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from micro-minds. Here we return to the thorny issue of the nature of binding. But the thrust of the utilitronium shockwave argument still stands. All the rich complexity of blissful transhuman and posthuman minds is ethically unacceptable from the perspective of CU because it doesn't maximise the cosmic abundance of bliss. These mega-minds should be converted into mega-orgasms, so to speak. As an NU, this possibility doesn't trouble me. But the shockwave scenario and its variations can be cited when CUs claim that NUs are plotting to destroy the world. Unlike CUs, NUs can settle for life based on gradients of intelligent bliss.
Aaron, I'm as keen on nuclear disarmament as anybody. But last year alone, over four times as many people took their own lives as were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Hundreds of millions of people world-wide suffer from chronic pain and depression. The problem of suffering will be solved only when we target its biological-genetic roots.
[on the binding problem]
Zarathustra, If the decohered bits and byes of a digital computer were superposed, then the program would malfunction, not yield functional phenomenally-bound states like perceptual objects. (Of course, hardware errors do occasionally impact computer software. See e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaZ_RSt0KP8)
And if the 1s and 0s were notionally replaced by discrete pixels of experience, the program would run correctly as intended as before, but the upshot would be a micro-experiential zombie, not a phenomenally-bound subject of experience - regardless of the complexity and sophistication of the code and regardless of how fast the program runs.
Of course, I'm making assumptions here, not least, no "strong" emergence.
But granted this assumption, bits and bytes can't somehow blend into each other.
Sorry, could you clarify your remark about "a disconnect between the information available neurologically and 'consciously'"?
The “Schrödinger’s neurons” conjecture proposes to solve the binding problem by speculating that at sub-femtosecond temporal resolutions, your mind and its world-simulation consist entirely of individual "cat states" (all legal according to unitary-only QM). But when investigators probe your mind-brain at multi-millisecond resolutions with today’s crude tools of neuroscanning, you seem from an outsider's perspective to be a pack of discrete classical neurons. This ostensible structural mismatch gives rise to the binding problem.
Matthew, do the Hogan sisters hint at the future of sentience?
The Hogan sisters
It's possible that reversible thalamic bridges will be feasible to allow "mind melding". But I'm inclined to think transhumans and even posthumans will still live in egocentric virtual worlds - intimately interconnected, for sure, but still, in one sense, solipsistic island-universes. Neurochips will offer virtual telepathy, but not literal telepathy.
Most approaches to the binding problem search for the elusive "mechanism" of binding to which you allude. The quantum-theoretic version of the intrinsic nature argument I explore doesn't need such a mechanism: neuronal superpositions ("cat states") are individual states, not classical aggregates in need of binding. Decoherence explains phenomenal unbinding.
The reason most scientists don't find the approach credible is timescales - femtoseconds(?) rather than milliseconds. And perhaps they are right!
[on smart drugs]
A sceptical if not cynical review:
Brain enhancers
("Effective Brain Enhancing Pills Do Not Exist Be suspicious of any drug that claims it will make you think faster or better.")
[on dreaming and lucid dreams]
And we're still dreaming, so to speak. But peripheral nervous inputs now shape our dreamworlds...
Eyes wide shut
("How newborn mammals dream the world they're entering A new Yale study suggests that, in a sense, mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are even born.")
Dreaming Minds
("Why Do Some People Always Remember Their Dreams, While Others Almost Never Do?")
No, I don't buy the interpretation of QM used, but yes, "waking reality and dreams are different versions of the same thing":
Dreams and Wakefulness
What differs during waking life is the existence of a selection mechanism.
Galantamine is a reversible inhibitor of acetylcholinesterase that induces lucid dreams:
Lucid dreams and consciousness
("Can lucid dreaming help us understand consciousness?")
[on closing slaughterhouses]
Shut the death factories
Sadly, a Close All Slaughterhouses campaign probably needs a 5 to 10
year delayed implementation clause to succeed - both to incentivise
cultured and alternative meat production and to ensure that enacting
legislation involves quite literally zero personal inconvenience to
consumers. Extravagant "compensation" should probably be offered to
farmers as well.
[on existential risk]
Status quo bias is stronger in heaven than hell.
What are the odds we destroy the world
Perhaps the best way to safeguard to the future of sentience is to abolish suffering and the nihilistic impulses it spawns:
Solve suffering by blowing up the universe?
Humans are ineradicable. The human species can disappear only via genome editing.
The Earth After Humans
60 °C of global warming "tens of millions would survive just fine"
[on grudges]
“Some wounds run too deep for the healing.”
(J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)
Another reason to edit our Darwinian source-code...
Why We Can't Forgive Or Forget
[on perception]
The case against reality
I love and use Hoffman's "interface icons" metaphor; but "The case against reality" is a click-baity title. Mind-independent reality is different from our phenomenal world-simulations; but this is an ancient theme. Moreover, if the intrinsic nature argument is sound, then - in one sense - mind-independent reality is actually more familiar than common sense would suppose.
However, "brains" are mind-dependent artefacts - though unlike Donald Hoffman, I'm also a realist and a physicalist.
Naive realism (Wikipedia)
Few researchers - and indeed few educated laypeople - would expressly defend naive realism. But what’s more insidious is how it’s implicitly assumed. Most of us use the language of “observation”, “perception” and a shared “public” arena. How often do you say “Within my phenomenal world-simulation, I’m experiencing…” rather than “I can see…”?
IMO the confusion of vehicle and content leads to everything from the measurement problem in QM to the binding problem in neuroscience and more mysteries besides.
Why does everything look and feel solid?
Well, if Schopenhauer was right that the inner essence of everything is conscious volition - "will" - then yes, reality ought to be sentience-friendly - despite Schopenhauer’s pessimism. But the modern version of the intrinsic nature argument that Schopenhauer pioneered doesn't identify the "fire" in the equations of physics as conscious “willing”, but something much broader: phenomenal what's-it's-likeness in all its guises. Most forms of consciousness do not have a volitional aspect. Macroscopic material objects are as much a part of one’s mind as conscious striving.
The contents of one's conscious mind typically masquerade as the external world. If one is lucid dreaming, then within one’s world-simulation, one can fly, dissolve, make grey hair turn black, and seemingly revise the laws of physics.
When one is awake, most of one's consciousness continues to take the guise of physical surroundings external to one’s body-image. But one's phenomenal world-simulation has become lawful and brutally constrained. The reason for this transition is that peripheral nervous inputs now intensely select the contents of the world-simulation run by one’s mind in fitness-enhancing ways. One’s extracranial body is no longer paralysed. Naïve realism is genetically adaptive.
In fairness, I should add that though there are compelling grounds to believe inferential realism is true - i.e. one doesn't directly perceive the mind-independent world - the conjecture that consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical is speculative. But if the conjecture is false, and instead the world's fundamental quantum fields are non-experiential, then I haven’t the slightest idea how to solve the Hard Problem.
Kristofer, The extended mind thesis is interesting. But one still needs to represent books, one's iPhone (etc) in one's skull-bound world-simulation. Strictly, one's virtual body interacts with virtual books and virtual computers in a virtual external world.
Contrast the view that the mind literally extends outside the skull.
The extended mind thesis (Wikipedia)
Why does everything look and feel solid?
[on predation]
Herbivorize predators
Cats are serial killers responsible for immense suffering. It's not their fault. But the cat family should be genetically reprogrammed or peacefully retired.
Philosophy at its most shallow...
Cats and the Good Life
Vegan robo-lions?
Robotic mega-fauna
Reprogram (human and nonhuman) predators, don't kill. Non-violence is vital to success.
Painlessly Killing Predators by Ben Bramble.
"We have an ethical duty to care for each individual animal on earth"
Exactly...
Animal Suffering by Jeff Sebo
("It is not enough to conserve species and ecosystems. We have an ethical duty to care for each individual animal on earth")
Unlike members of the cat family, are crocodiles the kind of "charismatic meta-fauna" we'll want to genetically-behaviorally tweak rather than retire?
Savaged by a crocodile
(I hope I'd be the friend who leapt into the water to punch the crocodile, but I fear I'd just start frantically philosophizing about the future of predation.)
Which species should be herbivorized and which peaceably retired? Presumably human enthusiasm for "conserving" even veganised sharks will be less than for members of the cat family.
‘Half-eaten zombie’ shark hunts for food after cannibalistic attack
("A shark carries on hunting for prey despite missing an extremely large chunk of its body")
Or we could reprogram predators, civilize the biosphere, and create post-Darwinian life.
Future animals
("The animals that may exist in a million years, imagined by biologists. Fully aquatic whale-rats. Praying mantises the size of dogs. Scientists imagine the future evolution of life on Earth.")
Sentient Darwinian malware in all its horror:
Do You Even Lift, Embryo?
("Cuckoos spend their early days murdering fellow nestmates. To pull it off, they start bodybuilding inside the egg.")
Wild animal suffering
"What’s also missing from the analysis of WAS is the joy predators get from killing prey."
Compare the argument that what's missing from analyses of human child abuse is the joy of the abusers. Altruism - effective or otherwise - means something very different to the classical and the negative utilitarian.
The predation problem
("Kyle Johannsen speaks to Herbivorise Predators")
One way to shift the Overton window - and also iron out technical problems - will be to conduct pilot studies in self-contained happy artificial biospheres / peaceable kingdoms. I haven't watched the full video yet, but the possibility of "separating" (as distinct from retiring or herbivorising) obligate carnivores is interesting: the advent of cheap cultured mincemeat meat makes this feasible and it's technically easier than genome-editing.
Power creates complicity - even if previously we have had zero personal relationship with the human or nonhuman animals in question. Uncontroversially, if one comes across an unfamiliar small child or a dog drowning in a shallow pond, then one has an obligation to intervene. Letting the victim drown would be just as morally bad as if one had pushed the child or dog into the water oneself. Later this century and beyond, biotech and IT mean that exactly the same level of complicity will exist in the fate of all free-living sentient beings throughout the biosphere.
Should all predators be herbivorised? Or should some species be non-violently retired - outside zoos at any rate? This is really a question of future politics and sociology - working out what options will be sociopolitically credible 50 or 150 years from now. The cat family is charismatic; snakes not so much...
Snakes fighting to the death
Last century, more humans died from snakebites than in the Holocaust.
Deadly Snakes
("'More than one million' died of snake bites in India")
[on controversial ideas]
"Controversy for the sake of controversy is sin. Controversy for the sake of truth is a divine command."
(Walter Martin)
Do We Really Need More Controversial Ideas?
("A new journal encourages scholars to share their most dangerous and tasteless thoughts.")
[on prioritising s-risk vs the abolitionist project]
S(uffering)-Risks & A Typology of S-Risks & The Abolitionist Project
Suffering-Focused Ethics FAQ
Perhaps a definition would be in order. By “the abolitionist project”, let us here use the broad sense of the deliberate, progressive abolition of suffering through science as distinct from any one particular blueprint for its eradication. Suffering-focused ethics has been at the heart of Buddhism and its secular counterparts for ages. What’s changed is that modern science has – or will shortly have - the technical tools to phase out the biology of suffering in human and nonhumans alike (cf. "A World Without Pain" (New Yorker)). So I think the term - or some variant - is warranted. A commitment to abolition may be explicit or implicit, e.g. the breathtakingly ambitious World Health Organization definition of health - “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing”. As so defined, support for the abolitionist project and lifelong good health is not exclusive to believers in suffering-focused ethics. Thus many effective altruists, transhumanists, classical utilitarians (etc) would favour a long-term goal of minimising, preventing and ideally abolishing involuntary suffering; but ending suffering is typically not their only goal, nor in some cases even a primary goal. And in some cases, the abolition of suffering is conceived as a possible by-product of something else, e.g. the advent of sentience-friendly machine superintelligence.
Now for our possible areas of disagreement, or rather differences in emphasis.
I. Temperamentally happy people have a different processing bias from depressives (cf. “depressive realism”). Suffering can make some people more empathetic with fellow sufferers. On the other hand, the opposite syndrome is common too: “It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.” (W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence). Quantifying these conflicting syndromes is hard. Not least, there is no clean dichotomy among sufferers between the compassionate-minded and the embittered. Also, advocates of suffering-focused ethics must tread carefully in wanting humans to continue modestly to suffer as a means to their recognising the moral urgency of ending suffering in others. I understand the reasoning. For instance, if meat eaters could feel even a small part of the misery of the factory-farmed pigs who end up on their dinner plates, then surely they wouldn’t pay for something so terrible in exchange for such a trivial reward (“But I like the taste!”). Yet it’s not clear how this notional deterrent to animal abuse could be made to work, nor whether unhappier meat eaters would be more likely to go vegan. After all, meat-eaters intermittently undergo a great deal of suffering in their lives, albeit not as much as their victims; suffering hasn’t made them more compassionate towards factory-farmed non-human animals. To be sure, there are subtle but important conceptual differences to be drawn between our urging more sympathy, more empathy and more compassion for our fellow sentients. Paul Bloom’s provocatively titled "Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion" (2016) is a case in point. But what exactly are we asking for? If any of us could glimpse – let alone consistently focus on - even a fraction of the suffering in the world, then one would go insane – not figuratively but literally psychotic. Even dimly understanding severe suffering can be debilitating - in anything but the formal sense of intellectual recognition, where one hasn’t really understood suffering at all, just a placeholder. Prolonged contemplation of life’s evils can easily lead to learned helplessness and behavioural despair rather than to action. So I think the naturally compassionate-minded need to switch off, or at least turn down, their propensity to sympathy / empathy / compassion in order to function more effectively. There exists a duty to self-compassion. What’s critical to the project of effectively reducing suffering, I think, is harnessing one’s basic sympathy / empathy / compassion for other sentient beings to a systematising mindset - indeed a hyper-systematising mindset - and applying the tools of gene-editing accordingly. Biotech offers the only long-term solution to the problem of suffering. On their own, socioeconomic and political reforms can’t tackle the biological-genetic roots of suffering and the negative-feedback mechanisms hedonic treadmill; hence the necessity of a twin-track approach of upgrading our environment and our reward circuitry. Why not promote more systematising and more compassion? It’s the obvious compromise. Alas there are poorly understood neurological tradeoffs between an empathising and systematising cognitive style. A more compassionate temperament can impair one’s ability to systematise. For instance, are people with a radically expanded circle of compassion inherently more compassionate than tribalists and the anthropocentric – or just better systematisers? My personal sympathies lie with “loved up” empaths on hug drugs; but MDMA-like consciousness is not the recipe for effective altruism. In short, creating an ultra-compassionate society of low-AQ hyper-empaths probably isn’t the way to realise the abolitionist project nor to promote effective suffering-focused ethics. Moreover, in my view bioethicists should dive into sociological and biological-genetic details of suffering prevention - from exploration of broad techniques (genome-editing, cross-species fertility-regulation, reprogramming predators, free preimplantation genetic screening and counselling for all prospective parents, etc) right down to specific genes and receptors. Which allele of SCN9A (“the volume knob for pain”) should we choose for our children? For ourselves? What versions of the FAAH and FAAH-OUT genes? How should trials be conducted? What could go wrong? What are the worse-case scenarios? And so forth. At first blush, this level of detail is too fine-grained. Most people aren’t ready to accept even the principle of genetic choice, let alone delve into specifics. But public attitudes to suffering reduction and the abolitionist project itself will shift as technologies mature - and public appreciation of what biotech can deliver becomes widespread. Compare, say, the ravages of aging. Today we try to rationalise growing old. Many people have partly managed to convince themselves that they wouldn’t use radical antiaging therapies even if such interventions were available. This response is little more than adaptive preference formation, aka sour grapes. The solution to status quo bias isn’t just antiaging propaganda, but also the development of biological-genetic tools to combat aging. Likewise with phasing out the biology of involuntary mental and physical pain. Until science can deliver us from suffering, most of us try to rationalise life’s cruelties and mundane disappointments. You know the spiel. We can’t appreciate the good things in life without the bad (etc). If pressed, maybe most of us say, and indeed believe, that we wouldn’t take Huxley’s soma or its future genetic counterpart. Accelerating their development will put professed reluctance to the test. So will advertising genome reform as a strategy to civilise the world.
Resources on the margin? Well, yes, it’s certainly true that more financial resources are needed. But I think suffering-focused ethicists should be at the vanguard of the abolitionist project, not cheerleaders on the sidelines.
II. What is the right balance to strike between moral advocacy and a transhumanist fondness for technical solutions to ethical problems? For instance, we can agree that factory-farming is monstrous. Ending animal agriculture should be a priority. But IMO the most effective way to get factory farms and slaughterhouses shut and outlawed this century involves combining animal advocacy with the development and commercialisation of cultured meat and meat substitutes. Moral argument alone should be enough; but it’s not. Or consider the ethics of bringing new human life into the world. As a believer in suffering-focused ethics, I really want to urge prospective parents not to create more life and misery. But it’s not a viable solution to the problem of suffering. If it were, Gautama Buddha could have preached universal monkish celibacy. For evolutionary reasons, antinatalist advocacy nearly always falls on deaf ears. Moreover, personally staying childfree won’t prevent long-term suffering either. Voluntary childlessness risks just contributing to selection pressure against antinatalism. So I think that believers in suffering-focused ethics should urge biological-genetic solutions (“designer babies”) rather than promoting the global antinatalist agenda that suffering-focused ethics naively entails. Likewise with helping existing human and nonhuman animals: for instance, this year’s (2021) stunning breakthroughs in genetic medicine mean that intravenous gene-therapy will be technically feasible to prevent physical pain and even underpin lifelong mental health. Wild animal suffering? Once again, I think suffering-focused ethicists should both be raising awareness of the cruelties of life in the wild and setting out concrete blueprints for how wild-animal suffering can be fixed. In the absence of such blueprints and specific policy-proposals, critics will assume that we’re ecologically illiterate – just philosophers who don’t understand the thermodynamics of a food chain. With blueprints publicly available, human complicity in the persistence of free-living animal suffering can be more widely acknowledged, and rationalisations of its inevitability - and the proverbial “wisdom of Nature” - can be subverted. Admittedly, today’s crude blueprints for civilising the biosphere will never be used. The science behind them will soon date. But publicising the feasibility of compassionate ecosystem design refutes claims there is no alternative to the cruelties of the Darwinian status quo. Conserving wild animal suffering next century and beyond will be a choice – a choice I hope humanity will decline.
Here’s another worry. Arguing for an exclusively suffering-focused ethics, and certainly any attempt to tie the abolitionist project exclusively to suffering-focused ethics, may sometimes be counterproductive – subverting what one is trying to achieve. Thus ardent life-lovers such as researchers into existential risk worry that single-minded focus on tackling life’s horrors may tempt the impressionable to draw the “wrong” conclusion – because from a technical perspective, apocalyptic solutions to the problem of suffering are naively simpler than reprogramming the biosphere (cf. “Solve suffering by blowing up the universe?” ). When defending strictly suffering-focused ethics, I’ve certainly experienced pushback (NU – "a devastatingly callous doctrine” – Toby Ord) from critics who are otherwise sympathetic to creating a world based entirely on gradients of intelligent bliss.
This critical reaction is frustrating. Who are more compassionate – people who if given the choice would “walk away from Omelas” or classical utilitarians who want to make Omelas more fun and maybe engineer zillions more Omelas in future? But one’s frustration is beside the point. How can we be most effective in reducing suffering? The more one emphasizes the horror of Darwinian life – a monstrous engine for creating suffering - the more life-affirmers seek to downplay life’s cruelties and stress life’s priceless value – and the marvelous delights to come. So discreetly biting one’s tongue is sometimes essential. Some NU purists might privately view happiness-focused ethicists as more akin to heroin pushers than morally serious philosophers (“Just try it – you’ve no idea how good it feels!”). But if our message is presented ineptly and unprofessionally, then instead of being close if sometimes uneasy allies, suffering-focused ethicists and existential-risk reducers might one day become mortal enemies. Therefore rather than striving for notional NU purity, I try to stress how implementing the abolitionist project - perhaps in the guise of the WHO vision of universal health - will make the world safer from the perspective of life-affirmers. And this is not a mere rhetorical ploy. A large if unknown percentage of the 850,000 or so people who currently take their own lives each year would take the rest of the world down with them if they could. Imagine hundreds of thousands of potential world-destroyers and advanced 22nd century technology. So the risk of involuntary suffering to the future of life stretches way beyond the philosophical thought-experiments of NU button-pressers. I would hope that suffering-focused ethicists and existential-risk reducers alike can unite around the vision of a future of passionate life-lovers blessed with invincible good health. To a committed believer in purely suffering-focused ethics, pitching the abolition of suffering as a stepping-stone to a glorious future of transhuman bliss may sound like morally frivolous fluff. But getting rid of suffering in all its guises will call for the broadest possible secular and religious coalition and political alliance-building. And support for getting rid of suffering can potentially be very broad. Radical recalibration of the hedonic treadmill is consistent with conserving your core values and preference architecture even if the reduction of suffering - let alone suffering-focused ethics - isn’t high on your list of personal priorities. There is also the question of power. Exclusively suffering-focused ethics may win over the depressive and the pain-ridden. But at the risk of reducing our debate to the social dynamics of a chimpanzee troop, suffering and depression are evolutionarily associated with subordination and defeat. Crudely, it’s low status. Dwelling on life’s awfulness can rarely inspire. Political, social and intellectual power and status will always reside with socially dominant life-affirmers – larger-than-life media influencers, billionaires and charismatic public intellectuals. We can see this in microcosm in the transhumanist and EA communities. Getting rid of involuntary suffering doesn’t deserve to be any more controversial than pain-free surgery. Purely suffering-focused ethics will never command such consent. This is why I sometimes use terms like the “biohappiness revolution”, “paradise engineering” or the “hedonistic imperative”.
III. I too worry about s-risks. An immense complication is that exploring certain s-risks is potentially a serious s-risk in itself. On a worst-case scenario, the investigation of the nastiest s-risks is potentially even the most serious s-risk of all. This possibility sounds contrived, and here I’m deliberately writing at a high level of abstraction; but some inexpressibly evil scenarios are conceivable. The solution to this ghastly dilemma is unclear. Censorship invites the Streisand effect. Self-censorship involves giving potentially flawed ideas a free pass, which potentially incurs s-risks of its own. [An ethically minor risk is taking oneself too seriously and conceiving oneself as a Dangerous Thinker when one is merely self-important and deluded.] But s-risk is one of those rare fields where even normally outspoken investigators should write with discretion.
Does attempting to implement the abolitionist project invite novel s-risks of its own? In High-tech Jainism (2014), I give the example of an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation that abolishes suffering and successfully engineers life based on gradients of intelligent bliss. There’s no dark secret the basement. They’ve done everything right in their solar system. Yet they’ve made an ethically disastrous mistake. They’ve wrongly assumed they are alone in the galaxy rather than pursued space-exploration. If they’d persevered, then they could have detected the signature of pain-ridden Darwinian life on Earth and prevented hundreds of millions of years of suffering here. No, I don’t believe this particular scenario is likely. I’m tentatively a “Rare Earther”. And even if I’m wrong, Earth-originating life may be more likely to propagate the biology of suffering, e.g. via ill-conceived directed panspermia, than to organise cosmic rescue-missions. The example is merely illustrative. Even if humanity does seemingly everything right, the possibility of ethical disaster from “exotic” s-risks of omission or commission remains. Until we understand the nature of reality and the theoretical upper bounds of rational agency in the cosmos, doing prematurely what I ultimately recommend could be ethically catastrophic: make hedonically sub-zero states of consciousness not just physically impossible, but unintelligible.
Other s-risks are more evident and integral to the project itself. An obvious minefield is ensuring that nociception and the functional analogues of depressive realism are conserved.
Anyhow, what's needed is a dual strategy of vigorous advocacy and developing / advertising the technical capacity of intelligent moral agents to prevent suffering. Advocating and implementing the abolitionist project on Earth defeats the s-risk of our spreading the code for suffering elsewhere. Highlighting the possibility of escape from suffering is critical. In the absence of concrete solutions, suffering-focused ethics undermines people’s rationalisations of life’s miseries and defeats its own purpose.
IV. I agree too with “minimizing suffering in expectation”. The abolitionist project is longtermist, to use a term fashionable in some EA circles, indeed ultra-longtermist, insofar as germline engineering tackles the origin of suffering itself. IMO, our primary obligation to future generations is to ensure that we don’t pass on the terrible code that spawned us. The effective irrevocability of germline engineering is precisely what worries bioconservative critics: germline editing is said to be irreversible. This charge isn’t strictly true. Germline changes could theoretically be reversed. A predisposition to suffer could be re-created no less than a predisposition to cystic fibrosis. Such re-creation is merely sociologically far-fetched. A thousand years from now, if all goes well, maybe suffering will no longer exist – I know of no insurmountable technical obstacles to its eradication. Good health for all sentient beings is genetically feasible. But intelligent moral agency will still have a responsibility to ensure experience below hedonic zero can never recur in our forward light-cone until the heat death of the universe. Focusing on the biological-genetic roots of suffering and recalibrating of the hedonic treadmill (rather than socio-political reform alone) offers a long-term cure for the ills of the world – exactly as suffering-focused ethics that minimises suffering in expectation demands. Combining an anti-suffering ideology with its concrete practice can also ensure that sinister Darwinian malware doesn’t radiate across the galaxy – a worst-case scenario if we don’t first fix suffering on Earth.
Might an advanced civilisation with mastery of the pain-pleasure axis / axis of (dis)value ever opt to bring back suffering if suffering-focused ethics weren’t central to its ideology? I sometimes give the example of a posthuman civilisation whose genetically programmed hedonic range is, say, +70 to +100 rather than our +10 to 0 to +10. Lifelong superhuman bliss is “natural”. Out of curiosity, might they engineer hedonic + 60s to see what ancestral depths were like? Might they probe even lower, beneath Sedgwick’s “natural watershed”, hedonic zero? Yet why? To use another analogy, imagine if you had access to a button the pressing of which makes you feel progressively more bored. Is there any possibility that you would keep on pressing - and maybe investigate mechanisms to engineer states of even greater tedium? The idea strains credulity. Of course, suffering matters ethically in a way that a mere lack of interest doesn’t. But this toy example illustrates my point. If intelligent moral agents do get rid of suffering, then posthuman superintelligences aren’t going to bring it back any more than they’d recreate boredom. Full-spectrum superintelligences presumably grasp different first-person perspectives better than egocentric humans. Superintelligences won’t entertain false theories of personal identity. Our biggest responsibility to future generations is to make sure that they aren't born to suffer like us.
Anyhow, consider, say, smallpox and s(mallpox)-risk. Before embarking on its
eradication, proponents should ideally have weighed both the
opportunity-cost (could the money be better spent?) and also the
possibility that the knowledge involved could be used to make smallpox
more virulent, or more prevalent, or to create artificial digital
plagues in sentient computer software, or serve in a blueprint for
creating plague-ridden ecosystems on other planets, and other
worst-case exotic s-risk scenarios. Maybe medical experts should have
weighed further raising awareness of the evils of smallpox and the
wisdom of preventing its spread (etc) before taking action to tackle
such an evil. However, after weighing the available evidence, medical experts would
soon conclude that the best way to get rid of s-risk was to eradicate
s. And indeed, now that we've eradicated smallpox, bringing it back is
inconceivable. We don't now have an expressly s-based ethic because
it's axiomatic the world is better off without s.
Likewise with the biology of suffering. Rather than being some freaky
coincidence, the best way minimise s-risk really is to eradicate s.
Yes, it's important we do worst-case analysis. But (to take examples
Tobias Baumann cites) it will be centuries if not millennia before our
descendants could ever spread sentience to other solar systems. We
both discount digital sentience. A morally systematising culture that
takes practical steps to implement the abolitionist project will
presumably be a culture that cares about ending s-risks too.
This sounds as though I'm downplaying s-risk, but rather, I view
getting rid of suffering as minimising s-risk in the long term.
Consider a future civilisation with a hedonic range of, say, +30 to +50, as compared to our hedonic -10 to 0 to +10. Its inhabitants can't imagine what hedonic sub-30 states are like, let alone the nature of the phase transition that occurs at hedonic 0. Nonetheless, they are still motivated to seek (the encephalized variants of) states in the hedonic high 40s and minimise time spent in (the encephalized variants of) states in the hedonic low 30s.
Or imagine an exhilaration / boredom dial. Turning it one way makes you feel more exhilarated, the other, progressively more bored. Is there any likelihood you will keep on turning to experience states of ever greater tedium?
Of course, this isn't a rigorous argument.
But the purpose of recalibrating the hedonic treadmill - as distinct from dismantling it and getting "blissed out" - is to create an intelligently blissful architecture of mind that avoids ethical catastrophes...
BodhiBill, apologies if you feel I've taken Gautama Buddha’s name in vain. This wasn't my intention. But everything we know about the historical Buddha suggests he was a pragmatist. If it works, do it! Clearly, speculating about what Buddha reborn today would think about molecular genetics, biotech and the prospect of reprogramming the biosphere is fanciful. But arguably he'd be overjoyed at new tools of suffering reduction! For I know of no way that following the Noble Eightfold Path can recalibrate the hedonic treadmill or end the horrors of "Nature, red in tooth and claw". Sadly, Buddhists sometimes suffer from mental health problems and chronic pain disorders no less than non-Buddhists. By contrast, if intelligent moral agents are willing to edit our sinister source code, then we can banish pain and suffering for ever. Nirvana? Yes, IMO, potentially. The devil is in the details.
[on the D factor]
Is the "d factor more credible than the "g" factor?
The root of all evil?
("Scientists Have Identified The Driving Force Behind Your Darkest Impulses")
What's your D score? I got 1.66 and 15%: not a perfect open individualist, alas.
If one doesn't care how other people feel, there's no need for delicacy and diplomacy. And creating a world of universal bliss will take not just high-tech, but also super-Machiavellian guile.
[on VHEMT]
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT)
“May we live long and die out”
On VHEMT
Humans are the only species able to eradicate suffering on Earth. So I don't favour VHEMT. But if there were a serious likelihood of our metastasizing across the cosmos without first editing the germline to end the possibility of suffering, well, I'm on board.
The end of suffering could come via the extinction of life (cf. Instant Universal Death). But speaking as a strict lexical negative utilitarian, I think the future belongs to fanatical life lovers - and we should act accordingly.
[on rationalism]
"It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream."
(Edgar Allan Poe)
How strong is your faith in rationalism? For a nice overview:
Why is it so hard to be rational?
But see the Argumentative Theory of Human Reason:
The Argumentative Theory
And for my musings, e.g.
The Inexplicable
[on gay genes]
“Straight? So is spaghetti until you heat it up”
(Jet Mykles, Squire)
Genes linked to same-sex sexual behaviour
("Is this how homosexuality evolved? Genes linked to same-sex sexual behaviour are also found in straight people and cause them to have more partners - outweighing the 'loss' of reproduction among gay people, study claims")
[on physics]
Mathematicians Prove 2D Version of Quantum Gravity Really Works
“...the world is made entirely from quantum fields. These fields do not live *in* spacetime; they live, so to speak, one on top of the other: fields on fields. The space and time that we perceive in large scale are our blurred and approximate image of one of these quantum fields: the gravitational field (193).”
(Carlo Rovelli, "La realtà non è come ci appare: La struttura elementare delle cose")
But fields of what exactly?
Josh, yes, Everettian QM is deterministic. But Everett, in common with almost everyone else, assumes we observe definite outcomes, just (according to Everett) non-unique definite outcomes, thereby conserving the deterministic evolution of the wavefunction.
However, what would reality really be like if the superposition principle of QM never breaks down? In my (tentative) view, our minds and their experiences of definite outcomes (e.g. of a live cat, a spin-up electron, etc) exemplify(!) the superposition principle. Neuronal vehicle and its subjective content should be distinguished. We are quantum minds simulating quasi-classical worlds.
I say a bit more in e.g. What is your preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics?.
Let's hope it's all bonkers.
“Testing quantum theory with thought experiments"
by Nuriya Nurgalieva and Renato Renner
QM and Thought Experiments
“Wigner’s thought experiment points to a conflict between the idea that quantum theory is a universally valid theory and our experience that measurements yield definite outcomes”
This claim conflates neuronal vehicle and subjective content. Alternatively, only the fact that the superposition principle never breaks down allows anyone (an “observer”) to undergo the phenomenally-bound experience that it does.
Scott Aaronson's credo:
My values, howled into the wind
"...those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, as well as those who incited them, should all be on trial for high crimes against the United States — specifically, for a plot to overthrow its duly elected government, one that in branches of the wavefunction close to ours actually succeeded, and that might yet do so in the future, as the Beer Hall Putsch was followed a decade later by the Reichstag Fire. And the fact that this isn’t happening terrifies me and keeps me awake at night." (Scott's comment #100)
Wavefunction realists/monists have more to worry about than trivia like a successful Trumpist putsch.
On the Shoulders of Everett
Giulio, conceptions of sanity are branch-relative. David, you're more psychologically robust than me.
Lev Vaidman, who'll be speaking, combines Everett with causally time-symmetric TSVF
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-state_vector_formalism
Schrödinger glimpsed both, but twice balked at the implications of his own equation.
James, sadly I'm inclined to agree with David Deutsch. If the wave function never collapses, then quantum mechanics is a deterministic theory - even though the future is unpredictable. Less obviously, if Everettian QM is true, then there is no unique classical past, which makes retrodiction tricky too. I don't know if this defence has ever been used in a court of law.
Giulio, to quote Alyssa Ney (160-61) "Rather than viewing the world fundamentally as field spread out over a high-dimensional space with each point corresponding to a configuration of particles or arrangement of fields, the idea is to represent the world by a state vector in Hilbert space…’What is fundamental does not involve spacetime or propagating quantum fields, but simply a vector moving smoothly though a very large-dimensional Hilbert space’ (Carroll and Singh 2019) This is what we may call the ray-in-Hilbert space view.....wave functions if they are instead as state vectors, are basis-independent..."
Anyhow, the relevance of all this to Martin's post (to quote Craig Callender):
“As J.S. Bell famously proved and experiments later confirmed, quantum phenomena display decidedly non-local correlations in 3-space. Meanwhile, up in Hilbert space or configuration space, two choices for the supposedly abstract space of quantum mechanics, the quantum state chugs merrily along locally since it is governed by the Schrödinger equation, a local differential equation. Hence we have a reversal of the classical situation: the quantum world seems to be non-local in low-dimensions but local in high-dimensions”
“None of the major interpretations of quantum theory dismisses Assumption S” [a measurement has a single outcome for the measuring agent]
Hence their empirical inadequacy:
Explaining the measurement problem
“No one has ever observed a superposition state directly.”
Understanding Time
No one has ever observed a collapsed state directly either.
Physicists tend to be perceptual direct realists. Direct realists conflate vehicle and content.
Alternatively, you only(!) ever experience superpositions. The content of your neuronal superpositions is always a definite outcome - whether of, say, a particle incident on a screen in a double-slit experiment or of a live cat. Only the superposition principle of QM allows your phenomenally-bound experiences of definite outcomes.
Disclaimer: this interpretation of the unitary dynamics is idiosyncratic: The Measurement Problem
[Paras writes] David, been reading your writings (again) and have a few questions. 1. If we go by your position of non-materialist physicalism where solutions to QFT are experiences, and since QFT is fundamentally quantum, then does this mean all superpositions are experiences of some sort? 2. Why don't we perceive superpositions directly? If not, doesn't it conflict with (1)? We seem to perceive a classical world with no superpositions, so how can superpositions be experiences? I hope I made sense. I understand quantum darwinism may play a role but fundamentally I can't make sense of the fact that if phenomenally bound experience is instantiated by superpositions why do we never experience things like same entity existing at two places. Wouldn't that be logically possible in this framework? (Since we definitely perceive the same color and sound to be at the same location, so why not the same object at two locations?)
Paras
1. Yes. I can’t fathom how we’ll ever know what it’s like to be, say, superfluid helium. But if non-materialist physicalism is true, then yes, it’s a macro-experience.
Superfluid Helium
2. It’s critical to distinguish (non-classical )vehicle and (classical) content. IMO, it’s only the fact that the superposition principle never breaks down that allows each of us to experience a virtual classical world of well-localized objects where it does. Most physicists are implicitly perceptual direct realists, so they don’t make the distinction between neuronal vehicle and subjective content. Compare Schrödinger: “…an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation.”
How serious is the measurement problem in QM?
Aatu, Rupert,
Everettians differ! But as first glimpsed by Hans Reichenbach back in 1926, the dimensionality of reality is insanely large:
The Wave Function reviewed by Craig Callender
In "The Emergent Multiverse", David Wallace defends space-time state realism.
By contrast, Alyssa Ney defends configuration space realism
and Sean Carroll ("Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space") defends Hilbert space realism
("I sketch how this might come about, although much work remains to be done". Hah!)
Who is right?
Unusually, I approach this question from the philosophy of mind. Thus if Wallace's space-time state realism is correct, I don't see how our phenomenally-bound minds and the world-simulations we run are possible.
But there are technical reasons for doubting space-time state realism too - and (sorry to pass the buck) here you'd do better to get input from real physicists who take unitary-only QM seriously:
On the shoulders of Everett
A lucid overview from Anil Seth:
The real problem of consciousness
IMO, only the physical is real. Physicalism is true. But the "fire" in the equations of QFT doesn't differ inside and outside your head. So there is no Hard Problem!
A recent convert to the intrinsic nature argument is Phil Goff:
Galileo's Error?
[on the future]
"The future is made of the same stuff as the present."
(Simone Weil)
Life in the Year 2050?
Futurists have their heads in the clouds
("On making good predictions for 2050")
On the Singularity
Only a minority of transhumanists believe that humans will find immortality in digital "mind uploads". If we want to overcome death, we'll need to defeat the biology of aging.
The Computer Metaphor of Mind
Proponents of "mind uploading" accuse disbelievers of "substrate chauvinism". But a classical Turing machine with a carbon substrate wouldn't be a phenomenally bound subject of experience either - or at least, not if physicalism is true.
[on exercise]
Exercise as an anxiolytic
Exercise reduces anxiety
("Higher intensity exercise found to offer greater relief from anxiety")
Exercise increases the body’s own ‘cannabis-like' substance
("Exercise increases the body's own cannabis-like substances, which in turn helps reduce inflammation and could potentially help treat certain conditions such as arthritis, cancer and heart disease.")
The high road to salvation
Meet the Weed Nuns Our Ladies of the Perpetual High"
("How a New Age order of feminist nuns is reimagining spiritual devotion and trying to heal the world — one joint at a time")
Some brains are better primed for pleasure than others...
Not Everyone Can Get Runner’s High
("New research suggests that a shortage of the mu-opioid receptor can inhibit runner’s high and increase the risk of depression")
Exercise and mood:
Runner's high
("Exercise increases the body’s own ‘cannabis-like' substance which reduces chronic inflammation")
[on a pain-free sea]
Oceanic bliss?
("Shouldn’t the reduction of suffering be our top priority when taking care of others’ needs – particularly of those we can’t ask? Soon, CRISPR edited gene drives could alter the pain perception and hedonic range of any sexually reproducing species. In episode 8. Ingo Niermann hears from David Pearce, a transhumanist philosopher who advocates the abolition of all negative feelings. David speaks from his home in Brighton, UK.")
[on philosophy and the meaning of life]
Cynthia, I'm inclined to agree with you. But if we want to promote a biological-genetic happiness revolution, then the option of value- and preference-conservation is a strong selling-point. In practice, transhumans may come to regard most of the things humans care about as junk. This prediction is not a recipe for winning hearts and minds.
[on painless civilisation]
Painless Civilisation by Masahiro Morioka
The author compares people nursed in an intensive care unit with factory-farmed chickens ("Picture a chicken shut in a small cage, whose life is nothing more than eating and sleeping; the light and temperature around it are artificially controlled, and it is brought all the food it needs on a conveyor belt.") An ICU does not resemble the horrors of industrialised animal abuse:
Factory-farmed Chickens
The meaning of life? Empirically, creating happiness creates meaning. Conversely, low mood destroys meaning. Genetically creating superhappiness will create superhuman meaning - an intensity of significance orders of magnitude richer than anything experienced by any human in history. As a negative utilitarian, I'm not convinced this superhappiness/supermeaning matters ethically. Preventing suffering trumps everything else. But a lifelong sense of hyper-significance is my tentative prediction for the future of sentience...
Super-Significance
This analysis of Danish society may resonate with Masahiko:
Is being too comfortable killing your happiness?
("What Denmark can teach us about the trap of privilege")
[on micro-experiential zombies]
Phenomenal binding is (1) classically impossible (2) non-algorithmic (3) exceedingly computationally powerful. To glimpse the computational power of binding as harnessed by natural selection, imagine if you were trying to function as, say, a schizophrenic with integrative agnosia, simultanagnosia (inability to experience more than one object at once) and akinetopsia ("motion blindness”). With such a constellation of deficits, you and your world-simulation would still have more phenomenal binding than a classical digital computer or connectionist system. But you’d be severely incapacitated compared to normal human and nonhuman animals.
So how do organic minds do it?
Tough question: Biological minds
Whatever the answer, disbelief in non-trivial digital sentience isn’t equivalent to disbelief in functionalism - as distinct from Turing machine functionalism.
Maximilian, from antiquity to the present, lots of philosophically-minded people have occasionally wondered if they could be surrounded by zombies, i.e. the sceptical Problem of Other Minds. (See too the non-sceptical belief that the inhabitants of your dreaming AND waking world-simulation are zombies, but the zombies of your waking life are the avatars of sentient beings: The Cartesian theatre). By contrast, far fewer people have sceptically wondered if they might live in a world of micro-experiential zombies, i.e. I am the only phenomenally-bound subject of experience. For even if consciousness is fundamental to the world, temporally-coarse grained inspection of your surgically-exposed cortex gives me no obvious reason to believe you are a unitary subject. Your CNS appears under light microscopy to be a pack of decohered neurons - just like your enteric nervous system, which I confidently believe is a zombie.
Anyhow, let's assume, as you suggest, that monistic physicalism is vindicated by future experiment. Tomorrow's neuroscience / interferometry detects a perfect structural match between our minds and (ultimately) the mathematical formalism of physics. (I can't overstress how far scientifically out a limb is my “Schrödinger’s neurons” proposal. Most professionals who understand decoherence would reckon it’s crazy, so the chances are they are right.) If this structural match is perfect, then why aren't we all just p-zombies, i.e. organisms devoid of qualia, whether phenomenally bound or otherwise?
To answer the question, we must return to the intrinsic nature argument. The only direct evidence you have of the intrinsic nature of the physical, as distinct from its structural-relational properties, consists of the properties of your own mind. You’ve no reason to believe that the intrinsic nature of the world’s fundamental quantum fields differs inside and outside your skull...
Modular, yes, but composed of phenomenally unified "cat states"...
Modular Minds
("The Core Discovery of Neuroscience: The Mind Is Modular. Self-understanding requires us to realize that the self is not a unified whole.")
Tim, yes, a classical Turing machine can simulate any computer algorithm. But biological minds can do all kinds of things that Turing machine zombies can't, ranging from running phenomenally-bound world-simulations to exploring the nature, varieties and causal efficacy of conscious experience - as now!
Magic?
No, quantum supremacy…
Quantum mind
[on introspection and mathematical physics]
Andres, you're right about Feynman’s introspective prowess. Alas, introspection is not highly valued in modern society. Imagine if a school student were to say that he was too busy intensively studying his own thought processes to study for a SAT test. Neglect of introspection is a recipe for ignorance of oneself AND the disciplines one is supposedly studying. This is because one is oblivious to how the medium of representation is shaping its nominal content.
Physicists may misunderstand the nature of the matter and energy for a different but related reason too. Imagine if Ed Witten had said, "Science can't explain the empirical evidence” rather than “Science can't explain consciousness” (cf. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/world-s-smartest-physicist-thinks-science-can-t-crack-consciousness/). Maybe quantum fields of insentience will strike post-materialist science as akin to fields of luminiferous aether.
Feynman once mischievously remarked, "If all mathematics disappeared today, physics would be set back exactly one week". This provocative comment is wrong not just because modern technology civilisation depends on the mathematical apparatus of QFT. Mathematics is also critical to understanding the physical world because mathematical physics is really the study of patterns of qualia.
Naturally, this is not how Feynman conceived of QED. Transposing the mathematical machinery of modern physics onto an empirically adequate idealist ontology takes strong nerves.
Machiavelli, I don't know. As it stands, the claim is obviously untenable - there will never be another Faraday. A more accurate synopsis of Feynman's views might be:
"..To summarize, I would use the words of Jeans, who said that "the Great Architect seems to be a mathematician". To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature. C.P. Snow talked about two cultures. I really think that those two cultures separate people who have and people who have not had this experience of understanding mathematics well enough to appreciate nature once."
"It is too bad that it has to be mathematics, and that mathematics is hard for some people. It is reputed - I do not know if it is true - that when one of the kings was trying to learn geometry from Euclid he complained that it was difficult. And Euclid said, "There is no royal road to geometry". And there is no royal road. Physicists cannot make a conversion to any other language. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in. She offers her information only in one form; we are not so unhumble as to demand that she change before we pay any attention."
("The Character of Physical Law" by Richard P. Feynman, MIT Press, 1967)
For what it's worth, I think most idealists and panpsychists - including Phil Goff in Galileo's Error - draw the wrong conclusion from the inability of modern science to explain consciousness and hence the empirical evidence. Mathematics is indeed the language of Nature. But materialist physicalists misinterpret the nature of the physical that the formalism describes.
Roger Penrose? Explaining how Penrose’s three levels interact is clearly a monumental
challenge. Alternatively, reality has only one level, qualia,
exhaustively described by the equation(s) of mathematical physics. The
possibility that mathematical physics is about patterns of qualia is
the purest expression of the intrinsic nature argument, i.e.
subjective experience discloses the essence of the physical. If so,
then Galileo was right about the mathematisation of Nature - just not
in the way materialists imagine. In fairness to mathematical platonists like Roger Penrose,
nominalising quantum mechanics is extremely hard:
Can quantum mechanics be nominalised
Propaganda, I fear.
The Quantum Field Theory on Which
the Everyday World Supervenes
And the everyday world? Or your everyday world-simulation? Science should be empirically adequate. So a
theory that predicts we should be zombies fails. By contrast,
transposing the mathematical apparatus of quantum field theory onto an
idealist ontology gives an empirically adequate description of the
natural world with immense explanatory and predictive power. On this
story, realism and physicalism are true. But the intrinsic nature of
the physical differs from what our naive materialist intuitions
suppose.
[on the fine-tuning argument for a Creator/Simulator]
God? Sadly the obvious explanation of the fine-tuning is that it's an anthropic selection effect. In all the quasi-classical Everett branches that don't support life, there is no one around to marvel at the unremarkable absence of fine-tuning. And there's nothing fine-tuned about the multiverse. If the superposition principle is truly universal, then any linear combination of solutions to the Schrödinger equation will also be a solution. Moreover - unlike a Simulator or nested hierarchy of Simulators - the multiverse of unitary-only QM offers a potential explanation-space for everything. The information content of reality = 0! (cf. Why does anything exist?)
Simulation Theodicy. Why create anti-Buddhist virtual worlds with such pointless, unspeakable cruelty and suffering as ours? This scenario utterly defeats my comprehension. And this isn't "just" an ethical point. Superintelligence presumably entails a superhuman cognitive capacity for perspective-taking - a richer capacity than even the most empathetic mirror-touch synaesthete today. If so, then why not create diverse digital paradises?
[on super-spirituality]
Transhumanism's answer to Deepak Chopra?
How a soulless materialist discovered the timeless truths of the ancients and embraced the mystic wisdom of the East?
Well, perhaps not exactly: The Dawn of Superspirituality
Seriously, keep up the fantastic work at IM!
"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
(Carl Sagan, ‘The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark’)
Genospirituality
("Genetic engineering for spiritual and religious enhancement")
Does the future of sentience lie in disenchantment or genetically engineered superspirituality?
Brain Circuit for Spirituality Identified
("A new study has identified a specific brain circuit centered in the periaqueductal gray that is linked to spiritual acceptance and religiosity")
I don't know:
Superspirituality
[on dispositional negativity]
"You cannot have a positive life and a negative mind."
(Joyce Meyer)
"Dispositional negativity": let's use gene-editing to create "dispositional positivity" instead...
How to curb your mind's negative habits
[the article is a mixture of wise words and the usual rationalisations ("Experiencing negative emotions is not a problem, in and of itself.")]
[on happiness and the paradox of hedonism]
Perpetual activation of your ultimate "hedonic hotspot" in the ventral pallidum might be more enlightening.
The Yale Happiness Course
("Over 3 Million People Took This Course on Happiness. Here’s What Some Learned.
It may seem simple, but it bears repeating: sleep, gratitude and helping other people.")
Hell has an escape-hatch. An infernal machine for creating suffering
can be genetically hacked and reprogrammed into an engine of
superhuman bliss. Tomorrow’s genome-editing should be underpinned by
an ideology of liberation biology - and a socio-political revolution
to match.
Alas, most academic philosophers still rationalise the status quo...
The flawed pursuit of happiness?
Should one cultivate depressive realism or a gratitude attitude / affective psychosis?
Practising gratitude makes people happier
("An experiment that asked participants to write and deliver thank-you notes found large increases in reported levels of happiness, a benefit that lasted for an entire month")
I'd settle for an unvarying diet of never-ending bliss...
Psychological richness
("‘Psychological Richness’ May Be the Missing Piece in Your Life’s Puzzle. Novel, complex, and perspective-changing experiences are undervalued parts of a satisfying life")
Genetic recalibration of the hedonic treadmill is a moral imperative.
Alternatively...
The Happiness Myth
from the author of "You Are Not Meant To Be Happy":
You Are Not Meant to Be Happy
But we're at an evolutionary watershed. A predisposition to (super)happiness will soon be adaptive. A predisposition to pain and suffering will soon be maladaptive. In an era of "designer babies", the nature of selection pressure changes - as "prospective parents preselect the genomes of their children in anticipation of the likely behavioural and psychological effects of their choices.
Dave what is sometimes true for individuals, namely the paradox of
hedonism, will not straightforwardly be true of a civilisation that
re-engineers its reward circuitry. However, in one sense at least, the
paradox of hedonism could continue to play out even in a civilisation
with a hedonic range of, say, schematically, +70 to +100, just as the
paradox arises in our dismal Darwinian hedonic range of -10 to 0 to
+10.
The paradox of hedonism
"...only about 10-15 percent of the variance in people's well-being can be attributed to external circumstances."
Personality and happiness
("How Much Does Personality Determine Our Happiness?
...and is it possible to change it?")
I’d like to combine a selective kappa opioid receptor antagonist (cf. "Kappa-opioid antagonists for psychiatric disorders: from bench to clinical trials") with a selective blocker of the ACKR3 receptor together with positive allosteric modulators for sustainable hedonic uplift.
FAAH:
A Genetic Component to National Differences in Happiness
Jo Cameron is an extreme case.
A Philosopher's Guide to Being Happy (mp3)
("Most of us think of suffering as a necessary feature of life. But what if that's just a lie we tell ourselves because we can't imagine the alternative? In this interview, David Pearce explores the practical possibilities of biomedically engineering a world of intelligent bliss.")
Life should be based on gradients of intelligent bliss, not rationalisations of suffering and philosophical waffle about "eudaimonia":
The neuroscience of pleasure
("What can the neuroanatomy of pleasure teach us about human flourishing?")
[on direct action]
Principled white-hat hacking or a ransomware attack?
Large North American meat plants stop slaughter after JBS cyberattack
Would you have e.g. helped free human slaves 200 years ago? Everyone has a duty to prevent crimes against sentience. JBS is an organization dedicated to mass killing - responsible for more cruelty, terror and violence than all the world's better-known terrorist groups combined. I think accelerating the development and commercialization of meat alternatives and cultured meat products is the best way to close the death factories. But I can understand why some activists take issue with the legalistic approach.
[on the robustness of value]
Value is Fragile
"Value isn't just complicated, it's fragile", says EY.
NUs would beg to differ. Both an AGI programmed to minimize suffering and a notional paperclip maximiser would be perfectly aligned with NU values. So I hope EY is right about the Intelligence Explosion and I'm wrong.
"...and so it spent until the end of time, and until the farthest reaches of its light cone, replaying a single highly optimized experience, over and over and over again", says EY.
Ironically, I used to dream longingly of just such a single highly optimized experience, an ideal here-and-now whose nature meant that any change would detract from its excellence.
Possibly EY would view a future light-cone tiled entirely with such experiences as just a sub-type of paperclipper scenario - I'm not sure.
Tim, you may know from previous experience that our conceptual scheme differs. That said...
Decision-theoretic rationality involves weighing conflicting preferences. Andy, Bob and Charlie are amoral rationalists. They each have a strong desire never to go hungry and a weaker desire to party.
Andy blows his monthly salary check in a weekend of excess; enduring metaphysical egos are fiction and his namesake's destitution later in the month is someone else's problem.
Bob ekes out his salary to the end the month with just a weekly pint with friends.
Charlie gives all his disposal income to Oxfam. Hungry kids in Ethiopia have a very strong desire not to starve.
Who do you reckon is more rational from a decision-theoretic (not from a moral) point of view?
Closed metaphysical individualists would say Bob.
I'd argue it’s Charlie. Charlie can't directly access the strong preferences of Ethiopian kids not to starve any more than he can access the preferences of his namesake later in the month for a full stomach and a fun weekend party. But Charlie doesn't confuse his epistemological blinkers with a metaphysical truth about the world – and he acts accordingly. All here-and-nows are equally real. Decision-theoretic rationality should accommodate this fact. The LessWrong Decision-Theoretic FAQ is a recipe for irrationalism.
(I am ignoring complications, but the point stands.)
[on plausible futures]
Alas some days the prospect of life based on gradients of superhuman bliss doesn't feel especially plausible:
DP interviwed by Plausible Futures
A plan, a vision or a daydream? Some days a transhuman world based on gradients of intelligent bliss can feel like an idle fantasy:
Maladaptive daydreaming disorder
("People with “Maladaptive Daydreaming” spend an average of four hours a day lost in their imagination")
[on Singularity Radio]
By the Year 2045? I wish...
Engineering Happiness & mp3
(DP on Singularity Radio)
[on suffering and unwisdom]
Why Suffering Is Essential to Wisdom by Michael S. Brady
I hope we'll have the wisdom to make suffering inconceivable once our ethical duties have been discharged.
If today our hedonic range is -10 to 0 to +10, let's aim for a civilisation with a hedonic range of, say, +70 to a +100. Information-sensitivity is the key to wisdom, not the ghastly "raw feels" of suffering.
Sameer, indeed, a hedonic +70 can be far richer than human "peak experiences", but it's the posthuman equivalent of our dark night of the soul. On the other hand, maybe posthuman civilisation will culminate in a hedonic +90 to +100 regime. I don't know. Mastery of the pleasure-pain axis makes your hedonic range an adjustable parameter.
Algernon, ignorance is my long-term goal - for myself and for all sentience.
The horror of Darwinian life should be forgotten...
[on How to Love Animals in a Human-Shaped World]
A New Statesman review of How to Love Animals in a Human-Shaped World (2021) by the Financial Times’ chief features writer Henry Mance:
The vegetarian in the abattoir
("Henry Mance uncovers the inconvenient truths about our treatment of animals")
I'm currently reading Henry Mance's new book. It's extremely well-written.
I did notice one typo: at the age of four, one can['t] envisage reprogramming the global ecosystem...
[on antidepressants]
What percentage of women would do well on a selective and reversible MAO-A inhibitor such as moclobemide?
The MAOA Gene Predicts Happiness in Women
IF one already has optimal sleep discipline, aerobic exercise,
nutrition and strong social bonds, then IMO a weak version of
Algernon's law is true - not because one's brain and body are
literally optimised, but because our ignorance is still too deep. Ray
Kurzweil (and anyone else with a serious stack) is taking a unique
cocktail. I worry about a combinatorial explosion of possibilities for
harm.
That said, I'm weakly, cautiously optimistic that orally active ACKR3
receptor blockers combined with a selective kappa opioid receptor
antagonist could offer mood enrichment for victims of chronic
depression and normal folk alike:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16664-0
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-021-00548-w
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6046055/
Despite the dismal history of biological psychiatry over the past 50
years, default hedonic tone probably won't prove (technically) as hard
to raise pharmacologically as cognitive performance or healthy
lifespan. Maybe mood disorders are crackable this century. (hollow
words for millions of people right now)
[on digital sentience and the binding problem]
"A poll last year showed that more than a third of Brits want to see wolves, wild boars and lynxes reintroduced into the wild, though, obviously, in someone else’s back yard. A quarter even want to see the return of bears, though a significant portion of those had just finished watching Paddington on Netflix."
Rewilding the UK
[on digital sentience and the binding problem]
Digital sentience and the binding problem
(Magnus Vinding interviews DP. A slightly fuller version of the interview is here)
Thanks Magnus! The computer and AI revolution has been marked by the progressive and accelerating divorce of intelligent behaviour from consciousness. Unlike so many predictions of the future of AI, the conjecture that our machines will one day "wake up" doesn’t rest on extrapolation - or indeed any proposed mechanism. And I suspect many AI researchers who assume digital computers will become conscious also assume that consciousness can't play any vital computational-functional role in intelligence; it's just a weird implementation detail of biological minds.
By contrast, as you’ve gathered, I think digital zombies are cognitively handicapped. Classical Turing machines will remain invincibly ignorant of what they lack.
Tim, two separate questions.
1) Can programmable digital computers, or classically parallel connectionist systems, support phenomenally-bound experience? If physicalism is true, i.e. no spooky, irreducible "strong" emergence, then the answer is "no". It's still "no" even if consciousness is fundamental to the world, i.e., even if constitutive panpsychism / non-materialist physicalism is true. It’s "no" even if we replace the discrete 1s and 0s and logic gates (or nodes of a connectionist network) of classical information processors with discrete pixels of experience.
Of course, physicalism may be false. But let's not go down that route.
2a) Can phenomenally bound minds such as us perform any well-defined cognitive tasks that can't be performed by a classical Turing machine, or alternatively could everything that we can do be executed by a programmable (micro-experiential) zombie? ("You insist that there is something that a machine can't do. If you will tell me precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that." - von Neumann)
2b) If so, how? After all, telepathy and precognition would give us computational advantages over classical computers too.
As an example of 2a, I'm interested in investigating the billions(?) of kinds of consciousness that have never been recruited by natural selection for any evolutionary purpose (cf. DMT, etc). And the only (theoretical) way I know that a classical Turing machine zombie could be programmed to perform such a daunting cognitive task would be for it to program the genetic blueprint of machines with a radically different architecture, e.g. biological humans. So yes, futuristic classical digital computers can notionally do everything we can do - but only by bioprinting the genetic source-code for sentient creatures like us!
I won't rehash my speculations on quantum mind (2b) here - just stress that the proposal that phenomenal binding is non-classical isn't a philosophical opinion. It's a conjecture that interferometry can (dis)confirm. I think it’s a crazy idea too; but that’s not the point.
Exponential growth of digital computer power may allow simulation of the 500-million-neuron enteric nervous system. Next the mind-brain? Well, I'm all in favour of mass destructive uploading in the name of whole brain emulation: destructive uploading would solve all our problems! The upshot would be a world of micro-experiential zombies. No more suffering. Perhaps someone who doesn’t want to be zombified should first try, say, selective replacement of their V4 cortical neurons – destruction causes total cerebral achromatopsia - with their supposed silicon surrogates and connectome. If phenomenal binding is a classical phenomenon, then not merely will the subject continue to experience colour, but perceptual objects in their virtual world will continue to seem inherently colourful as now, i.e. binding would be preserved.
I predict instead total cerebral achromatopsia.
Now colour-blind, the chastened Turing machine functionalist calls the whole experiment off...
Paras, if we were talking about classical fields, then structure might seem impossible. We'd simply be patterns of mind-dust. But what does it
feel like to be a quantum superposition of different qualia? Multiple
quantum states can be added together ("superposed") to create other
valid quantum states; and conversely, every quantum state can be
represented as the sum of multiple other distinct states. Normally,
quantum theorists would assume that these superposed states are
non-experiential. But if they are experiential, then superpositions
of what would otherwise be discrete feature-processors (colour, shape,
motion etc) are experienced as individual perceptual objects.
Virtually every other interpretation of quantum mechanics tries to explain why we never experience superpositions, just definite outcomes. I'm conjecturing instead that we experience only superpositions. Our minds are "designed" by Nature to confuse vehicle and content. Without the superposition principle, the structure of phenomenally-bound "observations" of definite outcomes would be impossible.
Yes, crazy stuff.
Dustin, at a minimum, any scientifically adequate theory of consciousness must be empirically adequate. It should be physicalist. It should make precise and genuinely novel empirical predictions. It should account for the (1) existence, (2) binding (3) diversity (4) causal efficacy of experience. The quantum-theoretic version of the intrinsic-nature argument satisfies these criteria. It also explains why we are subjects of experience and classical digital computers and connectionist systems are micro-experiential zombies. What non-materialist physicalism doesn't do is claim we're universal quantum computers (we’re not!). Nor - or at least, not without a lot more work - does non-materialist physicalism lay out a well-defined list of problems too difficult for programmable digital zombies to solve. Consider an example. If, on the African savannah, one experiences within one's world-simulation a pride hungry of lions advancing and flees to safety, then one has potentially a huge computational-functional advantage over a notional micro-experiential zombie - such as a sleeping tribesman. But this functional advantage doesn't mean that a futuristic silicon humanoid robot couldn’t be programmed to behave just as adaptively in such a threatening situation. The obstacles are daunting, but I assume that a well-designed, well-programmed micro-experiential zombie could escape the lions too. This classical workaround simply wasn't an option available to natural selection to harness. Until we better understand the upper bounds to zombie intelligence, my claim is more cautious. There is a vast range of cognitive tasks that a classical digital zombie can't do except by programming the physical construction of a system with a different architecture. By their very nature, classical digital zombies can't investigate the nature and varieties of phenomenally-bound experience. Their ignorance is hardwired. There aren't any workarounds for such ignorance - short of programming the digital zombie to design systems of a physically different, sentience-friendly architecture.
Dustin, forgive me for just quoting below from the recent Magnus interview. But if I'm right, then our awake mind-brains can't be considered as effectively classical systems. Their apparent classicality as suggested by modern neuroscanning is an artefact of our temporally coarse-grained tools of investigation. If a perfect structural match exists, as physicalism demands, then it's at the sub-femtosecond regime.
I sometimes say who will play Mendel to Zurek's Darwin is unknown. If experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, i.e. if non-materialist physicalism is true, then we must necessarily consider the nature of experience at what are intuitively absurdly short timescales in the CNS. At sufficiently fine-grained temporal resolutions, we can't just assume the existence of decohered macromolecules, neurotransmitters, receptors, membrane-bound neurons etc. - they are weakly emergent, dynamically stable patterns of "cat states". These high-level patterns must be derived from quantum bedrock - which of course I haven't done. All I've done is make a "philosophical" conjecture that (1) quantum coherence mediates the phenomenal unity of our minds; and (2) quantum Darwinism (cf. Quantum Darwinism tested) offers a ludicrously powerful selection-mechanism for sculpting what would otherwise be mere phenomenally-bound "noise".
Dustin, yes. Exactly the same paper contains Tegmark's frustratingly brisk, two-paragraph dismissal of the binding problem - section 3. Tegmark focuses on dynamical timescales. Whether we consider a stream of logico-linguistic thought-episodes, perceptual updates to our world-simulations, or neuronal spiking frequencies, the relevant timescale is scores or hundreds of milliseconds. By contrast, decoherence means the theoretical effective lifetime of neuronal superpositions is less than femtoseconds.
Case closed?
Tegmark assumes so.
But no. Recall the intrinsic nature argument isn't a proposal about dynamical timescales. Rather, it purports to solve the Hard Problem by proposing that experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical.
The implausibility of the intrinsic nature argument and panpsychism in general is normally supposed to derive from size: an electron field, for instance, seems the wrong candidate for the minimal "psychon” consciousness - electrons are intuitively too small and simple. But _if_ experience discloses the essence of the physical, then the nature of physical experience at sub-femtosecond resolutions must be considered too – and it’s not classical mind-dust! Individual superpositions (of neuronal edge-detectors, motion-detectors, colour-mediating neurons (etc) have precisely the (classically impossible) ontological unity needed to dissolve the binding problem. My best guess is that interferometry will reveal a perfect structural match. Binding via synchrony – a mere restatement of the binding problem - is really binding by superposition:
The Measurement Problem
Keith Frankish assumes classical physics - hence atomic billiard balls / Jamesian mind-dust and the resultant combination problem:
“How do the rich phenomenal worlds we enjoy arise from [superpositions of] the microphenomenal properties of the billions of discrete particles composing our brains”
Panpsychism and the Depsychologization of Consciousness
William James' "mind-dust" argument needs updating for the digital age. Yes, I understand the reasoning behind claims for digital minds. Our phenomenally-bound consciousness (somehow) arises from brains. It's commonly believed anything that brains can do can be done by a classical Turing machine. Turing machines are substrate-neutral - the multiple-realisability assumption. Therefore consciousness is presumably substrate-neutral too.
However:
(1) the substrate-neutrality of consciousness
and
2) the substrate-neutrality of phenomenal binding
are two separate theses.
Let's assume physicalism in the broadest sense - including constitutive panpsychism / non-materialist physicalism. If we were notionally to replace the 1s and 0s of a classical Turing machine with discrete pixels of micro-experience and execute the code, then the program would run as before - and the upshot of running the program still wouldn’t be a subject of experience, but just a micro-experiential zombie. Speed of execution or complexity of code make no difference to the outcome. Proponents of digital sentience - and hence the Simulation Hypothesis - are implicitly invoking some kind of unexplained "strong" emergence. It's unphysicalist. Therefore I'm unconvinced.
Maybe if phenomenal binding were a trivial implementation detail of our minds, then it might be tempting to set the binding/combination problem aside. But phenomenal binding is a ubiquitous and insanely adaptive feature of biological consciousness. Yes, digital workarounds are sometimes possible. But IMO all kinds of cognitive tasks will forever defeat classical digital zombies - from exploring psychedelia, the nature of the self and indexical thought to investigating the existence, varieties, binding and causal efficacy of consciousness. By way of a response, perhaps one could argue that the Church-Turing thesis is nonetheless true because programmable digital computers can still be programmed to create organisms with a radically different architecture from classical Turing machines, namely biological animal life with our ability to support classically-impossible phenomenal binding. But as far as I can tell, classical Turing machines themselves will always remain (micro-experiential) zombies.
So phenomenal minds like us can know that we are living in god-forsaken basement reality
Keith, IMO many forms of consciousness lack the phenomenal sense of "pastness" that memory involves, even including the sense of familiarity that often passes for knowledge. I'm not just thinking of experiences like jamais vu, but also how microelectrode stimulation of the brain may induce e.g. a fleeting speckle of colour or tiny a hiss of sound. Do these micro-experiences have a memory component? I'm not convinced. Anyhow, constitutive panpsychism / non-materialist physicalism is normally reckoned too far-fetched to be a viable solution to the Hard Problem because on such a story, the minimal "psychon" of experience must be far smaller than a neuronal micro-experience of colour or sound. And on the textbook neuroscientific story, constitutive panpsychism / non-materialist physicalism leads to the binding problem. But if the quantum-theoretic version of intrinsic nature argument is sound, then constitutive panpsychism / non-materialist physicalism already holds a solution to the binding problem. Recall the conjecture that experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical invites incredulity because the “psychon” must be ridiculously small. Much less discussed is how constitutive panpsychism / non-materialist physicalism makes the "psychon" of consciousness ridiculously short-lived. If constitutive panpsychism / non-materialist physicalism is true, then every individual physical state is experiential, including sub-femtosecond neuronal superpositions. Subjectively, what's it like to be a neuronal superposition ("cat state") of edge-detectors, motion-detectors, colour-mediating neurons and so forth? It's not a classical aggregate. In my (tentative) view, you and your entire virtual world are what a quantum mind feels like "from the inside":
Quantum Mind
[on travel in twenties]
[on the origin of COVID]
Vanity Fair has done some first-rate journalism:
The Lab-Leak Theory
("Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origin")
On the other hand,
Lab leak theory doesn't hold up
("The rush to find a conspiracy around the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins is driven by narrative, not evidence.")
"Nature is the biggest bio-terrorist..."
COVID's origin
Indeed.
[on sentience appraisal]
What credences would you assign?
Not really a science...
Consciousness science
("An academic survey on theoretical foundations, common assumptions and the current state of the field of consciousness science")
Me: certain.
Other people, monkeys, dogs, octopuses, babies, bats, fish, worms: probably yes.
Amoeba: neutral (leaning to yes)
Trees, rocks, thermostats: probably not.
Above I'm assuming some form of non-trivial, phenomenally-bound consciousness and ignoring the possibility that non-materialist physicalism / constitutive panpsychism is true.
And the next question to ask is: how would one test one's conjectures?
Jonathan, I believe any ethically important, non-negligible form of consciousness is multicellular. But the binding problem has deeper roots, and the minimal sentience of protozoa is a live option:
Evidence of conditioned behavior in amoebae
Recall the phenomenal binding/combination problem is why organic nervous systems aren't just aggregates of "mind dust":
Magnus Vinding interviews DP.
[on The Biohappiness Revolution]
The launch of my new book-cover...
the coffee-table edition!
(1) (2) (3) (4)
with thanks to Duarte
(publication details to be announced)
The biohappiness revolution will extend to all races and animal species. If critics will cry eugenics, then a blond-haired, blue-eyed kid on the cover might not be ideal. Also, the idea is that a predisposition to lifelong bliss should be hardwired - not that tomorrow's youngsters will be using psychoactive drug cocktails!
When will be the world's last unpleasant experience? Centuries, millennia or millions of years from now? I don't know. But the animal kingdom deserves a more civilised signalling system.
The title sounds less morally serious than, say, Preventing Suffering. But I think the best way to prevent future suffering is to ensure that life is genetically programmed to be happy.
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David Pearce (2021)
dave@hedweb.com
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