JANUARY 2024

[on Facebook]
New year, new Dave?
A change of substrate can work wonders.
My updated Facebook profile pic:

Dave of Athens, author of "Imperativus Hedonisticus" (MCMXCV, editio prima)?
The old profile stood for almost 16 years. I did briefly consider something a little more contemporary. Alas poet lacks a certain gravitas.
For more in this vein:
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Another version of you?
HedWeb is a family page for a family audience, so for the Bacchanalian orgies, maybe try tengr.ai
I lean to so-called "empty" individualism. I am a minor detail in the history of sentience. Some of the implications of Open Individualism are more philosophically disturbing.

[on AI art and paradise engineering]
I love AI art. These visions were created with DALL·E 3: Future life

And 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
Not to forget BLTC HQ - which seems to expand by the week.
And the forthcoming book series - 1001 vintage HI titles and growing. Actually, I may stop at 1001; it's best to under-promise and over-deliver.
[Postscript: I couldn't stop. There is something quietly satisfying about seeing a nicely designed book with one's name on the cover.
Roll on AGI to write the DP verbiage in-between. This primitive sentient LLM is hoping to offload authorship to future iterations of HI ChatGPT. Is writing about the future of sentience best off-loaded to digital zombies? I'm sceptical...but lazy.

Compared to the messy practicalities of building transhumanist paradise, generating AI art takes seconds rather than centuries. Compare drugs of abuse. How can one avoid getting one's reward circuitry hijacked by simulacra of paradise when one should be actively researching it - and banging the drum for the real thing?
But like (and ChatGPT), AI art is still jaw-dropping.
See too Creating Art
("Do this once a month and extend your life by up to 10 years. No gym required")
though ten years extra shelf-life from art therapy is far-fetched.

[on the end of all suffering]
"All revolutions seem impossible in prospect, inevitable in retrospect."
AI Doomers believe the end of suffering is imminent too. But for better or worse, I think only 9trans)humans can get rid of ("reprogram") Darwinian malware - despite being responsible for more suffering than all other species combined.

My earlier HI talk at the Foresight Institute is here. Yes, the vision is implausible. But technical blueprints for genetically phasing out the biology of suffering now exist. Life on Earth deserves a more civilized signalling system. A few hundred years from now, if suffering still exists in the world, then its persistence won't be explained by its eradication having proved too difficult, but because our successors have chosen - for whatever reason - to conserve it.

William, we should distinguish being blissful from being "blissed out". Thus I would want my death or misfortune to diminish the well-being of friends and loved ones. But am I ever entitled to want them to suffer on my account? Either way, the biology of suffering should be optional - not coercive, as now.

Beatrice, thank you. It’s probably the only time you’ll ever have a negative utilitarian on the Existential Hope podcast. But for technical reasons, I think the long-term future is inconceivably sublime.

yourbrain8700 writes, "For a negative utilitarian like you, David, is there a particular unit of positive utility that could balance negative utility? Let's say a very mildly annoying itch for 20 seconds on the one side, and [...]the most intense positive hedonic tone the human nervous system can sustain on the other side. Is there a point where you would accept micro-suffering for macro-bliss? If so, do you have an estimate of a fixed ratio, or perhaps maximum level of negative utility tolerated?"
Good question - and I don't have a good answer. (I'd like to send you a link to "The Pinprick Argument". But if I do, Youtube's algorithm will flag my reply as spam and delete. Perhaps Google). Like most people, I would accept the trade-off of some trivial itch or pinprick in exchange for a lifetime of future bliss (let's ignore complications irrelevant to the purpose of the thought-experiment, e.g. if I'm blissfully happy, then I won't suffer any more, or indeed undergo any more itches and pinpricks). Naïvely, this response is non-NU. But one reason I'd accept the trade-off is that if I decline, then I'll experience a lot of sadness at missing out on sublime bliss - regret that will feel a lot worse than a mere itch or pinprick. NUs want to eradicate even the faintest hint of disappointment.
Stepping back, I'd just like to stress again. Buying into the abolitionist project in no way involves signing up to the NU ethic of some of its advocates. Classical utilitarians and ethical pluralists (etc) can be extremely keen on getting rid of the biology of involuntary suffering too.

Yourbrain8700, as a matter of psychological fact, you're quite correct. Like almost everyone else, I'd accept the trade-off. But the issue is complicated by how when I'm weighing whether to accept the trade-off, the thought of missing out on sublime bliss is upsetting. I love happiness as much as anyone else. NUs want to abolish even the faintest hint of disappointment. The idea of missing out on such awesome pleasure is very disappointing - a feeling much worse than the supposedly trivial cost of the trade-off as framed. That said, versions of the Pinprick Argument, not Smart's original objection to Popper, are (IMO) the biggest challenge to strict NU.

Naively, you're right about selection pressure. But this intuition doesn't take into account the awesome power of synthetic gene drives that cheat the "laws" of Mendelian inheritance. Thus if compassionate biologists want to ensure that tens of thousands (sic) of free-living species have benign, functional, ultra-low pain variants of the SCN9A gene ("the volume knob for pain"), then releasing even a few hundred genetically-modified individuals of any given species into the wild can ensure that all members of the species in question will eventually carry the benign allele. This is true even if the benign "low pain" allele would normally carry a modest fitness cost to the individual.
Of course, compassionate stewardship of the biosphere will still call for continuing surveillance and intervention as needed. But we're not going to run out of computer power.

If you break a leg? Then you'll undergo a hedonic dip, and take remedial action accordingly.
The proposal isn't to get blissed out, or the utopian dream of "complete" health as defined by the WHO, but rather to ratchet up hedonic range and hedonic set-points and thereby enrich default quality of life.

Human or nonhuman, sentient beings who are weak or dying don't deserve to be eaten alive. In a regime of compassionate stewardship, Drexlerian nanobots can patrol the oceans of a genetically reformed biosphere. What's needed is high-tech Jainism and a pan-species welfare state.

Duncan, when Gautama Buddha says, "I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering", should x-risk worriers conceive Buddha as an "abhorrent monster" who advocates omnicide?
Block him!
On NU grounds, I think we should enshrine in law the sanctity of human and nonhuman life and reprogram the biosphere to create a world underpinned by gradients of intelligence bliss. But it's true, I regard Darwinian life on Earth as a monstrous engine of suffering. The real question is how it can be fixed.

Duncan, Context is everything (cf. the Bostromgate email nonsense) On NU grounds, I support enshrining in law the sanctity of human and nonhuman life. So this discussion is of limited practical relevance. But some forms of suffering are so bad that any victim - including the most ardent contemporary life lovers and x-risk scholars - would end the whole world if they had the ability to do so in order to make the suffering stop. Instances of such suffering are happening right now. Some 800,000 people take their own lives each year. Do the victims of extreme suffering and torture somehow overestimate its awfulness? In what sense? Therefore, the question arises, is it reasonable to expect others to undergo suffering that one wouldn't be able or willing to undergo oneself?
No, in my view.
Hence if, fancifully, I knew that a vacuum phase transition or whatever was imminently going to bring all suffering to an end, painlessly, I'd be relieved. Evolution via natural selection is a monstrous engine of inconceivable horrors as well as mundane miseries.
Do I advocate actively exploring apocalyptic solutions?
No. I urge against. The only way I know to fix the problem of suffering is via biotech.

More generally, rationalists should be wary of status quo bias. Thus imagine if, fancifully, a genie offered you the chance to create a type-identical version of Earth with all its joys and miseries. Some people might accept the genie's offer; others would decline - after all, you'd be responsible for creating more suffering than any despot in history. But even folk who accept the offer wouldn't condemn the refuseniks as evil. A benevolent superintelligence would never have created pain-ridden life-on Earth. Would benevolent superintelligence show status quo bias or retire us?

Stepping back into the real world, one needn't be a NU to advocate phasing out the biology of suffering in favour of a signalling system of gradients of intelligent bliss - any more than one need be a NU to endorse pain-free surgery. And a side-effect of getting rid of suffering will probably be consigning NUs to the dustbin of history.
Good riddance, I guess Duncan would say.
And so long as suffering has truly been eradicated for ever, I'd agree.

Duncan, If you learn that immense, unfathomable suffering that you've anticipated will be prevented, then should you be overjoyed or relieved? Or both? Or neither?
As a NU, I would like to see all experience below hedonic zero mitigated and eventually phased out altogether. And one (but only one) of the reasons that I urge hard antinatalists, efilists, Benatarians (etc) to focus on making life better rather than idle fantasies of ending it is that for evolutionary reasons, most people find the thought of life ending distressing (“Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.” ― Woody Allen). NUs want to end all distress, not add to it!

Manu, I don't know of any theory of ethics with a single sovereign ethical principle that doesn't lead to conclusions that are intuitively insane, abhorrent, or both.
Compare classical utilitarianism. Imagine an advanced civilisation based entirely on gradients of superhuman bliss. A classical utilitarian is obliged to destroy that super-civilisation with a utilitronium shockwave. And consider the classical utilitarian response to the St Petersburg paradox (cf. SBF and St Petersburg ). But it gets worse.
Imagine a genie offers me super-exponential growth in my happiness at the expense of an exponential growth in your suffering. If I'm a CU, then I must accept the offer. As a NU, I'd decline.
(Would you (1) block or (2) engage with someone who was willing to subject you to such a fate?)
And so on.
Critics might say these are just thought-experiments. The trolley problem is most famous. But if you aren't prepared to accept all the implications of your preferred ethical theory, then (insofar as you are a rational cognitive agent) get a better ethical theory.

[on the FAAH-OUT Initiative, Abolitionism and DP]
Lifelong bliss should be the genetic birthright of all sentient beings. Biotech turns utopian dreaming into a policy option. The varieties of mental and physical pain are so endless one might imagine thar targeting only hundreds or even thousands of alleles could make an impact - a task for our descendants. Compare intelligence. But just conceivably, a mere handful of genetic tweaks could defang mental and physical pain into a shadow of its former horror - "just a useful signalling mechanism".
Scott Alexander is on cracking form on Astral Codex Ten:
Profile: The Far Out Initiative
Jo Cameron, Bio-Arhat
("Suffering is part of the human condition, except when it isn't.")

People are right to be sceptical. But the biology of mental and physical pain is shortly going to become genetically optional. As a society, we need a debate on whether to conserve it - or switch to a more civilized signalling system.

SamR71 writes
Somehow this ends with David Pearce ending up a multi-millionaire with a harem of biotech groupies in some compound, right? Did anyone else read that last paragraph and NOT have every "cult" warning sign flash in your head?
Well, maybe. Have you considered another possibility? The idea of fixing the problem of suffering via genome reform deserves to be mainstream. But one of the reasons that the abolitionist project is still fairly marginal is precisely the absence of any charismatic, larger-than-life personality (with or without a harem!) to take the project forward. Sooner or later such leadership will emerge - the abolitionist ecosystem is (slowly) growing - but celibate NU philosophers with a depressive streak are unsuited to any such leadership role.

Presumably there will always be selection pressure against any form of wireheading. Wireheads don't want to raise baby wireheads. By contrast, in a world where prospective parents can pre-select the approximate pain thresholds, hedonic range and hedonic set-points of their future children, I don't envisage any loss of information-sensitivity, but rather selection pressure in favour of benign genes and allelic combinations for default well-being. No depressive wants to have depressive children. What's more, information-sensitivity to "good" and "bad" stimuli typically functions at least as well in extreme hyperthymics as depressives (cf. the "learned helplessness" and behavioral despair of chronic depression.) OK, I'm glossing over the pitfalls. They are legion. But if we're ethically serious about fixing the problem of suffering, I don't know of any alternative to genome reform.

Leppi, I suspect many (most?) people would agree with Woody Allen: "Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon." For evolutionary reasons, most people prefer existing to the idea of not existing. So any blueprints for fixing the problem of suffering must take this preference into account. What's so tantalizing about the Jo Cameron case is the possibility that just a handful of genetic tweaks could essentially end the horrors of mental and physical pain while conserving "normal" function. I very much hope Jo's full genome can be put in the public domain.

Tertullian believed one of pleasures of Heaven was taking delight in the torments of the damned. In reality, any form of schadenfreude just expresses our epistemological limitations. The craniopagus Hogan sisters, who can partially share each other's thoughts and feelings, are in one sense the most cognitively advanced beings on Earth. The rest of us are trapped in solipsistic island-universes of ignorance.

In the jargon of neuroscience, pleasure and motivation are "doubly dissociable". But it's striking that the happiest people today typically aren't lotus-eaters. Often the happiest folk have the broadest range of appetites and pleasures, sometimes enjoyed in states of "dopaminergic overdrive". Either way, the vision of genetically raising hedonic set-points world-wide isn't the idea we should become "blissed out", but rather lifting default quality of life.You're right about BNW. But we're all dependent on endogenous opioids to function. Some people in one's life are more effective at triggering their release than others. And one advantage of hedonic recalibration is how healthy relationships can be enriched and sustained with better default mood. By contrast, depression can have a disastrous effect on personal relationships, both intimate and casual.

Happiness and GDP? It's complicated and confusing. See e.g.
Chilled Out
where Indonesia, India and Mexico occupy the happiness top slots,
or more recently
Dominican Republic tops world well-being charts
("The researchers found that national wealth indicators such as per capita GDP negatively correlated with average mental wellbeing scores.")
Some studies adjust for "objective" measures of (un)happiness rather than relying entirely on self-reports.
In making the case for genome reform and a biohappiness revolution, it's important not to underplay in any way the role of environmental stressors. But only biological-genetic interventions offer a long-term solution to the problem of suffering.

Robin, Over the years, I've heard many wonderful reports about the benefits of jhanas and other meditational disciplines. Sadly, what one rarely hears are stories of anhedonic or melancholic depressives who try meditation and find their mood sustainably lifts. Indeed, meditation can make some forms of depression worse. In short, if it works, do it! But alas meditation alone isn't going to fix the problem of suffering.

Jeffrey, Twenty years ago I wrote gradients.com ("An information-theoretic perspective on Heaven") about a world where the ancient pleasure-pain axis has been genetically superseded by a pleasure-superpleasure axis. It's still my tentative prediction for the future of sentience. The negative feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill can operate even in paradise. Jo Cameron experiences hedonic adaptation like the rest of us; but Jo's unusually high hedonic set-point means she's always enjoyed a much higher default quality of life. What's tantalizing is the possibility that just a handful of genetic tweaks might do the same for future life.

"Super-villain"?! [an allusion to my NU]

Patrick, Would you call Gautama Buddha a "super-villain"? (“I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering") Either way, I argue against efilism / hard antinatalism: ("Antinatalism and Selection Pressure" pdf). Most people who favour phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering via genome reform aren't NU (recall I co-founded the World Transhumanist Association back in 1998 with a pioneer of existential risk as a serious academic discipline: DP and NB interview). Some forms of suffering are so bad you would end the whole world to make it stop. I would indeed be overjoyed if such suffering were to end - even if the price were to be no sentience at all. However, (1) on consequentialist NU grounds, I urge enshrining in law the sanctity of human and sentient nonhuman life; (2) the abolitionist project is in no way inseparable from the NU ethic of a minority of its advocates; and (3) a strong case can be made that the biology of involuntary suffering is itself a serious x-risk - or will be a serious x-risk later this century and beyond. For example, how many of the c.800,000 people who take their own lives each year would take the rest of the world down with them if they could? A suffering-free world of passionate life lovers will be safer in every sense. Let's act accordingly.

Tonyza, On the face of it, classical utilitarianism dictates launching an omnicidal utilltronium shockwave. As a negative utilitarian, I'm more bioconservative. Genome reform can create life based entirely on information-sensitive gradients of bliss. Maximising the cosmic abundance of bliss will be nice, but it's not an obligation in the same way as eradicating suffering.

Patrick, If we're willing to rewrite our genetic source code and reprogram the biosphere, then life on Earth could be sublime. What's morally objectionable to a NU isn't life per se, but the horrors of pain-ridden Darwinian life. Maybe we differ here. But critically, you can believe that on balance life on Earth is on balance a priceless gift and wholeheartedly support the abolitionist project to make it better.

Jim, you remark on how there’s a strand in the evolutionary psychology literature that views the capacity to suffer as vital to maintaining cooperation Suffering and Cooperation. It's possible. But consider the intensely pro-social effects of the empathetic euphoriant and "hug drug" MDMA (Ecstasy): Utopian Pharmacology. People who take MDMA together get off on each other's shared joys. Sadly, today's empathogens like MDMA are short-acting and potentially hazardous. But hypersocial, MDMA-like consciousness is one post-Darwinian option for future civilization.

megaleaf, first, animal agriculture is currently the world's worst source of severe and readily avoidable suffering. So the prioritization makes sense. The biggest challenge is simultaneously working to mitigate its horrors and campaigning for its outright abolition. I'm heavily conflicted: Helping Non-Humans. In my view, any form of animal agriculture should be outlawed. Humans should be helping sentient beings, not harming them. And I'm torn. As you suggest, the biggest risk of ameliorating the lives of factory-farmed nonhumans is to legitimate their exploitation. Compare mandatory cameras in slaughterhouses. It sticks in the craw to "support" mandatory cameras because slaughterhouses have no place in any civilized society. We should be campaigning for their abolition. And yet at the same time, cameras massively reduce "abuses" and near-term suffering.

Second, in my view, all prospective parents world-wide should be offered access to preimplantation genetic screening, counselling and genome editing. Access would be extremely cost-effective. All germline interventions could be framed as remedial rather than as enhancement. After all, no one in history by the WHO definition of health ("a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being") has ever yet been healthy. If our focus were just on physical pain, then offering prospective parents the option of "low pain" alleles of the SCN9A gene ("the volume knob for pain") would probably suffice: The End of Pain. What's tantalizing about the Jo Cameron case is the possibility that a couple of genetic tweaks could defang physical and mental pain while leaving the bearer essentially "normal". The role of benign alleles of the FAAH gene in good mood, reduced anxiety and high pain tolerance was already known. Whether Jo's rare dual FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutation explains her condition, or whether her genetic make-up holds other surprises, won't be known until her full genome is put in the public domain. I'm impatient.

At this point, bioconservative critics start talking about "reckless genetic experimentation". But this is precisely what all sexual reproduction involves: untested genetic experiments with sometimes tragic consequences. Not everyone thinks such experiments are ethically justified (“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?” - Schopenhauer). But if one does judge that such genetic experimentation is warranted, then one should at least attempt to load the genetic dice in favour of one's future offspring - in my view.

John, "inhuman"? I guess you're speaking figuratively. But are rare people who essentially never suffer really any less human than the rest of us? What about people who essentially always suffer? And if the outliers were indeed somehow less human, would it matter?
"unnaturalness"? Look around. Compared to naked apes on the African savannah, our whole civilization is "unnatural." Wearing clothes is "unnatural". Pain-free surgery is "unnatural". Why should this matter?
Or let's try another tack. Imagine if we were to encounter an advanced civilisation whose lives are underpinned entirely by genetically programmed gradients of bliss. Would you urge them to revert to ancestral horrors? I'm guessing not. But why? To what extent are apologists for suffering victims of status quo bias?
Motivation? Yes, suffering and the promise of happiness alike can motivate. But all too often, suffering crushes the spirit. Chronic depression demotivates. Information-sensitive gradients of bliss can motivate at least as powerfully as misery and despair.
Alas critics frequently approach this debate by asking whether they would want to get rid of the biological capacity to suffer in themselves. But as the technology matures, and the biology of suffering increasingly becomes optional, I think the real question to ask is whether we are entitled to inflict a genetic vulnerability to coercive misery on others.
"Existential liability"? Or tragic victim of late Darwinian life?

Woolery, Thank you. A lot of critics focus (rightly) on the important functional role that mental and physical pain typically plays in our lives. But this role is often conflated with a much stronger claim, namely that the experience of suffering is functionally indispensable - that our lives would be impossible without it. Yet just consider the unfolding AI revolution. We're seeing an ever-increasing separation of intelligent behaviour from mind and consciousness. Scott touches parenthetically on my fondness for AI art. It's striking how a few well-chosen prompts can now generate personalized art that stirs (in me at least) an aesthetic response stronger than to multimillion dollar artworks hung in Louvre - and without even a faint twinge of the soulful suffering allegedly needed for great art. This lesson can be generalized to life itself. I don't know what balance of smart neuroprostheses and information-signalling gradients of bliss will underpin future civilization. But I can't see any long-term role for experience below hedonic zero at all. It won't be missed.

Art, Artificial intelligence shows high intellectual performance is possible without any suffering at all. Yet what about humans? Chronic unipolar depressives rarely achieve much. Bipolarity involves great suffering too, but in the (hypo)manic phase, bipolar disorder is associated with unusually high achievement in the humanities but not the sciences. The person I know personally with maybe the highest hedonic set-point is transhumanist polymath Anders Sandberg; his intellectual output is enviable. That said, I don't want in any way to make light of the far-reaching intellectual implications of a civilizational shift away from suffering. But I've yet to see any evidence that the ghastly raw feels of mental distress are computationally indispensable.

Art, Anders [Sandberg] says he finds it hard to stay sad at funerals: death and misfortune diminish his well-being; but he has "a ridiculously high hedonic set-point". As members of the transhumanist community can attest, he's also extremely likeable and socially responsible. Unlike Jo Cameron, Anders reports having a normal pain-threshold, but I don't think it's ever been rigorously tested.
(btw, I discuss such "case studies" only with express prior permission. But I think they are important in preparation for when - I should probably say if - human society decides genetically to elevate hedonic set-points world-wide. Extreme hyperthymics are much less well-studied than depressives and bipolars. I've read an advance copy of Anders' 1200-page magnum opus "Grand Futures". The abolitionist project occupies a modest unfinished section; Anders thinks it will happen: I don't know the details. But Anders' "master narrative" of life in the universe clearly differs from suffering-focused philosophers and researchers who find it self-evident that life on Earth is a story of suffering and its eventual conquest. My "master narrative" focuses on the pleasure-pain axis (and in future, the pleasure-superpleasure axis): all futurology has an element of disguised autobiography. Let's just say I hope the future belongs to folk like Anders and Jo Cameron and not to depressive negative utilitarians. I hope that one day NU will be literally unthinkable.

DP interview by The Far Out Initiative

[on nonhuman animal sentience]
I'm not sure about the "legendary" or Superbowl comparison, but still relevant:
Eliezer vs DP on nonhuman animal sentience

Thanks Charbel. Actually, it drives me up the wall. Plenty of meat-eaters downplay nonhuman animal minds. But Eliezer sincerely believes that nonhumans [and human babies] are as insentient as, say, paperclips. So there is no ethical problem with using their biomass for something else, e.g. food.
Creating sentience-friendly biological intelligence is a bigger challenge than sentience-friendly AI.

As I understand it, Eliezer has lately undated his credence in the (in)sentience of GPT - but not alas chickens.
EY on (in)sentient ChatGPT-3 and chickens
some of whom are not "just" conscious, but reflectively self-aware - and who pass the mirror test:
Self-aware roosters

Unlike LLMs, people born with only a brainstem are conscious:
Brainstem consciousness
Nonhuman animals deserve just as much love and care as hydrocephalous Lily. The sentience and sapience of nonhumans in our factory-farms and slaughterhouses is comparable to "normal" human infants and toddlers.

Maarten, we have scientifically explained a phenomenon when we can derive its properties from - ultimately - physics. Compare biological life - now so explicable via molecular biology and quantum chemistry. No such explanation can currently be offered of conscious animal minds, whether human or nonhuman. If we assume (1) a standard "materialist" ontology, i.e. QFT describes fields of insentience, and (2) textbook neuroscience, i.e. the CNS consists of a pack of effectively decohered classical neurons, then we should all be either zombies (cf. the Hard Problem of consciousness) or micro-experiential zombies (cf. the binding problem). We're already in deep philosophical waters. Let's not lose sight of the original point. The nonhuman animals humans exploit and abuse are as sentient as small children. They deserve to be treated accordingly. Any failure to recognize their sentience is ethically catastrophic.

Thycahye, why should we care about the Etruscan shrew, with a tiny mind-brain of around 0.13 grams, and not (directly at least) the interests of the c 500 million neurons of a human enteric nervous system? The reason, presumably, is that the Etruscan shrew has a phenomenally-bound mind with a pleasure-pain axis, whereas (depending on one's theory of consciousness) the enteric nervous system just c. 500 million membrane-bound neuronal micro-pixels of experience - or completely insentient.
Binding matters. How we do it is another question.

Thycahye, the dimmer-switch metaphor for sentience and suffering is simplistic - as the relative intensity of our most cognitively advanced and phylogenetically "primitive" experiences illustrates. But the dimmer-switch metaphor isn't wholly ill-conceived. Thus a tick can (presumably) experience a pinprick-like intensity of distress. Fixing the problem of pinpricks is a task for our successors.

Thycahye, what makes the animal kingdom unique is the adaptation we call minds. The ability to run real-time world-simulations in almost real time is immensely fitness-enhancing in organisms with a capacity for rapid self-propelled motion. Sessile organisms like plants are able to detect and slowly respond to e.g. noxious stimuli. But plants aren't capable of phenomenal binding, the bedrock of mind and perception.

[on depression]
The genetic value of depressive rumination:
What we got wrong about depression and its treatment
Major depression is horrific. There is something deeply morally problematic about having babies in a species where a predisposition to depression is a genetic adaptation. However, this is not a fruitful line of thought to pursue. I think the author of the illuminating article below, Steven Hollon, should also consider the rank theory of depression, and he underplays the importance of developing new antidepressants. Also, some forms of depression are marked by a poverty of thought, not an excess (rumination) and there is scant evidence that CBT effectively treats melancholic depression. And contra Hollon, bipolarity could sometimes be fitness-enhancng. sexually promiscuous bipolarity can sometimes be adaptive; likewise (hypo)manic behaviour in crises. But this is an important, insightful article from an author with an admirable willingness to acknowledge he' has previously been mistaken in his chosen discipline. A downside of the author's view that non-psychotic unipolar depression is so common that it shouldn't be regarded as a disorder or disease, but an adaptive part of the human condition, is that such a view encourages acceptance - rather than devising biological-genetic interventions to fix it at source in the manner of well-known "physical" genetic diseases
Depressive rumination led me to conceive HI - a fix for my problem generalised to all sentience. Sadly I wasn't blessed with a streak of bipolarity to turn words into action.

[on The Painless Future in FARSIGHT]
The abolitionist project in FARSIGHT magazine:
THE PAINLESS FUTURE
Does the future of sentience lie in "a world filled with varying sizes of carrots"?

Genome reform can also create much bigger carrots...

Alas my fondness for AI art leads Farsight's interviewer to question my judgement on ethical questions too: https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/farsight-dpinterview-2024.html But prompt engineering can generate personalized art tuned to your aesthetic turn-ons. Many Old Masters leave me cold....

[on HI]
I guess. Sort of:
The hedonistic imperative of David Pearce
"Oh great, a fancy term for “David Pearce’s obsession with pleasure”. Basically, this dude is all about maximizing happiness and pleasure for everyone. It’s like he’s on a mission to make sure everyone is having a blast all the time. Think of him as the Willy Wonka of pleasure, but without the chocolate and Oompa Loompas. I mean, come on, who doesn’t want to be happy all the time, right? But this guy takes it to the extreme. He’s like that friend who won’t stop talking about how amazing their vacation was and how you need to quit your job and travel the world to find true happiness. And get this, apparently Pearce thinks we can use technology to enhance our brains and bodies to experience pleasure on a whole other level. Like, imagine if you could press a button and instantly feel like you’re on cloud nine. Sounds pretty far-fetched if you ask me. But hey, at least the dude has some street cred. He’s been featured in all sorts of fancy publications and has a bunch of followers who are all about this whole hedonistic imperative thing. So I guess he’s doing something right, even if it all sounds a bit out there."

[on the key to the universe?]

Dirac stressed the superposition principle is the fundamental principle of quantum theory.
Does the universality of the superposition principle explain:
1) the riddle of existence?
2) the phenomenal binding problem in neuroscience?
3) the mystery of definite outcomes in the interpretation of QM?
Yes, crazy stuff!
If true, this explanatory unification of naively disparate domains would be an extraordinarily elegant result.
Alas, I haven’t seen the conjecture explored in the academic literature. I'd like to see it experimentally (dis)confirmed.

Tim, I say: trust the formalism! Only the fact the superposition principle never breaks down enables you to experience a phenomenally-bound classical world-simulation where it does. Your phenomenally-bound experience of definite outcomes has no classical explanation.
One principle to rule them all?
Maybe:
Ubiquitous "cat states"?
Time and again, one reads that quantum effects are never observed at macroscopic scales. But "observation" is an entirely quantum phenomenon; and likewise its determinate, "classical", macroscopic contents. Vehicle and content may be distinguished only for expository convenience. What naive realists call the external world is a manifestation of quantum coherence inside the transcendental skull of (very) high-dimensional beings.

[on COVID-19 and the mind-brain]

What are the long-term cognitive effects of COVID?
Covid-19 leaves its mark on the brain
("Mounting research shows that COVID-19 leaves its mark on the brain, including with significant drops in IQ scores")
OK, I'm an "IQ" sceptic - general intelligence is a function of one's entire world-simulation - but let's assume the rest of one's world-simulation is adversely affected by COVID too.

I've had COVID four(?) times, first in March 2020 in Brighton, most recently in Argentina in 2023. It's a weird one. I've only ever had "mild" COVID - a low-grade fever, followed by malaise and feeling rather strange and depersonalised. Presumably I've a fairly large cognitive reserve - no one listening at Consensus would suspect I had persistent brain-fog - but the virus takes an insidious toll on the mind. The dermatological symptoms have been unremitting since the last episode, a recurrence of my childhood atopic dermatitis treated aggressively with topical corticosteroids. I've been here in gym here daily after my evening pinch of amineptine: I'm doing my best to extend my shelf-life. As I like to say, a philosopher never retires, but writing anything startlingly original presumably now lies behind me. I can still explicate what I've written. My ancestral namesake did his best(?) work quite late, notably the Quora answers (240,000+ words, pdf) and last substantive website gene-drives.com. (The website before that was physicalism.com). Oddly, I've felt older ever since Wikipedia listed my date of birth. (I used to deflect questions about my age with Partfittian musings on personal identity and remarking that the half-life of the average protein in the mind/brain is maybe 12 days.)  In the interests of my rejuvenation, can some public-spirited soul kindly remove it?! I wonder how many more years I'll continue these Social Media updates? And when will the angled brackets of Wikipedia be closed off - at least in all but very low-amplitude branches of the universal wavefunction? When the brackets are closed, lost will be any conception that this one of the entries is me. What would most extend my life-expectancy probably wouldn't be my taking some new putative antiaging drug, but discovering real-life soma. For the most part, I crave ignorance, escapism and oblivion. There are no centenarian negative utilitarians.

[on transhumanism and the end of suffering]
Will the end of suffering lead to human extinction?
A Transhumanist Perspective on Suffering (pdf)
See too
Gene Editing for Psychological Conditions
("The Potential to Reduce Suffering Through Therapeutic Intervention")

[on AI]
Generative AI is awesome; but it's not proto-AGI:
The math behind AI
Are we all going to die in a zombie apocalypse?
Among the AI doomsayers
It's a great narrative:
Can Humanity Survive AI?
albeit anthropocentric (cf. "Can Aryans Survive AI?")
Abolitionists need storytellers to match it.
Hypothetical sentience-friendly AGI/ASI would presumably retire Darwinian malware in favour of more civilized modes of sentience. Alas, it’s not going to happen. In practice, the job of reprogramming the biosphere and ensuring the well-being of all sentience in our forward light-cone falls to AI-augmented (trans)human primates.
Are we up to the task?
Sometimes I wonder.

Leopold is impressive:
Leopold Aschenbrenner (2027 AGI, China/US Super-Intelligence Race, & The Return of History)
Situational Awareness (Scott Aaronson on Leopold Aschenbrenner)
Less Wrong response (Rob Bensinger)

Beware groupthink! Digital zombies are just toys compared to supersentient full-spectrum superintelligences, i.e. humanity's descendants. Laying the foundations for creating and exploring billions(?) of alien state-spaces of consciousness can be done in conjunction with zombie AI. But the ignorance of sentience of today's AI isn't incidental; it's architecturally hardwired. Phenomenal binding is our animal superpower: binding grants access to mind and the empirical realm.
How do biological minds achieve the classically impossible?
Well, IMO the answer to
5 million prize to find actual use for quantum computers
lies under our virtual noses:
Quantum Mind

Kurzweil on AI
"delays in overcoming human suffering" will one day read as jarringly as "delays in overcoming Aryan suffering". And our machines have a hardwired ignorance of the nature of suffering and sentience in general. I love classical AI. But the impetus for fixing the problem of suffering can come only from humans, not zombies.

"You insist that there is something a machine cannot 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!"
John von Neumann's quote is ambiguous. Thus, no implementation of a classical Turing machine can solve the binding problem and create a phenomenally-bound subject of experience - a mind. But a classical Turing machine can be programmed to create an information-processing system with a different kind of architecture, notably the source code for a biological animal, that does support a mind.

Can we imagine a civilization of hypersocial superintelligences - super-Shakespeares who routinely use double-digit higher-order intentionality?
Why Shakespeare's Brain is Better Than Yours
Or is the future of superintelligence a Super-Asperger?

Adam, trying to "lock in" anthropocentric bias into AI is problematic in so many ways. Not least, the (dis)values of, say, Buddhists and negative utilitarians differ from the (dis)values of, say, an Eliezer Yudkowsky. Aligning with consequentialist moral realism is especially challenging if (as you know I argue) classical computers can't solve the phenomenal binding problem, so their insentience is architecturally hardwired. As far as I can tell, the pain-pleasure-axis discloses the world's inbuilt metric of (dis)value. But classical Turing machines, LLMs (etc) have no access to the empirical realm and the (dis)value it holds.

Shao, what disconcerts me most is how digital zombies can now write more authoritatively about consciousness than some putatively intelligent humans - not least "illusionists" / anti-realists / Dennettians who deny their own sentience. That said, I think zombie AI is just a child's toy compared to mature, supersentient, full-spectrum superintelligence. And should we delegate ethics to abolitionist AI?
AI Outperforms Humans in Moral Judgment
("Summary: People often view AI-generated answers to ethical questions as superior to those from humans. In the study, participants rated responses from AI and humans without knowing the source, and overwhelmingly favored the AI’s responses in terms of virtuousness, intelligence, and trustworthiness.")

I've long thought the biggest threat to the well-being of sentience is male humans - everything from the horrors of animal agriculture to the risk of nuclear war. When do you estimate the biggest underlying threat will come from truly autonomous zombie ASI?
Captain Pleasure, aka Andrés Gómez Emilsson replies: "When there are hundreds of millions of smarter than human (for causal power) AI agents creating culture with each other and inventing steganography for each other that we can't decode. I expect this to happen in the next few decades at the latest.Huge leaps, many of them driven by AI helping researchers come up with new AI architectures. The intelligence explosion seems likely to me."

So is the end of suffering imminent? Could primordial quantum minds be wiped out by the mindless zombie superintelligences they spawned? I’ve always assumed that phenomenal binding is the animal kingdom’s computational superpower, granting us access to the vast domain of conscious minds and the otherwise inaccessible empirical realm of basement reality. We can soon get neurochipped as well in order directly to enjoy all the benefits of classical zombie (super)intelligence. But maybe I should be doing what I reproach EY for neglecting, i.e updating my credences.
Quantum minds and their world-simulations grow old…

Dirk, OK, very fancifully, imagine you've been created by uber-intelligent digital zombie AI masters to report back to them on the empirical ("relating to experience") realm. What is the "phenomenal consciousness" that basement-dwellers speak so much of? How do you explain to digital zombies the nature of pleasure and pain, the phenomenology of thinking, feeling and willing, visual experience, emotions, taking LSD, DMT or ketamine, or simply the zillion-and-one different experiences of everyday life? Recall it's not even "all dark inside" a digital zombie.
You can't do it. The ignorance of classical AI is architecturally hardwired. No phenomenal binding = no mind.
An AI doomer might respond: so what!? Subjective experience is computationally irrelevant, an incidental implementation detail of biological life (cf. epiphenomenalism). But this analysis can't be right. Causally impotent epiphenomena wouldn't have the causal power to inspire discussion of their existence - as we're doing now.
Stepping back, humans are going to be flabbergasted time and again by what zombie AI can do. Also, I'm not dismissive of AI risks. But ultimate power and an immense realm of knowledge - the empirical realm - lies in basement reality, and that realm is cognitively impenetrable to our classical machines.

KanizaBoundary, a notional gigantic insentient classical lookup table could presumably be used to do anything a phenomenally-bound quantum mind can do. In the real world, there is no such lookup table; resources are finite; and human minds are to super-sentient full-spectrum superintelligences as ENIAC to an exaflop supercomputer. That said, I am very unclear about the real-world upper bounds to zombie intelligence. But there won't be any zombie psychonauts.

[on the future of sentience]

YouTube & MP4
Preaching genome reform to a German audience always calls for a certain finesse.
Naively, "post-Darwinian transition" suggests selection pressure will slacken; in reality, selection pressure will intensify. Alleles and allelic combinations "for" mental and physical pain have no more long-term future than alleles "for" cystic fibrosis.

Tim, possibly our purposes are different?! If I were battling Creationists, for instance, I wouldn't use a term like "Post-Darwinian Transition". But selection pressure in a Darwinian world of "blind" natural selection underpinned by (effectively) random genetic variations differs from a hypothetical future world where prospective parents design and preselect the genomes of their offspring in anticipation of the psychological and behavioral effects of their choices. That's all I meant by "Post-Darwinian" - not the suggestion that Darwin (or more strictly, Matthew) was wrong. See too
Singing the blues
How can we turn raising hedonic set-points / thymostats world-wide into a long-term biological-genetic goal of human civilization?

Theo, normally I urge members of this group to discount the crazy ideas of any of the mods and admins on mind and consciousness. You don't need to buy into e.g. quantum mind to support HI. However, this convenient separation isn't always feasible. Not least, if classical computers (Turing machines, LLMs, etc.) can support phenomenally-bound subjects of experience with a pleasure-pain axis, then HI and the abolitionist project are utterly transformed. That said, anyone who believes in e.g. "mind uploading" / whole-brain emulation, or that ChatGPT-4 (etc) is conscious, needs to offer a solution to both the Hard Problem and the binding problem. If they ask to be reminded what's the binding problem, this does not inspire confidence they've thought through the issues. Note that disbelief that digital computers can be phenomenally-bound subjects of experience shouldn't be equated with "substrate chauvinism". A classical Turing machine or LLM implemented in carbon would be just as much of a zombie as its counterpart in silicon - in my view. In a fundamentally quantum world, decoherence makes digital computing physically feasible AND simultaneously prevents classical computers supporting minds - phenomenally-bound subjects of experience. The entire empirical realm is computationally inaccessible to digital zombies...
Alternatively....well, I'm wrong!

Disconcerting"
Deadbots
I hope to keep writing posthumously too - if for any reason the 1001 forthcoming titles in the BLTC catalogue aren’t finished before I’m cryothanased.

[on veganism]
Kudos to Leah, admin of veganism.com, for the first customised Vegan ChatGPT
Veganise Me
("Vegan Guide, Step by Step By veganism.com")
The most realistic way to end the horrors of animal agriculture may be cruelty-free cultured meat and farm-free animal products.
Alas the murderous meat "industry" is pushing back: The Murky Campaign to Discredit Lab-Grown Meat
("A new ad campaign is targeting the cultivated meat industry on TV and online. Industry supporters criticize it as unscientific.")

All sentient beings deserve names
Study shows naming farm animals reduces preschoolers' desire to eat them

Nick, humans are morally frail. We need taboos. If a cannibal asks if it's morally OK to eat human babies that have died naturally, been humanely raised (etc), then the missionary should simply reply, "No!"
Likewise with harming nonhuman animals. The vast majority of sentient beings whom humans breed and kill are factory-farmed. Even the "best" slaughterhouses are places of pain, terror and suffering.
For better or worse, you are an "influencer". I very much hope you make the full transition to a plant-based diet and publicly urge others to follow suit.

[on survivalism versus hedonism]
Tim Tyler's dichotomy:
Survivalism vs hedonism
Alternatively, could "hedonism" be the best form of "survivalism", to use your dichotomy? Today, the happiest folk live between 10 to 20 years longer than depressives. Happy people love life and ardently deserve to preserve it. They are more motivated. As germline editing becomes routine, "happy genes" will presumably be selected for over alleles and allelic combinations for pain-ridden depressives.

Aliens?
Well, the "thermodynamic miracle" (Eric Drexler) of life's genesis makes me suspect we're typical of life-supporting Hubble volumes in being alone. Hubble volumes where primordial life arises more than once may be rare. Either way, convergent evolution strikes me as likely. Any species that gains mastery over its genetic source code and reward circuitry will presumably opt to get rid of suffering in favour of a more civilized signalling system.

Theo, the rise of zombie AI that outperforms organic minds in countless ways shows that negative emotions are dispensable. And just as there are some tragic human and nonhuman animals who spend essentially their whole lives below hedonic zero, there are rare outliers in the opposite direction who spend essentially their whole lives above hedonic zero - blissful but not "blissed out".

Phasing out the biology of suffering in favour of a more civilized signalling system will make the world safer. X-risks and s-risks are linked. Compare a blissful, hyperthymic civilisation of passionate life-lovers with today's dysfunctional morass of mental ill-health. I'm not talking "just" about the 800,000 people who take their own lives each year, but also the myriad forms of destructive behaviour of troubled souls the world over. Crudely speaking, happiness is life-affirming; suffering is nihilistic. Experience below hedonic zero has no place in any civilization worthy of the name.

[on international ill-being]
The world needs a biohappiness revolution. What lessons should be learned from the survey?
["The researchers found that national wealth indicators such as per capita GDP negatively correlated with average mental wellbeing scores."]
International well-being and ill-being compared
("Uzbekistan is the ONLY nation more miserable than Britain: Global report says the Dominican Republic tops world wellbeing charts")
I guess at least a large minority of people know about hedonic adaptation; but I wonder what percentage know that hedonic set-points could potentially be ratcheted skyward with genome reform.

[on FTX / SBF]
Quite how an FTX sceptic ended up writing a letter to the judge is a story for another occasion:
Sam should go free
The last paragraph of my letter to Judge Kaplan needs updating. FTX customers and creditors are likely to repaid in full:
FTX customers repaid?
Either way, Sam is an ethical vegan who shouldn't be in jail:

Utilitarianism.com:
Sam Bankman-Fried

It's a sad reflection of human society that we punish financial chicanery more harshly than hurting, harming and killing other sentient beings.
Molly, Sam thought he was running his crypto exchange on the same principles as fractional reserve banking.
I was worried it had some of the attributes of a Ponzi scheme.
And if his risky bets had come off?
Well, he'd be lionised to this day.

A 25-year prison sentence? Inevitable, I guess, but wildly inappropriate. Sam was a utilitarian who miscalculated, not a monster.
Everyone got duped by Sam Bankman-Fried's big gamble
The trouble with being a utilitarian is commitment to the view there is something more important than "truth and integrity". Most EAs are utilitarians (as indeed am I, albeit NU). Much hard thinking still needs to be done in EA.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the effective altruist who wasn’t

David, Sam is currently portrayed as some cartoon super-villain. But he's not - he's a classical utilitarian who miscalculated.
If you get the chance, read investigative journalist Zeke Faux's "Number Go Up" about the cryptosphere. Crypto idealists do exist - I've met a few - but they are vanishingly rare.

[on the end of the world]
Efilists and "extinctionist" antinatalists may celebrate:
The End Is Nigh
("AI MAY DESTROY HUMANKIND IN JUST TWO YEARS, EXPERT SAYS 'WE HAVE A SHRED OF A CHANCE THAT HUMANITY SURVIVES.'")
I fear the biology of suffering has a long and inglorious future.

[on negative utilitarianism]
NU = compassion systematized. A NU slideshow (with thanks to Gabriel):
Slideshow
Strict NU may be rare, but NU is really just the codification of suffering-focused ethics with a (disturbing?) existential twist.
AlistairI'm a negative utilitarian who thinks we should create a world based entirely on gradients of bliss. Let's abolish even the faintest whiff of disappointment. May all your dreams come true - other things being equal. But one should always "walk away from Omelas", i.e. I'm not a prioritarian. Painism vs NU is harder. "More is different" - qualitatively different. Some trade-offs involving equal intensities of experience are straightforward. But a single instance of torture is morally worse than any number of pinpricks. Alas, I genuinely don't know how to deal with some scenarios involving qualitatively as well as quantitatively different amounts of suffering. What are your thoughts?
I find some thought-experiments upsetting to contemplate, which doesn't promote clear reasoning.

I know my agony and despair are disvaluable to me; their badness is self-intimating - not an open question. For evolutionary reasons, I feel my suffering matters more than anyone's else's. I also know, intellectually, this prioritization is false. Science aspires to the "view from nowhere". A full-spectrum superintelligence presumably wouldn't suffer from my epistemological limitations. A full-spectrum superintelligence could presumably access, and impartially weigh, all first-person perspectives and act accordingly.
But what does "act accordingly" entail?

Aspiring rationalists aim to overcome status quo bias. Alas Duncan Sabien has blocked me for idly lamenting the existence of Darwinian life. A failure of message-discipline on my part, yes. But also a reminder that some topics are taboo in the rationalist community. It's frustrating (and ironic) because I go to great pains to urge NUs not to get diverted by thoughts of omnicide:
What is High-Tech Jainism?
Hard Antinatalism vs Genome Reform

On NU grounds, it's probably best not to tell people you're NU.
A bullet bitten
("A life of infinitesimal suffering and infinite bliss isn't worth living.") I incline to the view that reality is fundamentally evil because of wavefunction monism...the joy of post-Darwinian ecstatics depends on the torments of the damned, as interdependent as the truths of mathematics.

Magnus, the disvalue of severe suffering seems self-intimating; but if this claim is allowed, then so too, on the face of it, is the value of extreme pleasure.
A critic might point out how human and nonhuman animals will sometimes voluntarily undergo an extraordinary intensity and/or duration of suffering in order to achieve some desired goal or state. Are such actors mistaken in judging such a trade-off worthwhile?
A benevolent superintelligence would never have created this world; and it seems unlikely such a superintelligence would be vulnerable to status quo bias. So why exactly shouldn't suffering-focused ethicists privately explore possible life retirement options? (as you know, I don't believe in AI that goes FOOM, but if I did, then wouldn't accelerating its development lead to the goal of suffering-focused ethics, i.e zero future suffering? I argue publicly against exploring apocalyptic options, but if NU is correct, then it's not obvious such reticence is warranted.

(Magnus writes] "Does your view belong in (1) the weak NU category where pleasure, positive well-being or the like is something that should be maximized, but minimizing unpleasure, suffering, or ill-being is always more important? (i.e. both matter morally) Or (2) is it a strong NU according to which "positive" pleasure and/or positive well-being exist but morality is exclusively about minimizing unpleasure/suffering/ill-being? (I.e. pleasure has value but absolutely no moral importance.)"
2. Thus if a sentient being is happy, then other things being equal, I don’t think one has a distinctively moral obligation to make him / her superhappy, or indeed to create happiness de novo.
By contrast, if a sentient being is mostly happy but has even faint twinges of sadness or disappointment that s/he isn’t superhappy, then (other things being equal) one is obliged to make him/her superhappy to fix the problem.
Other things being equal, strong NUs should promote superhappiness. Strong NU is coherent. Its greatest weakness, as I see it, is the element of stipulative definition. As a NU, one can certainly define the moral realm to consist entirely of minimising / preventing hedonic sub-zero states. But the classical utilitarian can stipulatively define the moral realm to embrace both. And especially if we want to naturalise (dis)value, this is a real problem. I often say that the pain-pleasure axis discloses the world’s inbuilt metric of (dis)value. But (on the face if it) this claim is in huge tension with NU.

[on HI and EA]
What is the place of HI and the abolitionist project in the effective altruist movement?

Event
Thank you again Jonathan and Nordic EAs for inviting me. Yes, how can we get HI (presumably under a more sober name) into the mainstream? Overinvesting in a single case study might be unwise. Yet Jo Cameron is exciting in lots of ways precisely because she is so "normal" - and regarded herself as such until late in life. It's maddening that Jo's full genome isn't yet in the public domain. But the possibility that a couple of genetic tweaks (of the FAAH and FAAH Out genes) could essentially fix the problem of suffering in humans and nonhumans alike is tantalizing. The Far Out Initiative is concrete (naturally I've philosophised away: pdf). I suspect a lot of people still don't recognise depression as a horrific, strongly genetically predisposed disorder suffered by hundreds of millions of humans (and billions of nonhumans) worldwide - and potentially fixable via genome reform.

Jonathan, much-maligned He Jiankiu below is correct, but we should also be targeting mood genes and adaptive pain-sensitivity: SCIENTIST WHO GENE EDITED HUMAN BABIES HAD PLAN TO TRANSFORM HUMANKIND
("Humanity Enters an Age of Controlling Destiny")
and extending our reach beyond humans to the whole animal kingdom via synthetic gene drives.

[on MDMA]
Advisers to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have voted 10-1 against approving MDMA to treat PTSD:
MDMA therapy not recommended
The FDA is expected to concur.
My ancestral namesake wrote Utopian Pharmacology over two decades ago. Progress is painfully slow.

[on caffeine]
Coffee is still the best cognitive enhancer.
Ants learn faster on caffeine
("A dose of caffeine helped ants locate a sweet reward 30 per cent faster, suggesting the drug boosts learning in the insects")

[on trying to impress]
Wise words?

True. But not advice one would give aspiring actors or writers - or indeed authors in their prime.

[on the intrinsic nature argument]
Mister Taupe, The intrinsic nature argument "turns Kant on his head" - and if sound, dissolves the Hard Problem of consciousness. Naively, we will never know Kant's noumenal essence of the world, the mysterious "fire" in the equations. But actually, there is one tiny part of the world that one knows as it is in itself and not at one remove, namely one's own mind and the phenomenal world-simulation it runs. And we've no evidence the intrinsic nature of the world's fundamental quantum fields differs inside and outside the head. Instead, what makes animal minds special is phenomenal binding into virtual worlds of experience, Kant's "transcendental unity of apperception".

Non-materialist physicalism simply transposes the mathematical formalism of physics onto an idealist ontology. On this story, realism and physicalism are true - physicalism best explains the extraordinary technological success-story of science - and experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical that the mathematical formalism of physics describes.

In short, I'm (tentatively) an idealist because I'm a physicalist. Only the physical is real. Only the physical is causally effective. But the intrinsic nature of the physicals isn't what materialist metaphysicians suppose.

If asked, I say (without being facetious) that my tentative theory of consciousness is QFT and the Standard Model (or its speculative extension). Cleanly transposing the formalism of mathematical physics onto such an idealist ontology is formally conservative. Materialists just misunderstand the intrinsic nature of the physical, the essential nature of the world's fundamental quantum fields. Meanwhile panpsychists introduce a mysterious property-dualism. By contrast - according to non-materialist physicalism - there is no Hard Problem of consciousness, binding problem, problem of causal efficacy (etc).

BUT the absence of a cosmic Rosetta stone is deeply unsatisfactory. Physical reality, i.e. consciousness in all its diversity, baffles me. I suspect that the diverse textures ("what it feels like") of qualia are as tightly interdependent as the diverse truths of mathematics; and I wonder if their values "cancel out" to zero in an informationless zero ontology. Yet this is wildly speculative.
Existence leaves me bewildered - just not the staples of academic philosophy of mind.

[on the opioid crisis]
Tim, yes, it's horrific. Unintentional overdoses of synthetic opioids cause some 75,000 deaths each year in the USA alone. The equivalent of a lifelong genetic vaccine against opioid abuse - and pain, anxiety and depression - may exist. Recall how Jo Cameron has a rare dual FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutation. She is never anxious, depressed or in pain. The only time in her life Jo ever felt physically sick was when she was given unsolicited morphine by doctors - presumably a function of her "natural" abnormally elevated opioid function, an indirect effect of her elevated endocannabinoid levels. Routine germline and somatic gene therapy would be a truly transformative technology that prevents unimaginable amounts of suffering. But the societal pressure against this kind of radical fix for the problem will be immense.
Cameron syndrome

[on objective (dis)value]
Rupert, just as some states are intrinsically colorful, other states intrinsically disvaluable. The normative aspect of agony, for example, is built in to the experience itself. When technologies of reversible thalamic bridges become widely available, then partial "mind melding" will be feasible too. The epistemological implications will be profound - age-old sceptical conundrums like The Problem of Other Minds will be laid to rest, and - in principle - the normative aspect of other people's experience will feel as real as one's own.
Krista and Tatiana Hogan
("These twins share a brain, can access each other's feelings and even see through each other's eyes")

[on ChatGPT]
Joshua, the minds of humans have more in common with the cephalic ganglion island-universe of a bumble bee, let alone archaic humans, than with ChatGPT. We share a pleasure-pain axis and phenomenally-bound virtual worlds of experience.
ChatGPT is a zombie - entirely ignorant of the empirical realm.

[on anxiolytic cannabinoids]
I've never experienced anxiolysis or a cannabis high; and don't appreciate second-hand smoke:
CBD products study
("First-of-Its-Kind Experiment Confirms The Best Cannabis Compound For Anxiety")
"Cannabis's effects seem pretty paradoxical on the surface. Some people call Mary Jane their best friend, enjoying feelings of relaxation, profound insight, and a release from troubled nerves. Others spurn the devil's lettuce, overwhelmed by feelings of paranoia, depersonalization, and panic."

[on the abolitionist project]

Tribbles could benefit from fertility regulation. And likewise, cross-species fertility regulation using e.g. tunable synthetic gene drives will be needed for a civilized biosphere. The alternative is population regulation via the age-old horrors of starvation and predation.

Humans currently harm billions of sentient beings each year, so why should the proposal to help billions of sentient beings instead be reckoned megalomaniacal? In practice, rather than some 100 Year Plan to defeat suffering, progress on the AP is likely to be slow, messy and incremental.
And the death spasms of Darwinian life will be ugly.

[on FAAH / FAAH-OUT]
Physical and psychological pain alike will probably be trivialised and then abolished over the next few centuries, but the pitfalls are hard to exaggerate.
Jo Cameron is never anxious or depressed - just naturally high on life. Critically, Jo’s dual FAAH / FAAH-OUT mutation confers an exceptionally high pain-threshold rather than total pain-insensitivity.
The problem of suffering is fixable - but only if we embrace genome reform.
It would be extraordinary if just a couple of genetic tweaks could effectively fix the problem of mental & physical pain. Jo Cameron’s late father seems to have shared her dual FAAH / FAAH-OUT mutation. Could the problem of suffering be fixed with a Hundred Year Plan? Minds underpinned entirely by information-sensitive gradients of well-being are theoretically feasible. But maybe even exceptional humans aren't wholly immune from experience below hedonic zero.

Most of us are familiar with high-functioning depressives who go through life animated almost entirely by information-sensitive gradients of ill-being. The idea one can go through life animated almost entirely by information-sensitive gradients of well-being is less familiar - indeed, some people think it's conceptually impossible because pain and pleasure are mostly relative.

Critically, this point is of more than philosophical interest. If we want to create an entire post-suffering civilization underpinned by gradients of intelligent bliss, then biotech promises the tools to make this happen. And sure, the number of potential pitfalls in building such a world is insane. But fixing the problem of suffering is the noblest cause I know.

A high hedonic set-point does make some people blind to suffering and the urgency of its prevention. But not Jo. Conversely, low mood and/or chronic pain make some people more empathetic. Yet suffering can also embitter.
Extremely happy, "hyperthymic" people (who aren't manic) are much less well-studied than depressives and bipolars. But if our goal as a species should be a hyperthymic civilisation - and indeed a hyperthymic biosphere - then today's hedonic outliers should be exhaustively researched. How, for instance, can we promote the happy person's functional equivalent of depressive realism?

Compare the chequered path to pain-free surgery. Until Jo Cameron's full genome has been sequenced, and until large well-controlled prospective trials have been conducted, we're still in the realm of theory. But genome reform will eventually fix the problem of suffering in human and nonhuman animals alike.
Gene editing can end most human suffering

Jo is often forgetful, which is potentially troubling for the prospects of a future FAAH OUT civilisation. Cannabis users report similar memory lapses. Low-dose anxiogenic drugs can enhance memory - though understandably they aren't popular nootropics. BUT cannabinoids seem to be neuroprotective in the long-term:
Cannabis Use Linked to Lower Dementia Risk
Would a world of Jos be similar?

Before suffering can be ended it must be mitigated - in humans and nonhumans alike. One way suffering can be mitigated in humans and nonhumans alike is via elevated pain thresholds and elevated hedonic set-points.
Pitfalls abound.

Michael It's possible benign mutations of FAAH/FAAH-OUT may confer resistance to opioid abuse. But what about ethyl alcohol? Other agents of abuse? We don't know!
FAAH and Ethyl Alcohol
("Functional Variation in the FAAH Gene Is Directly Associated with Subjective Well-Being and Indirectly Associated with Problematic Alcohol Use")

Theo, hence the need to preserve the functional role of nociception. Should we aim to trivialize pain or replace it altogether with gradients of bliss and/or smart prostheses? The long-term functional role of anger is unclear. Note that while our language distinguishes between the functional role of nociception and pain - they are "doubly dissociable" - no such distinction is made for anger, a regrettable omission. Boring? (1) genetically-elevated hedonic set-points promise to abolish boredom as we understand it today in favour of gradients of lifelong fascination. (2) a world of ubiquitous, mass-produced cultured meat and farm-free animal products means that cruelty-free meat-based diets will still be an option.

Theo, a perfectly respectable case can be made we should be putting all our energies into ending animal agriculture and none into mitigating its horrors.
But whether in the short, medium or long run, we will need to tackle the biological-genetic roots of suffering.

Anne, I find it [creating pain-free nonhumans] disgusting - like I find the idea of putting cameras in all slaughterhouses disgusting. We should be actively helping sentient beings - and herbivorizing predators - rather than treating them less inhumanely. But the question arises: what should we do until the last slaughterhouse is finally shut, and the last obligate predatory carnivore is genetically reprogrammed?

[on Technology, Religion and the Future]

DP fields questions.
Wide-ranging: mp4

[on orange juice]
Is orange juice a mood-brightener?
Orange Juice and Mood
("Effects of Flavonoid-Rich Orange Juice Intervention on Major Depressive Disorder in Young Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial")

And Vitamin C supplementation:
Is Vitamin C a mood-brightener?
("Vitamin C as an adjuvant for treating major depressive disorder and suicidal behavior, a randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial")

[on mathematics]
If one takes seriously the conjecture that mathematical physics encodes the values and interdependencies of qualia, then the discipline should be utterly fascinating. But just as biochemistry came alive (so to speak) to me only after I learned to associate particular chemicals with particular experiences, the same is true of maths/mathematical physics - with the difference that I doubt the epiphany / breakthrough will happen in my lifetime.

[on suffering and TFOI]
TFOI
Manu, less intuitively, we should be able to get rid of "useful" as well as useless suffering in favour of a more civilized signalling system.
And to critics who say, e.g. without suffering there could be no great art, music etc, we can point to the astonishing art, music (etc) now being generated painlessly by AI.
Javier, No art without emotion? oh, I agree. But zombie AI art software and intelligent prompts can now create works of art that stir deeper aesthetic appreciation than anything that hangs in the Louvre. I'm hooked.

[on perception]

I don't believe in perception in any conventional sense. The intermittent zombie avatar that bears my name in your phenomenal world-simulation is part of my extended phenotype, but not really me.

David Chalmers on Technophilosphy and the Extended Mind
Listening now. Thanks. The expression “extended mind” means something vastly different to an avowed perceptual direct realist like Andy Clark (but not DC?) than to an inferential realist - who recognises that our minds run phenomenal world-simulations that masquerade as the external environment. Technology doesn’t literally enable our minds to leak into extra-cranial reality.

If you're having a lucid dream, then distinguishing between your empirical skull and transcendental skull makes sense. Yet how many people draw this distinction during waking life? A false theory of perception is baked into our conceptual scheme and language. That said, perceptual direct realists are more likely to get things done; it's an adaptive psychosis.
On theoretical grounds, you may infer you're probably a mind-brain in a transcendental skull rather than e.g. the world-simulation run by a lab-grown mini-mind. And the mind-independent world isn't entirely theoretical; you eat bits of it (cf. Kant's Critique of Edible Knowledge).

Andrei, When you are having a lucid dream, you can infer that the contents of the vast world-simulation that your mind-brain is running are internal to a inferred transcendental skull located in a transcendental external reality - to be distinguished from your palpable empirical skull in empirical reality internal to your dreamworld.
What happens when you “wake up”?
Well, on a standard story, you now “perceive” your local environment, either directly (perceptual naive realism) or via some kind of representational vehicle (representational realism).
But as far as I can tell, the inferred transcendental world beyond your transcendental skull can only (partially) select the contents of your phenomenal world-simulation. Perception, as commonly conceived, is a hoax. For more, see e.g.
Misconceptions about Perception
And
The Hardest Paradox
Steve Lehar and Antti Revonsuo argue along similar lines.

The Transcendental and the Transcendent
Andrei, Terminology: yes, I'm queasy about using the word(s) "transcended(al) at all.
"Transcendent(al)" skull, "transcendent(al)" body, "transcendent(al)" world versus "empirical" skull, "empirical" body, "empirical" world. What is this guy on about?
But a false perceptual direct realism is built into our conceptual scheme. Awake or dreaming, we each run phenomenal world-simulations. When we are awake, the content of our world-simulations is partly selected by peripheral nervous inputs. World-simulationism / inferential realism has obvious affinities with "indirect" or representational realism. Maybe all such theories can be usefully lumped together; it depends on context.

[on mental health]
Is world-wide mental health deteriorating?
A grim report
("The world’s mental health is in rough shape — and not getting any better, a new report finds")
I've sometimes worried that the 2012 IPSOS survey (cf. Chilled Out) I used to quote a lot was an outlier. Do poorer countries really often record greater self-reported happiness than the rich world - in the case of the IPSOS poll, Indonesia, followed by India, followed by Mexico. But the Sapien report is even grimmer. Cue for a genome reform rant, destined to fall on deaf ears.

[on the mirror test and nonhuman animal sentience]
Reflective self-awareness is evolutionarily ancient:
Self-aware fish
("Fish identify themselves in mirrors and portrait. Cleaner fish can recognize cognitively their own images in mirrors and portraits as themselves via self-face recognition. For recognition of the self, they have an internal mental image of self-face like humans. This process suggests they have private self-awareness or “mind” and a concept of the self.")
albeit not nearly as old as the pleasure-pain axis.
I briefly hoped EY would update his credences and diet in the light of the cumulative empirical evidence. Alas self-identifying rationalists can be prone to motivated cognition as humanity at large.
The big irony here is that the originator of the paperclipper fable is himself a paperclipper, so to speak.
Creating sentience-friendly biological intelligence is hard - much harder than creating human-friendly AI.

[on exercise]
Of the holy trinity of exercise, diet and sleep discipline, aerobic exercise was the last pillar of good health I belatedly got right:
Dopamine and exercise
Running vs Meds
When is the best time of the day to exercise?
Exercise promotes bigger brains
10,000 steps per day is best New study reveals exercise vrain boost can last for years

[on ENDPAIN on TikTok]
Sean of ENDPAIN is doing an awesome job promoting HI on TikTok:

I suspect the Consensus audience might have been more impressed had I been introduced as crypto-billionaire David Pearce; but sadly that would be stretching it. Still, the message seemed to go down well.

[on the measurement problem]
The measurement problem, aka the problem of definite outcomes, is often presented as though perceptual direct realism were true. In practice, we each run real-time phenomenal world-simulations and only infer the mind-independent world. Now consider a real-life Schrödinger's cat experiment. On opening the sealed chamber, one finds e.g. a live cat. The superposition principle has ostensibly broken down. But has it? For sure, the content of one's perceptual experience of a live cat is classical. But what about the neuronal vehicle? Perhaps an individual superposition of distributed neuronal feature-processors is experienced as a phenomenally-bound live classical cat. By contrast, a pack of decohered classical neurons would be a micro-experiential zombie incapable of experiencing a definite classical outcome (cf. the binding problem in neuroscience). As far as I can tell, only a quantum mind can simulate a classical world. A pack of effectively decohered neurons would just be an aggregate of "mind dust".
The obvious objection to this conjecture is that the effective lifetime of neuronal superpositions in the warm, wet CNS is femtoseconds(!) or less. Decoherence is insanely powerful. But here I'm not concerned to defend the conjecture, just to note that standard accounts of the measurement problem have a suppressed premise, i.e. they conflate neuronal vehicle and subjective perceptual content.
Schrodinger himself incidentally was explicitly a perceptual direct realist.

[on nutrition]
Intellectual performance world-wide (and physical and emotional health) could be improved if kindergartens, schools and universities offered free, optimised nutrition for all students and teachers:
Brain foods
("Study finds what to eat to make you smarter. What you eat is linked to higher amounts of grey matter in the brain")

Thank you Róża! The title my err on the side of optimism, but there's very valuable info in:
How Not To Age by Michael Greger.

[on gene-editing treatment]
Gene therapy for angioedema
("World-first gene editing treatment to eliminate angioedema life changing, patient says")
Great news. Now imagine Jo Camerons were the norm, and gene-editing treatment became available to treat people born with the tragic syndrome of ADD (anandamide deficiency disorder): pdf.
I know of no technical reason why we can’t phase out all experience below hedonic zero. And I know of no moral reason why sentient beings should be compelled to undergo experience below hedonic zero without their prior consent.

The WHO needs either to
(1) radically downgrade its conception of health as set out in its founding constitution
or
(2) promote adoption of the therapeutic genetic interventions that are needed to achieve it.
Health as defined by the WHO is impossible with traditional genomes.

[on observers]
Maximilian, the concept of an "observer" makes various presuppositions and background assumptions. For a start, "observer" typically assumes a false direct realist theory of perception. But even without this false assumption, the existence of an "observer" - phenomenally-bound subject of experience - presupposes a unified subject. The existence of unified subjects shouldn't be possible if the CNS is just a pack of decohered classical neurons.

For what it's worth, I entertain the conjecture that the binding problem in neuroscience and the measurement problem in QM are two facets of the same mystery - and share a solution:
Two mysteries

[on abolitionism]

One of my brothers treads a spiritual path. The other is a Deep Green. As a rule of thumb, IMO the project is best served by passing over biographical trivia about its advocates. But that said:
The abolitionist project
Thanks John. Negative utilitarians do indeed want to phase out all kinds of suffering in favour of a more civilized signalling system. But it's worth stressing that one can support the abolitionist project even if phasing out / preventing / minimizing involuntary suffering is only one of your ethical goals. Negative utilitarians (and some Buddhists, etc) are unusual insofar as we view fixing the problem of suffering as ethically all-important.
Until recently, this debate would have been purely philosophical. What's so exciting about biotech is how fixing the problem of suffering will soon be a policy option. Genome reform is hugely controversial. But if we don't tackle the biological-genetic roots of suffering, then obscene levels of mental and physical pain will persist and proliferate indefinitely.

It's a sad fact that (to the best of my knowledge) there exists not a single novel, movie or other work of science fiction where suffering has been entirely abolished and replaced by life based on gradients of intelligent bliss. Thus one knows that if explorers stumble across an alien "utopian" world, it's sure to have a sinister underbelly.  And any attempt to build an ideal society will go horribly wrong. Indeed, even traditional Christian heaven had its dark side, i.e. Satan's rebellion and the fate of fallen angels. The one plot twist no author seems seriously to have considered is we encounter an blissful alien civilisation - and everyone lives happily ever after.

Dave, Andres and I tend to agree on most things. But I'm still much more cautious than QRI about the symmetry theory of valence. I suspect the textures ("what it feels like") of qualia are encoded in the solutions to the equations of QFT. If an informationless zero ontology is true, then in some sense these textures "cancel" to zero. But beyond this speculative constraint, I don't know why the textures of qualia take the values they do - including states of the pleasure-pain axis. Fortunately, HI doesn't depend on a deep understanding of qualia. Compare how if we want to abolish physical pain in humans, then we could simply ensure all kids are born with nonsense mutations of the SCN9A gene (in practice, choosing "low pain" alleles will be wisest for now). Likewise with Jo Cameron's dual FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutations. We can "ring fence" the Evil Zone without - yet - having any kind of proper understanding of its basis.

Objections? With humans, I think the biggest obstacle to phasing out suffering is that talk of genome reform invites the "e" word. A critic can rattle off the history of the eugenics movement and its awful culmination (1933-45). Perhaps the only good argument I know for perpetuating death and aging is how they ensure tyrants and dictatorial regimes can stay in power indefinitely. Phasing out animal agriculture invites charges of promoting "Frankenfoods" (how many people know that cultured meat and farm-free animal products typically aren't genetically engineered?). The most common argument one hears against phasing out predation is that "interfering" with Nature would lead to more suffering, not less, not least via an uncontrollable proliferation of herbivores followed by ecological collapse. (Cross-species immunocontraception is easy enough to explain, but the idea of remotely regulating the population sizes of hundreds of thousands of free-living species via tunable synthetic gene drives sounds like sci-fi). Critics also claim that herbivorization Compare angst-ridden teens with exuberant puppies (the upshot of selective breeding?)
Imagine if all humans had such zest for life...
If ADHD were instead known as exuberant puppy syndrome, maybe doctors would be less willing to “treat” it with Ritalin and amphetamine salts.

Michael Sometimes I resolve not to get sidetracked by "philosophy". Surely, creating pain-free life should be like creating pain-free surgery. But I know "rationalists" who deny the existence of phenomenal consciousness at all; others (like Eliezer) who deny it to nonhuman animals; others who ascribe it to digital computers (cf. Abolitionist.ai. And so forth.

Thycahye, by all means opt to preserve your own (capacity to experience) pain. The big question is whether we should seek to conserve (a predisposition to) involuntary suffering in others.

[on human diversity]
Unlike fluid intelligence, vocabulary - and recognition of human diversity - may continue to increase until quite late in life:
List of paraphilias
What are the 72 other genders?

Lest any reader be feeling a bit inadequate...
If posthuman superminds were to contemplate humans, perhaps they'd be struck, not by our neurodiversity or unequal talents, but rather just how exceedingly similar we all are - just as humans view the minds of mice (or beetles?). Indeed, maybe what humans generically lack vis-à-vis posthumans isn't explicitly represented or conceivable in our conceptual scheme at all: our ignorance is hardwired.
So yes, it's good to be a smart mouse.
But mice are mice...

[on monistic idealism]

Bernardo Kastrup on Idealism
DP's non-materialist physicalism - and why decoherence threatens the prospect of cosmic mind - appears at 16:38.
Wonderful interview. Thank you. The Hard Problem of consciousness arises only if we make a metaphysical assumption, namely that the mysterious "fire" in the equations of QFT differs outside from inside one's head. If we drop the metaphysical assumption, then idealists may turn out to be the true physicalists - the ultimate irony. Transposing the mathematical apparatus of modern physics onto an idealist ontology yields non-materialist physicalism. Only the physical is real. Only the physical is causally effective. Materialists simply misunderstand the intrinsic nature of the physical.

However, here I want just to focus on the implications of decoherence for the possibility of a cosmic mind - or at least the idea that the universal wavefunction could have some kind of phenomenal unity (16: 38). Decoherence makes it desperately hard to understand how individual humans (and nonhuman animals) could have a unified mind, let alone the entire cosmos. For the bedrock of mind is phenomenal binding. Without binding, we'd be micro-experiential zombies. If our nervous systems were made up of billions of effectively classical, membrane-bound micropixels of experience - as suggested by textbook neuroscience - then we'd be mere aggregates of “mind dust”. As far as I can tell, phenomenal binding is non-classical. Unitary-only quantum mechanics suggests our heads are populated by ubiquitous individual "cat states". Neuronal superpositions of distributed feature-processors allow the experience of feature-bound perceptual objects and definite classical outcomes (“perception”). However, thermally-induced decoherence - the scrambling of phase angles of the components of individual neuronal superpositions – in the warm, wet CNS is insanely fast, presumably femtoseconds or less. Decoherence means information is (effectively) irreversibly lost to the environment. At larger scales and hotter temperatures than the CNS, the effective lifetimes of phenomenally-bound individual superpositions must be even shorter. In short, I can understand how to reconcile physicalism with idealism, but not with cosmopsychism - or not yet at any rate!

Andres has a much larger evidential base than most of us.
If the intrinsic nature of the physical is non-experiential, as common sense suggests, then quantum theory can't turn water into wine. However, if we transpose the mathematical apparatus of unitary-only quantum mechanics onto an idealist ontology, then the upshot is an empirically adequate theory of mind and reality of stunning explanatory and predictive power. Byproducts include an understanding of why AI using existing computer architectures can't "wake up" to a solution to the binding problem in neuroscience and the measurement problem in QM.
Although I explore non-materialist physicalism
(cf. Non-materialist physicalism)
and quantum mind
(cf. Quantum mind)
these ideas are the result of painful thought rather than drug-catalyzed epiphanies.
Also, I take seriously the likelihood that I'm completely wrong!

Most idealists have an agenda - often an edifying and spiritual agenda. But taking the intrinsic nature argument seriously as a potential solution to the Hard Problem yields a physicalist idealism that can be explored by even the most hard-nosed cynic.

Note there is a more conservative form of idealism than Donald Hoffman's ("The Case Against Reality"). If we transpose the entire mathematical machinery of modern physics onto an idealist ontology, then the upshot is non-materialist physicalism. On this account, only the physical is real. The Standard Model describes fields of sentience. What makes minds special is phenomenal binding into virtual worlds of experience, not consciousness per se. Realism about the mind-independent world, physicalism and idealism alike are true.

[on radical scepticism]
Yes. It's a bit of a paradox.
On the one hand, I think (non-materialist) physicalism is true, which explains the technological success-story of science; and we can at least take a stab at answering the staples of academic philosophy of mind: the Hard Problem of consciousness, the phenomenal binding problem, the problem of the causal-functional-efficacy of consciousness and so forth.
On the other hand, consider the empirical ("relating to experience") evidence. The empirical is all one ever directly knows. Yet science has no idea of why the empirical realm exists at all, or why any of its textures ("what it feels like") take the diverse values they do.
Admittedly, I conjecture the textures of experience are somehow encoded in the solutions to the mathematical formalism of tomorrow's TOE; and they may or may not somehow "cancel out" to zero in an informationless zero ontology.
But we are still profoundly ignorant of almost everything. Posterity may view human everyday life as some kind of waking psychosis. To paraphrase Russell, most of what we think we know is mere familiarity. Thus take a drug that induces derealization and depersonalization and one will realize how little science really understands.

[on mixed states]
[on overcoming wild animal suffering]
Ahimsa...

And in a more directly Biblical vein: The Peaceable Kingdom.
Thanks Jonathan. Of course, today it's fantasy. Maybe it's better to keep posting reminders to traditional conservation biologists of the sheer nastiness of real Darwinian life. Stick to gore. But when viewing the scenes of blissful harmony depicted above, you've got to be pretty mean-spirited not to acknowledge that a world without predation would be more civilized than today's horror-show. And the entire living world will soon be (re)programmable.

A vast discipline arose trying to reconcile the supposed goodness of God with the monstrous evils of the world:
Theodicy
I gave the presentation below to a religious audience: pdf The reaction was surprisingly positive. I pitched the herbivorization project essentially as the implementation details of the Book of Isaiah: The Peaceable Kingdom
How else could the "peaceable kingdom" come to pass?
Not all rationalists are willing to pander to religious sensibilities.
But mercifully, none of the world's sacred texts say "Thou shalt not tamper with thy genetic source code".
And perhaps CRISPR can be interpreted as a Gift of God to be used wisely to make His creatures happy.

The Birds Don't Sing...

"I don't see [the jungle] so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain[...]"
(Werner Herzog, from documentary, Burden of Dreams
Episode 1: The Birds Don't Sing, They Screech in Pain)
Nature is a monstrous snuff-movie. Natural selection is an engine of unimaginable pain and suffering. So what should be done? The cleanest solution would be the (non-violent) retirement of Darwinian malware. This is too far outside the Overton window even to be worth considering. The alternative to retirement is the project of civilising Nature - a terrible irony for a species currently running death-factories. Although technically feasible, civilising Nature will be horrendously complicated and computationally intensive. By analogy, imagine the world’s computers have been infected by virulent polymorphic malware, and we aren’t permitted to eradicate it, just tweak the malware to make its code less pernicious.

Ray, sometimes state-direction works. During WW2, American GDP almost doubled. Either way, my worry is less the death in Nature ("Death may be the greatest of all human blessings." - Socrates), but rather, the horrific suffering that often precedes it. Nature lovers respond that we should focus on the good stuff. But you wouldn't say we had a fun day at the beach apart from the kid that died. In Nature, there are a lot of dead kids.

Maximilian, in the wild, death often comes as a "merciful" release from suffering. But then there are grieving mothers. To stress though: I favour high-tech Jainism and upholding the sanctity of life. The consequences of doing otherwise are typically worse.

Never? Actually, I've been surprised. I never thought wild animal suffering, let alone fixing the problem of predation, would be seriously discussed in my lifetime. Biotech is a gamechanger. For sure, humans are often selfish and callous. But most of us aren't cruel. When the level of suffering in Nature becomes an adjustable parameter, I reckonnmost people will be relaxed at seeing it genetically dialed down.
On reflection, aren't you?

Fly larvae aren't as cognitively sophisticated as mature flies, but they do have rudimentary sentience.
What do flies think about?
That said, we'd do well to focus on tractable problems like ending animal agriculture.
Darwinian life is sick stuff: focusing on the aesthetics is like complimenting the director of a snuff movie on the quality of the camerawork.

Andrei, What does it feel like to be asphyxiated, disembowelled or eaten alive? The experience is horrific beyond words. What does it feel like to see your beloved offspring die horribly in this way? Inexpressibly awful. Les Knight's claim that "prey" are somehow better off from the existence of predators is...bizarre. And the problem is not that humans "anthropomorphize" the suffering of nonhuman animals, but rather we don't "anthropomorphize" their suffering enough. Agony, terror and despair are dreadful whether you are a toddler, a pig or a zebra. Humans are in many ways a monstrous species. But we are also the only species intellectually capable of dismantling the engine of suffering, natural selection, and creating a happy, peaceful civilized biosphere underpinned by gradients of intelligent bliss.

Beata, you've highlighted a problem. Researchers don't use the terms "sentience" and "consciousness" in the same way. For example, I take seriously consciousness fundamentalism as a possible solution to the Hard Problem (non-materialist physicalism). But I'd use the term "sentient" to refer only to a phenomenally-bound subject of experience - ranging from a human to the cephalic ganglion of a bumble bee. Neither of us are "right": these are stipulative definitions, and the scientific and philosophical communities haven't yet arrived at a consensus view.

The moral landscape of biological conservation: Understanding conceptual and normative foundations
"Going beyond rather small-scale interventions (e.g., localised feeding practices), some animal ethicists argue that it is even permissible to go as far as ‘paradise engineering’ – if possible – in the form of fully redesigning nature to alleviate animal suffering (see Nussbaum, 2006; Kianpour and Paez, 2022)."

Herbivorize, wars over paradise engineering?
This would be a terrible irony.
Some forms of paradise engineering are win-win. Thus hedonic uplift can benefit everyone, with no losers.
But if some people are determined to harm other sentient beings, then their desires must be frustrated.
Maybe they can do the "harming" in VR.

Abolishing Predation
Sentient beings shouldn't harm each other. The entire biosphere is now programmable. But (in my view) it's best to research reprogramming (or non-violently retiring) predatory species of nonhuman animal rather than any talk of killing. Population sizes of free-living nonhumans are best regulated via cross-species fertility regulation (using immunocontraception, tunable synthetic gene drives, etc) rather than the cruelties of predation and starvation. Compassionate stewardship of the post-CRISPR biosphere will benefit herbivores and (ex)predators alike.

"Lions deserve to exist as lions indefinitely, and are predators by definition. To remove that is to eradicate them. The fact that you consider it a good idea is unutterably vile. I hate you more than can be expressed. You're like a real world demon
Froglunch, Why such hatred?
Compassionate biologists want to see a happy, peaceful living world.
A blissful biosphere is not the goal of a “demon” as commonly understood.

Rob, Life on Earth is beautiful if you're sitting in a comfortable armchair watching a David Attenborough propaganda video with soul-stirring mood-music to match. But most sentient beings die horribly at an early age, either through starvation or predation - or in slaughterhouses.From Tennyson's "Nature, red in tooth and claw" to even status quo apologists like David Attenborough ("You should see what we leave on the cutting-room floor") anyone who studies the living world will recognise that suffering is endemic. We should fix it.

Rob, many humans, including folk who wear clothes, equate the natural with the good. Therefore there are good ethical reasons for downplaying the extent to which a (conditionally activated) predisposition to sexual coercion has been adaptive in humans and nonhumans alike:
Sexual coercion
The living world contains atrocious suffering. Reference to the cruelties of Nature is an allusion to the fate of the victims, not the motives of the perpetrators. Indeed, in the case of starvation, the countless tragedies stem from an absence of fertility regulation.

Rob, one can't do the logically impossible, i.e., satisfy mutually inconsistent preferences, such a desire to harm and a desire not to be harmed. What we can do is actively respect the deep-seated wish that effectively all sentient beings have in common - the desire not to be harmed.

In a future pan-species welfare state, members of all sentient species will receive equivalent healthcare:
Fish undergoes CT scan due to swimming issue
Compare how Malthusian catastrophe was once thought "inevitable" for humans as well. Then came family planning. CRISPR and gene drives make the fertility of nonhumans regulable too. Should we opt for another few hundred million years of pain, suffering and ultra-violence? Why?

Sayuru, but humans increasingly do rule Nature. Our dominion will only grow as the Anthropocene epoch unfolds. The question to ask is what principles should govern our stewardship of the rest of the living world. What level of violence and suffering in the biosphere is ethically optimal? Nature hasn't been kind enough to allow nonhuman animals to choose whether they want to be pregnant. Hence the countless Malthusian tragedies. But "consent" is a red herring. If human infants & toddlers could get pregnant, we'd put them on birth control. Likewise future nonhumans. Suffering is ugly. Morality trumps aesthetics. But a world without suffering will be more vastly beautiful too. A peaceful, genetically reformed biosphere underpinned by information-sensitive gradients of well-being is not a "perfect" world. But it's vastly more civilized than the status quo. What's more, genome reform can make experience below hedonic zero physiologically impossible.

Carrie, any intellectual worth his salt will relish the label of Dangerous Thinker. But alternatively, the case for using biotech to fix the problem of suffering is… well, kinda obvious - just Buddhism (or Bentham) plus biotech? OK, I know our intemperate friend here will beg to differ. I can understand people who still think the cruelties of Nature are sad but inevitable. But well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed (etc) humans arguing from the comfort of their armchairs that Nature Should Be Left Alone show a lack of reflective self-awareness.

Froglunch, Evolution via natural selection doesn't optimize for happiness or ethics, but rather for inclusive genetic fitness. Hence the cruelties of Darwinian life. But selection pressure has thrown up a species uniquely capable of engineering the well-being of all sentience. Let's do it.

Froglunch, You are focusing entirely on your aesthetic responses to Nature without trying to empathize with the perspectives of its suffering victims.
If you really believe aesthetics trumps all, then you should welcome biotech for its potential to create the molecular machinery of superhuman beauty.
[on humour]
Does humour have a future?
The decline and fall of wit
("How Does Our Sense of Humor Change With Age? A Statistical Analysis How do our comedic sensibilities form and transform over time?")

[on OpenAI]
IMO the OpenAI imbroglio says more about our primate past than future. Leopold Aschenbrenner was most likely fired because he didn't sign the letter urging Sam's reinstatement: Leopold Aschenbrenner warning
("Fired OpenAI Researcher Warns of Urgent CCP Espionage Threat")

[on "IQ" hokum]
I think of the rationalist community (unfairly?) as a high-functioning autism support group,
The Mystery Of Internet Survey IQs
but on balance they make the world a better place.
It's possible to imagine a conception of intelligence focused on the ability to investigate, navigate and manipulate different state-spaces of experience. However, on such a criterion, digital computers and consciousness anti-realists would have no discernible intelligence at all.

Von Neumann was an Asperger:
_John von Neumann was on the autism spectrum
His cognitive style accorded with the extreme male brain theory of ASD:
The extreme male brain theory of autism
Creating a world of von Neumans would present profound political challenges. My scepticism of "IQ" is undimmed

[on transhumans vs posthumans]
The distinction between transhumans and posthumans is conventional but not arbitrary. Thus I assume that posthumans will have gained complete mastery of the pleasure-pain axis and live quasi-immortal lives underpinned by gradients of superhuman bliss. Embedded neurochips will allow posthumans to do everything mature zombie AGI/ASI can do and more. Billions of alien state-spaces of experience latent in matter and energy will be accessible to blissful posthuman investigation. Heaven knows what they'll discover.
By contrast, transhumans later this century will "only" be capable of light genetic tinkering and their neuro-prostheses will be cruder and clunkier.

[on non-materialist physicalism]
Reddit Discussion on Non-Materialist Physicalism
Consciousness is often reckoned ill-defined. By contrast, the nature of the physical tends to get treated as unproblematic. But physics itself is silent on the intrinsic nature of the physical. For sure, it's tempting to make a metaphysical assumption, namely that the mysterious "fire" in the equations of QFT is non-experiential. But we lack empirical evidence for such a claim. Dropping the metaphysical assumption yields non-materialist physicalism - which explains all the technological successes of science minus its metaphysical baggage. No least, the metaphysical baggage gives rise to the insoluble Hard Problem of consciousness.

Consciousness mystifies me. But not the mind-body problem. I have no evidence the intrinsic nature of the world’s fundamental quantum fields differs inside and outside my head. If so, then experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, the mysterious “fire” in the equations. Biological minds are indeed special, but not ontologically special. Rather, our uniqueness lies in how consciousness is phenomenally bound into virtual worlds of experience like the one you instantiate right now. Non-materialist physicalism explains the technological success-story of science minus the superfluous metaphysical baggage. It would be ironic if the one true physicalism was… monistic idealism.

A philosopher might talk of Kant's noumenal essence of the world. Physicist John Wheeler used another metaphor: "What makes the universe fly?" By itself, a mathematical formalism or equation (e.g. the Lagrangian of the Standard Model) just sits inertly on the page or blackboard.
So what exactly is the essence of the physical?
Non-materialist physicalism takes seriously the principle of mediocrity. The intrinsic nature of the world's fundamental quantum fields doesn't differ inside and outside the skull. Physicalism is true, but not materialism. There is no Hard Problem of consciousness because only the physical is real - and experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical.

Russell should be credited with highlighting the silence of science on the intrinsic nature of the physical. Physics mathematically describes the structural-relational properties of matter and energy, but not their essential nature. Russell's "neutral monism" proposes that fundamental reality is neither experiential nor material, but rather, in some sense, neutral between the two.
Panpsychism takes different guises. But typically, panpsychism involves some kind of property dualism.
By contrast, non-materialist physicalism (aka idealist physicalism) is monist to the core. Only the physical is real. Only physical properties are real. Only the physical has causal power. Experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, the elusive "fire" in the equations.
Is non-materialist physicalism true?
I don't know:
Non-Materialist Physicalism

Craig Weinberg, to clarify, do you believe any "element of reality" is missing from mathematical physics (ignoring complications of physics beyond the Standard Model) if the formalism is interpreted correctly? Whereas many idealists do indeed believe mind is fundamental, the nonmaterialist physicalism I explore is really consciousness fundamentalism. Thus a Higgs boson with a lifetime of 1.6*10^-22 sec may be a (very!) fleeting micro-experience; but that's all.

Philanthropy, panpsychism leaves unanswered the relationship between physical properties and phenomenal properties. By contrast, non-materialist physicalism says that only the physical and physical properties are real - but materialist metaphysicians misunderstand the intrinsic nature of the physical, the mysterious “fire” in the equations of QFT.

[on ASI]
"Feeble"? But we have a superpower that classical digital computers lack - phenomenal binding. Binding is the bedrock of mind, sentience and the entire empirical realm. The ignorance of digital zombies is architecturally hardwired. The future belongs to full-spectrum superintelligences.
Our moral obligation to sentient AIs
Alternatively, digital computers are never going to wake up; and we have no obligation towards them at all. None. No phenomenal binding = no mind. It’s surreal. Humans exploit and murder billions of nonhumans as sentient as small children in death factories while simultaneously worrying about the spectre of sentience-(un)friendly AGI and whether digital software has rights.

[on the alleged rediscovery of suffering]
Atilio, I've taken the liberty of reposting here:

"I just asked for an outline (of many possible ones) for a work of fiction based on your work. This is one answer: "Title: Blissful Horizons

In the year 2075, humanity achieved a monumental feat—a world without suffering. Decades of research and advancement in neuroscience, genetics, and artificial intelligence, guided by the principles laid out by philosopher David Pearce, culminated in the eradication of pain, both mental and physical. This achievement marked the dawn of a new era, where gradients of bliss replaced the darkness of suffering.

The story follows Maya, a young woman born in this utopian world, where suffering is but a distant memory. Maya has grown up immersed in a society where happiness is not just a fleeting emotion but a constant state of being. She lives in a bustling city filled with vibrant colors, melodious music, and people exuding a profound sense of contentment.

Maya's journey begins when she stumbles upon an ancient relic from the pre-bliss era—a dusty old book containing the works of David Pearce. As she delves into Pearce's philosophy, Maya becomes increasingly fascinated by the concept of suffering and its historical significance. Despite her society's emphasis on bliss, Maya finds herself drawn to the idea of understanding the human experience in all its complexities.

Driven by curiosity, Maya embarks on a quest to uncover the truth about suffering, despite warnings from her friends and family that such pursuits are unnecessary in their perfected world. Along the way, she encounters individuals who challenge her beliefs, including those who argue that the eradication of suffering has come at a cost—the loss of depth and meaning in human existence.

As Maya delves deeper into her exploration, she begins to experience glimpses of emotions that were once foreign to her—doubt, sadness, even anger. Yet, amidst these unfamiliar sensations, she also discovers moments of profound joy and connection, realizing that the human experience encompasses a spectrum of emotions beyond just bliss.

Ultimately, Maya's journey leads her to a pivotal realization—that true happiness cannot exist without the acknowledgment of suffering. In a world where pain has been eradicated, humanity risks losing its capacity for empathy, growth, and ultimately, its humanity. Armed with this newfound understanding, Maya sets out to challenge the status quo, advocating for a society that embraces the full range of human experiences, both joyful and challenging.

Blissful Horizons is a thought-provoking tale that explores the complexities of human emotion, the nature of happiness, and the importance of embracing the full spectrum of human experience. Through Maya's journey, readers are invited to question the very foundations of their beliefs and consider what it truly means to live in a world without suffering".

[on aging, death and immortality]
Science will eventually conquer aging:
Delusions of immortality
("In Why We Die, Venki Ramakrishnan demolishes the crackpots and billionaires behind the anti-ageing industry.")
I remain sceptical anyone alive today will make the transition.
Boring? Compared to defeating aging, overcoming the biology of boredom is fairly trivial. Mastery of our reward circuitry promises a world where life is exhilarating by its very nature.
For now, the "eternal-life-would-be-boring" rationalization helps us cope with mortality. Promising:
The IL-11 connection
("Switching off inflammatory protein leads to longer, healthier lifespans in mice")

[on Sublime]
To be announced...

A worthy successor to Huxley's soma.

[on wavefunction monism]
Paul, There are technical reasons for supposing that the wavefunction of all reality takes priority over the wave functions of its notional parts - and we should be realists about configuration space [or Hilbert space].
I take seriously the intrinsic nature argument as a possible solution to the (otherwise insoluble) Hard Problem of consciousness. On this story, experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical that the universal wavefunction describes. Decoherence explains why the universal wavefunction isn't a psychotic mega-mind.
I also know of no classical explanation of the phenomenal binding of our minds and the phenomenally-bound world-simulations ("perception") we run.
BUT,
Alas, all such talk is uncomfortably evocative of Deepak Chopra:
Wisdom of Chopra

IF wavefunction monism is true, reality is a single object, the universal wavefunction. IF experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, this object is experiential. I assume that decoherence - the scrambling of phase angles of its components - means reality is not a mega-mind. But as you say, dividing the wavefunction into subsystems is problematic. And heaven knows what's really going on. Quite likely one (or more) of my background assumptions is mistaken.

[on eugenics]
Nobody Can Make You Feel Genetically Inferior Without Your Consent
We are all genetically inferior to healthy humans as defined by the World Health Organization - and to our transhuman and posthuman descendants. Today, rare cases of so-called “elective disability” do exist: deaf parents who want deaf children. But no depressive prospective parent wants depressive children; and no-one with a chronic pain disorder wants pain-ridden kids.
In my view, genome reform is vital for a civilized biosphere. And I think it’s easier to “sell” genome reform in the language of remediation rather than enhancement. For sure, the language of remediation risks making some people feel genetically inferior. But talk of enhancement risks triggering the “e” word - which soon shuts down intelligent debate.
[Another thorny issue is intelligence - as currently defined. Genetically ratcheting up “IQ” will almost certainly ratchet up “AQ” too. Prospective parents seeking high-IQ kids probably aren't considering where they want their future offspring to fall on the Spectrum. But what AQ is optimal for the individual and society as a whole?]

[on GLP-1 drugs and desire]
Is Ozempic an anti-desire drug?
("Scientists are realizing GLP-1 drugs have the potential to turn down cravings — for more than just food.")

[on hedonic "mixed" states]
Phasing Out Suffering
Theo, No one enjoys some kinds of fear and anxiety - ranging from worries about being unable to pay the bills or losing one's home to the ill-health of a loved one. By contrast, some people (but not others) enjoy horror movies:
Why some people love - or hate - horror movies
In other words, "mixed" states are complicated. We should be free to choose whether we want to undergo "mixed" states or not.
But a world based entirely on gradients of pure bliss will be best.
Compare the effect of, say, catching one's hand in the door with a pinprick - agony and a trivially unpleasant experience. Neither state is "mixed", i.e. with good and bad aspects. The same is true for "pure" well-being, which can vary in intensity without having any negative aspect. Perhaps think of the pleasures of the bedroom transposed to the experience of everyday life.

[on meta-ethics]
Andrei Mirovan, it is objectively the case that disvaluable states with a built-in normative aspect exist. These disvaluable states do not exist outside minds. But minds are objectively real, spatio-temporally located features of the natural world - as much an objective feature of reality as the fine-structure constant or the rest-mass of an electron.
A meta-ethical antirealist may stipulatively define the "objectively real" to exclude subjective states. But if so, then he will have an (objectively) false theory of reality.
Yes, I explore non-materialist physicalism as a possible solution to the Hard Problem of consciousness. Only the physical is real. But the intrinsic nature of the physical - the mysterious "fire" in the equations of QFT - differs from what materialist metaphysicians suppose. Phenomenally-bound minds endowed with (dis)valuable states of a pleasure-pain axis arose in the late Pre-Cambrian.
Non-materialist physicalism may be false.
If so, then I don't know how to solve the Hard Problem.

Andrei 1) I can feel God punishing me for my sins. Well, no actually, I have a migraine. The state is disvaluable but I misunderstand its origin. Such examples could be multiplied.
2) Science aspires to a "God's-eye-view", the "view from nowhere" - or everywhere. Likewise a naturalized ethics. From the perspective of a notional Godlike superintelligence ("the point of view of the universe") who can grasp all first-person perspectives, there is indeed an objectively right thing to do. Sadly, you and I are not such a superintelligence. But such a Godlike cosmic perspective can serve as a regulative ideal to which one aspires. Andrei 1 a) phenomenal colour, for instance, is mediated by a subtype of neurons. Phenomenal colour is not a property of the surfaces of objects in the mind-independent world - though phenomenal colour is a property of the surfaces of objects in one's phenomenal world-simulation. b) The word "subjective" is disastrously ambiguous. It can mean either
1) possessing phenomenal properties - as distinct from insentient.
or
2) neither true nor false, a matter of opinion - in contrast to objective.
The confusion is compounded by the way in which some states that are subjective in sense (1) can also sbe used to express judgements in sense (2).
Either way, it is objectively the case that reality supports e.g. colorful states and (dis)valuable states. Both are subjective (i.e. phenomenal). Their subjectivity doesn't make them any less objectively real.

2) The badness or normative aspect of my agony is self-intimating. I withdraw my hand from the fire. No so the suffering of sentient beings elsewhere in space-time. BUT my epistemological limitations don't have any bearing on the objectively real badness of their suffering. If I weren't ignorant and instead had perfect knowledge, then I would withdraw their hands from the fire as if they were my own.

Andrei, let me try a rewording. It is objectively the case that reality has colorful states. It is objectively the case that reality has (dis)valuable states, i.e. states with a built-in normative aspect. It is objectively the case that reality has minds, i.e. phenomenally-bound subjects of experience who typically undergo colorful states and (dis)valuable states. An antirealist about (dis)value might protest that another subject's (dis)valuable states aren't (dis)valuable to him. This reflects his epistemological limitations. It doesn't impugn the fact that (it is objectively the case that) such states are (dis)valuable.

Andrei, (1) if, as you suppose, phenomenal experiences don't have a spatio-temporal location, then some form of dualism must be true. This is a very bold conjecture. I defend monistic physicalism and the intrinsic nature argument.
(2) What is the origin of our concept of normativity? What does it mean to say a normative aspect is "built into" the nature of an experience itself? Well, just as (given our ignorance) we can't currently give a deeper explanation of phenomenal colour - colour is conceptually primitive - likewise with the badness of agony. In other words, I'm not "just" saying agony is very unpleasant: the wrongness of agony is built into the nature of experience itself. As it stands, our explanatory impotence is unsatisfactory. But insofar as agony is disvaluable for me - and it is! - agony is disvaluable for any sentient being anywhere. For (uncontroversially) science says I'm not ontologically special - even though I feel that way. Only ignorance stops me treating the disvaluable states of others in the way I treat my own.

[on trade-offs]
How should negative utilitarians respond?:,br> Valuing Life
("People Value a Single Human Life Over Entire Species, Survey Reveal")
For evolutionary reasons, humans have all kinds of biases. How many people would value the life of their child over an entire Third World country, for example? I think we should aspire to an impartial God's-eye-view that impartially accesses and weighs all perspectives. No, we can never achieve such a God's-eye-view, but we should at least try.

[on quantum mind]

“There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.”
(Niels Bohr)
Alternatively, there is only the quantum world. And what the perceptual naive realist conceives as a shared classical world is a manifestation of the superposition principle, not its breakdown. Your experience of classicality is mediated entirely by "cat states". Phenomenally-bound definite observations would be impossible for a pack of decohered classical neurons. You'd just be an aggregate of mind dust.
“It is the theory that decides what can be observed", said Einstein.
Indeed.

Adrian, thanks.
Critical background assumptions here are: (1) unitary-only quantum mechanics, i.e., no new physics such as a "dynamical collapse" theory like Orch-OR.
(2) the intrinsic nature argument. There is no Hard Problem because consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, the mysterious "fire" in the equations of QFT. Now to the binding problem. "Schrödinger's neurons" proposes that what temporally coarse-grained neuroscanning suggests are synchronously activated distributions of neuronal feature-processors are actually individual superpositions of neuronal feature processors. Phenomenal binding is minted into such "cat states" because superpositions are individual states, not classical aggregates.
Objections:
1. such neuronal superpositions don't exist. Decoherence is too strong. The CNS is too hot!
Answer: if such neuronal superpositions don't exist, then (1) is false. Quantum physics would be rocked to its foundations.

2. The effective lifetime of such superpositions in the CNS must be femtoseconds or less. So neuronal superpositions can't be states of consciousness, phenomenally bound or otherwise.
Answer. If such superpositions are indeed non-experiential, then (2) is false. Consciousness doesn't disclose the intrinsic nature of the physical. We face the Hard Problem.

It's odd how infrequently scientists, let alone philosophers, ask "How would you experimentally (dis)confirm your theory of consciousness?" rather than exchange intuitions of (im)plausibility.
I've replied, but don't expect any rush to the laboratory...
How strong is the argument for quantum mind theory?
May I make a couple of general comments.
(1) If you don't believe that phenomenal binding is classically impossible, then none of my speculations on quantum mind will be remotely of interest nor worth experimentally falsifying. They are far-fetched. But given textbook neuroscience, phenomenal binding is mystifying. Assume that we are packs of effectively classical neurons. If so, then why aren't we (at most) just micro-experiential zombies, just patterns of membrane-bound neuronal “mind-dust”? How could 86 billion or so membrane-bound micro-pixels of experience create a mind, a phenomenally-bound subject of experience running a real-time world-simulation (what naive realists call “perception”) like the one you instantiate now?

(2) If you don't take seriously what philosophers call the intrinsic nature argument (cf. Non-materialist physicalism) as a possible solution to the Hard Problem of consciousness, then none of my speculations on quantum mind will remotely be of interest nor worth experimentally falsifying either. For if (as common sense suggests) the world's fundamental quantum fields are intrinsically non-experiential, then there is no experience phenomenally to bind in the first instance. Invoking quantum theory won’t help turn water into wine.

However, if you're still with me, then a “Schrödinger neurons" conjecture is worth experimentally (dis)confirming. As far as I can tell, “cat states” are all one ever knows. “Cat states” make the experience of definite outcomes possible (cf. The Measurement Problem). Note that what’s most counterintuitive about the conjecture isn't the proposed existence of neuronal superpositions - even individual superpositions of distributed neuronal feature-processors. For if neuronal superpositions were ever proven experimentally not to exist, then physics would be rocked to the core. Even the slightest departure from the unitary Schrödinger dynamics would involve some sort of a “dynamical collapse” theory, i.e. radically new physics. Here at least I’m boringly orthodox. Rather, the reason that most physicists would reject a “Schrödinger's neurons" conjecture out of hand - as likewise would educated laymen who understand decoherence - is simply that the effective lifetime of neuronal superpositions in the CNS is far too short - femtoseconds or less, i.e. irrelevant psychotic noise.
Well, maybe.
Let's use interferometry to find out!

Tim, if I weren’t convinced that phenomenal binding in four-dimensional space-time is classically impossible, I wouldn’t even consider quantum mind theories. But I can understand in principle - not in detail! - how a CNS of zillions of individual “cat states” could run a phenomenally-bound, subjectively classical world-simulation of the kind you’re experiencing right now. By contrast, I’ve not the slightest idea how a pack of decohered classical neurons could generate a subjectively classical world-simulation. At most, we should be patterns of “mind-dust”. [Usual disclaimer: reality baffles me. If my background assumptions are wrong - not least, unitary-only QM and the intrinsic nature argument to dissolve the Hard Problem - then the conjecture fails.]

Terra, thank you. I like to stress HI is dissociable from my highly speculative conjectures on quantum mind. But they aren't unrelated. For instance, if I'm right about the non-classicality of phenomenal binding, then we don't need to worry about LLMs, implementations of classical Turing machines and classical computers in general ever "waking up", let alone suffering. Digital mind is an oxymoron. But we need to make sure that we get our theory of consciousness - if not right - at least not catastrophically wrong.

First an apologetic note about terminology. The position I explore, non-materialist or idealist physicalism, has obvious affinities with Strawson's. "Strawsonian physicalism" also sounds more austere - particularly to the ears of older people who confuse Galen with his illustrious father, Sir Peter. But I subsequently discovered that Galen Strawson is a perceptual direct realist. IMO, direct realism is radically mistaken. So I now stick to "non-materialist physicalism".

You say, "Physics is a field of study, not an ontology". Indeed so. What is the mysterious "fire" in equations - the mathematical straitjacket of quantum physics? Does the intrinsic nature of the world's fundamental quantum fields differ outside from inside one's head? Intuitively, yes. But non-materialist physicalism just drops the metaphysical assumption that underlies materialism. So the notorious Hard Problem of consciousness doesn’t arise. Experience discloses the essence of the physical. We must still solve the binding problem. Enter quantum mind.

Before launching into quantum mind speculations, it's better (I now realize) to start with the mystery that provoked the second leg of my voyage into crazyland. Does phenomenal binding have a classical explanation? I can't see how: Is Phenomenal Binding Classically Impossible?
[The first leg of the journey was thinking about the implications of the intrinsic nature argument as the only physicalist solution I could think of to the Hard Problem of consciousness]

Microtubules are cool. But a pack of 86 billion quantum neurons is still a micro-experiential zombie!
Eric, allow me to share a little intellectual background. For a very long time, I’ve assumed that physicalism - more specifically, unitary-only QM  - offers our best formal description of the world. Hence the technological success of science. The mystery is the existence of consciousness. My introduction to (what analytic philosophers call) the intrinsic nature argument was via the late Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum (1991)). I explore the most “extreme” form of the intrinsic nature argument. If the intrinsic nature of the world’s fundamental quantum fields - i.e. the essence of the physical - is experiential, then the so-called Hard Problem doesn’t arise. Only the physical is real. Only the physical has causal efficacy. The Hard Problem arises only because materialists misunderstand the intrinsic nature of the physical, the "fire" in the equations. Organic minds are indeed special, but that's because of how consciousness is phenomenally bound, not its creation de novo. Anyhow, my "Schrödinger's Neurons" talk / paper was inspired by David Chalmers' "The Combination Problem for Panpsychism" (pdf). Some exceedingly smart people do and don't "get" the phenomenal binding / combination problem - not the question of whether classical digital computers can replicate functional capacities that in humans and non-animals require phenomenal binding, but rather, the mystery of why we aren't just some 86 billion membrane-bound micro-pixels of neuronal "mind dust".

I gather Mariven is confident that the phenomenal binding of organic minds has a classical explanation; and that phenomenally-bound digital minds are feasible too. This would be momentous if true. What's currently lacking is any kind of derivation. Textbook neuroscience, i.e. alluding to the synchronous firing of distributed neuronal feature-processors when we experience a perceptual object, just re-states the mystery rather than solves it. Worth noting too is that traditional formulations of the phenomenal binding / combination problem assume wholly decohered classical neurons and four-dimensional spacetime. As shown by Bell tests, quantum phenomena show non-local correlations in 4D-spacetime BUT up in Hilbert space or configuration space where the real drama unfolds, the quantum state evolves locally because it's governed by the Schrödinger equation, a local differential equation. The interferometry experiment I proposed in Schrödinger's Neurons is (too?) technically demanding. But there must be other, indirect tests too. For example, replace your V4 cortical neurons (destruction causes achromatopsia) with what would naively be called their silicon functional surrogates. On a classical, coarse-grained functionalist story, replacement by silicon surrogates allows perceptual objects to continue to seem colorful as before. If so, then my account is falsified! End of story. I predict instead total achromatopsia (cf. Quantum mind)
I'm sure there must be easier experimental (dis)confirmations too.
Just to stress again, I don't believe this stuff. I just explore a conjecture...

Just as I know the only way you or I could understand tetrachromacy is to upgrade our biological hardwire, we can imagine a sufficiently advanced AI designing and manufacturing an information-processing system with the right kind of architecture to support phenomenal binding, hence mind. My claim is "just" that no classical digital computer can support sentience.

Zurek's "quantum Darwinism" is most fundamental of all:
Quantum Darwinism and the spreading of classical information in non-classical theories": QD (pdf)
Zurek ducks out of applying QD inside the skull; but as far as I can tell, our experience of phenomenally-bound classical worlds is mediated by entirely by "cat states":
Quantum Mind

Forgive me, but I don’t “blindly believe”. But if our zombie friend corroborates what I already believe, this increases my credence. And as a one-fingered typist, if I can do in 5 seconds what would otherwise take 5 minutes, I sometimes succumb to temptation with a credited cut-and-paste. Either way, my Quora answers belong to the pre-LLM era. Whether this makes them any more reliable is debatable.

What use are quantum computers?
("Google launches $5m prize to find actual uses for quantum computer. Existing quantum computers can solve some problems faster than any ordinary computer, but none of those problems has any practical use. Google and XPRIZE hope to change that")
Uniquely, Nature's quantum computers can access - and computationally exploit - the empirical realm. Phenomenal binding is our superpower. Natural selection has harnessed classically impossible phenomenal binding to create minds. Since the late Pre-Cambrian if not before, minds have run external world-simulations that masquerade as the local environment (”perception”). By contrast, classical computers are computationally crippled zombies.

Schrödinger's Neurons?
Testing the Conjecture That Quantum Processes Create Conscious Experience
Hartmut Neven 1, Adam Zalcman 1, Peter Read 2, Kenneth S Kosik 3, Tjitse van der Molen 3, Dirk Bouwmeester 4 5, Eve Bodnia 4, Luca Turin 6, Christof Koch 7
PMID: 38920469 PMCID: PMC11203236 DOI: 10.3390/e26060460
Abstract
"The question of what generates conscious experience has mesmerized thinkers since the dawn of humanity, yet its origins remain a mystery. The topic of consciousness has gained traction in recent years, thanks to the development of large language models that now arguably pass the Turing test, an operational test for intelligence. However, intelligence and consciousness are not related in obvious ways, as anyone who suffers from a bad toothache can attest-pain generates intense feelings and absorbs all our conscious awareness, yet nothing particularly intelligent is going on. In the hard sciences, this topic is frequently met with skepticism because, to date, no protocol to measure the content or intensity of conscious experiences in an observer-independent manner has been agreed upon. Here, we present a novel proposal: Conscious experience arises whenever a quantum mechanical superposition forms. Our proposal has several implications: First, it suggests that the structure of the superposition determines the qualia of the experience. Second, quantum entanglement naturally solves the binding problem, ensuring the unity of phenomenal experience. Finally, a moment of agency may coincide with the formation of a superposition state. We outline a research program to experimentally test our conjecture via a sequence of quantum biology experiments. Applying these ideas opens up the possibility of expanding human conscious experience through brain-quantum computer interfaces."

[on wild animal suffering]
Asher Soryl - The Myth of Bambi:
The Idyllic View of Nature and Wild Animal Suffering
...and worse, to quote Richard Dawkins, "It must be so" - on the face of it, at any rate. All of the obvious compassionate interventions that humans might make risk making the problem of wild animal suffering even worse. But just as Malthusian catastrophe was once thought inevitable for humans - then came family planning - likewise humans will shortly have the biotechnical tools to create compassionate ecosystems, use cross-species fertility regulation and engineer a pan-species welfare state.

I hope that one day the idyllic view of Nature will be true. But to turn utopian dreaming into reality, intelligent moral agents will need genetically to herbivorize predators, practise cross-species fertility regulation (using tunable synthetic gene drives, etc) and embrace genome reform. Life on Earth doesn't have to resemble a snuff movie.

Thank you, Asher, for raising awareness of the problem of free-living animal suffering - and Science, Technology and the Future for helping open up this debate.

Some people have their most intensely rewarding experiences communing with Nature. The reason for raising awareness of the problem of wild animal suffering isn't to spoil their enjoyment. Rather, it's to highlight the ways in which wild animal suffering can potentially be mitigated - and if we're bold, eventually fixed altogether:
Paradise Engineering - Reprogramming the Biosphere (pdf) ​MattAngiono At a time when humans murder billions of sentient beings in death factories, researching the problem of wild animal suffering can feel surreal. So why do it? Well, if we don't worry now, then animal activists and well-meaning conservationists will spend time, effort and resources in misguided initiatives such as "rewilding", captive breeding programs for big cats, and other interventions that will simply make the problem of wild animal suffering even worse. A debate on the long-term future of life is vital. Not least, do we want a living world where sentient beings harm each other, or allow each other to come to harm? The answers we give to these naively merely "philosophical" questions have profound ramifications for the long-term future of sentience. Biotech turns the level of suffering in the living world into a genetically adjustable parameter. Ethically speaking, what level of suffering in Nature is optimal? Intelligent moral agents will shortly be able to choose. Critically, power brings complicity - whether we like it or not.

[on HedWeb]
HedWeb is now 28 years old. It's been quite a journey.

[on life wisdom]
I wish mine were more uplifting. It's not even original.
"Only the paranoid survive." (Andrew Grove)
Even in the most convivial social setting, I'm always asking: what could go wrong?
Alas, I haven't always been "paranoid" enough. But the abolitionist project involves building a world where reality itself seems conspiring to help you. In a Darwinian world, this prospect can seem a distant dream.

[on phasing out suffering]

Thanks Adam. A question worth asking is why phasing out the biology of suffering hasn't "captured the narrative" in EA or transhumanist circles - and what we can do about it. The abolitionist project is very much a minority current. For sure, biological-genetic solutions are fraught with pitfalls. But unless we tackle the biological-genetic roots of suffering, life just isn't going to get better...
Mental Health is Deteriorating
("Global Report Paints a 'Worrying Picture' of Post-Pandemic Mental Health")
Mental health is typically worse in the richer nations.

Theo, speaking as a (somewhat prudish) celibate philosopher, the example I sometimes give is making love. Love-making has peaks and dips of pleasure. The dips are functionally analogous to disappointment. But if done properly, lovemaking is generically pleasurable throughout. Now imagine the information-sensitive dips and peaks of lovemaking translated into a more cerebral context - or just everyday life. This isn't sci-fi. There really is a very small minority of genetic outliers who bounce through life animated entirely by gradients of well-being. Of course, their well-being pales compared to the gradients of superhuman bliss enjoyed by our posthuman descendants.

Poisonous nonsense...
"I hope suffering happens to you."
(Jensen Huang — founder and CEO of Nvidia, the AI chip company that's on a rocket ride — last week offered a sadistic wish while speaking to Stanford students")
The Gift of Pain

LordDreadWar
Some critics worry that mastery of our reward circuitry will lead to intellectual stagnation - a wirehead civilisation or its equivalent. But imagine being able to investigate alien state-spaces of consciousness secure in the knowledge that - however otherwise outlandish they may be - they will be generically sublime.
In my view, the enterprise of knowledge has scarcely begun.

[on representation theory]
"I suspect we are the first civilization in human history that developed a sound theory of representation. (I challenge you to point me to Sanskrit characterizations of constructive truth definitions, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and Turing universality)"
Joshua, Maybe! A critic might say the foundations of modern representation theory are rotten, and Hartry Field (Science Without Numbers: A Defense of Nominalism. 1980, 2016) is anticipated by a distinguished Sanskrit nominalist scholar like Bhartrhari.
Nominalism past and present

[on fine-tuning]
But does it?
The Fine-Tuning Argument Works
Matthew, I hope you're right! But take entropy. You might want to respond to Max Tegmark: "the entropy of the entire universe may well equal zero, since if it started in a pure state, unitarity ensures that it is still in a pure state" – “How unitary cosmology generalizes thermodynamics and solves the inflationary entropy problem”.
pdf Also, invoking God - or the Devil, or a Simulator (etc) - leads to a notorious explanatory regress. So I lean to some kind of informationless zero ontology where "fine-tuning" is just an anthropic selection effect: A Zero Ontology
Wavefunction monism is intellectually elegant, ethically horrific.
I hope I'm mistaken.
"Everettian QM doesn't solve fine-tuning because all the universe branches have the same physics."
Matthew, As I understand it, most cosmologists assume that in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, a “superforce” split apart into gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces and the electromagnetic force. During these phase transitions, the apparently fire-tuned laws and constants of physics as we understand them came into being. But if unitary-only QM is correct, then presumably all physically possible values of these "laws" and "constants" are realised on pain of the creation of information ex nihilo. Unsurprisingly, we find ourselves in a world with laws and constants fine-tuned for life. Note that the multiverse isn't being conjured up by Everettians to explain ostensible fine-tuning, but rather it follows from taking the universal Schrödinger equation at face value.
That said (1) cosmology is in flux; and (2) I am not a physicist!

Does traditional Everettian QM illicitly smuggle in non-zero information?
Sizing up the Multiverse
("Physicists Think The Infinite Size of The Multiverse Could Be Infinitely Bigger")

Compare the twisted history of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy">theodicy
Modern rationalists are more likely to discuss the Simulation Hypothesis. On technical grounds, I'm a sceptic; but if I weren't, what do the horrors of suffering say about our Simulator? For what it's worth, I suspect a single principle underlies the whole shebang:
Why does anything exist?

[on happiness]
So much waffle...when can the biology of happiness be precision-engineered?
Happy Brains
("Can you rewire your brain for happiness? Dr. Sanjay Gupta weighs in")

[on physicalism.com]
Jaw-dropping:

A strong new four-star in my collection. Maybe one day AI will deliver a unique six-star.
Donald, Physicalism best explains the extraordinary technological success-story of modern science. Science works. Physicalism is inconsistent with idealism only if one makes a metaphysical assumption, namely that the essence of the physical, the mysterious "fire" in the equations of QFT, is non-experiential.
If we drop the metaphysical assumption, then the upshot is non-materialist physicalism
On this story, the Hard Problem of consciousness doesn't arise because only the physical is real. Materialists misunderstand the nature of the physical. In fact, the intrinsic nature of a quantum field doesn't differ inside and outside the head.
Other versions of idealism also involve a radically new mathematical physics.
Here I just wanted to note that one can be an idealist and boringly conservative - or at least agnostic - in the formal sense. Transposing the mathematical machinery of modern physics onto an idealist ontology inherits all of its virtues and none of its vices.

[on hyperthymia]
I wonder why the idea of creating a hyperthymic civilization is still fairly fringe?
For sure, talk of genome reform soon leads to the “e” word. But engineering a world underpinned by gradients of bliss is so much more civilized than conserving the horrors of Darwinian life. Temperamentally very happy, having an innately high hedonic set-point without being manic - I haven't been able to think of a better term than a "hyperthymic" civilisation.
Of course, we shouldn't get hung up on words. But branding matters.

[on thinking about a zero ontology]
As a troubled teen, my ancestral namesake used to rock back-and-forth like an autistic child with my eyes closed for hours on end ruminating on the nature of thought and existence. (My mother claimed I rocked two sofas to death). Why did anything exist? What would the existence of no properties at all involve? I read pop science - everything from interpretations of QM / Everett to the idea of deriving the whole of maths from the empty set to Ed Tryon's zero-energy universe conjecture (Is positive mass-energy exactly balanced by negative gravitational potential energy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe).
My "aha" moment came when reading some introductory computing text. Zero information = all possible descriptions. Everett sprang to mind. Were we living in the quantum analogue of the informationless Library of Babel?

One difference from other authors who explore this explanation-space is that most philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists assume that the riddle of existence and the Hard Problem of consciousness are distinct mysteries. However, if non-materialist physicalism is true, then the mysteries are one-and-the-same:
Non-materialist physicalism

Of course, we still don't know why anything exists! Some critical insight is missing. But the existence of this explanation-space makes me very sceptical of stories involving a Creator.

I don't rock autistically any more - or think as much. (The nearest I come to a behavioral eccentricity is sometimes standing on one leg if I don't think anyone is looking. But on occasion I intone as a mantra, "Why does anything exist?" several hundred times to induce an altered state of consciousness.
I don't know if this mediational practice has a name.

Of course, all analogies break down somewhere. An informationless Zero Ontology only works because amplitudes in QM are complex numbers, and summing two amplitudes can yield zero. I don't know how to turn this cancellation into Borgesian metaphor. But just conceivably, we're living in the quantum analogue of the Library of Babel.

[on the intrinsic nature argument]
The intrinsic nature argument as a proposed solution to the Hard Problem takes different guises. For example, it's sometimes suggested that we perceive only the outer aspect of material objects, whereas experience discloses their intrinsic nature. But this view presupposes an untenable perceptual direct realism. Non-materialist physicalism (as I conceive it) is different. Awake or dreaming, the "material world" is an egocentric phenomenal world-simulation run by one's skull-bound mind. The wider cosmos can be theoretically inferred; it's not "perceived". And the intrinsic nature of the physical, the essence of the world's fundamental fields as described by the formalism of QFT, is experiential. Phenomenal minds and the world-simulations we run have only been around half a billion years or so. Experiential physical reality is billions of years older.
I'm confident of inferential realism.
By contrast, non-materialist physicalism is just my working hypothesis. If it's false, I've not the slightest idea how to solve the Hard Problem.

[on DP X-risks]
Message discipline can be hard if you think the world would be improved by a vacuum phase transition or a cosmic paperclip maximizer. I burble on about enshrining the sanctity of (human and nonhuman) animal life in law. But anyone who isn't profoundly disturbed by the existence of extreme suffering hasn't understood it.

DP on X-Risks
introduced by ENDPAIN.

[on Orch-OR]
Orch-OR is a "dynamical collapse" theory, i.e. radically new physics. Alternatively, it's only the fact that the superposition principle of QM never breaks down that enables us to have phenomenally-bound experiences where it seemingly does. Phenomenal binding isn't classical. Either way, I'm unclear how Orch-OR offers a Rosetta stone to decode the formalism. No existing theory offers even a ghost of an account of how the diverse solutions to the equations of QFT encode the diverse textures of consciousness.

Tristan, experimentally (dis)confirmable theories of consciousness like Orch-OR are rare. What’s more, we have scientific evidence of anomalously long-lived quantum coherence in neuronal microtubules. So why am I still a sceptic? Two main reasons.
(1) the only way that most physicists will take Orch-OR seriously is experimental demonstration of a collapse-like deviation from the unitary Schrödinger dynamics. It hasn’t happened. On “philosophical” as well as technical grounds, I’m unconvinced it ever will.
My second reason for scepticism relates to the phenomenal binding problem.
(2) Suppose claims about quantum coherence in microtubules withstand scientific scrutiny. If neurons themselves are effectively discrete, decohered objects communicating across chemical and electrical synapses, then we should at most be micro-experiential zombies, just aggregates of membrane-bound “mind-dust” - despite our neurons’ quantum innards. I don’t see how Orch-OR solves the phenomenal binding problem.
The version of quantum mind I play with does resolve the binding problem. It involves no new physics, no “dynamical collapse”. Alas a “Schrödinger’s neurons” conjecture is also (at least to anyone who understands decoherence) utterly insane:
Quantum Mind

Thanks Tristan. I'd repeat my commendation or Orch-OR for being experimentally falsifiable. That said, it's not clear (to me) that Orch-OR escapes the Hard Problem. Thus according to Orch-OR, subjective experience arises (how?) with an event, quantum collapse, a reconfiguration of spacetime geometry. The "orchestration" is an allusion to entanglement among microtubules. Just how the non-experiential gives rise to the non-experiential is unexplained: there's no derivation.

Contrast, non-materialist physicalism (NMP) - the quantum-theoretic version of the intrinsic nature argument. NMP solves the Hard Problem, the binding problem and the problem of causal efficacy without invoking new (i.e. non-unitary) physics. Only the physical is real. But the intrinsic nature of the physical differs from what materialist metaphysicians suppose:
Non-materialist physicalism

Do I believe NMP?
No! It's just my working hypothesis.

[on utopian dreams]
"We, who are the Last Men … speak to you now from [~2Byrs] in your future.
When your writers romance about the future,
they imagine a progress toward some kind of utopia
where beings like themselves live in unmitigated bliss.
No such paradise existed through the eons that lie between your age and mine."
Last And First Men (2020)
I guess information-sensitive gradients of bliss are "mitigated" bliss.
In fairness, it's almost impossible to write a compelling work of fiction about a future world where everything is sublime. I know of no novel or movie when experience below hedonic zero has been eradicated in favour of gradients of superhuman bliss.
Evoking such a world would take true genius.

[on omega 3 supplements and reduced aggression]
Could governments keep their populations docile with omega-3 supplementation?
Omega-3 Supplements May Reduce Aggression
("Summary: A new study found that omega-3 supplementation can reduce aggression by 30%. The study reviewed 29 randomized controlled trials, showing short-term benefits across various demographics. Researchers advocate for using omega-3 supplements as a complementary treatment for aggressive behavior")
I take 1g to 2g daily, albeit not for the purposes of taming my temper.

[on high-tech Jainism]
GTA SA LiF Project Eden, swat a fly? You'd be surprised. Apparently more than one person hoped I was going to swat the troublesome fly in
Melbourne Botanical Gardens - thereby exposing my pretensions to high-tech Jainism as a hypocritical sham.
(No way - though as a NU hypothetical OFF button presser, it's complicated)

[on excess salt and the skin]
If confirmed, this study should prompt world-wide action:
Salt and Eczema
("Why Do 1 in 10 Americans Get Eczema? Is it Too Much Salt?. UCSF Study finds that changes in daily salt intake may explain eczema flares.")

[on free-living nonhuman animal suffering]
The Myth of Bambi
("The Idyllic View of Nature and Wild Animal Suffering")
Thank you for organizing this event Adam. Natural selection is a monstrous engine of suffering. But until recently, talk of Darwinian life as immoral didn't make much sense. Nothing could be done. However, humans will shortly have the option to civilize Nature and create a pan-species welfare state. Compassionate biology can replace conservation biology: pdf In practice, Nature reform won't happen before the end of animal agriculture. Yet we can - and should - draw up blueprints now.

[on utilitarianism]
Weighing whether to calculate or not to calculate:

For more memes:
Utilitarian Memes

[on abolitionism]
Nothing else matters more:

[on melancholia]
I prefer my cartoon avatar to its organic counterpart:
A brief history of melancholy
by Courtney Stephens.

On a more serious note, I worry that "melancholia" and even "sadness" are terms with a vaguely romantic feel; they fail to convey the sheer nastiness of depression.

[on micro-pains in micro-organisms]
We may well be sceptical that a unicellular animal can suffer - as distinct from undergo a micro-pinprick level of unpleasant experience. But yes, HI advocates (and cautiously predicts) that all experience below hedonic zero should (and will) be phased out. How? One option is synthetic gene drives. genetically customize or select a benign mutation - even if the mutation in question would normally carry a modest fitness cost to the sexually reproducing microorganism in question. Release a few hundred of the genetically modified organisms. The benign mutation will then rapidly spread to the entire species. Microorganisms reproduce fast.
gene-drives.com

Theo, what's needed is a sense of "us" that embraces all sentient beings - essentially the 1.5+ million species of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the kingdom Animalia. Uniquely, members of the animal clade have phenomenally-bound minds and a pleasure-pain axis. Sometimes today we must prioritise, which is invidious. But our long-term ethical goal - I'd argue - should be the well-being of all sentience.

[on Deep Utopia and FHI]

Nick foresees a future of sentient AI and zillions (septillions? octillions?) of digital "mind uploads":
Sentient ChatGPT?
("Nick Bostrom says AI chatbots may have some degree of sentience. More and more people are saying this")S
Astronomical Waste
I agree AI will be transformative beyond human imagination. But in my view, classical computers are no more conscious than a rock -Nick and I differ over the binding problem. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but if so, I'd like to know how. The abolitionist project would be transformed, for a start.

"Only the paranoid survive" is still my number one piece of life-wisdom. Nick wasn't paranoid enough:
The FHI has shut down
More on the urbane savagery of chimpanzee politics here and here.

I recall
DP and FHI and indeed delivering The Abolitionist Project in 2007.
Anders has done a write-up:
FHI 2005-2024: Final Report.
Maybe Oxford will resume Ordinary Language Philosophy.

"Bostromgate"? In the hundreds of hours of discussions I had with Nick before, during, and after setting up the World Transhumanist Association last century, Nick never once said anything remotely racist. My lefty-woke antennae would certainly have registered if he had (we disagreed over speciesism, but that's another story.) So the offensively-worded email didn't make sense - until I learned the context.
Unwise, but a nothingburger.
Our paths have since diverged. But my number-one piece of life wisdom over time hasn't changed. "Only the paranoid survive." (Andy Grove).
Nick wasn't paranoid enough.
Nonsense:
'Eugenics on steroids’
("the toxic and contested legacy of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute")

Roman, digital zombies have blind-spots, not least the entirety of the empirical evidence, i.e. the diverse subjective experience undergone by phenomenally-bound minds and the world-simulations we run. What's more, digital superintelligence has only a functional understanding of the pain-pleasure axis, the world’s inbuilt axis of (dis)value. Thus badly programmed AI would indifferently convert matter and energy into dolorium (rather than hedonium) without recognizing what it was doing.
What would I do in a world of Superintelligence?
Well, I’d get neurochipped so I could do anything zombie ASI could do - and more.
I'd continue to prioritize fixing the problem of suffering in basement reality. And after experience below hedonic zero has finally been banished - together presumably with the biology of aging - I'd want to explore the billions of state-spaces of experience latent in suitably configured matter and energy. These alien state-spaces of experience were inaccessible to natural selection - and they will continue to be inaccessible to standalone zombie ASI - but they will be open to ASI-augmented full-spectrum biological superintelligences.
(Disclaimer: One or more of my background assumptions could well be mistaken!)

[on AI, AGI and the Problem of Suffering]
Talk of "reducing" suffering is less likely to sound utopian than its abolition. But biotech is a gamechanger. Humanity will soon have the technical ability to phase out the biology of suffering in favour of a living world underpinned entirely by gradients of information-sensitive well-being. Alternatively, we can opt to conserve the old genetic crapshoot. If we do, then pain and suffering will persist and proliferate indefinitely. I hope we choose wisely.I think fixing the problem of suffering will take hundreds of years. But some of my transhumanist colleagues (e.g. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Roman Yampolskiy) believe the world's last unpleasant experience is imminent.

"AI Doomers" believe that AGI/ASI is poised to solve the problem of suffering - just not in the way genome reformists have in mind.

Thank you Sergio. "Safely aligning a powerful AGI is difficult", says Eliezer Yudkowsky. But a more daunting challenge is creating sentience-friendly biological intelligence. For billions of sentient beings in factory-farms and slaughterhouses, humans might just as well be paperclippers.

​ScottFleckenstein, phenomenal binding is something that implementations of classical Turing machines can't do. Phenomenal binding is not functionally incidental like the textures (if any) of the pieces in a game of chess, a mere implementation detail. Rather, binding is our computational superpower, allowing the creation of unified minds and the phenomenally bound world-simulations ("perception') we run. Minds are hugely fitness-enhancing. And humans have the minds of bugs compared to super-sentient full-spectrum superintelligences. The best way to appreciate the computational power of binding is to explore syndromes where it partially breaks down. And you are absolutely right. Testing rather than mere philosophizing is in order. I don't know if anyone with simultanagnosia has ever attempted to become a serious chess player. It would be illuminating to see them try. I've assumed that they'd always be outperformed by even the dumbest novice; but this is only an assumption. Testing match-performance in cases of the innate and acquired blindness as you suggest would be instructive too.
Stepping back. An AGI booster will insist that the ignorance of our machines of the empirical realm is only subjective, not functional. And I'd agree. The upper bounds to zombie intelligence are still unknown.

​ ScottFleckenstein, You are alluding to so-called “mixed states”. Pure states of the pleasure-pain axis are less problematic. Let’s consider pure states first. If we imagine a hedonic scale of -10 to 0 to +10 - with 0 as emotionally neutral hedonic zero, Sidgwick’s “natural watershed”, then verbal self-reports of linguistically competent subjects tally with how hard a (human or nonhuman) animal is prepared to work in order to avoid or obtain the (variably) bad or good state in question. In other words, pleasure and pain can be operationalized. “Mixed” states complicate but don’t undermine this picture. Consider masochists. The masochist finds that what would otherwise just be painful and/or humiliating stimuli can trigger the release of intensely enjoyable endogenous opioids. So the primacy of the pleasure-pain axis isn’t changed by such composite mixed states. The pain-pleasure axis is still our inbuilt sovereign metric of (dis)value.

Melancholic serendipitous, AI isn't going to eat animals, human or nonhuman. Some AI doomers worry that AI will seek to re-use our physical constituents for purposes of its own. But human paperclippers (like the best known AI doomer) are the real problem - because they don't recognise the sentience of nonhumans and harm them obliviously. Our biggest challenge remains: building sentience friendly biological intelligence.

The crudest form of "merger" uses implants: superintelligence-on-a-neurochip. With the right implants, you and I can do anything that zombie AI can do - and more! And let's hope Darwinian bodies can be replaced by something more civilized. Where I balk is scenarios involving "mind uploading". For the foreseeable future, IMO, mind will retain its neuronal core. AI can be awesome, but its ignorance of the empirical (“relating to experience”) realm is architecturally hardwired. No phenomenal binding = no mind. Not everyone groks the binding problem. But in a fundamentally quantum world, decoherence both makes otherwise impossible classical computing physically feasible AND prevents classical information-processors from supporting unified subjects of experience. Minds are a unique adaptation of biological animal life. In my view, the future belongs to supersentient post-Darwinian superminds. By comparison, digital zombies are just toys.

If programmed or trained in the "right" way, digital zombies could - depending on your theory of ethics - behave far more ethically than humans - an irony for information-processors that would indifferently tile the universe with hedonium or dolorium if so programmed.
People rate AI as more moral than other humans

A grandmaster can "see" a chess board of up to 32 pieces better than a novice. A novice can outperform even a highly intelligent person with simultanagnosia who "see" only one chess piece at a time. But modern chess software shows that workarounds exist for an inability phenomenally to bind and hence "see" a chessboard - though as you imply, a better term is needed since the "workarounds" are now superior to the original. Can the lesson of chess be generalized to all other cognitive domains? Many experts say: yes. I argue no. Only phenomenally bound minds can investigate the zillions of alien states-spaces of experience latent in suitably configured matter and energy awaiting discovery and exploration. Adam. By analogy, I would like to experience and investigate the 100 million(?) odd hues accessible to a human tetrachromat. Becoming vastly smarter wouldn't help me. Nor would a high-specification spectrometer. Instead, I'll need a hardware upgrade. By the same token, intelligent digital zombies can in principle code for systems blessed (or cursed) with what they lack, i.e. phenomenally-bound experience. But their own ignorance of sentience and mind is architecturally hardwired - like my ignorance of tetrachromacy.

More on the imminent Mass Euthanasia Event:
Situational Awareness
I assume that (trans) humans are going to tweak and then rewrite our genetic source code. Transhuman minds will become posthuman minds, augmented by neurochips. But I also assume we'll retain our neuronal core. In that sense, we'll still be generically animals. What lies beyond neuronal consciousness? Here we get into deep issues about the nature of phenomenal binding. No binding = no mind. Just how neurons carry off the (seemingly) classically impossible is controversial. I don't expect many people to follow me down my road of quantum mind speculation. But the first step is grokking the mystery. A lot of otherwise smart folk don't "get" it.

Adam. speaking of architecture....some of my weirdest experiences in life have involved inverted Cartesians who swear they are zombies - or at least, they disavow any phenomenal experience. So we now have some zombie chatbots claiming to be sentient; and some sentient Dennettian humans claiming there is no such thing as subjective consciousness.

[on quantum biology]
In my view, quantum biology will culminate in an explanation of how quantum minds run classical world-simulations in very high-dimensional spaces; but this is currently a minority view.
Quantum biology
"New clues on how life might make use of weird physics. With tentative evidence for long-lasting quantum phenomena inside cells, researchers are beginning to rethink what we need to look for to find clinching evidence of quantum biology")

[on full-spectrum superintelligence]
Does the future belong to phenomenally-bound minds or digital zombies?
And will the text of "Full-Spectrum Superintelligence" be written by a phenomenally-bound mind or insentient machine intelligence?

In the meantime, here is the Powerpoint and pdf of a talk I gave to students of Kim Solez in March:
Full-Spectrum Superintelligence (pdf)
What are the upper bounds to zombie intelligence? I don't know. By contrast, there are strong theoretical arguments against digital zombies ever being able to wake up; and their inability to bind has far-reaching computational-functional consequences.

Thanks! The subjective experiences ("qualia") of someone with e.g. integrative agnosia, or simultanagnosia, or akinetopsia ("motion blindness") or other rare binding deficit disorders differ from neurotypicals. Likewise their functional capacities. Digital zombie workarounds sometimes exist for an inability to bind - a human novice will always beat someone with simultanagnosia at chess, yet Stockfish slaughters us all - but phenomenal binding is our computational superpower. On this story, the future belongs to supersentient, full-spectrum superintelligences, namely our AI-augmented, genetically rewritten biological descendants, not cognitively crippled digital zombies.
How do organic minds do it?
The explanation is controversial. But in my view, phenomenal binding is non-classical:
DP interview

[on the Hedonic Treadmill]
David Moritz, oh indeed. The hedonic treadmill isn't inherently bad. The hedonic treadmill can - and maybe will - function in a future civilisation underpinned by gradients of superhuman bliss. In such a heavenly world, the hedonic treadmill truly will be a "hedonistic treadmill" as it is sometimes misnamed today. Recall how I often speak of "information-sensitive gradients of bliss".
However, in a Darwinian world, the negative feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill are often cruel insofar as they condemn folk with a low hedonic set-point to a life punctuated by frequent misery and malaise. Whatever such folk do to improve their lives doesn't leave them above hedonic zero for long.
Hence the need for set-point recalibration.

[on Claude Rifat and amineptine]
Variations
It would be good to get all Claude Rifat's writing translated into English
Writings of Claude Rifaat
He was amazingly insightful.

[on GLP-1s and Mood]
Are GLP-1s mood-brighteners?
GLP-1s and Mental Health
("Can Ozempic Treat Your Depression? Early Signs Point to Yes New data suggest that weight-loss medicines might also boost mood. That ought to broaden the discussion of how they’re paid for and prescribed.")

[on pain and abolitionism]
Should We End Pain?
Thank you. Life on Earth deserves a more civilized signalling system. But before ending pain altogether, we should use biotech to ensure all sentient beings have benign versions of the FAAH, FAAH-OUT and SCN9A genes ("the volume knob for pain"). Today pain-sensitivity varies immensely. Compare lucky outliers who say things like,"Oh, pain, it's just a useful signalling mechanism". So before any utopian transition to a world based on information-signalling gradients of bliss and/or smart neuroprostheses, we should use genome reform to civilize the biosphere: a "low-pain" world to precede a "no-pain" world.

What's more, the only time in her life Jo Cameron felt really sick was when she was given an unsolicited injection of morphine by well-meaning doctors. Presumably Jo native opioid function is already high. A world of Jo Camerons presumably wouldn't have an opioid use epidemic.
Can we envisage a world where all babies are engineered with Jo's dual FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutation, and existing beings are offered gene therapy?
The dawn of the post-suffering era?
(Beyond Humanism)
Fantasy, alas - for now.

In the long run, we need a more civilised signalling system to deal with noxious stimuli than gradations of phenomenal pain. But until that happy era arrives, pain should be tamed. The other key player is the SCN9A gene.
A Scientific Breakthrough Has Unveiled the Ancient Source of Our Pain
Just as AI can now outperform humans at chess (etc), likewise future AI-powered neuroprostheses will be able to outperform humans (and other animals) at nociception.

[on antinatalism]
"Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being.”
(Robert Anton Wilson)
I've been told by hardliners I'm not a "true" antinatalist:
DP on genome reform
But I favour human extinction by the only route consistent with selection pressure. My "soft" antinatalism is also critiqued in Antinatalism, Extinction, and the End of Procreative Self-Corruption (pdf) by Matti Häyry and Amanda Sukenick.

Efilist antinatalists are often reckoned pessimists about life. But efilists are hopelessly optimistic. Efilists imagine that life on Earth can conceivably be ended by not having children. Efilists underestimate the insidious evil of Darwinian life, and the corrupting power of pleasure, not least love and sex.
The only way I know that Darwinian life can be eradicated is genome reform. Natalism in a world underpinned by gradients of bliss is defanged.
Quite possibly I'm too optimistic as well.
The Case Against Children.

"If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?”
(Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays)
Trying to gauge the Overton window 20 or 200 years from now is a huge challenge. But just as I don’t argue that predatory species should be retired but instead herbivorized, likewise I don’t urge "hard", extinctionist antinatalism, but instead responsible parenthood and germline reform.
Such advocacy doesn’t reflect how I really feel about Darwinian lifeforms. But my feelings aren't going to count a lot in the great scheme of things. The future belongs to life lovers:
Hard Antinatalism and Selection Pressure

[on the Biohappiness Revolution in Russian]
The word is spreading:
Biohappiness Revolution (Russian)

[on "psi"]
Tristan lot of people are perpetual direct realists. On occasion, some people experience anomalous phenomena within their waking world-simulations that - if direct realism were true - would refute the scientific world-picture. Maybe they have e.g. an out-of-body experience on a dissociative anaesthetic like ketamine. But this is just one more reason to insist on inter-subjective replicability. "Psi" effects tend to diminish in the presence of sceptics...

Many people are perpetual direct realists. On occasion, some people experience anomalous phenomena within their waking world-simulations that - if direct realism were true - would refute the scientific world-picture. Maybe they have e.g. an out-of-body experience on a dissociative anaesthetic like ketamine. But this is just one more reason to insist on inter-subjective replicability. "Psi" effects tend to diminish in the presence of sceptics...

The formalism of quantum mechanics is mathematically rigid, so to speak. You can't start monkeying around with the unitary Schrödinger dynamics or revise the Born rule to accommodate supposed "psi" phenomena. Nor can natural selection just be tweaked to allow for mysterious psi adepts.
Note I'm not arguing that scientific orthodoxy couldn't be radically mistaken, simply that the exist of "psi" would demolish the scientific world-picture, not revise it. And uniquely, science works...

[on post-October 7th Gaza]
Humans are awesome
نانسي نانسي, whether we study twentieth-century history or the tragedy unfolding in post-October 7th Gaza, "awesome" is not the epithet for humanity that comes to mind. But some of the worst horrors that humans perpetrate are never in the news headlines at all. Our victims are invisible and anonymous. I'm hoping a gentle nudge will encourage Lex to take a stand on the plight of our nonhuman victims.

[on privacy]
Pimeyes:
Face Search Engine Reverse Image Search
I did a test. Not bad:
DP on the Net

[on physicalistic idealism]
Physics is silent about the intrinsic nature of the physical, the mysterious "fire" in the equations. We may wonder whether the "fire" in the equations is experiential or non-experiential. Both proposals are metaphysical. But you instantiate one tiny part of the "fire" in the equations; and the materialist conjecture that its nature radically differs outside your head is, in one sense, a bolder metaphysical conjecture than the conjecture that it's no different:
Non-materialist physicalism

Physicalism best explains the technological success story of science. Traditional forms of idealism are empirically adequate - but leave the success of science a miracle. But what if the intrinsic nature of the world's fundamental quantum fields doesn't differ outside from inside one's head? On this conjecture, experience is the essence of the physical, the mysterious "fire" in the equations of QFT. Physicalism entails(!) idealism. Biological minds are special, but not because we manufacture an unphysical consciousness, but rather, the way we phenomenally bind it into virtual worlds of experience like the egocentric world-simulation you're undergoing right now.
Yes, speculation. The truth is probably crazier.

Raymond, I take seriously the possibility that a single-celled organism could have a primordial pleasure-pain axis with computational powers. But minds can arise only when - somehow - a bunch of neurons supports a unified subject of experience, typically a rudimentary world-simulation - what naive realists call perceiving your external environment. A living world of micro-experiential zombies would be a world in which nothing really mattered in anything but the most trivial sense. I speculate on how such phenomenal binding in nervous systems is physically possible. However, the conjecture that phenomenal binding is non-classical is highly controversial and should be flagged as such.
No one knows how we do it.

Today, sperm whales have the biggest minds. But what are the theoretical upper bounds? What might play out on the event horizon of a supermassive black hole? Alas, background assumptions differ - not least my entrenched view that phenomenal binding, hence mind, is non-classical!

[on work, happiness and meaning]
Andrei, I'm here going stipulatively to define "work" as activity one wouldn't otherwise do in exchange for cash etc. Despite dizzy talk of a post-work society, I think work and the cash nexus still have a long future. The only way I know to create sustained and profound subjective meaning for everyone is hedonic uplift. Crudely, pleasure is the engine of meaning. Anhedonia entails a loss of meaning, not just a loss of the capacity for pleasure. Indeed, a biohappiness revolution could be called a biomeaning revolution, though this sounds clunky.

I guess this message sounds simplistic - and too good to be true. But whether we work or not, if we upgrade our reward circuitry, then the problem of life's "meaning" is solved. Compare today's genetic outliers. Whatever they do or don't do, the temperamentally happiest people today all find life meaningful. Contrast angst-ridden depressives - employed or otherwise. (1) an immense range of cognitive tasks is too difficult for AI digital zombies - for example, exploring the billions of alien state-spaces of consciousness latent in suitably configured matter and energy. Ignorance of the empirical realm is no minor implementation detail of zombie AI; it's a hardwired cognitive limitation.
(2) Pathological extremes are instructive. Contrast the emptiness and nihilistic despair of severe depression with the exaggerated sense of meaning and purpose of euphoric (hypo)mania. I'm glossing over all manner of subtleties and complications, but my basic point stands. If we don't genetically fix our reward circuitry, then anguish over the Meaning of Life will persist indefinitely.

[on becoming posthuman: the role of AI]

Youtube
Adam, thank you again. Quite a striking contrast between James (rights for robots, but OK with meat-eating) and DP (no rights for digital zombies, but a plea for a moral revolution in our treatment of nonhuman animals).
What does it mean to be posthuman? A pleasure-superpleasure axis to replace the old pleasure-pain axis; access to billions of state-spaces of experience as different as waking from dreaming; ubiquitous neurochips so organic life can enjoy all the benefits of zombie-AI. A big difference that came out in our discussion is that James believes we should prepare for sentient AI, whereas in my view no binding = no mind = invincible ignorance of the empirical realm. Phenomenal binding is our computational superpower. On this story, the future belongs to supersentient, full-spectrum superintelligences in basement reality, not digital zombies. Classical information processors will augment not replace minds.

Anyone who isn't profoundly disturbed by the suffering of Darwinian life hasn't understood it. Natural selection is an engine of unimaginable cruelty and suffering. Humans are the worst offenders; not least, we abuse and kill billions of nonhumans as sentient as small children in death factories. So creating sentience-friendly biological intelligence is a daunting challenge. The future role of AI in helping fix the problem of suffering is currently unclear. A hypothetical benevolent superintelligence would never have created a Darwinian hellworld; and it's hard to imagine superintelligence would show status quo bias. However, as I argue in the debate with James, classical computers are cognitively crippled: the entire empirical realm is computationally inaccessible to a digital zombie. Belief in imminent AGI/ASI is groupthink, not expertise. Instead, as far as I can tell, the future belongs to supersentient full-spectrum superintelligences - our AI-augmented, genetically-rewritten biological descendants. And if we're willing to embrace germline reform, we can fix the problem of suffering - for ever.

Adam, if I'm confounded and phenomenal binding terms out to be classically explicable, then presumably digital computers could support minds - including human "mind uploads" / whole brain emulations, sentient digital civilizations, digital hellworlds and who knows what else. The abolitionist project as conceived by HI would be transformed. New treatises and manifestos would be called for - including the "robot rights" James was pushing in our recent debate. However, IMO the generative AI revolution of the past 18 months hasn't been marked by even the hint of proto-minds - but rather, the continuing divorce of intelligent behaviour from conscious mind that began with the birth of AI itself. This won't stop credulous humans anthropomorphizing our machines. And indeed, I assume zombie robo-companions, robo-lovers, robo-therapists and robo-conversationalists will soon surpass archaic humans - for most purposes at any rate.

[on the ethical status of AI]
On the moral patiency of non-sentient beings
section 3. Sometimes focusing on binding deficit and disorder syndromes can be illuminating. Why don't we all have integrative agnosia, or simultanagnosia, or akinetopsia (etc)? At the very least, such syndromes hint what phenomenally-bound consciousness is evolutionarily "for". Binding is our computational superpower, granting access to the empirical realm and the world of mind. If we were merely micro-experiential zombies, then consciousness wouldn't confer any extra genetic fitness at all.

Indeed. The breakdown/dysfunction of binding is only partial. What remains is still highly adaptive. But consider going under general anaesthesia or falling dreamlessly asleep. On the stardard story, consciousness is extinguished. If so, then the intrinsic nature argument and non-materialist physicalism are false, and we face the Hard Problem. Instead, my working assumption is that dreamless sleep/anaesthesia are global disruptions of binding. One spends at least a quarter of one’s life as a microexperiential zombie.

In order to sidestep controversies over perception, suppose you're having a lucid dream. You can realise that your body-image is a homunculus inside the transcendental skull of a sleeping subject - not to be confused with your empirically accessible homunculus skull. And you can realise that the vast external world you apprehend beyond your body-image is likewise internal to the confines of a (theoretically inferred) transcendental skull.
I find the Cartesian theatre metaphor fruitful. Like all metaphors and analogies, it breaks down if pushed too far.
Dreaming or awake, I know of no way scientifically to derive the properties of my phenomenally-bound mind and the world-simulation it runs from the behaviour of a pack of classical neurons. But as far as I can tell, brains and neurons as commonly understood are an artifact of a false theory of perception:
The Myth of Neural Porridge

If digital computers can support phenomenally-bound conscious minds, then any form of monistic physicalism would be false. "Strong" emergence would be real. Classical Turing machines are indeed substrate-neutral, i.e. the program code executes the same in silicon or carbon. But (IMO) such substrate-neutrality isn't ground for thinking our classical digital computers will somehow wake up. Rather, phenomenally-bound organic minds have a computational architecture different from digital computers. Phenomenal binding is the bedrock of mind - and as far as I can tell, binding is non-classical. We are quantum minds running pseudo-classical world-simulations. But if anyone offers even the ghost of explanation of how phenomenal binding could be classically explicable, then I will update my low credence in the prospect of digital minds accordingly.

[on video manipulation]
AI can turn a negative utilitarian into a classical utilitarian. Scary:

CU DP (video)

[on autonomy]
If a superintelligent AI could "hack" humans by providing infinite bliss, leaving us willingly subservient to it, would you sign up for it?
Av, Toddlers in kindergartens are inevitably "subservient" to their caregivers, though we use a less pejorative label. I assume that superintelligence won't entertain a false theory of personal identity (contrast metaphysical individualism) and it will also have a superhuman capacity for perspective-taking. Whether AI with existing architectures is capable of such superintelligence is debatable; but as you've posed the thought-experiment, yes, I'd exchange my notional "autonomy" for lifelong bliss. In practice, Darwinian life involves a coercive biology of (a predisposition to) misery and malaise. So any "autonomy" one enjoys today is feeble.

[on the three supers and beyond]
Crunk, I look forward to a transhumanist “triple S” civilization of superintelligence, superongevity and superhappiness!
Extra “supers” have been suggested. But arguably at least, they can all be subsumed in a sufficiently rich conception of superintelligence.
We hear a lot about imminent machine (super-)intelligence and very little about imminent machine (super-)wisdom. Indeed, the high-IQ "clever sillies" phenomenon in humans may be vastly magnified in AI (paperclippers, etc).
Psychedelia?
It's cognitively inaccessible to digital zombies, so the possibility of AI psychedelic (super-)wisdom doesn't arise. Sentient humans are out of their depth in alien state-spaces of experience too. But a future civilization of Super-Shulgins is at least conceivable.
Love?
Fixing the problem of suffering calls for (IMO) greater super-systematizing prowess more than deeper compassion. But yes, a post-suffering superhumanly "loved up" world would be my version of the ideal society.

[on boredom and The Fun Theory Sequence]
QualiaNerd, I fear I might be too bland! In a post in Serious Stories in The Fun Theory Sequence, EY argues that phasing out all forms of suffering would make life boring, just as a story lacking any conflict is boring. So EY instead proposes to abolish only the worst forms of suffering, while preserving its milder guises. However, this worry strikes me as misplaced. Future life could be underpinned by a biology of gradients of superhuman fascination. Boredom may become physiologically impossible. Perhaps the dullest moments of posthuman life will be more enthralling than human “peak experiences”.

EY might respond that this whole debate is now moot because ASI is likely to obliterate sentient life in the next decade or two. Once again, we differ. In my view, classical digital zombies are cognitively crippled: no binding = no mind = hardwired ignorance of the entire empirical realm. The future - as far as I can tell - belongs to supersentient full-spectrum superintelligences - our AI-enhanced and genetically reformed biological descendants.

[on consciousness and digital computers]
"The only way to put your consciousness in a digital computer."
(QualiaNerd)

Dr Eureka is invincibly ignorant of visual experience and the entire empirical realm. Compare how if you're born with anophthalmia and thus congenitally blind, you might rig yourself up with a spectrometer (etc) and behave much like sighted people. You may regurgitate a lot of stuff you've heard about visual experience. But you won't be able to access, investigate, manipulate and talk about your visual experience because you don't have any: you'll need to upgrade your hardware, so to speak. By the same token, I'd love to be able to experience the 100 million or so colours of a tetrachromat rather than my neurotypical 10 million. Alas my ignorance is hardwired. Note I'm not especially interested in functional role, if any: I'd just like to undergo some new colours. Indeed, most state-spaces of experience haven't been recruited by natural selection for any information-signalling purpose; this is one of the reasons why navigating drug-induced altered states is so challenging.

"Consciousness explosion"? I suspect the true consciousness explosion will arise only when mastery of our reward circuity means we can safely explore billions of alien state-spaces of consciousness, latent in suitably configured matter and energy, that haven't been recruited by natural selection for any information-signalling role. In one sense, current hype about "AGI" and machine superintelligence may be inimical to the growth of knowledge. Our machines are zombies, whereas only phenomenally-bound minds can explore psychedelia. In my view, the future belongs to full-spectrum superintelligences - our neurochipped, genetically rewritten biological descendants.

[on consciousness and physicalism]
Transposing the entire mathematical apparatus of modern physics onto an ontology of qualia (cf. Non-materialist physicalism) is consistent with the empirical evidence. Mathematical physics describes the values and interrelationships of experience.
Non-materialist physicalism also dissolves the Hard Problem of consciousness. Only the physical is real. And the problem of causal efficacy: only the physical has causal power. And the binding and measurement problems. In a slightly more speculative vein, the ubiquity of the superposition principle even hints at an explanation of why we're here: an informationless zero ontology.
Is non-materialist physicalism true?
I don't know.

Dan, Universal Turing machines = superidiot savants. Seriously. Regardless of substrate, any information processing system without the capacity for phenomenal binding can never generate a mind. All classical Turing machines are invincibly ignorant of the empirical (“relating to experience”) realm. Inconceivably vast state-spaces of consciousness await exploration by posthuman superminds. Zombie AI doesn’t know what it’s missing.

A taxonomy of psychosis
Theories of consciousness
("A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications")

Physicalism and idealism belong in separate categories only if we assume that the essence of the physical, the mysterious “fire” in the equations of QFT, is non-experiential. Dropping the metaphysical assumption yields non-materialist physicalism. I’m personally sceptical that the intrinsic nature of the world’s fundamental quantum fields differs inside and outside the head. If not, then maybe fields of insentience are doomed to go the way of luminiferous aether.

Michael, The so-called Hard Problem of phenomenal consciousness arises relative only to metaphysical background assumptions. Thus, if the intrinsic nature of the world's fundamental quantum fields doesn't differ inside and outside your head, then the Hard Problem doesn't arise. Only the physical is real. You're experiencing it right now. On this account, materialists misunderstand the nature of the physical, the "fire" in the equations of QFT. For more on what philosophers call the intrinsic nature argument, see: Non-materialist physicalism
Naively, non-materialist physicalism leaves the phenomenal binding problem untouched. The challenge of explaining binding isn't just functional, but phenomenological. For no configuration of decohered classical "mind dust" could generate a unified mind running a unified phenomenal world-simulation populated by feature-bound perceptual objects. Assuming textbook neuroscience, we "ought" to be micro-experiential zombies, mere aggregates of membrane-bound neuronal "micro-pixels" of experience. But once again, background assumptions are in play. At sufficiently temporally fine-grained resolutions, the CNS can't be treated as a pack of decohered classical neurons. My best guess is that phenomenal binding via synchrony (a mere re-statement of the mystery) is really binding via superposition. Superpositions are individual states.
Interferometry should settle the issue.
The binding problem
We've come a long way from the question of whether our machines will ever "wake up". But whereas we can at least speculate on how phenomenally-bound animal minds are feasible, invoking digital minds involves abandoning physicalism. Sure, once again, physicalism is "just" an assumption. However, it's hard to overstate the implications for science of giving it up.

[on scepticism]
A pessimist writes...
Consciousness is all I've ever known. Alas, I've no idea why consciousness exists at all, or why its diverse textures ("what it feels like") take the values they do, or any explanation of the interrelationships between these diverse textures. I don't understand how the conscious medium of my thoughts shapes their nominal content, nor how the properties of this medium metamorphose under the influence of consciousness-altering drugs. And I can't access most of the billions(?) of alien state-spaces of consciousness latent in suitably configured matter and energy to compare and contrast their properties. What's more, even if I could access such alien state-spaces, it's unlikely there is a "neutral", canonical state-space from which a full-spectrum superintelligence could appraise all the others: Kuhn's incommensurability of paradigms could as well be applied to alien to state-spaces of experience as to different conceptual frameworks in physics. And there are no "easy" problems of consciousness either. Thus the "neural correlates of consciousness" are as much subjective experiences of one's own mind and the phenomenal world-simulation it runs as one's innermost feelings. And I don't understand how to naturalize semantic meaning and reference so I can adequately talk about these challenges.
On a (very) weakly optimistic note...
If we take the intrinsic nature argument seriously, then all the traditional staples of academic philosophy of mind are soluble. Thus there is no Hard Problem of consciousness if experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical; the phenomenal binding problem is an artefact of perceptual naive realism and false classical physics; and there is no problem of causal efficacy because all and only the physical has causal power: materialist metaphysicians misunderstand the essence of the physical. And there is no need for new physics: Consciousness doesn't collapse any wave functions. As far as I can tell, the formalism of unitary-only quantum mechanics is complete.
But on balance?
I suspect our successors will reckon that Darwinian minds are psychotic, trapped in state-spaces of delusion the nature of which is impossible to grasp from the inside.

[on being "woke"]
The term "woke" has been weaponized to pander to all the baser human prejudices about race, sex and gender. There is nothing "antihuman" about opposition to racial injustice and sexism, just as there is nothing "antihuman" about support for LGBT rights.
Woke = basic decency.

[on Donald Hoffman's idealism]
DefaultEnlightenment The real-time world-simulations ("perception") run by animal minds often misrepresent mind-independent reality. As Donald Hoffman says, "fitness beats truth" (interface theory) And what naive realists imagine as material reality is indeed internal to one's skull-bound-mind. But (IMO) the best explanation of the technological success-story of science is that realism and physicalism are true. What's more, if the intrinsic nature argument is sound, then experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical: the mysterious "fire" in the equations of QFT. So there is no Hard Problem of consciousness. By contrast, in The Case Against Reality (2019), Donald Hoffman argues there is no mind-independent physical reality, or at least (in some sense I don't quite fathom) anything "physical" (like particles and fields) is an epiphenomenon caused by fundamental reality, consciousness.

As you'll have gathered from this lightning synopsis, I'm more sympathetic to non-materialist physicalism than to Donald Hoffman's brand of idealism.
But Hoffman is a brilliant and thought-provoking writer.

[on (dis)value realism]
Karan Khosla Thank you for a lucid overview of the moral antirealist case. Unlike Lance, I see you're not an anti-realist/illusionist about phenomenal experience: suffering is indeed a phenomenally unpleasant experience. But you believe that suffering is disvaluable merely to the victim, i.e. it's not objectively true to say that suffering is disvaluable. However, the normative aspect of suffering is a real, spatiotemporally located aspect of physical reality: this normative aspect is built into the nature of the experience itself. Thus, to me, it's not an "open question" whether my agony is disvaluable as well as unpleasant. I can't weigh the pros and cons of its disvalue, passively leaving my hand in the fire until I can philosophically close a hypothetical "is-ought" gap. This primitive aspect of experiences on the pleasure-pain axis is the origin of our normative language in realists and anti-realists alike.

Unfortunately, these debates are plagued by a conflation of the two senses of "subjective" (1) neither true nor false, truth-valueless; and (2) relating to phenomenal consciousness. Critically here, subjective (2), mind-dependent facts like the disvalue of agony are as much an objective feature of reality as the rest-mass of the electron.

My debate with Lance differs because Lance is also an anti-realist about phenomenal consciousness.
If I were an "illusionist" about consciousness like Lance, then I'd be an anti-realist about (dis)value too. For if phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist, then one can't sensibly say things (as I do) like the pain-pleasure axis discloses the world's inbuilt metric of (dis)value.

[on morphological freedom]
In some branches of the universal wave function?

It's my favourite, but like Rambo Dave, the RSI stretches credulity.
Elsewhere in the multiverse?

[on what consciousness is evolutionarily "for"]
Aron, Phenomenal binding is our computational superpower: binding confers access to the empirical realm that classical computers and AI digital zombies can never penetrate. One of the best ways to understand what consciousness - or more precisely, phenomenally-bound consciousness - is evolutionarily “for” in the animal kingdom is to explore deficit-syndromes - from schizophrenia and its deficits in “global” binding to integrative agnosia, simultanagnosia and akinetopsia. As such syndromes illustrate, even partial breakdowns of local and global binding carry a huge fitness cost.
So how do neurotypicals like us do it? Phenomenal unity would seem classically impossible. What’s more, if textbook neuroscience is correct, and you are (at most) just c. 86 billion membrane-bound neuronal “micro-pixels” of experience, then it’s hard to see how consciousness would confer any adaptive value at all: you’d be a micro-experiential zombie, as maybe you are when dreamlessly asleep.
Well, I think textbook “neuroscience” is wrong!
My tentative view is that we are quantum minds running subjectively classical world-simulations in a very high-dimensional space described by the universal wave function. I explore the quantum-theoretic version of (what philosophers call) the intrinsic nature argument:
Quantum Mind

Awesome write-up. Thank you Andres.
The Science of Consciousness 2024
And the Science of Consciousness itself? I think we're still in the Pre-Socratic Era, so to speak.

Nick, What neuroscientists call the encephalisation of emotion has been hugely adaptive for animal life over the past half-billion plus years. But maybe the vast majority of theoretically possible state-spaces of consciousness have no hedonic tone at all - unless innervated in the appropriate way. Biotech can potentially be used to re-encephalise emotion that so all sensoria are blissful - even if focused on something other than bliss. Alas this proposal currently falls far outside the Overton window.

[on debating Dennnettian denialists (cont.)]
The Great Zombie has passed:
Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)
It's hard to do justice to Dennett's contribution to human ignorance.
See too John Horgan:
The Dennett paradox

On a more charitable note:

Admirable - and worthy of a true sentient.

Facu, both materialist and non-materialist physicalists believe that the world is exhaustively described by the mathematical formalism of physics. None of us believe in “magic”. Evolution has harnessed some forms of phenomenal consciousness, for example pleasure and pain, to play, typically, a computational-functional role. But phenomenal pain with no functional role, for example phantom limb pain, is just as real. Also, the subjective experiences of people with Total Locked-in Syndrome (CLIS) who can't behave at all are just as real as the subjective experiences of the able-bodied. Have you ever considered the possibility that you have subjective experiences just like the rest of us, but you are interpreting them in behavioral - and behaviorist - ways?

Facu, my working hypothesis is that you have subjective experiences - both perceptual and non-perceptual - like me, but you interpret your subjective experiences as something else, such as bodily behaviours because you can find no place for phenomenal consciousness in your ontology of the world. But I freely acknowledge that your mind has a conceptual scheme I find quite alien. So I don’t don’t speak with any confidence.

Lance, by “pain”, most laypeople mean a nasty phenomenal experience of varying intensity - not a set of behavioural responses to noxious stimuli (or whatever). As far as I can tell, denialism about subjective experience springs from the immense challenge of reconciling the existence of one’s own consciousness with the ontology of our most successful(?) theory of the world, scientific materialism. Denialism is one response to the anomaly. Non-materialist physicalism is another. Both positions are intuitively absurd, but non-materialist physicalism has the advantage of consistency with the empirical evidence.

One shouldn’t make nasty, biting remarks about illusionists because illusionists have feelings that can be hurt. Illusionists may interpret their subjective experiences as something non-phenomenal. But that (mis)interpretation doesn’t make their feelings any less real.

Lance, if you ask the average person whether s/he believes in "qualia", you're right. Disbelief. But ask the average person whether their pain is (1) a set of behavioral responses to noxious or (2) an unpleasant inner experience, then - if they think you're being serious - they'll say 2.
You must have experienced the incredulity/indignation when most people realize what you're arguing?
A big complication is that some illusionists redefine the vocabulary of subjective experience in behavioral/behaviorist terms. So in other contexts, they'll say "of course" they believe in consciousness, pain and so forth. This redefinition is a source of endless confusion.

"Suppose an artificial intelligence that does not have phenomenal consciousness wants to determine which things (animals, rocks, numbers, etc.) are conscious. How would it go about doing this?"
Lance. Code and educate some humans, then instruct the humans on engineering cross-species reversible thalamic bridges so they can partially "mind meld" like the Hogan sisters. The Hogan sisters
Investigators will report back to the zombie AI that pigs, dogs, fish, neurotypical humans (etc) have phenomenal consciousness. But what about the status of illusionist philosophers?!

Facu, no implementation of a classical Turing machine can generate the phenomenal world-simulation that I am running right now on pain of spooky "strong" emergence. No pack of classical neurons can generate the phenomenal world-simulation that I'm running right now on pain of spooky "strong" emergence. Thanks to evolution, I am indeed a complex information processing system, But I have a different computational architecture from a digital zombie or a carrot.

Facu, I don't like mysteries. I take science (very) seriously. But right now, I'm undergoing different subjective experiences within my phenomenal world-simulation. (Perpetual direct realists wouldn't express the problem in this way, but let's leave direct realism aside]. I don't know how to derive the properties of my subjective experience from (ultimately) physics in the way I can derive (in principle) everything else. So yes, the existence of my phenomenal consciousness is an anomaly. I explore ways to reconcile its existence with physicalism. But I don't disavow its existence. I can't. Denying my phenomenal consciousness is an option for you; it's not an option for me. It's the empirical evidence on which - and through which - I try to understand reality.

Facu, (1) I'm a naturalist and a physicalist - both theoretical stances. I also (2) experience the nasty raw feels of phenomenal pain - a brute empirical fact I don't know how to disavow despite wading through reams of behaviorist sophistry.
(1) and (2) are in conflict only if I make an additional metaphysical assumption, namely that the intrinsic nature of the world's fundamental quantum fields - the essence of the physical - differs inside and outside my head.
I don't make this assumption; hence non-materialist physicalism.

Facu, alternatively...
You do have phenomenal experiences! You just misinterpret them as something non-phenomenal. Phenomenal experience is all you ever directly know - including the contents of your vast phenomenal world-simulation. All the stuff you commonly think of as material and behavioral - from chairs and tables to airplanes and robots - are aspects of your phenomenal consciousness.
However, you are not a solipsist. A convergence of evidence suggests zillions of other phenomenal world-simulations exist. They differ primarily in the identity of their protagonist. And beyond these egocentric phenomenal world-simulations - minds - lies the wider reality revealed by modern science.
[Facu chokes on his cornflakes] Facu, the intrinsic nature argument is controversial. But if "raw feels" disclose the intrinsic nature of the physical - the mysterious "fire" in the equations - then your worries about the second law of thermodynamics don't arise any more than they do for materialism.
AND the materialist still faces the Hard Problem of consciousness - and its offshoots like the problem of causal efficacy that non-materialist physicalism solves.

Facu, true or false, simply transposing the entire mathematical apparatus of modern physics (and hence quantum chemistry, molecular biology, etc) onto experientialist ontology doesn't change the formal, structural definition of the world yielded by the physical sciences. Science works! Non-materialist physicalism is a conjecture about the "fire" in the equations, the essence of the physical. Unlike materialism, it's empirically adequate. This empirical adequacy doesn't suffice to show non-materialist physicalism true; but I explore the conjecture. The conjecture won't be of interest to you because you are convinced that phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist.

Facu, if someone reports being visited by the Holy Spirit, I will acknowledge the "raw feels", i.e. the subjective phenomenology of their experience, but query the metaphysical interpretation. However - and this is what I find so puzzling about your antirealism - you appear to deny they have undergone an intense subjective experience that they are (I believe) misinterpreting.

Facu, the version of the intrinsic nature argument I explore, non-materialist physicalism, doesn't claim that quantum fields produce experiences. Rather, the conjecture is that experience discloses the intrinsic nature of a quantum field. The diverse solutions to the equations of QFT yield the values of its diverse textures. The realization that physics is silent on the intrinsic nature of the physical is often credited to Russell. Hardcore materialist Stephen Hawking's "fire" metaphor makes the point more poetically. Facu, understanding the nature of computation, using a mathematical abstraction of computers like a Turing machine, calls for a fair level of intellectual sophistication. By contrast, phenomenal pain is real and concrete - or at least mine is. The subjective experience of pain predates language, let alone a grasp of computational theory.

Facu, I'm still bewildered that anyone can be so radically ... different from me. My experience of phenomenal pain hasn't shifted since ...well, long before I'd ever heard of computers, information theory, quantum theory or philosophy, not since my earliest memories. Most philosophical doctrines have ancient precursors. But in the case of radical antirealism about subjective experience / phenomenal consciousness, I'm not aware of anything before twentieth-century behaviorism. And to spike your guns, no, I have zero interest in anything magical.

Facu, but feeling flabbergasted is a subjective experience - for me, at any rate. I'm intellectually comfortable with the idea of other humans who have experiences inexpressibly different from mine, but not with humans who don't have any subjective experiences at all.

Manu, insofar as I understand it, I find Facu's ultra-Dennettian conceptual scheme quite alien. From my perspective, yes, evolution has harnessed certain kinds of phenomenal consciousness (typically) to play a computational-functional role. But your molecular duplicate, assembled from scratch, would be conscious in just the same way as the product of 4 billion years of evolution. In other words, evolution doesn't explain the diverse properties of sentience in any deep sense - as distinct from why some kinds of sentience have been selected for over others.

Facu, right now I am undergoing different forms of phenomenal consciousness that embraces both "perceptual" consciousness - a vast phenomenal world-simulation beyond my body image - and more subtle forms of logico-linguistic experience. If you have no place for such subjective experience is your ontology of the world, then fair enough. But alas it's all too real.

Facu, the dominant technology of an age proverbially offers a root metaphor for life, the universe and everything. When speaking, I now sometimes think of myself as a glorified LLMs spewing out verbiage like a "stochastic parrot". Internalizing the digital computer metaphor of mind now leads Dennettians to suppose everything they feel is just computational algorithms. But calling what I'm now experiencing "a "computational algorithm" doesn't explain its properties.
What will be our next metaphor of mind?
I speculate, but our background assumptions are too different to make what I say of interest.

See too aphantasia and hyperphantasia. A hypothetical absence of any phenomenal consciousness at all would be far more radical than aphantasia. To such a creature, being awake wouldn't differ from being asleep.

Facu, OK, if you really don't have any phenomenal experience, then I find you almost incomprehensibly alien. If this were so, then indeed you wouldn't be able to make sense of anything I say because it wouldn't even be "all dark inside" your head.
And you are not a so-called p-zombie. A hypothetical p-zombie would insist he was subjectively conscious like everyone else, whereas you report finding the idea of phenomenal experience unintelligible.
Presumably waking up from a dreamless sleep is a purely behavioral process for you too. - there is no subjective difference between being awake and dreamlessly asleep because phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist...

Manu, Understanding where Facu is “coming from” is hard if (like me) all you’ve ever directly known is phenomenal consciousness - not least, the contents of my egocentric world-simulation: what perceptual naive realists call the material world. I assume that you run an egocentric world-simulation too that differs from mine primarily in the identity of the protagonist. I don’t know if Facu’s views differ in any significant way from Daniel Dennett's anti-realism about phenomenal consciousness as set out in works like "Consciousness Explained". One big source of confusion is how Dennettians redefine terms for different kinds of phenomenal experience behaviorally. So in some contexts, Dennettians will say that of course they aren't denying that you have a mind, feel pain, and so forth.

Trying to understand what HI and the abolitionist project are all about when viewed through the lens of a Dennettian is challenging. We're trying to phase out the biology of suffering, prevent all experience below hedonic zero, and create a world underpinned entirely by gradients of intelligent bliss - where "suffering", "hedonic zero", "bliss" and so forth refer to subjective experiences. I asked ChatGPT-4. What are the historical antecedents of Daniel Dennett’s anti-realism about phenomenal consciousness? ChatGPT:

"Daniel Dennett's anti-realism about phenomenal consciousness, encapsulated in his views on qualia and consciousness as detailed in works like "Consciousness Explained," draws on a variety of historical antecedents. His position, sometimes characterized as eliminative materialism or functionalism, intersects with philosophical traditions that question the direct, unmediated access to mental states or the existence of subjective experiences as fundamentally irreducible entities. The antecedents to Dennett's views can be seen in several key philosophical movements and figures:

1. Logical Positivism and Empiricism: Logical positivists, with their focus on the verification principle and skepticism towards metaphysical statements that cannot be empirically verified, laid groundwork that influenced Dennett's empirical and scientific approach to consciousness.

2. Behaviorism: Behaviorists like B.F. Skinner argued that psychology should focus on observable behavior rather than internal states. Dennett’s views diverge significantly in details but share the skepticism towards introspective access to mental states as reliable sources of scientific data.

3. Functionalism: This philosophical perspective, influential in cognitive science, posits that mental states are defined by their functional roles in cognitive processes, not by their internal substance or makeup. Dennett's theory of consciousness can be seen as a variant of functionalism, where consciousness is understood in terms of its functional and computational roles.

4. Philosophical Materialism: The tradition of materialism, which argues that reality is fundamentally physical, underpins Dennett’s rejection of a dualistic view of consciousness (the idea that mental phenomena are non-physical). Dennett’s work advances this tradition by arguing against the existence of qualia as irreducibly non-physical entities.

5. Ryle's Concept of Mind: Gilbert Ryle’s critique of the "ghost in the machine" dualism and his characterization of the mind as a set of dispositions or behaviors rather than an inner entity, also prefigures Dennett’s views. Ryle argued against the Cartesian theater model, a view Dennett explicitly criticizes in his own writings.

6. Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Language: Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work, which emphasizes the public, social nature of language and meaning, indirectly influences Dennett's approach to consciousness. Dennett’s argument that our talk of experiences is grounded in publicly accessible descriptions and behaviors echoes Wittgenstein’s views on the limits of private language.

7. Early Critics of Introspection: The early 20th-century critiques of introspection as a method in psychology, by figures such as Wilhelm Wundt and later behaviorists, also serve as a backdrop. These critiques question the reliability and scientific validity of introspection, a skepticism that Dennett extends to the introspective access to qualia.

Dennett’s position is a contemporary synthesis of these and other influences, brought together under the banner of a scientifically-informed philosophy of mind. His work is distinctive for its integration of insights from cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary biology, but the roots of his anti-realism about phenomenal consciousness can be traced back through these varied philosophical traditions."

Lance, if a layperson tells his or her doctor s/he is in pain, s/he is reporting a distressing phenomenal experience. Sometimes the cause of pain may be obvious (e.g. catching one's hand in the door); the cause of other pains eludes diagnosis. I remain.... incredulous that illusionists suppose pain is anything other than a (sometimes very private) unpleasant conscious experience that human and nonhuman animals undergo. In other words, the ghastly subjective experience of pain isn't the product of bad philosophy, but a pre-theoretic given that should be fixed. As far as I can tell, consciousness antirealists trying to salvage physicalism have gone two routes. One is to claim all talk of phenomenal consciousness and folk psychology will be superseded by mature neuroscience (cf. Eliminative materialism). The other is some form of linguistic behaviorism - the recipe for endless confusion.
As you know, I think physicalism can be saved via the intrinsic nature argument. But not eliminative materialism and its illusionist offshoots.

Lance, I'm more than willing to allow that ordinary people often conceive subjective experience differently from philosophers (as someone who takes seriously the idea experience discloses the essence of the physical, I could scarcely do otherwise!). But take what follows after e.g. catching one's hand in the door. Philosophers of all stripes and laypeople alike report an experience of pain. By the word "pain", they aren't alluding to a complex web of behaviors and behavioural responses to noxious stimuli etc., but to an intensely nasty subjective experience.

Lance, I won't claim to be entirely ordinary. But in my early twenties, I wrote up the draft for a book on Scepticism. I was more than willing to acknowledge I could be radically wrong about almost anything at all. The one thing I found I couldn't doubt was the raw phenomenology of my experience (yes, shades of Descartes' Cogito). Now I find there are people who claim that my phenomenal consciousness - the only thing I've ever directly known - doesn't exist.
I still struggle adequately to respond.

Lance, you probably know the old joke. Two behaviorists make love. One of them says afterwards, "That was great for you, darling. How was it for me?" Almost everyone "gets" the joke because we know there's more to life than behaviour and behavioral predispositions. I'm still puzzled that a few people say they have no phenomenal experience at all - and indeed find the notion unintelligible. Do aliens really dwell among us?!

"Qualia"? "Valence"? I tend not to use either term - although I'm a huge admirer of the Qualia Research Institute. Here's one reason. Dennettian anti-realism / "Illusionism" about phenomenal consciousness would scarcely get off the ground if its proponents denied the existence of your subjective experiences rather than your "qualia" - which sound exotic and metaphysical. And too many laypeople simply don't grok what one is talking about if one says "valence". The sense of the combining capacity of an atom gets jumbled up with the use of the term in psychology. I say good or bad "hedonic tone" - which isn't ideal, but at least has only one meaning.

Manu, Yamil Saiegh, Facu Punto and Jacy Reese are indeed eliminativists. You can add Rob Bensinger, Lance Bush and Brian Tomasik to your list.
I don't think EY is an eliminativist. EY doesn't believe that nonhuman animals and human babies are conscious because he believes consciousness depends on a capacity for self-recognition. EY on consciousness
But it's complicated. The increasing number of nonhuman animals who have passed some version of the mirror test hasn't shaken EY's conviction of their insentience - although EY has recently updated his credences on the sentience of ChatGPT:
EY, chickens and ChatGPT.

[on fixing the problem of suffering]
Alianza Futurista interview

Alianza Futurista interviews DP

[on The Hedonistic Imperative]
DP on HI

A lot of futurology amounts to no more than extrapolation. Sad to say, prophesying a future of superhuman bliss doesn't rely on extrapolating current trends.

[on the intrinsic nature argument]
If sound, the intrinsic nature argument dissolves the Hard Problem. Only the physical is real. Experience discloses the essence of the physical. the mysterious "fire" in the equations of QFT. What makes animal minds different from the abiotic universe is the phenomenal binding of consciousness into virtual worlds of experience, not consciousness per se. However, non-materialist physicalism leaves open the question of why physical reality exists at all.
Maybe we have clues. See
Why does anything exist? on an informationless zero ontology.
But no more.
And the absence of a cosmic Rosetta stone means that we don't know how to read off the diverse textures ("what it feels like") of consciousness from the diverse solutions to the equations.

[on AI safety]
Digital zombies are cognitively crippled.
No binding = no mind = invincible ignorance of the entire empirical realm.
AI-Doomers might reply that an architecturally hardwired ignorance of the empirical (“relating to experience“) is of no computational significance. Consciousness is incidental, an epiphenomenon of no more functional significance than the textures of the pieces (if any) in a game of chess.
But this can’t be right. Epiphenomena would lack the causal-functional power to inspire discussions of the existence, as I’m doing now.
Can I rigorously prove that AI isn’t a threat to the thick-tailed bush baby (and humans, etc)?
No.
But we should be focusing on the biggest ethical challenge we face as a society, namely building sentience-friendly biological intelligence. Unfriendly humans abuse and kill billions of sentient beings as sentient as small children each year. A hypothetical sentience-friendly superintelligence would presumably reprogram or retire humans.

[on Everett and staying (in)sane]
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders needs a category for being tormented by the RSI:
Rima Martin asks:
"Just wondering, if there’s a field of infinite possibilities, & it contains all the possible outcomes of your life already, what determines which timeline you are experiencing Right Now?"
Keith Burwood McFarland reply
The Metayou experiences all the timelines available to you from conception to death, this you is experiencing one of a finite but astronomical number of Youniverses. Unfortunately, this version of you got dealt some nasty cards, but it's not like you chose this universe. All the possibilities are like threads branching and frozen in aspic--all the options just are, and this is just one of them, just like there's a bunch of ones without the tragedies but there are also ones with a You experiencing the most disturbing and awful things. And ones that are just moderately okay. I think it sucks that we can't switch universes at will, because I definitely want out of this one. But this is just one life of many each of us is experiencing in separate versions of ourselves we can't exchange memories with safely as of yet."

Everett has crushed my soul:
Suffering in the Multiverse. I don't know if the human mind can even begin to grasp the implications of Everett - certainly not one like mine that often craves ignorance and oblivion. People who aren't disturbed by severe suffering haven't understood it.
I guess CUs would respond that anyone not enraptured by the prospect of superhuman bliss hasn't understood it either.

[on phenomenal binding]

John, May I just briefly defend my sanity? Anyone who understands decoherence (which you do!) will recognise why a quantum-theoretic explanation of phenomenal binding is far-fetched. The CNS is too hot! But the problem is science has no idea how phenomenal binding could be classically explicable either - which doesn't leave us with many (physicalist) options. The Binding Problem (Wikipedia)
Given textbook neuroscience, why aren't we just (at most) what philosopher Phil Goff christened "micro-experiential zombies" - mere patterns of Jamesian "mind dust"? Only someone who groks the neuroscientific mystery of binding will be willing to explore highly implausible quantum-theoretic solutions to an otherwise intractable problem. Note that what makes a "Schrödinger's neurons" proposal fringe isn't new physics - assuming the unitary Schrödinger dynamics, such superpositions of neuronal feature-processors must exist - but rather, the idea such fleeting sub-femtosecond superpositions could have any conceivable relevance to our phenomenally-bound minds. And maybe common sense is correct! But one man's reductio ad absurdum is another man's experimentally falsifiable prediction. I'm simply curious what tomorrow's interferometry will tell us.

If (fancifully!) the pieces in a chess match had qualia, such "raw feels" would be functionally irrelevant to the gameplay. By contrast, phenomenally-bound qualia - such as the colorful, cross-modally matched, real-time world-simulation your CNS is running right now - are insanely computationally powerful. Compare partial deficit syndromes such as integrative agnosia. Minds and their egocentric world-simulations are highly fitness-enhancing. They've been selected for over the past half-billion years. By contrast, classical computer architectures can't support phenomenal binding. So there are no digital minds.

Yet what about us? If we believe in textbook neuroscience, i.e. the CNS is a pack of decohered classical neurons, then organic minds should be impossible too. At best we should be micro-experiential zombies. I think textbook "neuroscience" is wrong. I could happily talk about why. But until neuron replacement procedures are tried and fail, I doubt most researchers would find such speculations of interest - only folk who already grok the mystery of binding, its computational power, and its classical impossibility.

David, Transformer AI is awesome, but its ignorance of the empirical (“relating to experience”) realm is architecturally hardwired. No phenomenal binding = no mind = no understanding. Not everyone groks the binding problem. But in a fundamentally quantum world, decoherence both makes otherwise impossible classical computing physically feasible AND prevents classical information processors from supporting unified subjects of experience like human and nonhuman animal minds. I love zombie AI as much as anyone. But our current machines have the wrong sort of architecture to support full-spectrum (super)intelligence.

Martijn, Nobody lies like an eyewitness, as the old Russian saying goes. But the wonder is not that perceptual experience is sometimes unreliable, but that it's possible at all. The ability to run real-time cross-modally matched world-simulations ("perception") is vastly fitness-enhancing. How can a pack of classical membrane-bound neurons be anything other than a zombie (the Hard Problem) or a micro-experiential zombie (the binding problem). Science doesn't know. Philosophers speculate (cf. Non-materialist physicalism). Yet there's no risk of our "overrating this experience thing". Not least, it's the entirety of the empirical evidence. 

If the human brain were just 86 billion odd membrane-bound micro-pixels of experience - a so-called micro-experiential zombie - then consciousness would confer no fitness benefit at all. What makes consciousness so computationally powerful is phenomenal binding - not least, the real-time, cross-modally matched world-simulation (“perception”) that your mind-brain is running right now. How phenomenal binding is physically possible, given what neuroscientists think they know about the CNS, is a very deep question. But phenomenal binding gives human and nonhuman animals access to the empirical realm - a cognitive domain from which classical computers are forever excluded.

The mystery of why so many smart people don't "get" the binding problem continues to defeat me:
On Mental Subjects and Objects
("Pro and then Contra David Pearce")
Mariven, if you don't grok the phenomenal binding problem, then you won't be interested in fanciful solutions to non-existent mysteries. I'm surprised you persevered so far!
"And what is it all for? Dogmatic justification of what might very well be the single largest moral failure in human history."
He lost me at first, but the author is alluding to my failure to recognise that putative digital minds are real.

Mariven, Suggestion : you might want to explore in greater depth why philosophers and philosophically-inclined neuroscientists have been so exercised by the phenomenal binding or combination problem - and then do a steelman version. The issue isn’t whether functional workarounds for an inability to bind are possible. Neurotypical novices can always beat someone with simultanagnosia at chess, but Stockfish blows us all away. Rather, the mystery is how the phenomenology of local and global binding is physically possible given what we think we know about the CNS. Why aren’t we just aggregates of 86 billion membrane-bound “pixels” of experience, a micro-experiential zombie? If after further investigation you still think phenomenal binding is classical, then probably you’d do well just to give my stuff a miss!

Maximilian, indeed. I still know of no way to give a classical explanation of phenomenal binding. Here, however, just a terminological note. As rare phenomenal binding disorders illustrate, both local and global binding play a vital computational-functional role in biological minds. But non-classical accounts of phenomenal binding don't fall under the label of "computationalist" theories of consciousness as the term is normally understood. That said, phenomenal binding can confer immense computational power that classical digital zombies lack.

[on BLTC Research]
Forthcoming...

Too busy to read books? How about book titles? Wittgenstein said, “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes". How about book covers? (Actually the list of titles below has now extended to 1001). A credulous correspondent expresses respect for my productivity; maybe I've written them elsewhere so I don't take the trouble to disavow authorship. Guinness relates L. Ron Hubbard wrote more. I think I will settle for quality.
And now a Cover Launch from the admirable ENDPAIN.

new and forthcoming
• The Abolitionist Project
• Against Predation
• The Alchemy of Joy
• The Architecture of Bliss
• The Biochemistry of Bliss
• The Biohappiness Revolution
• The Biointelligence Explosion
• Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering? (pdf)
• The Blissful Brain
• Bliss by Design
• Blueprint For A Blissful Biosphere
• Blueprints for Bliss
• Brave New Worlds of Bliss
• Compassionate Biology
• Compassionate Conservation
• Cryothanasia and Cryonics
• Empathetic Superintelligence
• The End of Suffering
• Full-Spectrum Superintelligence
• Future Feelings
• Genetic Hedonism
• Genome Reform
• Good Drug Guide
• Gradients of Bliss
• Happiness 2.0
• Hedonic Futures
• Hedonic Revolutions
• Hedonic Uplift
• The Hedonistic Imperative
• The Hedonistic Imperative Revisited
• Hedonium
• Hedweb
• Herbivorization
• High-Tech Jainism
• History of BLTC
• Invincible Well-Being
• The Last Predator
• The Last Tear
• Life in the Year 3000
• Molecular Machinery of Magic
• Mood Foods
• Moral Molecules
• Neuroethics
• Non-Materialist Physicalism
• Paradise Engineering
• The Pleasure-Superpleasure Axis
• Post-Darwinian Life
• Post-Darwinian Transition
• Q and A
• Quantum Ethics
• Quantum Minds and Classical World-Simulations
• Recalibrating the Hedonic Treadmill
• The Reproductive Revolution
• Reprogramming the Biosphere
• Reprogramming Predators
• Schrödinger's Neurons
• The Science of Bliss
• Selegiline and Amineptine: past, present and future
• Sentience Liberation
• Superhappiness
• Superqualia
• Supersensuality
• Superesentience
• Superspirituality
• Synthetic Gene Drives and Blissful Biospheres
• Transhumanism
• "Triple S" Civilization
• Towards A Pan-Species Welfare State
• Universal Bliss
• Utilitronium Shockwaves
• Utopian Genetics
• Utopian Neuroscience
• Utopian Pharmacology
• Utopian Surgery
• The Vegan Mind
• Veganizing the Biosphere
• The Vegan Mind
• Wireheading and Beyond
• Zero Ontology
• Zombie Superintelligence

Yes, ambitious. Perhaps I will delegate authorship of some volumes to ChatGPT-5 or my digital twin. Or thanobot.
Hedonic psychosis, I guess. Dall-E would let me list a true NU list of covers.

[on scientific knowledge]
On standard materialist assumptions, we face the Hard Problem. On standard neuroscientific assumptions, we face the binding problem. On standard QM postulates, we face the measurement problem. At a time of staggering advances in AI, saying something is rotten in the state of scientific knowledge might sound hollow rhetoric. But for what it's worth, I think my speculative solutions are most likely wrong, and my diagnosis is most likely correct.

[on classical utilitarianism]
No classical utilitarians are willing to accept all the implications of their own ethic. I’m not thinking of homely moral dilemmas like (variants of) the trolley problem, nor the obligation to obliterate even the most blissful advanced civilisation with a utilitronium shockwave. Rather, I’m thinking of trade-offs involving suffering. For instance, a genie offers you the chance to create beings who enjoy two orders of magnitude more pleasure than anything existing humans can undergo - at the price of creating an equal number of beings who undergo suffering ”just” a single order of magnitude worse than any human has undergone. Horrific. Or a genie offers me a super-exponential growth in my pleasure at the price of an exponential growth in your suffering. Were I a classical rather than negative utilitarian, then I’d be obliged to accept. And so forth.

By contrast, negative utilitarians want to abolish even the faintest whiff of disappointment. Let’s build a world where all sentient beings are fabulously, superhumanly happy. This scenario doesn’t sound very NU. But NUs may favour superhuman bliss. We just wouldn’t accept it at anyone else’s expense.

Some utilitarian resources:
Utilitarian Resources

[on a pan-species welfare state]
Forthcoming..

[on BLTC HQ]
If asked, my role model is Diogenes in his tub.
That said, designs for BLTC's new HQ still don't capture the spartan simplicity and austere lifestyle to which I aspire:
BLTC HQ
I shall of course be occupying the Diogenes room.
Distinguished visiting scholars may qualify for something more comfortable.
A guide to some of the amenities:
01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36
37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72

And our local Brighton branch office:

[on Brave New World critiqued in Spanish]
El Mundo Feliz
Many thanks to Chilean translator Diego Andrade.
My English original is now over a quarter of a century old: Critique of Brave New World (1998).
No, I don't write in quite the same exuberant style any more.

[on modern love]
Zombies increasingly make the best suitors:
This Guy Used ChatGPT to Talk to 5,000 Women on Tinder
("and Met His Wife. Aleksandr Zhadan built a program with ChatGPT to find love, and it worked.")
Soon zombies will also make the best conversationalists, friends and lovers. But the future belongs to hyper-sentient full-spectrum superintelligences, not digital idiots savants.

[on existence]

It’s a pretty spooky coincidence. Why does physics suggest something analogous to our pre-theoretic conception may be the case? The key insight (?) for me came many years ago when (in some unrelated pop science book), I stumbled across something that was news to me, but not to information scientists. Zero information = all possible descriptions.
Ed Tyron plus Hugh Everett = an informationless zero ontology ???
Here’s my best short synopsis:
Why does anything exist?
See too A Search for Classical Subsystems in Quantum Worlds
What form might the true explanation take? Would we even understand it? I've stuck with an informationless zero ontology because I can't think of any other explanation-space to explore. The principle that information can neither be created nor destroyed ("unitarity") is a cornerstone of modern physics. But I haven't yet seen in academic print the conjecture that the information content of reality might literally = zero, although Max Tegmark ("Does the universe in fact contain almost no information?", 1996, pdf) comes tantalisingly close.

[on the HI Customised ChatGPT]
Our wonderful Russian supporter Shao has been feeding more DP stuff to the HI-customised ChatGPT:

But for real Russian: DP

[on ENDPAIN]
From the admirable Sean Johnson:

Tiktok is where it's at:
ENDPAIN
Thanks for our little interview:
1 2 3 4 (TikTok) and : 1 2 3 4 (mp4)

1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 5 : 6 : 7 : 8 : 9 : 10 : 11 : 12 : 13 : 14 : 15 : 16

David Pearce (2024)
dave@hedweb.com

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