Reason was interviewed at the Undoing Aging conference in Berlin 2019 by Adam Ford – focusing on philosophy of anti-aging, ethics, research & advocacy. Here is the audio! And the video: Topics include philosophical reasons to support anti-aging, high impact research (senolytics etc), convincing existence proofs that further research is worth doing, how AI can…
True & false vs right & wrong – People converge their views to set of rights and wrongs relative to in-group biases in their peer group. As a survival mechanism, convergence in groups is sometimes more healthy than being right – so one should optimize for convergence sometimes even at the cost of getting stuff…
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?…
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…
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…
At a recent conference in Beijing (the Global Innovators Conference) – I did yet another video interview with the legendary AGI guru – Ben Goertzel. This is the first part of the interview, where he talks about some of the ‘amazing’ progress in AI over recent years, including Deep Mind’s AlphaGo sealing a 4-1 victory…
An exploration of the philosophical concept of metaphysical identity, using numerous variations on the infamous Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Video interview with Keith Wiley Note: a separate text interview is below. Keith Wiley is the author of A Taxonomy and Metaphysics of Mind-Uploading, available on Amazon. The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’…
“Longevity Day” (based on the UN International Day of Older Persons – October 1) is a day of support for biomedical aging and longevity research. This has been a worldwide international campaign successfully adopted by many longevity activists groups. In this interview Aubrey de Grey lends support to Longevity Day and covers a variety of…
