157 quotes found
"[If] our actions have even the slightest effect on the probability of eventual colonization, this will outweigh their effect on when colonization takes place. For standard utilitarians, priority number one, two, three and four should consequently be to reduce existential risk. The utilitarian imperative “Maximize expected aggregate utility!” can be simplified to the maxim “Minimize existential risk!”"
"Many humans look at nature from an aesthetic perspective and think in terms of biodiversity and the health of ecosystems, but forget that the animals that inhabit these ecosystems are individuals and have their own needs. Disease, starvation, predation, ostracism, and sexual frustration are endemic in so-called healthy ecosystems. The great taboo in the animal rights movement is that most suffering is due to natural causes. Any proposal for remedying this situation is bound to sound utopian, but my dream is that one day the sun will rise on Earth and all sentient creatures will greet the new day with joy."
"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder."
"The singleton hypothesis is that Earth-originating intelligent life will (eventually) form a singleton. It is an open question whether the singleton hypothesis is true. My own opinion is that it is more likely true than not. Historically, we have seen an overarching trend towards the emergence of higher levels of social organization, from hunter-gatherer bands, to chiefdoms, city-states, nation states, and now multinational organizations, regional alliances, various international governance structures, and other aspects of globalization. Extrapolation of this trend points to the creation of a singleton."
"Searching for a cure for aging is not just a nice thing that we should perhaps one day get around to. It is an urgent, screaming moral imperative. The sooner we start a focused research program, the sooner we will get results. It matters if we get the cure in 25 years rather than in 24 years: a population greater than that of Canada would die as a result. In this matter, time equals life, at a rate of approximately 70 lives per minute. With the meter ticking at such a furious rate, we should stop faffing about."
"By anybody’s standards, there is a huge amount of unnecessary and undeserved suffering that is just bad and that we should get rid of."
"The Internet is a big boon to academic research. Gone are the days spent in dusty library stacks digging for journal articles. Many articles are available free to the public in open-access journal or as preprints on the authors’ website."
"The universe is cold. Fun is the fire that melts the blocks of hardship and creates a bubbling celebration of life. It is the birth right of every creature, a right no less sacred for having been trampled on since the beginning of time."
"What could be more fascinating than discovering life that had evolved entirely independently of life here on Earth? Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we are not entirely alone in this vast cold cosmos. But I hope that our Mars probes will discover nothing. It would be good news if we find Mars to be completely sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit."
"Aggregative consequentialist theories are threatened by infinitarian paralysis: they seem to imply that if the world is canonically infinite then it is always ethically indifferent what we do. In particular, they would imply that it is ethically indifferent whether we cause another holocaust or prevent one from occurring. If any non-contradictory normative implication is a reductio ad absurdum, this one is."
"It is possible that efforts to contemplate some risk area—say, existential risk—will do more harm than good. One might suppose that thinking about a topic should be entirely harmless, but this is not necessarily so. If one gets a good idea, one will be tempted to share it; and in so doing one might create an information hazard. Still, one likes to believe that, on balance, investigations into existential risks and most other risk areas will tend to reduce rather than increase the risks of their subject matter."
"Since we cannot completely eliminate existential risk — at any moment, we might be tossed into the dustbin of cosmic history by the advancing front of a vacuum phase transition triggered in some remote galaxy a billion years ago — the use of maximin in the present context would entail choosing the action that has the greatest benefit under the assumption of impending extinction. Maximin thus implies that we ought all to start partying as if there were no tomorrow. That implication, while perhaps tempting, is implausible."
"In this book, I try to understand the challenge presented by the prospect of superintelligence, and how we might best respond. This is quite possibly the most important and most daunting challenge humanity has ever faced. And—whether we succeed or fail—it is probably the last challenge we will ever face."
"Observers in earlier epochs might have found it equally preposterous to suppose that the world economy would one day be doubling several times within a single lifespan. Yet that is the extraordinary condition we now take to be ordinary."
"Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it."
"The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development—and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion."
"The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds."
"Perhaps it is a sign of civilizational progress that the very idea of threatening a nuclear first strike today seems borderline silly or morally obscene."
"[A]ssuming that the observable universe is void of extraterrestrial civilizations, then what hangs in the balance is at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 human lives (though the true number is probably larger). If we represent all the happiness experienced during one entire such life with a single teardrop of joy, then the happiness of these souls could fill and refill the Earth’s oceans every second, and keep doing so for a hundred billion billion millennia. It is really important that we make sure these truly are tears of joy."
"Our demise may instead result from the habitat destruction that ensues when the AI begins massive global construction projects using nanotech factories and assemblers—construction projects which quickly, perhaps within days or weeks, tile all of the Earth’s surface with solar panels, nuclear reactors, supercomputing facilities with protruding cooling towers, space rocket launchers, or other installations whereby the AI intends to maximize the long-term cumulative realization of its values. Human brains, if they contain information relevant to the AI’s goals, could be disassembled and scanned, and the extracted data transferred to some more efficient and secure storage format."
"Nature might be a great experimentalist, but one who would never pass muster with an ethics review board – contravening the Helsinki Declaration and every norm of moral decency, left, right, and center."
"Solving the value-loading problem is a research challenge worthy of some of the next generation’s best mathematical talent. We cannot postpone confronting this problem until the AI has developed enough reason to easily understand our intentions."
"Even a single missed crucial consideration could vitiate our most valiant efforts or render them as actively harmful as those of a soldier who is fighting on the wrong side. The search for crucial considerations (which must explore normative as well as descriptive issues) will often require crisscrossing the boundaries between different academic disciplines and other fields of knowledge. As there is no established methodology for how to go about this kind of research, difficult original thinking is necessary."
"Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound."
"In this situation, any feeling of gee-wiz exhilaration would be out of place. Consternation and fear would be closer to the mark; but the most appropriate attitude may be a bitter determination to be as competent as we can, much as if we were preparing for a difficult exam that will either realize our dreams or obliterate them."
"Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say: “If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.”"
"To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty."
"In the universe where everything works the way it common-sensically ought to, everything about the study of Artificial General Intelligence is driven by the one overwhelming fact of the indescribably huge effects: initial conditions and unfolding patterns whose consequences will resound for as long as causal chains continue out of Earth, until all the stars and galaxies in the night sky have burned down to cold iron, and maybe long afterward, or forever into infinity if the true laws of physics should happen to permit that. To deliberately thrust your mortal brain onto that stage, as it plays out on ancient Earth the first root of life, is an act so far beyond "audacity" as to set the word on fire, an act which can only be excused by the terrifying knowledge that the empty skies offer no higher authority."
"I have sometimes thought that all professional lectures on rationality should be delivered while wearing a clown suit, to prevent the audience from confusing seriousness with solemnity."
"It would actually be quite surprisingly helpful for increasing the percentage of people who will participate meaningfully in saving the planet, if there were some reliably-working standard explanation for why physics and logic together have enough room to contain morality."
"Declaring yourself to be operating by "Crocker's Rules" means that other people are allowed to optimize their messages for information, not for being nice to you. Crocker's Rules means that you have accepted full responsibility for the operation of your own mind — if you're offended, it's your fault. Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor. (Which, in point of fact, they would be. One of the big problems with this culture is that everyone's afraid to tell you you're wrong, or they think they have to dance around it.) Two people using Crocker's Rules should be able to communicate all relevant information in the minimum amount of time, without paraphrasing or social formatting. Obviously, don't declare yourself to be operating by Crocker's Rules unless you have that kind of mental discipline. Note that Crocker's Rules does not mean you can insult people; it means that other people don't have to worry about whether they are insulting you. Crocker's Rules are a discipline, not a privilege. Furthermore, taking advantage of Crocker's Rules does not imply reciprocity. How could it? Crocker's Rules are something you do for yourself, to maximize information received — not something you grit your teeth over and do as a favor."
"If you declare Crocker's Rules, other people don't need to worry about being tactful to you. (You still need to worry about being tactful to them — Crocker's Rules only work one way.)"
"Crocker's Rules didn't give you the right to say anything offensive, but other people could say potentially offensive things to you, and it was your responsibility not to be offended. This was surprisingly hard to explain to people; many people would read the careful explanation and hear, "Crocker's Rules mean you can say offensive things to other people.""
"The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."
"People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed... Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back — providing aid and comfort to the enemy."
"Ever since I adopted the rule of "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be," I've also come to realize "That which the truth nourishes should thrive." When something good happens, I am happy, and there is no confusion in my mind about whether it is rational for me to be happy. When something terrible happens, I do not flee my sadness by searching for fake consolations and false silver linings. I visualize the past and future of humankind, the tens of billions of deaths over our history, the misery and fear, the search for answers, the trembling hands reaching upward out of so much blood, what we could become someday when we make the stars our cities, all that darkness and all that light — I know that I can never truly understand it, and I haven't the words to say."
"Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge."
"But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance."
"Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it's probably going to stay there."
"If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing."
"The strength of a theory is not what it allows, but what it prohibits; if you can invent an equally persuasive explanation for any outcome, you have zero knowledge."
"The police officer who puts their life on the line with no superpowers, no X-Ray vision, no super-strength, no ability to fly, and above all no invulnerability to bullets, reveals far greater virtue than Superman — who is only a mere superhero."
"Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit."
"Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals, they are passed milestones on our road; and the most important milestone is the hero yet to come."
"The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over."
"People cling to their intuitions, I think, not so much because they believe their cognitive algorithms are perfectly reliable, but because they can't see their intuitions as the way their cognitive algorithms happen to look from the inside. And so everything you try to say about how the native cognitive algorithm goes astray, ends up being contrasted to their direct perception of the Way Things Really Are—and discarded as obviously wrong."
"Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so, if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality."
"There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model."
"The nature of "reality" is something about which I'm still confused, which leaves open the possibility that there isn't any such thing. But Egan's Law still applies: "It all adds up to normality." Apples didn't stop falling when Einstein disproved Newton's theory of gravity. Sure, when the dust settles, it could turn out that apples don't exist, Earth doesn't exist, reality doesn't exist. But the nonexistent apples will still fall toward the nonexistent ground at a meaningless rate of 9.8 m/s2."
"If you've been cryocrastinating, putting off signing up for cryonics "until later", don't think that you've "gotten away with it so far". Many worlds, remember? There are branched versions of you that are dying of cancer, and not signed up for cryonics, and it's too late for them to get life insurance."
"Physiologically adult humans are not meant to spend an additional 10 years in a school system; their brains map that onto "I have been assigned low tribal status". And so, of course, they plot rebellion—accuse the existing tribal overlords of corruption—plot perhaps to split off their own little tribe in the savanna, not realizing that this is impossible in the Modern World."
"Part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe — a universe containing no ontologically basic mental things such as souls or magic — and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment."
"If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular."
"By and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions — some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization — simply fail to exist in the first place."
"If I'm teaching deep things, then I view it as important to make people feel like they're learning deep things, because otherwise, they will still have a hole in their mind for "deep truths" that needs filling, and they will go off and fill their heads with complete nonsense that has been written in a more satisfying style."
"We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape."
"The people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality, are unusually honest, or, failing that, at least have unusually bad social skills."
"If dragons were common, and you could look at one in the zoo — but zebras were a rare legendary creature that had finally been decided to be mythical — then there's a certain sort of person who would ignore dragons, who would never bother to look at dragons, and chase after rumors of zebras. The grass is always greener on the other side of reality. Which is rather setting ourselves up for eternal disappointment, eh? If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed."
"This is crunch time for the whole human species, and not just for us but for the intergalactic civilization whose existence depends on us. This is the hour before the final exam and we're trying to get as much studying done as possible. It may be that you can't make yourself feel that for a decade or thirty years or however long this crunch time lasts, but the reality is one thing and the emotions are another... If you confront it full on, then you can't really justify trading off any part of intergalactic civilization for any intrinsic thing you could get nowadays, and at the same time, it's also true that there are very few people who can live like that (and I'm not one of them myself)."
"If you want to build a recursively self-improving AI, have it go through a billion sequential self-modifications, become vastly smarter than you, and not die, you've got to work to a pretty precise standard."
"Have I ever remarked on how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so? Support like, say, spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores? The more so considering this is a central allocation question for the entire economy?"
"Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use."
"Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and the more fun we have the more people will want to join us."
"Maybe you just can't protect people from certain specialized types of folly with any sane amount of regulation, and the correct response is to give up on the high social costs of inadequately protecting people from themselves under certain circumstances."
"Litmus test: If you can't describe Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage and explain why people find it counterintuitive, you don't know enough about economics to direct any criticism or praise at "capitalism" because you don't know what other people are referring to when they use that word."
"I am tempted to say that a doctorate in AI would be negatively useful, but I am not one to hold someone’s reckless youth against them – just because you acquired a doctorate in AI doesn’t mean you should be permanently disqualified."
"There's a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) of a Sneer Club of people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Asshole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn't matter that God doesn't actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f'd-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it."
"There was a conference one time on: "What are we going to do about the looming risk of AI disaster?" … And what came out of that conference was OpenAI, which was basically the worst possible way of doing anything. Like, "This is not a problem of, 'Oh no, what if secret elites get AI', it's that nobody knows how to build the thing." … So, like, "Let's open up everything! Let's accelerate everything!" It was like ChatGPT's blind version of throwing the ideals at a place where they were exactly the wrong ideals to solve the problem. … And that was it. That was me in 2015 going, "Oh. So this is what humanity will elect to do. We will not rise above. We will not have more grace, not even here, at the very end." So that is when I did my crying late at night, and then picked myself up and fought and fought and fought until I had run out all the avenues that I seem to have the capability to do."
"You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualise a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?"
"And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star, they won't tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they're old enough to bear it; and when they learn they'll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed!"
"Lies propagate, that’s what I’m saying. You’ve got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that’s connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you’d even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn’t work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn’t work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they’ve got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn’t exist and there’s no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn’t just mistaken, it’s anti-epistemology, it’s systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there’s someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there’s a lot of people out there telling lies."
"Many boys and girls are heroes in their dreams," Dumbledore said quietly. He did not look at any of the other girls, only at her. "Fewer in the waking world. Many have stood their ground and faced the darkness when it comes for them. Fewer come for the darkness and force it to face them. It is a hard life, sometimes lonely, often short. I have told none to refuse that calling, but neither would I wish to increase their number."
"When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing."
"Crocker stumbled across Wikipedia early on. There were gaping holes in the encyclopedia's content, so he pitched in. As a semiprofessional poker player, he wrote the site's original poker article. As a fan of the martini, he wrote about that topic. "In the early days, it was pretty easy to find topics that needed to be covered," Crocker said. "It's not that easy today. It's pretty complete." Crocker wrote entries about Ken Kesey, Walter Annenberg, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and dozens of other topics. "Nowadays I'm not as active, but I still write," he said. "I spent a couple of hours on Wikipedia every day for a long time." In addition to writing articles, Crocker wrote new wiki software when the original program proved too slow to handle the site's growing popularity. Crocker embraced Wikipedia because he believes information should be free."
"[I]n the wake of the growth of the animal-rights movement, there has recently arisen a hitherto unfelt need to demonise and demean our non-human victims - and those who try to help them - now that our previously well-nigh unquestioned right to kill and exploit them is being challenged. Bloodsports enthusiasts, for instance, currently spend a lot of time cataloguing the alleged depredations of our victims on the environment. Recreational animal-killers go to extraordinarily lengths to avoid admitting that they themselves enjoy hunting and killing other creatures for fun. But then until a few years ago such rationalisations seemed scarcely called for. Selfish DNA had honed our intuitions so that the most agonising bloodshed seemed simply "natural"."
"Nature documentaries are mostly travesties of real life. They entertain and edify us with evocative mood-music and travelogue-style voice-overs. They impose significance and narrative structure on life's messiness. Wildlife shows have their sad moments, for sure. Yet suffering never lasts very long. It is always offset by homely platitudes about the balance of Nature, the good of the herd, and a sort of poor-man's secular theodicy on behalf of Mother Nature which reassures us that it's not so bad after all. That's a convenient lie. If you had just gone through the horror of seeing your loved one eaten alive by a predator, or die slowly of thirst, you would find such clichés empty. Yet in Nature this kind of thing happens all the time. It's completely endemic to the prevailing red-in-tooth-and-claw Darwinian regime. Lions kill their targets primarily by suffocation; which will last minutes. The wolf pack may start eating their prey while the victim is still conscious, though hamstrung. Sharks and the orca basically eat their prey alive; but in sections for the larger prey, notably seals. An analogous scenario in which intelligent extraterrestrial naturalists turned the stylised portrayal of our death-agonies into a lyrical spectacle for popular home entertainment is repugnant. Yet as long as we revel in the production of animal snuff-movies in the guise of wildlife documentaries, that is often the role we play in the tragic lives of photogenic members of other species here on earth."
"By far my greatest dread in life […] is that (some variant of) the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true."
"[T]here is no fundamental biological reason why the human genome can't be rewritten to allow everyone to be "in" love with everyone else - if we should so choose. But simply loving each other will be miraculous enough; and will probably suffice. An empty religious piety can be transformed into a biological reality."
"When Bernard Marx tells the Savage he will try to secure permission for him and his mother to visit the Other Place, John is initially pleased and excited. Echoing Miranda in The Tempest, he exclaims: "O brave new world that has such people in it." Heavy irony. Like innocent Miranda, he is eager to embrace a way of life he neither knows nor understands. And of course he comes unstuck. Yet if we swallow such fancy literary conceits, then ultimately the joke is on us. It is only funny in the sense there are "jokes" about Auschwitz. For it is Huxley who neither knows nor understands the glory of what lies ahead. A utopian society in which we are sublimely happy will be far better than we can presently imagine, not worse. And it is we, trapped in the emotional squalor of late-Darwinian antiquity, who neither know nor understand the lives of the god-like super-beings we are destined to become."
"I argue that what breathes fire into the QM equations is field-theoretic what-it's-likeness: "microqualia" to use a philosopher's term of art. The different values of the solutions to the ultimate physical equations exhaustively yield the abundance of different values of subjectivity. There is no room for dualism; "nomological danglers"; causally inert epiphenomena; classical, porridge-like lumps of otherwise insentient but magically mind-secreting matter, etc. There is no "explanatory gap" because there aren't any material objects - not even brains or nerve cells as commonly (mis)perceived. Instead, over millions of years, non-equilibrium thermodynamics and universal, (neo-)Darwinian principles of natural selection have contrived to organise a minimal and self-intimating subjective sludge of microqualia into complex functional living units. Initially, these units have taken the form of self-replicating, information-bearing biomolecular patterns. Eventually, selection-pressure has given rise to complex minds as well, albeit as just one part of the throwaway host vehicles by which our genes leave copies of themselves. Conscious mind, on this proposal, is a triumph of organisation: our egocentric virtual worlds are warm and gappy QM-coherent states of consciousness. Contra materialist metaphysics, sentience of any kind is not the daily re-enactment of an ontological miracle. Moreover the idea that what-it's-like-ness is the fire in the equations is (at least) consistent with orthodox relativistic quantum field theory - because the theorists' key notions (e.g. that of a field, string, brane, etc) are defined purely mathematically. In other cases, they readily lend themselves to such a reconstruction. Using the word "physical" doesn't add anything of substance."
"As the neurobiological basis of feeling and emotion is unravelled, and the human genome decoded and rewritten, it will become purely an issue of post-human decision whether negative modes of consciousness are generated in any form or texture whatsoever."
"The negative utilitarian might reply that this formulation of the problem is misleading. We do not live in a notional world where only a pinprick, minor pains, or even just "mild" suffering exists. In the real world, frightful horrors as well as humdrum malaise occur every day. The intensity of suffering is sometimes so dreadful that its victims are prepared to destroy themselves to bring their torment to an end. Each year, some 800,000 people across the planet kill themselves while in the grip of suicidal despair. Tens of millions of people are severely depressed or suffer chronic neuropathic pain. By way of contrast, the genteel conventions of an ethics seminar in academic philosophy, or the scholarly technicalities of a journal article, simply fail to come to terms with the enormity of what's at stake. To talk of a "pinprick" is to trivialise the NU ethical stance."
"[U]nlike positive utilitarianism or so-called preference utilitarianism - neither of which can ever be wholly fulfilled - [negative utilitarianism] seems achievable in full."
"[N]othing is too terrible to be true if it is consistent with the laws of nature [...]."
"A lot of people recoil from the word "drugs" - which is understandable given today's noxious street drugs and their uninspiring medical counterparts. Yet even academics and intellectuals in our society typically take the prototypical dumb drug, ethyl alcohol. If it's socially acceptable to take a drug that makes you temporarily happy and stupid, then why not rationally design drugs to make people perpetually happier and smarter? Presumably, in order to limit abuse-potential, one would want any ideal pleasure drug to be akin - in one limited but important sense - to nicotine, where the smoker's brain finely calibrates its optimal level: there is no uncontrolled dose-escalation."
"Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldn't it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code?"
"It's not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings."
"When one is gripped by excruciating physical pain, one is always shocked at just how frightful it can be."
"If we want eternal life, then we’ll need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like. “May all that have life be delivered from suffering”, said Gautama Buddha. It’s a wonderful sentiment. Sadly, only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the living world. Compassion alone is not enough."
"My own sense of how to behave in a simulation has more traditional roots in the theory of perception. I've long believed that each of us lives in an egocentric simulation of the world run by the mind/brain. Since the zombies of each (waking) simulation have sentient real world counterparts, one should treat them as though they were real. Nonetheless as an angst-ridden teenager, my dawning acceptance of an inferential realist theory of perception made me feel as if I'd been condemned to solitary confinement for life. The sense of loneliness was indescribable. Naïve realism is better for one's mental health."
"Assume, provisionally at any rate, a utilitarian ethic. The abolitionist project follows naturally, in "our" parochial corner of Hilbert space at least. On its completion, if not before, we should aim to develop superintelligence to maximise the well-being of the fragment of the cosmos accessible to beneficent intervention. And when we are sure – absolutely sure – that we have done literally everything we can do to eradicate suffering elsewhere, perhaps we should forget about its very existence."
"My own view of the risks and uncertainties is that there is a critical distinction between trying to abolish suffering exclusively via social reform and abolishing suffering directly via biotechnology. As we know, utopian social experiments typically go wrong, sometimes hideously wrong, and end up causing a lot of suffering instead. The abolitionist project of eradicating the biological substrates of suffering sounds like just another utopian scheme, whether it's touted as a grandiose species-project or simply as a byproduct of the Reproductive Revolution explored here. Although the abolition of psychological pain is arguably no more utopian in principle than pain-free surgery, it could presumably go wrong in unanticipated ways too. Perhaps we'll unwittingly create a fool's paradise. But if and when we ever abolish the molecular underpinning of unpleasant experience, and it becomes physiologically impossible for any sentient being to suffer, we thereby change the very meaning of what it is for anything to "go wrong". Unwelcome surprises where no one gets hurt are very different from unwelcome surprises where they do. For what it's worth, I think the abolition of involuntary suffering is the precondition of any civilised posthuman society; and therefore a risk worth taking."
"Here the question comes down to an analysis of risk-reward ratios - and our basic ethical values, themselves shaped by our evolutionary past. Lest extension of the new reproductive medicine seem too rashly experimental even to contemplate, it's worth recalling that each act of old-fashioned sexual reproduction is itself an untested genetic experiment, the outcome of random mutations and meiotic shuffling of the genetic deck, and with no happy ending to date. So just who are we to accuse of reckless gambling? As it stands, all of us are genetically predestined to grow old and die; and in the course of a lifetime, the great majority of humans will experience periods of intense psychological distress, for instance loneliness and heartache after an unhappy love affair. Our social primate biology ensures that most of us sometimes experience, to a greater or lesser degree, all manner of nasty states that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment e.g. jealousy, resentment, anger, and so forth. Hundreds of millions of people in the world today suffer bouts of depression; others live with chronic anxiety. One might say these phenotypes are part of what it means to be human. Worse, we pass a heritable predisposition to these horrible states on to our children."
"[H]ere we come to the nub of the issue: the alleged moral force of the term "natural". If any creature, by its very nature, causes terrible suffering, albeit unwittingly, is it morally wrong to change that nature? If a civilised human were to come to believe s/he had been committing acts that caused grievous pain for no good reason, then s/he would stop - and want other moral agents to prevent the recurrence of such behaviour. May we assume that the same would be true of a lion, if the lion were morally and cognitively "uplifted" so as to understand the ramifications of what (s)he was doing? Or a house cat tormenting a mouse? Or indeed a human sociopath?"
"Given our anthropocentric bias, thinking of non-human vertebrates not just as equivalent in moral status to toddlers or infants, but as though they were toddlers or infants, is a useful exercise. Such reconceptualisation helps correct our lack of empathy for sentient beings whose physical appearance is different from "us". Ethically, the practice of intelligent "anthropomorphism" shouldn't be shunned as unscientific, but embraced insofar as it augments our stunted capacity for empathy. Such anthropomorphism can be a valuable corrective to our cognitive and moral limitations. This is not a plea to be sentimental, simply for impartial benevolence."
"It is hard to imagine an experience more horrific than being eaten alive. Most of us would prefer not to imagine what it must feel like. Note that the photographer here had to persuade the park ranger to violate the park rules and put the baby elephant out of his misery. By analogy, suppose it were lawful to visit Third World countries for photoshoots but illegal to "interfere" and help a stricken human baby. Is there a fundamental difference between "ethical" intervention to help humans and "sentimental" pleas to "interfere" and help non-humans? Should we encourage the preservation of life-forms such as the hyena in their current guise? Or do the value judgements underlying the "science" of conservation biology need to be re-examined?"
"Our present-day neurochemical cocktail, we are asked to believe, is the medium through which alien realms of consciousness can be grasped and neutrally appraised from a third-person perspective. Empirical research suggests this optimism is at best naïve."
"Human intuitions are systematically biased. Evolutionary psychology explains how our moral intuitions and the rationalisations they spawn have been shaped by millennia of natural selection to maximise the inclusive fitness of our genes, not to track the welfare of other sentient beings impartially conceived. Many human cultures have found nothing intuitively wrong with aggressive warfare, slavery, wife-beating, infanticide or female genital mutilation. Ultimately, folk morality is a doomed enterprise as hopeless as folk physics. A mature posthuman ethics, I'd argue, must be committed to the well-being of all sentient life; and mature posthuman technology offers the means to deliver that commitment."
"Many city-dwellers have a romanticized conception of the living world. From another perspective, some "conservation biologists" favour e.g. "". By contrast, I think any truly compassionate person should be horrified at the terrible suffering of Nature "red in tooth and claw". Why not aim for a cruelty-free world instead?"
"From a young age, I've viewed the animals we abuse and kill as akin - functionally, intellectually and emotionally - to small children. Small children are vulnerable. Typically, they don't need "liberating". Infants and toddlers in particular need looking after. The problem - when I was a teenager - was that most of interventions I could think of to alleviate wild animal suffering might easily make things worse in the long run. Thus if we sought to rescue herbivores, then obligate carnivores (and their young) would starve. If we were to phase out carnivorous predators altogether, then there would a population explosion of "prey" species. Lots of herbivores would then starve too. The food chain seemed an inexorable fact of the world - a fact as immutable as, say, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Only after reading Eric Drexler's classic "Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology" did I gradually come to realize that there were technical solutions to all these problems - notably in vitro meat, immunocontraception, neurochips to modulate behaviour, nanobots to manage marine ecosystems, and ultimately rewriting the vertebrate genome."
"Today, empathetic intelligence entails sharing the sorrows of other sentient beings. In our posthuman future, will empathy consist entirely in sharing each other's joys?"
"A global transition to a cruelty-free vegan diet won't just help non-human animals. The transition will also help malnourished humans who could benefit from the grain currently fed to factory-farmed animals. For factory-farming is not just cruel; it's energy-inefficient. Let's take just one example. Over the past few decades, millions of Ethiopians have died of "food shortages" while Ethiopia grew grain to sell to the West to feed cattle. Western meat-eating habits prop up the price of grain so that poor people in the developing world can't afford to buy it. In consequence, they starve by the millions. In my work, I explore futuristic, hi-tech solutions to the problem of suffering. But anybody who seriously wants to reduce human and non-human suffering alike should adopt a cruelty-free vegan lifestyle today."
"Some days will be sublime. Others will be merely wonderful. But critically, there will be one particular texture ("what it feels like") of consciousness that will be missing from our lives; and that will be the texture of nastiness."
"Suffering exists only because it was good for our genes. Conditionally-activated negative emotions were fitness-enhancing in the ancestral environment. In the current era, apologists for mental pain are serving as the innocent mouthpieces of the nasty bits of code which spawned them."
"I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences."
"So what is the alternative to traditional anthropocentric ethics? Antispeciesism is not the claim that "All Animals Are Equal", or that all species are of equal value, or that a human or a pig is equivalent to a mosquito. Rather the antispeciesist claims that, other things being equal, equally strong interests should count equally. Experiences that are subjectively negative or positive in hedonic tone to the same degree must count for the same."
"[B]oth natural selection and the historical record offer powerful reasons for doubting the trustworthiness of our naive moral intuitions. So the possibility that human civilisation might be founded upon some monstrous evil should be taken seriously - even if the possibility seems transparently absurd at the time."
"[O]ne might naively suppose that a negative utilitarian would welcome human extinction. But only (trans)humans - or our potential superintelligent successors - are technically capable of phasing out the cruelties of the rest of the living world on Earth. And only (trans)humans - or rather our potential superintelligent successors - are technically capable of assuming stewardship of our entire Hubble volume."
"The biology of suffering in intelligent agents is a deep underlying source of existential risk – and one that can potentially be overcome."
"A few centuries from now, if involuntary suffering still exists in the world, the explanation for its persistence won't be that we've run out of computational resources to phase out its biological signature, but rather that rational agents – for reasons unknown – will have chosen to preserve it."
"What right have humans to impose our values on members of another race or species? The charge is seductive but misplaced. There is no anthropomorphism here, no imposition of human values on alien minds. Human and nonhuman animals are alike in an ethically critical respect. The pleasure-pain axis is universal to sentient life. No sentient being wants to be harmed – to be asphyxiated, dismembered, or eaten alive. The wishes of a terrified toddler or a fleeing zebra to flourish unmolested are not open to doubt even in the absence of the verbal capacity to say so."
"Getting rid of predation isn't a matter of moralising. A python who kills a small human child isn't morally blameworthy. Nor is a lion who hunts and kills a terrified zebra. In both cases, the victim suffers horribly. But the predator lacks the empathetic and mind-reading skills needed to understand the implications of what s/he is doing. Some humans still display a similar deficit. From the perspective of the victim, the moral status or (lack of) guilty intent of a human or nonhuman predator is irrelevant. Either way, to stand by and watch the snake asphyxiate a child would be almost as morally abhorrent as to kill the child yourself. So why turn this principle on its head with beings of comparable sentience to human infants and toddlers? With power comes complicity."
"In the long run, there is nothing to stop intelligent agents from identifying the molecular signature of experience below hedonic zero and eliminating it altogether — even in insects. Nociception is vital; pain is optional. I tentatively predict that the world's last unpleasant experience in our forward light-cone will be a precisely datable event — perhaps some micro-pain in an obscure marine invertebrate a few centuries hence."
"Suppose we encounter an advanced civilization that has engineered a happy biosphere. Population sizes are controlled by cross-species immunocontraception. Free-living herbivores lead idyllic lives in their wildlife parks. Should we urge the reintroduction of starvation, asphyxiation, disemboweling and being eaten alive by predators? Is their regime of compassionate stewardship of the biosphere best abandoned in favour of "re-wilding"? I suspect the advanced civilization would regard human pleas to restore the old Darwinian regime of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" as callous if not borderline sociopathic."
"[L]ike nonhuman animals in human factory farms, free-living nonhumans who are starving - or being disembowelled, asphyxiated or eaten alive - cannot console themselves by chanting the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. The moral case for helping other sentient beings, regardless or race or species, does not rest on the distress their plight does (or doesn't) cause spectators."
"It's easy to support the status quo if one is not another of its victims."
"The reason for sketching what's technically feasible with the tools of synthetic biology is that only after human complicity in the persistence of suffering in the biosphere is acknowledged can we hope to have an informed socio-political debate on the morality of its perpetuation. No serious ethical discussion of free-living animal suffering can begin in the absence of recognition of human responsibility for nonhuman well-being."
"To be sure, risks abound; but no one is proposing compassionate stewardship of ecosystems by philosophers. Humans are capable of choosing our own future pain-sensitivity too; but any species-wide genomic shift in human pain tolerance will depend on the willingness of prospective parents to use preimplantation genetic screening."
"[H]uman nature as encoded in our DNA isn't immutable. Mankind's barbaric track-record to date is an unreliable guide to the future. If Homo sapiens' nastier alleles and their more sinister combinations can be silenced or edited out of the genome, and new improved code-sequences inserted instead, then the pessimists will be confounded. A major discontinuity in the development of life lies ahead. Providentially, we've learned that the DNA-driven world isn't written in God-given proprietary code it would be hubris to tamper with, but in bug-ridden open source amenable to improvement."
"... our descendants may recognize that we are the sociopathic emotional primitives in the grip of an affective psychosis. Jealousy, envy, resentment, ridicule, hate, anger, disgust, spite, contempt, schadenfreude and a whole gamut of nameless but mean-spirited states we undergo each day are a toxic legacy of our Darwinian past. More commonly, perhaps, our genetic make-up ensures we simply feel indifference to the plight of all but a handful of significant others in our lives. Right now, for instance, one knows dimly at some level that there is frightful and preventable suffering in the world. Yet most of us feel no overpowering moral urgency to do anything about it."
"[T]he existence of the mind-independent environment beyond one's world-simulation is a theoretical inference, not an empirical observation."
"Confusion of sapience with sentience can be ethically catastrophic."
"Why expect a false theory of the world, i.e. classical physics, to yield a true account of consciousness?"
"Genes and culture have co-evolved. But crudely, natural selection "designed" male human primates to hunt nonhumans and build coalitions of other male human primates in order to wage territorial wars of aggression. Nature didn't design us to become a scientific community and collaborate to overcome aging. It's difficult to imagine that any human enemy could inflict such gruesome damage on the victims as growing old. The ravages of aging strike down combatants and civilians alike. So the trillions of dollars that humans currently spend on ways to harm and kill each other ("defence") would be more fruitfully spent on defeating our common enemy. We should work together to build a "Triple S" civilisation of superlongevity, superhappiness and superintelligence."
"If we don't address the genetic causes of suffering (physical and mental) we will find ourselves in 500 years enjoying material abundance via nanotech, living in a perfect democracy, colonizing space, and still sitting around wondering "Why are we miserable so much of the time? Why can't we all just get along? Why are we not all happy?""
"Today, status quo bias runs deep. Conservation biology is an ideology masquerading as a science. Many researchers seek to extend the tenets of conservation biology to humans. By contrast, a benevolent superintelligence might view Darwinian life on Earth as an infestation of biological malware and act accordingly. The amount of suffering caused by Homo sapiens is hard to quantify. But the suffering is immense and growing daily with the spread of industrialised animal abuse."
"Humans are prone to status quo bias. So let's do a thought-experiment. Imagine we stumble across an advanced civilisation that has abolished predation, disease, famine, and all the horrors of primitive Darwinian life. The descendants of archaic lifeforms flourish unmolested in their wildlife parks – free living, but not "wild". Should we urge scrapping their regime of compassionate stewardship of the living world – and a return to asphyxiation, disembowelling and being eaten alive? Or is a happy biosphere best conserved intact?"
"I think there's an asymmetry. There's this fable of Ursula Le Guin, short story, Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. We're invited to imagine this city of delights, vast city of incredible wonderful pleasures but the existence of Omelas, this city of delights depends on the torment and abuse of a single child. The question is would you walk away from Omelas and what does walking away from Omelas entail. Now, personally I am someone who would walk away from Omelas. The world does not have an off switch, an off button and I think if one is whether a Buddhist of a negative utilitarian, or someone who believes in suffering-focused ethics, rather than to consider these theoretical apocalyptic scenarios it is more fruitful to work with secular and religious life lovers to phase out the biology of suffering in favor of gradients of intelligent wellbeing because one of the advantages of hedonic recalibration, i.e. ratcheting up hedonic set points is that it doesn't ask people to give up their existing values and preferences with complications."
"All that matters is the pleasure-pain axis. Pain and pleasure disclose the world's inbuilt metric of (dis)value. Our overriding ethical obligation is to minimise suffering. After we have reprogrammed the biosphere to wipe out experience below "hedonic zero", we should build a "triple S" civilisation based on gradients of superhuman bliss. The nature of ultimate reality baffles me. But intelligent moral agents will need to understand the multiverse if we are to grasp the nature and scope of our wider cosmological responsibilities. My working assumption is non-materialist physicalism. Formally, the world is completely described by the equation(s) of physics, presumably a relativistic analogue of the universal Schrödinger equation. Tentatively, I'm a wavefunction monist who believes we are patterns of qualia in a high-dimensional complex Hilbert space. Experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical: the "fire" in the equations. The solutions to the equations of QFT or its generalisation yield the values of qualia. What makes biological minds distinctive, in my view, isn't subjective experience per se, but rather non-psychotic binding. Phenomenal binding is what consciousness is evolutionarily "for". Without the superposition principle of QM, our minds wouldn't be able to simulate fitness-relevant patterns in the local environment. When awake, we are quantum minds running subjectively classical world-simulations. I am an inferential realist about perception. Metaphysically, I explore a zero ontology [...] the total information content of reality must be zero on pain of a miraculous creation of information ex nihilo. Epistemologically, I incline to a radical scepticism that would be sterile to articulate. Alas, the history of philosophy twinned with the principle of mediocrity suggests I burble as much nonsense as everyone else."
"In future, nerve cell responsiveness to naturally occurring endogenous opioids can be increased via receptor enrichment in the brain too. In principle, we can modulate their lifelong "overexpression", intermittently heightened (or gently diminished) by whatever kinds of personal and environmental contingencies we judge fit. Both functionally and anatomically, our reward pathways can be made "bigger and better". But intelligent emotional self-mastery will involve re-engineering the mind-brain so we derive the most intense rewards from activities we deem most lastingly worthwhile: i.e. prioritising our higher-order desires over legacy first-order appetites. Natural selection has "encephalised" our emotions to benefit our genes. Rational agents can "re-encephalise" our emotions to benefit us."
"[T]rue hedonic engineering, as distinct from mindless hedonism or reckless personal experimentation, can be profoundly good for our character. Character-building technologies can benefit utilitarians and non-utilitarians alike. Potentially, we can use a convergence of biotech, nanorobotics and information technology to gain control over our emotions and become better (post-)human beings, to cultivate the virtues, strength of character, decency, to become kinder, friendlier, more compassionate: to become the type of (post)human beings that we might aspire to be, but aren't, and biologically couldn't be, with the neural machinery of unenriched minds. Given our Darwinian biology, too many forms of admirable behaviour simply aren't rewarding enough for us to practise them consistently: our second-order desires to live better lives as better people are often feeble echoes of our baser passions."
"[A]s well as seriously – indeed exhaustively – researching everything that could conceivably go wrong, I think we should also investigate what could go right. The world is racked by suffering. The hedonic treadmill might more aptly be called a dolorous treadmill. Hundreds of millions of people are currently depressed, pain-ridden or both. Hundreds of billions of non-human animals are suffering too. If we weren't so inured to a world of pain and misery, then the biosphere would be reckoned in the throes of a global medical emergency. Thanks to breakthroughs in biotechnology, pain-thresholds, default anxiety levels, hedonic range and hedonic set-points are all now adjustable parameters in human and non-human animals alike. We are living in the final century of life on Earth in which suffering is biologically inevitable. As a society, we need an ethical debate about how much pain and misery we want to preserve and create."
"All moral tradeoffs are messy. However, on some fairly modest ethical assumptions, when a severe and irreconcilable conflict of interests occurs, then the interests of the more sentient take precedence over the less sentient. This rule of thumb holds regardless of the age, race or species of the victim."
"...it won't just be the quality and quantity of consciousness in the world that will be transformed in the post-Darwinian Transition. As (post-)humanity emerges from the neurochemical Dark Ages, enriched dopaminergic function in particular may sharpen the sheer intensity and meaningfulness of every moment of conscious existence. For a generation whose lifetimes span both modes of awareness, it will be as if they had just woken up. They will feel they had hitherto been sleep-walking through life in a twilit stupor. Thereafter their former mundane and minimal existence may be recalled only as some kind of zombified trance-state whose nature they were physiologically incapable of recognising..."
"The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event. Two hundred years ago, powerful synthetic pain-killers and surgical anesthetics were unknown. The notion that physical pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed absurd. Today most of us in the technically advanced nations take its routine absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as psychological pain, too, could ever be banished is equally counter-intuitive. The feasibility of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of social policy and ethical choice."
"Much more seriously, in those traditional eco-systems that we chose to retain, millions of non-human animals will continue periodically to starve, die horribly of thirst and disease, or even get eaten alive. This is commonly viewed as "natural" and hence basically OK. It would indeed be comforting to think that in some sense this ongoing animal holocaust doesn't matter too much. We often find it convenient to act as though the capacity to suffer were somehow inseparably bound up with linguistic ability or ratiocinative prowess. Yet there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case, and a great deal that it isn't."
"The functional regions of the brain which subserve physical agony, the "pain centres", and the mainly limbic substrates of emotion, appear in phylogenetic terms to be remarkably constant in the vertebrate line. The neural pathways involving serotonin, the periaquaductal grey matter, bradykinin, dynorphin, ATP receptors, the major opioid families, substance P etc all existed long before hominids walked the earth. Not merely is the biochemistry of suffering disturbingly similar where not effectively type-identical across a wide spectrum of vertebrate (and even some invertebrate) species. It is at least possible that members of any species whose members have more pain cells exhibiting greater synaptic density than humans sometimes suffer more atrociously than we do, whatever their notional "intelligence"."
"No amount of happiness enjoyed by some organisms can notionally justify the indescribable horrors of Auschwitz. [...] Nor can the fun and games outweigh the sporadic frightfulness of pain and despair that occurs every second of every day. For there's nothing inherently wrong with non-sentience or [...] non-existence; whereas there is something frightfully and self-intimatingly wrong with suffering."
"Negative-utilitarianism is only one particular denomination of a broad church to which the reader may well in any case not subscribe. Fortunately, the program can be defended on grounds that utilitarians of all stripes can agree on. So a defence will be mounted against critics of the theory and application of a utilitarian ethic in general. For in practice the most potent and effective means of curing unpleasantness is to ensure that a defining aspect of future states of mind is their permeation with the molecular chemistry of ecstasy: both genetically precoded and pharmacologically fine-tuned. Orthodox utilitarians will doubtless find the cornucopian abundance of bliss this strategy delivers is itself an extra source of moral value. Future generations of native ecstatics are unlikely to disagree."
"It's easy to convince oneself that things can't really be that terrible, that the horror I allude to is being overblown, that what is going on elsewhere in space-time is somehow less real than the here-and-now, or that the good in the world somehow offsets the bad. Yet however vividly one thinks one can imagine what agony, torture or suicidal despair must be like, the reality is inconceivably worse. The force of "inconceivably" is itself largely inconceivable here. Blurry images of Orwell's "Room 101" can barely even hint at what I'm talking about. Even if one's ancestral namesakes [aka "younger self"] underwent great pain, then the state-dependence of memories means that much of pain's sheer dreadfulness is semantically, cognitively and emotionally inaccessible in the here-and-now. So this manifesto's rhapsodies on the incredible joys that do indeed lie ahead tend to belie its underlying seriousness of purpose. For the biological strategy is propounded here in deadly moral earnest."
"One should be wary of assuming that we're the folk who can properly look after ourselves, whereas our descendants, if they become genetically pre-programmed ecstatics, will get trapped in robot-serviced states of infantile dependence. For it shouldn't be forgotten that exuberantly happy people also have a fierce will to survive. They love life dearly. They take on daunting challenges against seemingly impossible odds. One of the hallmarks of many endogenous depressive states, on the other hand, is so-called behavioural despair. If one learns that apparently no amount of effort can rescue one from an aversive stimulus, then one tends to sink into a lethargic stupor. This syndrome of "learned helplessness" may persist even when the opportunity to escape from the nasty stimulus subsequently arises."
"Taking the abolitionist project to the rest of the galaxy and beyond sounds crazy today; but it's the application of technology to a very homely moral precept writ large, not the outgrowth of a revolutionary new ethical theory. So long as sentient beings suffer extraordinary unpleasantness - whether on Earth or perhaps elsewhere - there is a presumptive case to eradicate such suffering wherever it is found."
"Any plea ... for institutionalized risk-assessment, beefed-up bioethics panels, academic review bodies, worse-case scenario planning, more intensive computer simulations, systematic long-term planning and the institutionalized study of existential risks is admirable. But so is urgent action to combat the global pandemic of suffering. "The easiest pain to bear is someone else's"."
"If we are to bring about real regenerative therapies that will benefit not just future generations, but those of us who are alive today, we must encourage scientists to work on the problem of aging"
"I define aging as the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us."
"When I was much younger I had a couple of relationships with women who were very smart but, being teenaged, had not had time to demonstrate it. It was important to them that I not compliment them too much on their (very considerable) physical attributes, and I respected that at the time and still do. But for those of us who have already achieved plenty in life, and who thus have nothing to prove, the same does not apply. I have a mission in life, and I have no compunction whatsoever in furthering it by means that have nothing to do with my intellect, whether that be my ability to feign a reasonably aristocratic accent or my own physical attributes. Similarly, I view it as not only acceptable but positively recommended that those of my colleagues who are similarly committed to this same mission should take whatever advantage may be available, of whatever attributes they may possess, to influence those who have major potential to further that mission - and, to the extent that they do so without even thinking about it, that they not be all coy and in denial they they do so. There’s a war on, my friend; there's no time to be all pompous about some hypothetical greater value of those enviable features that one has earned through hard work over those that one was born with. We need to work with what we have, however we obtained it."
"It is at the same level of women in World War II sleeping with Nazis to get information. It is a war against aging here. You have to persuade people to give money. That is honestly who I am. I am the general. .. It is just not possible I could have said anything like this to [Complainant #2] in 2018. […] I would not dream of saying anything remotely along those lines. I have not used any of my staff in terms of womanhood in that way. I put my scientists next to donors to talk science."
"I am at last in a position to apologise - which I gladly do publicly - to Laura Deming for my email to her in 2012, about which I had forgotten until the investigator reminded me of it. As STAT reported three weeks ago, I consider that that email would have been a mistake even if she had been five years older, because we were in a mentor-mentee relationship. I catgorically deny Laura's current (though, as she made clear on August 10th, not contemporaneous) view, shared by the investigator, that I sent that email with improper intent - but my email does not become OK just because improper intent is now being misread into it."
"I don't feel the need to subtweet that one - Aubrey is an absolutely terrible human being"
"I had one bad experience with him when I was 17 - he told me in writing that he had an ‘adventurous love life’ and that it had ‘always felt quite jarring’ not to let conversations with me stray in that direction given that ‘[he] could treat [me] as an equal on every other level’. He sent this from his work email, and I’d known him since I was 14."
"Aubrey de Grey is a sexual predator. For years he has used his position of power in the aging field to attract his victims. These victims include me, Laura Deming, and multiple other anonymous women. Laura was a minor when Aubrey came on to her; I was a SENS-funded student. Aubrey’s proclivities are a long held open secret in the aging field."
"we find Dr. de Grey purposefully and knowingly disregarded multiple directives (from the acting Executive Director, this investigator, and his own counsel) to retain the confidentiality of the investigation. In his interview, Dr. de Grey not only admitted to this conduct, he made unreasonable efforts to justify it ..Dr. de Grey’s unapologetic interference with the investigation by reaching out to a witness through a third party and repeatedly posting about the investigation has generated angry attacks on the accusers and perpetuated misinformation (i.e., that he has been exonerated)"
"Scientist Aubrey de Grey made inappropriate sexual comments to two female entrepreneurs, independent investigation finds"
"Aubrey is one of the kindest and most generous people I have ever known. He only ever treated me with respect and kindness. I never saw him intentionally disrespect anyone."