If we are sentient robots, without will, sentience is not useful. And if it’s useful, how can it be?

When it is stated that sentience has a purpose, this idea is usually explained by indicating that sentience is useful because it motivates doing certain things and avoiding others. In addition, in this explanation, it is usually indicated that sentience motivates but does not force. That is, under this explanation, sentience is not simply the cause and behavior the consequence, but sentience motivates to strive to make the best possible decision, under the threat of pain and the reward of pleasure. According to this explanation, sentient beings would make better decisions and will be selected (“better”, from an evolutionary point of view).

But we can also consider that it is possible that we are sentient robots, but without will, that we simply do what we have been programmed for, even though we have the feeling that we make free decisions, so that sentience really does not play any role in the evolution in form of motivation.

So, is sentience useful or inevitable?

My best intuition is that sentience is probably inevitable when certain conditions are met. So, sentience would be inevitable. Not useful. But let’s assume for a moment that sentience is useful. If sentience were useful, then sentience must incorporate some element that goes beyond classical physics, to be really useful. For example, related to quantum physics or the multiverse.

Why?

Because if sentience had a positive effect (in the form of motivation) on survival, in some way that can be explained by classical chemistry and physics, for example, thinking faster, taking better decisions, or being able to escape running faster than a predator, this behavior, that would be evolutionarily selected, would have to compete with another behavior that would also be evolutionarily selected, which is to do exactly the same, following the laws of chemistry and classical physics, but without the sentience.

I will give an example to try to illustrate all this.

Suppose we have a DNA chain that “reproduces as much as possible” and that follows the laws of classical physics. This chain does not feel.

By the way, when I say that the chain “reproduces as much as possible” I am not assigning agency, but summarizing in that phrase what is happening on a physical level. That chain that “reproduces as much as possible” is simply matter following the laws of physics. The phrase “reproduces as much as possible” is a summary way of describing what is happening.

We also have a second strand of DNA also formed by physical particles and obviously also that “reproduces as much as possible.” However, this DNA chain does feel: it feels pleasure every time it reproduces and frustration if it can not. Which motivates it to reproduce as much as possible.

This second strand of DNA is motivated to reproduce, but in what physical way would it be able to do it better than the chain that does not feel, and therefore is not “motivated”?

Whichever way we imagine that this second chain can do something better than the first chain, if it is following the laws of physics, it is something that chains like the first one could also perform. That is, evolution could always create chains that do not feel, like the first one, and that would have that characteristic of being more efficient, like the second one. Then both types of chain could exist: those that feel and those that do not feel. Motivation would not have any differential advantage.

If instead of DNA chains we think about complete individuals like us, the example works the same.

Obviously, if we consider that from a certain level of complexity or when certain functions appear, all the chains (or individuals) feel, then it would seem that sentience plays a role in evolution, but simply what would be happening is that sentience is a byproduct of something else. And it is that other thing (complexity, function) the thing that is being selected, not sentience. Sentience would not be useful: it would be inevitable.

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The importance of phenomenal binding, by David Pearce

We normally assume a fundamental distinction between conscious and non-conscious systems. Instead, I explore the possibility that what makes animals special isn’t consciousness per se, but phenomenal binding. Unless spooky “strong” emergence is true, then a termite colony, or the enteric nervous system, or a classical digital computer, or the population of the United States is not a unified subject of experience.

So how is phenomenal binding possible in the CNS? Why aren’t we micro-experiential zombies too?

I explore a quantum-theoretic version of the intrinsic nature argument for non-materialist physicalism. In recent years, the intrinsic nature argument has undergone a revival. See Phil Goff’s “Galileo’s Error” (cf. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/27/galileos-error-by-philip-goff-review) for an accessible introduction. According to the intrinsic nature argument, experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, the mysterious “fire” in the equations.

The biggest technical obstacle faced by the intrinsic nature argument is often reckoned the phenomenal binding / combination problem: https://www.quora.com/How-should-we-categorize-the-binding-problem-in-the-context-of-easy-and-hard-problem-of-consciousness

However, I argue that _if_ the intrinsic nature argument is sound, and _if_ unitary-only quantum mechanics is correct, then we already have a built-in solution to the binding problem: https://www.quora.com/Do-our-brains-work-at-the-quantum-level-Is-the-brain-itself-a-quantum-machine

Stepping back, a lot of researchers assume that we face a stark choice: scientific materialism versus mysticism/dualism.

Not so. I assume that monistic physicalism is true.

But I’ve no idea how to reconcile subjective experience with materialism:
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-philosophy-that-can-overcome-materialism

Text by David Pearce

The Physical and Consciousness: One World Conforming to Different Descriptions, by Magnus Vinding

Panpsychism is the doctrine that the world’s fundamental physical stuff also has primitive experiential properties. Unlike the physicalistic idealism explored here, panpsychism doesn’t claim that the world’s fundamental physical stuff is experiential. Panpsychism is best treated as a form of property-dualism.

How, one may wonder, is Pearce’s view different from panpsychism, and from property dualist views more generally? This is something I myself have struggled a lot to understand, and inquired him about repeatedly. And my understanding is the following: according to Pearce, there is only consciousness, and its dynamics conform to physical description. Property dualist views, in contrast, view the world as having two properties: the stuff of the world has insentient physical properties to which separate, experiential properties are somehow attached.

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Teorías de la sintiencia: una charla con Magnus Vinding

English version

Magnus Vinding es un filósofo centrado en reducir el sufrimiento. En su obra desarrolla temas como el altruismo eficaz, el antiespeciesismo, la ética centrada en el sufrimiento (sobre la que actualmente está escribiendo un libro) y cuestiones de identidad personal y ontología, como el individualismo abierto y el fisicalismo. Es licenciado en matemáticas y autor de los libros: Why We Should Go Vegan, Why “Happy Meat” Is Always Wrong, Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It, Reflections on Intelligence, You Are Them, y Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others?

Manu Herrán: Comencemos por el principio. Usaré la palabra sintiencia para las experiencias de sufrimiento y disfrute, y conciencia para las experiencias subjetivas en general. No solo dolor y placer sino, por ejemplo, percibir. ¿Coincide con tu terminología?

Magnus Vinding: Sí.

Manu Herrán: Algunos investigadores consideran que, en general, los animales no humanos tienen falta de conciencia. ¿Implica que merecen menos (o incluso ninguna) consideración moral?

Magnus Vinding: La palabra “conciencia” a veces es entendida como “autoconocimiento”, que uno puede buscar operacionalizar y medir de varias maneras, pero una forma obvia es comprobar si un individuo puede pasar la prueba del espejo. Muchos animales no humanos son evidentemente conscientes en este sentido. Pero más allá de eso, es ciertamente posible, digamos, que un invertebrado o un niño humano en desarrollo sienta dolor sin tener una idea muy clara de lo que está sucediendo, sin tener un modelo de uno mismo. Pero eso no disminuye la relevancia moral de ese sufrimiento, cuando existe. En mi opinión, la sintiencia es, en última instancia, lo que importa, o al menos lo que más importa.

Manu Herrán: ¿La sintiencia es lo único que importa?

Magnus Vinding: Existe desacuerdo entre los filósofos en este asunto. Pero al menos parece que la mayoría coincide en que, en la medida en que algo pueda importar, la sintiencia se encuentra por lo menos en el conjunto de las cosas que importan.

Manu Herrán: Otras personas consideran la belleza, la complejidad o la vida. O el conocimiento.

Magnus Vinding: Se puede argumentar que el conocimiento, especialmente si se interpreta de manera amplia de forma que incluya valores epistémicos, tiene un estatus especial. Visto en perspectiva, podemos pensar en términos de valores epistémicos por un lado (por ejemplo, consistencia, sobriedad, “parecer razonable / plausible”, etc.) y valores morales por el otro (por ejemplo, reducir el sufrimiento, vivir en armonía, no mentir, etc.).

Me parece que la relación entre estas dos clases de valores es interesante. Por ejemplo, debemos depender de ciertos valores epistémicos para alcanzar cualquier conjunto de valores morales, sin embargo, a su vez, podemos decidir, en función de nuestros valores morales, cambiar ciertos valores epistémicos que inicialmente teníamos, por ejemplo, si pensáramos que un exceso de curiosidad y afán de exploración podría causar más sufrimiento en el futuro. Y esto podría acarrear el coste de cerrarnos a cierto conocimiento que en realidad podría cambiar aún más nuestros valores morales. El problema de cómo equilibrar lo mejor posible estos valores entre sí es complejo; después de todo, ¿qué valores deberían soportar este análisis? Esto es filosofía profunda.

En relación con el asunto de si la belleza, la complejidad o la vida son buenas (o malas), mi opinión es que solo tienen valor instrumental. Es decir, son buenas o malas en la medida en que haya alguien cuya experiencia se vea afectada de manera positiva o negativa por ellas.

Lo mismo puede decirse sobre el conocimiento, si ignoramos el tema más fundamental mencionado anteriormente: en mi opinión, respecto de la ética, el conocimiento es bueno en la medida en que puede ayudarnos a evitar el sufrimiento extremo (lo cual no quiere decir que debamos pensar necesariamente acerca del conocimiento en tales términos instrumentales; eso puede no ser útil en la mayoría de los casos).

Manu Herrán: Estás en contacto con los principales investigadores y organizaciones que tienen como objetivo reducir el sufrimiento. ¿Dirías que compartís un entendimiento común de la sintiencia, de qué se trata y de dónde proviene?

Magnus Vinding: En algunos aspectos sí, pero no en otros. Llevaría mucho tiempo explicarlo todo correctamente, pero la distinción principal es entre realistas y no realistas sobre la conciencia.

Los no realistas, o eliminativistas, sostienen que la conciencia realmente no existe. Brian Tomasik ha defendido esta opinión, y parece haber inspirado a muchas personas preocupadas por reducir el sufrimiento (Brian a su vez se ha inspirado en Daniel Dennett y Eliezer Yudkowsky).

El eliminativismo es también la posición que tentativamente suscribe el Sentience Institute. Digo “tentativamente” porque el Sentience Institute no parece sostener que la conciencia no exista. Por ejemplo, Jacy Reese escribe: “Estoy totalmente de acuerdo con el ‘Pienso, luego existo’ y con la idea de que existe un 100% de confianza en tu propia experiencia en primera persona”. El sentido en el que Jacy niega la existencia de la conciencia es, por lo que puedo decir, más bien en el sentido de que la conciencia no es una categoría nítida, así como, digamos, “música” no es una categoría nítida y bien demarcada. Sin embargo, esto, diría yo, no es negar la existencia de la conciencia en ningún sentido sustantivo; después de todo, la mayoría de los realistas estarían de acuerdo con la afirmación de que la conciencia, en el sentido de una mente compuesta compleja, no es una categoría claramente delineada.

He intentado, en otro lugar, establecer una analogía con el sonido y la música: precisamente porque “música” es una categoría difusa, y es posible que no podamos dar una respuesta clara a si una colección de sonidos cuenta como música o no. Esto no significa que no haya verdades sobre la naturaleza de esta colección de sonidos (su volumen, tono, carácter, etc.). Lo mismo, diría, se puede aplicar a la conciencia: solo porque no podamos estar de acuerdo acerca de lo que cuenta como una mente compuesta (que a menudo es lo que el término “conciencia” connota) no significa que no haya verdades sobre el estado fenoménico de una mente-cerebro dada (en términos de intensidad, su contenido, su carácter, etc.).

A diferencia de los no realistas, existen realistas explícitos sobre la conciencia. Uno de ellos es David Pearce, quien ve la “conciencia” y “lo físico” como el mismo fenómeno bajo diferentes descripciones (he tratado de dar una explicación simple de su punto de vista aquí). Pearce ha presentado una atrevida hipótesis sobre la conciencia en términos físicos concretos que uno puede encontrar aquí.

Entro los realistas también se encuentran Mike Johnson y Andrés Gómez Emilsson co-fundadores del Qualia Research Institute, en el que exploran las firmas físicas de la conciencia desde una posición algo más agnóstica que la de Pearce (en cuanto a qué podrían ser dichas firmas físicas en última instancia).

Más allá de eso, hay que hacer una distinción entre las explicaciones de la conciencia funcionalistas y no funcionalistas (tal vez podría llamarlos “concretistas”). Brian Tomasik es un funcionalista, mientras que alguien como Mike Johnson no lo es; solía serlo, pero cambió de opinión y escribió lo siguiente, en mi opinión, más bien una dura crítica al funcionalismo. Pearce a veces se llama a sí mismo “micro-funcionalista”, lo que significa que si hiciéramos una copia de una mente-cerebro hasta el más fino nivel de detalle “micro-físico”, en un sentido concreto más que abstracto, entonces tendrá las mismas propiedades fenomenológicas que el original. Pero no de otra manera, y por lo tanto no es funcionalista en el sentido tradicional.

Estas opiniones, a su vez, tienen implicaciones muy diferentes para lo que es el sufrimiento en particular y lo que podemos hacer al respecto. Por ejemplo, David Pearce ve el sufrimiento como un fenómeno concreto que probablemente entenderemos con gran detalle y finalmente eliminaremos, mientras que Brian Tomasik no ve el sufrimiento como algo que se pueda entender o eliminar de manera nítida; En su opinión, el sufrimiento es, al menos en cierto sentido, más inherente a la realidad.

Manu Herrán: Esta es una diferencia muy importante, con implicaciones muy significativas en la asignación de recursos en un posible proyecto para reducir el sufrimiento. ¿No es así? Estoy pensando, por ejemplo, en el proyecto de The Hedonistic Imperative.

Magnus Vinding: Sí, aunque explorar el alcance total de las diferencias está más allá del alcance de esta conversación. Sin embargo, también vale la pena señalar que hay puntos significativos de convergencia, incluido que los límites que establecemos en relación con los cuales los seres pueden sufrir son bastante confusos desde nuestro punto de vista actual. Aunque desde una perspectiva realista son difusos debido a nuestra ignorancia; mientras que en la visión no realista son difusos más o menos por definición. Por lo tanto, se puede decir que el realismo implica más investigación sobre esta cuestión que el no realismo (lo que no quiere decir que necesariamente no se encuentren ciertas respuestas asumiendo el realismo).

Más allá de eso, vale la pena señalar que, independientemente de sus puntos de vista sobre la conciencia, prácticamente todos los que participan en el movimiento Altruismo Eficaz y tratan de reducir el sufrimiento están de acuerdo en que debemos tratar de explorar los riesgos futuros con una mente abierta; que debemos tratar de relacionarnos con otras personas de manera amistosa y cooperativa; que deberíamos expandir el círculo moral; que debemos promover la compasión y un pensamiento consecuencialista prudente, etc.

Manu Herrán: ¿Cómo puede Brian conciliar el eliminativismo y el funcionalismo? Quiero decir, si entiendo correctamente, Brian cree en el eliminativismo y en el funcionalismo al mismo tiempo.

Magnus Vinding: Tendrías que preguntarle, supongo. Pero sospecho que diría que el eliminativismo es cierto objetivamente, mientras que (su) funcionalismo es la forma en la que elige, subjetivamente, de definir la conciencia y la sintiencia.

Manu Herrán: ¿Crees que Brian y David tienen cada uno una fuerte convicción acerca de sus propios (y diferentes) entendimientos sobre la sintiencia o por el contrario reconocen honestamente que otras teorías también pueden ser ciertas?

Magnus Vinding: Sé que a David le cuesta entender la opinión de Brian, por ejemplo, le cuesta incluso entender lo que significa. Brian, que yo sepa, en su mayoría retiene cierta incertidumbre por motivos de tipo “Aumann. Pero hablando en términos más generales, creo que ambos tienden a reconocer que todos podemos estar muy equivocados acerca de la naturaleza de la realidad, y que nuestros conceptos humanos pueden en última instancia hacer un mal trabajo cuando se emplean para tratar de capturar lo que realmente está sucediendo.

Manu Herrán: ¿Cuál es tu punto o puntos de vista preferidos sobre la conciencia? Quiero decir, en el sentido de las “hipótesis más probables”.

Magnus Vinding: Mi punto de vista es fisicalista y no funcionalista en el sentido macro; únicamente en el sentido micro / “concretista”. En general, creo que David Pearce tiene razón en que, tal como Mike Johnson resume la opinión de David: “la conciencia es ‘ontológicamente unitaria’, por lo que solo una propiedad física que implique unidad ontológica (como la coherencia cuántica) podría instanciar físicamente la conciencia” (Principia Qualia, p. 73).

Es decir, me inclino hacia la idea de que mi mente consciente actual es una “cosa” física, real y unitaria. Después de todo, si la experiencia no fuera físicamente unitaria de esta manera, si pudiera emerger de algo físicamente desconectado por una pequeña distancia, ¿por qué no podría ser capaz de emerger de algo separado por una gran distancia? ¿Por qué el estado físico que media un aspecto particular de mi experiencia  — digamos, percepciones — no podría estar situado en otro país, o de hecho en otro planeta, lejos de los estados físicos que median otros aspectos, como los sonidos y las emociones? (Trazo una analogía similar con computadoras hechas con bolas de billar aquí). Creo que debe haber alguna conexión e integración en términos físicos, y sospecho que las intuiciones de la mayoría de las personas estarían de acuerdo.

Y la pregunta relevante es entonces en qué sistemas se obtiene dicha conexión / integración. ¿Podría, por ejemplo, obtenerse algún día en sistemas como las computadoras actuales? Lo dudo, y creo que en nuestros círculos muchos tratan la respuesta afirmativa a esta pregunta como una conclusión inevitable, y consideran que las dudas al respecto equivalen a sobrenaturalismo y antropocentrismo. Creo que es una equivocación. Las computadoras no han sido diseñadas para reunir constantemente gran cantidad de información sensorial de su entorno para su propia supervivencia. Los cerebros biológicos en cambio, sí. Esta es una diferencia bastante significativa. Y decir que dos modelos altamente abstractos de sistemas físicos diferentes son, en cierto sentido, isomórficos (digamos, algún modelo abstracto de computador personal, y el de un cerebro animal, respectivamente) de ninguna manera implica asumir que vayan a compartir todas las propiedades relevantes que tienen estos sistemas físicos.

Manu Herrán: ¿Tu fisicalismo es el mismo que el de David Pearce?

Magnus Vinding: En cierto sentido. Sin embargo, por lo que puedo decir, soy mucho más agnóstico acerca de la naturaleza de la conciencia en términos físicos. Pero a nivel básico, sigo el pensamiento de Pearce, y de hecho me ha inspirado mucho. Es decir, como Pearce, tengo una visión monista según la cual solo hay un mundo conforme a diferentes descripciones.

Esta visión puede parecer contraintuitiva, pero creo que la analogía que dibujé anteriormente en relación con el sonido en general y la música en particular puede ayudar a disolver parte de nuestra confusión y hacerla más intuitiva. El problema es que tenemos esta palabra, conciencia, que cubre demasiado. Se requiere cierto refinamiento léxico (ver el enlace anterior para más detalles).

Otro punto de confusión es que combinamos epistemología y ontología; en cierto sentido, confundimos nuestros modelos físicos de realidad con la realidad misma, y no nos damos cuenta cuando hablamos de reducción epistemológica versus reducción ontológica. Estas ideas las desarrollo en un artículo que he publicado recientemente, titulado Physics Is Also Qualia.

Manu Herrán: Las diferentes teorías suenan complejas, pero tus explicaciones las aclaran mucho. ¿Podemos resumir que Brian, David y tu tenéis puntos de vista diferentes sobre la sintiencia?

Magnus Vinding: Sí, creo que es bastante correcto decirlo así. Aunque la diferencia entre David y yo no es tan grande; estamos cerca el uno del otro en relación con Brian (aunque, de alguna manera, Brian también está cerca, como cuando describe su punto de vista como pampsiquista). La principal diferencia entre la opinión de David y la mía es, como se mencionó, que soy más agnóstico con respecto a los “detalles” físicos. Además, a diferencia de David, no creo haber dicho realmente nada original; Las cosas que he escrito sobre la conciencia en su mayoría aclaran y defienden aspectos de la visión de David.

Manu Herrán: ¿Crees que podremos vencer el sufrimiento?

Magnus Vinding: Daré una respuesta funcional que pueda ser útil para los agentes morales: creo que los agentes morales orientados a reducir el sufrimiento siempre deben emplear una gran parte de sus recursos en explorar cómo pueden reducir el sufrimiento futuro de la mejor manera, y esto seguiría siendo cierto incluso cuando el sufrimiento esté totalmente bajo control.

Además, el asunto de si el sufrimiento puede ser abolido definitivamente y para siempre dependerá de la visión que uno tenga de la naturaleza del tiempo y del universo en general, por lo que no es fácil dar una respuesta concisa.

Más allá de eso, también diría que centrarse en derrotar el sufrimiento como objetivo personal puede ser realmente perjudicial. Creo que es mejor centrarse en reducir el sufrimiento esperado tanto como sea posible, pero dentro de los límites de unas restricciones coyunturales razonables, lo cual en el mejor escenario será también parte constituyente de la “derrota del sufrimiento” global de todos modos.

Manu Herrán: Gracias Magnus. Ha sido un placer tener esta charla.

Magnus Vinding: Lo mismo digo. Buena suerte con tus proyectos.

 

How a nervous system operates without giving rise to an experience

In our bodies, if our knee is lightly tapped, our leg moves automatically (with no intention on our part) and independently of the experience of the tap that we sense.  The information that originates in our knee, with the tap, splits up and moves through two separate pathways: one path goes to our brain through the spinal cord, where it is processed to produce the corresponding experience; the other path involves a different circuit, going through the spinal cord to the muscles that operate the leg, without ever reaching the brain. In the second path, the information takes a much shorter direct route to enable our body to react quickly to the stimulus (‘reflex arc’). There is a good reason why this dual mechanism exists. There are cases where some part of the body will be endangered by a slow reaction to an external threat. If we had to think about moving because of pain, rather than responding automatically, we might not act quickly enough to avoid harm.

What is relevant here is that the information transmitted through this ‘reflex arc’ is never experienced because it is never processed by a central nervous system. The non-centralized nervous systems of some animals operate just as reflex arcs do. Information is transmitted from the cells receiving certain stimuli to other cells which must be activated, without any involvement of subjective experience. In these cases, there is a merely mechanical transmission of information. Such reactions are not an indication of sentience.

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No binding, no suffering

Plants don’t suffer. Their fictitious misery should not be used to justify the real misery of our nonhuman animal victims. “But how do you know plants don’t suffer?!” says the meat-eater, affecting a touching concern for the well-being vegetables. “Science proves plants feel pain!”

But no. Suppose that consciousness is fundamental in Nature, or at least to individual cells. Plant cells are encased in thick cellulose cell walls. So they aren’t phenomenally-bound subjects of experience. Organisms such as plants without the capacity for rapid self-propelled motion haven’t evolved the energetically expensive nervous-systems needed to support phenomenal binding. No binding = no suffering.

A lot of computer scientists and natural scientists are implicitly epiphenomenalists – though they probably wouldn’t use the term. But epiphenomena don’t have the causal power to inspire discussions on their existence.

Even so, might consciousness be a spandrel? What’s consciousness evolutionarily “for” – other than inspiring useless philosophical discussions? Well, imagine if we were just 86 billion odd classical neurons, as textbook neuroscience suggests. Phenomenal binding would be impossible. So we wouldn’t be able to experience individual perceptual objects. There would be no unity of perception nor unity of the self. We couldn’t run phenomenal world-simulations. Indeed, a micro-experiential zombie would soon starve or get eaten.

Yet how is phenomenal binding possible?

— David Pearce

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Epiphenomenalism cannot be true

In brief, epiphenomenalism cannot be true. Qualia, it turns out, must have a causally relevant role in forward-propelled organisms, for otherwise natural selection would have had no way of recruiting it. I propose that the reason why consciousness was recruited by natural selection is found in the tremendous computational power that it afforded to the real-time world simulations it instantiates through the use of the nervous system. More so, the specific computational horse-power of consciousness is phenomenal binding –the ontological union of disparate pieces of information by becoming part of a unitary conscious experience that synchronically embeds spaciotemporal structure. While phenomenal binding is regarded as a mere epiphenomenon (or even as a totally unreal non-happening) by some, one needs only look at cases where phenomenal binding (partially) breaks down to see its role in determining animal behavior.

Once we recognize the computational role of consciousness, and the causal network that links it to behavior, a new era will begin.

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Can someone debunk Solipsism?

We live as we dream – alone.”
(Joseph Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899))

The sceptical Problem Of Other Minds will be solved by biotechnology. Compare people born without a corpus callosum to connect their cerebral hemispheres, or “split brain” patients who’ve had their corpus callosum surgically severed to treat epilepsy. If one hemisphere entertains doubts whether the other hemisphere is really conscious (aka the Problem Of Other Hemispheres), then currently the sceptical hemisphere can’t prove the sentience of its twin. However, advanced biotech promises corpora callosa grown to order, laying sceptical doubts to rest. More radically, artificially-grown corpora callosa and reversible thalamic bridges will let neurotypical humans partially “mind-meld” like the conjoined Hogan sisters today. So yes, solipsism can, in principle, be scientifically disproved.

Mind-melding won’t be technically easy. Are there other objective tests of consciousness?

This is a contentious issue. On standard materialist assumptions, i.e. the formalism of quantum field theory describes fields of insentience, there is no scientific touchstone of consciousness. If physicists and chemists are correct about the fundamental properties of energy and matter, then we should all be p-zombies. First-person facts shouldn’t exist. One’s own mind is the anomaly. Eliminative materialists bite the bullet and claim that humans are p-zombies – although eliminativists disbelieve in their own minds, too, so they aren’t solipsists. Here let’s assume that science should be empirically adequate; most of us struggle to feign anaesthesia. A monistic materialist ontology – as distinct from monistic physicalist ontology – can’t be reconciled with the empirical evidence, i.e. one’s own experience. Dualism and mysterianism lead nowhere. By contrast, non-materialist physicalism is not just empirically adequate, but also has explanatory and predictive power. I don’t know whether non-materialist physicalism is true – it feels absurd. But speculatively, futuristic cerebroscopes could use molecular matter-wave interferometry to demonstrate the insentience of silicon robots and the sentience of biological nervous systems. On this story, scrambled phase coherence is the hallmark of the zombie. The non-classical interference signature diagnostic of phenomenally-bound minds will disclose a perfect structural match between minds and the formalism of physics. Or rather, I predict a perfect structural match. It’s easy to delude oneself. Yet dualism is crazy too.

Will mind-melding technologies or futuristic neuroscanning (eventually) vindicate common sense?

Not entirely, IMO. Solipsism, i.e. the conjecture one is the only sentient being, should be distinguished from the theory that one inhabits a virtual world populated by zombies. Perceptual direct realists conflate these two theories, so the distinction needs elaboration.

Everyone you meet when you’re dreaming is a zombie. Ascribing consciousness to other organisms on the basis of their similar behaviour is systematically misleading; the argument from analogy fails in dreamworlds. Unless you’re having a lucid dream, you are deceived by phantoms. Dreaming is evolutionarily ancient, so life on Earth supports countless zombie-ridden virtual dreamworlds. What’s more controversial is the nature of waking worlds. The perceptual direct realist believes that waking consciousness confers an ability directly to perceive the local environment, including other people’s bodies – and occasionally their exposed brains, too, in a surgical operating theatre. According to the perceptual direct realist, the observable bodies of other organisms are brute facts about our public macroscopic world; only the consciousness of other organisms in this shared arena is a challenge to prove. By contrast, the inferential realist about the external world believes that awake and dreaming world-simulations alike are populated by zombies. The difference between dreaming and perceptual consciousness is that during waking life the zombies of one’s acquaintance are the avatars of sentient beings whose existence one may infer on theoretical grounds, together with the rest of the cosmos. So the argument from analogy may be invoked with justification, but only to hypothesise other zombie-ridden world-simulations run by minds akin to one’s own, not to anthropomorphise the zombies populating one’s own mind. Kant said as much, though he didn’t talk about zombies. The inferred external world sculpts and partly selects the waking world-simulations run by one’s skull-bound mind. Yet even the seemingly faraway horizon is an intrinsic property of the neocortical matter and energy within one’s transcendental skull. Whereas dreamworlds are autonomous, waking up from sleep reboots one’s world-simulation and brings world-making under tight external control via peripheral nerve inputs. Yet the skull is a windowless prison. “Waking up” doesn’t allow feats of remote viewing or confer any other kinds of psi power. In other words, the solipsist is right to believe that his perceived reality is autobiographical; but he’s wrong to believe he is special. Disposable world-simulations in the guise of external reality are an adaptation of animal life.

Does this diagnosis matter?
Typically, the waking psychosis of perceptual direct realism is better for one’s mental health than inferential realism. In common with e.g. Roko’s Basilisk, the Simulation Argument, Bolzmann Brains and Everettian Quantum Mechanics, the world-simulation model of the human predicament is a meme-hazard. In everyday life, perceptual realism is a healthy psychosis to be encouraged in everyone but the most psychologically robust.

However, intellectually speaking, the conceptual framework of perceptual realism also leads to unfathomable mysteries such as (1) the Hard Problem of consciousness, i.e. how does a lump of neural porridge generate first-person facts? (2) the phenomenal Binding Problem in neuroscience, i.e. why aren’t we micro-experiential zombies composed of membrane-bound pixels of “mind-dust”? and (3) the Measurement Problem in quantum mechanics, i.e. why does the otherwise universally valid superposition principle of QM break down on measurement to yield definite outcomes in accordance with the Born rule? Such mysteries proliferate: they are unanswerable within the conceptual framework of perceptual realism. In my view, scientists should trust the formalism of unmodified and unsupplemented (i.e. unitary-only) quantum mechanics, not folk-realism about perception. Our minds exemplify the superposition principle, not its breakdown. In fairness, this is a controversial position. But when saying anything about consciousness, what isn’t?

Ethically speaking, whether we adopt the conceptual framework of inferential realism or common sense perceptual realism wouldn’t matter if natural selection had optimised our waking world-simulations to mirror things as they are. In some ways, the world-simulations run by scientific rationalists are faithful to the structural-relational properties of inferred extra-cranial reality; hence technological civilisation. In other respects, our world-simulations are egocentric cartoons. Some dark Darwinian minds are probably best left entombed in their skulls. Yet in my view, the reason we should favour the development of mind-melding technologies to breach our solipsistic island-universes isn’t their potential to banish philosophical doubt, or even to overcome semantic solipsism. Rather, the tools of inter-personal and cross-species mind-melding will bring about a revolution in both ethics and decision-theoretic rationality – an artificial distinction born of the skull-bound prison of Darwinian life.

Is sentience evolutionarily useful or physically inevitable?

It is very intuitive to believe that sentience motivates us to make (better) decisions (“better”, from an evolutionary point of view).

But we can also consider that it is possible that we are sentient robots, but without will, that we simply do what we have been programmed for, even though we have the feeling that we make free decisions, so that sentience really does not play any role in the evolution in form of motivation.

If there is no will, then the apparent motivation produced by sentience would also be an illusion. Sentience would be a byproduct of certain physical conditions, or something ubiquitous (Panpsychism). Sentience would appear to be evolutionarily useful, and yet what would be evolutionarily useful would be such physical conditions.

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The imperative to abolish suffering: an interview with David Pearce

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Photo: Peter Singer, Justin Oakley and David Pearce at EA Global Melbourne.

David Pearce is a British philosopher famous for his idea that there is a strong ethical imperative for human beings to work towards the abolition of suffering of all sentient beings (named “The Hedonistic Imperative“). In the manifesto, Pearce outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will eliminate, over time, all forms of unpleasant experience. He is co-founder, along with Nick Bostrom, of the World Transhumanist Association (today known as Humanity+). David Pearce is currently director of The Neuroethics Foundation.

 

Sentience Research: How would you define “transhumanism”?

David Pearce:  Transhumanism is the directed evolution of improved humans. Transhumanists aspire to a “triple S” civilisation of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness. These three “supers” need unpacking.

Superhappiness sounds straightforward enough. Darwinian life is racked by suffering. Misery and discontent have been adaptive. Imminent mastery of our genetic source code means the entire biosphere will soon be programmable. The level of suffering – and bliss – in the living world will be an adjustable parameter. The reward circuitry of human and nonhuman animals can be genetically upgraded. A new motivational architecture is feasible – life based entirely on information-sensitive gradients of well-being. A few genetic outliers today display hints of such a blissful psychology. Such “hyperthymic” folk are exceptional. Low mood is more common. Bodily malaise is more widespread than vibrant physical well-being too. In future, humans and then transhumans will recalibrate the hedonic treadmill, ratchet up pain-thresholds and hedonic set-points, and create a civilisation based entirely on gradients of bliss – eventually, superhuman bliss beyond the bounds of normal human experience.

Editor’s note: The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

Superlongevity entails overcoming the biology of aging. Inorganic robots can be repaired and upgraded indefinitely. No fundamental law of Nature forbids sentient biological machines – and tomorrow’s cyborg hybrids – from enjoying indefinite youthful lifespans as well. Here the molecular-biological details are sketchier. Realistically, today’s oldsters won’t make the transition to perpetual youth – although Aubrey de Grey (Ending Aging, 2007) is more optimistic about timescales. But transhumanists have a fall-back strategy: cryonics and maybe cryothanasia. So aging life-lovers needn’t miss out. If you want to wake up a hundred or thousand years from now, you needn’t abandon hope – if you sign up to be cryonically suspended. Understandably, sceptics abound. Even if cryonics technically succeeds, will the reanimated, repaired and maybe enhanced person who awakes centuries hence still be me? If you’re an angst-ridden soul who wakes up troubled by the worry you might be a different person from your namesake who fell asleep last night, then no – strictly speaking, enduring metaphysical egos are a fiction. But otherwise, if you’re afraid of oblivion, consider signing up for cryonics until the superlongevity revolution matures.

Superintelligence is trickiest to define. Transhumanists differ radically on its nature. Here’s a crude trichotomy.

Biological Transhumanists envisage full-spectrum superintelligence as our AI-augmented and genetically-rewritten descendants.

Kurzweilian “Singularitarians” foresee a complete fusion of humans and our machines as the exponential growth of computer power accelerates, perhaps embracing “mind uploading” to a less perishable digital substrate – maybe as soon as the middle of this century (cf. The Singularity is Near, 2005).

Intelligence Explosion theorists combine Moore’s law of the exponential growth of computer power with the idea of recursively self-improving software-based AI that leads to a runaway explosion of machine superintelligence. The fate of humans on this scenario is uncertain.

Some transhumanists would add further “supers”. What about super-empathy? And what about a superhuman capacity to explore alien state-spaces of consciousness – so-called psychedelic transhumanism? But as shorthand, the term “full-spectrum superintelligence” encompasses them all.

Sentience Research: It is no surprise that both now and then there are objections to transhumanism. Have the objections presented before transhumanist proposals evolved since your beginnings with Nick Bostrom?

David Pearce: The religious and secular objections to transhumanism haven’t changed. Eternal life sounds boring: what will we do all day? How can you appreciate the good things in life without a contrast with the bad? Only a privileged elite will benefit from transhumanist technologies. Rewriting the genome is a slippery slope to coercive eugenics. Transhumanism is a rehash of Huxley’s Brave New World. It’s unnatural. It’s playing God. Hubris! And so forth. But the technical objections to the transhumanist project have receded or developed in pace with advancing technologies. For instance, CRISPR-based gene drives defy the “laws” of Mendelian inheritance. Synthetic gene drives can be used to eradicate vector-borne disease and prevent suffering in Nature – and help create a blissful ecosystem for all sentient beings. However, critics highlight how gene drives could also be used by biohackers, super-terrorists or state actors as bioweapons to crash whole ecosystems. Much recent criticism of transhumanism has focused on the hazards of artificial intelligence – whether weaponised AI or the inadvertent risks of “summoning the Demon”. A machine Intelligence Explosion might not turn out well for humanity. Following its conception by mathematician I.J. Good back in 1965, Eliezer Yudkowsky, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and most recently Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence, 2014) have explored the risks to mankind of runaway software-based AI. So transhumanists aren’t all the gung-ho technology worshippers of popular stereotype. We know countless things could go wrong.

Yet what does it mean for things to “go wrong?” Historically, utopian experiments end up causing more suffering than they prevent. In theory, gene-editing can transform human nature – the rock on which previous utopian schemes foundered. But are humans intellectually or ethically competent enough to orchestrate their own metamorphosis? And metamorphosis into what exactly? “Transhuman” is a ragbag term. However, if we phase out the molecular substrates of experience below hedonic zero – my own primary focus – then the nature of things “going wrong” will change too. If suffering becomes impossible because its biological substrates are absent, then the unknown unknowns – “things going wrong” – can’t literally be bad in the same aversive sense. This speculative transition in our hedonic architecture isn’t an argument for complacency. There are risks both to individuals and to civilisation in a world without suffering – for instance, getting trapped in a local maximum, i.e. life that is “merely” wonderful rather than sublime. Yet from the perspective of Earth’s contemporary Darwinian hellhole, the risk of getting sub-optimally “stuck” in a mediocre utopia isn’t exactly imminent. Bootstrapping our way out of the Darwinian abyss is the challenge. Critics of transhumanism decry the risks of reckless genetic experimentation: a brave new world of “designer babies”. Yet with the exception of child-free anti-natalists, we’re all implicated in the creation of suffering to gratify our craving to reproduce and pass on our genes. All children born today are untested genetic experiments – endogenous opioid addicts born with a lethal genetic disease (aging), and prone to a lifetime of physical and psychological distress. If we’re determined to create new life, then let’s at least try to experiment more responsibly. Prospective parents should use benign code.

Sentience Research: What can I ask a man who has written more than 400 answers in Quora?

David Pearce: I don’t know! What can I say? I guess my background is a bit odd. Apparently, I’m quite Neanderthal, or at least I’ve more Neanderthal variants than 93% of 23andMe customers. I’m also a third-generation vegetarian/vegan. At least three of my eight great-grandparents were vegetarian as well. My maternal great-grandfather cycled from one end of the British Isles to the other on a penny-farthing, not a feat of athleticism I could emulate. My maternal grandmother became vegetarian age 10, along with her mother, on learning the family rabbit was destined for the pot; life in early twentieth-century Manchester was tough. My paternal grandmother turned vegetarian in 1930 on converting from Zoroastrianism to Anthroposophy. My mother belonged to The Order of the Cross, a small non-sexist Christian denomination that worships God the Father-Mother. One of my earliest memories is of learning I could be born again – maybe as boy, but maybe as a girl, because gender didn’t matter! My ancestral namesake was appalled. Yes, I now think binary gender should go the way of horns and a tail, but I was more backward in those days. In general, I was a lonely, introspective child, very sad and worried about death and suffering. I used to rescue worms in danger of desiccation on the tarmac, and nursed injured ants that had been trodden on. Aged five or so, I recall clapping my hands to scare off a blackbird pulling a worm from the back-garden – and then feeling foolish, defeated by the inevitability of suffering. If the blackbird didn’t eat the worm, her nestlings would starve; but the poor worm had feelings too, so what could one do? As a disturbed teenager, I rocked back-and-forth to pop music for hours each day in a darkened room thinking about life, consciousness and the universe – a “hypercholinergic frenzy” of teen angst. Reading about Olds and Milner’s discovery of (what were then called) the pleasure centres of the brain was a revelation. Wireheading shows no tolerance. I progressed to thinking about futuristic designer drugs that could sabotage or recalibrate the hedonic treadmill, and dreamed of the tantalising prospect of genetic rewrites and Drexlerian nanotech (The Engines of Creation, 1986). How far “down” the phylogenetic tree was it possible to go in order to eradicate death and suffering? I assumed my weird ideas were unpublishable. But then came the Internet, more specifically the World Wide Web. So in late 1995, I wrote The Hedonistic Imperative (cf. https://www.hedweb.com). For the past two decades, I’ve maintained websites pushing for a biohappiness revolution.

Sentience Research: In Wikipedia we can read that you are a negative utilitarian, a philosophical position that considers that what is relevant is to reduce suffering, not to increase happiness. But you also constantly talk about super happiness. How are these two ideas reconciled?

David Pearce: On the face of it, yes, there’s a tension between suffering-focused ethics and advocacy of life based on gradients of bliss. If all that matters is getting rid of suffering, shouldn’t negative utilitarians aim just for tepid contentment? Unlike paradise-engineering, an ethic of negative utilitarianism (NU) sounds…well, negative, bleak, at once uninspired and uninspiring. “Negative utilitarianism” is a lousy brand-name. Even a morally serious label like “suffering-focused ethics” is apt to chill the soul. But NU is essentially the secular formulation of a compassionate Buddhist ethic (“I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering.” – Gautama Buddha). Our overriding ethical obligation is to mitigate and prevent suffering throughout the living world. NU is easy to misunderstand. By way of example, think of some NU-sounding policy proposal that you find unappealing – or even the slightest bit disappointing to contemplate. Other things being equal, this policy-option can’t really be NU! For NUs want to abolish disappointment, frustration and anything that causes you the slightest hint of concern or sadness. NUs would like to help all your dreams come true! NU is a supremely compassionate ethic. Obviously, there are times today when other things aren’t equal. For instance, settling for a veggie burger when you wanted a hamburger can be disappointing – or so I’m told. But technology can phase out the biology of disappointment in favour of its functional analogues – information-sensitive dips in well-being that never ceases to be awesome. We’re talking about gradients of rich, insightful, socially responsible well-being – a default hedonic state of being blissful rather than being indiscriminately “blissed out”. Life-lovers, not depressive nihilists, will inherit the Earth. I hope that scientific rationalists and religious believers, NUs, classical utilitarians (CUs) and ethical pluralists of all kinds can all collaborate to create post-Darwinian paradise via biotechnology and artificial intelligence. The difference between CUs and NUs is just that NUs will always “walk away from Omelas”, i.e. shun pleasure obtained at the expense of the pain of others. But NUs can have fun too – and ideally, superhuman bliss!

This pragmatic answer won’t satisfy critics. NUs have even been branded an existential risk – although the real underlying risk to civilisation in an era of WMD lies in the biology of involuntary suffering. Just consider how many of the world’s hundreds of thousands of suicidal depressives would take the rest of the world down with them if they could. “Sure”, says the critic, “but as a NU, would you press the OFF button – for example, initiate a vacuum phase transition that cleanly and painlessly brings the experiment of life to a close?”

I could now put on my philosopher’s hat. Counterfactual conditionals don’t have truth-conditions. Or I could challenge status quo bias and ask critics whether they’d press a notional ON button that generates a type-identical copy of the world – and thereby create more suffering than Adolf Hitler. Let’s just say I’d defer to the wisdom of the Buddha.

Sentience Research: Tell us something about the motivation that has led you to develop your work. What makes you get out of bed (if you ever sleep!) and try to save the world?

David Pearce: Selegiline, amineptine, nine or ten cups of black coffee laced with protein isolate and several cans of sugar-free Red Bull. This regimen would not suit everyone.

Seriously, I’m animated by the problem of suffering – and the need to tackle this unfathomable evil at source. As Thoreau remarked, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” I focus mainly on genetics. But despite sounding like a crude genetic determinist obsessed with rewriting our DNA, I’m well aware that socio-political reform is essential too. Social justice matters. Arms control matters. Universal basic income and healthcare reform matter.  Domestic violence, gender equality and LGBT rights matter. The list goes on. And right now, I think our most urgent priority is ending the non-human animal holocaust. Our victims are as sentient as small children. Let’s shut and outlaw factory-farms and slaughterhouses.

However, social reform and animal liberation aren’t enough on their own. Unless we tackle the biological-genetic roots of misery and malaise, suffering will proliferate indefinitely. For sure, Darwinian genomes are written in hideously complex spaghetti code. Yet even a handful of genetic tweaks to the germline of human and nonhuman animals could dramatically reduce suffering in the living world. All babies should be genetically designed for happiness.

Sentience Research: Do you have a feeling of success? What emotional impact has it had on you to deepen your understanding of consciousness? And in particular, what emotional impact has it had on you to deepen your understanding of suffering?

David Pearce: Success? No. Reality is sinister and malignant. The scale of suffering is inconceivable. I feel impotent to do anything about it – most of it, at any rate.

You ask about a deeper understanding of suffering. I fear gaining a deeper empathetic understanding would induce madness – or at least, worsen a predisposition to learned helplessness and behavioural despair. The kind of deeper understanding to which I do aspire is neuroscientific and molecular-genetic – the formal, structural shadows of first-person subjective experience. Only by decrypting the physical signature of pain, pleasure and the negative-feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill in the Central Nervous System (CNS) can we hope to consign suffering to history. Such formal understanding isn’t deep, but it’s potentially effective – which is what matters.

Sentience Research: People who approach your ideas may be emotionally overwhelmed by the amount of suffering in the world. Even worse, if we consider suffering in the multiverse. Do you have any personal-wellbeing tips for altruists who took the suffering in the multiverse essay “too seriously”?

David Pearce: Sorry. Darwinian life is evil beyond belief. Words fail. Concepts fail. And I’ve no feel-good “But…”, no words of consolation – the kind of sugar-coated pap that sells books and brings fame and fortune.

Yes, I worry about wavefunction monism – the possibility that we live in a multiverse, the misnamed “many worlds” of unitary-only QM. See e.g. physicist Sean Carroll’s Something Deeply Hidden (2019) for a lucid popular exposition, or Mad-Dog Everettianism (cf. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.08132.pdf) for the heavy stuff. My heart sinks. But suppose unitary-only (“no collapse”) QM is indeed true. If so, then tackling the biology of pain and depression, shutting factory-farms and slaughterhouses, and preventing wild animal suffering are actually far more important than one realises, not less. For when choosing to help – or not to help – just one other sentient being, you and your decohering (“splitting”) namesakes are unwittingly helping (or neglecting to help) far more victims than perceptual naïve realism and Copenhagen-style positivism suggest. Or at least, that’s one way to analyse what’s going on. Let’s hope no-collapse QM is false. It’s haunted me ever since I stumbled across Everett’s doctoral thesis back in Oxford. The risk of thinking too hard about immense, inescapable suffering is emotional numbing, fatalism and despair – “burn out”. Self-compassion is vital to effective agency. Your last interviewee – my good friend Magnus Vinding – reminds us of this duty of self-care in his forthcoming book Suffering-Focused Ethics (2020).

Sentience Research: Ok. Let’s assume now that you succeed and all suffering is eradicated from Earth. Or better, let’s say from our Universe. No, even better, from all universes. What about if future civilizations forget about what suffering is? Wouldn’t this be a big risk?

David Pearce: If a transhuman civilisation were to forget about suffering prematurely, then yes, there’s a risk of recurrence. And some risks of premature amnesia may be subtle and distinctly non-obvious. As an example of an ethical catastrophe in the guise of success, I offer an alien civilisation that has embraced the sort of biohappiness revolution I promote (!). Everyone in this advanced civilisation leads magnificently fulfilled lives. No one is excluded from paradise. Superhappiness feels even more wondrous than the prophets foretold. There is no death or aging. Life is beautiful. Their wildlife parks resemble the Garden of Eden. There are no dark secrets, no tormented juvenile alien in a basement (cf. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas). Yes, it’s the Hedonistic Imperative! But this advanced civilisation has fallen victim to a terrible error. Their forebears believed that primordial life in the universe was vanishingly rare. They opted to forget about primeval life too soon. If they had persevered on an arduous spacefaring trajectory, mindful of their cosmological responsibilities, then they could have discovered – and launched cosmic rescue-missions to save – pain-ridden Darwinian life beyond Earth.

This example is probably fanciful. For what it’s worth, I’m provisionally a Rare Earther, based on the thermodynamic improbability of primordial information-bearing self-replicators arising in the first instance. We’re most likely alone in our Hubble volume. But Rare Earthism is still only guesswork. The conjecture shouldn’t be dignified as scientific fact. So I don’t believe that post-Darwinian civilisation should forget about suffering until we comprehend the nature of reality and the theoretical upper bounds of intelligent moral agency in the cosmos. If there is the slightest possibility of Darwinian life existing elsewhere within our cosmological horizon, then we should place our rescue responsibilities first – the opposite of the Prime Directive, much as I love Star Trek. In practice, long-term responsibility for cosmic stewardship can probably be offloaded to insentient AI; biological wetware isn’t designed for interstellar travel and galactic exploration. Yet we don’t yet know whether ethical responsibility can be safely offloaded to digital zombies, or the specifics of what “cosmic stewardship” entails.

If we forget altogether about suffering, might there still be a risk that suffering could be recreated here? After all, some well-known transhumanists, notably Nick Bostrom – an ardent life-lover – have speculated about an ultra-advanced civilisation creating virtual “ancestor simulations” – and wondered if, statistically, we could be one of them. I don’t believe in digital sentience and the idea that unified subjects of experience can arise at different levels of computational abstraction. But even if I’m mistaken, I still don’t envisage an advanced civilisation re-creating the Holocaust, say, in the guise of running ancestor-simulations. After all, we’re talking about posthuman superintelligence, not the Devil. So let’s discount ancestor-simulations, here at least. Assume we live in basement reality. Imagine our descendants, a posthuman civilisation with a hedonic range of schematically, say, +70 to +100  rather than our -10 to 0 to +10 – with rock-bottom hedonic +70 the equivalent of our dark night of the soul. On this scenario, it’s hard to foresee anyone wanting to explore the hedonic +60s, let alone to penetrate the inconceivable watershed below hedonic zero. Centuries from now, maybe we should pause hedonic uplift and start worrying about the risks of premature amnesia. The risk of forgetting about suffering is currently not one of our more pressing challenges.

Sentience Research: Which is your best theory of the nature of sentience?

David Pearce: First a disclaimer. No one understands sentience. And no believer in suffering-focused ethics need take seriously any of the weird speculations I play around with. Not least, orthodox scientific materialists can sign up for the abolitionist project. What’s critical to our prospects of phasing out suffering isn’t the truth or falsity of materialism, but rather monistic physicalism. Only the physical is real. Only the physical has causal efficacy. Reality is exhaustively described by the mathematical formalism of physics. That’s why technology works. Alas, I still worry we’re ignorant and deluded. For science does not understand the existence, phenomenal binding, causal efficacy and diverse textures of consciousness, i.e. the empirical evidence. Worse, the mystery of consciousness can’t be quarantined from our understanding of the rest of physical reality, as perceptual direct realists implicitly suppose. One’s conscious mind and the entire phenomenal world-simulation it runs ought not to exist if physicists and chemists really understood the fundamental nature of matter and energy. Likewise, one’s conscious mind and the entire phenomenal world-simulation it runs ought not to exist if neuroscientists correctly understood brains as packs of decohered neurons: phenomenal binding is classically impossible (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#categorize). Likewise, “observations”, “observers” and the subjective experience of definite outcomes in one’s world-simulation ought not to exist if physicists really understood the (relativistic generalisation of the) Schrödinger equation, the bedrock of modern physics. The measurement problem in QM is a scandal at the heart of physics: as it stands, the decoherence program alone doesn’t solve it. Consciousness is the empirical evidence – it’s all any of us has to go on. All the stuff one reads about the “empirical” adequacy of science, about “progress” in neuroscience, and the “success” of the Standard Model in physics is a farrago of self-deception and hype. So-called scientific materialism is a degenerating research program: it’s not empirically adequate.

So what’s my best guess of the right explanation-space for answers? I explore a mix of the theoretically conservative and the seriously weird – a version of what philosophers call the intrinsic nature argument. Physicalism is true. Unitary-only quantum mechanics (i.e. QM without the ad hoc collapse postulate) is formally complete. But the mathematical machinery of QFT describes fields of sentience rather than insentience. What makes biological minds special isn’t consciousness per se, but non-psychotic phenomenal binding. You and your phenomenal world-simulation are what a quantum mind feels like from the inside. I investigate a “Schrödinger’s neurons” conjecture. More formally, I explore the quantum-theoretic version of the intrinsic nature argument for non-materialist physicalism. You and your phenomenal world consist of “cat states” sculpted by the most powerful selection-mechanism ever conceived, Zurek’s quantum Darwinism, i.e. the decoherence program in post-Everett quantum mechanics applied to the central nervous system.

Anyone who knows a bit of physics will appreciate why this version of quantum mind is so far-fetched – not because the conjecture invokes a modification of the unitary Schrödinger dynamics like Orch-OR or a spontaneous collapse theory, but rather because the theoretical lifetime of neuronal superpositions (“cat states”) in the CNS is femtoseconds or less. Brains are too hot to sustain quantum coherence. Decoherence is too strong and uncontrollable. The dynamical timescale of neuronal superpositions is wrong by many orders of magnitude. Our mental lives and phenomenal world-simulations play out over scores of milliseconds, not femtoseconds! Phase coherence between the components of neuronal superpositions is scrambled too rapidly to be remotely relevant to consciousness. So naïvely again, neuronal superpositions are (at most) functionally irrelevant “noise” rather than a credible solution to the binding problem. Consciousness must (somehow) be classical and emergent.

Maybe so. However, critically, the quantum-theoretic version of intrinsic nature argument is not about dynamical timescales; it’s a theory of the intrinsic nature of the physical, the elusive “fire” in the equations of QFT or its stringy successor. In my tentative view, only the fact that the superposition principle of QM doesn’t break down in your head (or anywhere else) allows each of us to run a phenomenally-bound world-simulation that can be described from within by an approximation of classical physics. Only the ubiquity of the superposition principle allows you (an “observer”) to experience phenomenally-bound definite outcomes (“observations”) within your world-simulation. Note this interpretation of the QM formalism is an inversion of the normal physics story in which superpositions exist only when unobserved, after which they unaccountably vanish – the infamous “collapse of the wavefunction”. The blindingly obvious assumption that superpositions aren’t experienced spawns the measurement problem – the alleged non-unitary transformation of the state vector on measurement into a seemingly definite classical state in accordance with the Born rule. If I may quote Schrödinger himself, “The task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.” Quite so. A notional micro-experiential zombie made up of some 86 billion decohered, membrane-bound classical neurons – the staple of conventional neuroscience – couldn’t observe a live cat (or a dead cat), or the apparatus for detecting a spin-up (or a spin-down) electron – or anything else. The measurement problem in QM and the binding problem in neuroscience are two sides of the same coin – and share a solution.

As I said, crazy stuff! And don’t worry, I promise I don’t believe such speculation – it’s a conjecture, amenable to refutation via the normal methods of science, in this case interferometry. If I’m confounded – as I may well be! – just don’t expect the true explanation of the Hard Problem, phenomenal binding and the measurement paradox to be any saner. Unlike testability, credibility is a red herring. All the options are bizarre and absurd. Critically, if phenomenal binding is non-classical, then the interference signature as revealed by tomorrow’s molecular matter-wave interferometry will tell us: a “Schrödinger’s neurons” conjecture predicts a perfect structural match. What perceptual naïve realists call phenomenal binding via synchrony – a mere restatement of the binding problem – is really superpositions of distributed neuronal feature-processors in your CNS. This account of consciousness and binding doesn’t rest on some subtlety related to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem like the Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR theory. Phenomenal binding is the staple of our mental life. In human and non-human animals with a capacity for rapid self-propelled motion, non-psychotic phenomenal binding is what consciousness is evolutionarily “for”: real-time phenomenal world-making is ridiculously adaptive. In the meantime, until we can perform the interferometric tests, I think the best empirical evidence that you’re a quantum mind – but not a universal quantum supercomputer! – lies under your virtual nose in the guise of the unity of consciousness. Unless dreamlessly asleep, you’re not patterns of Jamesian “mind-dust”, let alone a classical Turing machine, but a unified subject of experience, an egocentric world.

The ethical relevance of the (conjectured) quantum supremacy of biological minds is mostly negative. If phenomenal binding and the unity of consciousness are non-classical, and if dualism is false, then unified subjects of experience aren’t going spontaneously to “emerge” in programmable digital computers, inorganic robots or classically parallel connectionist systems. So the abolitionist project to get rid of suffering is effectively confined to biological life – with complications over e.g. lab-gown mini-brains. By the same token, humans aren’t going to “upload” our minds to digital computers. “Whole-brain emulation” is physically impossible – our minds are patterns in the world’s underlying quantum substrate. Futuristic non-biological quantum computers that do exploit the world’s quantum substrate may also support exotic sentience. But we’ve no reason to believe that abiotic quantum computers will be endowed with a pleasure-pain axis. Therefore the importance of artificial quantum computing will be instrumental rather than intrinsic.

Sentience Research: What do you think is your most misunderstood idea? Is there anything you can say here to clarify things?

David Pearce: Well, I’ve read I want to “exterminate” predators. One kindly critic even suggested I deserved an extinction event named after me to rival the Permian-Triassic; a flattering prospect, but I reckon a park-bench is more realistic. Reading though the comments below e.g. https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-radical-plan-to-eliminate-earths-predatory-species-1613342963 makes me groan. I wouldn’t hurt a fly – literally. And it gets worse. When critics hear you’re a negative utilitarian (NU), they say you’re encouraging (if not actively plotting!) Armageddon. The latently apocalyptic implications of classical utilitarianism, i.e. the obligation of intelligent moral agents to launch a utilitronium/hedonium shockwave to maximise the cosmic abundance of bliss in our Hubble volume, haven’t received much academic attention. Hence the lack of a scholarly rebuttal. By contrast, the seemingly apocalyptic implications of NU were noted almost as soon as its formulation – and are normally treated as its reductio ad absurdum. When Nick and I set up the World Transhumanist Association (H+), Nick knew I was a NU, and I knew Nick was preoccupied by existential risk. But NUs don’t spend their time scheming Armageddon any more than CUs are planning an utilitronium shockwave. Not yet, at any rate.

What else? Well, talk of “paradise engineering” can sound as though I’m trying to sell my version of utopia. I could indeed share with you my private dream of an ideal society – everyone perpetually “loved up” on the genetically-expressed counterpart of MDMA! But this little fantasy isn’t part of the package. Complications aside, radical hedonic recalibration is preference-neutral. Preference-neutrality is critical. Conjure up your version of the good life, your peak experiences, your most cherished personal fantasies and your conception of paradise. Now genetically ratchet up hedonic range and hedonic set-points. Hedonic recalibration can make your vision of heaven richer than you ever dreamed. Better still, hedonic recalibration can prevent sabotage of your perfect heaven via the negative feedback-mechanisms of a Darwinian hedonic treadmill. In tomorrow’s world of paradise-engineering, your pleasures will always be sublime.

A final misunderstanding – though this is my fault. I don’t always explicitly advocate we should abolish all involuntary suffering, rather than just all suffering. I cautiously predict all suffering will be eradicated over the next few centuries – pessimistically, the next few millennia – but not via coercion. No one is credibly going to force you to be happy against your will if you want the “right” to be sad. Debates over whether humanity should aim to eradicate suffering would be shorter if they were focused on whether it’s defensible to conserve the biology of coercive misery.

Sentience Research: In “Non-Materialist Physicalism: a testable hypothesis” you mention “some sort of Rosetta Stone to ‘read off’ the values of qualia – both bound and unbound – from the solutions to the field-theoretic equations of [quantum field theory]”. Do you have any speculations on what the Stone could be?

David Pearce:  As far as I can tell, a notional Rosetta stone would need to come from “outside” the universal wavefunction – which is physically impossible, indeed unintelligible. So even if non-materialist physicalism turns out to be true, I’m pessimistic about understanding consciousness in any deep sense – although youthful acquaintance with psychedelics may colour my pessimism here too. For sure, someone who touts answers to the Hard Problem of consciousness, the binding problem, the problem of causal efficacy and other mysteries of materialist metaphysics could be mistaken for an intellectual optimist. Not so. I just think key background assumptions underpinning our ordinary formulation of these problems are mistaken.

Despite the absence of a cosmic Rosetta stone, the diverse values of qualia hypothetically encoded in the solutions to the equations of QFT probably aren’t arbitrary. The textures of consciousness may well be as interdependent as the truths of mathematics. But unlike mathematics, we’ve no clues to the fundamental principle(s) underlying the palette of experience to guide us, just brute first-person facts. Granted, I’ve speculated that the textures of qualia encoded by the solutions to the equations of QFT may precisely “cancel out” to zero as part of an informationless zero ontology (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#anything). Maybe think of the all the colours of the rainbow “cancelling” to colourless white light – if you’ll pardon the dubious New Age metaphor. Anyhow, don’t take such flights of fancy too seriously. And of course, the conceptual framework of non-materialist physicalism itself may well be false. The intrinsic nature argument is currently enjoying an academic revival, but it’s still a minority view. Try telling a hard-nosed scientific materialist that your preferred theory of consciousness is the Standard Model in physics and you’ll gain some funny looks. I really am what I say, baffled by existence.

Sentience Research: Why do you think full-spectrum superintelligence would not choose in certain situations to stay ignorant of someone’s feelings in order to achieve its goals?

David Pearce: Both instrumentally and as a long-term goal, I think intelligent agents should aim at selective ignorance. If, like me, you’ve a naturally low-AQ cognitive style (cf. https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aqtest/), then naively it’s easy to believe that what the world needs most is more compassion. All we need is love! Sentient beings need helping not harming. So stop paying for animal abuse and go vegan. Oxytocin-release leads to increased empathy. Unfortunately, heightened oxytocin function is also associated with nepotism, tribalism and out-group hostility – or at best, self-referential altruism. Compare taking a hug-drug like MDMA (“Ecstasy”). Insofar as ethics is computable, we also need the impartial benevolence of autistic hyper-systematisers – whether human or transhuman. Or artificial intelligence.

Sentience Research: How is your view different from the perceptual indirect realist’s?

David Pearce: A perceptual indirect realist believes we see the world only via intermediary sense-data. On an inferential realist view, we don’t perceive the world. Rather, we each run phenomenal world-simulations. External reality is a hypothesis. When we’re awake, our world-simulations are partially sculpted by peripheral nervous inputs. So our phenomenal world-simulations track fitness-relevant macro-patterns in the theoretically inferred local environment. What the external environment does, essentially, is select states of our mind/brains that masquerade as our external reality. We don’t literally “observe” our local surroundings – if we did so, magically, then we’d see the insides of our skulls. Disconcertingly, the virtual people in your egocentric world-simulation are zombies, the cartoon avatars of sentient beings in the mind-independent world. Schizophrenics, DMT users talking with machine elves and scientific rationalists alike converse with phantoms of their own minds. Thus a neurosurgeon operating on a patient doesn’t see – directly or indirectly – surgically-exposed nervous tissue. Rather, the neurosurgeon’s body-image operates on another “interface icon” (Donald Hoffman’s metaphor) within his own skull-bound phenomenal world. Compare how during a lucid dream, you may distinguish between your tangible empirical skull and your theoretically-inferred transcendental skull. You can recognise that the inhabitants of your lucid dreamworld must be zombies. Likewise, during waking life, you need to distinguish between your empirical skull and the theoretically-inferred transcendental skull within which the drama of your life unfolds. “Waking up” each morning to commune directly with the external world is a pre-scientific fiction – quite useful when crossing the road.

The evidence for inferential realism is quite compelling. It’s been central to my conceptual framework since my teens. Inferential realism is the recipe for a lonely life (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#current). By contrast, non-materialist physicalism is extremely speculative. The possibility that experience discloses the essence of the physical feels insane. I’m not wholly immune from common sense.

Sentience Research: What reading could be helpful in understanding your view on consciousness?

David Pearce: I’ve indexed a bunch of Quora answers:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/index.html
Or perhaps see e.g.
https://www.quora.com/Do-our-brains-work-at-the-quantum-level-Is-the-brain-itself-a-quantum-machine

Sentience Research: What is your approach to personal productivity? Do you think you could be more productive?

David Pearce: Well, I wish I could forget inferential realism and become a naïve realist. Perceptual direct realists make better effective altruists. Sometimes I wish I had messianic delusions, or at least a testosterone-patch to make me more strong-minded. If you have an inflated view of your own importance in the great scheme of things, then you can do more good in the world – and more bad, too, if you screw up. By contrast, I struggle with depressive realism.

Sentience Research: How do you understand the anti-realist position on value?

David Pearce: Let’s assume physicalism – whether mainstream “materialist” physicalism or its recent non-materialist cousin. On either account, putative moral facts are what philosopher J. L. Mackie (cf. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 1977) called “queer”, i.e. a unique and unexplained hybrid of the descriptive and the normative. As a materialist, Mackie was explicit about what followed from this anomalous status. All moral judgements are false. There is no fundamental, objective difference between championing your ethical values and supporting your football team. You and I might be strongly opposed to, say, rape, torture and child abuse. But claiming such behaviour is morally wrong just expresses our personal psychology rather than captures anything inherently wrong with such practices. Our responses can ultimately be explained by evolutionary psychology. If eating your mother had promoted the inclusive fitness of our genes in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness – like matriphagous spiders – then mother-eating could well seem a sacred duty to this day.

I defend value-realism (cf. https://www.quora.com/What-is-David-Pearces-position-on-meta-ethics). (Dis-)value is mind-dependent, therefore an objective feature of physical reality. Moral disagreement stems from our epistemological limitations. The pain-pleasure axis discloses the world’s intrinsic metric of (dis-)value.

Sentience Research: Should suffering-focused altruists try to enter politics?

David Pearce: Can one be most effective by entering politics or lobbying existing political parties to adopt transhumanist/EA ideas? Or both? The USA has both a Transhumanist Party and a transhumanist Republican(!) presidential candidate, Zoltan Istvan. I’d love to see the three transhumanist “supers” at the heart of political policy-making. Laying out the transhumanist vision of our glorious future and trusting one’s ideas will be luminously self-evident – my normal approach – is probably not a recipe for success, or at least, not success with any kind of objective metric. Inevitably, politics is a sordid affair when practised by Machiavellian apes; it’s easier to stay pure and impotent on the side-lines. As Adlai Stevenson observed, “The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.”

Can transhumanists and effective altruists do better?

Sentience Research: What non-profit organization is missing in the world?

David Pearce: An ambitious “One Hundred Year Plan” to eradicate suffering via biological-genetic interventions would be technically feasible using recognisable extensions of existing technologies – genome editing, gene drives, cultured meat, and preimplantation genetic screening and counselling for all prospective parents. A serious global organization to implement such a mega-project sounds fanciful. Amazingly, such an organization exists. The World Health Organization is dedicated to the promotion of good health for everyone as laid out in its founding constitution (1946). “What is the WHO definition of health? Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being”. Note the “complete”. Complete well-being is an astonishingly bold definition of health. Compare the incomplete, information-sensitive dips in well-being urged by some supposedly wild-eyed transhumanists. Perhaps we need a Greta Thunberg to remind our politicians to live up to their responsibilities for public health – the abolition of suffering through medical science.

Sentience Research: What would be your most charitable account of the eliminativist position?

David Pearce: Scientific materialism is our best story of the world. Unlike every other belief-system, science works: hence technological civilisation. Our best scientific theory of reality has no place in its ontology for subjective experience. The behaviour of matter and energy, including naturally-evolved biological robots such as human beings, can be exhaustively explained without invoking consciousness. Therefore, subjective experience can’t really exist. It’s an illusion.

Yes, devil’s advocacy for eliminativism is a challenge – unless you’re a p-zombie, and sadly I’m not so blessed. I wish eliminativism were true. For if consciousness didn’t exist, then there would be no problem of suffering – just the (non-)problems of nociception, depressive behavioural suppression and the vocalisations caused by noxious stimuli.

Like eliminativists, I suspect humans do radically misunderstand what we call consciousness – just as religious schizophrenics may misunderstand what they hear as the Voice of God. I agree with eliminativists that only the physical is real. Where I’d part company with consciousness-deniers is over the essence of the physical. Anti-realists about consciousness – and indeed mainstream scientific materialists – assume that the “fire” in the equations must be non-experiential. By contrast, non-materialist physicalism proposes that subjective experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the “fire” – Kant’s noumenal essence of the world, supposedly unknown and unknowable. In other words, non-materialist physicalism is anti-realist about the “physical” as conceived by the eliminative materialist. Perhaps fields of insentience as hypothesised by materialist metaphysics are destined to go the way of luminiferous aether.

We shall see.

Sentience Research: Is there a role for psychedelic drugs in understanding consciousness?

David Pearce: Trying to understand consciousness without exploring alien state-spaces of experience is like trying to understand matter and energy entirely by observation. Non-experimental science will always be shallow. The rationalist community worries mainly about cognitive bias, whereas I worry more about ignorance, in particular drug-naïve ignorance. For sure, there are huge methodological challenges in psychedelic exploration. Turning the study of consciousness into an experimental science rather than a philosophical talking-shop won’t happen any time soon. Disparate state-spaces of consciousness are often mutually incommensurable. Worse, there is no canonical “neutral” medium of experience via which psychonauts can impartially appraise all other modes of experience. Any distinction between vehicle and propositional content is artificial. Exacerbating the challenge, alien state-spaces of consciousness haven’t been recruited by natural selection for any information-signalling purpose. So we lack even a pseudo-public conceptual framework for their systematic exploration. Today, plunging headlong into psychedelia can be a recipe for psychosis, not enlightenment. But unless we expand our impoverished evidential base, our ignorance will stay hardwired.

I could now denounce prohibitionism. The disreputable status of psychedelic agents in academia has bred learned ignorance and scholarly obscurantism. Yet I’m also a hypocrite. If I had kids, I wouldn’t want them exploring psychedelics – or any drug-cocktail stronger than black coffee. Darwinian minds are too dark and dysfunctional safely to explore radically altered consciousness. Tomorrow will be different.

Sentience Research: Do we need new psychedelic drugs?

David Pearce: Yes. Insofar as we hope to understand the properties of fields of matter and energy, we need new psychedelics, new genes, new neurons, new metabolic pathways, and new modes of phenomenal binding. I’m sceptical of the therapeutic potential of psychedelics – as distinct from un-trippy interventions that target mood, anxiety and motivation. For sure, psychedelics can sometimes induce life-changing epiphanies. I know of miraculous success stories. Yet psychedelics are horribly unpredictable. Informed prior consent by the drug-naïve to their use is impossible. The darkest, sickest minds can also have the worst trips. With ingenuity, maybe most bad trips are preventable even in archaic humans. In post-Darwinian paradise, bad trips will be impossible. But today, psychedelic euphoriants or cocktails have “abuse potential” and therefore pitfalls of their own. To function in a Darwinian world, humans need to feel “normal” – a misnomer for many troubled minds. We’re social primates with families and work-related responsibilities. So for now, aiming at an idealised version of ordinary waking consciousness (hyperthymia) is probably wise.

However, if your question is about post-Darwinian life, then emphatically, yes, novel compounds harnessed to novel genes and novel gene-expression profiles will revolutionise our conception of reality. Maybe billions of years of consciousness-exploration lie ahead – starting with the creation of alien state-spaces of experience as different as, say, sight from sound, or waking from dreaming consciousness, or cognition from volition and emotion. Today, we don’t have any conception of what we’re missing, or names for our deficits. I believe it’s impossible to overstate the intellectual significance of these outlandish state-spaces of experience – though there’s a vast junkyard of psychotic nonsense, too, amidst the jewels. By analogy, imagine if you were congenitally blind, but didn’t know you were sightless, nor have any concept of visual experience. Now multiply this ignorance a billionfold. I reckon the human predicament is comparable to a tribe of congenitally blind rationalists.

Sentience Research: Do you think it is possible to abolish suffering forever?

David Pearce: In our forward light-cone? Yes, I think so. After we identify the molecular signature(s) of experience below hedonic zero, suffering can be made impossible. The Evil Zone (or however our successors conceptualise Darwinian consciousness) can be circumscribed with multiple, fail-safe barriers to access. Today, molecular ring-fencing sounds dauntingly ambitious because of the ever-expanding range of intentional objects that humans can be (un)happy “about”. [Intentionality is philosophical jargon for the object-directedness of thought.] But the heart of darkness lies in the nasty core emotions of our limbic system. Evolution has “encephalised” our ancient emotions in fitness-enhancing ways, “painting on” affective colour to intrinsically neutral phenomenal stimuli within our neocortical world-simulations. The late evolutionary novelty of generative syntax massively enlarges the range of our nominal discontents. Yet in the vast state-space of all possible experiences, subjective nastiness is just a comparatively small corner. If mankind gets its act together, then suffering can go the way of the cuckoo clock.

I can’t rule out exotic cosmological possibilities whereby suffering could recur. But so long as we genetically eradicate suffering throughout the living world, and ensure the impossibility of further suffering within our cosmological horizon, then I think our ethical duties will have been discharged.

Sentience Research: What do you think of the current state of VR technology?

David Pearce: Today’s toy virtual worlds are a thin foretaste of mature multimodal VR. Augmented reality and immersive VR will become ever more compulsively addictive as supernormal stimuli hijack our reward circuitry. Regrettably, VR on its own can’t banish the need for a biohappiness revolution. Unless we hack the hedonic treadmill, states of misery and malaise will persist in virtual designer utopias, just as they do in (what naïve realists call) the real world. Not even utopian VR can recalibrate the hedonic treadmill. Let’s assume real-world reward-pathway enhancements. Even with hedonic recalibration, it’s still hard to see how life in basement reality can compete.

Perceptual direct realists will complain about people losing touch with reality. Critics do so now with social media and video gaming. But maybe our choice is between living life in natural organic VR or synthetic VR: even refurbished basements will be comparatively dull. Note this sense of “basement reality” and artificial virtual worlds differs from the idea that sentient beings can be scanned, digitised and instantiated in silico (“mind uploading”) or that subjects of experience will somehow “emerge” at different levels of abstraction in digital computers.

Some futurists wonder whether transhumans will ultimately all spend their entire lives in Experience Machines. This VR scenario is problematic. Selection pressure in basement reality must be weighed too. Just as wireheads don’t seek to breed babies, Experience Machine addicts don’t seek to breed biological babies either. Ultimate power – and responsibility – lies with whoever controls the basement.

Sentience Research: Do you have plans to develop The Neuroethics Foundation?

David Pearce: In principle, I’d love to have a team of researchers working full-time on the abolitionist project. I’d love to be able to offer opportunities for career development. If you’re a financial heavy-hitter, please feel free to get in contact. Maybe telling people one’s role model is Diogenes in his tub hasn’t been the best way to attract serious funding.

Sentience Research: Do you think it is possible to have a civilization which takes reducing suffering as its main mission?

David Pearce: A global civilisation with a Buddhist ethic – or its secular counterpart – is conceivable. Sadly, I don’t consider such a civilisation likely. In consequence, the abolition of suffering will be needlessly protracted. For evolutionary reasons, most people report they love life (“Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon” – Woody Allen). Most people don’t want to focus on the evils of existence. Even among reflective folk who recognise the problem of suffering lies at the heart of ethics, talk of “ending suffering” can sound too big – impossibly vague and grandiose. Even piecemeal, well-targeted interventions such as eradicating malaria or ending factory-farming are forbiddingly difficult. With a global consensus for the abolitionist project, a One Hundred Year Plan targeting the biological-genetic basis of suffering could probably work. This kind of timescale is sociologically fanciful.

Sentience Research: What should young aspirant abolitionists do to contribute?

David Pearce: First, do an audit of your strengths and weaknesses. Are you temperamentally best equipped for a career in medical science, bioethics or activism – or for pursuing a more conventional career while earning-to-give? Consider creating a YouTube channel and doing podcasts. Set up your own dedicated website. Tweet. Try Wikipedia editing. Join the HI Facebook group – community-building matters. Not least, speak to Manu Herrán and his colleagues at the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering – OPIS.

Sentience Research: Why are relatively few effective altruists interested in transhumanism?

David Pearce: I worry that (some) transhumanists have a moral blindspot. Most transhumanists are life-loving optimists focused on radically extending human lifespan and developing superintelligence rather than on traditional EA concerns. Let’s face it, spending one’s life focusing on, say, poverty and disease in sub-Saharan Africa is depressing. I salute heroic EAs who do just that. But my impression is the overlap between EA and transhumanism is increasing.

Sentience Research: Why the molecular signature of bliss and not of suffering? 

David Pearce: A tiny region of the basal ganglia promises to reveal the molecular signature of pure bliss – though phenomenal binding is a huge complication. Thanks to the work of Kent Berridge and his colleagues at the University of Michigan, our ultimate pleasure centre has been more sharply localised than the anatomical location of pure pain: the brain’s ultimate “hedonic hotspot” has been narrowed to a single cubic centimetre in the posterior ventral pallidum. Mu opioid receptor activation of these wonderful cells isn’t itself the essence of bliss. But does this magic centimetre hold the molecular key to the future of life in the universe? It’s a tantalising prospect. Even so, naïvely, an advocate of suffering-focused ethics will find the quest morally frivolous. Why concentrate on deciphering the physical signature of pure pleasure – and eventually hedonium (matter and energy optimised for pure bliss) – rather than “dolorium”, its opposite?

I worry about suffering risks (“s-risks”). Potentially, a physical understanding of the pleasure-pain axis is dangerous knowledge – and I’m not alluding to the hypothetical threat to civilisation of a utilitronium shockwave. Humans have primitive notions of punishment, revenge and the metaphysics of personal identity. I know of no limits to human depravity. Archaic humans could in theory inflict far worse horrors than anything in history to date if knowledge of the molecular signature of pure suffering were ever abused. So as well as a fabulous opportunity to eradicate suffering, such knowledge could also pose an information-hazard. It’s a dilemma. Are humans morally responsible enough physically to understand the axis of empirical (dis)value? In order to eradicate suffering for ever, humanity must find a safe way to rise to the challenge.

Sentience Research: Which do you think has been your most useful idea?

David Pearce: Our overriding ethical obligation is to phase out experience below hedonic zero throughout the world. Genetic recalibration of the hedonic treadmill can replace the biology of suffering with life animated by information-sensitive gradients of superhuman bliss. Genome-editing is no longer science-fiction – a biohappiness revolution deserves to go mainstream.

Sentience Research: Do you think it is worth it to live?

David Pearce: I’m now I’m torn between giving you a heart-warming answer and an honest answer.

Pleasure corrupts. We all agree that the judgement of heroin users can’t be trusted. Jacking up heroin feels glorious (“I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God” – Lenny Bruce), but an opioid habit makes users selfish and amoral. Addiction normally ends up causing untold suffering to everyone. However, the fiendish cunning of natural selection has made all of us junkies – not in some strained metaphorical sense, but literally addicts, physiologically hooked on endogenous opioids – and willing to rationalise all manner of suffering by way of collateral damage to feed our habit. Insidiously, Darwinian life is bribed with pleasure, not just coerced with pain. Worse, evolution has engineered most opioid addicts to propagate their habit to a new generation of addicts via orgasmic sex – not the best tool for an impartial appraisal of reproductive ethics. Of course, addiction isn’t how most of us conceptualise our endogenous opioid dependence. The majority of humans are unaware of the neurochemical basis of reward. Pleasure just feels good. Life lovers will recoil at such a tendentious label; healthy humans are not “addicts”. The grim topics covered in this interview won’t resonate with many people. Humans in general value great art, literature, beautiful sunsets, friends, lovers, humour, spirituality, sex, the latest iPhones – good times. Life is a precious gift that must go on! But objectively, neurologically, we’re all ensnared in a vicious cycle of opioid addiction, and in denial about the harm we cause our victims – human and nonhuman – and ourselves. Addiction warps morality to promote the inclusive fitness of our genes. OK, I enjoy peak experiences whereas you’re a slave to Mill’s “lower pleasures”, but we are all hapless prisoners of the pleasure-pain axis. Darwinian life is self-replicating malware, a monstrous engine for perpetuating pain, suffering and addiction. The scale of the suffering is unimaginable. And it’s utterly pointless.

There’s one complication to this analysis. Even the most angst-ridden Darwinian malware can be valuable if one prevents more suffering than one causes. So whether you’re an effective altruist earning to give, or a vegan activist campaigning against industrialised animal-abuse, or even, yes, a philosophical wordsmith churning out treatises on how to reduce suffering, even a pain-ridden and depressive life can still be worthwhile. Believers in suffering-focused ethics should act accordingly. And don’t help only others; you have a moral obligation to take care of yourself. That way, you can do more good in the rest of the world. Critically, Darwinian malware is now smart enough to rewrite its source code. The future belongs to life-lovers, not extinctionists, anti-natalists or nihilists. Happy folk find the meaning of life self-intimating. Empirically, more happiness = more meaning. Superhappiness = superhuman meaning. Post-human life will be awesomely worthwhile by its very nature.

Sentience Research: To end this interview, and trying to condense your philosophy: What is important?

David Pearce: Civilisation will be based on gradients of intelligent bliss. So let’s shut the death factories, re-engineer the genome, and use biotech to phase out suffering. Everything else is fluff.

Sentience Research: Just one question more, whom should we interview next?

David Pearce: Maybe Andrés Gómez-Emilsson of Qualia Research Institute?

Sentience Research: Excellent idea. Thank you very much David.

David Pearce: Thank you Manu, Alex, Jone. You are very kind. Keep up the fantastic work.