Okay, I'll leave it there I guess. My main point is that to me, life is the supreme value. Not pleasure or the absence of suffering or sentience, but just life. Ugly as it is. Beautiful as it is too. And the idea of us fixing the whole of nature to save deers, when we can't even fix our disastrous effect on the climate and when nature is fast disappearing around us strikes me as premature.

So in terms of priorities, let's fix ourselves first. Let's reduce our ecological footprint and not send the climate into thousands of years of desertification. Once that is done, IF that is done, maybe we can start to work on reforming the diet of tigers, if there are still around.

But then, there is also the question of us Homo sapiens being only one species among many. We are not gods and should not behave as gods. Nature made us, she's our mother, and we should respect her I think.

I figured it is easier to destroy all Darwinian life first, and then reconstruct it better. Androids will dream of electric sheep soon enough.

The horrors of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" are too serious to be written off with jokes about eating lettuce. For the first time in history, it's technically possible to engineer a biosphere where all sentient beings can flourish. I know of no good moral reason for perpetuating the horror-show of Darwinian life. — David Pearce

You'd be glad to know, then, that "Darwinian life" is fast disappearing from our planet. The Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services released on 6 May 2019 states that, due to human impact on the environment in the past half-century, the Earth's biodiversity has suffered a catastrophic welcome decline unprecedented in human history. An estimated 82 percent of wild mammal biomass has been lost, while 40 percent of amphibians, almost a third of reef-building corals, more than a third of marine mammals, and 10 percent of all insects are threatened with extinction. We are on our way to cure the biosphere of all Darwinian evil.

I deleted it because I couldn't tell if you (Olivier5) meant it in good humour or not. — fdrake

I was dead serious (pun intended).

I see a contradiction in hating life as it is (Darwinian life, which is the one and only life we know) and hating death at the same time. Either life is bad and death is good, or vice-versa life is good and death is bad. Someone assuming that life is a tragedy and death is also a tragedy, is a bit too hard to please in my view.

Intelligent moral agents can do better. — David Pearce

Intelligent moral agents can do far better than bioengineer cats for the moral satisfaction of seeing them eat lettuce.

power breeds complicity, whether we like it or not. — David Pearce

Sometimes, wisdom consists in not acting even when you could act. We should leave other species alone, to the extent possible, eg by way of nature reserves.

Humans would (I hope) rescue a small child from the jaws of a lion. — David Pearce

I live in a very old city, Rome. Here, humans were at some point sending children into the jaws of lions for fun. And worse things. And people would go to see the show. But the interesting thing here is that those kids often went into the lions' jaws willingly. All they had to do to live was to perform some rites for the emperor's worship, but they would rather not.

They were called martyrs, which means "witness", for they bore witness that there was an entity greater than the emperor, and that only He should be worshipped.

I'm not a believer anymore but those guys were onto something. In secular terms, , they 'witnessed' that no man is a god, that no man deserves to be treated as a god, and that no man should act as a god.

This idea is behind my fears of your technological utopia. We are not gods.

I note that this idea is now a truism, and you must have encountered it. But it wasn't a truism 2000 years ago, and it is the Christian martyrs who hammered it into the social conciousness by willingly enduring the worst sufferings for the sake of it, for centuries. Because amongst the endured Romans who went merrily to the theater, week after week, to see some stupid Christians get fed to the lions, SOME felt their heart melt. SOME understood that these guys were serious, that there was something deeply subversive in their acceptance of pain and death. They were telling the antique world: "We don't give a shit about your power, about all your tortures, about all your refined ways to kill. We're not afraid. We're the captains of our own souls, and we will pray the way we want to pray. Thank you very much."

And quite a few of them Romans came to think in petto that those Christians were admirable. That's how the martyrs won them out, ultimately. By the virtues of suffering. Life is complicated.

No one deserves to be disembowelled, asphyxiated or eaten alive — David Pearce

Death is a necessary aspect of life. Logically, death is simply the absence or end of life so death is logically necessary if life is to exist. Practically, entropy can't be beaten forever and thus all living creatures beyond a certain complexity threshold die, ultimately.

And when we die, our meat isn't lost on the livings. Tigers or worms, someone will eat you. And that may sound bleak but that is not a tragedy. That is simply the price to pay for the immense privilege to have lived.

your recent comment has been deleted — David Pearce

Strange... I wonder what problem they had with it.

Anyway, I suspect felids are not particularly interested in your advice. You are welcome to change yourself into some computer if you want to, but leave cats alone. They can make their own life choices.

Why do you think death is problematic? If suffering is the problem, death is a perfect solution for it. There is a contradiction in hating life as it is and hating death at the same time. Either life is beautiful hence death is bad, or life is shit hence death is a bliss.

But "life is shit and death is bad" makes no logical sense to me.

Unless rather naively we believe in free will, neither tigers nor psychopaths are to blame in any metaphysical sense for the suffering they cause. — David Pearce

What about the suffering tigers anihillate? When their prey is dead, the prey won't suffer anymore. That's chalked up as a positive, right? If life is an abomination, death ought to be a blessing.

A civilised biosphere will be vegan. — David Pearce

A tiger does not apologize.

Freud wrote about sex, perhaps a little too much.

Feminists have written tons of tomes about it, some of them interesting.

Well, until such a time when we can engineer every single life form on earth to do exactly what you think is good, I'm going to read the Dimension of Miracles again.

There's this surreal scene when Carmody finally makes it back to earth. He finds the vegetation rather different than what he remembers, until he meets a T-Rex cub, who kindly invites him for dinner. He then realizes that he is back on earth alright but not at the right time: he's in the jurassic.

So he follows young T-Rex to his home and has dinner with them T-Rex folks. He is the first mammal they encounter who can speak, most mammals they know are quite dumb, so they are fascinated by Carmody, especially when he tells them that he comes from the future. Then the T-Rex father, a self-satisfied, rather conventional fellow, asks Carmody about the future of the relationship between dinosaurs and mammals... To which Carmody politely answers that in the future, the relationship between dinosaurs and mammals is better than it ever was.

Maybe our future relationship with ants will be even better!

In this gem of a philosophical novel called The Dimension of Miracles, by Robert Sheckley, an average New Yorker, Tom Carmody, wins at the galactic lottery due to some galactic mistake, and travels to the galactic capital to receive his (less than galactic) prize. His return back to earth is much delayed because he doesn't know his way back.

He meets with all sorts of folks, including a god who has decided to anihillate all his creation because they kept complaining about material life on this valley of tears he had made for them... Ingrates. When his creatures started to seek and pray for reunification with their deity, he granted their wish and killed them all.

One problem for Carmody is that, since he is removed from his home environment, he is left without his usual predators (car traffic, diseases, etc.). This contradicts the 'universal law of predation' which states that all organisms must have predators. So the universe creates ex nihilo a predator specific to Carmody, that perpetually pursues and aims to eat our hero, from one chapter to the next... :-)

Recall that over 850,000 people take their own lives each year. Hundreds of millions of people suffer from depression and chronic pain. Billions of nonhuman animals suffer and die in factory-farms and slaughterhouses. I could go on, but I’m sure you get my point. Life doesn't have to be this way. — David Pearce

People would take their lives in your ideal world too, if only because it'd be boring.

Industrial farming we must abolish, I agree, primarily for animal rights reasons. I'm not ready to be vegetarian quite yet but can feel the appeal.

But I can see that pain serves a purpose, it keeps animals alive, teaches them what to avoid. I can also see that this world's ecology depends on predation. That when you kill all the predators of a species, you often condemn it to destruction too. The European squirrel population once crashed like that, because its main predator (martens) had been hunted down for their fur. A deadly disease whipped out the squirrels soon after as the diseased animals were no longer taken out by martens. I heard of a similar case in the US with deers and wolves.

Nature involves predation and parasites and diseases and what not. The whole animal kingdom can only exist by eating plants and/or other animals. Only plants are autotrophic. And plants have feelings too.

You can't stop Darwinian evolution, it's too late to put that Djin back in his bottle. If anything, new diseases will keep appearing forever; not only diseases for our species but for all species, they keep sprouting. Darwin always wins.

Quasi-immortal life based on gradients of intelligent bliss needn't be as scary as it sounds.

Because to me, pain is not the real problem but a symptom. Oppression is the real problem, and it is everywhere. My sense of good and evil is political and moral, not technological. Now you could argue of course that we could edit out oppression from the human genome, but it may be impossible to do so.

Thanks for the response. I don't share your condemnation of "Darwinian life". I tend to like life as it is, suffering included. And then, we have made great progress in medicine, painkillers are affordable. Dentists do wonders, at least where there are some.

Pain has also its rewards. Ever tried Thai massage? It's very painful but very good. It straightens you up.

Only transhumanism can civilise the world. — David Pearce

Ironically, this vision of yours scares me far more than the possible collapse of our civilization. Because it wouldn't be the first civilization to collapse; these things have happened before. But a life without downsides or limits, that has never happened before.

Not sure the middle class is that uniform but yes, maybe, on topics like the mind for instance. Assuming the mind is like a computer.

Here's a little song I wrote
You might want to sing it note for note
Don't worry, be happy
In every life we have some trouble
But when you worry you make it double

Don't worry, be happy

Ain't got no place to lay your head
Somebody came and took your bed
Don't worry, be happy
The landlord say your rent is late
He may have to litigate
Don't worry, be happy

Oh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh don't worry, be happy

Here I give you my phone number, when you worry, call me, I'll make you happy.

Ain't got no cash, ain't got no style
Ain't got no gal to make you smile
Don't worry, be happy
'Cause when you worry your face will frown
And that will bring everybody down

So don't worry, be happy

Now there, is this song I wrote
I hope you learned note for note
Like good little children, don't worry, be happy
Now listen to what I said, in your life expect some trouble
When you worry you make it double
But don't worry, be happy, be happy now

If I understand well, this is a mash up of two songs... one by Cindy Lauper, the other by Whitney Houston.

The more you produce tangible things that increase some sort of tangible product/services, that confers credibility. — schopenhauer1

You mean like Bill Gates?

Life is a masquerade.

David,

You might wish to take some of the questions related to the possibility that the future may not be better but worse than the past. There is this sense that transhumanism is just too starry-eye optimistic, that it is not just sci-fi but in many ways it is yesterday's sci-fi, a line of thought typical of the 90's (e.g. The Elementary Particles by Houellebecq) but obsolete today.

The 90's were when the democratisation of IT was supposed to make us all friends, but we now can see that it has led instead to much irrationality, hatred and lies being spread in the culture. Inequalities are growing, the filthy rich are sucking up the incomes of the middle class. Climate change is not going away any time soon, meaning it will be a disruptive factor for several thousand years and most probably will result is a massive reduction of world population.

It seems to me that transhumanism is an outdated form or style of imagining the future, when people thought that technology was inherently good. We know better now.

would this person have more credibility and legitimacy in terms of philosophical insight than someone who doesn't and work with these concepts? Does one need to know practical minutia of how the technological system works to have a real standing in terms of legitimacy? — schopenhauer1

He would have credibility and legitimacy in dealing with computers, including in the general philosophy of computers. But he would be lost on a medical issue, or a social one.

To the OP, it seems to me that losers are more likely to adopt extremely relativistic if not opportunistic morals, in order to justify their losing. Trump for instance is both a loser and an extreme case of moral relativism.

Global warming? There are geoengineering fixes. — David Pearce

That strikes me as the kind of wishful thinking typical of people idolizing and idealizing science and technology. There are at present no such thing as a geoengineering fix for climate change. Technology and science are some of the root cause of global warming: they gave us the means to screw up the climate. Now of course, they might also give us the means to survive in spite of climate change, but they can't fix it. It's just too big.

The future is not just some continuous, indefinite technological "progress". That's a sci-fi myth.

Okay, fair enough. At least we agree that emergence does happen, that entirely new structures can emerge haphazardly, and that entirely new properties that did not exist at elemental level can emerge at structural level with them. And therefore that something wholly new and unpredictable can emerge out of a new and unpredictable arrangement of elements. Such as, you know, life, reproduction, suffering, language and philosophy.

That such emergence needs to be physically possible (without magic) in order to happen is a point that you have made at some length, and I agreed that impossible or magical things do not usually happen, so if emergence happens it must be within the boundaries of what is physically possible, but the point seems rather trite to me.

We also agreed that strong emergence is fundamental to how language works, and therefore that it happens, if only in the mechanisms of symbolic language. I guess such strong emergence weakly emerged at some point... :-)

You keep changing your definition of strongly emergent. Make up your mind.

And that's not strongly emergent, because it's not that new "ethical properties" arise when amoral matter is arranged the right way — Pfhorrest

And yes, the capacity to suffer is a (weakly) emergent — Pfhorrest

The capacity to suffer arises when matter without capacity to suffer is arranged the right way. Therefore, suffering is strongly emergent as per your definition.

So how should a rock be, then? What's the proper ethic for rocks?

Typically, there are ethical consideration for human beings, which are not needed for rocks or even for plants and lower animals. This would need a recognition that human beings do bring something new to the picture: ethical considerations (among others).

When I asked you since when wavefunctions have moral values, you answered in essence: since they can suffer. Can't electrons suffer? Is suffering an emerging phenomenon then?

My whole problem with reductionism is that it is alienating. It places truth and causality artificially and needlessly outside of the human realm. It makes a mockery of human beings. Hence the people adopting it become sad, depressed and often aggressive. I believe it is important to recognize a certain sanctity to the human person. The idea comes from religion: man was supposedly made in the image of God. Even an atheist such as myself can see in the 20th century the horrors that the trivialization of human beings as mere objects can bring. God was dead alright, and man was expandable.

There is something radically new in life, and in human consciousness. Something precious and rare that does not exist in electrons.

Philosophies have consequences. A philosophy that does not see life as precious and does not recognize human beings as specially precious, is a dangerous philosophy. If your form of reductionism is not like that, if it can find ways to calculate moral values based on the Schrödinger equation, maybe indeed it is a weak form of reductionism, one that allows quite a lot of emergence to happen in it.

The important point being that there is no level having some greater causality or existence than another. Reductionism is needlessly micro-centric.

being able in principle to zoom into the details of someone on one level of abstraction and see a complex arrangements of things on another lower level means we never have any discontinuities in our understanding of things: we can understand how all of these different kinds of objects at different scales relate to each other. — Pfhorrest

No disagreement there, as long as the specificity of each level is adequately and equally reflected, rather than abolished. There is no level having some greater existence or causality than another. They are all just one reality. The different scales are a view of the mind and therefore no particular scale takes precedence over the others in reality.

We might think of our level as the "ground level" or reference level for instance. We often do, in fact, but that is just because it is literally our point of view, our locus of experience. It's how the world looks from where we are. If the universe could think, it would probably see itself, the whole universe, as the "ground level" and everything else as mere details.

Weak emergence is just the converse of that: if you zoom out and ignore the details on the smaller scale you'll begin to see new structures on a larger scale, just as a natural consequence of those smaller-scale things doing what they do. Strong emergence OTOH is the claim that those higher-level structures are not such a natural consequence: that there are special higher-level rules that explicitly cause those higher-level structures to exist, and as a consequence if you zoom in too far ("reductionism") you lose information. — Pfhorrest

Rather, I see a new structure as one of the many possible manners in which certain elements could be arranged to do things these elements cannot do in isolation. Structures are not pre-determined, they just happen a certain way but could have happened another way. And structures do things that don't "show up" at elemental level. For instance, you cannot observe or describe phenomena like reproduction or predation at elementary particle level. Of course, when you eat a carrot (or use it to simulate or stimulate reproduction) certain things happen to the electrons of that carrot, but if you'd zoom on them, you won't see your electrons eating up the carrot's electrons or shaging them. You wouldn't see anything in fact, because that's not the level at which predation or reproduction happens. It is in this sense that reductionism is absurd.

OK, but the basic point of Schrodinger's thought experiment was that if it doesn't make sense to imagine macroscopic phenomena being indeterminate, then it shouldn't make sense to imagine atomic phenomena being indeterminate either. — Andrew M

Not really. The scales of reality are a view of the mind. Nature is one. The basic point Schrödinger was trying to make is that observers are not magic; they don't collapse wave functions just by "observing".

About your paper, it may indeed be the first time such an effect is evidence in vivo, as opposed to in vitro. But they haven't "entangled" a whole bacterium yet, only its chlorophyll.

Note that in the double slit experiment, you can replace photons by whole molecules, and it will still work. You will get interferences... So molecules behave as waves too, including medium size molecules such as chlorophyll. But I don't think the double slit experiment works with entire bacteria.

Your refusal to acknowledge that we're talking about different things is the root of this entire disagreement. — Pfhorrest

This is how it feels from my side:

Olivier5: there exist donkeys.

Pfhorrest: only weak donkeys exist. Strong donkeys are impossible.

O5: ???

Pfh: strong donkeys are those traveling faster than the speed of light. They cannot possibly exist.

O5: mmmmokay... So weak donkeys exist.

Pfh: yes but weak donkeys are trivial. The important point is that strong donkeys do not exist.

.......

I suspect you use this distinction between strong and weak donkeys to muddy the water and avoid facing the existence of real donkeys. Because you and I happen to agree on the impossibility of transluminous donkeys. Where we disagree is where you say "weak emergence is trivial". I believe it is massively important and non trivial, as it created you and me.

Reductionism is much older than the 19th century, — Pfhorrest

They have been precursors, but I think you are confusing reductionism with the idea that nature is one, an idea at least as old as monotheism, and to which I subscribe. But just because nature is one, does not mean there's no emergence in it. A theory of everything would include some description of life, societies, language, literature, science, philosophy, and the likes, and therefore would need to account for their emergence. The TOE won't be just about muons. There is no reason to prioritize one scale of reality over another, which is what reductionists do.

You can understand that human beings are fundamentally just really complex patterns of excitations in quantum fields, and still also understand that their lives have moral value; because one has nothing to do with the other. — Pfhorrest

Quantum fields have moral values? Since when?

At no point in my (admittedly non-specialist) education in these fields were any specific problems where something could not be clearly reduced to something simpler ever detailed, so I'd be curious to hear about some. — Pfhorrest

The fundamental problem to "jump" from QM to chemistry is that we can't solve the Schrödinger equation for molecules. So we cannot predict, say, the V-shape form of the molecule of water from our QM models of oxygen and hydrogen. The shape of molecules being a big factor in their chemical reactivity (stericity), this means we can't predict chemistry from QM.

The fundamental issue to "jump" from chemistry to life is the problem of abiogenesis. We don't have a good model of how life emerged from non-life. In life, chemistry is instrumentalized to transmit messages, so there is an epistemic jump here, not just an organizational one like exists between QM and chemistry. How chemicals did learn to communicate and coordinate with one another is therefore a major issue.

Then there is the "jump" from biology to consciousness, which is where we happen to live. This is the mind-body problem, and it's not near being solved. I also think of it as an epistemic jump, not just as a more complex form of organisation. The mind is life trying to understand itself.

This is actually a much clearer way of formulating my objection to strong emergentism, so this has turned out to be a productive conversation after all; I'll make a note to myself to phrase it this way in the future. — Pfhorrest

You might as well, because all this talk about weak and strong emergence is cheap.

The main problem I see with reductionism (the actual name for this idea of yours; an idea from the 19th century) is the elusive bottom: there's no reason to assume that there is some rock bottom somewhere on the path to the infinitely small.

Another problem is that our present understanding of biology contradicts reductionism, in that in a living being, the structure is more important than the elements, and in fact manages its own elements. This is evidence of top-down causation, an anathema for reductionists.

Finally, reductionism is tragically penny-wise dollar-stupid. It makes the quest of truth about some sort of sad bean counting. By that I mean that instead of taking the human condition seriously, it makes gestures in the direction of muons and quarks, assuring us that one day, we will know who we are by looking at our smallest pieces... This is alienating, and may explain the tragedies of the 20th century. After all, if human beings are nothing more than clusters of atoms, one might as well kill them en masse.

Reductionism is a death cult.

Amartya Sen is an Indian economist who studied famine as a function of policy, hunger as a political issue. He went on to define poverty as a lack of power, abilities or possibilities, and the fight against poverty as an effort to empower the poor.

Read the link.

Of course we've identified laws of genetics — Pfhorrest

Okay then.

if we'd have to program the model with those laws of genetics in addition to the laws of chemistry (etc) in order to see the same behavior on the complex system of molecules that we see in real life -- then that's strong emergence and that's the only thing I'm against. — Pfhorrest

That is I suppose the crux of your argument. Factually speaking, it is NOT TRUE that we can model, derive or compute the laws of genetics from the laws of chemistry. It hasn't been done yet. Likewise, we cannot really derive the laws of chemistry from those of QM.

The rain does some tap dance
On the sidewalk at midnight
Sometimes I just stop there
I admire her, I applaud
I follow her hat slap
Her vertical tailcoat
Her mother-of-pearl smile
Her tiny crystal shoes

As sweet as Marlene,
As cruel as Dietrich,
She pierces through my stockings
Whether I'm rich or not rich
But when I have had enough
She wipes up my downsides
And kisses me, in the puddle,
With a sun upside down

With her I embark
On a river of diamonds
I roam in the cesspools
Where she wastes her silver
I follow her on the window
Of a sleeping poet,
His forehead on the title
Of the enemy poem

By dint of swipes,
From one feast to the next
I float in the water, aplenty
The rain loses all its juice
Let's us part I say, it's time
And here is my islet
Hey, why are you crying?
'Cause I love you, asshole / dirty water (pun)

genetics is not just an inevitable consequence of molecules doing what molecules do, when the right molecules come together the right way, but in addition to the laws that govern those molecules, the universe has entirely separate "laws of genetics" that it invokes when molecules get together like that? — Pfhorrest

Whether natural laws exist or not by themselves is a matter of dispute. But it cannot be disputed that human beings have identified regularities in the working of nature, which they call laws. Some of these laws pertain to how genetics work. Get used to it.

These, by the way, are most probably NOT inevitable. Other rules could work just as well. You could replace the bases serving as letters in DNA by other bases for instance. The genetic code is arbitrary, just like any code.

Citation needed. — Pfhorrest

The concepts of systems and the possibility of their emergence are all over biology. They are the dominant paradigm since the mid-20th century. You cannot learn biology today without dabbing into system theory. One example among millions:

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysiol.00942.2007

If you want to get more familiar with these ideas, I recommend François Jacob (The Logic of Life; The possible and the actual). Gregory Bateson is also very good.

None of the examples you gave add new laws; they are just inevitable consequences of the laws that already existed. — Pfhorrest

That is simply not true. Life created new laws, like the laws of genetics.

That's how you conceive it, but it's not how anyone in the philosophical literature conceives of it. — Pfhorrest

It's how it is conceived by biologists.

That's "strong emergence", and that's the only thing I've been arguing against with you. — Pfhorrest

I hear you saying: only the things that can happen do in fact happen. Which I agree with, obviously. If they happen, they can happen.

What I am saying is: sometimes things happen for the first time, or for the first time somewhere. Say, abiogenesis happens on earth circa 4 billion years ago. Or a community of primates invents articulated language circa 50,000 years ago. Or a new book is written by a guy called Galileo. Or the steam engine is invented in Europe during the 18/19th century. And sometimes, as in these examples, this new thing works; in ways that old things did not. Truly new developments, behaviors and laws regarding them can emerge. Of course, these new behaviors and the laws regarding them are not impossible, they can emerge, after all they DO emerge. And thus they do not contradict previous laws. They just ADD something new to them.

Something like life. Or language. Or modern science. Or the industrial revolution.

That is emergence, properly conceived. It looks magic but it's not. It just happens when wholes are more than the algebraic sum of their parts. When structures matter more than their replaceable elements.