Yes. Just as a pinprick has something tenuously in common with agony, posthuman well-being will have something even more tenuously in common with huma...
Sorry, I should clarify. Even extreme hyperthymics today are still recognisably human. But future beings whose reward circuitry is so enriched that th...
Yes, talk of a "triple S" civilisation is a useful mnemonic and a snappy slogan for introducing people to transhumanism. But are the "three supers" in...
I wonder to what extent hesitancy stems from principled opposition, and how much from mere status quo bias? People tend to be keener on the idea of He...
Consider the core transhumanist "supers", i.e. superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness. If you became a full-spectrum superintelligence, ...
Indeed so. Programming a happy biosphere is technically harder than sterilizing the Earth. But I can't see the problem of suffering is soluble in any ...
Complete "cyborgisation", i.e. offloading all today's nasty stuff onto smart prostheses, is one option. A manual override is presumably desirable so n...
An ontic structural realist (cf. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/#OntStrReaOSR) might agree with you. But if someone has no plac...
Thanks, you raise some astute but uncomfortable points. Asphyxiation is a ghastly way to die, but even if death were instantaneous, there is something...
Yes, well put. In their different ways, pain and pleasure alike are coercive. Any parallel between heroin addicts and the drug naïve is apt to sound s...
Agony and despair are inherently bad, whether they serve a signaling purpose (e.g. a noxious stimulus) or otherwise (e.g. neuropathic pain or lifelong...
Yes. Such calculated deceit is probably the recipe for more suffering. So it's not NU. Imagine if Gautama Buddha ("I teach one thing and one thing onl...
I’m a strict NU. And it’s precisely because I’m strict NU that I favour upholding the sanctity of human and nonhuman life in law. Humans can’t be trus...
Negative utilitarianism (NU) is compassion systematised. NUs aren’t in the habit of letting small children drown any more than we’re plotting Armagedd...
Apologies, by “hedonic zero” I just mean emotionally neutral experience that is perceived as neither good nor bad. Hedonic zero is what utilitarian ph...
Sorry, could you unpack the footballing metaphor for me? What “goalposts”? As far as I know, I’ve consistently been arguing for replacing the biology ...
Yet depression is a devastating disorder. It has a high genetic loading. Depression is at least as damaging to quality of life as the other genetic di...
To the best of my knowledge, there is no alternative. The pleasure-pain axis ensnares us all. Genetically phasing out experience below hedonic zero ca...
But you are addicted to opioids. Everyone is hooked: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/research-overview/neuroscience-of-linking-and-wanting/. ...
If a small child were drowning, you would wade into a shallow pond to rescue the child – despite your professed dislike of small children, and your we...
Maybe. But if so, would you argue that the World Health Organization should scrap its founding constitution ("health is a state of complete physical, ...
Cosmology is in flux. We understand enough, I think, to sketch out how experience below hedonic zero could be prevented in our forward light-cone. At ...
If we take a gene's-eye-view, then a predisposition to depression frequently did serve a useful purpose in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness...
One of the most valuable skills one can acquire in life is working out who are the experts in any field, then (critically) deferring to their expertis...
Biotech informed by negative or classical utilitarianism can get rid of disvaluable experience altogether over the next few centuries. Preference util...
The possibility that we live in a multiverse scares and depresses me: https://www.abolitionist.com/multiverse.html I'm not sure the notion of physical...
Thank you for the kind words. Evolution via natural selection is a monstrous engine for the creation of pain and suffering. But Darwinian life contain...
My best guess is that what Eric Drexler called the "thermodynamic miracle” of life's genesis means that the percentage of life-supporting Hubble volum...
I am not without idiosyncrasies. But short of radical scepticism, the claim that agony and despair are disvaluable by their very nature is compelling....
Some of the soul-chilling things Nietzsche said make him sound as though he had an inverted pain-pleasure axis: https://www.nietzsche.com In reality, ...
I think the question to ask is why we nominally (dis)value many intentional objects that are seemingly unrelated to the pleasure-pain axis. "Winning” ...
One may consider the possibility that one could be a mind-brain in a neurosurgeon’s vat in basement reality rather than a mind-brain in a skull as one...
Even if we prioritise, preference utilitarianism doesn’t work. Well-nourished tigers breed more tigers. An exploding tiger population then has more fr...
Artificial mini-brains, and maybe one day maxi-minds, are technically feasible. What's not possible, on pain of spooky "strong" emergence, is the crea...
Yes, anyone who understands suffering should "walk away from Omelas". If the world had an OFF switch, then I'd initiate a vacuum phase-transition with...
IMO, asking why agony is disvaluable is like asking why phenomenal redness is colourful. Such properties are mind-dependent and thus (barring dualism)...
The preferences of predator and prey are irreconcilable. So are trillions of preferences of social primates. The challenge isn't technological, but lo...
Creating new life and suffering via the untested genetic experiments of sexual reproduction feels natural. Creating life engineered to be happy – and ...
A plea to write good code so future sentience doesn't suffer isn't escapism; it's a policy proposal for implementing the World Health Organization's c...
Thank you. Evolution via natural selection has encephalised our emotions, so we (dis)value many things beyond pain and pleasure under that description...
You say you're "mostly an ethical egoist". Do you accept the scientific world-picture? Modern civilisation is based on science. Science says that no h...
A hundred-year moratorium on reckless genetic experimentation would be good; but antinatalism will always be a minority view. Instead, prospective par...
Candidly, no. Until we edit our genomes, even self-avowed transhumanists will remain all too human. All existing humans run the same kind of egocentri...
Compare the introduction of pain-free surgery: https://www.general-anaesthesia.com/ Surgical anaesthesia isn't risk-free. Surgeons and anaesthesiologi...
I share your reservations about gung-ho enthusiasm for technology. But transhumanism is a recipe for deeper self-understanding. The only way to develo...
Preimplantation genetic diagnosis and screening is worth distinguishing from gene-editing. Ratcheting up hedonic range, hedonic set-points and pain th...
It's complicated: https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#devote But which version of the ADA2b deletion variant, COMT gene, serotonin transporter gene...
Phasing out the biology of suffering in favour of life based on information-sensitive gradients of well-being can be "perfect" in its implementation i...
The misconception that pain and pleasure are relative is tenacious. But we need only consider the plight of severe chronic depressives to recognise th...
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