Grand Futures – Anders Sandberg
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Grand Futures – Anders Sandberg

Grand Futures – Thinking Truly Long Term. What are the limits of what advanced civilizations can achieve? What is the upper limit of value? Anders Sandberg speaks on existential hope about the far future and his upcoming book ‘Grand Futures: Thinking Truly Long Term‘, and how to be an optimist about the future. Synopsis: How…

The End of Suffering – Genome Reform and the Future of Sentience – David Pearce
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The End of Suffering – Genome Reform and the Future of Sentience – David Pearce

A talk by David Pearce for the Stepping into the Future conference 2022. Synopsis: No sentient being in the evolutionary history of life has enjoyed good health as defined by the World Health Organization. The founding constitution of the World Health Organization commits the international community to a daringly ambitious conception of health: “a state…

Stepping Into the Future – April 23rd-24th, 2022

Stepping Into the Future – April 23rd-24th, 2022

What will the future look like? See complete info here We are excited to announce that we have a great line up of topics and speakers this year! When? April 23rd – 24th, 2022. More details to come. Speakers/panelists confirmed: Anders Sandberg (Future of Humanity Institute) Andres E. Gomez (Qualia Research Institute), Ben Goertzel (OpenCog)…

Abolitionist Bioethics – David Pearce
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Abolitionist Bioethics – David Pearce

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…

AI, Consciousness, Science, Art & Understanding – Joscha Bach
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AI, Consciousness, Science, Art & Understanding – Joscha Bach

Here Joscha Bach discusses consciousness, it’s relationship to qualia and whether an AI or a utility maximizer would do with it. What is consciousness? “I think under certain circumstances being conscious is an important part of a mind; it’s a model of a model of a model basically. What it means is our mind (our…

How science fails
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How science fails

There is a really interesting Aeon article on what bad science, and how it fails. Update: a discussion on this exists in the philsci FB group on here. What is Bad Science? According to Imre Lakatos, science degenerates unless it is both theoretically and experimentally progressive. Can Lakatos’s ‘scientific programme’ approach, which incorporates merits of…

John Wilkins – Comprehension and Compression
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John Wilkins – Comprehension and Compression

“In short, data is not knowledge; knowledge is not comprehension; comprehension is not wisdom” The standard account of understanding has been, since Aristotle, knowledge of the causes of an event or effect. However, this account fails in cases where the subject understood is not causal. In this paper I offer an account of understanding as…

Reason – Philosophy Of Anti Aging: Ethics, Research & Advocacy
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Reason – Philosophy Of Anti Aging: Ethics, Research & Advocacy

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…

Uncovering the Mysteries of Affective Neuroscience – the Importance of Valence Research with Mike Johnson

Uncovering the Mysteries of Affective Neuroscience – the Importance of Valence Research with Mike Johnson

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?…

Physicalism & Materialism – John Wilkins
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Physicalism & Materialism – John Wilkins

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…