David Pearce

The British Field Sports Society wanted my website taken down. A search for them in Alta Vista search engine yielded my site first - which they claimed amounted to the tort of passing off. My ISP wobbled. hedweb.com/campaig/bfss.h… The episode made me realise I needed my own domain and own server.

@webmasterdave @algekalipso Whats the domain ownership <--> Sentience killing connection?? As in , protect your voice by owning your content forever?

Latest Substack :-) > A small anecdote that gives you a sense of his operating style. In summer 1996 (one year into the public web, three years into the open web with the Mosaic browser), David was a Brighton-based philosopher with a pavilion.co.uk/david-pearce page on his local ISP. He had been writing critically about the British Field Sports Society, the UK lobby for fox-hunting and other blood sports. The piece in question was called “Killing for Kicks.” It still exists at hedweb.com/killkick.htm and reads like it was written by someone with both a temper and a thesaurus: the BFSS is “this chillingly ill-named outfit,” its rhetoric is “an almost equally Orwellian parody of the abuse of language” (comparison: pro-slavery “drapetomania”-talk), its actual practice is “the pornography of violence.” The illustrating images included a huntsman giving a Nazi salute. David understood meta tags well enough that when anyone AltaVista-searched for “British Field Sports Society,” David’s anti-BFSS article was the top result. The BFSS’s own audience was being routed straight to his critique of them. > On August 8, 1996, the BFSS’s Chief Press Secretary sent a letter threatening a court injunction and legal damages against David and Pavilion Internet (his ISP), demanding the article come down within seven days. On August 28, the BFSS’s solicitors faxed Pavilion a further legal threat: comply by 4 p.m. the next day or face imminent court action. Pavilion wobbled. David’s response was to publish the entire legal correspondence on his site (it’s still up, at hedweb.com/censor.html), turning a censorship attempt into a Streisand-effect campaign. ISPs and individuals across the UK and abroad offered to host the article for free. That is how David ended up with hedweb.com. The BFSS got a much wider readership for “Killing for Kicks” than they would have if they had ignored it, and David acquired both a domain and a permanent demonstration of how to handle a legal threat from a position of moral and technical advantage. He has been quietly outmaneuvering people on the internet since the internet was three years old. Appearing @webmasterdave @cube_flipper @42irrationalist

@Geiger_Capital @elonmusk The multiethnic British Commonwealth has a combined population of approximately 2.5 to 2.7 billion people, which accounts for nearly one-third of the global population. Freedom of movement is central to a free society. Let’s relegate racism, tribalism and xenophobia to history.

Doing this against the native population’s will is ethnic cleansing, by the way.

@ArthurMacwaters @elonmusk Many humans violently abuse and kill billions of sentient beings in death factories. Should we empathise with the victims? Or the tastebuds of the perpetrators?

60% of violent criminals are re-imprisoned for new crimes within just a few years of their release Shallow empathy prioritizes the criminal over their victims Deep empathy prioritizes victims over the criminal

@zaborpiotr @allTheYud The AI would still be a (micro-experiential) zombie. Classical parallelism doesn’t suffice for a mind.

@webmasterdave @allTheYud What if an AI was instantiated on, let's say, a million or a billion computing cores, each of them performing parallel calculations? And the results of the computations being combined in a shared memory, let's say 50 times each second?

LLM Whisperers, what publicly available thinking model with search seems competent but *least* conscious to you?

@FeepingCreature @_virgil19 @allTheYud Why does the enteric system not support a unified subject of experience? Why, intermittently, does the mind-brain? I know you’re not persuaded the binding problem is real, but (IMO) a solution will show which information processors are and aren’t unified subjects of experience.

@_virgil19 @webmasterdave @allTheYud I think a lot of nets may have felt-this. How would we know? They can't think or talk about it. They can't even perceive it (that needs salient-select-of-felt-this). I think we just super overestimate how much felt-this requires, because we attach many other human skills to it.

@InformationBot0 @algekalipso I don’t do justice to the role of meditation in the abolitionist project. But I focus on biological-genetic solutions because only genome reform can end suffering for ever. Most sentient beings can’t meditate.

@webmasterdave @algekalipso We already know John Lilly put electrodes in macaques brains and found that ejaculation and orgasm are in different parts of the brain. So you can stimulate the orgasm part and give the monkeys a button to do it they do it all day long and fall asleep and get up and do it again.

@singularityblog Thanks Nikola. AI is a gamechanger. The blueprint outlined in e.g. gene-drives.com would take hundreds of years to complete. But machine superintelligence could design blissful genomes on a much shorter timeframe - and create cultured meat to end animal agriculture.

What if ending #suffering isn't a dream but an engineering problem? Philosopher David Pearce has staked his life on it. My 2013 talk with the co-founder of the World #Transhumanist Association: snglrty.co/4orFFDi

Consciousness is extraordinarily diverse. The vast majority of qualia have never been recruited by natural selection for any informatiion-signaling or functional purpose (cf psychedelics). Only states on the pleasure-pain axis intrinsically matter. But the “encephalization of emotion” by natural selection is extremely adaptive.

@webmasterdave @allTheYud True, during the primates' evolution, the pain-related mechanisms were extended to situations not directly related to tissue damage: e.g. ostracization in humans produces a similar bio response. Still, it remains not much different form the "battery is low" icon on your phone.

@elonmusk Humans are prone to sociopathic callousness, not suicidal empathy. Incarcerating and killing beings as sentient small children in death factories is a crime on a par with the Holocaust.

Beware the empathy exploit. Empathy is good and right when thought through (deep), but can be deadly to civilization when simply stimulus-response (shallow). For example, releasing a repeat violent offender may feel good at first (shallow empathy for the criminal), but it is wrong to do so when that person will go on to hurt or murder innocent victims, as there should be deep empathy for future victims.

@elonmusk @WatcherGuru Elon, please be kind. Why be needlessly hurtful about other people’s bodies? If someone doesn’t want to look like a brutish macho male, then cool.

@WatcherGuru Obviously. Sometimes grown men send me their Instagram profiles and I’m like are you transitioning or what?

JUST IN: Elon Musk says "Instagram is for girls."

@OttoMller12 @allTheYud The existence of tissue damage is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of phenomenal pain. Life on Earth deserves a more civilized signalling system.

@webmasterdave @allTheYud It is a common misconception that saying "the human brain is a computer" - is devaluing humans. The statement is simply a correct summary of how the brain works. The same is true for pain etc. Of course, pain is just a damage signal to the bio CPU. Still, we should reduce it.

@OttoMller12 @allTheYud Would you really tell a victim of cluster headaches that “humans ard no more concious than a rock” , or alternatively “pain per se doesn’t matter”. clusterfree.org Agony and despair are real; and their disvalue is self-intimating.

@webmasterdave @allTheYud Pain per se doesn't matter, as it's simply a signal about ongoing damage. But the signaling system has an important bug: prolonged exposure to the signal can cause physical damage by itself, due to physiological stress response etc. Thus, makes sense to reduce it

@OttoMller12 @allTheYud If offered just a muscle-paralyzing agent before surgery, would you insist on anaesthesia too? If you’re just a zombie, why bother?

@webmasterdave @allTheYud Humans are all zombies with no more sentience than a rock. The insentience of stochastic monkey is hardwired. The warm pudding they call "brain" has no ability to actually experience anything, it's all just genetically programmed heuristics to predict the next event in savanna

@algekalipso The arguments for an informationless zero ontology conjecture are technical. But I can understand how it might be woven into a meditational practice or spiritual tradition.

@jessi_cata @algekalipso @cube_flipper

I am not sure what Pearce means by zero ontology, but my closest match is, according to Everettian quantum mechanics, the Von Neumann entropy of the cosmos is zero, because it started in a pure state, and unitary evolution preserves Von Neumann entropy. Von Neumann entropy becomes positive when factorizing a system in a pure state into two different systems, H_1 ⊗ H_2. Then take the sub-system entropy of a pure joint density matrix | Ψ > < Ψ | by tracing out one of these systems. We get the same Von Neumann entropy either way: S(Tr_1 ( | Ψ > < Ψ |)) = S(Tr_2( | Ψ > < Ψ | )). This has the somewhat paradoxical implication that, while the Bekenstein bound gives an upper bound for entropy of what is inside a region with finite surface area, it could also give the same upper bound for whatever is *outside* that region, assuming the cosmos is in a pure state. The creation of quantum information through interaction comes up with Wigner's friend. From Wigner's perspective, the system composed of H_friend ⊗ H_qubit starts pure, and the interaction (friend measuring qubit) is unitary. Yet to the friend, it looks like information is created: the qubit takes on a value, either | 0 > or | 1 >, and it was not predictable. Wigner can consider the Von Neumann entropy of either system (H_friend or H_qubit) afterwards by tracing out the other system, and getting the same result. It could also relate to de Sitter space and cosmological inflation, because in de Sitter space, different systems can become forever inaccessible to each other. That would imply that unitary reversal of "measurement interactions" becomes impossible. This could lock in creation of quantum information; imagine separating a Bell pair so far that they cannot interact again.

Then original article that inspired @webmasterdave to develop Zero Ontology :D

@ApriiSR @jessi_cata @algekalipso x.com/i/grok/share/2…

@jessi_cata @algekalipso @webmasterdave ...what reason do we have to believe it started in a pure state?

@algekalipso See too: chatgpt.com/s/t_6967e95978…

How can everthing = 0? What about entropy? With no information ever created or destroyed, the entropy of reality = 0 too. A pure state remains a pure state on pain of violating unitarity (cf. Max Tegmark, "the entropy of the entire universe may well equal zero, since if it started in a pure state, unitarity ensures that it is still in a pure state" – “How unitary cosmology generalizes thermodynamics and solves the inflationary entropy problem”. arxiv.org/pdf/1108.3080

@we_arent_here @elonmusk Yes. Predation, starvation and other horrors have no place in a civilized world. The entire biosphere should be reprogrammed.

@webmasterdave @elonmusk Empathy no. Rational compassion yes. The animal kingdom is brutal and one big food chain.

Read this book and give it to all your friends. Survival of civilization depends on it!