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 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 | 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...
by Dan | Apr 14, 2019 | Amoral Solipsism, Exploring the End Game, Facilitating Post-human Transition Collaboration
Rich in tradition and material wealth, Japan’s reclusive youths are often completely uninterested in sex, relationships, or work. The country’s youth – especially men – are seeking escape from the job and romance market. Video game addiction...
by Dan | Mar 8, 2019 | Controlling Intelligent Substrate, Morality as Arbitrary and Contextual, The Good Must Be Explored, Transhuman Transition
The AI value alignment argument goes something like this: As artificial intelligence will continue to approach human-level intelligence Artificial intelligence will generally be driven by a reward function, by a kind of abstract goal Any such goal could have...
