Post #16: My current thoughts on where David Pearce and I agree and disagree

Okay, time for some meat! (Oh um…sorry David, just a figure of speech.) Regardless of what I should be doing to grow my general web presence or improve this crappy WordPress address, there’s the matter of writing interesting content itself. I sent the following to David as a preview on the hope that I’m still of interest to him. Fortunately so! He’s sent me a brief initial response for now that I’ll include at the end. Here’s the post:

– – – – –

Since it’s relatively rare for me to agree with others regarding the most speculative areas of science and philosophy, I consider it quite significant that David and I are in strong agreement regarding what constitutes the value of existence itself.  This is to say, feeling good rather than bad.  Apparently both maternally and paternally he comes from deep vegetarian roots.  So given such an environment and standard sympathy for what suffers, deciding to devote his life to the abolition of suffering does seem appropriate. 

Conversely I didn’t choose to directly seek the reduction of suffering as a kid, though might have been similarly sensitive. As I recall I instead mainly wanted to understand how reality worked well enough to grasp why it is that people and reality itself can be so fucking horrible? Here I didn’t feel the need to personally stop eating meat or other apparently vile standard practices, since my own participation should be virtually insignificant when compared against a total magnitude of world horrors. I figured it would be best to sidestep that in order to hopefully grasp human nature itself and thus potentially figure out good solutions for general problems. So given the difference between “activist” versus “non-activist” forms of theorist, where do our positions stand today?

I consider our disagreement regarding consciousness to be relatively minor in the end. To me David’s universal micro sentience proposal (the “intrinsic nature” argument), effectively boils down to the non sentience position that I hold regarding things in general. What I instead consider important is our agreement that brain based dynamics rather than magical dynamics create macro (or effectively “true”) sentience. I also like that he hasn’t gotten caught up in the popular computationalism/ functionalism/ illusionism position, and even calls for the empirical testing of falsifiable proposals. Hopefully we’ll get into the particulars of our different testable suspicions at some point.

So what might the existence of macro phenomenal value itself mean?  I think it means that all value happens to be based upon how good to bad any defined subject feels over a specified period of time.  So if something makes you feel better for a given period, then it will be good for you in that specific regard.  It’s the same for any defined individual or aggregate collection of sentient beings.  And note here that there will be tremendous potential for a given event to be valuable to one defined subject while anti-valuable to another, thus creating natural conflicts of interest. 

People generally seem to dislike defining value this cleanly however since the result can contrast with our various moral notions. Wouldn’t this mean that a person who increases their own happiness by doing unspeakably horrible things to others, should thus be doing what’s “good for them” to do? Yes and there are countless other repugnant implications here as well. I don’t think such repugnance itself should lead us to disbelieve the premise however. I consider this to merely reflect how reality itself can be quite repugnant.

I don’t call myself either a utilitarian (“maximize the positive”) or even a negative utilitarian (“minimum the negative”), because I consider moral notions in general to take us away from what truly exists as good/bad for a defined subject. Causality mandates the existence of the good to bad that’s felt, though social norms and acceptance make the supposed rightness and wrongness of behavior somewhat arbitrary. My own position is instead perfectly amoral and subjective, and it references the total value/disvalue experienced over a defined period of time for any given subject. So the acronym ASTV may be used. (Amoral Subjective Total Value.)

I do agree with David’s skepticism that sentience/self exists over time (which in that post #9 video he called “diachronic unity” as opposed to the “synchronic” kind that constitutes phenomenal binding itself). I consider sentience/self to exist momentarily, though in practice countless individual instances tend to be joined with the past by means of memory, as well hope and worry regarding what will happen. I’m saying that these dynamics provide a measure of temporal continuity that shouldn’t otherwise exist. For example a person with memory problems should display such natural diachronic discontinuity given that their past selves should thus be less joined with the present one. Or for a joining case, a presently hopeful/worrying future will effectively provide diachronic continuity with that otherwise disconnected future, since they feel good/bad presently.

David is quite supportive of eugenic based plans and technology from which to improve happiness. Instead of deciding to have kids based upon whatever a random set that father and mother sperm and egg happen to yield, we could select for better traits that are less prone to disease and so on. He thinks we could even elevate hedonic set points for people to have happier lives in general.

I use to talk about this potential quite a lot, and with family and friends generally not approving. I figured that when people with lower genetic quality scores decide to have children, they’d be compensated to substitute genes with better traits. In recent years however I’ve grown less confident that liberal societies will survive given the model of China’s surveillance state and social credit system. This system actively rewards those who follow state guidelines and actively punishes those who diverge. (Thus a “Brave New World” without the need for Huxley’s Soma!) I suspect this will either cause China to become both productive enough and powerful enough to rule humanity directly, or at least be copied widely enough to effectively end liberal state governing in general over the next few centuries.

I have no evidence that David either foresees such a change or desires it, but if true then surely the ability to procreate would require state application. Here you can be sure that “designer babies” would be the only option whenever genetic deficiencies exist. But perhaps humanity would then become more “healthy”, “beautiful”, “happy”, and so on? And would eugenics be tried with wildlife as well? Surely at least somewhat, though that should be more difficult to get right given that this would be messing with nature’s system rather than something which was humanly built.

Do I suspect that sentient existence on Earth as a whole feels more positive or negative? I agree with David on this. The potential for extreme suffering suggests that each second of existence here as a whole, results in an incredibly horrible new tragedy.

These are some of my current thoughts on similarities and differences between the positions of David Pearce and my own. Do you have any thoughts on these matters as well?

– – – – –

Here’s what David has said so far in a twitter message reply:

– – – – –

I always try to stress that I could be wildly wrong about the stuff on mind and the physical I post and the case for phasing out the biology of suffering via biotech would still stand – and vice versa

one of the ways they _are_ connected is (my belief in) the non-classicality of binding

if digital computers could support minds, the abolitionist project would look different

much much more to be said more closely engaging in detail with your points !

– – – – – –

Yes several cans of worms have been opened up here! (Oh shit, another ghastly reference to animal cruelty!) We’ll see how things go for now. Actually there’s a good chance that I’ll get into consciousness itself soon enough. This just might help! In a causal world, ultimately all elements of reality have appropriate connections.

14 thoughts on “Post #16: My current thoughts on where David Pearce and I agree and disagree”

  1. “Here you can be sure that “designer babies” would be the only option whenever genetic deficiencies exist. But perhaps humanity would then become more “healthy”, “beautiful”, “happy”, and so on?”

    There is a model of this type of eugenics that is a mutli-billion dollar business in the states. The designer babies industries is so “successful” that the wealthy European trash who order these designer infants are suing the company for fraud because so many of these genetically superior kids grew up to be complete disasters as young adults even though the pedigree of both donors used for these infants is impeccable.

    Another anecdote: Science has identified the gene that makes one left handed however, that does not guarantee that one will be left handed. What’s up with that???????

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Hi Anonymous, welcome. I suppose you’re talking about how there are companies in the business of paying men for their sperm and women for their eggs so that others can use their genes? I see with a quick search that men can make $100 per donation, possibly maxing out at $1500 per month, and women can make $5,000 to $10,000 per donation, though the industry likes to limit this to a potential of only 6 donations for any given women.

      In a quick search I didn’t notice anything about the people who buy sperm or egg or both, sue the company because it turns out that they weren’t happy with the resulting humans. I do see a case where a lesbian couple sued because the sex of their baby wasn’t as advertised. And of course there are lawsuits where mixed up administrations result in the wrong samples used.

      I wonder if you could point me in the right direction? It would certainly be contemptible and ignorant to think that “designer babies” do not require good parenting in order to become happy and healthy people. And I wouldn’t expect Europeans to be any more dense about this than Americans even if the “trash” you’re now referring to does happen to be European.

      On handedness, apparently while genes are relatively fixed, they don’t always tell us exactly what will result. They interact with the environment and each other to produce observed results that are often called “phenotype”. Though scientists may have found a gene which suggests left handedness, the following article implies that there will be other factors involved as well.

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4227468/#:~:text=It%20is%20therefore%20likely%20that,or%20strength)%20represent%20distinct%20phenotypes.

      Like

      Reply

      1. Eric,

        The Anonymous entry is actually First Cause. Your wordpress setting must be off or something.

        This information came from an article I read more than five years ago. These designer babies with all of the documented pedigrees from the donors, along with the surrogate mothers, and all of the other fees cost the purchasers several hundred thousand of dollars for each baby.

        I suppose if I was willing to lay down that type of cash for the human trafficking of infants and got a derelict human being I’d want my money back too, along with all of the cost associated with the upbringing.

        Like

      2. Hey buddy, sorry about that. I think what happened is this. David told me that I ought to get more of a memorable authoritative web address with the intention of actually building up “a brand”. Like maybe “physicalethics.org”. He ought to know since he’s been brand building for his causes since at least 1995. Then I told him some things about myself and he suggested “ericborg.com”. But observe how “ericborg.org” also rhymes! Furthermore I paid $48 to get rid of the adds on this site for a year and they said I get a free domain name with that purchase. So I figured I’d use ericborg.org as an auxiliary site some day. What wordpress did however is use that address for this site and trash the crappy “cemifanpage.wordpress.com” address. I was disconcerted at first but then decided, fuck it, if anyone wants to get to me, then yes my name does happen to be Eric Borg.

        Anyway since you’re an email subscriber rather than directly with wordpress, you’ll probably need to end that old subscription and do a new email subscription for this new address. Hopefully the wordpress subscribers aren’t affected by this as well.

        On that article that you read five plus years ago, I bet they were talking about what could happen rather than what has happened. I think if any billionaire tried to sue for that, it would become a worldwide media sensation. They’d be flayed! Unless they were as idiotic and somehow untouchable as Donald J. Trump himself, surely their publicists wouldn’t let them do something quite that stupid.

        Like

      1. Definitely James! This is one of those things that I don’t think people in general grasp. We humans do things in a purposed based capacity, or teleologically. Thus we serially engineer things to do this, that, and so on given our understandings and what we desire those things to do. But evolution doesn’t work like that at all. It harbors no purpose or understandings but rather in tandem implements instruments that are infinitely more diverse. Here it’s simply about what gets genes promoted more effectively given the dynamics of causality itself. In reference to the amazing dynamics of life, I don’t know how we could ever expect to serially engineer anything which approaches such complexity — as if it were merely a more advanced television, rocket ship, or whatever. Our engineering should be ridiculously inept in comparison, and I consider this to be an essential difference between two fundamentally different forms of function.

        Like

  2. I think there is something of slippery slope.

    At some point we could end up becoming biotech hybrids eventually with even our thoughts and experience controlled by technology.

    We already have the softer technology of the Internet. But that we can escape if we really want but the thing is that almost nobody really wants to escape. When the electrodes go into the brain, how do we escape?

    We (and I) want to improve human life but where does the technological intrusion end? How do we stop it from going too far and us becoming the Borg. This could be a threat greater than or at least nearly equal to AI.

    Like

    Reply

    1. If I understand you right James, my perspective could be a bit different. Yes we’ll continue to build better simple body parts for people who need them. And of course we operate robots, both remotely and from within those robots. Melding the robot such that the human gains a partly technological mind however (if that was your cyborg reference), generally goes a bit too far for me. There’s of course nothing in principle wrong with this under the popular computationalism/ functionalism/ illusionism position, though I argue this to be truncated computation, which is to say, non-causal.

      From McFadden’s natural theory however, to change consciousness the machine must change the EM field which constitutes it. But then I guess that’s at least possible even if wildly complex. Transmitting electrodes in the head could give you an experience of seeing, hearing, feeling, etc, so you’d think and decide what to do with the machine detecting your decisions and producing corresponding phenomenal outcomes. This would be more than a dream because tastes, sounds, and so on would truly exist. Or maybe in real life your EM field consciousness could be augmented to display computer images over your standard vision. Or with the aid of a telescope standard vision could be replaced with a telescopic form directly rather than as something to view with your standard vision. Things like that would be possible as long as the electrodes in your head were creating the correct EM field which itself exists as these phenomena.

      In truth however I think once we can choose our conscious experiences, there should be the tendency to just zone out with perpetual bliss settings. This is known as “wireheading”, and it doesn’t need to be nearly so complex. David’s mission is instead to alter human genetic code so that we generally feel much better than we do today in standard life, and never truly suffer.

      Like

      Reply

      1. I’m not seeing much when I go to X.

        Who is the “we” that is going to choosing our conscious experience? “We” may not be choosing anything.

        We could gain control over the brain without really understanding consciousness. We just need to understand the firings enough that we can intervene at the right places to achieve the result we want. We can already do some of this to a limited degree with implants.

        “Our brains remember how to formulate words even if the muscles responsible for saying them out loud are incapacitated. A brain-computer hookup is making the dream of restoring speech a reality”.

        https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2023/08/brain-implant-speech-als.html

        All that seems good but take it to the next level.

        Imagine a scenario when we receive implants at ten years old. The implants boost intelligence forty points. They guarantee a life without depression, mania, dementia, or any kind of mental decline. At what point, do the implants become capable of altering belief? Could they be programmed to generate fear when triggered by images or words? Or joy with other images and other words? Could one political figure be made to be seem godlike, another the epitome of evil? Could they make a person completely content and happy as a servant? Could they make people riot and kill?

        Like

      2. I missed your comment today James. Instead I wrote out a post about exploring David Pearce’s consciousness proposal. I’m going to put that on hold however given something else in your comment to post about. I’ll get to that in a minute.

        A brain implant that boosts intelligence by 40 points, guards against depression, mania, dementia, and mental decline, sounds incredibly involved to me. Before anything like that is possible I’d think we’d need to know how consciousness works, and a great deal more as well. David’s point however is that we already have the technology to begin improving humanity genetically in all sorts of ways like that. Furthermore instead of each person requiring some sort of a machine implant, genetic improvements would endure through standard procreation.

        The thing that caught my attention however is the link you left about researchers implanting two electrodes in a woman’s brain whose muscles are degraded so she can’t speak. The electrical signals that they’ve been picking up and translating into words on a computer screen, should actually be her EM field thought itself! Given the specifics of what’s being detected, this could be strong validation of McFadden’s cemi! Maybe I can get a quick new post up on the matter published tonight, since I should be busy Tuesday.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. “Need to know how consciousness” works might not mean any kind of deep knowledge. We knew how to use fire for thousands of years before we knew how it worked.

        Like

      4. I like the fire analogy here James! There was a time when the human could find and exploit fire, though couldn’t create it. That’s about where I think modern human science remains regarding consciousness. We can find consciousness and use it (as we use animals for example), though we remain utterly clueless regarding the creation of consciousness.

        It’s with this perspective that I’m skeptical we could use today’s technology and general consciousness ignorance, to build a machine which augments the brain to do things like boosts someone’s intelligence by 40 points.

        Let’s say however that we do learn how to create consciousness no less than we once learned how to create fire. In that case countless false consciousness proposal ought to become invalidated to thus clean up some very troubled fields of study. With a founding premise regarding the way that the brain creates consciousness, I could imagine our scientists developing robotic augmentation of mind. And indeed, I expect such empirical determination soon enough.

        On that emerging “failed speech to real text” technology that you’ve provided, I suspect that one reason for its success is that the methods of these scientists also implement the physics of consciousness itself. Sometimes such serendipity is needed.

        Liked by 1 person

Leave a comment