by Dan | Sep 8, 2019 | Improving Sentient Experience
The environment matters only insomuch as it is required to support sentient life. Granite, molten lava, clouds, and puddles all seem unlikely to be aware of themselves. If a granite planet the size of a billion earths was destroyed tomorrow in some far away and...
by Dan | Sep 2, 2019 | Managing the Transhuman Transition, Transhuman Transition
The transition from biological to non-biological will come in phases, and it will be driven by our own human drives. I’ve written about this at length back in 2014 in an essay called “Human Ideals Will Tear Us From Humanity”, but that essay only fleshed out the...
by Dan | Aug 18, 2019 | Transhuman Transition
Definition: The ‘transhuman transition’ describes the means and phases of change from the current state of homo sapiens (the human condition as we know it in 2019), to drastically altered state of expanded physical and mental capabilities. This likely...
by Dan | Aug 17, 2019 | Consciousness is What Counts
Straight up: The screaming shame of modern science is our lack of understanding of consciousness itself. It is things that are conscious that hold moral weight. A coffee mug or a granite stone or an iPhone are unlikely to have an “internal movie” (qualia)...
by Dan | Jul 28, 2019 | Discerning the Good Itself, Exploring the End Game
The following are assumptions that most of us hold as iron truths: Happiness is only made possible because of its opposite: Pain. Without pain, there is no real happiness. If anyone could ever experience continued pleasurable states (no pain), this would diminish all...
by Dan | Jul 27, 2019 | Transhuman Transition
Last week I posted an annotated version of my interview on Allan Saakyan’s Simulation Series show. Directly after the video went live I got personal messages (in some cases from people I hadn’t heard from in years). Some messages were excited, but most...
by Dan | Jul 24, 2019 | Facilitating Post-human Transition Collaboration, Morality as Arbitrary and Contextual
This week my second interview on Simulation Series is live. If you aren’t familiar with Allen Saakyan’s Simulation Series video series, I recommend checking out his YouTube playlists page. Allen and I touched on a lot of ideas in this conversation, and I...
by Dan | Jul 11, 2019 | Creating or Enhancing Consciousness, The Good Must Be Explored
The following quote is as good an introduction to this article as I could ask for: “…he saw in Java a plain far as the eye could reach entirely covered with skeletons, and took it for a battlefield; they were, however, merely the skeletons of large...
by Dan | Jul 1, 2019 | Facilitating Post-human Transition Collaboration, Managing the Transhuman Transition
I believe that it’s important to question the human-centric view of the future. In many parts of the world, humans are increasingly aware of their impact on future generations, on other animal species, and on the natural ecosystem that supports all life. Still, when...
by Dan | Jun 3, 2019 | Amoral Solipsism, Discerning the Good Itself
Michel de Montaigne isn’t particularly popular in the twenty-first century. Born to a well-to-do family in 1533 near modern-day Bordeaux, France, Montaigne was a politician and thinker who recorded his thoughts in many essays. Montaigne is widely regarded as the...
