Taking modern physics seriously yields a conception of reality very from the world-simulation of one's everyday experience. — David Pearce
What makes you suppose I want to change myself into a computer?!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 — Olivier5
power breeds complicity, whether we like it or not. — David Pearce
Humans would (I hope) rescue a small child from the jaws of a lion. — David Pearce
No one deserves to be disembowelled, asphyxiated or eaten alive — David Pearce
Aging is a frightful disorder. Medical science should aim for a cure.Further, what's wrong with the original, biological human; isn't Transhumanism better suited for a virtual world? — ghostlycutter
Biotech (genome editing, synthetic gene drives, etc) turns the level of suffering in Nature into an adjustable parameter. Yes, traditional conservation biologists favour preserving the snuff movie of traditional Darwinian life: sentient beings hurting, harming and killing each other.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. — Olivier5
Consider lucid dreaming. When having a lucid dream, one entertains the theory that one's entire empirical dreamworld is internal to the transcendental skull of a sleeping subject. Exceptionally, one may even indirectly communicate with other sentient beings in the theoretically-inferred wider world:
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/researchers-exchange-messages-with-dreamers-68477
What happens when one "wakes up"? To the naive realist, it's obvious. One directly perceives the external world. But the inferential realist recognises that the external world can only be theoretically inferred. For a nice account of the world-simulation metaphor, perhaps see Antti Revonsuo's Inner Presence (2006): — David Pearce
You remark, "To say that something is theoretical is to say that it is mind-dependent." But when a physicist talks of, say, the theoretical existence of other Hubble volumes beyond our cosmological horizon (s/he certainly doesn’t intend to make a claim of their mind-dependence. Of course, how our thoughts and language can refer is a deep question. Naturalising semantic content is hard: https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#aboutness — David Pearce
Unique individuals?
Yes, our egocentric world-simulations each have a different protagonist. Yet we are not uniquely unique. When I said that "science suggests I'm not special", I was alluding simply to how the fact that I seem to be the hub of reality is (probably!) a fitness-enhancing hallucination: — David Pearce
Intelligent moral agents can do better. — David Pearce
It's possible your recent comment has been deleted — David Pearce
Strange... I wonder what problem they had with it. — Olivier5
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
I deleted it because I couldn't tell if you (Olivier5) meant it in good humour or not. — fdrake
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
t's a tragedy that no such rescue-mission ever reached our planet; it could have prevented 540 million years of unimaginable suffering. — David Pearce
I'm mystified why you value life per se rather than certain kinds of life. Do you really believe we should value and attempt to conserve, say, the parasitic worm Onchocerca volvulus that causes onchocerciasis a.k.a. "river blindness"? If so, why? Yes, humans are "playing god". Good. We should aim to be benevolent gods.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. — Olivier5
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