My 2026 to date: hedweb.com/social-media/2026… Just training data for zombie AI?

Can we create machine superintelligence with Buddhist values? piped.video/watch?v=b-iARM-h…

Despite a widespread European decline in church attendance, surveys show young Westerners are more drawn to mysticism than their grandparents. | bit.ly/4t3Ol3G Will the future be one where we see a return to an open acceptance of mysticism and spirituality? David Pearce, Naomi Goulder, and Rupert Sheldrake debate.

Can AI write heavenly source code to replace Darwinian malware? timjuliusbrauer.com/blog/202… (with thanks to @kollect123)

The Hedonistic Imperative is one of the best philosophical writings ever. David Pearce is one of the most revolutionary philosophers of all time, and the fact that HI isn’t more publicly known after 30 years reflects how painfully unaware we are of a utopia’s true image

A primordial quantum computer from the Darwinian Era stands in front of Australia's first classical electronic computer... piped.video/watch?v=xTM5Cgm-…

If what philosophers call the intrinsic nature argument is sound, then the Hard Problem of consciousness is an artefact of bad metaphysics. piped.video/watch?v=sRUUIT1V… Naively, consciousness fundamentalism is the recipe for digital minds. But our (super)intelligent AIs are no more conscious than a rock. Humans are creating alien (super)intelligence, not alien sentience.

Can digital zombies awake? piped.video/blIMhVkhPiA?si=3bPx… Or are we creating alien intelligence, not alien minds?

Zombies are getting ever smarter than humans; and still no more conscious than a rock. economist.com/leaders/2026/0…

Let’s use biotech and Ai to create life based on gradients of bliss.

MC0001 Highlight "The Panel Where Everyone Disagrees About Saving the World" by @Plinz @webmasterdave and Andrew Critch Watch the talk here: piped.video/A3jRaGMLhNc

Why a utilitarian makes life sacred David said the thing that reorganized the conversation for me. I had been needling him, pointing out that “whatever it takes” runs straight into trade-offs and cost-effectiveness, that his worldview was meeting a hard constraint, that he sounded less like a utilitarian and more like a priest. He answered without flinching. On strict negative-utilitarian grounds, he said, the best route to minimizing suffering is to enshrine in law the sanctity of sentient life, human and nonhuman. The claim is exact and worth keeping in his terms. The sanctity of life is a legal fiction adopted on consequentialist grounds: given the frailties of human nature, treating sentient life as inviolate yields better outcomes by the negative utilitarian’s own criteria than any regime that lets you weigh each killing on its merits. He grants that treating Darwinian malware like us as though it were sacred can stick in the craw, and he reads the twentieth century as decisive evidence that the legislative framework is wise anyway. Philosophers call this indirect utilitarianism. David notes, accurately, that indirect negative utilitarianism just collapses back into negative utilitarianism, so he is endorsing the plain article. Sit with how strange and how correct that is. A man whose foundational commitment is the abolition of suffering, who would in principle weigh any life against any other, arguing that we should hard-code life as near-inviolable into our institutions. The resolution is that the hard rule is the utilitarian move. This is two-level thinking of the kind R. M. Hare described. At the critical level you may reason in pure consequences, but the disposition you want running in fallible agents at the intuitive level is a near-absolute reverence for life, because agents who price each killing case by case produce far worse outcomes than agents fenced in by a bright line. The bright line is a Schelling fence. Permit case-by-case killing on utilitarian grounds and the category of permissible killing erodes under motivated reasoning until it has swallowed things no honest ledger would have allowed. A society visibly precommitted to the sanctity of life is more trustworthy and lower-variance, and spared the slow arms race of ever more elaborate justifications (following the letter rather than the spirit of the rules). The sacredness is load-bearing social technology, and a utilitarian who understands game theory should want it installed and should want it to feel like more than a calculation, because a reverence you can switch off when convenient is no constraint at all. This is also, David likes to point out, why he flew the Jain banner rather than the Buddhist one. The Buddha did not think like a lawyer. The ambiguity over whether monks could eat meat offered as alms handed self-serving rationalization its opening, and the result is that less than half the world’s Buddhists are even vegetarian. The sanctity-of-life rule is an attempt to leave rationalization no such opening. It is the lawyer’s instinct turned to mercy. The shape recurs in law and in karma alike. The law attaches harm to a named actor who must answer for it, and the karmic ledger attaches it to a mind that must carry it. The sanctity-of-life norm belongs to the same family, insisting that even a justified killing leaves a mark. Each is a refusal to let the cost of an act quietly vanish, and the refusal is wiser than any single calculation that would override it. Now return to where we began. If we would beg a superintelligence to keep us, cognitively humble and occasionally dangerous as we are, inside the circle of compassion, then how I treat the scorpion tonight is a rehearsal for the norm I want encoded in whatever succeeds us. There is a hard-nosed version of this in current AI safety, the proposal that we install reverence for all sentient life as a core constraint in artificial agents, and a constraint we visibly keep ourselves is far more credible than one we merely recommend. The stick in my hand and the alignment of a future mind rhyme, because both turn on what the strong owe the weak when the weak can do nothing whatsoever to enforce it. And it settles the reprogram-or-retire question in the direction David has argued for decades, the same direction as the Herbivorize Predators project he advises. Confronted with a vicious scorpion or a vicious human, the abolitionist chooses reform over retirement. You do not exterminate the species or execute the man. You relocate the individual tonight, and over the longer arc you reach for fertility regulation by immunocontraception, for obligate carnivores genetically and behaviourally tweaked into harmlessness, for an ethic of compassionate stewardship in place of the snuff-movie logic of orthodox conservation biology (don’t pretend “conservation biology” is morally neutral - it’s laden with background philosophical assumptions that are highly dubious when examined carefully). High-tech Jainism is the refusal to retire anyone, scaled up and down the whole ladder of minds, and held to even on the nights when retirement would be cheaper. One note of self-suspicion, because the inquiry demands it and David modeled it first. He emphasized, unprompted, that he might be running on motivated cognition here, that high-tech Jainism is a domain where he holds standing while the jhanas and the attainments are a domain where he feels barely on the foothills, so some of the fervor could be ordinary status-seeking in ethical dress. He was right that this does not discredit the argument and right that it belongs on the record. The mirror-image hazard is mine. I have run a lot of this very reasoning (micromort analysis, legal liability, etc.) past language models, and as David dryly observed, they are all subtly sycophantic, the more so toward people whose work they have read, so I discount the warm glow of their agreement accordingly (Claude has read all Qualia Computing posts and all Hedweb essays! Claude knows our [semantic-embedding] minds better than almost anyone). Being open about the pragmatism is part of the hedge. It is much harder to be charged with hypocrisy when you have stated the trade-offs out loud instead of smuggling them in.

This link got buried in the new X layout change too. Hmm… I’m a rather conservative futurist.

This page was mysteriously buried in the new layout change on X.

Time to stop eating each other: phys.org/news/2026-08-mathem…