A "Transhumanist"?!

[Edwardo Piet]

Hi. Glad to have found this forum.

And I'm glad you're here. Reading through this OP you sound like a brilliant human being.

These days my philosophy is pretty well captured by someone like Sam Harris most of the time[...]

You and me both.

(minus parts of Waking Up although I think half of it is truly great).[...]

I'd love to hear more of what parts you disagree with

I like to take contentious positions. Some that interest me are the following. For one, I consider myself a transhumanist. That just means that I think we should use technology to overcome out biological limitations; indeed, that may be one of our defining traits as a species. Glasses are the most basic example of that. I'm no fan of "natural". Enhancement is more and more becoming a possibility and I think we should apply "glasses" to many other areas of human performance, rather than worshiping the humanness of seeing in blur. Or, say, getting ill and aging.

This is all very fascinating to me.

I am also a fan of utilitarianism, specifically the 'negative' sort which holds the relieving of suffering as having the highest moral weight.

If I had to choose a form of utilitarianism I would definitely be more on the negative utilitarian (NU) side of things.

I am definitely a consequentialist. I buy into Sam Harris' science of morality and utilitarian-ish ideas but the only objection I have to utilitarianism is I don't think that suffering of many individuals can be aggregated.

Every individual's sufferings are separate. Empathy indeed exists but empathy is within the consciousness of individuals and when someone empathizes with someone else, they feel that empathy within their own brain.

No matter how many people suffer a pinprick, every single person merely suffers a pinprick. It makes no sense to me to say that if we got enough people merely feeling the pain of a pinprick, that it could even outweigh the pain of one person being kicked very hard in the kneecap.

I am an anti-speciesist: in the words of philosopher David Pearce, that means I think "all else being equal, equally strong interests should count equally" regardless of the arbitrary criterion of what species something is. Granted, "all else" isn't always equal, but there's a lot of room for improvement, I think, without even really having to consider that.

Awesome!

I don't believe in free will.

Me either!

Do you agree with Sam Harris' arguments and do you believe that losing our belief in free will, rather than dehumanizing us - humanizes us? And makes us more compassionate and reduces vengeance? Retribution makes no sense without free will

I think the Many Worlds interpretation of QM is probably correct. I think materialism is probably false, because of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Subjective experience seems irreducible to hard spherical particles bouncing around. So I tend to think reality is experiential in nature (i.e. Strawsonian physicalism), but not in any woo-woo sense of "you manifest it" or "the universe is one great mind" or anything like that. It is hard to deny, though, as a person who is experiencing doing this right now, that the universe has first-person qualities. I speculate that those first person qualities may have always been around like a soup of incoherent noise, and sentient brains my have evolved to specialize in 'binding' those incoherent microexperiences. Very speculative indeed, but maybe still preferable to eliminative materialism ("consciousness is an illusion") or, *gasp*, dualism.

Are you familiar with Daniel Dennett's position on the matter?

I agree with Daniel Dennett's view on consciousness, but I don't agree with his view on free will. I agree with SH on that matter.

Anyway.. hopefully this will be a good place to find some challenging discussions and sharpen my mental toolset and whatnot. That's what I'm mostly looking for. Cya'll around.

Cya around indeed!

I spent years engaging in serious discussions here, and I still do... but I am mainly here for fun and friendship now