Taking modern physics seriously yields a conception of reality very from the world-simulation of one's everyday experience. — David Pearce

One can take modern physics seriously in at least two distinct ways: instrumentally or realistically. Taking it realistically has been argued to lead to incoherence. What would your reply be to this kind of argument : https://metaphysicsnow.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/common-sense-versus-physics

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 naïve 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 good development of the world-simulation metaphor, perhaps see Antti Revonsuo's Inner Presence (2006):

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

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 I perceive myself to be the hub of reality is (probably!) a fitness-enhancing hallucination:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#moralvalues

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

What makes you suppose I want to change myself into a computer?!
(cf. http://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#braincomp)

Either way, power breeds complicity, whether we like it or not. Humans would (I hope) rescue a small child from the jaws of a lion. It's perverse not to rescue beings of comparable sentience. No one deserves to be disembowelled, asphyxiated or eaten alive. Of course, ad hoc solutions to the problem of predation are unsatisfactory. Hence the case for a pan-species welfare state and veganising the biosphere.

I see purpose in Transhumanism, but preferably, not in this dimension.

I think the process of augmentation would result in harm and people would neglect their augments. In a more virtual reality, the process may be more perfect.

The technical nature in creating technology is not beyond us, but I think our surgical skills are lacking and inconsistent.

A petty version of Transhumanism may work, exo-augmentation.

Further, what's wrong with the original, biological human; isn't Transhumanism better suited for a virtual world?

In my view, instrumentalism threatens to collapse into an uninteresting solipsism. Instead, we'd do well to interpret the mathematical formalism of modern, unitary-only quantum mechanics realistically. Just as the special sciences (chemistry, molecular biology etc) can be derived from physics, likewise science should aim to derive the properties of our minds and the phenomenally-bound world-simulations they run from fundamental physics. This is a monumental challenge. But if there isn't a perfect structural match, then presumably some kind of dualism is true.

Let's stick to physicalism. I explore the quantum-theoretic version of the intrinsic nature argument. It’s counterintuitive:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#quantummind

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.

Further, what's wrong with the original, biological human; isn't Transhumanism better suited for a virtual world? — ghostlycutter

Aging is a frightful disorder. Medical science should aim for a cure.
More generally, mental and physical suffering are vile. A predisposition to suffer is genetically hardwired. For example, hundreds of millions of people worldwide suffer from chronic depression and pain. Even nominally healthy humans sometimes suffer horribly as a function of our legacy code. In the absence of biological-genetic interventions, the negative-feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill will play out in immersive virtual worlds no less than in basement reality.
What's more, we shouldn’t retreat into escapist VR fantasy worlds until we have solved the problem of suffering in Nature and have created post-Darwinian life.
In short, transhumanism is morally urgent.

Thanks for the response, a couple of follow ups:
"In my view, instrumentalism threatens to collapse into an uninteresting solipsism."
How does instrumentalism, if tied with commonsense realism, lead to solipsism? Perhaps instrumentalism tied to idealism of some kind might, but the argument on the link I provided seems to be trying to bolster commonsense realism, on the grounds that the alternative winds up in incoherence. Which leads me to the second follow up, which is just a repeat of my initial question: how would you respond to that argument?

Yes, fine, well said.

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

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.
Intelligent moral agents can do better.

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

I have no problem with the idea that the external world is theoretically inferred, because I lean toward idealism, but I think "theoretically inferred" is a stretch. This is because inference is a conscious rational process, and I think recognition that there are things external or independent of oneself is a deeper capacity, not dependent on logical inference

However, naive realism and naive idealism can be very similar in the sense that they both suffer the same problem, which is that without a medium between the perception and the thing sensed, we cannot account for the existence of mistakes. So from the idealist perspective, there must be something which separates the ideas of your mind from the ideas of my mind, otherwise we'd be thinking each others thoughts. What exists between us is that medium, and we call it the external world.

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

I don't think this analogy really suffices to resolve the issue. If we make the external world consist solely of possibilities (as in the use of "theoretical" in your example), then we need some principles whereby we discern what is real, actual, or true to the world. The "world" is what is supposed to be common to us. Aristotle used hylomorphism for example, the concept of "matter" gives us the realm of possibilities external to us, while "form" is applied to what is real, actual, allowing us to understand through common terms.

If we do not have any such principles to apply, then there is nothing to prevent your theoretical world from being completely different from my theoretical world. And there need not be any commonality, or even an inclination toward consistency between us, because there is no single reality, or the Truth, which we ought to conform our ideas to. So allowing that the world is theoretical in this way, will only increase strife between various people who have no desire to make their theories compatible with the theories of others. And strife produces conflict.

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

Now don't you see the problem here? If the external world is theoretical, as you said, then a human being's mind, as the holder of a theory, is by that fact, the hub of reality. We cannot escape this unless we have some way to get the theory outside of the mind. Therefore under your idealist principle that the external is theoretical, that I am the hub of reality is a true principle. And if this principle is "fitness-enhancing", it must be good. So it is clearly wrong to call this an hallucination unless we deny that the world is theoretical. To say that this is an hallucination is an act of self-deception, but for what end is that deception being applied? If it is not self-deception, is it aimed at others?

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.

What do you think it feels like to be eaten alive? 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.

It's possible your recent comment has been deleted — David Pearce

Strange... I wonder what problem they had with it. — Olivier5

I deleted it because I couldn't tell if you (Olivier5) meant it in good humour or not. Since David seems to have taken it in good humour I guess it's fine!

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

If you're talking about the existing biosphere, that would mean reengineering almost everything including microbes. I'd be really worried about that going badly wrong. Seems way more challenging than creating a new one on Mars or Venus (not that terraforming is easy, but your timescale seems to be over centuries or millennia).

But as for the morality of it, do you think we should do the same if we come across an alien biome? Would we want advanced aliens to come tame our world?

If pain-ridden Darwinian ecosystems exist within our cosmological horizon, then I would indeed hope future transhumans will send out cosmic rescue-missions. It's a tragedy that no such rescue-mission ever reached our planet; it could have prevented 540 million years of unimaginable suffering. Here on Earth, delegating stewardship of the global ecosystem to philosophers would be unwise. But pilot studies of self-contained happy ecosystems are feasible even now. CRISPR-based synthetic gene drives are an insanely powerful tool of compassionate stewardship. However, before we start actively helping sentient beings, we must first stop systematically harming them:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#slaughterhouses

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.

It was J. L. Austin (of all people!) who acknowledged that "common sense is the metaphysics of the stone age". Folk physics is not my point of departure. What counts as "common sense" is time- and culture-bound. My common sense most likely differs from your common sense. By "commonsense realism", do you mean perceptual naïve realism? Either way, we want to explain the technological success story of modern science. Anti-realism leaves the technological success of modern science a miracle. Maybe we can take an agnostic instrumentalist approach. Yet a lot of us want to understand reality. Why does quantum mechanics work? What explains the Born rule?

Most scientists are materialist physicalists. Materialism leads to the insoluble Hard Problem of consciousness:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#whohardprobsol
Most scientists treat the mind-brain as pack of classical neurons. Treating the mind-brain as an aggregate of decohered, membrane-bound neurons leads to the insoluble phenomenal binding/combination problem:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#categorize
I don’t know if non-materialist physicalism is true; but it’s my working hypothesis.

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.

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

But then we wouldn't be here. Some alien reengineered biosphere would have been the result. No dinosaurs either :(

Maybe that's a resolution to the Fermi Paradox. Benevolent aliens go around reengineering life. They just haven't gotten around to us yet. Do you think sentient life should be allowed a choice in the matter?

I think compassionate stewardship of the living world is morally preferable to uncontrolled habitat destruction.

Darwinian malware had no choice about being born. Under a regime of natural selection, the lives of most sentient beings are “nasty, brutish and short”. Elsewhere I’ve urged upholding the sanctity of human and nonhuman life in law - not because I believe in such a fiction, but because failure to do so will most likely lead to worse consequences.

Would a notional benevolent superintelligence opt to conserve a recognisable approximation of Darwinian life-forms?
Or optimise our matter and energy for blissful sentience?
I don’t know.
But in the real world, a policy framework of compassionate conservation would seem to be a workable compromise.

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

Any solution to the problem of suffering must be technically and sociologically credible. It's a daunting challenge, but I know of no alternative:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#abolitionismbioethics
There is no OFF button.

@Olivier5

If you're just gonna mock our guest, you'll be deleted.

David has a very brave and beneficent opinion, we're not dinosaurs anymore.

Species is predictable, having so much focus on having a harmonious animal kingdom where animals continuously evolve is pointless.

Focus on human-kind for a great, beneficent relapse.

Though David thinks the answer is Transhumanism, and I don't, I still agree his premises are correct, and if people agree with it then it's entirely a possible cure for suffering in the world. I would opt for virtual reality and less restricting laws to enhance experience.

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 was wondering what your take is on the opioid crisis. Were not all concerned hedonistic pleasure seekers?

Thank you. You are very kind. I'm curious though. You believe there is potentially a cure for suffering, but it's not transhumanism. First, we need to define what is meant by the term "transhumanism". If we don't edit our source code, recalibrate the hedonic treadmill, and genetically change "human nature", then I'm at a loss to know how the abolitionist project can ever be realised - short of apocalyptic scenarios that are unfruitful to contemplate.

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

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.