What is the relationship between anti-aging and the reduction of suffering? What are some common objections to the ideas of solving aging? How does Anti-Aging stack up against other cause areas (like climate change, or curing specific diseases)? How can we better convince people of the virtues of undoing the diseases of old age? Keith…
Materialism was a pre-socratic view that for something to be real it has to be matter – physical stuff made of atoms (which at the time were considered hard like billiard balls – fundametal parts of reality). The reason these days the term physicalism is used is because it can describe things that aren’t matter…
Andrés Gómez Emilsson joined in to add very insightful questions for a 3 part interview series with Mike Johnson, covering the relationship of metaphysics to qualia/consciousness/hedonic valence, and defining their terms, whether panpsychism matters, increasing sensitivity to bliss, valence variance, Effective Altruism, cause prioritization, and the importance of consciousness/valence research . Andrés Gómez Emilsson interviews…
What’s the relationship between valence research and AI ethics? Hedonic valence is a measure of the quality of our felt sense of experience, the intrinsic goodness (positive valence) or averseness (negative valence) of an event, object, or situation. It is an important aspect of conscious experience; always present in our waking lives. If we seek to…
In this interview with Christof Koch, he shares some deeply felt ideas about the urgency of reducing suffering (with some caveats), his experience with mindfulness – explaining what it was like to visit the Dali Lama for a week, as well as a heart felt experience of his family dog ‘Nosey’ dying in his arms,…
Michio Kaku on Nanotechnology – Michio is the author of many best sellers, recently the Future of the Mind! The Holy Grail of Nanotechnology Merging with machines is on the horizon and Nanotechnology will be key to achieving this. The ‘Holy Grail of Nanotechnology’ is the replicator: A microscopic robot that rearranges molecules into desired…
Why is aging research important? Biological aging causes suffering, however in recent times there as been surprising progress in stem cell research and in regenerative medicine that will likely disrupt the way we think about aging, and in the longer term, substantially mitigate some of the suffering involved in growing old. Aubrey de Grey is…
The topic of is controversial (and often misrepresented); it is considered by many to be repugnant – provocative questions arise like “who’s morals?”, “who are the ones to be morally enhanced?”, “will it be compulsory?”, “won’t taking a morality pill decrease the value of the intended morality if it skips the difficult process we normally…
I grew up wondering about the nature of alien life, what it might look like, what they might do, and whether we will discover any time soon. Though aside from a number of conspiracy theories, and conjecture on Tabby’s Star, so far we have not discovered any signs of life out there in the cosmos….
Magician James Randi (known as ‘The Amazing Randi’) has spent the bulk of his career debunking the claims of self-proclaimed psychics and paranormalists. Randi has an international reputation as a magician and escape artist, but he is perhaps best known as the world’s most tireless investigator and de-mystifier of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. The Amazing…
