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…
A group of interested AI enthusiasts have been discussing Engineering Machine Consciousness in Melbourne for over a decade. In a recent interview with Jamais Cascio on Engineering Happy People & Global Catastrophic Risks, we discussed the benefits of amplifying empathy without the nasty side effects (possibly through cultural progress or technological intervention – a form…
Transcript of interview with Peter Singer on ‘The Life You Can Save‘: I’ve been writing & thinking about the question of global poverty and what affluent people ought to do about it for more than four years now. The first article I published on that ‘Famine Affluence & Morality’ came out in 1972. But I’d…
Panelists ([from left to right] Hilary Greaves, Peter Singer, Justin Oakley & David Pearce) discuss what they believe are important philosophical aspects of the Effective Altruism movement – from practical philosophy we can use today to possible endpoints implied by various frameworks in applied ethics. The panelists navigate through a wide range of fascinating and…
Filmed at EA Global Melbourne 2015 Slides of talk are here Kerry Vaughan discusses: What is effective altruism? what is it’s history? what isn’t EA? and how to succeed at being an effective altruist. Approaches to doing good include: – Being Skeptical – using the case study of play pumps in africa – hoping to…
Did Nietzsche have something like Transhumanism in mind when he wrote about the Übermensch? Bostrom rejects Nietzsche as an ancestor of the transhumanist movement, as he claims that there were merely some “surface-level similarities with the Nietzschean vision” (Bostrom 2005a, 4). In contrast to Bostrom, I think that significant similarities between the posthuman and the…
Bioconservatives often quote a line from Nietzsche: “That which does not crush me makes me stronger.” But alas pain often does crush people: physically, emotionally, morally. Chronic, uncontrolled pain tends to make the victim tired, depressed and weaker. True, some people are relatively resistant to physical distress. For example, high testosterone function may make someone…
A discussion among philosophers, mathematicians and AI experts on whether science can be automated, what it means to automate science, and the implications of automating science – including discussion on the technological singularity. – implementing science in a computer – Bayesian methods – most promising normative standard for doing inductive inference – vehicle : causal…
Bayesian inference is a useful tool in solving challenging problems in many fields of uncertainty. However, inferential arguments presented with a Bayesian formalism should be subject to the same critical scrutiny that we give to informal arguments. After an introduction to Bayes’ theorem, some examples of its misuse in history and theology will be discussed….
