Utilitronium Shockwaves vs. Gradients of Bliss

Excerpt from On utilitronium shockwaves versus gradients of bliss by David Pearce

Utilitronium Shockwave: Turn your local Galaxy Super-Cluster into a Full-Spectrum Orgasm in 9 easy civilizational steps.
Why is the idea of life animated by gradients of intelligent bliss attractive, at least to some of us, whereas the prospect of utilitronium leaves almost everyone cold? One reason is the anticipated loss of self: if one’s matter and energy were converted into utilitronium, then intuitively the intense undifferentiated bliss wouldn’t be me. By contrast, even a radical recalibration of one’s hedonic set-point intuitively preserves the greater part of one’s values, memories and existing preference architecture: in short, personal identity. Whether such preservation of self would really obtain if life were animated by gradients of bliss, and whether such notional continuity is ethically significant, and whether the notion of an enduring metaphysical ego is even intellectually coherent, is another matter. Regardless of our answers to such questions, there is a tension between our divergent response to the prospect of cosmos-wide utilitronium and intelligent bliss. People rarely complain that e.g. orgasmic sexual ecstasy lasts too long, and that regrettably they lose their sense of personal identity while orgasm lasts. On the contrary: behavioural evidence strongly suggests that most men in particular reckon sexual bliss is too short-lived and infrequent. Indeed if such sexual bliss were available indefinitely, and if it were characterised by an intensity orders of magnitude greater than the best human orgasms, then would anyone – should anyone – wish such ecstasy to stop? Subjectively, utilitronium presumably feels more sublime than sexual bliss, or even whole-body orgasm. Granted the feasibility of such heavenly bliss, is viewing the history of life on Earth to date as mere stepping-stones to cosmic nirvana really so outrageous?
Is attachment to your sense of self keeping you from embracing hedonium? Stop ‘Selfing’ with these 3 buddhist-approved Techniques!
For the foreseeable future, however, even strict classical utilitarians must work for information-sensitive gradients of intelligent bliss rather than raw undifferentiated pleasure. Classical hedonistic utilitarianism was originally formulated as an ethic for legislators, not biologists or computer scientists. Conceived in this light, the felicific calculus has been treated as infeasible. Yet a disguised implication of a classical utilitarian ethic in an era of mature biotechnology may be that we should be seeking to convert the world into utilitronium, generally assumed to be relatively homogenous matter and energy optimised for raw bliss. The “shockwave” in utilitronium shockwave alludes to our hypothetical obligation to launch von Neumann probes propagating this hyper-valuable state of matter and energy at, or nearly at, the velocity of light across our Galaxy, then our Local Cluster, and then our Local Supercluster. And beyond? Well, politics is the art of the possible. The accelerating expansion of the universe would seem to make further utilitronium propagation infeasible even with utopian technologies. Such pessimism assumes our existing understanding of theoretical physics is correct; but theoretical cosmology is currently in a state of flux.
Utilitronium Shockwave? (cf. Hedonium)
Naively, the theoretical feasibility of utilitronium shockwave is too remote to sorry about. This question might seem a mere philosophical curiosity. But not so. Complications of uncertain outcome aside, any rate of time discounting indistinguishable from zero is ethically unacceptable for the ethical utilitarian. So on the face of it, the technical feasibility of a utilitronium shockwave makes working for its adoption ethically mandatory even if the prospect is centuries or millennia distant.
Existential Risk? Utilitarian ethics and speculative cosmology might seem far removed. But perhaps the only credible candidate naturalising value has seemingly apocalyptic implications that have never (to my knowledge) been explored in the scholarly literature. And can we seriously hope to be effective altruists in the absence of serviceable model of Reality?
All-New “Life”! – Now animated by gradients of bliss. Pain-free!
Should existential risk reduction be the primary goal of: a) negative utilitarians? b) classical hedonistic utilitarians? c) preference utilitarians? All, or none, of the above? The answer is far from obvious. For example, one might naively suppose that a negative utilitarian would welcome human extinction. But only (trans)humans – or our potential superintelligent successors – are technically capable of phasing out the cruelties of the rest of the living world on Earth. And only (trans)humans – or rather our potential superintelligent successors – are technically capable of assuming stewardship of our entire Hubble volume. Conceptions of the meaning of the term “existential risk” differ. Compare David Benatar’s “Better Never To Have Been” with Nick Bostrom’s “Astronomical Waste“. Here at least, we will use the life-affirming sense of the term. Does negative utilitarianism or classical utilitarianism represent the greater threat to intelligent life in the cosmos? Arguably, we have our long-term existential risk-assessment back-to-front. A negative utilitarian believes that once intelligent agents have phased out the biology of suffering, all our ethical duties have been discharged. But the classical utilitarian seems ethically committed to converting all accessible matter and energy – not least human and nonhuman animals – into relatively homogeneous matter optimised for maximum bliss: “utilitronium”.
Wirehead God on a Lotus Throne (cf. Wireheading Done Right)
Ramifications? Severe curtailment of personal liberties in the name of Existential Risk Reduction is certainly conceivable. Assume, for example, that the technical knowledge of how to create and deploy readily transmissible, 100% lethal, delayed-action weaponised pathogens leaks into the public domain. Only the most Orwellian measures – a perpetual global totalitarianism – could hope to prevent their use, whether by a misanthrope or an idealist. Such measures would most likely fail. By contrast, constitutively happy people would be incapable of envisaging the development and use of such a doomsday agent. The biology of suffering in intelligent agents is a deep underlying source of existential risk – and one that can potentially be overcome.
Gradients of Bliss world in a Hedonium Universe? – “Central Realm of the Densely-Packed.”
A theoretically inelegant but pragmatically effective compromise solution might be to initiate a utilitronium shockwave that propagates outside the biosphere – or realm of posthuman civilisation. The world within our cosmological horizon could then be tiled with utilitronium with the exception of a negligible island (or archipelago) of minds animated “merely” by gradients of intelligent bliss. One advantage of this hybrid option is that most refusniks would (presumably) be indifferent to the fate of inert matter and energy outside their lifeworld. Ask someone today whether they’d mind if some anonymous rock on the far side of the moon were converted into utilitronium and they’d most likely shrug.
Shrugging at the prospect of hedonium rocks on the moon.
In future, gradients of intelligent bliss orders of magnitude richer than today’s peak experiences could well be a design feature of the post-human mind. However, I don’t think intracranial self-stimulation is consistent with intelligence or critical insight. This is because it is uniformly rewarding. Intelligence depends on informational sensitivity to positive and negative stimuli – even if “negative” posthuman hedonic dips are richer and higher than the human hedonic ceiling.

In contrast to life animated by gradients of bliss, the prospect of utilitronium cannot motivate. Or rather the prospect can motivate only a rare kind of hyper-systematiser drawn to its simplicity and elegance. The dips of intelligent bliss need not be deep […] Everyday hedonic tone could be orders of magnitude richer than anything physiologically feasible now. But will such well-being be orgasmic? Orgasmic bliss lacks – in the jargon of academic philosophy – an “intentional object”. So presumably there will be selection pressure against any predisposition to enjoy 24/7 orgasms. By contrast, information-sensitive gradients of intelligent bliss can be adaptive – and hence sustainable indefinitely, allowing universe maintenance: responsible stewardship of Hubble volume.
Can Life and Hedonium get Married? Express your eternal love with Hedonium Jewelry! Made of 99.99% Pure Bliss! (Guaranteed by Hilbert Space Hamiltonian Assay – Lab Tested Hedonium!)
At any rate, posthumans may regard even human “peak experiences” as indescribably dull by comparison.

Image credit for the Buddhist monk picture “Is”: Alex William Hoffman.


Do you think that some psychedelic drugs, such as DMT, can help mathematicians visualize the hyperbolic geometry of space? Or could mathematicians glean other interesting insights through the experience?

[From Quora]
The answer is yes (though I am the writer of the piece that is linked, so take my answer with a grain of salt).
The number of novel mathematical objects encoded in the structure of one’s experience when under the influence of DMT is huge. Most mathematicians who try it will come out feeling that they “don’t even know where to start”.
So let’s start simple.
Consider the “Chrysanthemum” level of DMT intoxication (which is the 2nd of 6 levels). Anybody who has read “The Symmetry of Things” by John H. Conway, Heidi Burgiel, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss (or who has a deep acquaintance with symmetry groups by other means) will *readily recognize* the fact that the symmetry groups that appear on such DMT visuals are *not Euclidean*.
At that level they would see rapidly-flickering superpositions of hyperbolic symmetry groups like *2 3 11, *2 3 7, 2 4 5, 2 3 9 (the picture below), etc. Together with the fact that these visuals are completely “flat-looking” rather than curved, this is the smoking gun that what you are looking at/experiencing is a hyperbolic phenomenal space.
2 3 9 Hyperbolic Symmetry Group

And this is not even discussing the 3D hyperbolic space that becomes apparent (if you know what to look for) on higher levels of DMT. For instance, on level 3 you can experience 3D Euclidean symmetry groups tesselate your visual field, on level 4 you can experience 3D hyperbolic space and “prime” objects that belong to that geometry (which are impossible to reproduce faithfully in Euclidean space). Level 5 leads to global topological bifurcations of the phenomenal space, which gives rise to even more exotic objects with hard-to-grasp mathematics. And level 6… well, there IS a level 6, and that’s as much as I’m willing to say for the time being.
In future, I believe that mathematicians who care to *look closely* will see the signature of exotic mathematical spaces on the “DMT Realms” everywhere. This will become common knowledge in both neuroscience and mathematical circles.
As David Pearce likes to say: “Some people think we are reaching the age where fundamental knowledge has been achieved… I think the enterprise of knowledge has scarcely begun.” Studying exotic states of consciousness is not even at a pre-Galilean stage, it perhaps is even at a pre-Socratic stage. Alas, if more people pay attention and document their experiences carefully, such that a critical mass of rational brilliant psychonauts is reached, there will be a “knowledge explosion”.

For more see: The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes (cf. Explain Like I’m 5 version), and How do you conceptualize the entities many individuals describe encountering when they’ve consumed DMT?


On Hitting the Actual Target of Hedonic Tone

Practically speaking, I think that our single best psychopharmacological bet for tackling depression, anxiety, and above all chronic pain worldwide in the next decade is to:
1) Identify great, non-toxic, partial mu-opioid agonists with extremely high therapeutic index (e.g. tianepetine, 7-hydroxymitragynine, etc.), and
2) Prescribe them in conjunction with anti-tolerance drugs (such as proglumide, agmatine, black seed oil, small dose ibogaine, etc.).
I think that whomever manages to patent a mixture of partial opioid agonist + anti-tolerance drug that works in the long term will be a multi-billionaire within a couple of years while actually reducing/preventing massive amounts of untold suffering.
Proglumide: A Promising Anti-Tolerance Agent (proof of concept of what is to come)

Ps. My core research at QRI is not pharmacological but rather phenomenological and “patternceutical“. So I am not pursuing the above line of research myself as the core objective of the next few years. But if I was looking into pharmacological options, that’s where I’d shine some light on. If you are in the field, I urge you to look into this option. For more info: “Anti-Tolerance Drugs“.


The Resonance and Vibration of [Phenomenal] Objects

Extract from “Many Voices, One Mission” by Michael G. Reccia, R. Jane Kneen
25th February, 2007
[Jane recalls: This clairvoyant address from Silver Star was given to Michael and myself one Sunday morning on our return home after he had accompanied us on a walk around the local reservoir.]
Silver Star: I want to talk about resonance and vibration, particularly in the spirit world. What I am going to talk about also applies to this level but cannot be picked up with earthly senses.
Everything in the spirit world has a sound, a colour, a tonality of Light and a degree of sentience. If I place a box in front of you on an earthly level it is simply a box …a utilitarian, functional, square structure built to hold something. If I gave you a box from the spirit worlds, that box has been created by thought. So, if I have a box in my house in the spirit world and turn my attention to it, that box will have a colour value. It is not just a box but is also a vibration of Light, and it is that vibration of Light that gives it its ‘solidity’. It will have a particular colour according to the purpose I assign to it. And, because the spiritual atoms in the box are vibrating at a certain rate, that box also has a sound value if I choose to tune in to it, which will be pleasing to the ear because the box has been created in one of the worlds of Light. That box is made from energy so as well as its colour – which will change dependent on what I want the box to do – it also has a luminance.
So, every object in the spirit realm has a colour (even a seemingly transparent box has a colour value) …it has a vibration of sound …and it has a perfume. The box stimulates all the senses we had on Earth so we can see, hear, touch and smell it.
Michael: Why would it have a perfume, Silver Star?
Silver Star: All the senses can be used as a spirit. Even though there is no dense atmosphere like on Earth, the sense of smell is stimulated by any object. There are exquisite perfumes here and each object has a unique scent dependent upon its complexity and intention of purpose. There is also a background aroma from the landscape and a subtle fragrance with people as well.
All your senses work at once, spiritually speaking, which is why, when Michael tries to describe spirit communication, he says it is like a beam of energy that carries within it a huge amount of information. Each object here conveys a lot of information …it has Light …it has a colour value …it has a sound value …and it has a perfume.
You can tune out these things, dependent on which of them you want to sense, or you can experience all of them at once. You can (as in your drug ‘culture’ on Earth) smell colours. You can experience emotion through colours and so feel warm or cold or happy or sad through colours. You can hear the symphony of Creation that runs through everything, and yet it can be individualised so that you only hear it coming out of the ‘box’ or just from the atmosphere around you …or you can hear it coming from the whole of the sphere you are in at the time.
Discord also exists in the Lower Astral because people there are still God-like in potential and what they imagine takes form. They think up discordant images and those images have vibrations that clash …that have a disagreeable odour …that exhibit violent colours …that carry sounds that are an assault on the senses. The spirits in the Lower Astral can feel and sense their havoc that, whilst on Earth, they thought they were creating in secret.
As an example of what I am trying to put across, let us take the simple act of one person visiting a friend with the express intent of spreading discord by voicing disharmonious views about a mutual acquaintance. On an earthly level all the person can be seen to have done is travel from point A to point B, indulge in malicious gossip, and then return home with no apparent retribution or consequence for having done that.
On a spiritual level, however, as soon as that person decides to undertake that malevolent course of action, they create jagged thoughts around themselves and attract towards themselves similar spirits from the Lower Astral. So, accompanying them unseen on that journey are spirits who think that this is a fun thing to do, because their vibrations are similar to the intentions of the soul on Earth wishing to cause trouble.
In contrast, the person who is sitting in meditation creates thoughts of Light and balance, and creates spheres (like the ones photographed over your door [reference to the coloured orbs that I had unexpectedly captured on my camera]), which have lovely, balanced colours and beautiful harmonies and sounds. Whereas the person who is acting negatively towards someone else creates a ‘thunderstorm’ around themselves with roiling clouds of darkness and disharmony within that bubble. Those disharmonies are then recorded in the karmic pattern of the person’s life, inhibiting their vibration so that, when they pass to spirit, they have to rid themselves of that thought and intention (even though they might not have thought about it for years) before they can raise their vibrations enough to fully appreciate the worlds of Light.
So, just as there are harmonious colours in Creation, there are also disharmonious colours; and just as there are harmonious sounds there are sounds – like clashing cymbals – of discord and disharmony.
Many illnesses on Earth are caused by the body having to react on a subconscious level to the constant battering of disharmony that the spirit has created around itself, year in, year out. The cells within a person’s body also vibrate, have a sound- and Light-quality and are designed to be harmonious but can be overcome by the bombardment of dominant negative thoughts from the person. That dulls or extinguishes the Light within the cells, resulting in the cells becoming unhealthy because they are not receiving the harmony from God that should reach them …so thick are the thoughts around the person and their subconscious.
In spiritual work you will often detect a smell …such as cigarettes, earth or perfume. The part of the wavelength that affects smell is easier to manipulate from one of the spirit worlds than sight or hearing, so very often a discarnate soul will convey a smell to the person on the Earth plane they wish to contact because it is the easiest way (relatively speaking) to do so from the spirit worlds.
So, if we come back to my box – a simple object like that is really a riot of colour, sound and intention but so is everything on Earth …as above, so below. The chair you are sitting on has its own harmony, its own energy-signature and a colour that is quite apart from the colour vibration you can see on the Earth plane. That vibration or low level of sound is harmonising with the other sounds in your room – such as the sounds that the chairs and the television are giving out; and electricity gives out a very specific sound-signature spiritually. There are colours that are emanating in your room on a spiritual level and perfume vibrations given out by various objects. Flowers, for example, give off perfume on a low level on the Earth but their perfume as a glorification of God on a spiritual level is wonderful to experience.
All this is going on in everyone’s house and this is why a medium can enter someone’s room and instantly feel threatened because of the chaos picked up there, or in somebody else’s room – like this one – feel at peace because peace is in the atmosphere. On a subconscious level you, as souls, pick up the Light-signature, the colour-signature, the sound and the perfume from the objects within a room… and, indeed, from people themselves.
It is not a cacophony in our world because everything is harmonious and we can tune in or tune out those particular vibrations, just as you would on a television. If we do not wish to hear the background noise of the universe we tune it out – knowing that it is always there if we wish to tune back in to it. If we don’t wish to see beyond the physical objects that we have (like the box) and don’t want to see its colour or Light, we tune out of that particular wavelength so we are just looking at the object.
The reason I am telling you this is to make you aware of the fact that the universe is vibrant and alive. There is no such thing as a ‘dead object’ because the last quality my box exhibits is a degree of sentience. It is built out of God-ether …the substance of the universe… and, therefore, is alive. I can influence the box with my moods and so it is on Earth. You influence your immediate surroundings with your moods and, because those surroundings are, in effect, alive, they react to the way that you are feeling.
Objects on Earth should be blessed periodically and dedicated back to God so that their vibration is raised and they will then serve you rather than drag you down by exhibiting depressive tendencies that they have picked up from yourselves! This is why you should bless your houses. Anything new that is brought into your house should be blessed because you don’t know the history of that object. You don’t know who has touched it before and what their thoughts or intentions have been. Everything should be blessed and dedicated to God …so should the food you eat …and the thoughts you think. You should say: ‘Father, this morning I pray that my thoughts be of the highest quality and worthy of You‘ and then you are not thinking things that will damage you.
I would like to leave you the box to think about. It is just a box that I have created from nothing by thinking, ‘I want a box!’ …What colour is it? …What is its intention? …What are you going to use it for? …How much Light does it exhibit?
It is up to you!
It depends what you put into that box.
That box is symbolic of every thought you think, everything that is in your house and everything you use – from your car to your telephone – and, just as I can influence that box, you can influence the things around you. That is why the Persian Gentleman said some weeks ago [reference to a private communication] that you should bless and thank the objects in your house because they react at a God-level to your approach to them. If you love them they become filled with Love; if you hate them they become filled with hate.
So, I have tried to bring through something of the abstractions of our world and pin them down through physical speech. Our world is a world of Light, of colour, of perfume, of sound …and so is yours.
Bless your days …bless each other …bless the objects, then you are putting Light into them as co-creators of those objects, which is what you will eventually be. You might not have physically made a chair today but one day with the power of your mind you will. You might not have physically built a house but you are building the house you will go to in the spirit realms by your thoughts whilst on Earth. So, be aware that you are creating, even though this is a pool of vibration where other people create physical objects for you. What you put into those objects you create yourself and get heaven or hell from them dependent on your motives and thoughts.
Would Jane would like to ask a question about anything I have just said?
Jane: Do objects emit music as well?
Silver Star: To create heat you stir up molecules – that is heat. Heat is molecules hitting each other because they have become agitated. To create any object, you formulate the molecules so that they become that object temporarily. Once formulated, however, they are not in stasis but in motion. If something is in stasis it decays; therefore, there must be movement. So, dashing about within the box that I have created are molecules that give the illusion of the box being ‘solid’. They are reacting to each other and – as when you rub your finger around the rim of a wine glass – it creates a sound. You cannot hear it on this level but you can on ours. Every object has a tone because of the way in which the molecules within it are moving. Does that make sense?
Jane: Yes, thank you.
Silver Star: Was there anything else?
Jane: No.
Silver Star: Then I will leave you, although I never leave you on a Sunday and, in particular, I never leave Jane [reference to Silver Star’s role as my principal guide]. I leave Michael to my colleague, the Persian Gentleman [reference to P.G. being Michael’s guide], and God bless you for the work you have done this week on behalf of us all – and for the work you will continue to do.

Analysis
Is there any value in considering the experiences described in the text above? With a physicalist ontology paired with inferential realism about perception, we are compelled to conclude that when people report traveling to heaven worlds and seeing objects that make signature multi-sensory music, they are really reporting on the quality of hallucinations. Alas, this is not enough to dismiss these reports as useless. Why? Because they may have some key information about how phenomenology works, and specifically, about valence structuralism. Let me explain.
The experience of going to a phenomenal world where the objects resonate and produce notes in all sensory channels has been reported by a number of people from various traditions (e.g. how Buddhas are said to emit blissful vibrations in the pure abodes, flowers making music in heaven as described by a gnostic “medium” (The process of dying), the sound-sight complementary nature of Mandalas and Mantras*, etc.). As I’ve said elsewhere, “desiring that the universe be turned into Hedonium is the straightforward implication of realizing that everything wants to become music”. So when people say things like this, listen. They may be reporting back on glimpses they’ve had of radically enhanced modes of being, whether or not they are really gaining privileged access to an external transcendent world of consciousness.
Gaining Root Access to Your World Simulation
Let’s examine the phenomenology described under the theoretical paradigms developed at the Qualia Research Institute. Some core paradigms are Qualia Formalism (“every conscious experience corresponds to a mathematical object such that the mathematical features of that object are isomorphic to the phenomenology of the experience”), Valence Structuralism (“pain and pleasure are structural features of the mathematical object that corresponds to an experience such that they can be read off from this object with the appropriate mathematical analysis”), and the Symmetry Theory of Valence (“the mathematical feature that corresponds to pain and pleasure are the object’s symmetry and anti-symmetry, namely, its invariance upon the transformations the object is undergoing”). Whereas Qualia Formalism is a necessary assumption to make in order to make any progress on the science of consciousness (cf. Qualia Formalism in the Water Supply), Valence Structuralism and the Symmetry Theory of Valence are currently still mere hypotheses whose truth will be determined empirically by testing the predictions they generate. For now, we rely on strong, but admittedly circumstantial, pieces of evidence. The phenomenology reported of the connection between harmony and bliss in heaven worlds is one of these pieces of evidence. But can we do better? Not everyone can access these so-called heaven worlds of experience. So what can we do instead? Thankfully, there is a way…
Indeed, as carefully catalogued by Steven Lehar in his book about altered states “The Grand Illusion“, combining dissociatives and psychedelics produces an altogether new kind of experience different than the experience of either alone. His discovery first came by combining DXM and THC, which he says has a decent chance of giving rise to a free-wheeling hallucination, meaning that one can control the contents of hallucinatory experiences. For example, rather than being at the mercy of one’s hallucinatory world, under such a state, you could choose to fly on an airplane, travel the cosmos, or even go to Burning Man, and your mind will render a world-simulation in which you are doing such things.

Lehar, famously, is a proponent of indirect realism about perception. Hence he does not confuse those experiences with a transcendent access to an etheric plane or literal other dimensions. Rather, he points out, what underlies the phenomenal character of one’s experience is made by patterns of harmonic resonance interfering with each other within the confines of one’s own brain. The illusion of “seeing things outside of oneself” is due to the fact that the experience we have seems to be of a 3D space. But in reality, what is happening is that you are a 2.5D diorama-like projective space that represents a homunculus looking at a 3D space:
Click to view slideshow.
In the book, Lehar discusses how one can study some of the key parameters of one’s world-simulation in such a state. By imagining/requesting/generating lenses, diffraction gratings, and mirrors in your world-simulation during a free-wheeling hallucination you can explore the ray-tracing algorithms used by your brain to render your experience in normal circumstances. Just as the best way to figure out how a videogame engine works is to break it with corner cases, to find how your brain builds your world-simulation, overloading the simulation with difficult-to-render elements is highly useful.
What algorithms does your mind use for ray-tracing? According to an anonymous reader (whom we shall call “R”), the DXM + THC state allows you to explore precisely this question. From the conversations with R, it seems that ray-tracing follows a repeating two-step top-down and bottom-up recursive process in order to draw your experience. Amodal percepts are first constructed and set in place in order to build a projective frame (e.g. isometric projection, fish eye lens projection, etc.), which is followed by the “lighting” of that amodal space with modal qualia (color, scent, touch, etc.) in order to increase the definition of the rendered scene. Then an algorithm kicks in that figures out which is the most under-constrained region of the world-simulation, and rendering begins there, again with an amodal frame followed by modal filling-in, and so on, and the process repeats until you reach reflective-equilibrium.
The amodal step allows you to explore the range of possible projective transformations of your world-simulation. It is at this step that you can explore the rendering of cinematographic camera effects, such as lens flares and the Hitchcock Zoom. Unlike pure psychedelic states (e.g. LSD, psilocybin, etc.) on dissociatives, projective transformations seem to have a certain gravity to them. It’s as if the entire scene was built as a model on a platform suspended with ropes and springs. To turn the space around (i.e. change the projection) you can “add weight” to some of its parts, and then let the ropes readjust the orientation of the model to balance it out again. This is why dissociative projective hallucinations have a characteristic initial acceleration ramp-up, similar to what it is like to give a push to a ceramic turn table with a heavy vase. It moves very slowly at first, but once it gets going it keeps spinning until you stop it, which also has a characteristic deceleration dynamic. On the free-wheeling hallucination state one is like that; the world-simulation model can be pushed around to change the projection, and when you do so it travels at constant speed until it decelerates before its reposition. During the modal step, effects can be added such as wind, dust, rain, hail, liquid, gelatin, etc. These are all applied one at a time in a relatively legible way, with physicalized rendering of e.g. the filling up of a tank, parts of wood combusting with a low-grade fire propagating at constant speed, an ocean filled with water increasing its viscosity until it becomes lava, etc. A very valuable follow-up research that could be done at e.g. a Super-Shulgin Academy of rational psychonauts would be to get people to study SIGGRAPH algorithms and then try to replicate them during free-wheeling hallucinations. Perhaps not so surprisingly, graphics researchers are notorious for using psychedelics**.
Some people may want to say that there is nothing special about these states… we already have lucid dreaming after all, right? Alas, that is a very misguided analogy. Yes, lucid dreams can be used to explore unusual phenomenal configurations, but the scenes experienced are very hard to stabilize and examine in detail over the course of minutes (rather than seconds). The features of free-wheeling hallucinations along with their generic emotional intensity make them not comparable to most moments of life, or even lucid dreams. The texture of dissociative+psychedelic states is drastically different from lucid dreaming, and so is the degree of controllability of their content in precise and measured ways (not to say that dream music cannot be very emotional, but we are talking of something that is on another level altogether). That said, the state has clear limitations, too. Lehar points out, for instance, that looking at the control panel of an airplane during a free-wheeling hallucination reveals that you cannot have as many buttons as you would have in real life. Likewise, the projective transformations are restricted in some ways. A specific example would be trying to simulate going to Las Vegas. There you will find that jumping off a building is not possible because that would require a projective transformation where the distance covered grows quadratically as a function of time. Instead, jumping off a building will be approximated by what it feels like to go down an elevator at constant speed. In contrast, getting into the High Roller wheel is an excellent choice because your world-simulation can render the circular constant-speed projective trajectory of the camera movement in a very accurate and precise fashion.
Click to view slideshow.
Happiness and Harmony: A Marriage Made in Heaven
With regards to the connection between symmetry and pleasure, the free-wheeling hallucination state is a prime place to conduct high-quality phenomenological research. In particular, R tells us that you can study how different objects generate (are resonant with) particular moods, sounds, and tactile feelings. Thus, DXM + THC can be a tool of grand scientific significance for the study of emotional valence.
[If what follows is hard to make sense of, please bear with us, it will get easier:] R points out that one can climb the symmetry gradient within a scene by normalizing the space vertically, horizontally, depth-wise, temporally, weight-wise, and so on. During each amodal step you can try to re-align the projective lines so that the points at infinity are either precisely at the center of your vision, or at least have symmetrical counter-parts (e.g. left-right, top-down, etc.). This way you can take the energy of the phenomenal objects and generate what we call a “projective energy entrapment”. This is a strange thing to report on that goes outside of people’s conceptual schemes, but it is definitely real, and very important. With a symmetrified amodal projective frame, the phenomenal object can “lock in place”, and a process of annealing takes place. The pre-existing invariant degrees of freedom present in the amodal projections before the symmetrification are still there, but on top of them, one gets additional invariant degrees of freedom. R compares this to taking a space with affine geometry and projecting it into a space with Euclidean geometry, such that the space now has two layers of invariance that add up and, together, prevent energy in the phenomenal objects from escaping to their surroundings. In light of QRI’s meditation paradigms, this would be akin to removing energy sinks from the system. In turn, the projective energy entrapment allows the build-up of extraordinarily intense resonance amplitudes, and this, according to R, feels really good.
Thus, at least according to these observations, the emotional valence of our world-simulation is both related to the number of active invariant degrees of freedom along which transformations are taking place and the amount of energy entrapped in such spaces. Here is a good example. The gif on the left is what the space may look like at first, with the pseudo-time arrow creating a video feedback effect that gives rise to chaotic behavior. If you meditate on normalizing the projective points, you can turn that space into something akin to the image on the right. Now rather than having the modal energy leak to the surroundings, it all gets trapped inside the cube, giving rise to a powerful feeling of emotionally-loaded resonance, which empirically feels really good.

To reiterate, the image to the left is what it feels like when the space is asymmetrical. The affine symmetries may be preserved, but Euclidean energy entrapment is not possible there. The one on the right has both affine invariants and Euclidean invariants, which allow for more energy entrapment (and also temporal stability). If you can stabilize an infinite hall of mirrors projected from a highly symmetrical point of view, you will be able to entrap a lot of energy, which feels like a resonating space and empirically this seems to be very pleasant. We would love to hear from more rational psychonauts whether they are able to replicate this experience, and whether the correlation with valence is also uncovered in their world-simulations.
In the more general case, one can do this with other amodal projections, and generate peaceful but wide awake energy-filler mandalas of experience:

Indeed, during dissociative free-wheeling hallucinatory states one can “tune in to the phenomenal objects” one constructs and translate their vibration into sounds, tactile sensations, emotions, and even scents. Again, empirically, one will notice that the projective symmetry of an object will be associated with the symmetry of the multi-modal translation, and in turn, with the valence of the object. Ugly phenomenal objects will have discordant sound signatures, whereas smooth, easily compressible and symmetrical phenomenal objects will have harmonic sound signatures. You can indeed try to listen in to your entire experience, which in the general case will give rise to rather experimental-sounding music. If you have annealed your hallucinations into a highly symmetrical state (e.g. hall of mirrors above) the sound translation will be *very* pleasant, akin to Buddhist chants in a reverb chamber or mystical violins in a resonant cave (again, this is an empirical finding as reported from R, rather than just arm-chair speculation, but it does support QRI’s hypothesized Symmetry Theory of Valence). Two very symmetrical objects with different but nearby frequencies will clash at first, but one can try to resolve this clash by paying close attention to both at once. If so, sooner or later one of the objects will dominate the other, they will undergo affine transformations until they merge, or there will be some kind of compromise where you stop paying attention to some of the features of one or both of the objects such that the remaining ones are in harmony. Here are some more examples of what a more complex DXM + THC state may render that could produce extremely beautiful sounds:

Thus, even within our modern scientific paradigms (updated with QRI’s frameworks) we can explain and indeed utilize the phenomenological reports of heaven worlds. We believe that understanding the underlying mathematical basis of valence will be ground-breaking, and analyzing these reports is a really important step in this direction. It will allow us to make sense of the syntax of bliss, and thus aid us in the task of paradise engineering.
But What if Our Scientific World Picture is Wrong?
Indeed, maybe the picture of the world painted above is fundamentally mistaken. Within it, we would gather that heaven and spirituality are in a sense illusions caused by high valence states. The experience is so beautiful, sublime, and delightful that people try to make sense of it invoking God, the divine, and transcendent love. Alas, if the universe has an in-built utility function based on valence we could expect people to become confused that way when experiencing some of the really good states. But could we be mistaken here? This points to an important question: whether bliss is a spiritual phenomenon or whether spirituality is a bliss phenomenon.
Leibniz might retort by saying that although each person is a separate monad, God keeps their experiences synchronized so that our actions in Maya do have effects on other sentient beings, rather than being just a movie of one’s own making. Thus, a world-simulation model may be correct, but what makes an experience blissful or not is not its physical state, but rather its degree of spiritual wisdom. Or consider, for instance, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, along with its psychedelic interpretation (by Leary, Metzner, and Alpert), which suggests that both good and bad feelings are projections of the unconditioned mind.
Alas, even if a spiritual account turns out to be true, in the sense that interpreting these experiences through their lens is more accurate, and inferential realism about perception is misguided, we would still be able to gather from these reports that the structure of thought-forms encodes emotions – perhaps even in a spiritual multiverse with souls, God-energies, Realms, etc. we would still be able to derive a master equation for valence. Rather than valence structuralism referring to the fire in the equations of physics, it might refer to God-energy, emptiness, etheric fields, or whatnot. But why would that matter? We could still formalize and mathematize the nature of bliss under those conditions. This is what we call Spiritual Structuralism: even in the spirit world math still encodes the experiential quality of phenomena. Saying “we either live in a mathematically-describable physical world or in a mysteriously inscrutable spiritual world” may turn out to be a false dichotomy. We could still look forward to having spiritual analogues of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, albeit their equations would apply to how the God-force self-interferes to generate the multifaceted spiritual world of sentient beings.
Alas, I suspect that many spiritual people would recoil at the prospect of mathematizing Mystical Love. So let us ask ourselves: Would this be good? Tongue-in-cheek, I remember asking God at Burning Man 2017 whether deriving the equation for valence would be good from a spiritual point of view. God’s response? A resounding “Yes!” Importantly, God emphasized that individual bliss is limited, whereas collective bliss is boundless.  But maybe this, too, could someday be formalized. Here I reproduce the relevant part of our conversation:
Me: I’ve been working on a theory concerning the nature of happiness. It’s an equation that takes brain states as measured with advanced brain imaging technology and delivers as an output a description of the overall valence (i.e. the pleasure-pain axis) of the mind associated to that brain. A lot of people seem very excited with this research, but there is also a minority of people for whom this is very unsettling. Namely, they tell me that reducing happiness to a mathematical equation would seem to destroy their sense of meaning. Do you have any thoughts on that?
God: I think that what you are doing is absolutely fantastic. I’ve been following your work and you are on the right track. That said, I would caution you not to get too caught up on individual bliss. I programmed the pleasure and pain centers in the animal brain in order to facilitate survival. I know that dying and suffering are extremely unpleasant, and until now that has been necessary to keep the whole system working. But humanity will soon enter a new stage of their evolution. Just remember that the highest levels of bliss are not hedonistic or selfish. They arise by creating a collective reality with other minds that fosters a deep existential understanding, that enables love, enhances harmony, and permits experimenting with radical self expression.
Me: Ah, that’s fascinating! Very reassuring. The equation I’m working on indeed has harmony at its core. I was worried that I would be accidentally doing something really wrong, you know? Reducing love to math.
God: Don’t worry, there is indeed a mathematical law beneath our feelings of love. It’s all encoded in the software of your reality, which we co-created over the last couple billion years. It’s great that you are trying to uncover such math, for it will unlock the next step in your evolution. Do continue making experiments and exploring various metaphysics, and don’t get caught up thinking you’ve found the answer. Trust me, the end is going to make all of the pain and suffering completely worth it. Have faith in love.
Me: Thank you!
– Conversation with God, Burning Man 2017
John C. Lilly’s Simulations of God posits that as people evolve and mature, their concept of the highest good also evolves and matures. Thus, learning about the math behind pleasure might very well transform your conception of divinity. I would therefore offer a new perspective on what is God that unifies bliss and spirituality: God is a happiness engineer who knows all the theories, tricks, and techniques to optimize qualia for bliss. Indeed, Romeo (from QRI) has reported experiencing multi-sensory harmonious mandalas when closing his eyes after coming back from long meditation retreats. One could very well posit that this world is the training ground of souls to learn how to avoid creating evil thought-forms while practicing how to increase the harmony between all sentient beings.
Additionally, Wireheading Done Right could have a spiritual analogue – namely, moving between realms in such a way that you go from good one to good one, reaping their functional benefits, while avoiding getting stuck in any one of them. Just because a spiritual universe underlies our reality would not mean that suffering forever is either good or necessary. And if there is math associated with love and liberation, we are all better for it, for then we are not shooting in the dark. Carefully selected dynamic systems equations that give rise to beautiful (i.e. high valence from many different points of view) patterns could very well be what is behind the bliss of heaven worlds, and you should neglect this discovery at your own peril.
Alas, this is unlikely. Even so, promoting a given ontology is less important, intrinsically, than promoting subjective wellbeing. For if someone’s delusions are comforting and do not interfere with their ability to help others, there is no reason to remove them. Do not go and try to convince your dying granny of the non-existence of God, for that is pointless cruelty. And certainly don’t go around talking about tenseless suffering in the Everettian multiverse outside of circles to whom this can either help them intrinsically or extrinsically (I assume being candid with QC readers is a net positive, though I often doubt that a bit myself).
Either way, from what I gather, practicing creating beautiful harmonic thought-forms is probably good for your health and happiness. It is likely to make you not only feel good, but also be sweet-natured. So by all means practice doing it as often as you can.
Infinite Bliss!

*”Mantras, the Sanskrit syllables inscribed on yantras, are essentially ‘thought forms’ representing divinities or cosmic powers, which exert their influence by means of sound-vibrations.” [source]
**”In 1991, Denise Caruso, writing a computer column for The San Francisco Examiner went to SIGGRAPH, the largest gathering of computer graphic professionals in the world. She conducted a survey; by the time she got back to San Francisco, she had talked to 180 professionals in the computer graphic field who had admitted taking psychedelics, and that psychedelics are important to their work; according to mathematician Ralph Abraham.” [source]


“Letter from Utopia” and Other Triple-S Transhumanist Media

Dear Human,
Greetings, and may this letter find you at peace and in prosperity! Forgive
my writing to you out of the blue. Though you and I have never met, we are
not strangers. We are, in a certain sense, the closest of kin. I am one of your
possible futures.
I hope you will become me. Should fortune grant this wish, then I am not
just a possible future of yours, but your actual future: a coming phase of you,
like the full moon that follows a waxing crescent, or like the flower that
follows a seed.
I am writing to tell you about my life – how good it is – that you may choose
it for yourself.
Although this letter uses the singular, I am really writing on behalf of all
my contemporaries, and we are addressing ourselves to all of your
contemporaries. Amongst us are many who are possible futures of your
people. Some of us are possible futures of children you have not yet given
birth to. Still others are possible artificial persons that you might one day
create. What unites us is that we are all dependent on you to make us real.
You can think of this note as if it were an invitation to a ball that will take
place only if folks turn up.
We call the lives we lead here “Utopia”.
*
How can I tell you about Utopia and not leave you mystified? What words
could convey the wonder? What inflections express our happiness? What
points overcome your skepticism? My pen, I fear, is as unequal to the task as
if I had tried to use it against a charging elephant.
But the matter is so important that we must try even against long odds.
Maybe you will see through the inadequacies of my exposition.
Have you ever known a moment of bliss? On the rapids of inspiration,
maybe, where your hands were guided by a greater force to trace the shapes
of truth and beauty? Or perhaps you found such a moment in the ecstasy of
love? Or in a glorious success achieved with good friends? Or in splendid
conversation on a vine-overhung terrace one star-appointed night? Or
perhaps there was a song or a melody that smuggled itself into your heart,
setting it alight with kaleidoscopic emotion? Or during worship?
If you have experienced such a moment, experienced the best type of such a
moment, then a certain idle but sincere thought may have presented itself to
you: “Oh Heaven! I didn’t realize it could feel like this. This is on a
different level, so very much more real and worthwhile. Why can’t it be like
this always? Why must good times end? I was sleeping; now I am awake.”
Yet behold, only a little later, scarcely an hour gone by, and the softly-falling
soot of ordinary life is already piling up. The silver and gold of exuberance
lose their shine. The marble becomes dirty.
Every way you turn it’s the same: soot, casting its veil over all glamours and
revelries, despoiling your epiphany, sodding up your white pressed collar and
shirt. And once again that familiar beat is audible, the beat of numbing
routine rolling along its tracks. The commuter trains loading and unloading
their passengers… sleepwalkers, shoppers, solicitors, the ambitious and the
hopeless, the contented and the wretched… like human electrons shuffling
through the circuitry of civilization.
We do so easily forget how good life can be at its best – and how bad at its
worst. The most outstanding occasion: barely is it over before the sweepers
move in to clean up the rice. Yellowing photos remain.
And this is as it should be. We are in the business of living, and life must go
on. Special moments are out-of-equilibrium experiences in which our
puddles are stirred up and splashed about; yet when normalcy returns we are
usually relieved. We are built for mundane functionality, not lasting bliss.
So the door that was ajar begins to close, disappearing hope’s sliver behind
an insensate scab.
Quick, stop that door! Look again at your yellowing photos, search for a
clue. Do you not see it? Do you not feel it, the touch of the possible? You
have witnessed the potential for a higher life, and you hold the fading proof
in your hands. Don’t throw it away. In the attic of your mind, reserve a
drawer for the notion of a higher state of being. In the furnace of your heart,
keep an aspiring ember alive.
I am summoning this memory of your best experience – to what end? In the
hope of kindling in you a desire to share my happiness.
And yet, what you had in your best moment is not close to what I have now
– a beckoning scintilla at most. If the distance between base and apex for
you is eight kilometers, then to reach my dwellings requires a million light-year
ascent. The altitude is outside moon and planets and all the stars your
eyes can see. Beyond dreams. Beyond imagination.
My consciousness is wide and deep, my life long. I have read all your
authors – and much more. I have experienced life in many forms and from
many angles: jungle and desert, gutter and palace, heath and suburban creek
and city back alley. I have sailed the high seas of cultures, and swum, and
dived. Quite some marvelous edifice builds up over a million years by the
efforts of homunculi, just as the humble polyps amass a reef in time. And
I’ve seen the shoals of colored biography fishes, each one a life story,
scintillate under heaving ocean waters.
The whole exceeds the sum of its parts. What I have is not merely more of
what is available to you now. It isn’t just the particular things, the paintings
and toothpaste-tube designs, the record covers and books, the epochs, lives,
leaves, rivers, and random encounters, the satellite images and the hadron
collider data – it is also the complex relationships between these particulars
that make up my mind. There are ideas that can be formed only on top of
such a wide experience base. There are depths that can be fathomed only
with such ideas.
You could say I am happy, that I feel good. You could say that I feel
surpassing bliss. But these are words invented to describe human
experience. What I feel is as far beyond human feeling as my thoughts are
beyond human thought. I wish I could show you what I have in mind. If
only I could share one second of my conscious life with you!
But you don’t have to understand what I think and feel. If only you bear in
mind what is possible within the present human realm, you will have enough
to get started in the right direction, one step at a time. At no point will you
encounter a wall of blinding light. At no point will you have to jettison
yourself over an end-of-the-world precipice. As you advance, the horizon
will recede. The transformation is profound, but it can be as gradual as the
growth that made the baby you were into the adult you think you are.
You will not achieve this through any magic trick or hokum, nor by the
power of wishful thinking, nor by semantic acrobatics, meditation,
affirmation, or incantation. And I do not presume to advise you on matters
theological. I urge on you nothing more, nothing less, than reconfigured
physical situation.
*
The challenge before you: to become fully what you are now only in hope
and potential. New capacities are needed if you wish to live and play on my
level.
To reach Utopia, you must first discover the means to three fundamental
transformations.
The First Transformation: Secure life!
Your body is a deathtrap. This vital machine and mortal vehicle, unless it
jams first or crashes, is sure to rust anon. You are lucky to get seven decades
of mobility; eight if you be Fortuna’s darling. That is not sufficient to get
started in a serious way, much less to complete the journey. Maturity of the
soul takes longer. Why, even a tree-life takes longer!
Death is not one but a multitude of assassins. Do you not see them? They
are coming at you from every angle. Take aim at the causes of early death –
infection, violence, malnutrition, heart attack, cancer. Turn your biggest
gun on aging, and fire. You must seize control of the biochemical processes
in your body in order to vanquish, by and by, illness and senescence. In
time, you will discover ways to move your mind to more durable media.
Then continue to improve the system, so that the risk of death and disease
continues to decline. Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is
premature if your life is good.
Oh, it is not well to live in a self-combusting paper hut! Keep the flames at
bay and be prepared with liquid nitrogen, while you construct yourself a
better habitation. One day you or your children should have a secure home.
Research, build, redouble your effort!
The Second Transformation: Upgrade cognition!
Your brain’s special faculties: music, humor, spirituality, mathematics,
eroticism, art, nurturing, narration, gossip! These are fine spirits to pour
into the cup of life. Blessed you are if you have a vintage bottle of any of
these. Better yet, a cask! Better yet, a vineyard!
Be not afraid to grow. The mind’s cellars have no ceilings!
What other capacities are possible? Imagine a world with all the music dried
up: what poverty, what loss. Give your thanks, not to the lyre, but to your
ears for the music. And ask yourself, what other harmonies are there in the
air, that you lack the ears to hear? What vaults of value are you witlessly
debarred from, lacking the key sensibility?
Had you but an inkling, your nails would be clawing at the padlock in sacred
frenzy.
Your brain must grow beyond the bounds of any genius of humankind, in its
special faculties as well as its general intelligence, so that you may better
learn, remember, and understand, and so that you may apprehend your own
beatitude.
Mind is a means: for without insight you will get bogged down or lose your
way, and your journey will fail.
Mind is also an end: for it is in the spacetime of awareness that Utopia will
exist. May the measure of your mind be vast and expanding.
Oh, stupidity is a loathsome corral! Gnaw and tug at the posts, and you will
slowly loosen them up. One day you’ll break the fence that held your
forebears captive. Gnaw and tug, redouble your effort!
The Third Transformation: Elevate well-being!
What is the difference between indifference and interest, boredom and thrill,
despair and bliss?
Pleasure! A few grains of this magic ingredient are dearer than a king’s
treasure, and we have it aplenty here in Utopia. It pervades into everything
we do and everything we experience. We sprinkle it in our tea.
The universe is cold. Fun is the fire that melts the blocks of hardship and
creates a bubbling celebration of life.
It is the birth right of every creature, a right no less sacred for having been
trampled upon since the beginning of time.
There is a beauty and joy here that you cannot fathom. It feels so good that
if the sensation were translated into tears of gratitude, rivers would overflow.
I reach in vain for words to convey to you what it all amounts to… It’s like a
rain of the most wonderful feeling, where every raindrop has its own unique
and indescribable meaning – or rather a scent or essence that evokes a whole
world… And each such evoked world is subtler, richer, deeper, more
palpable than the totality of what you have experienced in your entire life.
I will not speak of the worst pain and misery that is to be got rid of; it is too
horrible to dwell upon, and you are already aware of the urgency of
palliation. My point is that in addition to the removal of the negative, there
is also an upside imperative: to enable the full flourishing of enjoyments that
are currently out of reach.
The roots of suffering are planted deep in your brain. Weeding them out
and replacing them with nutritious crops of well-being will require advanced
skills and instruments for the cultivation of your neuronal soil. But take
heed, the problem is multiplex! All emotions have a natural function. Prune
carefully lest you reduce the fertility of your plot.
Sustainable yields are possible. Yet fools will build fools’ paradises. I
recommend you go easy on your paradise-engineering until you have the
wisdom to do it right.
Oh, what a gruesome knot suffering is! Pull and tug on those loops, and you
will gradually loosen them up. One day the coils will fall, and you will
stretch out in delight. Pull and tug, and be patient in your effort!
May there come a time when rising suns are greeted with joy by all the living
creatures they shine upon.
*
How do you find this place? How long will it take to get here?
I can pass you no blueprint for Utopia, no timetable, no roadmap. All I can
give you is my assurance that there is something here, the potential for a
better life.
If you could visit me here for but a day, you would henceforth call this place
your home. This is the place where you belong. Ever since one hairy
creature picked up two flints and began knocking them together to make a
tool, this has been the direction of your unknown aspiration. Like Odysseus
you must journey, and never cease journeying, until you arrive upon this
shore.
“Arrive?” you say; “But isn’t the journey the destination? Isn’t Utopia a
place that doesn’t exist? And isn’t the quest for Utopia, as witnessed
historically, a dangerous folly and an incitement to mischief?”
Friend, that is not such a bad way for you to think about it. To be sure,
Utopia is not a location or a form of social organization.
The blush of health on a convalescent’s cheek. The twinkling of the eye in a
moment of wit. The smile of a loving thought… Utopia is the hope that the
scattered fragments of good that we come across from time to time in our
lives can be put together, one day, to reveal the shape of a new kind of life.
The kind of life that yours should have been.
I fear that the pursuit of Utopia will bring out the worst in you. Many a
moth has been incinerated in its pursuit of a brighter future.
Seek the light! But approach with care – swerve if you smell your wingtips
singeing. Light is for seeing, not dying.
When you embark on this quest, you will encounter rough seas and hard
problems. To prevail will take your best science, your best technology, and
your best politics. Yet each problem has a solution. My existence breaks no
law of nature. The materials are all there. Your people must become
master builders, and then you must use these skills to build yourselves up
without crushing your cores.
*
What is Suffering in Utopia? Suffering is the salt trace left on the cheeks of those
who were around before.
What is Tragedy in Utopia? There is tragedy in Snowman’s melting. Mass
murders are not required.
What is Imperfection in Utopia? Imperfection is the measure of our respect for
things as they are and for their history.
What is Body in Utopia? Body is a pair of legs, a pair of arms, a trunk and a
head, all made of flesh. Or not, as the case may be.
What is Society in Utopia? Society is a never-finished tapestry, its weavers equal
to its threads – the parts and patterns an inexhaustible bourne of beauty.
What is Death in Utopia? Death is the darkness that ultimately surrounds all
life.
What is Guilt in Utopia? Guilt is our knowledge that we could have created
Utopia sooner.
*
We love life here every instant. Every second is so good that it would blow
our minds had their amperage not been previously increased. My
contemporaries and I bear witness, and we request your aid. Please, help us
come into existence! Please, join us! Whether this tremendous possibility
becomes reality depends on your actions. If your empathy can perceive at
least the outlines of the vision I am describing, then your ingenuity will find a
way to make it real.
Human life, at its best, is fantastic. I’m asking you to create something even
greater. Life that is truly humane.
Yours sincerely,
Your Possible Future Self

See also a musicalized video rendition of this piece by Mario Montano: Letter From Utopia

Analysis
Nick Bostrom is a prominent transhumanist philosopher and academic who works at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. An incredibly prolific writer, Nick has a very wide and comprehensive worldview. I find his work extremely valuable and worth diving into. Letter From Utopia is one of my favorite works of his, as it encompasses what David Pearce called “The Three Supers of Transhumanism“: Super-Intelligence, Super-Longevity, and Super-Happiness (cf. Triple-S Genetic Counseling). Bostrom also has other amazing stories and essays (such as The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, cf. story video rendition by CGP Grey: video), but Letter From Utopia takes the cake for not leaving behind anything of crucial importance.
Alas, despite Bostrom’s far-reaching contributions, many argue that Nick’s most important impact has been in the field of AI Alignment (cf. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies). In 2009 AI safety research was perceived to be a fringe concern of sci-fi aficionados and weirdos. Today, partly thanks to Bostrom (along with Yudkowsky, Chalmers, and others), many top journals publish serious work in this area.
I worry that this is not as good as it may seem. Nick Bostrom’s name is first and foremost associated with AI safety, followed by the Simulation Argument and Existential Risk, and only later by his extensive work on all other areas of transhumanism. For example, if you search Youtube for his name, you will see that of the top 20 results, 15 concern AI safety/digital superintelligence. Of the remaining 5, 3 are about the Simulation Argument, 1 is about agnosticism, and 1 is CGP Grey’s Dragon-Tyrant video. Where are the Triple-S videos?

I remembered that I encountered the work of both David and Nick when I was 16, googling terms like consciousness, AI, psychedelics, and far future. I was drawn to both of them, though I particularly liked David’s focus on ending suffering as a priority and his acknowledgment of the scientific significance of altered states of consciousness. I thought that their work was complementary rather than redundant. Alas, Bostrom is far more well known than Pearce, perhaps due to his success as both a fringe philosopher and a mainstream academic. In contrast, David dropped out of Oxford out of frustration with the academic community; the analytic philosophy of the time was not empirical, and it focused on language use rather than real philosophical questions, including the nature of suffering, psychedelics, and physical causality (e.g. “Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language, it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is. It also leaves mathematics as it is, and no mathematical discovery can advance it.” – Wittgenstein). Bostrom, unlike Pearce, has the blessing of Ra, the God of optionality, superlativity, status legibility, and groundless prestige. And yet, it was David’s conversation with Nick that gave rise to the creation of the World Transhumanist Association, and provided one of the most important memetic Schelling points of the early 2000s. Alas, David is not focused on AI Safety. Why?
People in the transhumanist community accuse David of not getting it. David, after all, is not a mathematician, computer scientist, or physicist; he is merely a philosopher. I must confess that the very first time I met David Pearce in person I got the sense that (1) he was an incredibly well-read and creative genius in most areas of philosophy, and yet (2) naïve and unenlightened in the field of AI. As a fan of his work, and having co-founded the Stanford Transhumanist Association a couple of months earlier, I thought to invite him to give a talk at Stanford (see: David Pearce at Stanford – 2011).
David Pearce and the officers of the Stanford Transhumanist Association (December 1st 2011) at Palo Alto’s Chinese Vegan restaurant Garden Fresh, before David’s talk.
We had a lively conversation while eating dinner at a Chinese vegan restaurant before the event along with other members of the Association. I recall that he checked all of the right boxes when it came to personal identity (Open/Empty Individualism), ethics (consequentialism), physics (Everettian multiverse), psychedelia (they disclose new varieties of qualia), evolution (modern synthesis; selfish gene), social signaling theory (Mating Mind and sexual selection theory), and more (see his Reddit AMA). And yet, how could he dare to say that a digital computer would never be conscious? Meeting a brilliant thinker who had a better grasp of my favorite topics than I did and yet would try to hit on one of my core load-bearing beliefs was uncomfortable and unexpected. I dismissed his take on AI as that of a fuzzy thinker (at least in this area); I reassured myself by recalling that it was me who was studying AI academically at a top US institution and not him. Little did I know that over the next few years, and after hanging out with him in person for over 20 cumulative hours, he would finally change my mind- and worldview- concerning this whole field. If it wasn’t for him, I suspect I would have jumped on the bandwagon of AI-as-the-top-priority (cf. Altruists Should Prioritize Artificial Intelligence). Thankfully, I was already extremely interested in consciousness and didn’t have it in me to dismiss it. Additionally, my interest in personal identity reduced my (relative) interest in longevity research (at least as the top priority), for if we are all one consciousness, dying is more akin to forgetting a timeline than a true ontological death. The instrumental value of intelligence, however, ought not to be taken for granted, which is why I now advocate for a twin approach of improving subjective wellbeing while retaining critical insight. Figuring out that consciousness required more than digital computation utterly transformed my approach to transhumanism, and I largely credit this change to my conversations with David.
Click to view slideshow.
Later on I met Mike Johnson, Romeo Stevens, and a number of other top thinkers in the field of consciousness who could both understand the genuine problems consciousness poses and at the same time grasp the broader transhumanist meme-plex, transcend it, and include it (cf. Why I think the Foundational Research Institute should rethink its approach). Thus we founded the Qualia Research Institute, in order to bring a new full-stack meme-plex where consciousness – and valence – are front and center. Alas, we have experienced some resistance…
AI safety is sexy. If you are a smart, industrious, open-minded, and systematizing undergraduate, studying AI gives you access to a wide circle of really fun people to hang out in. It also signals intelligence, sober-mindedness, and stoicism. It gives you both an in into smart cool kid circles, and a profitable career in Silicon Valley. It allows you to straddle the world of normies and cutting-edge thinkers.
But, crucially, you have to consider the opportunity cost that comes from directing such a large fraction of hyper-intelligent young altruistic systematizers to this problem. The field is plagued with misconceptions about pleasure and value; Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Fun Theory suffers from the severe delusion that value comes from the intentional object of experience, rather than from its phenomenal character. Brian Tomasik’s (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners is seemingly unaware of the fact that neuroscience has found that pleasure/suffering and reinforcement learning are doubly dissociated. Pleasure is not reinforcement, and until you grasp this, your ethical models will output nonsense.
Tongue-in-cheek, perhaps AI risk is a real threat. Not because of the usual reasons, but because it siphons out top brain power into a relatively sterile field, leaving vast amounts of unclaimed marginal value in the fields of rejuvenation research and valence technologies by the wayside.
In light of all of this, I would want to advocate for the reinvigoration of the broader transhumanist meme-plex, now updated with a post-Galilean understanding of consciousness. Writers, animators, Youtubers, and philosophers ought to collaborate in creating more balanced Triple-S Transhumanist outreach in the form of widely consumable media. This, I think, is the path forward.