Autor: tstadmin
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Where Should Humanity Steer Sentience? Examining 8 Potential Directions
The list of eight options below is not intended to be a complete list. Rather, it is intended to be a reasonably likely list of options that people might discuss in the near term. For the sake of this article, the word pleasure is being used as a broad term to indicate all preferable conscious experiences, from…
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How a nervous system operates without giving rise to an experience
In our bodies, if our knee is lightly tapped, our leg moves automatically (with no intention on our part) and independently of the experience of the tap that we sense. The information that originates in our knee, with the tap, splits up and moves through two separate pathways: one path goes to our brain through…
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No binding, no suffering
Plants don’t suffer. Their fictitious misery should not be used to justify the real misery of our nonhuman animal victims. “But how do you know plants don’t suffer?!” says the meat-eater, affecting a touching concern for the well-being vegetables. “Science proves plants feel pain!” But no. Suppose that consciousness is fundamental in Nature, or at…
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Epiphenomenalism cannot be true
In brief, epiphenomenalism cannot be true. Qualia, it turns out, must have a causally relevant role in forward-propelled organisms, for otherwise natural selection would have had no way of recruiting it. I propose that the reason why consciousness was recruited by natural selection is found in the tremendous computational power that it afforded to the real-time world…
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Can someone debunk Solipsism?
“We live as we dream – alone.” (Joseph Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899)) The sceptical Problem Of Other Minds will be solved by biotechnology. Compare people born without a corpus callosum to connect their cerebral hemispheres, or “split brain” patients who’ve had their corpus callosum surgically severed to treat epilepsy. If one hemisphere entertains doubts…
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The evilness of suffering
“I believe that most of us tend to underrate the evilness of suffering. The reason is that it is difficult for us, when not actually suffering, to recollect what suffering really is. We employ numerous psychological mechanisms to conceal from our consciousness the true nature or meaning of suffering, to falsify and deny it. We…
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An overview of wagers for reducing future suffering
«Pascal’s wager is a famous argument for why one should believe in God. If God exists, then eternal life in heaven or hell is at stake, but if God doesn’t exist, one’s belief does not matter much – so one should wager on the former. (The validity of this argument has been discussed at length.)…
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Richard Dawkins about suffering in nature
«The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all…
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Is sentience evolutionarily useful or physically inevitable?
It is very intuitive to believe that sentience motivates us to make (better) decisions («better», from an evolutionary point of view). But we can also consider that it is possible that we are sentient robots, but without will, that we simply do what we have been programmed for, even though we have the feeling that…
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The imperative to abolish suffering: an interview with David Pearce
English | Español | Português Photo: Peter Singer, Justin Oakley and David Pearce at EA Global Melbourne. David Pearce is a British philosopher famous for his idea that there is a strong ethical imperative for human beings to work towards the abolition of suffering of all sentient beings (named «The Hedonistic Imperative«). In the manifesto,…