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…
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…
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…
“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 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…
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…
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,…
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…
