I am very surprised and pleased to find thinking that so closely parallels my own.
I typed this is Google: “what makes a particular arrangement of matter in the brain pain or pleasure”
This is what I have been thinking. The universe contains consciousness. Matter and energy (at least arranged in the form of a brain) are conscious. There are states of consciousness that feel good and states of consciousness that feel bad. What is the difference between the arrangements of matter (or the processes) in the brain that make some feel good and some feel bad? I think it would be extremely helpful and lead to answers if we actually knew exactly what these arrangements are and studied them, studied the physics of what is going on. Do we know yet? How much do we know?
Reasons I want to know
1 - curiosity
2 - increasing happiness and decreasing suffering in biological beings
3 - creating synthetic intelligence that is happy
4 - minimizing suffering in the universe and maximizing pleasure in the universe. it just occurred to me a few days ago that all the matter in the universe could be converted to whatever state is the most pleasure, convert the universe into bliss. hmm...many minds or one giant mind?
Right, absolutely. These are all things that we don’t know, but should.
Are you familiar with David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative movement? He makes a lot of the same points and arguments, basically outlining that it doesn’t seem impossible that we could (and should) radically reduce, and eventually eliminate, suffering via technology.
But the problem is, we don’t know what suffering is. So we have to figure that out before we can make much radical progress on this sort of work. I.e., I think a rigorous definition of suffering will be an information-theoretic one—that it’s a certain sort of pattern within conscious systems—but we know basically nothing about what sort of pattern it is.
(I like the word “valence” instead of pain/pleasure, joy/suffering, eudaimonia, hedonic tone, etc. It’s a term from psychology that just means ‘the pleasantness or unpleasantness attached to any experience’ and seems to involve less baggage than these other terms.)
I hope to have a formal paper on this out by this winter. In the meantime, if you’re in the Bay Area, feel free to ping me and I can share some thoughts. You may also enjoy a recent blog post: Effective Altruism, and building a better QALY.
I am very surprised and pleased to find thinking that so closely parallels my own.
I typed this is Google: “what makes a particular arrangement of matter in the brain pain or pleasure”
This is what I have been thinking. The universe contains consciousness. Matter and energy (at least arranged in the form of a brain) are conscious. There are states of consciousness that feel good and states of consciousness that feel bad. What is the difference between the arrangements of matter (or the processes) in the brain that make some feel good and some feel bad? I think it would be extremely helpful and lead to answers if we actually knew exactly what these arrangements are and studied them, studied the physics of what is going on. Do we know yet? How much do we know?
Reasons I want to know
1 - curiosity 2 - increasing happiness and decreasing suffering in biological beings 3 - creating synthetic intelligence that is happy 4 - minimizing suffering in the universe and maximizing pleasure in the universe. it just occurred to me a few days ago that all the matter in the universe could be converted to whatever state is the most pleasure, convert the universe into bliss. hmm...many minds or one giant mind?
Right, absolutely. These are all things that we don’t know, but should.
Are you familiar with David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative movement? He makes a lot of the same points and arguments, basically outlining that it doesn’t seem impossible that we could (and should) radically reduce, and eventually eliminate, suffering via technology.
But the problem is, we don’t know what suffering is. So we have to figure that out before we can make much radical progress on this sort of work. I.e., I think a rigorous definition of suffering will be an information-theoretic one—that it’s a certain sort of pattern within conscious systems—but we know basically nothing about what sort of pattern it is.
(I like the word “valence” instead of pain/pleasure, joy/suffering, eudaimonia, hedonic tone, etc. It’s a term from psychology that just means ‘the pleasantness or unpleasantness attached to any experience’ and seems to involve less baggage than these other terms.)
I hope to have a formal paper on this out by this winter. In the meantime, if you’re in the Bay Area, feel free to ping me and I can share some thoughts. You may also enjoy a recent blog post: Effective Altruism, and building a better QALY.