My Blog

Author: tstadmin

  • Conversations about the badness of involuntary suffering

    I have the intuition that voluntary suffering might not be bad. This is primarily due to personal experience: I often feel sad (sympathy) when I encounter sad stories or sad situations, but I don’t have the intuition that this is bad for me, because I don’t feel like I ought to look away or stop feeling sad in response to these and I often feel like thinking/learning/reading more about these situations even if I feel more sadness because of it (and I usually do). This happens to me with both real and fictional situations (I was a fan of tragedies for a while). Furthermore, sometimes in the past, when I’ve been depressed about my own life, I didn’t want to be happy and even preferred to be miserable.

    …

    It’s suffering that’s bad, intrinsically (though suffering can be instrumentally good)

    …

    I’m a hedonistic utilitarian, and I think that even voluntary suffering is be intrinsically bad, as long as it’s still suffering at that point.

    …

    Buddhism would say that if you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness but you don’t suffer from it.

    …

    My intuition is that suffering is bad, but sometimes (all things considered) I prefer to suffer in a particular instance (e.g. in service of some other value). In such cases it would be better for my welfare if I did not suffer, but I still prefer to.

    …

    I think we don’t quite have the words to distinguish between all these things in English, but in my mind there’s something like

    • pain – the experience of negative valence
    • suffering – the experience of pain (i.e. the experience of the experience of negative valence)
    • expected suffering – the experience of pain that was expected, so you only suffer for the pain itself
    • unexpected suffering – the experience of pain that was not expected, so you suffer both the pain itself and the pain of suffering itself from it not being expected and thus having negative valence

    Of them all, unexpected suffering is the worst because it involves both pain and meta-pain.

    …

    I noticed that reading only “positive” and “joyous” stories eventually feel empty. The answer seem that sad elements in a story bring more depth than the fun/joyous ones. In that sense, sadness in stories act as a signal of deepness, but also a way to access some deeper part of our emotions and internal life.

    Source

     

  • Physical theories of consciousness reduce to panpsychism

    The necessary features for consciousness in prominent physical theories of consciousness that are actually described in terms of physical processes do not exclude panpsychism, the possibility that consciousness is ubiquitous in nature, including in things which aren’t typically considered alive. I’m not claiming panpsychism is true, although this significantly increases my credence in it, and those other theories could still be useful as approximations to judge degrees of consciousness. Overall, I’m skeptical that further progress in theories of consciousness will give us plausible descriptions of physical processes necessary for consciousness that don’t arbitrarily exclude panpsychism, whether or not panpsychism is true.

    Source

  • How trees secretly talk to and share with each other

    Trees secretly talk to each other underground. They’re passing information and resources to and from each other through a network of mycorrhizal fungi—mykós means fungus and riza means root in Greek—a mat of long, thin filaments that connect an estimated 90% of land plants. Scientists call the fungi the Wood Wide Web because ‘adult’ trees can share sugars to younger trees, sick trees can send their remaining resources back into the network for others, and they can communicate with each other about dangers like insect infestations.

    Source:

    The Wood Wide Web: How trees secretly talk to and share with each other

     

  • A conversation between Brian Tomasik and Luke Muehlhauser

    Luke and Mr. Tomasik found that they agreed about the following:

    •  Physicalism and functionalism about consciousness.
    •  Specifically, Mr. Tomasik endorses “Type A” physicalism, as described in his
      article “Is There a Hard Problem of Consciousness?” Luke isn’t certain he
      endorses Type A physicalism as defined in that article, but he thinks his
      views are much closer to “Type A” physicalism than to “Type B” physicalism.
    •  Consciousness will likely turn out to be polymorphic, without a sharp dividing
      line between conscious and non-conscious systems, just like (say) the line
      between what does and doesn’t count as “face recognition software.”
    • Consciousness will likely vary along a great many dimensions, and Luke and
      Mr. Tomasik both suspect they would have different degrees of moral caring
      for different types of conscious systems, depending on how each particular
      system scores along each of these dimensions.

     

    A core disagreement

    In Luke’s view, a system needs to have certain features interacting in the right way in order to qualify as having non-zero consciousness and non-zero moral weight (if one assumes consciousness is necessary for moral patienthood).

    In Mr. Tomasik’s view, various potential features (e.g. ability to do reinforcement learning or meta-cognition) contribute different amounts to a system’s degree of consciousness, because they increase that system’s fit with the “consciousness” concept, but all things have non-zero fit with the “consciousness” concept.

    Luke suggested that this core disagreement stems from the principle described in Mr. Tomasik’s “Flavors of Computation are Flavors of Consciousness“:

    It’s unsurprising that a type-A physicalist should attribute nonzero consciousness to all systems. After all, “consciousness” is a concept — a “cluster in thingspace” — and all points in thingspace are less than infinitely far away from the centroid of the “consciousness” cluster. By a similar argument, we might say that any system displays nonzero similarity to any concept (except maybe for strictly partitioned concepts that map onto the universe’s fundamental ontology, like the difference between matter vs. antimatter). Panpsychism on consciousness is just one particular example of that
    principle.

    Source

  • Can GPT3 or a later version of it experience suffering?

    And if so, should we be continuing to develop it?

    I have to admit that I don’t know much about how the system works, but I’m genuinely curious: how do we know that it doesn’t feel anything? I’m just concerned because I’m seeing more and more articles about its creation and the many amazing things it’s been able to do so far but none that tell us about the ethical implications of its creation or that reassure me that the fact that it exists is entirely not a bad thing. It seems to me that the system is now able to do many complex things and it’s worrying me that it might also (eventually) be able to experience something akin to suffering.

    Read more

    Se also: Is gpt-3 a step to sentience?

  • What if a panpsychist view of consciousness encourages us to have more babies?

    Danny Donabedian wrote:

    Assuming a pan-psychist view of consciousness for a moment, with the potential for suffering subroutines to extend to fundamental physical particles and the simplest of physical systems, I am unsure if more complex systems like those found in living creatures and their neural networks or even unicellular organisms increase or decrease net suffering.
    If it turns out that net universal suffering decreases when matter is incorporated into more complex (life-like) systems, I guess we must switch it to have more babies.

    While I don’t necessarily believe that, I do believe that it can’t be excluded as a possibility due to the significant s-risk involved with making such a mistake if it turns out to be true. I guess a third option would be that the suffering of simple systems is no greater or less than complex systems.
    Though if I had to give a reason per say why one might think simple systems contain more suffering, perhaps a cessation of suffering, a tranquilism, or knowledge/certainty of its attainment, is only observed in certain complex systems and is an emergent property of those systems.

    Timothy Chan wrote:

    Does that idea that complexity decreases net suffering rely on the consciousnesses of simple systems being cancelled by being incorporated into a complex one though? If that’s the idea I’m not too sure about the intuition behind that. It seems difficult to draw a boundary around a system and say that it’s the ‘terminal’ system that cancels everything simpler.

    Danny Donabedian wrote:

    Even if their consciousnesses weren’t fully canceled during such an incorporation, perhaps the simpler systems are affected in some other positive manner (with the suffering component of consciousness broadcasted upstream?). But I agree with you that carving up boundaries is challenging and at least not possible for the time being.

    Manu Herrán wrote:

    Another (scary) very similar hypothesys is that the basic state of simple matter is intense suffering and it thrives to more complex systems in an attempt to avoid that suffering. I put that idea long ago on lyrics of a song called Hypothesis Mass of a Death Metal band called Mortem Tirana.

    Danny Donabedian wrote:

    That’s similar to but a better/updated model reminiscent of the buddhist approach to realms where hellishness seems to be very simple and correlates with decreased complexity and intense craving, and its converse, happy godliness is associated with max complexity and less overall craving compared to the lower realms.

    —

    This conversation takes place in July 2020 in a thread started by Wolf Bullmann in  the “Sounds like something Brian Tomasik would be against but ok” private facebook group. Excerpts taken with the consent of the authors.

     

  • The systematic approach to suffering: an Interview with Robert Daoust

    The systematic approach to suffering: an Interview with Robert Daoust

    English | French

    Algonomy is the name of a discipline for the systematic study of suffering, proposed by Robert Daoust. The Algosphere Alliance, launched by Robert and others in 2011, is an open and transparent global network of individuals and organizations, dedicated to alleviating suffering. 

     

    Sentience Research: You are one of the founders of the Algosphere. How did the organisation start, and what were its foundational principles?

    Robert Daoust: To my great surprise, I realized in 1975 that there was no central place in our culture where one could go to deal with the phenomenon of suffering itself, in all its variety or aspects. I then proposed the creation of a theoretical discipline and a practical enterprise. In the following decades, I found that people in general had sympathy for my proposal, but no one got involved with me until 2011, when Jean-Christophe Lurenbaum and I met through David Pearce’s mediation. Jean-Christophe also had in the seventies the idea of organizing the alleviation of suffering in the world; for that purpose, deliberately, he studied in public economics and then chose to work as a secretary for strategy at the largest French public corporation before retiring early, going back to university and writing a book summarizing his ideas. Mines were in a 1986 document called L’organisation générale contre les maux.

    Thanks to Jean-Christophe’s great expertise, the Algosphere Alliance was started in 2013. It is a unique kind of institution, open to all those for whom the alleviation of suffering is a priority. It has no registration in any jurisdiction (it is free from any external authority), no power structure (no place for ego or power trip), no money (no control by the wealthiest), no obligation imposed on participants (contribute as you wish) and it is designed to operate slowly, methodically, for centuries and for very large-scale changes, more than in the heat of each passing emergency. It does not act by itself to alleviate suffering but rather through its allies, each in their particular fields of interest.

     

    Sentience Research: What is the main feature of the Algosphere that makes it different from other projects?

    Robert Daoust: The Alliance proposes a convergence of forces at the most abstract level of generality that can bring together the diverse actors dealing with the alleviation of suffering — and that abstract level is in my opinion the most concretely powerful in practice because it radically simplifies the approach to suffering. To say it more clearly perhaps, you and I do our things but can get into synergy by taking decisions together that are mutually advantageous, and we all can do that collectively thanks to the meeting place offered by the Alliance, the Agora. The Agora works as a worldwide direct democracy tool, a decentralized and transparent decision-making process that is based on consent, i.e. non-disagreement, i.e. non-suffering.

     

    Sentience Research: What happened before that? In your biographical notes we can read depressing thoughts of teenage Robert about suffering, “Extreme pain endured by innumerable beings in their march across life appears to me like a hopeless persecution perpetrated by inhuman forces which we must absolutely defeat.” Has this changed in time? How do you actually experience personally and assess globally suffering in the world?

    Robert Daoust: How much suffering is there? Personally, my mother died when I was two years and a half, but I realized only recently that this was, for real, a painful tragedy. I mean… this made my life, and several other lives too, complicated and full of hardship, but that death never felt painful to me. I first encountered excessive suffering when I was ill with various common childhood illnesses, and from the age of ten I did all I could to avoid physical pain. Similarly, in my late twenties, I progressively learned to avoid psychological suffering due to causes such as depression or sexual frustration. After that, I have mostly been happy. Anyhow, it is not clear to me how someone can assess the amount of suffering that occurs in oneself, let alone in the whole world. We need an algometry, a science of suffering quantification, a subspecialty of algonomy. Roughly, I think that the amount of suffering on earth has been more or less equal during the last million years. I cannot look at the hellish state of the world without what I call welder’s goggles. I take solace, however, in this sentence from Maus, where Spiegelman’s father, a holocaust survivor, says about his stay in Dachau:  “And that’s where my troubles began”. That was after he had been in Auschwitz for a long time!!!

     

    Sentience Research: You say that “all major spheres of human activity deal in one way or another with suffering”, although it is not their main concern. Is this not a paradox or contradiction?

    Robert Daoust: Do you see a contradiction?

     

    Sentience Research: I mean, suffering is ubiquitous in human lives (and in other animals too, of course) and yet there have hardly been any humans who have set out to end suffering. It seems as if most accept it as a necessary or inevitable evil.

    Robert Daoust: Oh, yes! Before Newtonian science you could deal with gravity but only up to a certain point. It takes a lot of abstract thinking to get beyond the obvious and start discovering what else can be done, like going to the moon. It is only with the advent of a new scientific psychology in the 21st century, I believe, that we will really begin to understand how to escape the gravity of our suffering condition.  I noticed also that, by definition so to speak, the more something is needed, the harder it is to get it. That is because, I guess, we are in a world where each entity competes for its own construction, its own growth. Cooperation instead of competition occurs when one level of activity is unexpectedly surpassed by another level of activity, as it has occurred throughout the history of biological evolution, and of human evolution as well. That explains perhaps, but not very clearly, sorry, why it is so hard to find collaboration for projects like mine…

     

    Sentience Research: The idea of ​​a discipline that has suffering as its main focus, algonomy, is something that has matured in you for many years. (It has been in your head at least since 1975!) How has it changed since then? What are the challenges of this project?

    Robert Daoust: It did not change much. At the start I called it algology. Over the subsequent decade, I spent my time in libraries looking for works or fields of study that already existed in the spirit of algonomy. Alas, and to my unending surprise, I did not find much. In 1986, I produced a summary or blueprint L’organisation générale contre les maux, and around 2000-2005 an Introduction to Algonomy. I should say that from the very beginning, my feeling was that if the idea was as good as it seemed,  it would take only two weeks to find plenty of interested people! I still have the same feeling. The last attempt I made was in 2019, when I proposed to create an Institute of Algonomy: it’s easy, all you  have to do is find 10 million dollars from one billionaire philanthropist! Of course, that too was not settled in two weeks — because of a lack of audacity, I suppose: not a single request was made to obtain ten millions.  A new discipline dedicated to suffering includes a lot of challenges, but I predict that if we could get it off the ground, it would be so successful, in terms of spared sufferings, that its development would be quick and lasting. Sometimes, however, I think all this might be a lifelong delusion… but it’s a bet, a wager: could I imagine a more meaningful way to use my time?

     

    Sentience Research:  “Suffering”, “Pain”, “Disvalue”, “Negative Valence”, “Negative Qualia”, “Unsatisfied Desires” and “Frustrated Preferences” are conflicting terms sometimes used ambiguously. Which is your favourite term? Do you use different definitions?

    Robert Daoust: My favorite term is unpleasantness, which I retained from my studies in pain science, where it is used to distinguish between various components of physical pain, such as ‘aversion’ (“to not want” is not “to dislike”, cf Berridge) or ‘suffering’ (secondary or tertiary psychological distress). Around 2006-2010, I wrote most of the Wikipedia entry on suffering, and especially the section Terminology. By the way, even this article, which is regularly consulted, has not attracted much collaboration for its edition, which is a pity.

    Terminology about suffering is extraordinarily confusing. It reveals how much suffering is a blind spot in our culture. One of the first uses of algonomy would be to adopt a universal technical terminology. Perhaps suffering would be called ‘algo’. So… personally I use only one definition of suffering: unpleasant feeling. I find negative valence interesting, but I think it very often occurs without unpleasantness, like when for instance an inquisitive mind realizes that a piece of information is missing: this may be felt as a disvalue, but within a stream of pleasant exploration. Pleasure and suffering are not the only values that exist, in my opinion, far from it. It might be disastrous to stop all suffering (or to promote all pleasures) if it turns out that some of it is necessary (or is an obstacle) to reach something of great value.

    Another use of algonomy, that will bring light into this complex topic, will be to provide a taxology of suffering, a tool for collecting and classifying information concerning the “kinds of suffering,  people or animals who suffer, causes of suffering, people and organizations who cause suffering, solutions or strategies relative to suffering, people and organizations who contribute to stop or prevent excessive suffering, documents relevant to the systematic study of suffering,” etc.

     

    Sentience Research: What are your thoughts on the nature of suffering: why do we suffer and how sentient experience is possible in the first place?

    Robert Daoust: Ultimately, the nature of suffering or sentience depends on the nature of what exists at the most fundamental level, beyond our current knowledge. So, we are left to wonder what this world is and what value it has. Philosophically, I choose sanity, I believe and hope that the unknown will become known someday and most importantly, that it will not turn out to be “too” bad: in all likelihood there is no eternal hell or something even worse. My view is that we live in the universe described by modern physics, which consists of matter-energy or waves-particles. Contemporary science is in the process of discovering how sentience emerges from matter-energy, and as a consequence it will understand much better itself and its concepts like space-time, matter-energy, mathematical objects, linguistic objects, etc.

     

    Sentience Research: Did you reach any conclusions regarding the most probable explanation of the nature of suffering and sentience in general?

    Robert Daoust: For what it may be worth, I think I have a unique perspective in the field of psychoneural research because I’m a self-taught independent scholar, specialized in a topic, suffering, that has not been systematically approached until now within the framework of a modern scientific discipline. The closest relevant knowledge I could find in the academic world was pain science. By chance, McGill University in my hometown had perhaps the best pain research community, around which I hung out for several years and learned a lot.

    I hold a few things as pretty certain: 1) the brain stem is more essential to sentience than the cortex; 2) the emergence of sentience depends on electromagnetic wave-fields generated in the brain, more than on computations made by neurons; 3) the solution to the hard problem of consciousness requires an explanation at the right level of emergence, the psychological level, but based on previous levels described by biology, chemistry, physics.

    Sentient experience is made possible by evolution through the advent of complex systems of cells specialized in electrical activities. Those activities represent insentient sensory, motor, or associative activities. In spite of their sophistication, insects “probably” behave without sentience, thanks only to their deep learning neural networks. But within vertebrates and some invertebrates the electromagnetic representations become so numerous and well interrelated that they form a complex blob or wave-field where a theater of meaning-values can take place: qualia constitute streams of interrelationships where they mean-and-are-worth something to each other, within a “narrative”.

    I hypothesize that the value part has its physical substratum in forces of attraction and repulsion taking various symmetric and dissymmetric configurations. The meaning part depends on neural computations and it cannot be conscious without value. We suffer because it contributes to survival. The most basic evolutive tendencies are entropy and negentropy, i.e. de-struction and con-struction. A single bacteria cell, for instance, undergoes a tension that brings it toward a nutrient or away of a threat. In a billion cell organism like ours, a specialized system is at work and contributes to -struction.

     

    Sentience Research: So, in your view, how broad is “we”, when we speak of us all, the sentient beings who suffer?

    Robert Daoust: My feeling is that as a matter of fact there is no ‘’I’’ that feels. Each suffering is an independent instance of sentience. The “I” as the owner of consciousness is an illusion, but socially it represents a convenient fictional agent, often self-aggrandized by identification to various “we”. Technically, the experience, the content of experience, and the subject of experience are just and simply one and the same thing (see Strawson). Sentience, I like to say, is what it feels like to be an electromagnetic wavefield under certain circumstances. So… the extent of sentience, as far as we can tell, would be that it emerged on earth millions of years ago, it probably emerged also in countless places elsewhere in the universe, and in the far future it will probably emerge in all matter-energy that can be used for that purpose.

    That’s why antinatalism, nihilism, despair are useless as a solution. Rather than count on the end of wicked species like ours, we’d do better to count on the better angels of our nature and try to sustainably organize the alleviation of suffering.

     

    Sentience Research: Do you think suffering can be quantified? How to relate the intensity of suffering with the number of individuals affected? How do we decide to take action over one case of suffering instead of over another when the number of individuals affected and the intensity of their sufferings are different in both cases?

    Robert Daoust: Yes, quantifying suffering is not impossible, like many say, but it is not as easy as others seem to think. Algometry is a whole discipline by itself, for which I made those Preparatory Notes for the Measurement of Suffering. I invite interested readers to look at that document. It will take several million dollars to seriously start algometry as a subdiscipline of algonomy.

     

    Sentience Research: Tell us something more about the current situation of the Algosphere. How does it work and what do you expect from it? What are the bottlenecks for achieving its goals?

    Robert Daoust: The Algosphere Alliance has been in operation for seven years now. It invites everybody to gather and make sure that suffering is now under siege, encircled, approached from all sides… Some fifty persons have become allies, and a hundred others have registered on the website. Six organizations are also allies. It’s a slow but solid start. A main component of the Alliance is its Collaborative Platform, where everyone does what they find interesting. Various things have been growing there, mostly underground. Since last April, a major revamping of the Algosphere is underway, with a committee of five people working hard. The goal is to rethink the whole substance and form in order to make the general public understand what is going on in the Algosphere. More news on this coming soon… We expect that during this century, thanks to our allies, suffering will become a priority for most people on this planet, when it is a question of making important collective or individual decisions. If there is one bottleneck for achieving this goal, it is the challenge of cultural change: how can the hearts and minds become involved in a global collective operation to restrain the phenomenon of suffering? Plans are set up, let’s hope they work.

     

    Sentience Research: What are the strategies for abolishing suffering, and what can we do today as a movement?

    Robert Daoust: The strategies have been spelled out by David Pearce in his masterpiece The Hedonistic Imperative. Essentially, we should investigate the biological or genetic factors that are to blame for the apparition of suffering and from there we should build a better arrangement of the cellular or sub-cellular components of our psyche. Meanwhile, social and political action may also be necessary, although insufficient, for reaching the goal. The road ahead is relatively clear and simple, although fraught with obstacles. The main obstacle might be a collapse of civilization through one of the existential risks. Another obstacle might be that suffering represents an essential part of the normal and free functioning of sentience: we might build organisms that feel no suffering at all, but in my opinion they would self-destruct, if their behaviour is not technically constrained, because of the inherent negentropic will to power that makes every entity do everything it can to con-struct itself. In a sentient organism, the ultimate regulator is unbearable suffering. To overcome that obstacle we would have to ensure that resurrection is available, that pain-free-and-free-choosing sentient beings are immortal. 

    In any case, each of us who realizes the importance of controlling the phenomenon of suffering can act through the various suffering-focused organizations that appeared recently:

     

    And all of us who understand the value of synergy can join together in the Algosphere Alliance. Many other projects remain to be set up, for instance:

    • Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential: we have to harness this crucial resource for improving our world on a global level.
    • Toward an Institute of Algonomy: we cannot go far without such an institutional basis for systematic knowledge, bibliography, taxology, algometry, strategic analysis, etc.
    • “Alleviating my suffering”: this is a project, at Algosphere,  of an Information and Resources Center for responding to individuals’ requests.
    • Algomedia: this is another project at Algosphere, concerning the use of all kinds of media for popularizing suffering-focused news and activities.
    • Global strategy project: this is still to be developed, it has to do with the junction of various groups, like effective altruism, Buddhism, compassion research, etc. around some kind of political program.
    • Action-Teams for an organized minimization of inacceptable sufferings: this is a recent version of a project that I have been trying to set up for decades in order to link direct practical action and the systematic control of suffering.

     

    Sentience Research: Is there anything left to say? What else should we talk about in this interview for it to be a complete review of your more important thoughts and actions?

    Robert Daoust: Faith in God was important for me until I was seventeen. I wanted to become a saint, and a priest. I lost faith, mainly because of the absurd idea of an eternal hell created by an infinitely loving father. Also because modern science made more sense for explaining the world. I was especially impressed by a book in 1966 Les prodigieuses victoires de la psychologie moderne. I tried to recover a kind of faith until my mid-thirties, studying oriental religions and parapsychology, before concluding that nothing, in those spiritual realms, stands up against scrutiny. Now I believe there are more things in material matter than are dreamt of by philosophers and mystics. 

    Soon, I will meet with colleagues I knew at school some 55 years ago. I realize that I was a poor kid as a student, and I remained poor all my life, inadvertently following the vow of poverty. I did not have children. It was long before I met girls, in my twenties. I was for good in a couple between the ages of 44 and 69. Fortunately, my brothers and sisters have all been a blessing for me, and most of my dearest friends too, intellectually, financially, socially, emotionally. My main problem in my twenties, besides finding a girl and a god, was to find a career. I settled for being a ‘thinker’, because being a philosopher or a writer was too demanding for me. And I settled for discovering something, because this is the most efficient work one can do: for instance as a pot maker you can make a number of pots in your life, but as the inventor of the pot making machine you produce an incomparably greater number of pots.

    I really fear only one thing: that there be an eternal hell for any sentient being. I cannot stand that thought for more than a few seconds. I think that this is a fundamental fact of human life: everyone meets unbearable suffering, for instance as a child who puts a hand on the stove burner, but also sooner, probably as a newborn or even as a foetus. Discovering unbearable suffering is incredibly and very fundamentally traumatic. Not only we cannot do or have all what we want, but also we may be overpowered by something that is terribly awful, that will make us suffer endlessly. We all are affected by post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s so terrible, we should forget about it, shouldn’t we? What’s on TV tonight?

    Nevertheless, there are other important things in life besides the question of suffering: everything we love. I retained from my religious education that the object of true love takes the status of the sacred, of what we want to be holy, whole, well con-structed rather than awfully de-structed. I love those who are close and dear to me, I love science and knowledge, I love beauty and pleasure and the glorious power that I find beneficial, and I love forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, and seas and skies…

     

    Sentience Research: Thank you very Much Robert, it has been a pleasure.

    Robert Daoust: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to express my thoughts, the pleasure was mine too.

     

  • A comprehensive list of ways in which reality may be distorted by perception, by David Pearce

    “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”  —William Blake

    1. You don’t perceive the environment. There is no public world. Instead, your local environment partially selects your brain states, some of which are experienced as your external surroundings. Mind-independent reality is a speculative metaphysical inference, sadly a strong one, IMO. Contra William Blake (and Aldous Huxley), there are no see-though doors of perception in need of a good wash, just cranial prisons.

    2. Whether you are awake or dreaming, your world-simulation is populated by zombies. When you are awake, these zombies are the avatars of sentient beings, but the imposters loom larger than their hypothetical real-world counterparts.

    3. Your egocentric world-simulation resembles a grotesque cartoon. Within the cartoon, you are the hub of reality, the most important being in the universe…

    Read more

  • On Transhumanism and Philosophy by Phil Torres

    We have a pretty good sense of how digestion works. And our grasp of thermodynamics is excellent. We know that there are three bones – the smallest in our bodies – in the middle ear, and that stars produce light because of thermonuclear fusion. While I’m skeptical of “progressionist” claims that the human condition has inexorably improved since the Neolithic revolution (the proliferation of technology-related existential risks being one reason for skepticism), it seems that science has made genuine progress.

    The knowledge we now have about what the universe is like and how it works1 far exceeds that of our ancestors – even just a few generations ago.

    One finds the exact opposite situation in philosophy. There has been little to no significant progress on many of the most fundamental issues, such as the nature of causation, the self, knowledge, the a priori, meaning, and even consciousness. (Note that a causal explanation is not the same as a constitutive one; brain-thought correlations do not tell us what consciousness is!) Why would this be?

    Does the stagnation of philosophy suggest that its problems are intrinsically hard – perhaps even more difficult to apprehend than, say, black holes and quantum tunneling? Some philosophers answer “No – or at least not necessarily.” It might be that the question of what exactly causes are is incredibly easy to answer, except that the answer includes one or more concepts that our three pound Jell-O brains simply can’t grasp ahold of. Not in the sense that an ancient relative of ours would find it hard to grasp what “radioactive decay” refers to, but in the sense that a dog could never, in principle, make sense of the concept of a stock market – or a quark, or a palindrome. The mental machinery pumping out thoughts in the dog’s tiny skull simply doesn’t have the conceptual resources to get these ideas.

    Philosophers call this ineluctable situation “cognitive closure,” and we may distinguish two versions of it. The first involves having the mental capacity to ask a question but not to answer it. It appears that this is the case with a range of philosophical topics, from causation to consciousness, knowledge to meaning. The answers seem to dangle in front of our minds’ eyes, yet no matter how hard we struggle to clutch them they continually evade our reach.

    The second kind of closure is defined by the inability to even ask the question, much less answer it. This is the cognitive prison our canine friends find themselves in with respect to quarks and palindromes. Their predicament is marked by a second-order ignorance – ignorance of their ignorance of concepts X, Y, and Z. In Rumsfeldian terms, the concepts aren’t merely “unknown unknowns” but “unknowable unknowns.” They lie forever beyond the horizon of intelligibility.

    As just alluded to, the boundary between “mysteries” (perennial unknowns) and “problems” (in principle knowable even if currently unknown) is entirely relative to types of minds. It is, in other words, a species-specific distinction: the boundary line is drawn differently for Canis lupus than for Homo sapiens. It follows from this relativism that a superintelligence – whether taking the form of a cognitively enhanced cyborg or a wholly artificial machine – could potentially have access to a vastly expanded library of concepts that are permanently unavailable to us.

    As such, it could grasp a range of ideas, beliefs, theories, hypotheses, explanations, and so on, that we can’t even begin to fathom. Thus if “we” – meaning us and our posthuman progeny – want to actually make some progress in philosophy, it may be that the only way forward is through the creation of minds that are superintelligent. This is essentially what the transhumanist philosopher Mark Walker has proposed: rather than dumb down the questions, smarten up the thinker.2 In his words, “The idea … is that it is not we who ought to abandon philosophy, but that philosophy ought to abandon us.” Call this inflationism.

    The transhumanist literature distinguishes between “strong” and “weak” supersmarts, where the former is qualitative and the second quantitative.3 The situation above involves superintelligence of the strong variety (although it doesn’t preclude the other kind). But weak superintelligence could also be incredibly useful for philosophy. Why? Because – they are institutionally permitted to examine the “big picture”— to work towards an understanding of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term,” as Wilfrid Sellars put it.

    The difficulty in achieving this stems from the word “broadest.” While collective human knowledge has undergone an exponential climb in the past several centuries, our individual capacities have remained more or less fixed. The result is that the relative ignorance of individuals is at an all-time high.4 You and I and even the most polymathic scholar are pathetically unaware of truly oceanic realms of “known knowables.”5 This prevents us from seeing the big picture. The two primary constraints here are memory – use it or lose it! – and time – even with eidetic abilities the day just ain’t long enough.

    ​But a weak superintelligence could rectify this problem of “size.” Although it would not be able to think any new (in kind) thoughts about the peculiar nature and workings of reality, it could potentially “remember” every fact, theory, and notion that humanity has so far registered as knowledge. Furthermore, since an AI would by definition be running on hardware in which components communicate at roughly the speed of light, it could easily overcome the time constraint as well.

    Putting this all together, a mind that’s superintelligent in both the weak and strong senses has the potential to satisfy Sellars’ aim of “seeing the whole picture,” as well as to solve the still-unanswered, age-old philosophical questions about life, the universe, and everything. Perhaps the transhumanist agenda offers the only path to philosophical enlightenment.

    1 I.e., the properties of objects that exist in the cosmos and their various causal relations.

    2 A superintelligence might also make progress in scientific areas like fundamental physics, where a “theory of everything” still eludes us, and the best proposed idea so far posits spatial dimensions beyond the three of length, width, and height – dimensions that are, at best, only vaguely intelligible to even the brightest minds.

    3 I’m expanding the definition of a weak superintelligence to including not only information processing speed but information organization and retention as well.

    4 That is, precisely because our collective knowledge is at an all-time high.

    5 We are thus forced to rely on a complex hierarchy of divided cognitive labor to navigate the intellectual landscape, since we can’t do it on our own.

    Source: https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/torres20141003

  • Andrés Gómez-Emilsson on Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering

    I briefly explain that while some distributions (e.g. the size of the leaves of a tree) follow a Gaussian bell-shaped pattern, many others (e.g. avalanches, size of asteroids, etc.) follow a long-tail distribution. Long-tail distributions have the general property that a large fraction of the volume is accounted for by a tiny percent of instances (e.g. 80% of the snow that falls from the mountain will be the result of the top 20% largest avalanches).

    I then explain that based on previous research we have conducted at the Qualia Research Institute we have arrived at the tentative conclusion that the intensity of pleasure and pain follow a long-tail distribution. Why?

    First, neural activity on patches of neural tissue follow log-normal distributions (an instance of a long-tail distribution).

    Second, the extremes of pleasure and pain are so intense that they cannot conceivably be just the extremes of a normal distribution. This includes, on the positive end: Jhana meditation, 5-MeO-DMT peak experiences, and temporal lobe epilepsy (Dostoevsky famously saying he’d trade 10 years of his life for just a few moments of his good epileptic experiences). On the negative end, things like kidney stones, cluster headaches, fibromyalgia, and migraines top the charts of most intense pain.

    And third, all of the quantitative analysis we conducted on a survey about people’s best and worst experiences showed that the ratings, comparisons, and rankings of such experiences was far more consistent with a long-tail distribution than a normal distribution.

    I then conclude by saying that this is an *important*, *tractable*, and *neglected* cause.

    1) Important because we may be able to reduce the world’s suffering by a significant amount if we just focus on preventing the most intense forms of suffering.

    2) Tractable because there are already many possible effective treatments to these disorders (such as LSD microdosing for cluster headaches, and FSM for kidney stones).

    3) And neglected because most people have no clue that pain and pleasure go this high. Most utilitarian calculus so far seems to assume a normal distribution for suffering, which is very far from the empirical truth. Bentham would recoil at the lack of an exponent term when additively normalizing pain scales.

    I conclude by adding that in Effective Altruism there might be an implicit “youth” bias involved in the lack of knowledge of this phenomenon – due to the age of the people in the movement, most EA activists will not themselves have had intensely painful experiences. Thus, why it is so crucial to raise awareness about this topic in the community (it does not show up on its own). Simply put: because the logarithmic nature of pleasure and pain is *news* to most people in EA.

    Video, Article, Presentation given at EA New York