This panel is part of the ‘Stepping Into the Future‘ conference. What is the most wonderful experience you have had in your life? Now imagine if every moment in your life could be as good as this experience, or even better. Other things being equal, wouldn’t it be nice if we had higher quality lives?…
A talk at EAGx Melbourne by David Pearce about suffering and how to get rid of it. David predicts we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. 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: First, I’m going to outline…
Valence in overview Adam: What is emotional valence (as opposed to valence in chemistry)? Mike: Put simply, emotional valence is how pleasant or unpleasant something is. A somewhat weird fact about our universe is that some conscious experiences do seem to feel better than others. Adam: What makes things feel the way they do?…
An online panel focusing on reducing suffering & paradise engineering through the lens of science. Panelists: Andrés Gómez Emilsson, David Pearce, Brian Tomasik and Mike Johnson Note, consider skipping to to 10:19 to bypass some audio problems in the beginning!! Topics Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Qualia computing (how to use consciousness for information processing, and why…
The Antispeciesist Revolution [Original text found here] Speciesism. When is it ethically acceptable to harm another sentient being? On some fairly modest(1) assumptions, to harm or kill someone simply on the grounds they belong to a different gender, sexual orientation or ethnic group is unjustified. Such distinctions are real but ethically irrelevant. On the other…
Anders gives a short tutorial on the Singularity – clearing up confusion and highlighting important aspects of the Technological Singularity and related ideas, such as accelerating change, horizons of predictability, self-improving artificial intelligence, and the intelligence explosion. Tutorial Video: Points covered in the tutorial: The Mathematical Singularity The Technological Singularity: A Horizon of predictability Confusion…
Suffering is generally bad – Peter Singer (who is a Hedonistic Utilitarian), and most Effective Altruists would agree with this. Though in addressing the need for suffering today Peter acknowledges that, as we are presently constituted, suffering is useful as a warning sign (e.g. against further injury). But what about the future? What if we…
It is non-trivial for a couple of reasons:a) the pursuit of this vision of happiness is not trivial – it is likely to be a very challenging endeavor (though totally worthy of the effort)b) the aim is to achieve non-trivial modes of happiness, kinds of information-sensitive gradients of bliss (as opposed to being stuck in…
In an interview last year, I had a discussion with John Danaher on the Hedonistic Imperative & Superintelligence – a concern he has with HI is that it denies or de-emphasises some kind of moral agency – in moral theory there is a distinction between moral agents (being a responsible actor able to make moral…
Is the Hedonistic Imperative equivalent to wire-heading? People are often concerned about the future being a cyber-puink dystopia where people are hard wired into pleasure centers like smacked out like lotus eating milk-sops devoid of meaningful existence. Does David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative entail a future where we are all in thrall to permanent experiential orgasms…
