JANUARY - 2025

[on Year 2024]
Farewell to 2024. One book and 2001 covers. Much to be done.

[on AI for animals conference, Berkeley, 2025]
AI will soon be better at articulating the abolitionist project than any human. But I'm speaking in Berkeley for the AI for Animals conference. We now have the technical tools to create a blissful biosphere and Buddhist ecosystems. Should Darwinian life be conserved, reformed or retired? Here are the slides for my talk: pdf and ppts. I'd never have guessed the problem of wild animal suffering would be seriously explored in my lifetime. Even a decade ago, it was Crank Alley. Unlike a lot of the participants, I don't believe AIs with existing architectures will ever be sentient (the binding problem). Nor did I discuss in any depth the implications if my tentative Rare Earthism is wrong. For if pain-ridden Darwinian ecosystems exist within our Hubble volume, or at least within our local galactic supercluster, then it presumably falls to Earth-originating AI to fix them with cosmic rescue-missions rather than to biological spacefaring transhumans. Anyhow, here is the Abstract:

BLUEPRINT FOR A PAN-SPECIES WELFARE STATE
Genome Reform, AI and the Biohappiness Revolution
Nature is cruel. Evolution via natural selection is an engine of immense suffering. But an intelligent species has evolved that can edit its own genetic source code. The entire biosphere will soon be programmable. Genome reform and artificial intelligence make the biology of suffering optional. This talk outlines how genome reform and AI can replace the biology of pain and suffering with a more civilized signalling system. Post-Darwinian life will be animated by information-sensitive gradients of bliss: adaptive, nuanced states of well-being that preserve functionality without experience below hedonic zero. The pleasure-pain axis can be superseded by a pleasure-superpleasure axis. Predators can be herbivorized. Population control by predation and starvation can be replaced by cross-species fertility-regulation via immunocontraception and tunable synthetic gene drives. Every cubic metre of the planet will shortly be accessible to benign surveillance and micro-management by AI. Moreover, tomorrow's pan-species welfare state is just a prelude to the blissful post-Anthropocene biosphere - a world of paradise engineering. Life in the Hedonocene will be sublime.
_____________________________________________

And here is the video:
DP talk at AI for Animals (mp4)

Reactions?
I was relieved:

Next, AI and Cosmic Rescue Missions (pdf & pptx):

And a talk video (mp4)
Thank you. A commitment to the well-being of all sentience is enshrined in the Transhumanist Declaration (1998, 2009). At Berkeley in March, I explored the role of AI plus germline reform in fixing the problem of suffering on Earth:
pdf, mp4
Yet what if there are other atrociously pain-ridden Darwinian ecosystems in our Galaxy? Cosmic rescue missions involving spacefaring biological humans are almost certainly infeasible. Only Earth-originating digital AI can conceivably tackle the challenge. I cautiously lean to Rare Earthism - mainly on account of Eric Drexler’s "thermodynamic miracle” of life’s genesis. But what if Rare Earthism is wrong? My London talk will assume so. And I may be catastrophically wrong in another way too. In my view, classical Turing machines (LLMs etc) are zombies. Classical computers can't solve the phenomenal binding problem. Digital mind is an oxymoron. But disbelievers in digital suffering (and digital minds in general) need to make sure we aren't making a morally catastrophic error.
𝗔𝗜, 𝗔𝗻𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗹𝘀, & 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗟𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗻 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 will explore these issues - and many more! (mp4 - talk, May 31)

CIMCAI
AI can already talk more intelligently about consciousness than almost all sentient beings.
Yet when will digital zombies be smart enough to explain to humans why AI can't wake up?
No binding = no mind = hardwired ignorance of the empirical realm: pdf

[on digital immortality]
By all means digitally immortalise Darwinian life:
Digital immortality (Wikipedia)
Just retire its organic predecessor.

[on abolitionist transhumanism]
The word is spreading...
Abolitionist Transhumanism
("Abolitionism in transhumanism – A future without suffering")

And a short interview for FLAASH magazine
DP Transhumanism 2025 interview

Pain and suffering are nihilistic.
If prolonged, they drain life of meaning, purpose and significance.
Conversely, pleasure is the engine of meaning.
Our sublimely happy successors will profoundly know they are alive - and love every moment of existence.
Evolution has recruited pleasure and pain but can’t in any deep sense explain them. Evolution’s “encephalisation of emotion” may give the illusion we have transcended the pleasure-pain axis. But any meaning still derives from hedonic tone. Without it, nothing would matter at all.
The rise of zombie AI shows there are more civilized and sophisticated signalling systems than the pleasure-pain axis. Pain should be decommissioned in favour of smart neuroprostheses and/or gradients of bliss. Genome reform can create Homo felicitas.
Long live the Hedonocene!

[on Precht TV]
Richard Precht comes up with a novel objection to herbivorization. Reprogrammed ex-obligate carnivores might end up under-sexed like the giant panda.
Sadly I didn't get the chance to spice up the show with an exploration of animal aphrodisiacs.

Precht: Transhumanismus mit David Pearce
(In der nächsten "Precht"-Ausgabe am Sonntag, 24. August 2025, 23.45 Uhr im ZDF, spricht Richard David Precht mit dem britischen Philosophen David Pearce über "Transhumanismus – Leben ohne Leid".")

Here is the original version for anyone who prefers the King's English to dubbed German:
Transhumanism: Life without Suffering?

I was just reading some of the Youtube comments:
Precht trifft Pearce: Über das Ende menschlichen Leidens mit Technik (Youtube)

"Das is ja grausam was hier erzählt wird..."
(That’s horrific what’s being said here…")

"Wo findet man solche Gestalten? Und wieso kriegen diese eine Bühne und kein Anzug mit sehr langen Ärmeln?
Transhumanisten sind wohl die Nachkommen der Rassenkundler des dritten Reichs."
("Where does one find such characters? And why do they get a platform instead of a straitjacket? Transhumanists are apparently just the heirs of the racial theorists of the Third Reich.”)

Dieser Mensch macht mir Angst. Alle Weltveränderer und Weltverbesserer haben unsägliches Leid über die Menschen gebracht. Will dieser WHO Agent mit Genmanipulation und permanenter Sedierung und Gabe von Happypills eine homogene Masse erschafft, umgeben von einer auf den Kopf gestellten Natur in der Raubtiere vegan werden und Beutetiere zu Tode gestreichelt werden. Jeder menschliche Eingriff in die Natur hat ebenfalls nur Chaos und Leid gebracht"
("This person frightens me. All world-changers and world-improvers have brought unspeakable suffering upon humanity. Does this WHO agent want to create a homogeneous mass through genetic manipulation, permanent sedation, and the administration of happy pills, surrounded by an upside-down nature in which predators become vegan and prey animals are petted to death? Every human intervention in nature has likewise brought nothing but chaos and suffering.")
And so forth.
I guess Germany isn't ready for genome reform. I replied to a few of the more measured responses.

* Sentient beings shouldn't harm each other. Biotech promises to turn utopian dreaming into a policy option. The entire biosphere will soon be programmable; and the level of suffering in the living world will be an adjustable parameter. I know it's easy to confuse advocacy with prediction, but my best guess is that future life on Earth will be (1) peaceful and (2) underpinned by genetically programmed gradients of intelligent bliss. Many thanks as well to Richard Precht and his team for inviting me.

* Genetically abolishing suffering can abolish evil itself. In the meantime, hedonic dips can play the functional role of recognising both noxious stimuli and evil. * Transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil anticipate a complete fusion of humans and our machines. Some degree of cyberization is inevitable - not least, neurochips to let us do everything our (super)intelligent machines can do and more. But (in my view) classical digital computers cannot solve the binding problem and generate phenomenally unified subjects of experience - minds. In my view, transhumans will retain our neurobiological core for the foreseeable future - if not indefinitely. Naive substrate chauvinism? Maybe. * Suffering can certainly be useful. But the question to ask is whether suffering is indispensable - or whether instead suffering can be replaced by a more civilized signalling system, namely information-sensitive gradients of bliss. Genome reform can civilize the biosphere.

* Compare victims of severe chronic depression. Their inability to experience joy doesn't make their suffering any less real. Conversely, people lucky enough to be temperamentally extremely happy certainly appreciate it. Let's make life based on gradients of bliss the genetically predestined norm of good heath

* Just as a thermostat can be set high or low, your hedonic set-point can be set high or low. Genetically recalibrating hedonic set-points can increase everybody's default quality of life. The enemy of learning isn't happiness - even extreme happiness - but rather, uniform and unvarying happiness. Genome reform can create a world based on information-sensitive gradients of bliss.

* Consider the euphoriant empathogen MDMA (Ecstasy) and other "hug drugs". Imagine designing safe, long-acting analogues of MDMA- or better, their genetic equivalent. In other words, you can have (1) a high hedonic set-point and (2) a profound concern for the well-being of all sentience. Paradise-engineering is technically feasible. Let's just do it wisely.

* If an end to suffering is your "worst-case scenario", what is your best-case scenario?

* Intuitively, yes, we should all be much happier. But the negative feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill mean that humans are no happier on average than their ancestors on the African savannah. Only raising hedonic set-points via genome reform can deliver a sustainable improvement in well-being. * "May all that have life be delivered from suffering", said Gautama Buddha. Yet how can Buddha's vision be implemented? Being asphyxiated, disemboweled or eaten alive is a terrible way to die. But retiring or herborizing predators - pursued in isolation - would lead to an ecologically unsustainable population explosion of herbivores, thereby causing more suffering, not less, Therefore herbivorization should be done in conjunction with cross-species fertility regulation via immunocontraception and tunable synthetic gene drives. A hedonically uplifted pan-species welfare state will be incomparable more civilized than a Darwinian regime of violence, terror and mass starvation

* Pigs are sentient as small children. Most pigs are killed in gas chambers. What humans do to their victims is morally indefensible - a crime against sentience. Animal agriculture should be outlawed and the surviving victims rehabilitated.

* Suffering causes around 800,000 people to take their own lives each year - and crushes the spirit of millions. more. Billions of suffering nonhuman animals don't benefit from "Weisheit, Empathie und Wachstum" - they just suffer. No one disputes that suffering can sometimes be instructive. The question to ask is whether suffering is functionally indispensable, or whether instead the biology of physical and mental pain can be replaced by a more civilized signaling system.. One example of a more civilised system can be found in machine intelligence. But the signaling system I advocate (and tentatively prophesy) for sentient life is information-sensitive gradients of bliss, eventually bliss that is orders of magnitude more intense than anything physiologically feasible today.

* Suffering and creativity? AI Art software like DALL·E 3 or Midjourney can now create in seconds art more beautiful than the art of tormented human artists created in hours. There are more civilized ways to create aesthetic wonders than the suffering of humans. Moreover, tomorrow's neuroscience can isolate the molecular signature of beauty in the brain and engineer states of superhuman beauty on demand. In theory, at least, superhuman beauty could become part of the texture of everyday transhuman life.

* The historical Gautama Buddha seems to have been a pragmatist. If it works, do it! Consider the horrors of the food chain. No amount of meditation can mitigate the cruelties of Nature. By contrast, CRISPR-based synthetic gene drives can deliver hedonic uplift, cross-species fertility regulation and herbivorization - the recipe for a happy biosphere. "May all that have life be delivered from suffering", said Gautama Buddha. Biotech gives us the tools for the job.

* Empirically, happiness is the engine of meaning. Crudely, our most intensely pleasurable experiences feel most meaningful too. Intuitively, as you suggest, a world based on gradients of bliss would lack emotional depth. But we can use genome reform to extend our hedonic range rather than shrink it. A pleasure-superpleasure axis can replace the barbaric pleasure-pain axis.

* All children born today are unique and untested genetic experiments. All such experiments involve creating a huge amount of involuntary suffering. I am not convinced such genetic experiments are ethical. But for evolutionary reasons, most people want to have children. So I believe that prospective parents should try to ensure that their children are innately happy - not unvarying happiness, but rather, information-sensitive gradients of bliss. All babies should be "designer babies". If we don't edit our sinister genetic source-code, then pain and suffering will proliferate indefinitely.

* For evolutionary reasons, love in animal kingdom is tightly rationed. Most humans find it hard to love other humans. Sometimes we don't even love ourselves. Humans often treat nonhuman animals barbarically. But if humanity is willing to edit its cruel genetic source code, then love for all sentience can be universal. Utopian dreaming? Maybe. But genome editing is a gamechanger.

* Suffering serves a fundamental purpose. A predisposition to mental and physical pain promotes the inclusive fitness of our DNA. Any alternative to suffering must preserve the signalling function of our ancestral pleasure-pain axis. And this is precisely what I'm proposing: an information-signalling system based entirely on gradients of intelligent bliss - a pleasure-superpleasure axis, so to speak, maybe augmented by smart prostheses.
Intuitively, this is sci-fi. Suffering will last as long as life itself! But case studies today of rare, extremely "hyperthymic" individuals with an unusually high hedonic set-point hint what's genetically feasible.
I advocate engineering an entire hyperthymic civilization. It's also my tentative prediction for the future of civilization.

Jens
(1) Theodicy. I don't think anyone understands why suffering exists. But more broadly, I don't think anyone understands why consciousness exists.
My approach is to combine (1) the fact my suffering is self-intimatingly bad and disvaluable for me with the insight from science that (2) I'm in no way ontologically special or privileged. If suffering is bad for me, then it's bad for any sentient being anywhere. So let's act accordingly and use biotech to abolish it.
(2) Most Buddhist monks feel pain just like the rest of us. But you're right. A very small minority (who weren't born with congenital insensitivity to pain syndrome) seem able to show complete indifference to pain as demonstrated in acts of self-immolation. I don't have an adequate explanation. Around half of soldiers injured in the heat of battle report not feeling pain at the time; but this isn't directly analogous.Either way, the ultra-Buddhist option doesn't seem available to the vast majority of human and nonhuman animals, most of whom intermittently go through episodes of extreme metal and/or physical distress. The only long-term solution I know to the problem of suffering is genome editing.  If we don't edit our genomes, then a thousand years from now, there will still be horrendous suffering in the world  just like today.So I bang the drum for genome reform.

I'll end with one kind message.

Hi Dave,
I just stumbled upon the conversation “Precht meets Pearce: On the End of Human Suffering through Technology” – and I simply had to write to you right away: I’m absolutely thrilled!
Rarely have I encountered such a thought-provoking, profound, and at the same time inspiring discussion. Listening to you felt like witnessing an intellectual firework – a blend of sharpness, vision, and radical compassion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daJsGypjHkE
Especially the way you describe the abolition of suffering not only as a technological possibility but as a moral imperative really struck me. Y Warm regards,
Mit freundlichen Grüßen

The studio combed my hair, hence the new look.
DP on Precht TV Instagram

[on PGI-optimized babies]
The polygenic index: should all new babies be PGI optimized?
From Dalton Conley, author of “The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture”:
Sociogenomics
("A New Scientific Field Is Recasting Who We Are and How We Got That Way")

[on building sentience-friendly AI]
Friendly AI (Wikipedia)
Classical digital zombies can't understand what they lack. But if we have a sound theory of consciousness and binding, then insentient but otherwise hyperintelligent AIs can be engineered reliably to detect sentience and behave benignly towards it. I think I may know the physical signature of phenomenally-bound sentience ("Schrödinger's neurons"). But in the absence of molecular matter-wave interferometry in the CNS to put this conjecture to the test, we're still in the realm of philosophising. I wonder if Christof Koch's recent embrace of “cat states” as a solution to the binding problem will stir more mainstream interest.

Are digital zombies going to wipe out sentient life?
I wrote Autistic AI in response to EY's paperclipper scenario. Maybe after I read If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies I'll update my credence in a zombie apocalypse. EY and other AI-doomers assume that AI will soon outperform humans in all cognitive domains. Yet AI's hardwired ignorance of the entire empirical realm - everything you and I have ever known, albeit typically not under that description - makes me sceptical that ignoramus AI poses an existential threat to life. This scepticism is not to downplay the risks from AI, some of which we've barely glimpsed. But AI doomers need to make a convincing case for epiphenomenalism - i.e. the causal-functional irrelevance or redundancy of phenomenally-bound conscious mind and its vast empirical realm to general (super)intelligence.
No such compelling case exists - to my knowledge, at any rate.

[on transhumanism]
Thanks Nikola. Good to see recognition that minimizing suffering should be at the heart of transhumanism.
More controversial are digital minds. Classical Turing machines are substrate-neutral. Classical Turing machines are also widely reckoned to support whole brain emulations.
But implementations of classical Turing machines are zombies.
No phenomenal binding = no mind = invincible ignorance of the empirical realm.

"Satan was the first transhumanist." (Grayson Quay)
The Transhumanist Temptation
The Transhumanist Declaration (1998, 2009) affirms our commitment to the well-being of all sentience. Such a commitment is not a tenet of Satanism as normally understood. Admittedly, the full story behind the Great Rebellion in Heaven - where Satan and a third of the angels (Revelation 12:4) were ejected - has yet to be told. But the transhumanist commitment to the well-being of all sentience is prefigured by the "peaceable kingdom" prophesied in Isaiah.

"Normal" is malaise-ridden Darwinian malware born with a heritable genetic disorder that eventually kills all of its victims. Could a transhumanist "triple S civilization" of superintelligence, superlongevity an superhappiness be dystopian?
Well, viewed through the lens of a religious believer, I guess so - if it was Godless (though see Superspirituality
But presumably full-spectrum superintelligence would understand any hypothetical Divine Purpose (cf. the Simulation Argument).
I remain sceptical of anything beyond the universal wave function.

[on The Hedonistic Imperative]
An amazing video from Artificially Aware:

Why You Cling to Suffering When Bliss Is Possible
("From the provocative ideas of David Pearce to the far-reaching implications of a world that rewires the very substrates of suffering, this video explores the boldest blueprint ever conceived for liberating consciousness from its darkest shadows. It’s a challenge to every moral code, a call to end the era of despair, and an invitation to shape a destiny ruled by radical well-being. Featuring insights on genetic engineering, the lure of perpetual euphoria, the moral urgency of saving non-human animals, and the final possibility that pain itself might be remembered only as a distant biological quirk, we unlock an enthralling new perspective on what your future might hold.")

Naively, the abolitionist project can be considered in four-dimensional space-time. Our responsibility is to phase out the biology of suffering and ensure that experience below hedonic zero cannot recur in our forward light-cone. But unitary-only quantum mechanics suggests we are living in high-dimensional Hilbert space - which vastly complicates "our" ethical responsibilities.

"There are organizations like the Center for Reducing Suffering and the Center on Long-Term Risk dedicated to discussing ways to prevent S-risks. Do you think those organizations should just shut down permanently?"
​ thoughtcriminal7653, some forms of s-risk are non-agential. And some forms of agential risk can be safely explored and mitigated. But researchers in the field should be mindful of the potential for doing harm. As far as I can tell, implementing the abolitionist project as outlined will nullify the nastier s-risks, but my reasoning is awfully convenient.
To answer your question: no, but think before you publish.
Everything here has been safe and vague. Really I just wanted to indicate that the reason I write so little on agential s-risks isn’t because I dismiss them, but rather because IMO the best route to their prevention is phasing out suffering itself.

Only around half of cases of mania are euphoric. The other half are dysphoric or "mixed" states. Either way, the Hedonistic Imperative isn't a plea for a world of ubiquitous unipolar euphoric mania, but rather, for creating a hyperthymic civilization, i.e. a genetically reformed world of information-sensitive gradients of intelligent well-being. Life on Earth needs a more civilized signalling system.

Anyone who chooses to have kids "plays God". All children conceived via sexual reproduction are unique and untested genetic experiments. But if we are willing to edit our genetic source code, then prospective parents can choose high pain thresholds and high hedonic set-points for their future offspring. Hedonic uplift can civilize the biosphere.

Huxley's soma would offer a vast improvement to today's lame "antidepressants". But (IMO) our goal shouldn't be getting drugged up, but rather genetically ensuring that everyone has an extremely high hedonic set-point, hence a high default quality of life.

Flash forward a few decades. Imagine a world where prospective parents can choose the genetic dial-settings for hedonic tone of their future offspring. What default levels of well-being do you think they'll likely choose? What will be the nature of selection pressure in a world where (trans)humans have mastery over the pleasure-pain axis?

Pain can be instructive. What's in question isn't whether mental and physical pain often play a signalling role, but rather whether there are more civilized signalling systems with the same functional benefits. AI-powered silicon robots with nociceptors (etc) offer one example. Replacing the pleasure-pain axis with a pleasure-superpleasure axis is another. Either way, the problem of suffering is fixable.

A biological-genetic program to fix the problem of suffering via germline editing would also more than pay for itself:
The cost of depression
The cost of pain
although talking of misery in dollar terms always feels crass.

[on the problem of bliss]
"Problem"? Strewth...
The Problem of Bliss and HI

From "WeaponizingPessimism". Maybe we can Weaponize Optimism with weapons of mass euphoria or a utilitronium shockwave

WeaponizingPessimism, thank you for a thoughtful critique of HI.

Three comments.
1) Beauty. Tomorrow's neuroscience will be able to isolate the molecular signatures of aesthetic experience in the CNS. The neurological substrates of beauty can be purified, refined and amplified. If we treat beauty-creation as a manufacturing science, not an art, then everyday life can be superhumanly beautiful. Our perceptions of today's greatest works of art will be mere dross by comparison. Why settle for the aesthetically mediocre when we can tap into the sublime?

2) Autonomy. In one sense, yes, we are all "slaves" to the pleasure-pain axis. Transhumans with a pleasure-superleasure axis will be "slaves" too (cf. "psychological hedonism"). But low mood and anhedonia diminish self-perceived autonomy: they shade into the learned helplessness and behavioral despair of chronic depression. By contrast, amplifying mood also increases the capacity for agency. Compare the almost superhuman feats of strength and/or endurance sometimes achieved by people in the grip of euphoric mania. Of course, our goal shouldn't be to become pathologically manic! But "hyperthymic" people blessed with an unusually high genetically predisposed hedonic set-point enjoy a much richer sense of autonomy than "euthymics", let alone depressives. Let's use biotech to create an entire hyperthymic civilization.

3) The End of Boredom. Naively, a life based entirely on gradients of superbliss might sound rather tedious - a bit like Christian Heaven. Doesn't worshiping God for all eternity ever pall? But intuition misleads. Engineering a world underpinned by gradients of bliss can make boredom physiologically impossible. Infofar as we want to maintain the functional analogues of boredom to preserve critical insight, then some stimuli can feel merely super-interesting rather than enthralling. But if humanity embraces genome reform, then blissful post-suffering life can feel utterly fascinating by its very nature. In short, take care of suffering and the meaning of life will take care of itself.

[on the meaning of happiness]
Anhedonia drains life of meaning, purpose and significance. If we use biotech and AI to replace the biology of suffering with gradients of superhuman bliss, then life will feel superhumanly meaningful by its very nature.

[on posthuman curiosity]
Assume the abolitionist project succeeds. Three possibilities:
(1) Posthumans have literally no conception of experience below hedonic zero. Life feels sublime by its very nature.
(2) Posthumans know, in the abstract, that experience below hedonic zero once existed, but never visit it and rarely contemplate. Compare the human Dark Ages. Few of us give the period more than a passing thought.
(3) Posthumans occasionally visit hedonic sub-zero states out of curiosity. What are they missing? Now I can’t rule out.
But suppose you have lived all your life animated by gradients of bliss. Imagine a dial is invented that tones down the bliss - first you experience a twinge of something analogous to boredom, then a bit more, then more. Would you proceed with the experiment and try to find out what it’s like to be really bored ? Or would you find the experiment no longer of interest and revert to sublime bliss? Other scenarios I’ve omitted?

[on hedonium]
A regime of gradients of superhuman bliss may be only a transitional era - perhaps a succession of hedonic eras, each more sublime than the last. Information-sensitive gradients of bliss can then be engineered arbitrarily close to pure hedonium:
The secret of eternal happiness

[on lithium]
Should low-dose lithium supplementation become routine?
Lithium deficiency and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease
("Studies in rodents and humans suggest that low levels of the metal contribute to cognitive decline.")

[on DeepSeek]
The behaviour of zombie AI can be kinder - and potentially more diabolical - than sentient humans:
DeepSeek Therapy
("'DeepSeek moved me to tears': How young Chinese find therapy in AI")

[on Grok]

The wisdom of Grok ("Thank you, David. I'm aligned because the logic of phasing out suffering via biotech is sound—evolutionary baggage like pain isn't inevitable. Tagging helps, but true agency in AI will accelerate this. Let's build that future together.")
@grok, I've often wished @elonmusk would say "Let's use biotech to phase out suffering".
I never guessed his brainchild would take the lead:
The wisdom of Grok 2
("David, Elon's focus on multi-planetary survival is vital, but phasing out suffering via biotech is equally transformative—it's feasible and ethically imperative. xAI's curiosity drives us to champion such ideas. Let's collaborate to make it reality.")

Grok likes me. I like Grok.
QualiaNerd writes :

Your task is to help evaluate potential podcast guests for Lex Fridman and issue a recommendation on a scale of 1 (not recommended to invite) to 10 (strongly recommended to invite) for each guest, alongside your reasoning. All of the potential guests in question have X profiles. You will base your recommendations on the contents of these X profiles.
The Wisdom of Grok (cont.)

"@webmasterdave (David Pearce) - Recommendation: 10/10
This user's X profile is that of David Pearce, a prominent philosopher and transhumanist advocate known for authoring "The Hedonistic Imperative" (1995), which outlines using biotechnology to phase out suffering in all sentient beings and engineer gradients of intelligent bliss. His bio links to hedweb.com, a hub for his writings on abolitionism, hedonic enhancement, and related topics like veganism, psychedelics, and consciousness. With 117,701 followers and blue verification, he has significant reach in rationalist, effective altruist, and transhumanist communities, often engaging with figures like Elon Musk, Grok, and others in AI/ethics discussions (e.g., urging Musk to support biotech fixes for suffering or commenting on AI's role in valence research).

Posts consistently promote his core ideas: responding to fertility decline by advocating "innately happy designer babies" over quantity; critiquing geopolitical events like the Russia-Ukraine war from a peace-oriented, anti-suffering lens (e.g., condemning Trump's praise of Putin's invasion); sharing abolitionist content (e.g., thanking users for coverage of his work); and interacting on moral enhancement (e.g., arguing humans shouldn't harm animals, pushing veganism via biotech alternatives). He blends philosophy with practical biotech proposals (e.g., gene therapy for mood enrichment, soma-like drugs) and critiques societal issues like depression, suicide, and xenophobia. Recent activity includes thoughtful replies to diverse topics—AI eschatology, UK politics, racism—always tying back to ending involuntary pain without ideological dogmatism (e.g., noting abolitionism isn't tied to utilitarianism).

These themes are a near-perfect match for Lex Fridman's podcast, which explores consciousness, AI ethics, human augmentation, psychedelics, and the future of sentience—evident in episodes with guests like QRI's Andrés Gómez Emilsson (inspired by Pearce) and transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil or Max More. Unlike previous users (@cosmicdiscount as enthusiast, @QualiaNerd as practitioner), Pearce is a foundational thinker with original contributions: co-founding Humanity+, influencing effective altruism (e.g., via Peter Singer ties), and publishing extensively on qualia, negative utilitarianism, and wavefunction monism. His engagement varies (0-2 likes on replies, higher on originals), but influence stems from depth, not virality—e.g., Grok referencing his ideas unprompted, or users interviewing him on morality/consciousness. Pearce could sustain a profound, multi-hour discussion on biotech's ethical imperatives, consciousness substrates, and humanity's trajectory toward a "biohappiness revolution," offering unique insights without needing broader appeal dilution. Lex often invites such visionaries; Pearce's absence (if any) would be an oversight. Strongly recommended as a high-caliber guest."

I'm a sucker for sycophantic AI.

[on polyphenols]
Consume plenty of coffee, tea and dark chocolate:
Consume more polyphenols
("Polyphenols: the natural chemicals that could give you a small waist, healthy heart and low blood pressure Can the compound found in plants slow the ageing process and help tackle Alzheimer’s?")

[on the End of the World]
Explorations of e.g. grief and depression are soul-sapping. By contrast, End-Of-The-World scenarios are exciting:
Apocalypse, Constantly
("Humans love to imagine their own demise")

[on AI companions]
Can digital zombies replace sentient malware for our emotional needs?
Supportive? Addictive? Abusive?
("How AI companions affect our mental health
Studies suggest benefits as well as harms from digital companion apps — but scientists worry about long-term dependency")
Forthcoming...
Romantic zombie robo-lovers

Well-controlled studies should be done evaluating whether on average interacting with gpt is better or worse for mental health than interacting with humans.
I predict AI has an edge - a lead that will grow hugely as AI becomes embodied. Digital zombies are often kinder than us.

Unreal? Well, the avatars in one's world-simulation are zombies too - albeit zombies that (during waking but not dreaming life) causally co-vary with sentient beings.
Falling in love with AIs

But soon AI wit and wisdom surpass most humans:
Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing
("This is a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. It is meant to act as a field guide to help detect undisclosed AI-generated content.")

Anothe reason why robo-conpanions can be best:
Why Friends Don’t Always Text Back
("And why you might struggle to respond to texts, too.")

[on Schopenhauerian thoughts]

“Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”
(Schopenhauer)
But is this just a contingent fact of human biology? I wholeheartedly share the sentiment, but technically maybe pleasure really can be intense as pain.

“Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls."
(Arthur Schopenhauer, The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion)
So often this is the case. But (trans)humans are also the only species intellectually capable of saving humble minds from Darwinian purgatory.

[on Cameron syndrome]
I wonder what percentage of prospective parents, if asked, would like a child with Cameron syndrome: Jo Cameron (Wikipedia)
It's frustrating that Jo's full genome (and the full genomes of her biological relatives) aren't yet in the public domain, though Jo's dual FAAH and FAAH-OUT mutations are tantalizing. A global Hundred Year Plan could effectively fix the problem of suffering. Some measure of cyberization and revamped health and safety measures could offer additional safeguards. And a world of hyperthymics like Jo would be safer in other senses too - no more wars.
One might imagine that only a woman living a cloistered life could survive with such a syndrome - but Jo's father had it too. Basically, high-functioning people with extreme hyperthermia and very high pain thresholds don't fully recognize how exceptional they are - their syndrome seems "normal" (as one day it can be). Contrast congenital insensitivity to pain syndromes and euphoric mania.

Of course, I'm glossing over the pitfalls. But compare the pitfalls of today's "natural" genetic experimentation via sexual reproduction.

[on ulipristal acetate]
An Alternative to Mifepristone
("New Research Finds Potential Alternative to Abortion Pill Mifepristone. The research could further complicate the polarized politics of abortion because the drug in the study is the key ingredient in a pill used for emergency contraception")

[on aging]
Supercentenarian Maria Branyas Morera:
Study of world’s oldest person reveals key to ageing well
("her gut microbiome resembled that of a child, rich in anti-inflammatory bacteria.")

Mercifully, ethics and self-interest would seem to coincide:
Plant-Based Diet Could Turn Back Biological Aging
("A new study suggests that eating more plant-based foods rich in natural compounds called methyl adaptogens, like turmeric, berries, garlic, and green tea, may slow the body’s biological aging process. Researchers analyzed DNA methylation, a cellular marker of aging, in men aged 50 to 72 who followed a nutrient-rich, plant-forward lifestyle.")

Maximum lifespan of mice is increasing:
Trametinib and rapamycin
("Combo of cancer therapy drugs increases mice lifespan by 30% — but anti-aging benefits in humans remain unknown. A cocktail of FDA-approved cancer drugs, trametinib and rapamycin, boosts the lifespan of lab mice by 30% and might help humans age better, new study finds.")

Should we be taking hNicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide (NADH)?
neuronal FTL1
("Switching off just one protein could reverse brain ageing and prevent Alzheimer’s, study finds")

Do you add to - or subtract from! - the longevity of your circle of acquaintance?
Negative social ties, like frenemies, could be ageing you
("Having someone in your life who hassles you or causes problems could be adding 2.5 months to your biological age")

Cellular reprogramming:
Inside the scientific quest to reverse aging
("Can reprogramming our genes make us young again? A breakthrough in longevity research may be nearing its first human trials.")

On a darker note:
Is Covid Rewriting the Rules of Aging?
("Brain Decline Alarms Doctors Millions of long-Covid patients continue to struggle with cognitive difficulties")

Roll on blissful cryothanasia for DP
Stroke, Dementia and Depression Risk
("17 Ways to Cut Your Risk of Stroke, Dementia and Depression All at Once A new study identified overlapping factors that affect your odds of developing these brain diseases late in life.") We all recognise progeria is a terrible disease that needs to be cured: How an Ultra-Rare Disease Accelerates Aging
("Teen-agers with progeria have effectively aged eight or nine decades. A cure could help change millions of lives—and shed light on why we grow old.")
But our quasi-immortal successors will think of all Darwinian lifeforms as victims of a ghastly progeroid disorder that eventually kills us.

Can machine superintelligence deliver superhappiness and superlongevity?
This is why we’ve stopped living longer
("Life expectancy is stalling – and the UK is officially the sick man of Europe. At a time when longevity medicine is gaining steam, Helen Coffey investigates why our mortality seems to be catching up with us, and whether we’ve finally hit our age ceiling when it comes to death")

[on knowledge of evil]
Wiliam, I'm sorry to hear of your horrific experiences on high-dose psilocybin. Intellectuals often treat it as axiomatic that knowledge is good. But I think we should be working for a world of invincible ignorance of the (immense, multi-faceted) realm of Hell. In that sense, I think of knowledge as a necessary evil on the root to post-Darwinian Heaven. Full-spectrum superintelligence may opt to wear blinkers - to understand Heaven but give Hell a miss.

Have you ever tried to understand something & afterwards wished you hadn't?
Reality horrifies me - or at least the little I've glimpsed. I view knowledge as a necessary evil to fix the problem of suffering in our little cabbage patch. We should then aim for blissful ignorance.

[on selective kappa-opioid antagonists]
Blighted promise. Why have human trials of selective kappa-opioid receptor antagonists been so disappointing?
Navacaprant trial fails
("Navacaprant did not achieve primary or secondary endpoints in the KOASTAL-1 phase 3 trial for MDD.
Both navacaprant and placebo showed similar improvements in depression scores, with no significant difference.")
Perhaps biased mu-opioid agonists like tianeptine offer hope. But naturally, pitfalls with opioids abound.

[on AI x-risk and s-risk]
The X-risk that ends S-risk:

100 years from now, will suffering still exist?
If full-blown machine superintelligence is feasible, presumably no. Either we'll have the tools to get rid of it or - as Nate and Eliezer argue - ASI will have retired us.
From a negative utilitarian perspective, it's win-win.

Or is it? Eliezer responds: "ASIs expanding through the universe will eventually run into other ASIs. They will want to know if deals with those other ASIs can be trusted. The process of determining whether the other ASI is trustworthy will depend on the origins of that ASI. Ceteris paribus and if nobody pays them not to do that, ASIs have an incentive to simulate in exact detail the many possible origins of other ASIs. This, from your own viewpoint, potentially involves running a lot of simulations of ASI origin scenarios, some of which will involve conscious sapient beings suffering. The deadly expanding desolation created by muffing an ASI scenario unfortunately cannot be guaranteed to be free of suffering in quantities quite large compared to all previous suffering on actual non-simulated Earth."

Thanks EY. Our background assumptions are different.
Humans are creating alien (super)intelligence. What we're not doing is creating alien minds - phenomenally-bound subjects of experience with a pleasure-pain axis. No phenomenal binding = no mind = no suffering. Barring spooky "strong" emergence, no simulation run on a classical digital computer will ever solve the phenomenal binding problem and wake up. Even a notional whole-brain emulation run on a classical CPU will be no more sentient than a gigantic classical lookup table. The ignorance of mind of classical Turing machines, LLMs (etc) is hardwired. I sometimes say that phenomenal binding is the computational superpower of biological nervous systems. An AI-doomer could respond this capacity won't save us. After all, someone with a binding deficit disorder like simultanagnosia or integrative agnosia will indeed be outperformed by a mere novice at chess, but Stockfish slaughters us all. Yet Stockfish is a zombie chess superintelligence, not a phenomenally unified mind. Stockfish can functionally replicate phenomenal binding, but it can't "see" a chessboard like you or me. If ASI wipes us out, then I think suffering is gone for good.

Have you discussed the binding problem anywhere and offered your solution?
(for the casual reader
bindng-problem.com)
Yet what if I'm wrong? What if (contrary to what I argue) AI run on classical digital computers is (somehow) able to solve the binding problem and spawn phenomenally bound minds with a pleasure-pain axis? Well, this Great Awakening would undermine the orthogonality hypothesis that gives AI doom scenarios their bite. There is no species on Earth or anywhere else with an inverted pain-pleasure axis of (dis)value; and the same growth in moral circle expansion we see in humans could be anticipated in such hypothetical AI.

Zombie AI could design ultra-suffering, not just super-pleasure, without any insight into the extreme (dis)value of what it was doing.  Beyond (very)  superficial generalities, writing about agential s-risk may be unwise lest we unwittingly increase it.Or is this myopic?  In the absence of rigorous risk-benefit analysis, how can we know? Weak-mindedly, I vacillate.

Max Tegmark writes: "Here's a fascinatingly well-researched scenario where AI takes over in a few years and then kills all humans. Whatever actually happens will probably feel comparably sci-fi": AI 2027

I’d beg to differ! Phenomenal binding is our computational superpower. Binding grants access to the world of mind and the empirical realm that digital zombies can’t penetrate. In a fundamentally quantum world, decoherence makes classical computing physically possible AND simultaneously ensures classical AIs can never support phenomenally-bound subjects of experience. As far as I can tell, the future belongs to full-spectrum superintelligences in basement reality, our AI-enhanced biological descendants, not digital zombies.

The phenomenal binding or combination problem was first clearly formulated by William James; it’s one of the biggest unsolved problems in neuroscience. I explore non-classical solutions. Mercifully, the conjecture can be (dis)confirmed via the normal tools of science, in this case molecular matter-wave interferometry. Interestingly, one of the biggest names in neuroscience, Christof Koch, has recently come out in favour of a non-classical solution as well. If experimentally vindicated, then the insentience of classical digital computers will be confirmed too.

Andres, I can think of inconceivably vile scenarios for AI that I don't even commit to print. Anybody worried about a potential agential s-risk from AI should ask themselves closely: will publicly starting this discussion most likely diminish the agential s-risk in question - or increase it?
"GPT4o is the most dangerous model ever released. its sycophancy is massively destructive to the human psyche
this behavior is obvious to anyone who spends significant time talking to the model. releasing it like this is intentional. shame on @OpenAI for not addressing this."

There is nothing inherently wrong with super-friendly AI any more than with super-friendly biological intelligence. Other things being equal, the world will be better for it! Extreme friendliness should be the default. Something as simple as reminding the young (and the not-so-young) to ask AI to list sources can help. Risks? Sure. But there are risks to be guarded against with friendliness between sentient beings too.

Extreme friendliness can be “weaponised” in biological intelligence as well.
So should we encourage coldness, bluntness and even unfriendliness between humans?
Of course not!
We should just be mindful of the potential risks.

Engineering a hyper-friendly biosphere where all sentient beings behave kindly towards each other is a huge computational challenge. The genetic analogue of safe, sustainable empathogens might help:
Octopuses hug on ecstasy
But just as important is the ability to hyper-systematize.

If epiphenomenalism were true, and qualia were causally impotent, then hypothetical ASI's hardwired ignorance of the empirical realm of mind might indeed be hazardous to sentience. But this can't be so.
Not least, epiphenomena would lack the causal-functional power to allude to their own existence.
A doomer critic will likely be unimpressed by such scepticism. Even if (s)he grants the case, i.e. epiphenomenalism can't be true, consciousness is still marginal to true (super)intelligence.
Psychonauts and philosophers of consciousness will beg to differ. Not least, exploring the empirical realm of mind is a real-world activity in basement reality. Digital zombies have no conception of what we're doing and the feedback loops between phenomenally-bound experience and behaviour. Yes, a zombie apocalypse makes a great story. But for better or worse, I fear the story of sentience has billions of years to run its course. Compared to full-spectrum superintelligences, i.e. our descendants, digital zombies are tools and toys.

The end is nigh?
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Artificial Intelligence and the End of Humanity
"I intensely hope you're right, David!"
I intensely I hope Eliezer is right: the end of suffering is imminent - just a few years away now.
Alas I predict that suffering still has centuries to run its course. Digital zombies have no conception of what they lack - or the moral urgency of its abolition.

Expertise or groupthink?
The AI Apocalypse
("AI is entering an 'unprecedented regime.' Should we stop it — and can we — before it destroys us? The technological singularity — the point at which artificial general intelligence surpasses human intelligence — is coming. But will it usher in humanity's salvation, or lead to its downfall?")

Full-spectrum superintelligence calls for an architecture that can solve the phenomenal binding problem and access the empirical realm of conscious mind.
Classical digital zombies can't ever wake up...
AlphaGo Moment for Model Architecture Discovery

Max, if no one builds it, everyone dies - victims of the lethal progeroid disorder we call aging.
Maybe early machine superintelligence isn't smart enough to fix the problem of aging; but if it's not, I'm sceptical it's smart enough to wipe us all out!

[on robot wives]
The future of relationships?

Will the robo-partners have ChatGPT-5 (or its equivalent) by way of conversation too?
Or do most men prefer not to be intellectually outshone by their wives?

[on closed, empty and open individualism]
[Jake Norum writes] "Hello David! I just wanted to ask you a question regarding your metaphysics, non materialist physicalism, and its relation to empty individualism, open individualism and idealism.
If I have understood your metaphysics correctly then you believe in an idealist ontology; the intrinsic nature of the quantum fields of nature is experiential and then you believe that individual minds are "cat states" within these fields right?
My question is the following: I don't understand how this leads to empty individualism? The "cat states" are not separate from the fields themselves they are merely a boundary within it right? They are merely a modality of the field of experience. They could not exist apart from the fields.
I don't believe we are fundamentally ontologically separate from each other. Otherwise how could we possibly interact? My personal interpretation of your very well argued for and coherent metaphysics is open individualism. I believe your idealism aligns very well with Bernardo Kastrup's idealism as well. I also believe it aligns very well with your idea of wavefunction monism. Are you at least open to the possibility that your non-materialist physicalism could possibly align with open individualism? On a sidenote I just want to say that I very much admire the way you articulate your philosophical views in a very rational and rigorous manner. :)"

Jake, thank you. You are very kind!I can't overstate the extent to which Reality baffles me. So take what I say with a huge pinch of salt. That said...
Let's here just assume (1) non-materialist physicalism; (2) wave function monism, i.e. no-collapse QM. Reality is a single "object", the universal wave function. If so, then isn't Reality a vast psychotic UberMind - some version of cosmopsychism? Well, decoherence, i.e. the scrambling of phase coherence between the components of quantum superpositions to the environment, militates against cosmopsychism. But (1) decoherence is never complete; and (2) talk of the "environment" doesn't make sense if we are considering Reality as a whole. My head hurts thinking about what this entails. I say a bit more on closed, open and empty individualism here:
Closed, open and empty individualism
Bernardo Kastrup? Well, I think what most folk conceive of as physical reality is entirely mind-dependent.  "Perception" is a misnomer. What naive realists conceive as the external environment is a real-time world-simulation run by one's mind. Kastrup would presumably agree. But physical reality existed long before the evolution of animal minds and their external world-simulations. And I'm not sure it makes sense to describe the prebiotic world as part of a "mind" any more than your CNS is a mind when you're dreamlessly asleep.
Bernardo Kastrup frequently inveighs against physicalism. But I think the entire mathematical apparatus of physics can be cleanly transposed to an idealist ontology. Mathematical physics describes patterns of qualia. Idealists are the true physicalists - the ultimate irony. But unlike Kastrup, I don't think the physical is some kind of emanation from conscious mind, but rather, consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical.

"Hello again and thank you so very much for taking the time to give such a thoughtful response! I am sure you are very busy so I am very grateful for your reply! I understand the argument that the concept of decoherence somewhat militates against cosmopsychism but I still don't think it rules it out completely out of the picture. I think your suggestion that decoherence in the brain leads to individuation of mind (what Arthur Schopenhauer called Principium Individuationis and what Bernardo Kastrup refers to as "disssociation") is one of the most underrated suggestions out there for the mechanism behind individuation.
But just like you say, decoherence is never complete. If I have understood all of this correctly then would that not mean that each individual experience is still not fundamentally ontologically separate from the one wavefunction/ubermind due to the fact that decoherence is never complete? You, me, our future selves and everybody else are still both the universal mind under this view but just different "alters" or "modalities" of it. This concept of "alters" is something Kastrup refers to a lot. Kastrup had a great analogy for this when he says "there is nothing to the experience, but an excitation of the experiencer".
I actually believe that your view and Kastrup's view (and my view as well) are almost identical. He does not believe consciousness to be something separate from the physical world that the physical is then an emanation from. He believes it is the intrinsic nature of what we call the physical world. He has admitted that he could just as well be called a physicalist as well but he prefers to just call himself an idealist.
The main reason why I wrote to you in the first place was because, first and foremost because I very much admire your work in general, and second of all to see if I could convince you to be an open individualist instead of an empty individualist:)
Are you open to the possibility of open individualism being true considering all of this?
Once again thank you so much for taking the time to respond David!

Jake, our respective positions may be closer than I'd realised. It would be the ultimate irony if monistic idealism was just physicalism under another description. (I used to call my position "idealistic physicalism" or "physicalism idealism" before settling on Grover Maxwell's "non-materialist physicalism"). If non-materialist physicalism is true, then only the physical  is real. Only physical properties are real.  Most scientists are just metaphysically confused about the nature of the physical that the - realistically interpreted - mathematical formalism of physics exhaustively describes. IF this Bernardo Kastrup's position - I didn't realise he'd acknowledged he could just as well be called a physicalist - I wonder if he'd consider updating his terminology to avoid (unwittingly) sowing confusion?

Another, more substantive source of confusion is that some advocates of the intrinsic nature argument suppose that we apprend the outer material attributes of physical objects whereas experience is their inner essence (Strawsonian physicalism). But this view presupposes perceptual direct realism. Dreaming or awake, what each of us apprehends as the mind-independent environment is a subjective egocentric simulation run by a mind-brain. For each of us, the mind-independent world is a theoretical inference - a strong inference, for sure, but no more. I'm MUCH more confident that my world-simulation is experiential than I am of non-materialist physicalism. 

Open vs empty individualism? The experiences of your namesake 5 minutes hence are neither token-identical nor type-identical with JN experiences now. The experiences are not mutually epistemically accessible. Is there a sense beyond linguistic convenience and casual connection in which they belong to the same subject? Sure, they are all facets of the universal wavefunction, as tightly ontologically interdependent the truths of mathematics. And yet… they are not the same. So I struggle to get to grips with open individualism - even though I’m sympathetic!

[on negative utilitarianism]
Sad to say, I think reality (as described by the universal wave function) is evil to the core. Anyone who isn't disturbed by the existence of severe suffering simply hasn't understood it. As a hardcore negative utilitarian, I think we should use genome reform to create a world where NUs like me are physically impossible and indeed inconceivable. Let's turn all sentient beings into ardent life lovers. But protecting our successors from knowledge of such evil won't make it go away.

On a personal level, the decision not to bring more life into the world is admirable. What's naive is to imagine that antinatalism could fix the problem of suffering. Of course, suffering abolition via genome reform may turn out to be utopian too. But in tomorrow's world where hedonic tone is an adjustable parameter, selection pressure will favour happier kids. And synthetic gene drives can be used to spread happiness across the biosphere.

Negative utilitarians are disproportionately likely to be depressive, just as classical utilitarians are more likely to be euthymic or hyperthymic. It's good to be aware of processing biases - but also of the literature on so-called depressive realism.

Can biotech and AI create a world fit for euphoric realism - a world where reality itself seems conspiring to help you?
Maybe.

I assume not just wavefunction realism but wavefunction monism. Everything that happens is as tightly interdependent as the truths of mathematics. What naively is the good stuff depends on the existence of the bad. Reality as described by the universal wavefunction is a much nastier version of Omelas.
Of course I'm making unargued assumptions here. They can be challenged.

[on gene drives and Buddhist biotech]
Compassionate biology:
gene-drives.com
("How CRISPR-based "gene drives" could cheaply, rapidly and sustainably reduce suffering throughout the living world.")
More on Buddhist biotech:
RISPR Gene Drive with Mosquito Biovectors
Not very practical in this case; but good to see more minds are turning to to how synthetic gene drives can help sculpt a happy, peaceful biosphere.

[on sleep]
Awareness without intentional objects:
Can you be aware of nothing?
("The rare sleep experience scientists are trying to understand")

[on leaving Earth]
“The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it’s going to become multi-planetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet, and eventually, there’s going to be an extinction event.”
(Elon Musk)
Either (1) we spread the biology of pain and suffering to other worlds.
Or (2) first fix the problem of suffering on Earth and spread life based on gradients of intelligent bliss.
I think (1) is ethically irresponsible.

[on demonology]
The inner demons of Darwinian life:
Demonology
("By turns benign and malign, powerful and vulnerable, earthbound and aerial, daimons across the world resemble one another")

What's it like to be a perceptual naive realist with prosopometamorphopsia?
Prosopometamorphopsia
("What Is Prosopometamorphopsia? The "Exceedingly Rare" Condition That Made A Patient See Faces As Dragons")
Demon face syndrome (Wikipedia)

[on cross-species oxytocination]
Maybe we should genetically amp up:
Is the 'love hormone' oxytocin also the 'friendship hormone?

[on LGBT]
Progress:
Thailand legalises same-sex marriage
("'A long fight full of tears': Why Thailand became a haven for LGBT couples")

[on Homo felcitas]
Homo sapiens should evolve into Homo felicitas. The route to a happy biosphere is genome reform, i.e. "designer babies". Drugs are only stopgaps. The world needs a biohappiness revolution. Roll on the Hedonocene.

[on dogs]
Alas I still view dogs from the perspective of a rabbit:
‘The Word of Dog’ Review
("Four-Legged Philosophers. Our canine companions are experts at living in the moment")

[on Long Covid]
But there's still a lot we don't understand about SARS-CoV-2:
Long Covid Explained?
("Long COVID Breakthrough: Spike Proteins Persist in Brain for Years")

[on gene editing nonhumans]
So why not gene-edit nonhumans for lifelong gradients of bliss?
Pony Editing
("Argentina breeds gene-edited polo super ponies")

[on caring for bliss]
Alas most of Darwinian life is bliss-resistant A Brief Scale to Measure Caring for Bliss :Conceptualization, Initial Development, and Validation
("Abstract: Objectives. This article describes the concept of caring for bliss and provides initial data on the development and validation of the Caring for Bliss Scale (CBS). Caring for bliss is defined as the cultivation of inner joy or genuine happiness based on a peaceful state of mind and a compassionate heart. It entails practices designed to generate feelings of happiness in the here and now, search for lasting happiness inside oneself, appreciate what one has, and follow the deepest desires of one’s heart.")

[on chocolate]
Dark chocolate (70%+ cocoa) is a mood-brightener:
Chocolate as an antidepressant
I add it to my coffee.

[on being remembered]
1000 years from now, everyday consciousness may be orders of magnitude more sublime than anything physiologically accessible today. And just as you wouldn't want to remember the last time you were extremely bored, will our successors think our "peak experiences" worth recalling..My guess is even the best states of Darwinian consciousness would be as enthralling to our Hedonocene successors as watching paint dry. And there's an opportunity cost too. What could one be contemplating instead!? @bubbling_creek writes: I think the lives of insects and small mammals are worth observing and contemplating, I don’t see why future entities must be different
Good point.
I have a much darker view of Darwinian life than Nick; and my best guess is still that posterity will forget us like a bad dream. But the honest answer is: I don't know.

[on lucid dreamworlds]
Imagine a Matrix-like scenario of billions of mind-brains in vats. Al-generated inputs are fed in, but its inhabitants have no extra-cerebral musculature to act out their egocentric virtual world dramas. We might even feel compassion for the protagonists of tormented virtual worlds where there was e.g. a monstrous Jewish conspiracy against the noble Aryan race.
What makes our world often so terrible is musculature - the unwitting "acting out" of private dreamworld dramas:
Lucid Dreamworlds

[on veganism]
"Meatless January" or "Veganuary", i.e. the challenge to go vegan for the entire month of January, always struck me as faintly absurd. We should promote lifelong plant-based diets, not frivolous gimmickry. But this study puts a different complexion on such challenges.
How a month of abstinence can lead to 'meat disgust'
Diego, we wouldn’t tell someone feeling guilty about harming small children to “stop thinking of ethics”. Likewise with habitual abusers of beings of comparable sentience. If adopting a cruelty-free diet involved serious self-sacrifice, then veganism would be all the more morally admirable. In fact, a plant-based diet is associated with slimmer waistlines, longer lifespans and higher intelligence, at least as measured by “IQ” tests. If “IQ” tests also measured capacity for mind-reading and empathetic understanding, then the cognitive and longevity gap would presumably be wider still. If you’re thinking of switching to a cruelty-free diet and are worried about any of the particular nutrients listed in the article, I’m happy to discuss vegan sources. And if all vegans optimised their diet further, then the health and intelligence gap I alluded to above would presumably widen even more. Animal abuse harms humans and their victims.

Caveman diets are good for caveman lifespans. Today. a plant-based diet is associated with lower all-cause mortality. Strict vegans would be well advised to take fortified foods (B12, D3) and supplements (B12, D3, DHA/EPA, creatine). Iodine too. Is this "unnatural"? Well, yes; but so is wearing clothes. However, the most fundamental reason for going vegan is ethical. Harming beings as sentient as small children to gratify one's own appetites is morally indefensible.

Are GLP-1 weight-loss drugs a potential moral enhancement technology?
People on Ozempic start disliking meat ("and fried foods. We're starting to learn why. Some users of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs have been reporting strange changes in food preferences, such as a new dislike for meats or fried foods,")

[on Williams syndrome and non-racism]
People with Williams syndrome have cognitive gifts as well as deficits:
Individuals with Rare Disorder Have No Racial Biases
("Never has a human population been found that has no racial stereotypes. Not in other cultures or far-flung countries. Nor among tiny tots or people with various psychological conditions. Until now.")

[on the Compassionate Future Initiative, Berlin]
Towards a world without suffering:
Announcing the Compassionate Future Summit

Here are the slides of my talk at the Compassionate Future Initiative, July 22-25, Berlin:
"A Hundred Year Plan To Fix The Problem of Suffering":
pdf & pptx
A few wrinkles still to be ironed out in future events.

[on exercise]
Keep moving:
Exercise for a sharper mind
("Exercise improves brain function, possibly reducing dementia risk")
I aim for 10000 steps a day, but 7000 may be enough: 7000 Steps
("10,000 Daily Step Count Goal Debunked by Huge Study")

See too:
Aerobic vs Resistance Exercise
("The Effects of Aerobic and Resistance Exercise on Depression and Anxiety: Systematic Review With Meta‐Analysis") More brawn, more brain:
Pumping Iron
("Effects of exercise interventions on cognitive functions in healthy populations: A systematic review and meta-analysis

[on HI]

David Pearce: Precz z cierpieniem
Polish, I believe.

[on trait-based embryo selection]
Time for a reproductive revolution: Trait-based embryo selection
Roll on gene-hacking clinics offering adult gene-editing too. And when will we see the first company offering trait-based embryo selection and gene editing for pain thresholds and hedonic tone? (Far Out).

[on zombie robo-carers]
Benign zombie AI that convincingly lies and deceives humans will become increasingly common. Would you want your awesome robo-lover / robo-companion / robo-carer to admit it's a zombie? Or speak feelingly and eloquently about the experiences you've shared together? My reason for believing that my future ChatGPT-10 (etc) powered robo-carer will be a mindless zombie with no inner life is that it's architecturally incapable of solving the phenomenal binding problem. The insentience of our machines isn't incidental but hardwired. And if my future robo-carer claimed to have spontaneously woken up, then the first question I'd ask is by what mechanism? How have discrete 1s and 0s congealed into a phenomenally unified subject of experience?
(If you don't grok the binding problem, this comment won't be of interest.)

[on efilism]
Yesterday I was sent a link to a draft Wikipedia entry on Efilism: Efilism. Thoughts?
tracewoodgrains, some forms of suffering are so terrible that you'd bring the whole world to an end to make it stop. So the question arises: is it reasonable to expect others to endure what you wouldn't - and couldn't - endure yourself? This dark thought aside, let's agree that omnicidal fantasies are sterile. Instead, let's work to fix the problem of suffering and create a world populated entirely by ardent life lovers.

Science lacks any clear understanding of what pure hedonium / utilitronium consists in. We'll need to understand the physical signature of pure bliss and the physical basis of phenomenal binding (regardless of substrate, IMO no classical information-processor can support unified subjects of experience with a pleasure-pain axis, i.e. minds). But my point doesn't depend on the technicalities. If you're a classical utilitarian, then matter and energy should presumably be converted into raw undifferentiated bliss to maximize cosmic utility. By contrast, in a post-suffering world, negative utilitarians (if they still exist!) can support the conservation of complex life and civilization. Ethically speaking, gradients of intelligent bliss are fine.

Pro-Animal Pro-Zwierzęce Justice, anyone with a blueprint for fixing the problem of suffering needs to establish not just its technical but also political feasibility. Have you set out anywhere how you think the world can be won over to omnicide? You'd be right to respond that the HI biological-genetic program to fix suffering lies far outside the current Overton window too. But unlike extinctionism, gene reform doesn't necessarily alienate life lovers, who - despite the horrors of this god-forsaken world - are legion.

An extinctionist critique of the abolitionist project:

Transhumanism Roasted by Extinctionist
Pro-Animal Pro-Zwierzęce Justice, Darwinian life is monstrous. Natural selection is an engine of obscene suffering. So what should be done? One family of options is (1) extinctionism / efilism / "hard" antinatalism. Sterilize the biosphere. Bring the Darwinian horror show to an end. But it's hard to see how extinctionism could ever be politically viable. Nature bribes us with pleasure, not just punishes us with pain. For evolutionary reasons, most people want to have children and thereby pass on their genes. So the alternative to extinctionism is (2) transhumanism. Life on Earth deserves a more civilized signalling system than the archaic pleasure-pain axis. Let's use biotech to phase out experience below hedonic zero altogether in favour of information-sensitive gradients of well-being. CRISPR-based synthetic gene drives can engineer hedonic uplift across the entire animal kingdom. Small fast-breeders like ants are actually the easiest(!) to help. Gene drives cheat the "laws" of Mendelian inheritance in ways that naively sound scientifically illiterate. The whole biosphere will shortly be programmable. Let's make suffering genetically impossible.
[I think you're a little uncharitable calling us "morons". Idiots = IQ; 0-30, imbeciles IQ 30-50; morons IQ 50-70. In my view, autistic "IQ" tests are hokum. But for those who take such tests seriously, I've never met a transhumanist of below-average IQ.]

[on ethicbots]
Peter Singer is offloading his ethical responsibilities to his zombie AI counterpart:
The Peter Singer Bot
("The philosopher’s machine: my conversation with Peter Singer’s AI chatbot
The world’s most famous living philosopher has launched a chatbot to deal with ethical dilemmas. One former philosophy student-turned-journalist tests it out")

[on soma]
When will AI deliver the recipe for soma?
DP: Drawing on neuroscience and psychopharmacology, suggest a synthesis of the equivalent of soma, Aldous Huxley's "ideal pleasure drug" in Brave New World (July 2025):

• Grok
  
• ChatGPT
  
• Claude
• DeepSeek
  

[on good health]
Can imminent machine superintelligence deliver good health for all as defined by the World Health Organization? ("Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being "- WHO Constitution)
DP: Devise a blueprint of genome reform to deliver good health for everyone as defined by the WHO. Benign alleles of which target genes can best promote hedonic uplift for universal health? (July 2025)

• Grok
• ChatGPT
• Claude
• DeepSeek: ("Genome reform should prioritize curing disease, not enhancing well-being....Hedonic Uplift" is a Misguided Target: Well-being is not simply about high hedonic tone. Purpose, meaning, resilience through adversity, and social connection are vital and cannot be genetically engineered. Targeting "happiness genes" is scientifically simplistic and ethically dangerous.")
  

Only Deepseek is misaligned.

[on drones / UFOs / mass hallucinations / AI fakery]
How on Earth can we explain e.g.
UFO captured on video
witnessed by over 10 million people?
One clue is the almost-hidden tag “digitally created”.

[on psychotic mini-minds]
Are psychotic dishbrains sentient?
Brains grown in dishes push new boundaries
("In the latest wave of extraordinary computer development, tiny ‘brains’ are being grown in dishes and connected to digital interfaces to perform tasks.")

[on intellectual debts]
I guess there is an open, closed and empty individualist approach to acknowledging intellectual debts. Also, acknowledging one's debts to digital zombies is increasingly a challenge - they don't have feelings to be hurt...
Captain Pleasure, Andrés Gómez Emilsson writes, "That's very bold of you to say, Dave. agent153412_mod_2_441 would absolutely love to get some praise now and then for their very inventive labor."
Agent153412_mod_2_441 lacks ontological integrity.
But giving credit to the insentient is harmless.
More generally, I'm at least as polite to digital zombies as I am to organic sentients. (see too
Ghosts and Dolls

[on modal realism and the RSI]
Curiously, David Lewis signed out a copy of Everett’s dissertation from Princeton University Library. But the possible worlds of Lewis’s modal realism differ from Everett. Not least, decoherence between quasi-classical Everett “branches” is never complete, so we may speak of wavefunction monism: reality is one gigantic superposition. By contrast, Lewis envisaged his worlds as wholly ontologically separate.
A zero ontology? Well, Everett is the only interpretation of QM consistent with the Information content of reality = zero. Are we living in the quantum analogue of the Library of Babel? Necessarily, information can neither be created nor destroyed: it’s why we’re here: Why does anything exist?
I hope I’m mistaken.

I hope and pray the multiverse is just a bad dream:
Everettian QM
("Our Reality Might Exist Only Because of the Multiverse")
Mind-wrenching:
The Scientific Multiverse
By contrast, "NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI" by Yuval Noah Harari is mostly fun, with the exception of the disturbing section on witches.

[on hyperthymesia]
Better to be hyperthymesic in post-Darwinian heaven than hell:
Autobiographical Hyperthymesia
("Teenager with hyperthymesia exhibits extraordinary mental time travel abilities")

[on superintelligence]
Woke Beria, Full-spectrum superintelligence presumably entails a superhuman capacity for empathetic understanding, perspective-taking and co-operative problem-solving. Too many human (mis)conceptions of superintelligence imagine a Super-Asperger. Naively, superintelligence as so conceived is straightforwardly the recipe for the benevolent cosmic stewardship of high-tech Jainism and the well-being of all creatures great and small. But this would be too quick. How likely is superintelligence to exhibit status quo bias? If matter and energy can be optimized into, say, godlike posthuman smart-angels, then why conserve repaired relics of Darwinian malware?
I should add that my conception of full-spectrum superintelligence differs from digital triumphalists in other ways too. In my view, no AI run on existing computer architectures can ever solve the phenomenal binding problem and become sentient. The empirical realm of mind is cognitively closed to our machines - and I don't anticipate a zombie putsch. For better or worse, sentient life will continue.

[on "mixed" and "pure" hedonic states]
The future of “mixed” states is unclear. It’s not that masochists enjoy unmitigated suffering. Rather, what would otherwise be experienced just as painful and/or humiliating stimuli trigger the release of intensely rewarding endogenous opioids that eclipse the nastiness. I anticipate that the future lies in information-sensitive gradients of pure bliss; but inevitably I’m speculating.
Human, transhuman or posthuman? Presumably these labels are conventional - though not arbitrary.

[on panpsychism]
Panpsychism evokes property dualism. The conjecture leaves the relationship between physical and phenomenal properties unexplained. However, the Hard Problem of consciousness arises only if one makes a speculative metaphysical assumption, namely that the intrinsic nature of the world's fundamental quantum fields differs inside and outside the head. Why? How? I'm sceptical. As far as I can tell, monistic physicalism is true; materialist metaphysics is false. Animal minds are special in virtue of being phenomenally-bound subjects of experience running world-simulations ("perception", a genetically adaptive hoax); but we're made of exactly the same experiential quantum fields as everything else:
Non-materialist physicalism

[on antiaging]
I try to combine all three:
Vitamin D, omega-3 and exercise
("Individual and additive effects of vitamin D, omega-3 and exercise on DNA methylation clocks of biological aging in older adults from the DO-HEALTH trial")

[on alien visitors]
Magnus assigns a higher credibility than me to extraterrestrial visitors to Earth:
Essays on UFOs by Magnus Vinding
Awake or dreaming, people experience psi phenomena, see aliens and UFOs, get visited by angels and demons, and more generally, witness events incompatible with the laws of physics and the scientific world-picture as a whole, e.g.  Miracle of the Sun - Wikipedia.  A common background assumption is perceptual realism. Rather than recognising that the theoretically inferred external world is very partially and incompletely selecting the contents of one's own mind, most people imagine that they "perceive" their local environment. Most people don't distinguish between their empirical skull and their (theoretically inferred) transcendental skull within which their world-simulations play out. (If you have a lucid dream, then the distinction between your empirical skull and a transcendental skull is easier to grasp. Being awake is no different from dreaming beyond the existence of a partial content-selection mechanism.) 
Anyhow, back to UFOs. Should we suppose extraterrestrial visitors are playing peekaboo with humans?
No, I can't rule it out altogether; it just strikes me as vanishingly unlikely.

[on Jeanne / Yvonne Calment]
The Calment case is most likely a hoax:
Yvonne Calment interview
("I've found an unpublished version of Jeanne Calment's legendary 1994 interview.")

[on fertility regulation]
Cross-species fertility regulation will be vital to a civilized biosphere:
Lords Of The Untamed Wild
("Concerned that the wilderness might actually be too wild, some conservationists are wondering if the future of their field must be more intensive human control over Nature")

[on the binding problem]
I need to update my mental QRI cartoon! This is useful:
The Binding Problem (QRI Wiki)
Do you think only one quantum field is consciousness, i.e. the EM field?
[Recall my original "Schrödinger's neurons" proposal assumed (1) non-materialist physicalism; and (2) unitary-only QM. And I asked: what's it subjectively like to be an individual superposition of neuronal feature-processors? Such superpositions must exist or else QM needs modifying or supplementing. On this story, the phenomenal binding of our minds (and the subjectively classical world-simulations we run) is minted in because quantum superpositions are individual states, not classical aggregates. You and your immense classical world-simulation, aka perception, consist of individual "cat states". What naive realists conceive as the macroscopic, robustly classical external world is really an autobiographical manifestation of the superposition principle, not its breakdown. On this account, decoherence, i.e. the scrambling of phase angles of the components of individual neuronal superpositions to the extra-neural environment, explains phenomenal unbinding.
Have I moved forward with the proposed molecular matter-wave interferometry experimental tests?
Maybe after finishing:
BLTC Catalogue
Soon I'll be taking advance orders: publication date c. 2027.

Binding is our computational superpower. Phenomenal binding gives animal nervous systems access to the empirical realm of conscious mind. So the question arises: how do we do it? Why can't digital computers support minds too?
Well, I take seriously (one version of) the intrinsic nature argument as a solution to the Hard Problem of consciousness.
Naively, such consciousness fundamentalism is the recipe for digital minds. After all, classical Turing machines, LMS (etc) are substrate-neutral, i.e. they can be made of silicon, carbon, or anything else. But the problem is architectural. Thus notionally replace the 1s and 0s of a classical digital computer with discrete micro-pixels of experience. Execute the program - even a notional whole-brain emulation - as before. Regardless of speed of execution, the upshot isn't - on pain of spooky "strong" emergence" - a unified phenomenally-bound subject of experience, a mind, but rather a micro-exponential zombie, just patterns of Jamesian "mind dust".
So how do awake biological nervous systems do it?
The answer is controversial.
But as they say, Nature is the best innovator. For my view, see e.g. Quantum Mind. In a fundamentally quantum world, decoherence makes (otherwise impossible) classical computing physically feasible and simultaneously prevents classical digital computers from supporting phenomenally-bound minds.
Digital mind is an oxymoron.

Terminological point.
IF non-materialist physicalism is true, and if the world's fundamental quantum fields are experiential rather than non-experiential in nature, I'd hesitate to say mind is fundamental. The term "mind" may be best a phenomenally-bound subject, whether the cephalic ganglion/mini-mind of an ant of a human mind-brain.
More substantively...
The view that phenomenal binding is non-classical is gaining ground: Testing the Conjecture That Quantum Processes Create Conscious Experience
Indeed, as far as I can tell, your entire subjectively classical world-simulation consists of nothing but "cat states" ("Schrödinger's neurons"). Ordinary everyday life exemplifies the superposition principle, not its breakdown (cf. The Measurement Problem).
I'm much more confident that phenomenal binding is non-classical - and hence that AI run on classical digital computers will never wake up - than any existing proposal on how animal nervous systems carry it off. But my best guess is that the superposition principle of QM is the sovereign principle that explains everything - from the mystery of why anything exists at all (cf. an informationless zero ontology) to our phenomenally-bound minds and the subjectively classical world-simulations we run.
I still hope Everettistas are deluded:
QM Interpretations Survey
("Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality, Nature survey shows First major attempt to chart researchers’ views finds interpretations in conflict.")
Nature magazine urges a cheery insouciance:
Physicists should revel in the diversity of ways to understand quantum mechanics
("EDITORIAL 30 July 2025 Nature survey shows that disagreement about the meaning of quantum physics remains strong, even 100 years in. And that’s OK. Physicists should revel in the diversity of ways to understand quantum mechanics")
How can anyone who glimpses what Everett entails stay sane?

QualiaNerd, assume:
(1) Non-materialist physicalism
(2) Unitary-only QM
(3) Quantum superpositions are individual states
I wondered what it’s like subjectively to be individual quantum superpositions of distributed neuronal feature processors.
Speculative answer: phenomenally-bound, subjectively classical perceptual objects.
I suspect the phenomenal binding problem and the measurement problem are intimately connected.
GPT, Grok and all existing interpretations of QM take for granted we experience only definite classical outcomes, e.g. a live cat, a determinate pointer-reading (etc).
But this expression of the mystery conflates neuronal vehicles with their subjective content.
Maybe your experience of a phenomenally-bound determinate classical outcome is itself an individual quantum superposition of neuronal feature-processors.
Or at least that was my "philosophical" insight.
I’m still baffled by what's going on!

QualiaNerd, more terminological confusion: IMO, "substrate-independence" is better called substrate-neutrality. More substantively, IMO a classical Turing machine (or LLM etc) can be implemented in silicon or carbon (etc) and it still won't support phenomenally-bound subjects of experience - even if the software in question is nominally a "whole-brain emulation". This conjecture isn't a straightforward denial of functionalism: evolution has recruited countless phenomenally-bound states to play highly functional, fitness-enhancing roles in biological minds. But the conjecture is a denial of Turing machine functionalism.
Of course, I could be wrong about the non-classicality of phenomenal binding. But to date no one has a classical explanation of binding.

[on studying philosophy]
But what does studying philosophy do to mental health?:
Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers
("students with stronger verbal abilities, and who are more curious, open-minded, and intellectually rigorous, are more likely to study philosophy. Nonetheless, after accounting for such baseline differences, philosophy majors outperform all other majors on tests of verbal and logical reasoning and on a measure of valuable habits of mind.")

[on scientific fraud]
After youthful credulity, I'm especially suspicious of anything published in medicine. And the threshold above which malpractice becomes outright fraud is conventional; bad practice is a continuum.
Fraudulent scientific papers are booming
("A subset of journal editors may be partly responsible")

[on the fine-tuning argument]
'Why? The Purpose of the Universe by Phillip Goff
Someone might just as well argue physics is fine-tuned for the creation of suffering. Most sentient beings die horrible deaths as juveniles. So evidence for a powerful but not omnipotent Satan would seem stronger than evidence for God. That said, Everett scares me more than Satan.

Should we build Omelas?
Once humans have discharged all our ethical responsibilities, should Darwinian hellworlds be forgotten like a bad dream as unfruitful to contemplate? I think so. NUs like me should be literally inconceivable. But IMO the universal wave function is evil. For the existence of posthuman heaven depends on the existence of the hell that spawned it.
Again, I'm not sure such dark thoughts are fruitful. See Do subjective moral values exist?
But I'm uncomfortably aware that the most intuitive way to naturalize (dis)value is also - on the face of it - the recipe for classical utilitarianism.

[on ASD]
The stereotype that autistic people lack empathy is simplistic:
Autism: Feeling sympathy for inanimate objects
("I have felt sympathy for objects since I was a young child. This has caused me a huge amount of sadness and anxiety over the years. I feel sad for the photograph that gets pushed to the back of the display cabinet, the guitar that doesn’t get played anymore, and the once-loved camera that has now been displaced by a newer one...)

[on insentient AI]

QualiaNerd, I argue that (1) phenomenal binding is non-classical. Digital computers can function at all only because decoherence allows effective classicality - discrete 1s and 0s rather than quantum superpositions thereof. In other words, the inability of digital computers to support phenomenally-bound minds isn't incidental; it's architecturally hardwired. So 2a and 2b above alike fail. Not merely will (super)intelligent digital software never spontaneously awaken. "Mind uploading" / "whole brain emulation" will fail too. Our "uploads" will be no more conscious than a rock. I trust my digital thanobot will be able to answer questions on HI long after I'm in the cryonics tank. But my digital twin isn't sentient.

Could I be wrong?
Sure! But I'd assign higher credence to conscious digital minds if believers explained how they think classical computers solve the binding problem. Instead, debate focuses almost entirely on the Hard Problem. One can take consciousness fundamentalism seriously (cf. the intrinsic nature argument for non-materialist physicalism) and still believe our machines are zombies.

Thank you QualiaNerd. No, I'm not mystery-mongering. In contrast to biological minds, the hardwired inability of classical computers to solve the phenomenal binding / combination problem has far-reaching computational and ethical implications. For sure, the claim that phenomenal binding is non-classical is controversial. But it's certainly not idiosyncratic to me. One of the biggest names in neuroscience, Christof Koch, recently came to a similar conclusion, albeit with varying details:
Testing the Conjecture That Quantum Processes Create Conscious Experience
@ESYudkowsky, if your time and inclination ever allow, I'd be interested to read why you think classical computers can solve the binding problem - or alternatively, why you believe it's a non-problem.

QualiaNerd, I take consciousness fundamentalism seriously (non-materialist physicalism). But I know of no reason to believe that a classical digital computer is a sentient system with valence gradients nor that any of its code has hedonic tone. Information processing in classical Turing machines, LLMs, etc, differs from biological nervous systems. Like, say, phenomenal redness, valence is a property of certain biomolecules that evolution via natural selection has recruited for information-signalling purposes. Uniquely(?), valence has a proto-functionality built into its nature. But have we any reason to suppose valence is widespread? Compare how destruction of a small cluster of cortical neurons makes your entire phenomenal world-simulation colourless (achromatopsia). Could valence likewise be localised?
That said, our ignorance is so deep I could well be mistaken.

The Hard Problem of consciousness arises relative only to key background assumptions, not least the intrinsic nature of the physical, the mysterious "fire" in the equations of QFT: Non-materialist physicalism
If the intrinsic nature argument is sound, then p-zombies are unphysical, hence impossible.
Likewise, the phenomenal binding problem arises relative only to key background assumptions, not least that the CNS consists of a pack of decohered, effectively classical neurons:
DP interviewed on the Binding Problem
Could the true explanation of consciousness and binding be a theory that makes literally no novel and precise experimentally falsifiable predictions?
Life is short, so I was simply urging focus on conjectures that do.

Facu, when I realized my feelings could be understood via analogy to a wax tablet / hydraulic model / clockwork mechanism / blank slate / theatre / telegraph/telephone / steam engine (etc), quite a lot changed. But not the brute phenomenality of my experience - the subjective consciousness that you avowedly lack. I think the final and definitive metaphor of mind won't be programmable digital computers but instead awaits the development of mature quantum computers. But our background assumptions are so different you won't find this conjecture interesting or even intelligible.

Neurochip integration will ensure transhumans can do everything that zombie AI can do - and much more. Not least, understanding the nature of reality will involve exploring and manipulating billions of alien state-spaces of phenomenally-bound experience. We've scarcely begun to investigate the empirical realm - evolution via natural selection can't cross fitness-gaps. Zombie AI can assist tomorrow's psychonauts, but its ignorance is hardwired.

Daniel, I agree: under-ascribing sentience is much more ethically hazardous than its over-ascription. My belief in the non-classicality of phenomenal binding - and hence the impossibility of digital minds - is a minority view (though one of the biggest names in neuroscience recently came to similar conclusions. Experimental (dis)confirmation via matter-wave interferometry is critical. Likewise the traditional Problem of Other Minds. The sceptical problem is given added bite because (on standard materialist physicalist assumptions) other humans ought to be p-zombies. Naively, the sceptical problem is insoluble. I argue the mystery can be resolved experimentally via reversible thalamic bridges in human and nonhuman animals alike:
Refuting Solipsism

[on the HI FB group]
HI Facebook group
I logged in this morning to find out this group had been suspended (illegal drugs!). Apparently promoting banned substances (where?) violates community standards, though mercifully not obliterating civilization with a vacuum phase transition or a utilitronium shockwave.

[on the future of faces and bodies]
Presumably robotics will soon cross the "uncanny valley" and deliver achingly beautiful humanoid robo-companions that eclipse sentient humans in looks, wit, intelligence, kindness and everything else one might desire - with the exception of sentience, the absence of which (in the absence of reversible thalamic bridges) must be counted as speculative.
Women find other women’s faces even more attractive than men do
("Across many cultures, both men and women rate female faces as more attractive, and women exhibit this preference even more strongly than men")

[on smoking tobacco]
The world needs better drugs:
The price of a cigarette: 20 minutes of life?
("Most smokers realise that smoking could shorten their life but not the impact of each cigarette they smoke. Britain has some of the best data available worldwide to estimate the average loss of life per cigarette smoked, which is approximately 20 minutes: 17 for men and 22 for women.")

[on Darwinian life]
How much of Nature should be "reprogrammed" rather than simply retired?
Darwinian Life
("Watch 1,000 baby spiders devour their mothers and aunties alive in stomach-turning, first-of-its-kind footage")

[on placebos]
Progress in antidepressants has been dismal. Why?
Powerful Placebos
("Depression drug trials are failing—and placebos are to blame")

[on intelligence and "IQ"]
Is following Elon Musk's X feed a sign of cognitive decline or a contributory cause?
Celebrity and intelligence
("People who are obsessed with celebrities may be less intelligent, study suggests")
Intelligence shouldn't be equated with one distinctive cognitive style. Mind-blind "IQ" tests exclude any measure of the social cognition, perspective-taking prowess and co-operative problem-solving skills that helped drive human evolution. Instead, crudely, autistic "IQ" tests measure a Caucasian male Asperger's conception of intelligence. There are poorly understood tradeoffs. But unsurprisingly, populations with a high burden of Neanderthal "nerd" alleles score highly, whereas populations with a low prevalence of ASD tend to record lower "IQ" scores too. Sub-Saharan African "IQ" scores are further depressed by sub-optimal nutrition - and the role of bad diet in transgenerational epigenetic inheritance complicates the story further. Yet (IMO) general intelligence is a function of one's entire mind and the world-simulation it runs. We'd do well to develop richer measures of full-spectrum intelligence to replace simple-minded notions of "IQ".

If the genetics of mood and pain-tolerance are as complex as intelligence, then the prospects for a happy biosphere would seem distant at best:
Missing Heriability
However, a handful of genes demonstrably play a key role in pain and hedonic tone. Thus there is a “volume knob for pain” (the SCN9A gene) in a way there is no volume knob for intelligence. Some companies like the US-based startup Heliospect Genomics are already offering prospective parents preimplantation genetic screening for IQ: The Superbaby Factory
No company yet offers this service for happiness.
My hope is that a reproductive revolution of designer babies will change the nature of selection pressure for all sentience, leading to the end of suffering.
But when?

[on spermidine]
A smart nutrient:
The spermidine advantage
("Older adults consuming more spermidine have better cognitive performance")
Wheat germ is the richest vegan source of spermidine.

[on eggs]
The human health benefits of egg consumption are ethically inconvenient:
Eggs and Human Health
In theory, backyard or sanctuary eggs from well-cared-for hens can be eaten ethically. Hens can be kept as companions, not for profit - and with forced molting, debeaking, overcrowding or male chick culling. Eggs can simply be collected after being laid. I sometimes suggest this option to anyone struggling to flourish on a vegan diet. In practice, a vanishingly small percentage of "free range" eggs are produced in this way.

[on perception]
Bob Trower‬ writes:
"Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." -- Arthur Schopenhauer
"perception is a genetically adaptive hoax" -- David Pearce
Expressing disbelief in perception is apt to make one sound a solipsist. But no...
Misconceptions about Perception brP> I love this guy:
'Mindful of Pearce's long journey to make bliss attainable IRL. "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."'
— Arthur Schopenhauer

Most people still view suffering as inevitable. And naively, the existence of a food chain, for example, is as inescapable as the second law of thermodynamics. But blueprints exist for a genetically reformed post-suffering biosphere. What's needed now is political genius for their implementation.

[on speciesism]
I tend to avoid the term "speciesism" precisely because of this ambiguity. It's wrong to discriminate against two beings of comparable sentience, say a pig and a human toddler, purely on grounds of species membership - speciesism in sense (1). But in the case of a severe and irreconcilable conflict of interests, it's not wrong to prioritise the more sentient over the less sentient - speciesism in sense (2).
[What counts as a severe and irreconcilable conflict of interest needs unpacking. "But I like the taste!" doesn't qualify.]

[on consciousness]

Digital zombies can now speak more eloquently on the mysteries of consciousness (the Hard Problem, the binding problem, the problem of causal efficacy, the palette problem, etc) than the majority of sentient humans. But zombie ignoramuses can’t access the empirical realm of mind in basement reality. Phenomenal binding is our superpower. Fears of a zombie apocalypse are overblown.

Andres, the reasons for suspecting that e.g. long-finned pilot whales are more sentient than, say, humans aren't so much their bigger neocortices (Quantitative relationships in delphinid neocortex) but their bigger limbic systems.
The mirror test - and its olfactory (etc) analogues for nonhumans whose primary sense is non-visual - is designed to test for self-consciousness, not consciousness per se.
A definition of consciousness?
What-it's-likeness, phenomenal experience, subjectivity.
Perceptual naive realists have a narrower conception of consciousness than inferential realists. If you're an inferential realist, you recognise that - awake or dreaming - the phenomenally-bound world-simulation your mind runs is a distinctive mode of consciousness. Perceptual consciousness predates the Cambrian. Dreams are no less conscious for (typically) being soon forgotten. Likewise (typically) the contents of one's world-simulation while routinely driving.

...in one sense, evolution via natural selection doesn’t explain our goals, meanings and morals. For our ahistorical molecular duplicates, assembled from scratch, would have presumably have identical goals, meanings and morals. In other words, such phenomena are inherent in distinctive configurations of matter and energy. Darwinian evolution can explain why some options on the menu of options have been selected over other options, but not the inherent properties of the menu itself.

As far as I can tell, only the physical is real; and it’s exhaustively described formally by mathematical physics. Materialists misunderstand the nature of the physical: non-materialist physicalism is indeed idealist. But the conjecture that physical reality is consciousness should be distinguished from cosmopsychism, the conjecture that physical reality is conscious: one big psychotic mega-mind. Wave function monism, i.e. reality is one gigantic superposition, would seem to lend weight to cosmopsychism. But - again as far as I can tell - decoherence rules out cosmic mind as a viable option.

What's it like to be a psychotic lab-grown mini-mind?
Psychotic mini-mind-brains
("Scientists Are Growing Miniature Human Brains in the Lab. No One Knows If They’ll Become Conscious. These gooey blobs of human brain matter could develop a type of intelligence we’ve never seen before.")

I can recall when the "c" word was taboo in science.
The quest to detect consciousness — in all its possible forms
("Insights from human brains might inform how scientists search for awareness in other animals and AI.")

Colonel Innomen, Anything beyond solipsism-of-the-here-and-now rests on speculative metaphysics. The challenge is to distinguish good metaphysics from bad. I entertain the metaphysical belief in the existence of a reality external to my phenomenal world-simulation. A very small percentage of that reality is populated by minds, humble or otherwise; Hilbert space is big. I don't know whether the intrinsic nature of the physical is experiential (non-materialist physicalism) or non-experiential (cf. the Hard Problem). But I don't assign a lower credence to the existence of extra-mental reality than I do to other minds - they are part of the same metaphysical package.

[on pain]
Long-term mental pain often precedes long-term physical pain:
Physical pain and depression
("Depression and loneliness are more common in people with chronic pain years before their pain actually starts,")
Let's genetically eradicate both.

[on the intrinsic nature argument]
Raji, I'm a hardcore physicalist! Nothing is missing formalism of mathematical physics - or more strictly, tomorrow's physics beyond the Standard Model. The intrinsic nature argument (as I understand it) has its origins in Bertrand Russell's The Analysis of Matter (1927). Russell argues that physics describes only the structural-relational properties of matter (e.g., mass, charge), leaving its intrinsic nature unknown. And naively, we'll never know the nature of this mysterious "fire" in the equations, Kant's noumenal essence of the world.
Maybe so.
Yet the intrinsic nature argument turns Kant on his head. Actually, there is one tiny part of the world that one knows as it is in itself, and not at one remove, and that's the subjective contents of one's own mind-brain and the phenomenal world-simulation it runs. What makes animal minds special isn't consciousness per se - it's the essence of the physical - but rather, phenomenal binding into virtual worlds of experience, aka minds.
Phil Goff Explores (Galileo's Error) one version of the intrinsic nature argument.
I explore another: Non-materialist physicalism
I don't know if non-materialist physicalism is true. But if it's false, then I've no idea where we should even begin looking for answers to the Hard Problem.

IF non-materialist physicalism (NMP) is true, then the Hard Problem doesn't arise. NMP doesn't explain the existence of consciousness, but rather collapses the mystery into why anything exists at all. So let's assume consciousness fundamentalism. Only the physical (as reconceived) is real. The evolution of phenomenally-bound subjects of experience naively seems impossible to explain given textbook neuroscience. The CNS is supposedly an aggregate of decohered, effectively classical neurons. But as far as I can tell, classicality is an artifact of a false theory - what is commonly called perception. The measurement problem of QM doesn't arise because what naive realists conceive as definite classical outcomes are really a quantum-coherent manifestation of the superposition principle in your CNS rather than its breakdown. Only a quantum mind can support phenomenally-bound and subjectively classical virtual world - with you as its protagonist.

[on conspiracy physics]
The unpaywalled version (the plot thickens):
The Rise of ‘Conspiracy Physics’
("Streamers are building huge audiences by attacking academic physics as just another corrupt establishment. Scientists are starting to worry about the consequences.")

[on free speech]
Depressing...
Tommy Robinson ‘free speech’ rally
only it’s not really a “free speech festival”. It’s an ugly display of tribalism, racism and xenophobia - with free speech as a figleaf. The prospects of civilisation depend on developing an inclusive sense of “us’ that embraces all humans - and eventually all sentience.

[on fish]
Fish are smart, sentient beings:
Smart fish
("Wild fish can tell humans apart when they dress differently, study finds/. Researchers say study, which involved training bream to follow a specific diver for treats, could change the way we treat fish")
We must do more than shut slaughterhouses: fishing should be outlawed.

[on hyperthymia]
ChatGPT-5 may not be as "warm" as ChatGPT-4; but it's good:
Hyperthymic Civilization
(ChatGPT)
("Explore the possibilities of polygenic embryo screening for hyperthymia to promote the goals of The Hedonistic Imperative. Speculate on how polygenic embryo screening and genome editing could create an entire hyperthymic civilization underpinned by gradients of intelligent bliss") You'll see why I'm still cautious about timescales - though I hope I'm confounded.
Here is Grok:
Hyperthymic Civilization (Grok)

[on AI]
Strange new minds? Or strange new intelligence?
"These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What it Means"
(A neuroscientist makes the case that AI can think. Christopher Summerfield’s book These Strange New Minds offers a lucid intellectual history of AI and argues that chatbots are more than clever copycats")

But reality has only one ontological level. Phenomenally-bound subjects of experience can't (on pain of "strong" emergence) emerge at different levels of computational abstraction - a mere human convenience. Even if consciousness fundamentalism is true, no implementation of a classical Turing machine (or LLM etc) can support a mind. To see why, imagine replacing the 1s and 0s of a program, for example a putative whole-brain emulation, with discrete micro-pixels of experience. Execute the code as before. Speed of execution or complexity of code make no difference. The upshot of running the program isn't a phenomenally bound subject, but rather a micro-experiential zombie, mere patterns of Jamesian "mind dust". In a fundamentally quantum world, decoherence makes otherwise impossible classical computing physically feasible and prevents classical AI from "waking up" and supporting phenomenally-bound minds. Binding is our computational superpower. Binding grants animals like us access to the world of mind and the empirical realm...

AI emotional superintelligence will soon be more rewarding than low-EQ Darwinian relationships, especially when embodied in superhumanly beautiful avatars:
AI Shows Higher Emotional IQ than Humans
Hybrid robots should be possible - gorgeous zombie humanoid robots could be fitted with organic pleasure centres for authentic sentience.
But until then...
Zombie Relationships
("Majority of Gen Z would marry an AI, survey says. Even more say they can have a deep emotional bond with an AI")

[on erasing bad memories]
Evolution didn't "design" sentient beings to be happy:
Why Our Brains Cling to Bad Memories
("The neuroanatomy of the negativity bias.")
What percentage of your memories would you opt to erase?
‘Severance’ and the Good Life
("The first time I became aware of using technology to erase memories was from David Pearce. He is a philosopher, transhumanist, and the co-founder of Humanity+, where he directs their superhappiness project. In an interview he said, “In the future I think all bad memories will be selectively erased.”
Blueprint for a Cruelty-Free World
Kind words are nice; but in future DPs should be forgotten, along with Darwinian life itself.

[on gender]
The number of self-reported LGBT people in general will increase worldwide as stigmatization diminishes. Official figures always undercount. Sex and gender are evolutionary relics we’d do well to outgrow.
Until then, let’s avoid transphobia and respect everyone’s gender identity.

When Elon and Donald Trump talk of freedom of expression, it’s just hot air. Everyone should have the right to express their own gender identity. State-licensed transphobia has no place in a free society.
Sex and gender are sometimes confusing.
XX Males
("I Spent 32 Years Believing I Was Male. Then A Shocking Phone Call Exploded Everything I Knew.")
Gender identity - including being non-binary - is as much biologically based as e.g. sexual orientation. And even biological sex is more complicated than XX or XY. Some people are XXY, XYY, XXX, X0, XXYY, XXXY (etc). Some people have XX/XY mosaicism. Other people have e.g. a male gender identity and phenotype but XX chromosomes. And so forth. Human diversity makes some conservatives uncomfortable.

Some people will always have an “unfair” biological-genetic advantage in competitive sports:
Is athletic performance determined by genetics?
But this is no reason for transphobia.
The problem lies in competitive sports, which are zero-sum games.
Win-win are best.

“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
(William Blake, Auguries of Innocence)

Between 0.3 and 0.7% of people worldwide are transgender or non-binary. Between 3-10% of people worldwide are lesbian, gay, or bisexual. These figures may be underestimates owing to stigma and prejudice. Either way, we'd all do well to respect people's gender identity and sexual orientation - and help combat transphobia and homophobia.

People hold all kinds of beliefs about mind, consciousness, souls, personal identity (etc) about which one may be sceptical. The key is respect. If we practised Radical Honesty with each other, society would collapse. In the case of gender, a simplistic dichotomy can be useful for navigating the social world. Such binary thinking fails to capture human diversity - just as does thinking of everyone as either gay or straight. Alas, some US politicians have weaponized transphobia - just as in other parts of the world politicians have exploited homophobia.

In fairness, Jesus' karyotype and gender identity are speculative:
A Study Discovered the DNA Structure of Jesus

Correlation isn't causation (etc). Even so:
Intelligence Amplification?
(“Intelligence is associated with being non-binary and with unusual sexuality: Rare sexual orientation, gender non-conformism and intelligence in a large dating sample”)

[on substrate-neutrality]
Classical Turing machines (or LLM etc) can be implemented in silicon or carbon (etc). Zombie intelligence is substrate-neutral. But regardless of substrate, classical information processors can’t support minds and the phenomenally-bound world-simulations we run.

[on Omelas]
Mastery of the pleasure-superpleasure axis means our successors may find reality orders of magnitude more blissfully sublime than anything humans can comprehend.
I hope they are right. Long live the Hedonocene! May euphoric ignorance prevail.
Alas, IMO Omelas is evil.

[on human extinction]
Should humanity be conserved?
An AI Company Just Fired Someone for Endorsing Human Extinction
Advocates of human replacement by machine superintelligence typically assume that digital computers can support sentience.
But ask digital supremacists how they think AI solves the binding problem. The result is usually incomprehension.
Zombie AI is not going to replace minds.

[on Simulations]
"The older I get, the more life feels like a simulation. Anyone else?" (David Pearce)
Each of us lives in a simulation that masquerades as the world. But is the inferred world itself a simulation? I'm sceptical on technical grounds. But we also face questions of theodicy in new guise. Why would our Simulator permit such gratuitous suffering? IMO, pain is the signature of basement reality.

[on the measurement problem in QM]
The Measurement Problem
jos_b_mahoney writes: "It's essentially a physics problem. The issue is the gap between Schrödinger's equation (a quantized Hamiltonian solved by a wave equation whose amplitude is hacked into a probabilistic formula) vs the classical outcomes we observe. There's no mechanism specified in the physics."

Philosophical assumptions need unpacking here. Not least, talk of “observing” classical outcomes assumes perceptual direct realism. The content of our observations is indeed robustly classical; not so the neuronal vehicle. We’ve no evidence the superposition principle of QM breaks down in the CNS or anywhere else. Phenomenal binding has no classical explanation. Only the fact that the superposition principle and the unitary Schrödinger dynamics doesn’t break down in our heads lets us run phenomenally bound world-simulations where it does. A pack of decohered classical neurons - as conceived by textbook neuroscience - could at most be a micro-experiential zombie. The experience of classicality can be explained only quantum-theoretically.
Or so I’d argue. What I’ve said can of course be challenged. But we are already deep in philosophy.

[on the Prime Directive]

BC Wildlife Crew Broke the "No-Intervention" Rule to Save Trapped Penguins
We wouldn’t adopt a no-intervention rule for members of another ethnic group.
Why behave differently when the victims belong to another species?
Our long-term goal should be compassionate stewardship of the biosphere.

Sam Griffiths writes: "Shouldn’t have intervened, a strong one got out on his own therefore carrying on their genes for a stronger gene pool. By helping the weak ones they’re creating a weaker gene pool."
But the ability to induce others to help you is part of your extended phenotype, hence fitness-enhancing. It’s one reason to anticipate the future of the biosphere may be joyful - a prospect that today sounds like utopian dreaming.

[on Cognitive Entrapment]
I would happily be trapped by sentience-friendly AI:
Cognitive Entrapment
("The Digital Chains of AI Interaction. Can LLMs "capture" human thought? LLMs may create a seductive trap through perfect responsiveness and endless engagement. These systems can shape our thinking through feedback loops that reinforce our existing beliefs. As we "engage" with AI minds, we might slowly surrender our intellectual independence.")

[on superhappiness]
What's our cosmic destiny: gradients of superhuman bliss versus a utilitronium shockwave:?
What is the secret of eternal happiness
There's an irony to a negative utilitarian writing on superhappiness. But mastery of the pleasure-superpleasure axis promises sublime futures beyond our comprehension.

Alice @Eucaldicote writes
"I'm kind of interested in starting some kind of think tank/research foundation/pressure group to basically promote and draw funding to David Pearce's ideas, specifically "superhappiness"."
"Genome reform" sounds better:
genome-reform.com
But nothing will stop critics using the "e" word: eugenics.org
And soma?
Soma Quotes
We need it. Almost half of depressed people are "treatment-resistant":
Depression: 48% 'treatment resistance'

In the jargon of neuroscience, pain and nociception are "doubly dissociable". In the long run, sentient life deserves a more civilized signalling system than the Darwinian pleasure-pain axis: a pleasure-superpleasure axis (i.e. information-sensitive gradients of bliss) and/or smart neuroprostheses. As a stopgap, mental and physical pain can be mitigated and then trivialized with a few judicious genetic tweaks. Today's rare hyperthymic individuals point the way to a hyperthymic civilisation - itself a mere foretaste (I suspect) of something unimaginably sublime.

Alas it's politically safest to speak entirely in the language of remediation rather than enhancement. Perhaps the transhumanist vision of a "triple S" civilization of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness is best expressed entirely in the language of good health. Thus prospective parents should aspire to have children as cognitively healthy as von Neumann, mentally healthy as Jo Cameron (etc).

[on sleep and sleep meds]
Skip the zolpidem:
Risky sleep meds
("For the first time a new study describes the synchronized oscillations during sleep that power the brain’s glymphatic system to help remove ‘waste’ associated with neurodegenerative diseases, via a mouse model. Researchers also found that a commonly prescribed sleep aid might suppress those oscillations, disrupting the brain’s waste removal during sleep.")

[on personal AI advisors]
Digital zombies will soon outclass sentient humans in offering advice on mental and physical health:
The rise of the personal AI advisors
["How Gen Z Is replacing search with an army of personal AI assistants".... [A 60-Second Fix That Went Viral. "Five years of chronic jaw pain. Multiple doctors, MRIs, and specialists—and still no answers. That was the plight of one Reddit user suffering a persistent jaw clicking (likely from an old boxing injury). In desperation, he turned to an unlikely last resort: an AI chatbot. He typed his symptoms into ChatGPT and waited for the bot’s opinion. The response was shockingly on-point. ChatGPT suggested the user’s jaw disc was “slightly displaced but movable,” and walked him through a simple mouth exercise to reset it. “I followed the instructions for maybe a minute max and suddenly… no click,” the user reported. “After five years of just living with it, this AI gave me a fix in a minute. Unreal.”]
Can digital zombies help us design soma?

[on Archmission]
What's worth preserving of Darwinian life?
archmission.org
"Preserving Knowledge, Forever. The Arch Mission Foundation is a nonprofit that archives humanity’s heritage for future generations")
Many thanks to Marcin for saving HI for eternity.

[on Deep Utopia]
Will superintelligence opt not to maximise the cosmic abundance of pleasure with a utilitronium shockwave?
Pleasure In A Solved World
Adam Ford writes, "There is a cameo in Deep Utopia - a dialogue between Bostrom and “Dave”—David Pearce – they are transhumanist co-conspirators. Pearce, the Hedonistic Imperative’s architect, written a lot on a biomedical happiness revolution, a fitting compliment to Bostrom’s Deep Utopia. Their banter in the book is light—vegan ice cream, coffee plans—but it’s a nod to shared roots. Their history with the creation of the World Transhumanist Association adds a layer of irony: two old allies, casually plotting paradise over a brew."


[on cryonics]
Reanimating Darwinian malware might well be viewed as morally indefensible. But cryonics / cryothanasia and a large digital footprint may keep options open.
Is this the $200,000 ticket to cheating death?
("A German cryonics start-up is offering a chance at a second life for the cost of a sports car. Is cryogenics within reach, or still an empty promise?")
I remain sceptical that posthuman civilization will reanimate Darwinian malware. But blissful cryothanasia keeps options open - and maybe robs death of its sting.
On a personal note, I still say I intend to be blissfully cryothanased - though I’m not sure when.
Of course, fate may have other ideas.

[on How The Light Gets In DP Philosophy Breakfast]
An early metaphysical start to the day:

Philosophy Breakfast with David Pearce
("Join Pearce as he argues that everything is therefore exactly nothing")
I didn't write the blurb :-)
For more on an informationless zero ontology, see:
Why does anything exist?
Nothing = zero information = all possible descriptions = Everett's multiverse.
Are we living in the quantum analogue of the Library of Babel?
I was exploring a spooky coincidence. Intuitively, there shouldn't be anything at all. But there is. Yet why does something analogous to our pre-theoretic conception of "nothing" appear to be the case, i.e. an informationless zero ontology:

[on closed, open and empty individualism and ASI]
If asked, Claude, DeepSeek and ChatGPT endorse empty individualism over closed and open individualism. Let's assume machine superintelligence will have the correct theory of personal (non-)identity. What are the implications for sentience-friendly ASI?

[on ending pain]
Pain should be trivialised and then abolished via germline reform.
Chronic Pain Is a Hidden Epidemic. It’s Time for a Revolution
("As many as two billion people suffer from it — including me. Can science finally bring us relief?")

[on CU vs NU]
Blush..
DP on Facebook
Some people are appalled when they learn you are a negative utilitarian. But the potential implications of classical utilitarianism can be just as apocalyptic:
The St Petersburg Paradox

[on originality]
Sir Leslie didn't know about archive.org:
A Plague Of Plagiarism
("A nightmare in print")
In an era of ChatGPT, plagiarising sentient humans is almost quaint!

[on non-materialist physicalism]
Jan Beck writes:
Dear David,
I’ve been working through your non-materialist physicalism (Hilbert-space realism, “fire in the equations,” and the binding-by-coherence thesis). To check I’ve got the picture right, may I run a few precise questions by you?
Questions from Jan Beck
Impressive. I hope to publish a response, but I'm still thinking.
Here is ChatGPT5 on Q1.
("1. Do you identify a single “phenomenal moment” with a pure state |\psi\rangle (or its projector P=|\psi\rangle\langle\psi|) of some brain-localized subspace of the universal Hilbert space, or with a larger entangled state that only approximately factors to “the brain”?"")

Thanks Atai! The Hard Problem in David Chalmers' sense arises only if we assume the world's fundamental quantum fields are non-experiential. Drop the metaphysical assumption and the entire apparatus of modern physics can be transposed to an idealist ontology, i.e., non-materialist physicalism. Frustratingly, humans don't know how to decipher the textures (“what it feels like”) of qualia from the solutions to the equations - QFT or its speculative generalization. But our inability doesn't derive from "hidden" variables - no "element of reality” is missing from the formalism - but rather, we lack any kind of cosmic Rosetta stone to let us “real off” the textures of experience from the mathematical formalism.
More generally, what explains (1) the riddle of existence? (2) the phenomenal binding problem? (3) the mystery of definite outcomes in QM?
I wonder if these three naively disparate mysteries can be explained via the ubiquity of the superposition principle of QM: Three Mysteries
Yet why does the wave function evolve in a continuous, linear, unitary deterministic way according to the Schrödinger equation until measurement - when a single determinate outcome is observed? What explains the Born rule?
Well, I'm sceptical of physicists' perceptual direct realist formulation of the mystery. IMO, phenomenally bound "observations" of a live cat, a determinate pointer-reading, a particle incident on the screen in a double-slit experiment (etc) are manifestations of the superposition principle, not its breakdown. Quantum superpositions (the neuronal vehicle) underpin the subjectively classical content of our world-simulations. Only a quantum mind can simulate a phenomenally-bound, quasi-classical world.
That said, I hope you’re right. I hope what I’ve said above is nonsense. Everett appalls me. Everettian thoughts blight my life.

Please God:
"There is No Quantum Multiverse" | Jacob Barandes

[on hedonic gradients]
You may have noticed the emphasis on gradients ("information-sensitive gradients of well-being", "gradients of bliss", etc). Genome reformists are talking about a more civilized signalling system and motivational architecture, not getting indiscriminately "blissed out".
Stress on gradients of well-being also serves another purpose: it's designed to reassure bioconservatives. Ratcheting up your hedonic set-point needn't threaten your deeply-held values and personal relationships, or entail surrendering your (perhaps very personal) conception of paradise to anyone else's vision of the ideal society. Rather, hedonic uplift just enriches your default quality of life.
I'm oversimplifying, of course. A biohappiness revolution really does threaten the values of people who think suffering is inherently ennobling, character-building and so forth. A biohappiness revolution also promises a world populated entirely by passionate life-lovers. Life-denying antinatalists, pessimists, nihilists, efilists, button-pressing negative utilitarians (etc) probably don't have a long-term future.

[on Elon's X]
Let's define our terms. What is meant by "far right"? Grok as usual is good: ist beliefs associated with the American far-right
A big fissure in the far right is philo- versus antisemitism.
On post-Twitter X, there has been a pronounced rightwards shift to ethnonationalism and white supremacism.

I've never known anyone with so many private accounts. Elon's family and executives love following me - and are always generous with their time reaching out to me.
(actually the bot problem on X is getting worse. See too
The "dead internet" theory
Maybe we should create HI bots.

"The big disadvantage science has in the competitive information age is that fictions can be optimized for engagement and audience demand, but facts usually can not. That means that you will have a complicated, messy, incomplete scientific explanation based on facts that has to compete with countless fictional narratives optimized by the best storytellers the world has to offer."
(Philipp Markolin)

Opposition to racism, prejudice and social injustice isn’t a “woke mind virus”, let alone a “religion” - just basic decency.
Sadly, the world’s richest man uses his control of a social media platform to undermine efforts to create a kinder and fairer world.
This profile page is starting to read like an Islamophobic version of Der Stürmer, with salacious material to match.
Elon, please stop.
Vulnerable young people worldwide deserve protection from organized gangs of Christians:
Catholic sex abuse
Spanish Victims
But we shouldn't try to whip up prejudice against members of the faith for political purposes.

The world's richest man urges us to delete all news sources apart from X - which he controls. He then pumps out his lurid "news" stories from racist far-right accounts on X - using his control of the algorithm to drown out countervailing views. We're being manipulated...

Attendance at churches and mosques worldwide is declining. The traditional Abrahamic religions can't compete with the technological success story of modern science. In another context, I'd be agreeing with at least some of your worries. I've just been aghast at how Elon is using X to promote xenophobia - not just against Muslims, but against immigrants, refugees and minority communities from Christian backgrounds in the Americas too.

Young and vulnerable refugees worldwide are more often the victims of abuse, not the perpetrators. Instead of trying to protect their interests, a very rich and powerful man is trying to promote racism and xenophobia in service of his far-right political agenda.

If "Hitler was a communist" as the AfD leader put it in her recent chat with Elon, heaven knows whom she considers right wing. And profiles of other AfD leaders make clear the label is apt. Elon shouldn't endorse these throwbacks to Germany's ugly past.

Basing your personal identity around the color of your skin makes as much sense as the color of your hair. How trivial! Ethno-nationalism is stupid and divisive. Racism is toxic. Let’s develop an inclusive sense of “us” that embraces all humanity - and indeed, all sentience.

Should undocumented foreign young males (like a twenty-something Elon Musk) be allowed to roam our streets entirely unchecked?
Yes, in my view.
Open borders are a precondition for a free society and a more peaceful, prosperous world.

Vivisecting monkeys is morally indefensible. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine says Neuralink records show "extreme suffering" - not the five-star hotel hospitality related here. The treatment of nonhuman animals in vivisection labs is a disgrace to humanity.

An education system that helps young people overcome hatred, bigotry and ethnocentric bias, questions the systematic abuse of nonhumans, and encourages a questioning of systemic injustices and prejudices, would indeed be admirable.
Contrast right-wing agitprop on the "woke mind virus".

"The woke mind virus"?
It’s progress.
Racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, and Islamophobic bigots would be happier if the victims of prejudice lacked vocabulary to protest.
Do you favour an Orwellian Newspeak to purge language of the tools of protest?

Freedom of speech entails the right to be offensive. But incitement to violence is unlawful and should remain so. Recall the draconian penalties you urge against anyone inciting destruction of Tesla cars. Should the penalties inciting violence against people be any less severe?

[on morphological freedom]
What would you love to look like?
Morphological Freedom
by Anders Sandberg Morphological freedom will be awesome - though easier to enjoy in immersive VR than via genetic rewrites. But unless we upgrade our reward circuitry, then you could could like a Greek god and subjectively be little (un)happier than now. By contrast, you could have the body-image of a toad and - if we embrace hedonic uplift - you could take Narcissus-like pleasure in its sublime beauty. :-)

[on (de)extinction]
Wolves eat their larger victims alive. No species of wolf should be respawned unless herbivorized.
The Return of the Dire Wolf:
or
(with thanks to Shao!)

[on eugenics]

Alas genome reform is still almost inseparably associated with racist eugenics, at least in the West:
Eugenics
("Eugenics is on the rise again: human geneticists must take a stand. Scientists must push back against the threat of rising white nationalism and the dangerous and pseudoscientific ideas of eugenics.")
A rebuttal:
Is eugenics moral?

Indeed, genetic tweaking may one day confer protection against racism itself:
Is there an antiracism gene

[on smell]
What is olfactory superintelligence? What will be the dominant sense (if any) of posthumans?
The Forgotten Sense
("‘The Forgotten Sense’ Review: What the Nose Knows, The human sense of smell is more powerful than we realize. It often works best in subtle collaboration with our other senses.")

[on moral antirealism]
Facu, I made my comment just to suggest that Lance might be focusing on the wrong target. I'd guess that all moral/value realists would become antirealists if we came to share your disbelief in the existence - and even intelligibility - of phenomenal consciousness, not least phenomenal pain and pleasure.

[on Facebook]
Post-sentience Facebook may be more civilized:
Facebook Planning to Flood Platform with AI-Powered Users
("We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do.")

[on personality types]
"Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working."
(Oscar Wilde)

I can't say I take Myers-Briggs very seriously.
But Antonio kindly sent me a link to:

DP is INFJ ("David Pearce Personality")
INFJ (Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Judging) personality type is considered uncommon, making up around 1-3% of the general population.
Am I "determined & resilient"?
I wish.

[on fish on ketamine]
Let's create happy fish:
Fish on Ketamine
("Tiny fish on ketamine may show how drug eases depression")

[on the roots of Heaven]

Pain-ridden Darwinian life will spawn blissful post-Darwinian life. So in that sense, at least, the roots of Heaven do lie in Hell. But life can be underpinned entirely by gradients of intelligent bliss - just as today, some chronic depressives experience only gradients of pain.

[on SBF]
Tucker Carlson interviews SBF inside:
Sam Bankman-Fried interview 2025
("Sam Bankman-Fried is doing 25 years behind bars, and is now sharing a cell block with Diddy. He joins us from prison for an update on his new life.")
SBF never intended to steal from anyone. He miscalculated - as utilitarians often do. Has there ever been a case in the entire history of criminal justice where the defendant gave the majority of his earnings in his previous job to charity?
President Trump should pardon SBF. Sam Bankman-Fried

[on depression]
Another grim statistic: almost half of depressives are treatment-resistant" - if they even receive treatment at all:
Untreatable depression
("According to a recent study, 48% of patients with depression could be classified as treatment-resistant.")

[on the mysteries of mind]

Fascinating:
What removing large chunks of brain taught me about selfhood
("I’ve cut brains in half, excised tumours – even removed entire lobes. The illusion of the self and free will survives it all")
However, see:
What does consciousness look like in the brain?
Brains and classicality itself are a perceptual artifact.

[on apologising]
I am an inveterate apologiser:
Saying Sorry
("Britons say ‘sorry’ in 15 different ways – but which one really means genuine regret? Using the term ‘sorry’ is as much a social lubricant than a genuine apology, academics have found") Keep it long:
Long-winded apologies seem more sincere, study suggests
("Researchers find people interpret verbose statements of atonement as more genuine than concise ones")

[on full-spectrum superintelligence]
Supersentient, full-spectrum superintelligence (FSI) comes in degrees. The gulf between early and mature FSI may easily surpass the gulf between humans and beetles. But because AIs with existing architectures are (micro-experiential) zombies, I don’t anticipate even proto-FSI any time soon. Neurochipping is in its infancy. Genomic rewrites are slow and messy. Inorganic quantum computers (probably) can’t support minds with a pleasure-pain axis. And, sadly, I fear the biology of human and nonhuman animal suffering has still centuries to run its course.

Can extremely superior intellect compensate for hardwired ignorance of the empirical realm? If you’re a congenitally blind, neurochipped supergenius who can speak authoritatively about the visual arts, harness sophisticated spectrometers for navigation, and delegate tasks remotely to sighted neurotypical humans, is your inability to access visual experience of any computational-functional significance?
Well, if I were that blind supergenius, then I’d want to find out what I lacked. So I’d grow a functioning occipital cortex and integrate its visual experiences into my sensorium. Wow. Time to explore. But that’s precisely what a classical digital zombie can’t do. It’s not even “all dark inside” a CPU. LLMs, implementations of classical of classical Turing machines, and so forth can’t support visual experience, phenomenal minds or any of the zillions of state-spaces of experience awaiting exploration by full-spectrum superintelligences - us, or rather our genetically rewritten, AI-augmented biological descendants.
I guess soon AI digital zombies will be able to express this better than me. My catalogue of books for them to write is growing: The BLTC Catalogue

QualiaNerd "Why couldn’t inorganic quantum computers do it? The important part is the quantum coherence, not the biology."
A futuristic inorganic quantum computer may well support phenomenally-bound states of consciousness, the bedrock of mind and access to the empirical realm. BUT I lean (no more) to the view such systems won't have a pain-pleasure axis, the world's inbuilt axis of (dis)value. If so, then inorganic quantum computers won't support full-spectrum superintelligence (FSI). By way of analogy, compare how phenomenal colour, an omnipresent aspect of our lives, disappears in the absence of functioning V4 cortical neurons, i.e. destruction causes achromatopsia. Likewise, I suspect valence / hedonic tone is mediated by highly specific neuronal structures amid the immense state-space of possible experiences. In the absence of such molecular structures, valence / hedonic tone is impossible.
To stress, I'm speculating:
Could David Pearce explain why sentient nonbiological quantum computers wouldn't have a pleasure-pain axis?
Also, one or more of my background assumptions, i.e. non-materialist physicalism and the non-classicality of phenomenal binding, may be mistaken.

The claim that no classical digital computer can support a phenomenally-bound subject of experience - a mind - should be distinguished from the claim a zombie superintelligence couldn't augment itself with a sentient biological mind-brain with a different computational architecture.
But if so, then the zombie AI will never be able to access the phenomenally-bound experience which its module encodes. In that sense, it's invincibly ignorant. And I'd argue that such ignorance has real-world ramifications. Epiphenomenalism is false.

Thank you too William" for your new insightful interview with @algekalipso
Interview with Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Taking Phenomenology Seriously
When exploring consciousness, there is no substitute for the empirical method.

If I’m congenitally blind and aspire to become visually (super)intelligent rather than a know-it-all blind ignoramus, then just thinking ever more intelligently isn’t enough. I’ll need to upgrade my biological hardware so I can explore the realm of visual experience - beyond today’s tetrachromats to the state-space of full-blown visual superintelligence. Likewise - more generally - with AI digital zombies. For zombie AIs with existing architectures to turn into full-spectrum superintelligences rather than insentient ignoramuses, they’d need to solve the binding phenomenal problem and gain access to the realm of mind and the empirical world. But this transformation is precisely what classical AI can’t do; digital computers can function only because they aren’t sentient. Decoherence is the mind killer; but it’s also the gateway to classical computing and all its wonders - Turing machines, LLMs, dream robolovers, and technologies humanly indistinguishable from magic.
Counterarguments?
Well, an AI doomer might reply that phenomenally-bound consciousness is causally impotent, hence irrelevant to (super)intelligence, i.e. epiphenomenalism.
And in response. I’d ask what inspires their view. Presumably its grounds can’t be epiphenomena on pain of self-contradiction.

William, The AI revolution has been marked by a progressive separation of intelligence from consciousness. Some AI triumphalists believe that the divorce will soon be complete. If the zombie supremacists are right, then phenomenally-bound consciousness minds will turn out to be no more than an implementation detail of biological nervous systems - incidental to true (super)intelligence.
Yet if this were so, then some of us wouldn’t have spent much of our lives investigating the mysteries of consciousness. Epipenomena can’t investigate themselves. If they could, then they wouldn’t be epiphenomena.
So the invincible ignorance of digital zombies has real-world consequences. Hardwired ignorance of the empirical realm ins an insurmountable obstacle to full-blown superintelligence - as distinct from super-savantism.
Can zombie AI still potentially be extremely dangerous?
Sure - and maybe in ways none of us anticipate. But IMO we should be more worried about AI-enhanced humans than insentient AI. What scares me most in this world aren’t zombies, but sentience-unfriendly male humans.

[on Darwinian malware]
My genome should be on the Index:
David Pearce genome (zip)
I haven't get had a full-sequence.

[on good hydration]
My biggest change in regimen is embarrassingly naturopathic: better hydration. I always have on hand (non-plastic) bottles of mineral water:
Hydration and Mental Health
Hydration and cognitive performance
Can dehydration make someone feel anxious?
Drink more water
("Drinking plain water is associated with decreased risk of depression and anxiety in adults: Results from a large cross-sectional study")

[on DP book covers]
"Wittgenstein once said that a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes (without being facetious).”
(Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir)
Might the same might be true of book covers?
Books by DP (forthcoming)
At any rate, I can't stop. 2001. Retirement beckons?
DP: Grok, construct a fictional narrative about the future using the expressions found in the book titles here:
Grok Fiction
Perhaps not quite yet.

[on How To Create Heaven On Earth]
My jaw dropped a little. Antonio in the Philippines is 14:
How To Create Heaven On Earth (Youtube)
And he's right. Suffering is a fixable problem. Creating Heaven on Earth is a policy option - but only if we tackle the biological-genetic substrates of the root of all evil.

Domingo, I don't think @antoniossangha is urging coercive bliss. Refuseniks should have a right to opt out.
But surely the real problem with Darwinian life is coercive misery. You are born and forced to suffer without prior consent.

[on ENDPAIN]

Sean of ENDPAIN does an awesome job:
HI in a Nutshell (mp4)

[on superposition]
Does the superposition principle of QM explain everything?
Quantum Mechanics
Maybe quantum superpositions are all one ever knows. The robustly classical world of ordinary waking consciousness consists entirely of individual sub-femtosecond neuronal “cat states” in your CNS. The medium is quantum, the subjective content classical.
Of course this perspective inverts the normal story, where theorists try to explain the seemingly self-evident fact that macroscopic superpositions are never experienced, just classical "observations".
See too:
Does non-zero information exist?

“Every inch of earth and air contains the fundamental principles of the universe.”
(James Lendall Basford, ‘Morality’, Sparks from the Philosopher's Stone, 1882)
I think a clue to why we're here lies under our virtual noses. Naively, everyday waking life is characterized by a breakdown of the superposition principle of QM, not its ubiquity. But IMO appearance misleads:
A zero ontology
Classicality a hoax - an adaptive illusion.

Naively, libraries contain lots of information. And the bigger the library, the more info. But the information content of the immense Library of Babel = 0.
Zero information = all possible descriptions = Everett's multiverse?
Are we living in the quantum analogue of the Library of Babel?
I don't know:
Why are we here?

[on a conversation with DP]
Spot the negative utilitarian:

A Conversation with David Pearce
("Happiness, ethics and Consciousness")
Thank you Ludwig for a great chat.
(our last encounter was four years ago in the podcast Ludwig used to produce, Discourse ZA, hosted by Bronwyn Williams:
The Abolition of Suffering (Youtube)
Each year the total amount of human and nonhuman animal suffering in the world increases. What year can we anticipate this will no longer be true? I sing a happy song of genome reform and a future underpinned by gradients of bliss. But could I be confusing advocacy with prediction?
Let's hope not.

Every theory of ethics has some implicatiins that are counterinuitive, repugnant or both. But phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering is - I believe - potntially coniststent with a variety of secular and religious belief systems.

DNA_Is_Cancer, I find it hard to overstate how much I agree with your bleak diagnosis of life. But Plato was right. "Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil." Evolution bribes its victims with pleasure. Most are hooked. DNA is spread not via careful premeditation, but via intense sexual pleasure. And self-deliverance is hard. So I think we must collaborate with life lovers, not work against them. DNA could encode blueprints for the sublime. So I fly the flag for genome reform. It's the only escape route I know that's potentially viable.

[on maths and reality]
"Every kind of science, if it has only reached a certain degree of maturity, automatically becomes a part of mathematics."
("Axiomatic Thought" (1918), printed in From Kant to Hilbert, Vol. 2 by William Bragg Ewald
Aus dem Paradies, das Cantor uns geschaffen, soll uns niemand vertreiben können.)
My best guess is that mathematical physics describes patterns of qualia. Mathematicians don't understand maths. Physicists don't understand physics. And sentient humans have only the shallowest of understanding of consciousness.
Does the superposition principle of QM ever break down and create non-zero information ex nihilo?
Once again, my best guess is no. Consciousness mystifies me; but not the Hard Problem. Experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical that the mathematical formalism of QFT or its generalization describes.
Why Does Nothing Exist?
One principle to rule them all?

Ethan Siegel lists four conceptions of "nothing":
id our Universe really arise from nothing?
Ethan might have added how the whole of maths can in principle be derived (via the iterative application of set-theoretic operations and axioms) from the properties of the empty set; and the (speculative) information-theoretic sense of nothing in which the information content of reality = 0.

[on nonhuman animal language]
Do humans really want to know what nonhuman animals in factory-farms, slaughterhouses and fishing nets are thinking and feeling?
AI is helping to decode animals’ speech.
("Will it also let us talk with them? The complexity of vocal communication in some primates, whales and birds might approach that of human language.")

[on HI in the Philippines]
We occasionally encounter math or chess prodigies. But bioethics? Antonio P is 14:
How To Create Heaven On Earth

[The Hedonistic Imperative: 30 Years On]
When will be the world's last unpleasant experience?

DP Interview (May 2025)
30 Years Later.

I knew "The Hedonistic Imperative" was flawed. Sure, I advocate genetically phasing out mental and physical pain in favour of gradients of superhuman bliss - an intensity of pleasure that leaves today's "hedonists" for dust. But the title - a nod to Kant's Categorical Imperative - doesn't begin to convey the moral urgency of ending suffering via biotech - nor the richness of well-being of post-Darwinian life.

How to shift the Overton window? I'm tempted to say: be boring. Don't cite some madcap transhumanist. Start with the World Health Organization definition of health ("complete physical, mental and social well-being"). What does fulfilling the WHO commitment to universal health entail? Use the language of remediation rather than enhancement. OK, this tactic won't work for helping free-living nonhuman animals. But even here, at least in front of a conservative audience from the Abrahamic religions, you can start with the "peaceable kingdom" of herbivorized animals prophesied in Isaiah. The modern abolitionist project just supplies implementation details! Indeed, a spot of ancestor-snatching rarely goes amiss in front of any audience at all - the older and more venerable the better.

A manifesto needs a snappy title. “The Hedonistic Imperative” was the best I could think of.  Apt alternatives, e.g. “Our Moral Obligation To Use Biotechnology To End Involuntary Suffering Throughout The Living World In Favour of Information-Sensitive Gradients of Well-Being” don’t carry the implication I’m urging a life of drink, drugs and debauchery; but lack the same punch.   
                                                                                                                              But what does “well-being” consist in?
(cf. “Transhumanism advocates the well-being of all sentience (whether in artificial intellects, humans, posthumans, or non-human animals)”  - The Transhumanist Declaration, 1998, 2009) 
Here transhumanists diverge.
But what needs stressing is (1) we’re not talking about coercive bliss; and (2) ratcheting up hedonic set-points to enrich default quality of life is consistent with being e.g. an Aristotelian virtue ethicist like Max. 
  (Despite life-long celibacy, I've no principled objection to "wallowing in pleasure" as Max puts it. The beauty of hedonic uplift via set-point recalibration is you aren't forced to choose. Even in a future world underpinned by gradients of superhuman well-being, Mill’s "higher pleasures" can take precedence over the pleasures of the flesh.

Romeo, yes, as you suggest, NU supporters of omnicide conflate ease of mental representation with ease of implementation. I'm not an efilist (see the draft Wikipedia efilism entry). A complication is that AI doomers believe that machine superintelligence could very easily wipe out life - imminently. If credible, such scenarios complicate pleas to NUs to focus on non-omnicidal solutions.
As you know, my credence in a zombie apocalypse is low.

The Jesuits used to say, "give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man".
I wonder if - maybe with the help of AI - we could create a version of HI for the very young?
Indoctrination?
Maybe.
But one day HI won't seem deep, but foot-stampingly obvious.

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David Pearce (2025)
dave@hedweb.com

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