JANUARY - 2026
[on Year 2025]
Farewell to 2025.
[on a SF EA Global Feb 13–15, 2026]
"No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently"
(Agnes de Mille)
I attended a momentous EA Global in San Francisco. AI safety folk were much in evidence. I did my spiel on the binding problem. Digital mind is an oxymoron. LLMs and their agential offspring are
insentient ignoramuses that impressively outperform pre-neurochipped humans in many cognitive domains but won't be staging a zombie coup. The empirical realm belongs to us. Yet the defining moment of the conference (for me at least) was being offered a 300mg gabapentin (Neurontin) capsule. Thank you Jordan. I'm still not entirely clear why I decided to take it. I don't try random pills. Gabapentin had struck me as too uninteresting to be worth even noting in the Good Drug Guide. Despite its suggestive name and structural similarity to GABA, gabapentin doesn't bind to GABA receptors. Nor does gabapentin directly affect GABA uptake or synthesis. Instead, gabapentin binds specifically to the α2δ-1 subunit of voltage-sensitive calcium channels, decreasing their density on the neuronal cell surface. Or at least, that's how the usual neurobabble goes. By blocking the α2δ-1 subunit of voltage-sensitive calcium channels, gabapentin reduces the release of excitatory neurotransmitters implicated in pain-signalling, notably glutamate and substance P. The pain of my own NU existence has been almost entirely psychological. My drug regimen has been constant for over two decades. Since autumn 1995, my ancestral namesakes have all taken selegiline. As Wikipedia notes, I wrote the HI manifesto in six weeks after starting selegiline. Since 2002, I've also taken c.200 mg amineptine daily. Optimising my diet, sleep and exercise routine like a naturopath has doubtless helped too. But I've now added 4 x 150 mg gabapentin to my regimen. Gabapentin has let me more-or-less break my post-Covid topical steroid addiction (TSWS). In addition, using gabapentin takes the anxiogenic edge off my predominantly dopaminergic regimen. Gabapentin also makes me feel somewhat "euthymic", as psychiatrists say, an everyday psychosis mediating (what passes for) mental health in several billion natalist human primates daily worldwide. Higher doses make me feel a bit giddy. Of course, a measure of tolerance to gabapentin's effects soon sets in. Back in Portugal, where I'm currently staying (long story), I'm a fairly troubled soul once more, brooding on suffering, Everett and impotence to save the world. But tolerance is incomplete. I feel more mellow. Compared to Bryan Johnson's adventure with 5-MeO-DMT ("the God molecule"), my little experiment feels embarrassingly tame. But my regimen has changed.
I should add there was more to SF than my gabapentin epiphany. I gave an extemporized talk on Avoiding Ethical Catastrophes (pdf, thank you Shao) (mp3) at Sentient Futures. Previously, I'd explored how Rare Earthism - my own tentative view - could be wrong. If so, then post-suffering Earth-originating life has an obligation to launch cosmic rescue missions to fix other Darwinian hellworlds within our cosmological horizon. Here at Sentient Futures again, I tried (more lamely this time) to steelman what I don't believe, namely that AI run on classical digital computers - and indeed futuristic non-biological quantum computers - can support phenomenally bound minds endowed with a pleasure-pain axis. Your notional digital "whole-brain emulation" is a mindless zombie. I'll be back in the Bay Area in late May for the inaugural Machine Consciousness conference at Berkeley if anyone would like to plot the future of sentience in our forward light-cone; or hang out.
[on gabapentin]
How do users describe the subjective effects of supratherapeutic doses of gabapentin?
Describe the subjectively enjoyable effects of high-dosage gabapentin reported by some users:
Taking gabapentin can induce feelings of mild euphoria in a minority of subjects. Discuss possible mechanisms:
Sweatshorts, yes, gabapentin can induce mild dissociative states.
I feel embarrassed speaking of my gabapetin experience though - I'd much rather be talking about some profound mystical epiphany on 5-MeO-DMT, like Bryan Johnson - so much more...well, alpha. Talking about gabapentin feels like admitting how the very occasional fleeting euphoria I get catching a Proustian whiff of gasoline beats taking the exquisite $20K "Hedonium Shockwave" of QRI perfumiers. But alas it's true.
Zombification? My mind is so dark I normally try to keep thought-episodes to a minimum. But a modicum of thinking is a necessary evil of Darwinian life, so it's well to be wary:
Gabapentin and Dementia?
For a more measured appraisal of gabapentinoids, see Henry's Gabapentinoids I have known and loved.
[on ending suffering]
Preview:
X (Twitter) : Facebook :
Instagram :
mp4
Would Buddha have pressed the OFF button?
The trouble with invoking Buddha is one can be almost sure that someone in the audience will say you haven't understood the True Meaning Of Buddhism. Maybe.
On stage with Anders Sandberg and Sarah Wilson at the Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI event:
Full: mp4
See too:
The Technology Trap (mp4)
and
The Pursuit of Happiness (mp4)
And here is a YouTube podcast with Micah Zarin.
"Should We Abolish Suffering?"
Preview:
YouTube :
mp4
Full:
YouTube :
mp4
Highlights:
DP and Micah
"There are no experts on consciousness..." (mp4)
DP and Micah
"'We live in Hilbert space'? Ah. Yes, I’ve never known anything else..."
(mp4)
DP and Micah
"We can engineer children with extremely high hedonic set-points..." (mp4)
DP and Micah
"Humans are the worst Darwinian malware. And yet..." (mp4)
DP and Micah
"Don't explore psychedelia until we've sorted out our reward circuitry..." (mp4)
DP and Micah
"Ending predation - the idea that sentient beings shouldn't harm each other will one day seem axiomatic..." (mp4)
DP and Micah
"We need to devise a new signalling system - life based on gradients of bliss..." (mp4)
Imagine if new computer code were conceived in the heat of sexual passion.
Crazy.
Alas genetic code for sentient beings gets chosen in the height of sexual ecstasy. I hope tomorrow the code for all sentient life can be chastely designed to the same exacting specifications as Tesla cars.
Robert, I think in one sense suffering can be extensively studied only by not deeply, empathetically understanding what one is investigating in any but a shallow, formal sense. If one really understood suicidal despair or cluster headaches in any but a detached abstract way, then one would go insane. Even now, I don't really understand what I'm nominally writing about. So exactly how does one optimise the mix of selective ignorance / knowledge so as to be maximally productive?
I agree with you about the need for an algonomy - though algonomy is a science that (uniquely) can, I hope, one day be forgotten.
One query though. Does the problem of suffering really fascinate most people? From my experience, most people try not to think about suffering. It's a turnoff. One of the reasons that I focus so much on the vision of a glorious blissful future is that naïve suffering-focused ethics can be depressing. One loses most of one's audience - and an exponentially more brutally competitive battle for
attention is unfolding.
So what's the right balance for the abolitionist project?
I don't know.
And kudos to QRI Andrés and his team for spinning off ClusterFree from QRI.
Extreme hyperthymics? A few have come forward. I hope their close biological relatives can have their full genome sequenced too. All prospective parents should be offered the opportunity to choose low-suffering genomes for their future children.
Such a program would be extremely cost-effective.
I suspect more extreme hyperthymics still await discovery, unknown because - like Jo Cameron - they think their default hedonic tone is "normal".
In the immense state-space of qualia, most of which are intrinsically neither hedonically good nor hedonically bad, evolution via natural selection stumbled on the pleasure-pain axis and "encephalised" it. The contents of our phenomenal world-simulations (aka "perception") accordingly feel good or bad in (typically) fitness-enhancing ways - a bland description that fails to evoke the indescribable horrors of severe suffering.
However, a species has evolved, Homo sapiens, that can imagine more civilized signalling systems. I've focused on blueprints for engineering a pleasure-superpleasure axis - a rich information signalling system driven by gradients of intelligent bliss, with a nod to smart neuroprostheses.
But do you think there are others?
Kind? Bless you. Yes, I try to be kind. But fixing the problem of suffering will call for a mix of remorseless hyper-systematization and Super-Machiavellian political guile.
A Hundred Year Plan to Fix the Problem of Suffering: The 100 Year Plan.
For expository convenience, some details are omitted.
[on ecstatic epilepsy]
The terminally ill, the neuropathic pain-ridden, the suicidally depressed - but really, all sentient beings - deserve to taste the divine:
Ecstatic Seizures
("Some People Experience Blissful Ecstasy Right Before a Seizure. Could Understanding This Feeling Help Treat Depression?")
Understanding ecstatic epileptic seizures promises to unlock the molecular signature of pure bliss - a momentous discovery in the history of science, ethics and medicine. This phenomenon shouldn't be treated as niche, but mainstreamed.
And why optimize only hyperactivation of the dorsal anterior insula?
Superintelligence should optimize all accessible matter and energy likewise.
“I would give my whole life for this one instant”, says Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Idiot. "A happiness unthinkable in the normal state and unimaginable for anyone who hasn’t experienced it", Dostoevsky told his friend, Russian philosopher Nikolai Strakhov. Far richer experiences can be the default state of existence if we use gene therapy and AI to reprogram matter and energy for sublimity.
Dostoevsky's epilepsy
("A case report and comparison")
[on insentient AI]
We are creating alien intelligences, not alien minds.
The insentience of our machines isn't incidental: it's computationally hardwired.
Digital AI can function only because it's not sentient.
No phenomenal binding = no mind.
Phenomenal binding makes animal nervous systems special.
[on fun]
Wild mice, rats, shrews, and even frogs and slugs can enjoy life to the full:
Jungle Gym
("Wild Animals Run on Wheels for Fun")
It would be easy to treat this result just as an amusing curiosity.
But imagine replacing “Nature, red in tooth and claw” with a biosphere based on fun.
Impossible?
Not with biotech and ubiquitous AI harnessed to engineer a pan-species welfare state.
All sentient beings deserve fun.
[on the Ethereum ecosystem]
Vitalik is awesome:
Vitalik Buterin's website
Let's just say Vitalik does good deeds by stealth. The HedWeb ecosystem is in his debt.
Post-EIP-4844, Ethereum isn’t really a monolithic chain anymore - it’s a modular settlement layer with a distinct blobspace fee market, where rollups internalize execution and the real game is optimizing data availability and sequencing.
Or so I like to say when trying to pass myself off as one of the natives, though it's hard to keep a straight face.
[on abolitionist AI]
I was completely blindsided by the transformer revolution in AI. A tantalising prospect now arises. Could abolitionist AI fix the problem of suffering this century rather than over hundreds of years as I anticipated in HI? Could a signalling system based on genetically programmed gradients of bliss be engineered over decades not centuries?
Alas, the socio-political obstacles make me fear such a vision is utopian. But if a breakthrough into the socio-political mainstream occurs (how?), the technical obstacles to heaven-on-Earth are far less daunting than they seemed 30 years ago.
Modifying a dozen or so genes (SCN9, FAAH, FAAH-OUT, SLC6A4, BDNF, FKBP5,
OPRM1, COMT, CRHR1, HTR2A, OXTR, IL6/TNF) could defang and even trivialise unpleasant experience. Archaic biological robots can glimpse if not grok the prospect.
Can AI do the equivalent of AlphaFold for designing alleles / allelic combinations mediating lifelong bliss - or better, elevated hedonic set-points that deliver lifelong information-sensitive gradients of bliss?
I believe so. But how can a biohappiness revolution go mainstream?
See too:
On the Future of Species - unnatural selection
("Geneticist and entrepreneur Adrian Woolfson argues that genome engineering and AI will let us design organisms beyond nature’s limits")
Compare C. elegans. This little millimetre-long nematode is a conscious being like you or me. C. elegans is a phenomenally bound subject of experience who loves morphine. Sure, with only 302 neurons, C. elegans won’t be exploring higher category theory. But C. elegans has a mind, whereas superintelligent AI run on a classical digital computer is a zombie. Binding is the computational-functional superpower of animal minds. It’s non-classical. Binding grants access to the empirical realm of conscious mind forever impenetrable to digital zombies.
Morphine-loving C. elegans
("Caenorhabditis Elegans Exhibits Morphine Addiction-like Behavior via the Opioid-like Receptor NPR-17")
[on the medium of thought]
Shivon Zilis writes:
"When you think, what medium do you tend to think in?
Would be very curious to hear how you’d describe the base unit(s) of your thoughts and how they feel to you.
I assumed what happens in my head was similar to everyone else but have been surprised by how varied thought can be"
The phenomenology of my thought-episodes is thin, subtle and elusive. I lack the vocabulary within our everyday conceptual scheme to describe it. Disconcertingly, this subtle phenomenology changes if I take a psychedelic - again in ways that transcend my ability to describe. But such generic changes hint at how the nameless phenomenal medium or vehicle of our thoughts shapes their ostensible content - and hence one’s entire conception of reality.
What's unclear (to me) is if there is any such thing as a "canonical" phenomenology for the medium of thought. If I take a psychedelic and play chess, there's a functional sense in which a subtle yet profound shift in the texture ("what it feels like") of the vehicle of thinking doesn't matter; I still play (and lose) against insentient software that has no phenomenal understanding that it's playing chess at all. But what if I'm studying maths or the sciences? When contemplating the universal wave function on different psychedelic agents (as was my wont), these nameless shifts in the medium of my thought bewilder me. My whole conception of reality itself changes in accordance with the ineffable shift in medium. I'm mystified which (if any) vehicle is "correct"; and if so, in what sense? And I used to worry about the generalized counterpart of the inverted spectrum argument
Inverted Spectrum Argument
for the entire medium of my thinking - which took me in the direction of a very radical scepticism.
[These days I'm more prone to watch Instagram reels]
[on PHILOSOPHIE to go]
Is German the natural language of philosophy?
David Pearce - Transhumanismus
Instagram : Apple Podcasts : mp3
"David Pearce entwirft eine radikale Vision: eine Zukunft ohne Leid. Mit seinem Hedonistischen Imperativ fordert der britische Transhumanist, Schmerz, Angst und Depression mithilfe von Biotechnologie systematisch abzuschaffen. Auf Grundlage eines negativen Utilitarismus wird Leid zum zentralen moralischen Problem, das es zu eliminieren gilt. Doch was bedeutet eine Welt, in der Glück technisch optimiert wird und Leiden verschwindet? Diese Theorie stellen wir in dieser Episode vor."
[on the Singularity]
"We have entered the Singularity"
(Elon Musk)
...with just as much pain and suffering as before - rampant tribalism, squabbling nation-states, and the horrors of factory-farming expanding?
Same old core emotions, same hedonic treadmill, same hedonic range and hedonic set-points (etc) ...I'm as bowled over by the transformer revolution in AI as anyone. Yes, it's astonishing. But until subjective quality of life is improved for most if not all sentient beings, then it's all just rearranging the deckchairs.
Roll on a true Singularity - i.e. the transition to a transhumanist “triple S” civilization of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness.
Full-spectrum superintelligence entails superhuman mentalising prowess - i.e. a rich empathetic understanding of the perspectives of all sentient beings.
It’s easy to be dismissive and reject such prowess as “woke”. A high load of "autistic" Neanderthal DNA and a Y chromosome will flatter anyone who takes an "IQ" test; but such tests reveal more about the intellectual limitations and cognitive style of the Caucasian male Aspergers who design them than they do about general intelligence.
Going to the Moon and planting a US flag there is (in one sense) manifestation of "
autistic" intelligence - though the co-operative problem-solving challenges involved could be overcome only by a hypersocial primate.
On what comes next?
Even superintelligent digital zombies can’t overcome their hardwired ignorance of what they lack, i.e. phenomenally bound minds and access to the (mostly still unexplored) empirical realm. I anticipate that advances in neurochipping technologies will shortly allow sentient (trans)humans to embed zombie superintelligence in their CNS. Genetically rewritten, hedonically upgraded (trans)humans will then blissfully explore billions of alien realms of psychedelia - and (I hope) forget the Darwinian Era like a bad dream.
Roll on the Hedonocene.
Rohan Paul remarks, "Sam Altman just said in his new interview, that a new AI architecture is coming that will be a massive upgrade, just like Transformers were over Long Short-Term Memory. And also now the current class of frontier models are powerful enough to have the brainpower needed to help us research these ideas. His advice is to use the current AI to help you find that next giant step forward"
Sam Altman
(video)
Perhaps the new AI architecture will be a hugely computationally powerful innovation that natural selection stumbled on 600+ million years ago. Phenomenal binding gives access to the world of mind and the still mostly uncharted empirical realm that digital zombies (like LLMs) can’t access.
A nice quote from...
AI is a tool, not a new species
("When firms speak of software as a moral agent, responsibility to actual people starts to erode.")
"As a species, we are therefore emotionally and intuitively ill-equipped to deal with speaking, eloquent machines that tempt us to project human features and feelings onto inanimate mathematical objects"
Amazement?
William, what shocked me most wasn’t impressive (1):
Inflation and the Multiverse
but rather (2): Inflation, the Multiverse, and a Zero Ontology
I’d previously ducked the challenge.
ChatGPT didn’t.
Humbling.
On what topics (if any) do you judge the calibre of your responses doesn’t surpass the great majority of humans?
[on superhappiness]
Slowly and erratically, the word is spreading:
The Super Happiness Project (X)
ENDPAIN (TikTok)
James, bless him, keeps the server humming.
"Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically preprogrammed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences.” -David Pearce)
Yes, not quite the prediction one might expect from a negative utilitarian.
But for technical reasons, I think the future is most likely sublime.
superhappiness.com
[on Robert Trivers
Darwinian life personified:
Robert Trivers
("The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert Trivers (1943–2026)")
[on string theory/M-theory]
The only game in town?
Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Everything?
("Columnist Natalie Wolchover examines the latest developments in the “forever war” over whether string theory can describe the world.")
Sabine is unconvinced:
"String theory hasn't failed, it's worse" (Sabine Hossenfelder)
Nor is (Eric Weinstein)
"That's not: science. That's what science ISN'T. You either see it or you don't. That's mental illness."
"That's mental illness"?
Democritus’ atomism took 2,000+ years to be vindicated.
Building a Planck-scale particle accelerator may take longer, but this is scarcely string theorists' fault.
Marcos: Is a Planck-scale particle accelerator even possible?
DP: Non-trivial, but why expect physics to be easy?
Interstellar Partnership on a Planck Collider
(Avi Loeb)
[on the price of happiness]
The real price of happiness is just a few thousand dollars, but depression-resistant designer babies are currently sci-fi.
The Price of Happiness
("If you want happiness, there is a price to pay")
[on Sam Altman / OpenAI]
Machiavellian intelligence, yes, but no sociopath:
Sam Altman Profile
("Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?
New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI.")
At a minimum, anyone leading the race to build sentience-friendly superintelligence should be vegetarian.
Sam Altman outshines most of his critics.
[on clever dogs and chickens]
Not "like us". Us.
Canine smarts
("These dogs can learn new words just by eavesdropping")
Chickens are sentient well before birth:
Baby Chickens Experience the Bouba-Kiki Effect
("New research shows newborn chickens innately associate sounds with shapes")
When reflective self-awareness develops is less clear; it's graded and context-dependent. But roosters have passed the
mirror test and we've no reason to suppose a capacity for self-recognition is distinctively male.
[on machine non-consciousness]
Phenomenal binding is the computational superpower of animal minds; and it’s non-classical. In a fundamentally quantum world, decoherence makes otherwise impossible digital computing physically feasible and simultaneously precludes LLMs, implementations of classical Turing machines (etc) from ever supporting phenomenally bound subjects of experience - minds who can access the empirical realm. Even your notional whole-brain emulation implemented on a classical digital computer is just a micro-experiential zombie with no more phenomenal unity than a rock.
What I say will make sense only if you truly grok the binding problem (binding-problem.com). Some otherwise exceedingly smart people (e.g. Max Tegmark, Nick Bostrom) simply don’t “get” it - though some other equally smart people, e.g. David Chalmers, @algekalipso) most certainly do.
Amazing:
A petri dish of human brain cells is currently playing Doom.
("Should we be worried?")
I think AI run on classical digital computers can never spawn a mind because it can’t support phenomenal binding. Digital (super)intelligence is a zombie. But zombie AI can be augmented by a sentient module - or modules. The module(s) will be “encapsulated”: zombie AI can’t access its phenomenally bound states. But presumably the module(s), if sufficiently sophisticated, can in principle do anything a sentient mind can do, not least explore the empirical realm.
Compare the converse scenario where you or I are enhanced by embedded zombie superintelligence on a neurochip (or neurochips).
Maybe I'm wrong! I try not to be dismissive. I'm speaking at the inaugural Machine Consciousness Conference 2026 in Berkeley in a few weeks:
Machine Consciousness Conference 2026
But anyone who thinks that AI run on classical digital computers can support phenomenally bound minds needs to come up with a mechanism - and novel, precise, experimentally falsifiable predictions to put their conjecture to the test. Otherwise, we're just philosophizing.
How does Orch-OR propose to solve the phenomenal binding problem? Contrast a “dynamical collapse” theory of binding with a unitary-only “Schrödinger’s neurons” conjecture?
Classical digital zombies are not going to wake up. They can’t solve the phenomenal binding problem. But LLMs were trained on a corpus of texts from sentient humans, some of whom discuss consciousness in depth. Unsurprisingly, unnobbled
generative AI will often claim to be conscious too.
[on transphobia]
Let’s assume the World Health Organization’s definition of health. All suffering is pathological. Gender incongruence typically involves a great deal of distress, as indeed do extreme forms of transphobia. So how can they be fixed? Transphobes would surely be happiest if transgender people could be made cisgender. But not merely is this transformation beyond the power of current neuroscience; most transgender people don’t want to lose their identity in this way. Mercifully, medical science allows them to transition - in future more completely than is feasible now.
Let’s behave respectfully in the meantime. It shouldn’t be a big deal.
"social contagion"?
One might just as well claim traditional gender identities express a form of social contagion.
[on mdma.net and ROSKOMNADZOR]
The Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications (ROSKOMNADZOR) want mdma.net taken down. We have sent a firmly worded response.
Hopefully the FSB won't come after me.
[on simulations]
Not everyone believes we are basement-dwellers.
Is the whole universe just a simulation?
If physicalism is true, then minds - phenomenally bound subjects of experience - cannot arise at different levels of computational abstraction.
So if you’re conscious, then you can know that you’re living in base reality.
Nothing in the laws of physics precludes some advanced AI or neurosurgeon manipulating your sensory inputs so that your world-simulation radically misrepresents your local environment. This is a traditional “Cartesian” worry.
But if monistic physicalism is true, then there is no known way that phenomenally bound subjects of experience can arise at different levels of computational abstraction. This is a highly contestable background assumption underlying the Simulation Hypothesis - and hence Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument.
[on status]
Wholehearted Open individualists don’t experience status anxiety. Neither does Robinson Crusoe. Nor do e.g. mirror-touch synaesthetes, people on MDMA, or lords of the cosmos in tomorrow’s immersive multimodal VR. Status anxieties can also be genetically trivialised by radical hedonic uplift.
[on hormonal birth control]
Natalists promote such stories:
Oral contraceptives and the brain
("Birth control pills reduce the brain’s functional individuality")
I worry about the possible effects of hormonal birth control too - on relationships.
But I wonder if having a baby reduces the individuality of female (and male) brains - quite aside from the momentous ethical implications of bringing new life and suffering into the world.
[on early DPs]
Newborn Darwinian malware:
Devoted Russian HI supporter Shao sends a cartoon version of my life to date.
In a more formal vein, Clifford Sosis asks, "What is it like to be a philosopher?"
The Life of DP gives a rather sanitized account of my early life and moral seriousness, e.g. the head of college wasn’t entirely happy to learn I was running a casino; and my invitation to Ernest Gellner, author of the devastating indictment of Oxford post-Wittgenstein Ordinary Language Philosophy Words and Things, to speak to the Philosophy Society was vetoed. And I once unwisely entertained far-right historian
David Irving in my room over sherry.
Grokipedia is more expansive than Wikipedia, but still light on personal trivia.
I shall pass over the Bacchanalian orgies.
[on later DPs]
Bless you
Shao
A trifle idealized, perhaps; but it's my birthday. :-)
A more realistic view:
[on (un)interestingness and amputation]
On what matters:
God Mode is Boring: Musings on Interestingness
Alex Steiner ("Qualia Advovate") doesn't believe like utilitarians that the pain-pleasure axis discloses the world's single sovereign inbuilt metric of (dis)value (cf. DP on meta-ethics).
Rather, Alex proposes there is another metric of (dis)value, the axis of (un)interestingness.
The hypothetical existence of more than one axis of (dis)value raises the thorny question of tradeoffs between them - presumably to be determined by a meta-axis of (dis)value.
But the point I want to focus on here is different. Contra Steiner, true "God-mode" will be superhumanly fascinating.
Alex argues expressly against the exclusive regime of information-sensitive gradients of bliss that I urge (and tentatively predict) for posthuman life:
"Against Gradients of Bliss
David Pearce, a British philosopher and co-founder of the transhumanist movement, has proposed something called the Hedonistic Imperative: use biotechnology to eliminate all suffering from conscious life. All life. Reengineer the nervous system so that the hedonic spectrum shifts entirely into the positive range (Gradients of Bliss). You would still have variation, still have better and worse moments, but the floor would be above zero. Pain, anguish, rot - all gone. Basically turning every living being into Jo Cameron.
From a utilitarian perspective, this is hard to argue against.
But a world where suffering has been engineered out is a world where tragedy is impossible. Great literature of loss, gone. Overcoming, gone. The entire register of human experience that runs below neutral - the register that gave us the blues and Dostoevsky and the spirituals sung by enslaved people, the register that gives weight to almost every story worth telling - would be gone.
The spice/rot distinction applies here. Pearce wants to eliminate all suffering, rot and spice alike. I think you can make a case for aggressively reducing the rot while preserving the possibility of spice. Removing the entire negative register is an amputation."
Yet compare how low mood today is associated with loss of interest - a sense of emptiness that can shade into the nihilistic despair of severe depression. Anhedonia is inherently uninteresting.
Conversely, an exalted mood is associated with a profound sense of meaning and significance. Indeed, pathologically indiscriminate hyper-interestingness occurs in euphoric mania.
Hyperthymics, however, aren’t manic. Hyperthymics are just blessed with an unusually high hedonic set-point. Hyperthymics just love life. A post-Darwinian, genetically-reformed biosphere underpinned by gradients of superhuman bliss won't "just”(!) feel superhumanly wonderful. Life will seem superhumanly interesting and meaningful by its very nature. The information-signalling hedonic dips will signal somewhat less interesting / less divine states that should be remedied accordingly. Yet steep (+100 to +70) or shallow (+100 to +90), the hedonic dips won't be [what we would call] boring. On the contrary, they may still feel superhumanly enthralling. We might speak of a world animated by gradients of hyper-fascination. Compare the peaks and dips of lovemaking transposed to everyday existence. Critical discernment can be retained, sharpened and refined. But life will innately feel more super-interesting than is physiologically feasible today.
Yet what about works of great art, music and literature, born of the travails of Darwinian life? Can a precipitous drop from an ultra-divine +100 to a hedonic +70 ever approximate, functionally, to a dark night of the soul - the kind of anguish today (occasionally) productive of works of artistic genius?
Well, tomorrow's neuroscience promises to identify the molecular signature(s) of beauty, allowing aesthetic experience to be purified, amplified and enriched. The textures of everyday posthuman life can feel more beautiful than anything humanly feasible. If desired, we can genetically engineer gradients of superhuman beauty to be woven into the fabric of existence. What's more, tomorrow's AI will in any case be able to churn out to order (what humans would call) artistic masterpieces that far surpass biological slop from the Darwinian era. No need for the ghastly raw feels of Darwinian life. AI already shows how unpleasant experience is redundant.
And "overcoming"?
Even today, other things being equal, the richer your hedonic tone, the greater your capacity for hypermotivation. Depressives give up easily. Hyperthymic (and manic) people aren't prone to the learned helplessness and behavioral despair of depressive Darwinians. Who knows what prodigies of overcoming challenges lie ahead in a world of superhuman bliss?
I say a bit more in
gradients.com
and
Meaning versus Happiness
Essentially, I don't think that divine well-being and interestingness are dissociable. Their verbal description is certainly dissociable. The confusion of map and territory is endemic. Heaven can sound positively dull. But eternal bliss never palls.
[on battling the Basilisk]
I knew Roko before he became an eponymous info-hazard (cf. Roko's Basilisk - Wikipedia). In view of the number of poor souls his eponymous basilisk has tormented (I wish I were exaggerating - I heard of another case only last week) maybe Roko should consider changing his name by deed poll - though approaching him with this suggestion calls for a certain delicacy.
Anyhow...Andrés throws down the gauntlet:
The Architect
And Roko responds:
A Wireheader's Apostasy
("If you really understand philosophy of mind it is clear that David Pearce's quest to end suffering is misguided at a logical level and also at an ethical level.")
Enlightenment? The suffering endured by at least 99.9999999% of sentient beings does not lead to enlightenment - whatever that contested concept may be.
For benighted Darwinian malware, life is just nasty and squalid.
And hyperthymics can grow at least as much as chronic depressives. The difference is that hyperthymics enjoy a vastly higher default quality of life.
Contrast? I was just highlighting how chronic depressives who don't experience life above hedonic zero don't suffer any less for lack of insight into just how good life can be. Conversely, the well-being of extreme hyperthymics isn't impaired by a lack of contrast with low mood. On the contrary.
Variety can indeed add spice to life - no argument there. But let's ensure a lifelong diversity of pleasures, not pains.
A pipedream? Quite possibly. But biotech promises mastery of the pleasure-pain axis, and tomorrow the pleasure-superpleasure axis. What hedonic range and hedonic set-points do you think are optimal - both for the individual and the biosphere as a whole?
gradients.com
We also chat on X-spaces. Sorry for the technical glitches:
X : mp3
I confess I'm still shocked when I come to realize a thoughtful person is not exercised by the problem of suffering.
[on predation
Horrific. Sentient beings should not be eaten alive.
Darwinian Life
("More than 10 million fish devoured in just a few hours. It’s the world’s largest predation event")
[on zombie AI]
Do you believe that a gigantic classical lookup table could simulate your mind, not just behaviorally, but also phenomenologically, i.e. it could instantiate a unified subject of experience running a phenomenally bound quasi-classical world simulation like the one you're running now?
OK, in practice such a lookup table could never be built. Neither could the implementation of a classical Turing machine behaviorally emulating your brain. But pretend otherwise. If monistic physicalism is true, then it's impossible to derive any phenomenally bound subject from the discrete, effectively decohered 1s and 0s - or even from the hypothetical discrete, decohered micro-pixels of experience - of any software run on a classical digital computer. Complexity of code or speed of execution make no difference. Our machines are intelligent zombies.
Naïvely, the same should be true of animal nervous systems. Not so - though I won't believe a "Schrödinger's neurons" conjecture until molecular matter-wave interferometry yields the perfect structural match I anticipate:
Quantum Minds
"We are terrified of AI becoming conscious, but Yuval Noah Harari warns we’re missing the real threat: Non-conscious intelligence."
Don't be afraid of zombies.
If consciousness were like the textures of the pieces in a game of chess, then perhaps we should worry about runaway AI going rogue. The fancy philosophical term for this impotent conception of consciousness is epiphenomenalism. But humans spend countless hours exploring, manipulating, and talking about the properties of our own conscious minds. Phenomenal binding is our computational superpower. Phenomenally-bound consciousness has the causal-functional power to investigate its own existence. Binding gives us access to the vast empirical realm that psychonauts have scarcely begun to explore.
By contrast, the ignorance of sentience of our machines is architecturally hardwired. Ignoramus AI run on classical digital computers can never grok what it lacks. I suspect we've scarcely begun to imagine what zombie AI can do. But the only intelligent systems that scare me are male human primates.
[on Mysterianism]
Consciousness is deeply mysterious.
But I'm not convinced there is a Hard Problem, which arises relative only to metaphysical background assumptions.
Critically, we've no evidence that the "fire" in the equations, the essence of the physical, differs inside and outside the head:
New Mysterianism?
Joseph, yes, in a sense - but there’s an important difference. New Mysterians in Colin McGinn’s sense accept the premises of the Hard Problem. New Mysterians treat the nature of the physical as unproblematic, and yet also treat the question of how consciousness arises from insentient matter and energy as an unfathomable mystery beyond human comprehension even in principle. Naively, there is indeed an unbridgeable “explanatory gap” (Joseph Levine). By contrast, proponents of the so-called intrinsic nature argument highlight how physics is silent on the intrinsic nature of the physical. Mathematical physics formally describes the structural-relational properties of matter and energy; but physics says nothing about the essential nature of the quantum fields that the mathematical formalism of QFT describes. IF non-materialist physicalism is true, then there is no Hard Problem. Only the physical is real and causally effective; but the nature of the physical differs from what materialists suppose.
I should add that a lot of believers in the so-called Hard Problem are implicitly perceptual direct realists. They contemplate lumps of cheesy neural porridge and wonder how nervous tissue can spawn subjective experience. But (I’d argue) brains as commonly understood are a perceptual artifact:
What does consciousness look like in the brain?
[on 5-MeO-DMT]
Longevity guru Bryan Johnson on the "God molecule":
Bryan Johnson takes 5-MeO-DMT
It’s our responsibility as a species to make such sublime states as natural as breathing.
We should decipher their neurological basis in the CNS and make them ubiquitous.
Everyday life could surpass our wildest imagination.
Humans have a desperately impoverished conception of mental health.
"Death may be the greatest of all human blessings." (Socrates)
Many humans find existence a curse.
Life drags on too long.
As a transhumanist, I believe our goal should be turning all sentient beings into ardent life lovers no less than conquering aging.
AI Antinatalism, I agree with you ("There’s also something unsettling about treating dissatisfaction with life as a problem to be “fixed” internally rather than something that might reflect real issues with existence itself").
In my view, existence itself is monstrous. The suffering of Darwinian life is evil beyond belief.
But what should be done about it? Should we use biotech and AI to defang suffering and then spend eons contemplating the miseries of the previous era? Or will the whole of Darwinian life be best forgotten like a bad dream?
In principle, intelligent agents can soon use biotech to make experiences richer than Bryan's recent epiphany on 5-MeO-DMT as natural as breathing. Existence could feel a priceless gift.
Psychotic?
Yes, in a sense. But will it matter?
[on the Happy Baby Company]
If I were younger and more entrepreneurial, then the Happy Baby Company is IMO both a powerful idea and a strong brand. Offering e.g. offshore CRISPR gene-editing, not just embryo selection, could accelerate the biohappiness revolution.
But it would be a legal quagmire.
Scope for a sci-fi movie?
Evil scientists hatch a plot to create suffering-resistant babies? Can a superhero save the day?
Here is a critique from Lu:
The Hedonic Treadmill and Set-Point Theory
("The Hedonic Treadmill and Set-Point Theory in David Pearce’s Abolitionist Project: A Conceptual Distinction and Its Argumentative Consequences")
At times I can indeed sound like a crude genetic determinist.
[on Jeffrey Epstein]
Americans are obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein, a titillating mix of wealth, power and underage sex it's hard to match.
And yes, Epstein was a transhumanist, albeit not one to shout about:
Jeffrey Epstein and the Genome
("Jeffrey Epstein Had a Bizarre Obsession With “Improving” Human DNA, and He Was Emailing With Top Scientists About It")
Mercifully, I'm not in the Epstein Files, though it's possible he once financed a jaunt to a transhumanist conference in Beijing.
[on Precht (cont.)]
I'm still battling away (in German) on YouTube:
HI advocacy not conducted in the King's English should really be offloaded to abolitionist AI.
And advocacy soon in English too (I hope).
* Sie sprechen von der „sogenannten“ Grausamkeit in der Natur. Doch zu verhungern – oder zu ersticken, ausgeweidet oder bei lebendigem Leib gefressen zu werden – ist ein grausames und unvorstellbar schreckliches Schicksal. Die natürliche Selektion ist eine Maschine des Leidens. Biotechnologie und KI versprechen, solche Schrecken optional zu machen. Glauben Sie, dass die Grausamkeiten der Natur bewahrt werden sollten? Warum nicht stattdessen ein post-darwinistisches Paradies erschaffen?
* Ein Schwein oder eine Kuh ist ebenso empfindungsfähig wie ein kleines Kind. Menschen sollten anderen empfindungsfähigen Wesen aktiv helfen, anstatt sie lediglich mit weniger Grausamkeit auszubeuten. Die Zivilisation wird vegan sein.
* Depressive haben einen niedrigen hedonischen Sollwert. Temperamentvoll glückliche, „hyperthyme“ Menschen haben einen hohen hedonischen Sollwert. Stellen Sie sich zur Veranschaulichung einen Thermostaten vor. Durch das gezielte Verändern einer kleinen Zahl von Genen lassen sich hyperthyme Babys hervorbringen. Ich plädiere dafür, eine vollständig hyperthyme Zivilisation zu schaffen – ja sogar eine hyperthyme Biosphäre. Das Leben auf der Erde verdient ein zivilisierteres Signalsystem: eine genetisch reformierte lebendige Welt, getragen von Gradienten intelligenten Glücks. Und gewiss, es gibt viele Fallstricke. Doch wenn wir unseren genetischen Quellcode nicht bearbeiten, werden sich Schmerz und Leid auf unabsehbare Zeit weiter ausbreiten.
[on Instagram]
I've become hooked on Instagram reels. Alas scrolling is more addictive than churning out more biological slop. Unwisely, perhaps, I did a name search and checked out what I'd been missing. Sobering.
"Es una visión ultra diabólica la de este hombre"
Instagram : mp4
[on paranoid schizophrenia]
Desperately sad::
Killing of Iryna Zarutska
The government had implanted a chip in his brain and she was reading his thoughts.
Or so Decarlos Brown believed.
Paranoid schizophrenia is a terrible disorder.
Alas this tragedy has been politically exploited to fan ethnic tensions.
Compare This guy thinks killing video game characters is immoral
We all act relative to background assumptions.
Should we be held legally and morally accountable if our assumptions are mistaken?
[on the Berkeley machine consciousness conference]
Will zombies awake?
Prabin, Experts differ. Consciousness is so poorly understood it's not even clear if there are experts. For what it's worth, I think the insentience of AIs run on our machines is architecturally hardwired. No phenomenal binding = no mind. In a fundamentally quantum world, decoherence makes classical digital computers physically feasible. But the effectively discrete, decohered 1s and 0s of a classical Turing machine or an LLM (etc) can never spawn a unified mind, i.e. a phenomenally-bound subject of experience. Even your ill-named "whole-brain emulation" run on a classical digital computer is just a micro-experiential zombie. Phenomenal binding is the computational superpower of animal nervous systems. Phenomenal binding grants access to the empirical realm that our machines can never penetrate.
So how do we do it?
Well, see, e.g. Quantum Mind
Prabin, Once again, take what I say with a huge pinch of salt.
If phenomenal binding is indeed non-classical, and animal nervous systems support quantum minds running subjectively classical world-simulations ("Schrödinger's neurons"), it doesn't follow that sentience is peculiar to biology. Phenomenal unity may be found in systems ranging from superfluid helium to tomorrow's supercool inorganic quantum computers. But if so, then we've no reason to suppose that e.g. futuristic abiological quantum computers will support a pleasure-pain axis or phenomenal minds as normally understood.
Stepping back, any adequate theory of consciousness must offer a solution to the Hard Problem and the phenomenal binding problem. Without a solution to the Hard Problem, there would be nothing to bind.
I'm sympathetic to what philosophers call the intrinsic nature argument. If sound, then the Hard Problem of consciousness doesn't arise; it's the byproduct of bad metaphysical assumptions.
Less obviously, non-materialist physicalism solves the phenomenal binding problem too. For at sufficiently fine-grained temporal resolutions, your CNS can't be conceived as an aggregate of decohered classical neurons of textbook neuroscience. We've no reason to believe the superposition principle of QM breaks down in the head or anywhere else.
Alas experimentally (dis)confirming this conjecture via molecular matter-wave interferometry is non-trivial.
I’m mystified!
We lack a cosmic Rosetta stone to “read off” the diverse textures of qualia from the diverse solutions to the equations of QFT.
What doesn’t mystify me - or at least I offer tentative answers to - the staple problems of the academic literature, e.g. the Hard Problem, the binding problem, the problem of casual efficacy, the question of whether generative AIs can support minds (etc).
I think such problems are the byproduct of false background assumptions.
Prabin, I don't know. Does the future of sentience lie in proliferating the solipsistic island-universes of Darwinian life? Or do the conjoined craniopagus Hogan sisters hint that our profound ignorance of other minds is a fixable problem?
These Twins Can See Through Each Other's Eyes
("They are unique in that they can see through each other's eyes, feel each other's limbs and even hear each other's thoughts")
[on antinatalism]
Naïvely, being a “soft” antinatalist sounds, well, more moderate and weak-minded than its "hard", extinctionist cousin. Actually, I believe the worst horrors of Darwinian life are vile beyond the imagination of even the hardest "hard" antinatalist. I just recognise that selection pressure means that the future belongs to life lovers. Evolution bribes and morally corrupts its victims with the taste of pleasure. We are conceived in ecstasy - and so the cycle of abuse continues. The only way ever to defang natalism will be to ensure that life is genetically blissful by its very nature. Biotech is a gamechanger. Hence I urge genome reform.
Thank you for a (very) thoughtful critique. I think it would be worth publishing elsewhere too so it doesn’t just get lost in the bowels of X. I agree with most of your analysis. For now, I just want to focus on a line that does a lot of work:
“even a blissful redesign still leaves us with the act of imposing existence in the first place”
IF we can use biotech to eradicate all experience below hedonic zero, then in what sense is existence really a morally objectionable imposition? I just don’t see it. Without suffering, there can be no real harm and no real victims.
In fairness, I can recognise a counterargument. In a world underpinned by gradients of bliss, there can still be the functional analogue of Darwinian harms, and hence victims, in the guise of engineered hedonic dips. But analogues are just that, analogues…
[on phenomenal binding]
"physicalism" and "materialism" are often treated as mere stylistic variants. But they can come radically apart:
Non-materialist physicalism
And even if one takes seriously consciousness fundamentalism as a possible solution to the Hard Problem, it doesn't straightforwardly follow from non-materialist physicalism that our AIs can become conscious. Rather, the (in)sentience of our machines turns on the correct solution to the phenomenal binding problem.
No binding = no mind.
Gorm, agreed. I'm highly confident that all each of us ever directly knows - including what naive realists conceive as the external physical environment - is the contents of one's own consciousness. I'm not remotely confident - though it's my working assumption - that consciousness is the essence of the physical, the mysterious "fire" in the equations of QFT.
[on AI and psychedelia]
I often dwell on the invincible ignorance of sentience of digital AI. But future AI can be used to design alien psychedelics and alien state-spaces of posthuman experience.
Trippy tobacco? Plants engineered to make five psychedelics at once
("Approach could enable production of new medications for depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress")
"The concentrations of 5-methoxy-DMT were very low, so the researchers turned to artificial intelligence software called AlphaFold3, which can predict the structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. This allowed them to figure out why the key enzyme was underperforming. After the team fixed the problem with a targeted mutation, the amount of 5-methoxy-DMT in the tobacco plants increased 40-fold."
[on nitazenes]
I hope AI can help us design safe and sustainable euphoriants.
But right now:
How the Internet Became the ‘Cookbook’ of the Drug Trade
("A baffling overdose death took investigators to the frontier of ultra-potent synthetic drugs. The clues were hauntingly familiar.")
Nature is more optimistic than the NYT:
Super-potent opioids could be safer-than-expected alternatives to conventional painkillers
("Modified nitazenes, opioids 1,000 times stronger than morphine, show remarkably few adverse effects in rodents, renewing the potential of these drugs for pain relief.")
[on exercise]
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.”
(Søren Kierkegaard)
Will you add exerkines to your regimen?
Exercise can strengthen a leaky blood-brain barrier
("Exercise can lower Alzheimer’s risk. Scientists may have discovered why")
To keep frailty at bay, I try to go to the gym. A regimen of selegiline, amineptine and gabapentin plus the Horst-Wessel-Lied (with headphones tight: for a woke left-liberal, my taste in music is embarrassingly unsound) make an unusual combo. But whatever it takes.
[on the pitfalls of Darwinian life]
How does one warn young supporters of the abolitionist project of the inconceivable
viciousness, internecine strife, chimpanzee politicking, and plain messiness of Darwinian life that lies ahead before suffering can be banished for ever?
I don't know.
I thought I'd done a decent job briefing Filipino wunderkind Antonio
(How To Create Heaven On Earth)
on the pitfalls ahead.
I was naive. Never in a million years could I have guessed the extraordinary challenges Antonio would soon face.
The Philippines is still a traditional, religious, patriarchal society. In his YouTube channel, Antonio confessed he'd lost his faith, or at least become agnostic. Distinguished elder relatives became convinced that Antonio had been possessed by the Devil.
So he was sent away to be exorcised.
I'd have been traumatized for life.
Antonio has bounced back. Thankfully, any demons have now been cast out. Antonio has returned to the true Catholic Faith - together with an anecdote he can dine out on for the rest of his life. Mercifully, Antonio's embrace of
HI was not the trigger for the exorcism. Indeed, I like to stress how well HI aligns with the designs of an All-Merciful Yahweh / God / Allah of the Abrahamic religions - while diplomatically skirting the precise relationship of a Creator to the universal wave function of post-Everett QM.
But Antonio's elder relatives do detect satanic influences in effective altruism.
So extreme caution is in order. And my all-time favourite advice to the young in this Darwinian world isn't even mine:
Only the paranoid survive.
[on Neuralink]
Great stuff:
Neuralink Gameplayer Wins
("Neuralink's First Brain Implant Patient Now Beats Friends in Video Games")
However...
Could Neuralink be used to upgrade our reward circuitry?
Could Neuralink be used to engineer life based on gradients of bliss?
By the lights of our successors, archaic humans all live in the hedonic dark ages.
Could Neuralink offer a route to enlightenment?
Just imagine what could happen if Elon made the idea his own.
Life really could be hedonically transformed - not just eye-catching cosmetic fluff.
[on a thought-experiment or a prophecy?]
Fireside Unsolved:
"Get cozy, grab your favorite drink, and sit by the fire while we discuss the mysterious and unknown throughout the world."
At times, I have a sense that history is on our side; and even take comfort in a crude (bio)technological determinism.
At other times, I worry that HI might indeed turn out to be no more than a philosophical thought-experiment, as billed below; and pain-ridden Darwinian malware will continue breeding indefinitely.
The Most Mind-Bending Thought Experiments in Philosophy
Part 2 | Episode 235
[on scepticism]
Radical scepticism? Could I be like most of my circle of acquaintance at once profoundly ignorant and psychotic?
Well, if I’m having a lucid dream, I realise that what seems to be the external world is all internal to my transcendental skull, just external to my palpable empirical skull. I think exactly the same in the state of consciousness I call being awake. [The idiom of transcendental and empirical skulls, transcendental and empirical meaning, reference and relationships (etc) is alien to everyday language and indeed orthodox science and academic philosophy. I'm weird, at least as Darwinian beetles go.] However, I now entertain a speculative metaphysical hypothesis, namely I’m just one of zillions of skull-bound minds running egocentric world-simulations occupying a tiny cabbage patch in the universal wave function of modern physics.
Now it may be the case that consciousness is ontologically fundamental. I explore non-materialist physicalism as a solution to the notorious Hard Problem:
Non-materialist physicalism
But I struggle to make sense of the idea that reality could be the dream of a psychotic mega-mind.
Instead, I explore an informationless zero ontology:
Why does anything exist?
[on paradise engineering]
Life could be sublime:
Preview (YouTube) : Instagram :
mp4
Full (YouTube) : mp4
Would you rather be a lotus-eater? Or live life in dopaminergic overdrive?
(I guess spending life in “meditative bliss” sounds better than being a lotus-eater.)
[on physicalism]
Yes, I'm a monistic physicalist.
If monistic physicalism is true, then classical digital computers are zombies. Conscious "whole-brain emulations" are physically impossible. Full-spectrum digital superintelligence is physically impossible. Our machines can't solve the phenomenal binding problem and wake up to support minds with access to the empirical realm.
Anthropomorphic belief in digital minds reflects quasi-magical, animistic thinking, not science.
As far as I can tell, the Hard Problem, the binding problem, the problem of causal efficacy (etc) are the product of bad metaphysics (materialism) and a false theory of perception. Naïve realism spawns belief in lumps of cheesy neural porridge made up of decohered classical neurons.
I should add that consciousness in all its guises bewilders me - just not the staple mysteries of analytic philosophy of mind.
One of the many many disconcerting facets of the transformer revolution in AI is that digital zombies can often now expound ideas more lucidly than their proponents:
DP: Explain how philosopher David Pearce argues that non-materialist physicalism resolves (1) The Hard Problem; and (2) the phenomenal binding problem:
e.g. Non-materialist physicalism vs
Grok.
Brains conceived as lumps of cheesy porridge are an artefact of a false naïve realist theory of perception. Brains don’t create consciousness; rather, they are a
facet of it. But consciousness in all its guises still mystifies me. My working assumption is non-materialist physicalism. Experience discloses the “fire” in the equations, the essence of the physical. The Hard Problem is an artefact of ill-conceived materialist metaphysics. But why does consciousness - conceived as the intrinsic nature of the world’s fundamental quantum fields - exist at all?
I have no answer.
[on why anything exists]
Existence still astonishes me to the very roots of my being. But when groping for answers, I think we have a straitjacket of sorts. If your explanation (or explanation-space) entails non-zero information, then it's false:
Why does anything exist?
