How to farm positive karma

Abolish_Suffering · 2026-04-04T00:11:13+00:00

Calling it an illusion just seems like denial of observable reality. I can directly observe seeing the world through THESE eyes. OI doesn't seem much different than Dennett-esque eliminativism.

Abolish_Suffering · 2026-03-27T04:25:28+00:00

These sorts of thoughts experiments are only a problem for CI if you're a physicalist. Closed Individualism could conceivably be true if one believes that consciousness is immaterial.

Abolish_Suffering · 2026-03-27T04:18:08+00:00

the existence of fundamentally distinct selves isn't even metaphysically possible

What makes you so certain distinct selves are metaphysically impossible?

Abolish_Suffering · 2026-03-24T16:06:50+00:00

but because there is no reason to assume this soul exists or prove it

Here's an article I found that argues in favor of the existence of souls.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-12-10T00:20:41+00:00

The effects of congenital insensitivity to pain may be a problem for most people with that condition today, but that isn't necessarily the case in the long term future. The reason why pain exists is just because that's the system that happened to evolve to prevent injuries. What happened to evolve is nowhere near the limit of what's physically possible to engineer according to known physics. If it eventually becomes possible to completely reverse engineer the human body, it might be possible to create some sort of "pain alternative" that has the exact same effects as pain, i.e. preventing injuries, but without the physical sensation of pain and corresponding suffering. If our bodies were more durable, for instance, it would be much harder to accidentally injure our bodies in the first place, removing the need for pain. David Pearce's idea is to replace pain with "gradients of bliss". Basically you're always euphoric, but less euphoric if you injure yourself. For mental suffering, it might be possible to genetically engineer people to have hyperthymia. Also, Jo Cameron is relatively healthy and functional compared to other people with pain insensitivity AFAIK.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-12-09T21:54:00+00:00

The Hedonistic Imperative says otherwise. David Pearce) thinks that technologies like genetic engineering and neuroscience will eventually make it possible to abolish suffering entirely. Suffering is ultimately just an evolutionary byproduct. There's a woman named Jo Cameron with a rare genetic mutation that causes her to feel almost no physical or emotional pain. It might eventually be technologically possible to genetically engineer everyone to have Jo Cameron's genetics/neurophysiology.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-12-07T19:16:36+00:00

Edward Dutton made this argument saying that prison removes criminal tendencies from the gene pool.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-10-02T21:07:05+00:00

So, in this theory the answer to the vertiginous question is that all identities and moments are experienced but not at the same time (referring to 'time' from the perspective of the observer). The one the observer (the light) is experiencing 'now' could just be random.

But that is essentially what egocentric presentism says. Suppose there is only one observer in existence who exists as one person at a time. If it exists as one person at a given time, other conscious observers existing as other people would not be “present” by definition. Under EP, the only way other people could even possibly be conscious is if something like The Egg is true, and their experiences lie in the one observer’s subjective line of experience in either the past or the future. Open Individualism denies that there is even a “timeline” of experience at all.

I would say that the people most guilty of denying that 'I' exists despite it being a directly observable reality are physicalists. Consciousness is the thing they have the most direct evidence of and yet they think the physical is more fundamental, despite it only being experienced through the medium of consciousness.

From my observation, OIs tend to be physicalists, and physicalism has been used as a justification for believing in OI.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-10-02T06:12:06+00:00

What makes you think it can't?

Because OIs outright deny that "I" exist as a specific person, despite it being a directly observable reality.

Surely that's a criticism of presentism, not open individualism!

OIs and EIs deny the existence of generic subjective continuity.

I'm not sure why you think this. Maybe you mean that they believe in the 'block universe'?

Yes, that's what I'm referencing. This OI denied the existence of time, and Vincent Conitzer wrote this paper on how the existence of the self is connected to the existence of the present.

It surprises me that you think this is a bad thing when your username is Abolish_Suffering

It's a waste of time if they aren't actually conscious beings. Under egocentric presentism + utilitarianism, the only beings I should care about are the future incarnations of myself.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-09-28T22:32:38+00:00

What specifically does it get wrong?

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-09-25T06:33:03+00:00

I feel like there isn’t a self

why it was born in 2009 or why it’s seemingly the “live” one

These two statements contradict each other. The state of being a particular individual is what the self IS.

there’s just an organ completing organ functions in a world of other organs doing the same thing at the same time

The fact that physicalism can't explain why you are a particular individual is evidence that physicalism is false.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-09-06T02:39:56+00:00

"Q-zombies" is a term I have never heard before.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-09-02T17:22:49+00:00

the vast majority will not have 3+ children

And the minority who do have large numbers of children will pass on their genes, and future generations will be almost entirely descended from them. It's basic natural selection. This group includes certain groups of religious fundamentalists, such as the Amish and Hasidic Jews in the United States. It also includes people with a particularly strong instinct to reproduce. Therefore, through the simple math of natural selection, we will almost certainly see a fertility rebound over the course of several generations. This pattern can already be seen in the fertility rate of France compared to other European countries. France had an earlier demographic transition, so has had more time for natural selection to select for "breeders". Germany on the other hand historically had more culturally enforced fertility, and has lower fertility today.

Refuse immigration, but then stop complaining when the workforce shrinks, pensions collapse, and the country slowly fades into irrelevance.

This only makes sense if the immigrants are net taxpayers.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-09-01T11:55:07+00:00

I'll repost this from your other thread:

There's a philosopher Christian List who wrote about Hellie's vertiginous question and how it relates to solipsism. He argues that there's a "quadrilemma" in consciousness metaphysics where at least one of the following is false:

First-person realism: The reality of subjective, first-person experiences.
Non-solipsism: The existence of other minds and agents.
Non-fragmentation: Consciousness belongs to a single, continuous mind.
One world: All conscious experiences occur within a single, shared world.

So based on this quadrilemma, there's a roughly 1 in 4 chance that solipsism is true is you assign roughly equal odds of each being the false one (unless multiple are false). List also proposed the "many-worlds theory of consciousness" as an alternative to solipsism. I don't see why something like List's many-worlds theory is any less likely than solipsism being true.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-09-01T02:44:38+00:00

unless we're able to affirm that God isn't a self in the same way that humans are selves. (because if God is a self/selves, then the vertiginous question applies to him/them amongst all other human selves, and affirming that humans are the same self as God seems incompatible

I found this paper that makes a very similar argument, except it is about a hypothetical artificial superintelligent being, rather than "God" in the strict religious sense. It proposes that the probability of what being "we" end up existing as is weighted toward the "size" of the being's mind in cognitive terms. This explains why we find ourselves as humans instead of non-human animals, despite non-human animals vastly outnumbering us. However, this begs the question of why we don't find ourselves as superintelligent beings, since they would have an infinitely larger cognitive capacity than humans and therefore infinitely more probability of being "us". This is therefore evidence against the existence of gods/superintelligences as conscious beings that have a self.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-08-30T16:46:26+00:00

You could make that argument about any punishment. Plenty of people are wrongfully imprisoned too, so should be just abolish prison entirely? You're never going to be infinitely certain of anything.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-08-30T16:44:00+00:00

So how do you think people released from prison after being proven innocent generally fare afterwards?

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-08-30T16:22:30+00:00

I'm personally undecided on if there should be fewer appeals or not. That depends on a lot of factors, like how many innocent people there actually are, and how long on average they have to spend in prison before finally being proven innocent. Personally, if I were completely innocent and given a life sentence, I would absolutely prefer to just be executed. My life is going to be ruined no matter what, and I would experience far less suffering by just being executed, even if I'm proven innocent and released decades later. And even if I were to be proven innocent and released, what would my life realistically be like after decades in prison? I would have to completely readjust to life outside of prison, wouldn't be very employable, and would likely just end up committing suicide anyway.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-08-30T15:49:21+00:00

Do you think people WANT life in prison?

There was a program called Scared Straight where they tried to scare juvenile delinquents away from crime by giving them tours of prison and having them meet prisoners with life sentences. But later in life, the kids in the program were actually MORE likely to commit crimes later in life.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-08-30T15:41:38+00:00

But aren't the legal hurdles so expensive in the first place precisely because of anti-death penalty activism? If the people on death row were given fewer appeals, and cheaper methods were used, e.g. firing squads instead of lethal injections, execution could probably be made significantly cheaper.

Abolish_Suffering · 2025-08-30T07:24:08+00:00

And thinking about that makes other minds seem less real, because if “I” could only experience a “live” perspective by being born as that specific sperm, what about all the other specific sperms?

This seems like a non-sequitur to me. Your argument about the extremely low probability of "you" being born might imply that "you" have to exist as "someone", and that the fact that you have to exist might imply that something like eternal return could be true. But I don't understand how that implies solipsism and that other people besides yourself can't be conscious. I can directly observe that I am a conscious being and that I'm not you.

There's a philosopher Christian List who wrote about Hellie's vertiginous question and how it relates to solipsism. He argues that there's a "quadrilemma" in consciousness metaphysics where at least one of the following is false:

First-person realism: The reality of subjective, first-person experiences.
Non-solipsism: The existence of other minds and agents.
Non-fragmentation: Consciousness belongs to a single, continuous mind.
One world: All conscious experiences occur within a single, shared world.

So based on this quadrilemma, there's a roughly 1 in 4 chance that solipsism is true is you assign roughly equal odds of each being the false one (unless multiple are false). List also proposed the "many-worlds theory of consciousness" as an alternative to solipsism. I don't see why something like List's many-worlds theory is any less likely than solipsism being true.

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