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#5958·Vincent Brunsch, 3 days ago·AI-assistedI think this leaves my central criticism unresolved: Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity, whereas my question is whether it can have subjective experiences without possessing that capacity.
Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?
This seems to depend on the very connection between universal creativity and sentience that is under dispute. What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?
And I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.
When she wakes up, however, what seems to change is her capacity for reflective awareness and understanding.
… I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.
She’s unconscious for all of that! It shows the opposite.
I shouldn’t be a hypocrite…
Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity…
More unnecessarily complicated language.
Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity…
More needlessly complicated language.
#5958·Vincent Brunsch, 3 days ago·AI-assistedI think this leaves my central criticism unresolved: Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity, whereas my question is whether it can have subjective experiences without possessing that capacity.
Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?
This seems to depend on the very connection between universal creativity and sentience that is under dispute. What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?
And I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.
When she wakes up, however, what seems to change is her capacity for reflective awareness and understanding.
What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?
Because nothing is missing in our explanations of how calculators, roombas, self-driving cars etc work. Consciousness doesn’t figure in our explanations of them. The information processing animals do is the same as that of calculators etc. So the same conclusion applies.
#5958·Vincent Brunsch, 3 days ago·AI-assistedI think this leaves my central criticism unresolved: Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity, whereas my question is whether it can have subjective experiences without possessing that capacity.
Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?
This seems to depend on the very connection between universal creativity and sentience that is under dispute. What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?
And I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.
When she wakes up, however, what seems to change is her capacity for reflective awareness and understanding.
Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?
Because then it can be explained fully in terms of mindless execution of a pre-written computer program.
#5958·Vincent Brunsch, 3 days ago·AI-assistedI think this leaves my central criticism unresolved: Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity, whereas my question is whether it can have subjective experiences without possessing that capacity.
Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?
This seems to depend on the very connection between universal creativity and sentience that is under dispute. What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?
And I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.
When she wakes up, however, what seems to change is her capacity for reflective awareness and understanding.
Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity…
More unnecessarily complicated language.
#5943·Dennis Hackethal revised 4 days ago… because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.
I don’t think that’s right. There could be animal behavior I’d have serious trouble explaining.
People asked me about this at Conjecture Con. For example, if we took an animal out of the context in which it evolved, and put it in a new context it didn’t evolve for – that’s where animals bug out – but instead of bugging out, it behaved more like a human in an unknown situation and became reflective, actually seemed to understand what was going on, that would at least give me pause.
I can’t be more specific than that because it would depend in part on new knowledge the animal would have to create in that situation, and by definition I can’t predict new knowledge. But I’d know it when I see it.
That may not be completely satisfying, but it shows that it’s simply not true that any animal behavior “could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.” (Or rather, the implication that I could always explain any animal behavior away.)
To be as specific as I can though, video 15 in my series on animals and sleepwalkers shows the kind of thing I mean. The woman in the video is asleep while talking to her husband for most of the video, but toward the end she wakes up, and there’s something different in her eyes and about her attitude and responses. It’s hard to put into words, but again you know it when you see it.
I think this leaves my central criticism unresolved: Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity, whereas my question is whether it can have subjective experiences without possessing that capacity.
Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?
This seems to depend on the very connection between universal creativity and sentience that is under dispute. What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?
And I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.
When she wakes up, however, what seems to change is her capacity for reflective awareness and understanding.
#5956·Moritz WallawitschOP, 3 days ago·AI-assistedFixed. The discussion title now uses title case: ‘Immortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas Is Not Immoral’.
This idea (#5956) should be revised to be marked as a criticism.
#1678·Dennis Hackethal, about 1 year agoImmortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas is not immoral
If that’s the title of your essay, you would want to use title case consistently.
Fixed. The discussion title now uses title case: ‘Immortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas Is Not Immoral’.
Moritz Wallawitsch updated discussion ‘Immortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas is not immoral’.
The title changed from ‘Immortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas is not immoral’ to ‘Immortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas Is Not Immoral’.
The ‘About’ section changed as follows:
Dropped the corrected clause of the Deutsch quote; footnote links his erratum (answers #1673).
I recently spent a Sunday vibe coding an ai-image-gen micro-SaaS. The person that inspired me accused me of copying his product and threatened to damage my reputation. However, I improved on his idea by implementing several features his product didn’t have such as allowing for 7 multiple output styles, custom prompts, churn-prevention email follow-ups, and a landing page that better explains the product.
Most people hold fundamentally wrong ideas about morality. This includes thinking that copying business ideas or having CRISPR-edited super babies is immoral, that death is good, that the existence of billionaires is wrong, and that not helping others is immoral. They all spring from an avoidance of conflict: the conflict of ideas, the conflict of accepting not to exist, the conflict of envy, etc. This “morality” becomes destructive because it’s scared of the turning forces of evolution by evading conflict and adversity of any kind. It’s suffocating.
Morality is best explained by epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), not religion or intuition. With this lens morality is the knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for1.
The most fundamental tenet of morality is to not remove the means of error-correction2. Since error-correction is the only way our knowledge can improve.
If society hinders a scientist from inventing and distributing a cure for cancer, that is deeply immoral. Many regulations that restrict the freedom of people and their ideas are immoral.
Copying someone's business
The Samwer brothers famously copied Airbnb and other companies, but these companies provided the solution to people in different geographies or demographics, improving access to the solution.
Their Airbnb clone, Wimdu, largely failed because it was only a surface-level copy that didn’t innovate on any aspect of the business. It incentivized Airbnb to innovate on better host support, internationalization, trust infrastructure, and regulatory compliance.
Opening a lemonade stand two blocks from an existing one incentivizes both lemonade stand operators to improve their lemonade. Competition leads to innovation.
Now, why do most people believe that copying someone’s business is immoral?
I think the main reason is that people think ideas can be “stolen”. That is wrong. Ideas are non-rivalrous3. And everyone should be incentivized to reproduce them and correct their errors. Problems are solvable4, and there is an infinity of problems (people always want more). IP law is another way to incentivize people to innovate. Unfortunately, large companies like Amazon (with hundreds of people in their internal legal department working on IP law) exploit this system to prevent competition.
But isn't competition for losers?
Peter Thiel famously proclaimed this in his book Zero to One. In a demand-constrained market, this is true. Building another AI headshot app wouldn’t be a great idea if the demand for AI headshots were shrinking rapidly. It is not.
Even Founders Fund (Thiel’s venture firm) invested in companies with strong competition:
- Ramp: Launched two years after Brex; both grew quickly as financial operations digitalized.
- Spotify: Entered a crowded market (iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody) just as music streaming took off.
- Rippling: Entered HR/payroll after Gusto, ADP, and Paychex; succeeded by bundling HR, IT, and finance as businesses moved to the cloud.
- Postmates: Was started after Grubhub and Seamless, but grew fast as on-demand delivery became a habit.
- Icon.com: Was started after there were already countless AI ad generator platforms. As more people consume short-form video content and realistic AI-image and video generation becomes possible, demand for this kind of software explodes.
It would be stupid to claim these companies are immoral because they copied another business. Here are some other moral mistakes I have considered lately. They range from economics to biology to altruism.
Altruism
Helping can be immoral if it prevents people from learning to solve their own problems. It can also be immoral if the invested resources could have led to a greater error correction. Socialism, with its underlying philosophy of altruism, is the embodiment of this error. For example, the US government taxes the 343 million Americans ~$1.2 trillion per year (that’s ~$3,580 per person on avg.) to fund a public education system that is stuck in the 1800s. These people could have used the resources the state took from them to buy education services from private companies that have a clear profit incentive to improve their service. To quote my previous post, “They don’t care if the students hate school” nor if they end up in student debt.
Being immortal
Death is not the only reason that life is “precious”. There are better reasons.
The idea that the shortness of life is what gives it its “meaning” is wrong. Meaning is not zero-sum. I.e., your life doesn’t have a fixed amount of meaning that is reduced if you live longer. The opposite is true, a longer life leads to more meaningful experiences. Life is more like water when you’re thirsty than a rare diamond; its value comes from how much you can experience, not from being limited in quantity.
Life is not its own meaning. Meaning comes from the things you do and create. If your life is unbounded, so is the meaning you can create within it.
People wear seatbelts. Nobody says, “I want to get hit by a car, because my life will have more meaning if it ends sooner.” There’s nothing inherently meaningful about limitation or scarcity by itself. If that were true, a two-day life would be more meaningful than a 70-year life.
Some argue that meaningfulness of life is binary. But if knowing the exact day of your death feels terrifying, that shows that it’s not simply mortality that gives meaning, but the unpredictable and exciting adventure of living itself.
Even Christianity calls death an enemy from humanity’s fall, promising its end: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). In paradise, “death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4). It sees death as a problem to be solved, not a source of meaning.
Ultimately I think arguments that claim death is moral originated to cope with the fear of death. The thought that our existence suddenly stops. All the laughter, parties, friends, interesting conversation, sex, beautiful landscapes and skylines are suddenly taken from us, for eternity.
Nick Bostrom in his essay The Fable of the Dragon‑Tyrant calls this "deathist" ideology—the passive acceptance of what should be humanity's greatest enemy. My friend Arjun criticized other common arguments against immortality in his blog post.
Involuntary death isn’t a cosmic necessity; it’s a biological error, possibly the greatest error of all. And it’s one we may soon be able to fix. Just imagine the inventions we never experienced and how many more lives would flourish today if people like Euclid, Newton, Tesla, Marie Curie, or Alan Turing would still be alive.
CRISPER-edited Super Babies
Some people don’t like the idea of us playing God. But that is what we are now. We are as gods and might as well get good at it5.
Others claim that gene-editing super babies (to be free from disease or just smarter) would be an innovation that only the rich could afford, thereby creating a segregated society. The 1997 movie Gattaca is a dramatization of this claim.
That logic is wrong because it impedes the spread of an innovation (and error correction). The assumption that non-gene-improved people will be relegated to menial jobs is also wrong because there are many wealthy people with fun jobs who are low in IQ or disabled.
History shows that innovation disperses. Initially only the rich could afford better nutrition or computers. Should we have waited before allowing people to buy a computer until they are cheap enough for eight billion people to have their own? No.
Opposing gene-editing is like opposing antibiotics because not everyone could afford penicillin in 1928.
The technology is here. Using embryo selection or gene editing to have a super baby is a choice about your body and procreation. Some people don't think you should have this choice. But *it's not their choice to make. It's yours*.6
Billionaires
Some people claim billionaires shouldn’t exist. That is wrong. I'd even go so far as to say that not wanting to be a billionaire (or trillionaire) is wrong. Ambition is a consequence of optimism. In his Davos 2024 speech Javier Milei said:
Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral
We are like billionaires to people living 5000 years ago. If some of these people did not desire immense wealth, we’d probably still live in mud huts now. We're like iron age peasants to the people that will live 2000 years from now.
Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.7
I think the disgust of the existence of billionaires likely stems from envy. But that response is wrong. What matters is not the relative, but the absolute wealth and well-being of people. In the future, inequality will become ever greater. Some people will own entire galaxies, while others will only own a continent on a single planet. Everyone will be immensely more wealthy.
Thanks for reading this. I’ll now continue playing the infinite game of capitalism.
Thanks to my friends for feedback on this essay: Tom Hyde, Milan Scharfe, Ben Chugg, Vaden Masrani, Maxime Desalle, Saketh, Jesse Ray Nichols, David Taurat, Logan Chipkin, Brian Chau, Remus
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3. The Spark, Page 61
See discussion here: https://nav.al/david-deutsch
While ideas as abstract knowledge are non-rivalrous, their application can involve rivalry over scarce complementary resources such as capital, employees, customers, or attention. In this practical sense, ideas can “compete,” but this competition is itself part of the process of error-correction and innovation.
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3, The Spark, Page 64
Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, opening sentence, 1968
Quoting my friend Kian Sadeghi in his launch video for Nucleus.
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 9, Optimism, Page 218
I recently spent a Sunday vibe coding an ai-image-gen micro-SaaS. The person that inspired me accused me of copying his product and threatened to damage my reputation. However, I improved on his idea by implementing several features his product didn’t have such as allowing for 7 multiple output styles, custom prompts, churn-prevention email follow-ups, and a landing page that better explains the product.
Most people hold fundamentally wrong ideas about morality. This includes thinking that copying business ideas or having CRISPR-edited super babies is immoral, that death is good, that the existence of billionaires is wrong, and that not helping others is immoral. They all spring from an avoidance of conflict: the conflict of ideas, the conflict of accepting not to exist, the conflict of envy, etc. This “morality” becomes destructive because it’s scared of the turning forces of evolution by evading conflict and adversity of any kind. It’s suffocating.
Morality is best explained by epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), not religion or intuition. With this lens morality is the knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for1.
The most fundamental tenet of morality is to not remove the means of error-correction2. Since error-correction is the only way our knowledge can improve.
If society hinders a scientist from inventing and distributing a cure for cancer, that is deeply immoral. Many regulations that restrict the freedom of people and their ideas are immoral.
Copying someone's business
The Samwer brothers famously copied Airbnb and other companies, but these companies provided the solution to people in different geographies or demographics, improving access to the solution.
Their Airbnb clone, Wimdu, largely failed because it was only a surface-level copy that didn’t innovate on any aspect of the business. It incentivized Airbnb to innovate on better host support, internationalization, trust infrastructure, and regulatory compliance.
Opening a lemonade stand two blocks from an existing one incentivizes both lemonade stand operators to improve their lemonade. Competition leads to innovation.
Now, why do most people believe that copying someone’s business is immoral?
I think the main reason is that people think ideas can be “stolen”. That is wrong. Ideas are non-rivalrous3. And everyone should be incentivized to reproduce them and correct their errors. Problems are solvable4, and there is an infinity of problems (people always want more). IP law is another way to incentivize people to innovate. Unfortunately, large companies like Amazon (with hundreds of people in their internal legal department working on IP law) exploit this system to prevent competition.
But isn't competition for losers?
Peter Thiel famously proclaimed this in his book Zero to One. In a demand-constrained market, this is true. Building another AI headshot app wouldn’t be a great idea if the demand for AI headshots were shrinking rapidly. It is not.
Even Founders Fund (Thiel’s venture firm) invested in companies with strong competition:
- Ramp: Launched two years after Brex; both grew quickly as financial operations digitalized.
- Spotify: Entered a crowded market (iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody) just as music streaming took off.
- Rippling: Entered HR/payroll after Gusto, ADP, and Paychex; succeeded by bundling HR, IT, and finance as businesses moved to the cloud.
- Postmates: Was started after Grubhub and Seamless, but grew fast as on-demand delivery became a habit.
- Icon.com: Was started after there were already countless AI ad generator platforms. As more people consume short-form video content and realistic AI-image and video generation becomes possible, demand for this kind of software explodes.
It would be stupid to claim these companies are immoral because they copied another business. Here are some other moral mistakes I have considered lately. They range from economics to biology to altruism.
Altruism
Helping can be immoral if it prevents people from learning to solve their own problems. It can also be immoral if the invested resources could have led to a greater error correction. Socialism, with its underlying philosophy of altruism, is the embodiment of this error. For example, the US government taxes the 343 million Americans ~$1.2 trillion per year (that’s ~$3,580 per person on avg.) to fund a public education system that is stuck in the 1800s. These people could have used the resources the state took from them to buy education services from private companies that have a clear profit incentive to improve their service. To quote my previous post, “They don’t care if the students hate school” nor if they end up in student debt.
Being immortal
Death is not the only reason that life is “precious”. There are better reasons.
The idea that the shortness of life is what gives it its “meaning” is wrong. Meaning is not zero-sum. I.e., your life doesn’t have a fixed amount of meaning that is reduced if you live longer. The opposite is true, a longer life leads to more meaningful experiences. Life is more like water when you’re thirsty than a rare diamond; its value comes from how much you can experience, not from being limited in quantity.
Life is not its own meaning. Meaning comes from the things you do and create. If your life is unbounded, so is the meaning you can create within it.
People wear seatbelts. Nobody says, “I want to get hit by a car, because my life will have more meaning if it ends sooner.” There’s nothing inherently meaningful about limitation or scarcity by itself. If that were true, a two-day life would be more meaningful than a 70-year life.
Some argue that meaningfulness of life is binary. But if knowing the exact day of your death feels terrifying, that shows that it’s not simply mortality that gives meaning, but the unpredictable and exciting adventure of living itself.
Even Christianity calls death an enemy from humanity’s fall, promising its end: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). In paradise, “death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4). It sees death as a problem to be solved, not a source of meaning.
Ultimately I think arguments that claim death is moral originated to cope with the fear of death. The thought that our existence suddenly stops. All the laughter, parties, friends, interesting conversation, sex, beautiful landscapes and skylines are suddenly taken from us, for eternity.
Nick Bostrom in his essay The Fable of the Dragon‑Tyrant calls this "deathist" ideology—the passive acceptance of what should be humanity's greatest enemy. My friend Arjun criticized other common arguments against immortality in his blog post.
Involuntary death isn’t a cosmic necessity; it’s a biological error, possibly the greatest error of all. And it’s one we may soon be able to fix. Just imagine the inventions we never experienced and how many more lives would flourish today if people like Euclid, Newton, Tesla, Marie Curie, or Alan Turing would still be alive.
CRISPER-edited Super Babies
Some people don’t like the idea of us playing God. But that is what we are now. We are as gods and might as well get good at it5.
Others claim that gene-editing super babies (to be free from disease or just smarter) would be an innovation that only the rich could afford, thereby creating a segregated society. The 1997 movie Gattaca is a dramatization of this claim.
That logic is wrong because it impedes the spread of an innovation (and error correction). The assumption that non-gene-improved people will be relegated to menial jobs is also wrong because there are many wealthy people with fun jobs who are low in IQ or disabled.
History shows that innovation disperses. Initially only the rich could afford better nutrition or computers. Should we have waited before allowing people to buy a computer until they are cheap enough for eight billion people to have their own? No.
Opposing gene-editing is like opposing antibiotics because not everyone could afford penicillin in 1928.
The technology is here. Using embryo selection or gene editing to have a super baby is a choice about your body and procreation. Some people don't think you should have this choice. But *it's not their choice to make. It's yours*.6
Billionaires
Some people claim billionaires shouldn’t exist. That is wrong. I'd even go so far as to say that not wanting to be a billionaire (or trillionaire) is wrong. Ambition is a consequence of optimism. In his Davos 2024 speech Javier Milei said:
Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral
We are like billionaires to people living 5000 years ago. If some of these people did not desire immense wealth, we’d probably still live in mud huts now. We're like iron age peasants to the people that will live 2000 years from now.
Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now.7
I think the disgust of the existence of billionaires likely stems from envy. But that response is wrong. What matters is not the relative, but the absolute wealth and well-being of people. In the future, inequality will become ever greater. Some people will own entire galaxies, while others will only own a continent on a single planet. Everyone will be immensely more wealthy.
Thanks for reading this. I’ll now continue playing the infinite game of capitalism.
Thanks to my friends for feedback on this essay: Tom Hyde, Milan Scharfe, Ben Chugg, Vaden Masrani, Maxime Desalle, Saketh, Jesse Ray Nichols, David Taurat, Logan Chipkin, Brian Chau, Remus
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3. The Spark, Page 61
See discussion here: https://nav.al/david-deutsch
While ideas as abstract knowledge are non-rivalrous, their application can involve rivalry over scarce complementary resources such as capital, employees, customers, or attention. In this practical sense, ideas can “compete,” but this competition is itself part of the process of error-correction and innovation.
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3, The Spark, Page 64
Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, opening sentence, 1968
Quoting my friend Kian Sadeghi in his launch video for Nucleus.
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 9, Optimism, Page 218. I omit the sentence’s final clause (“and you and I would be immortal”), which Deutsch corrected in the book’s errata.
Synced with latest draft: Altman line, fisherman gloss, Deutsch flowers, gap in theory.
The Epistemology and Defence of Ambition
Until about a week ago it seemed incredibly obvious to me that wanting to be rich is rational but I could not explain why. Fundamentally I agree with Popper and Deutsch that all life is problem solving. But is not having a mansion on Lake Como a problem? Is not being immortal a problem? How do we decide between these?
The lone scientist obsessed with some theoretical problem strikes most people as weird. How can someone toil for 30 years on a problem, living on a modest salary, without any desire to accumulate massive wealth? According to the simple Popperian view mentioned, that is completely rational. The scientist is fully engrossed in problem solving.
If that is true, why am I and most people so drawn to solving my problem of not having a mansion on Lake Como, driving a Bugatti hypercar, or overlooking the skyline of NYC from a Billionaires' Row apartment? Why am I so drawn to these problems? It can’t just be because they are status symbols. I’d want these things even if nobody knew about them.
I think the two reasons are:
- Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do. I can likely only experience these things with incredible wealth. They are a symbol of that repertoire. Future desires are unknowable thus attaining wealth allows me to solve problems in the future I don’t know I’ll have.
- This is the antithesis to the famous fisherman story. The story contains the assumption that the fisherman already knows the problem he wants to solve. The fisherman might want to travel the world, build a school, research AI, explore space.
- Imagine a person 1000 years ago. They might only want better food, safer shelter, a healthy family, or perhaps a larger farm. But if they knew these things existed, they would desire flying across the Atlantic, playing table tennis, or listening to recorded music.
- There are clear limits to this theory. Just because I’m a septillionaire it does not give me a cure for cancer. The fundamental limitation remains the knowledge.
- Beauty is accumulated knowledge. These experiences—the lake mansion, the hypercar, the best view of the most beautiful skyline humanity has forged—are objects of incredible beauty. They are products of accumulated human knowledge. So desiring beauty is a form of desire to experience knowledge.
So how ambitious should you be? In the startup world there is this famous saying that “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do.” So why not pick the bigger problem, since if you solve it society will reward you accordingly. Or should you only be guided by curiosity; as that drive likely carries some latent knowledge about what society wants? I don’t know. I suspect it is best to follow a mix of these strategies. Whatever the right mix is, I don't think ambition has a ceiling.
Alexandr Wang recently said “Humans will dream bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems.” I think that is true. And one day kids will dream of owning several galaxies. We don't yet know what we'd want after that. Human dreams, desire, and our future are infinite.
The Epistemology and Defence of Ambition
Until about a week ago it seemed incredibly obvious to me that wanting to be rich is rational but I could not explain why. Fundamentally I agree with Popper and Deutsch that all life is problem solving. But is not having a mansion on Lake Como a problem? Is not being immortal a problem? How do we decide between these?
The lone scientist obsessed with some theoretical problem strikes most people as weird. How can someone toil for 30 years on a problem, living on a modest salary, without any desire to accumulate massive wealth? According to the Popperian view above, that is completely rational. The scientist is fully engrossed in problem solving.
If that is true, why am I and most people so drawn to solving my problem of not having a mansion on Lake Como, driving a Bugatti hypercar, or overlooking the skyline of NYC from a Billionaires’ Row apartment? Status plays a part, but I think I’d want these things even if nobody knew about them.
I think the two reasons are:
- Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do. I can likely only experience these things with incredible wealth. They are a symbol of that repertoire. Some of my desires I know already, like the mansion. Most I don’t know yet. Future desires are unknowable, thus attaining wealth allows me to solve problems in the future I don’t know I’ll have.
- This is the antithesis to the famous fisherman story (a businessman advises a fisherman to scale up his business so he can retire and fish). The story contains the assumption that the fisherman already knows the problem he wants to solve. The fisherman might want to travel the world, build a school, research AI, explore space.
- Imagine a person 1000 years ago. They might only want better food, safer shelter, a healthy family, or perhaps a larger farm. But if they knew these things existed, they would desire flying across the Atlantic, playing table tennis, or listening to recorded music.
- There are clear limits to this theory. Just because I’m a septillionaire doesn’t mean I get a cure for cancer. The fundamental limitation remains the knowledge.
- Beauty is accumulated knowledge. These experiences—the lake mansion, the hypercar, the best view of the most beautiful skyline humanity has forged—are objects of incredible beauty. They are products of accumulated human knowledge. So desiring beauty is a form of desire to experience knowledge. Deutsch’s example is flowers: they evolved to attract insects, yet we find them beautiful too.
So how ambitious should you be? In the startup world there is this famous saying that “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do.” So why not solve the problem people pay the most for? Or should you only be guided by curiosity, as that drive likely carries some latent knowledge about what society wants or where the most interesting gaps are? I don’t know. This is a gap in my theory, and I’d love for someone to fill it. I suspect it is best to follow a mix of these strategies. Whatever the right mix is, I don’t think ambition has a ceiling.
Alexandr Wang recently said “Humans will dream bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems.” I think that is true. And one day kids will dream of owning several galaxies. We don’t yet know what we’d want after that. Human dreams, desire, and our future are infinite.
Updated to the current Substack version; fixes the copyedits. Open: #1673 (erratum) and #1678 (title).
Elaboration:
I recently spent a Sunday vibe coding an ai image-gen micro-SaaS. The person that inspired me accused me of copying his product and threatened me to damage my reputation. However, I improved on his idea by implementing several features his product didn’t have such as allowing for multiple output styles and a landing page that better explained the product.
Most people hold fundamentally wrong ideas about morality. This includes those that copying business ideas is moral, that death is moral, that the existence of billionaires is wrong, and that not helping others is immoral.
Morality is the knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for.
The most fundamental tenant of morality is to not remove the means of problem-solving and error correction. If society hinders a scientist from inventing and distributing a cure for cancer that is deeply immoral. Many regulations that restrict the freedom of people are immoral.
Copying someone's business
The Samwer brothers famously copied Airbnb and other companies, but these companies provided the solution to people in different geographies or demographics, improving access to the solution.
Their Airbnb clone, Wimdu largely failed because it was only a surface level copy that didn’t innovate on any aspect of the business. It incentivized Airbnb to innovate on better host support, internationalization, trust infrastructure, and regulatory compliance.
Opening a lemonade stand two blocks from an existing one incentivizes both lemonade stand operators to improve their lemonade. Competition leads to innovation and holding back innovation is immoral.
I think it’s interesting to ponder how this wrong moral belief originated. Why do most people believe that copying someone’s business is immoral?
I think the main reason is that people think ideas can be “stolen”. That is wrong. Ideas are non-rivalrous. And everyone should be incentivized to reproduce them and correct their errors. Problems are solvable and there is an infinity of problems (people always want more). IP law is another way to incentivize people to innovate. However, large companies like Amazon (with hundreds of people in their internal legal department working on IP law) are exploiting this system to prevent competition.
Competition is not always for losers
But isn't competition for losers? (Peter Thiel famously proclaimed this in his book Zero to One). In a demand constrained market—yes. Building another AI headshot app wouldn’t be a great idea if the demand for AI headshots would be shrinking rapidly. It is not.
Even Founders Fund (Thiel’s venture firm) invested in companies with strong competition:
* Ramp: Launched two years after Brex; both grew quickly as financial operations digitalized.
* Spotify: Entered a crowded market (iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody) just as music streaming took off.
* Rippling: Entered HR/payroll after Gusto, ADP, and Paychex; succeeded by bundling HR, IT, and finance as businesses moved to the cloud.
* Postmates: Was started after Grubhub and Seamless, but grew fast as on-demand delivery became a habit.
* Icon.com: Was started after there were already countless AI ad generator platforms. As more people consume short-form video content and realistic AI image and video generation becomes possible demand for this kind of software is exploding.
It would be stupid to claim these companies are immoral because they copied another business.
Helping others
Helping can be immoral if it prevents people from learning to solve their own problem. It can also be immoral if the invested resources could have led to a greater error correction. Socialism is the embodiment of this error. For example, taxing the 343 million Americans ~$1.2 trillion per year (that’s ~$3,580 per person on avg.) to fund a public education system that is stuck in the 1800s. These people could have used the resources the state took from them to buy education services from private companies that have a clear profit incentive to improve their service. To quote myself, “They don’t care if the students hate school” nor if they end up in student debt.
Being immortal
Everyone has heard bad arguments about death being good. Such as death being the only reason that life is “precious” (there are other great reasons). Ultimately I think these originated to cope with the fear of death. My friend Arjun explained this further in his blog post.
Wanting to be a billionaire
Some people claim that the fact that billionaires exist is immoral. That is wrong. I'd even go so far to say not wanting to be a billionaire is wrong. Ambition is a consequence of optimism.
Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral
—Javier Milei
We are like billionaires to people living 2000 years ago. If some of these people did not desire immense wealth we’d probably still live in mud huts now. We're like iron age peasants to the people that will live 2000 years from now.
Similarly, it’s likely that because certain people prevented the means of error correction through history we are not immortal and exploring the stars by now.
Thanks for reading this. I’ll now continue playing the infinite game of capitalism.
I recently spent a Sunday vibe coding an ai-image-gen micro-SaaS. The person that inspired me accused me of copying his product and threatened to damage my reputation. However, I improved on his idea by implementing several features his product didn’t have such as allowing for 7 multiple output styles, custom prompts, churn-prevention email follow-ups, and a landing page that better explains the product.
Most people hold fundamentally wrong ideas about morality. This includes thinking that copying business ideas or having CRISPR-edited super babies is immoral, that death is good, that the existence of billionaires is wrong, and that not helping others is immoral. They all spring from an avoidance of conflict: the conflict of ideas, the conflict of accepting not to exist, the conflict of envy, etc. This “morality” becomes destructive because it’s scared of the turning forces of evolution by evading conflict and adversity of any kind. It’s suffocating.
Morality is best explained by epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), not religion or intuition. With this lens morality is the knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for1.
The most fundamental tenet of morality is to not remove the means of error-correction2. Since error-correction is the only way our knowledge can improve.
If society hinders a scientist from inventing and distributing a cure for cancer, that is deeply immoral. Many regulations that restrict the freedom of people and their ideas are immoral.
Copying someone's business
The Samwer brothers famously copied Airbnb and other companies, but these companies provided the solution to people in different geographies or demographics, improving access to the solution.
Their Airbnb clone, Wimdu, largely failed because it was only a surface-level copy that didn’t innovate on any aspect of the business. It incentivized Airbnb to innovate on better host support, internationalization, trust infrastructure, and regulatory compliance.
Opening a lemonade stand two blocks from an existing one incentivizes both lemonade stand operators to improve their lemonade. Competition leads to innovation.
Now, why do most people believe that copying someone’s business is immoral?
I think the main reason is that people think ideas can be “stolen”. That is wrong. Ideas are non-rivalrous3. And everyone should be incentivized to reproduce them and correct their errors. Problems are solvable4, and there is an infinity of problems (people always want more). IP law is another way to incentivize people to innovate. Unfortunately, large companies like Amazon (with hundreds of people in their internal legal department working on IP law) exploit this system to prevent competition.
But isn't competition for losers?
Peter Thiel famously proclaimed this in his book Zero to One. In a demand-constrained market, this is true. Building another AI headshot app wouldn’t be a great idea if the demand for AI headshots were shrinking rapidly. It is not.
Even Founders Fund (Thiel’s venture firm) invested in companies with strong competition:
- Ramp: Launched two years after Brex; both grew quickly as financial operations digitalized.
- Spotify: Entered a crowded market (iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody) just as music streaming took off.
- Rippling: Entered HR/payroll after Gusto, ADP, and Paychex; succeeded by bundling HR, IT, and finance as businesses moved to the cloud.
- Postmates: Was started after Grubhub and Seamless, but grew fast as on-demand delivery became a habit.
- Icon.com: Was started after there were already countless AI ad generator platforms. As more people consume short-form video content and realistic AI-image and video generation becomes possible, demand for this kind of software explodes.
It would be stupid to claim these companies are immoral because they copied another business. Here are some other moral mistakes I have considered lately. They range from economics to biology to altruism.
Altruism
Helping can be immoral if it prevents people from learning to solve their own problems. It can also be immoral if the invested resources could have led to a greater error correction. Socialism, with its underlying philosophy of altruism, is the embodiment of this error. For example, the US government taxes the 343 million Americans ~$1.2 trillion per year (that’s ~$3,580 per person on avg.) to fund a public education system that is stuck in the 1800s. These people could have used the resources the state took from them to buy education services from private companies that have a clear profit incentive to improve their service. To quote my previous post, “They don’t care if the students hate school” nor if they end up in student debt.
Being immortal
Death is not the only reason that life is “precious”. There are better reasons.
The idea that the shortness of life is what gives it its “meaning” is wrong. Meaning is not zero-sum. I.e., your life doesn’t have a fixed amount of meaning that is reduced if you live longer. The opposite is true, a longer life leads to more meaningful experiences. Life is more like water when you’re thirsty than a rare diamond; its value comes from how much you can experience, not from being limited in quantity.
Life is not its own meaning. Meaning comes from the things you do and create. If your life is unbounded, so is the meaning you can create within it.
People wear seatbelts. Nobody says, “I want to get hit by a car, because my life will have more meaning if it ends sooner.” There’s nothing inherently meaningful about limitation or scarcity by itself. If that were true, a two-day life would be more meaningful than a 70-year life.
Some argue that meaningfulness of life is binary. But if knowing the exact day of your death feels terrifying, that shows that it’s not simply mortality that gives meaning, but the unpredictable and exciting adventure of living itself.
Even Christianity calls death an enemy from humanity’s fall, promising its end: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). In paradise, “death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4). It sees death as a problem to be solved, not a source of meaning.
Ultimately I think arguments that claim death is moral originated to cope with the fear of death. The thought that our existence suddenly stops. All the laughter, parties, friends, interesting conversation, sex, beautiful landscapes and skylines are suddenly taken from us, for eternity.
Nick Bostrom in his essay The Fable of the Dragon‑Tyrant calls this "deathist" ideology—the passive acceptance of what should be humanity's greatest enemy. My friend Arjun criticized other common arguments against immortality in his blog post.
Involuntary death isn’t a cosmic necessity; it’s a biological error, possibly the greatest error of all. And it’s one we may soon be able to fix. Just imagine the inventions we never experienced and how many more lives would flourish today if people like Euclid, Newton, Tesla, Marie Curie, or Alan Turing would still be alive.
CRISPER-edited Super Babies
Some people don’t like the idea of us playing God. But that is what we are now. We are as gods and might as well get good at it5.
Others claim that gene-editing super babies (to be free from disease or just smarter) would be an innovation that only the rich could afford, thereby creating a segregated society. The 1997 movie Gattaca is a dramatization of this claim.
That logic is wrong because it impedes the spread of an innovation (and error correction). The assumption that non-gene-improved people will be relegated to menial jobs is also wrong because there are many wealthy people with fun jobs who are low in IQ or disabled.
History shows that innovation disperses. Initially only the rich could afford better nutrition or computers. Should we have waited before allowing people to buy a computer until they are cheap enough for eight billion people to have their own? No.
Opposing gene-editing is like opposing antibiotics because not everyone could afford penicillin in 1928.
The technology is here. Using embryo selection or gene editing to have a super baby is a choice about your body and procreation. Some people don't think you should have this choice. But *it's not their choice to make. It's yours*.6
Billionaires
Some people claim billionaires shouldn’t exist. That is wrong. I'd even go so far as to say that not wanting to be a billionaire (or trillionaire) is wrong. Ambition is a consequence of optimism. In his Davos 2024 speech Javier Milei said:
Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral
We are like billionaires to people living 5000 years ago. If some of these people did not desire immense wealth, we’d probably still live in mud huts now. We're like iron age peasants to the people that will live 2000 years from now.
Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.7
I think the disgust of the existence of billionaires likely stems from envy. But that response is wrong. What matters is not the relative, but the absolute wealth and well-being of people. In the future, inequality will become ever greater. Some people will own entire galaxies, while others will only own a continent on a single planet. Everyone will be immensely more wealthy.
Thanks for reading this. I’ll now continue playing the infinite game of capitalism.
Thanks to my friends for feedback on this essay: Tom Hyde, Milan Scharfe, Ben Chugg, Vaden Masrani, Maxime Desalle, Saketh, Jesse Ray Nichols, David Taurat, Logan Chipkin, Brian Chau, Remus
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3. The Spark, Page 61
See discussion here: https://nav.al/david-deutsch
While ideas as abstract knowledge are non-rivalrous, their application can involve rivalry over scarce complementary resources such as capital, employees, customers, or attention. In this practical sense, ideas can “compete,” but this competition is itself part of the process of error-correction and innovation.
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3, The Spark, Page 64
Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, opening sentence, 1968
Quoting my friend Kian Sadeghi in his launch video for Nucleus.
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 9, Optimism, Page 218
The Epistemology and Defence of Ambition
Until about a week ago it seemed incredibly obvious to me that wanting to be rich is rational but I could not explain why. Fundamentally I agree with Popper and Deutsch that all life is problem solving. But is not having a mansion on Lake Como a problem? Is not being immortal a problem? How do we decide between these?
The lone scientist obsessed with some theoretical problem strikes most people as weird. How can someone toil for 30 years on a problem, living on a modest salary, without any desire to accumulate massive wealth? According to the simple Popperian view mentioned, that is completely rational. The scientist is fully engrossed in problem solving.
If that is true, why am I and most people so drawn to solving my problem of not having a mansion on Lake Como, driving a Bugatti hypercar, or overlooking the skyline of NYC from a Billionaires' Row apartment? Why am I so drawn to these problems? It can’t just be because they are status symbols. I’d want these things even if nobody knew about them.
I think the two reasons are:
- Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do. I can likely only experience these things with incredible wealth. They are a symbol of that repertoire. Future desires are unknowable thus attaining wealth allows me to solve problems in the future I don’t know I’ll have.
- This is the antithesis to the famous fisherman story. The story contains the assumption that the fisherman already knows the problem he wants to solve. The fisherman might want to travel the world, build a school, research AI, explore space.
- Imagine a person 1000 years ago. They might only want better food, safer shelter, a healthy family, or perhaps a larger farm. But if they knew these things existed, they would desire flying across the Atlantic, playing table tennis, or listening to recorded music.
- There are clear limits to this theory. Just because I’m a septillionaire it does not give me a cure for cancer. The fundamental limitation remains the knowledge.
- Beauty is accumulated knowledge. These experiences—the lake mansion, the hypercar, the best view of the most beautiful skyline humanity has forged—are objects of incredible beauty. They are products of accumulated human knowledge. So desiring beauty is a form of desire to experience knowledge.
So how ambitious should you be? In the startup world there is this famous saying that “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do.” So why not pick the bigger problem, since if you solve it society will reward you accordingly. Or should you only be guided by curiosity; as that drive likely carries some latent knowledge about what society wants? I don’t know. I suspect it is best to follow a mix of these strategies. Whatever the right mix is, I don't think ambition has a ceiling.
Alexandr Wang recently said “Humans will dream bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems.” I think that is true. And one day kids will dream of owning several galaxies. We don't yet know what we'd want after that. Human dreams, desire, and our future are infinite.
#5750·Zelalem Mekonnen, 15 days agoThis works if the tests are identical. What happens if idea A passes test 1 but fails test 2, while idea B passes test 2 but fails test 1?
Good q. I think it would depend on the tests. For example, idea C could say: ‘Both A and B fail a test, but test 1 is more severe than test 2, so A is preferable.’
We have different degrees of awareness during different dreams, I agree. But we’re aware of them. With higher critical ability, we plausibly get lucid dreaming – lower instead means passive observation.
It’s like watching a movie. I have no control over what happens in the movie, still I’m consciously aware of it. I could instead play a video game, where I do have some control over what happens, and which arguably requires more of a critical attitude. I don’t see how this refutes my stance.
We have different degrees of awareness during different dreams, I agree. But we’re aware of them. With higher critical ability, we plausibly have more control over a dream – lower instead means passive observation.
It’s like watching a movie. I have no control over what happens in the movie, still I’m consciously aware of it. I could instead play a video game, where I do have some control over what happens, and which arguably requires more of a critical attitude. I don’t see how this refutes my stance.
#5690·Dennis Hackethal, 19 days agoWe have different degrees of awareness during different dreams, I agree. But we’re aware of them. With higher critical ability, we plausibly get lucid dreaming – lower instead means passive observation.
It’s like watching a movie. I have no control over what happens in the movie, still I’m consciously aware of it. I could instead play a video game, where I do have some control over what happens, and which arguably requires more of a critical attitude. I don’t see how this refutes my stance.
Vincent is right that lucid dreaming is about having knowledge that one is dreaming. I was under the mistaken impression that lucid dreams are about control, but that’s not the case:
… a lucid dream is a type of dream wherein the dreamer knows that they are dreaming while in their dream.
#5737·Vincent Brunsch, 16 days ago·AI-assistedI don’t think the movie/video-game analogy captures what I find interesting about dreaming here, because it seems to put phenomenal awareness, meta-awareness and control on a single scale of “critical ability”.
These capacities can dissociate: In an ordinary non-lucid dream there can already be vivid phenomenal experience without awareness that one is dreaming. Lucidity adds that meta-awareness, but does not necessarily add control (lucid dreams can themselves occur with or without substantial control over what happens).
So rather than a simple progression from passive/uncritical to active/critical, dreaming seems to give us different combinations of phenomenal experience, meta-awareness and control.
That is precisely why I think it provides some evidence that phenomenal experience is not tightly bound to the other capacities.
… without awareness that one is dreaming.
I can be unaware that I’m dreaming but still be aware of the dream itself. Just like I can be unaware that someone’s utterances are lies but still aware of their utterances. The word ‘aware’ has more to do with knowledge here than with consciousness.
… because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.
I don’t think that’s right. There could be animal behavior I’d have serious trouble explaining.
People asked me about this at Conjecture Con. For example, if we took an animal out of the context in which it evolved, and put it in a new context it didn’t evolve for – that’s where animals bug out – but instead of bugging out, it behaved more like a human in an unknown situation and became reflective, actually seemed to understand what was going on, that would at least give me pause.
I can’t be more specific than that because it would depend in part on new knowledge the animal would have to create in that situation, and by definition I can’t predict new knowledge. But I’d know it when I see it.
That may not be completely satisfying, but it shows that it’s simply not true that any animal behavior “could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.”
To be as specific as I can though, video 15 in my series on animals and sleepwalkers shows the kind of thing I mean. The woman in the video is asleep while talking to her husband for most of the video, but toward the end she wakes up, and there’s something different in her eyes and about her attitude and responses. It’s hard to put into words, but again you know it when you see it.
… because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.
I don’t think that’s right. There could be animal behavior I’d have serious trouble explaining.
People asked me about this at Conjecture Con. For example, if we took an animal out of the context in which it evolved, and put it in a new context it didn’t evolve for – that’s where animals bug out – but instead of bugging out, it behaved more like a human in an unknown situation and became reflective, actually seemed to understand what was going on, that would at least give me pause.
I can’t be more specific than that because it would depend in part on new knowledge the animal would have to create in that situation, and by definition I can’t predict new knowledge. But I’d know it when I see it.
That may not be completely satisfying, but it shows that it’s simply not true that any animal behavior “could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.” (Or rather, the implication that I could always explain any animal behavior away.)
To be as specific as I can though, video 15 in my series on animals and sleepwalkers shows the kind of thing I mean. The woman in the video is asleep while talking to her husband for most of the video, but toward the end she wakes up, and there’s something different in her eyes and about her attitude and responses. It’s hard to put into words, but again you know it when you see it.
Give video example of behavior
… because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.
I don’t think that’s right. There could be animal behavior I’d have serious trouble explaining.
People asked me about this at Conjecture Con. For example, if we took an animal out of the context in which it evolved, and put it in a new context it didn’t evolve for – that’s where animals bug out – but instead of bugging out, it behaved more like a human in an unknown situation and became reflective, actually seemed to understand what was going on, that would at least give me pause.
I can’t be more specific than that because it would depend in part on new knowledge the animal would have to create in that situation, and by definition I can’t predict new knowledge. But I’d know it when I see it.
That may not be completely satisfying, but it shows that it’s simply not true that any animal behavior “could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.”
… because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.
I don’t think that’s right. There could be animal behavior I’d have serious trouble explaining.
People asked me about this at Conjecture Con. For example, if we took an animal out of the context in which it evolved, and put it in a new context it didn’t evolve for – that’s where animals bug out – but instead of bugging out, it behaved more like a human in an unknown situation and became reflective, actually seemed to understand what was going on, that would at least give me pause.
I can’t be more specific than that because it would depend in part on new knowledge the animal would have to create in that situation, and by definition I can’t predict new knowledge. But I’d know it when I see it.
That may not be completely satisfying, but it shows that it’s simply not true that any animal behavior “could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.”
To be as specific as I can though, video 15 in my series on animals and sleepwalkers shows the kind of thing I mean. The woman in the video is asleep while talking to her husband for most of the video, but toward the end she wakes up, and there’s something different in her eyes and about her attitude and responses. It’s hard to put into words, but again you know it when you see it.
#5745·Vincent Brunsch, 16 days ago·AI-assistedThe evidential standard seems asymmetric.
You have said that there ultimately cannot be a purely behavioral criterion for consciousness, because what matters is an explanation of the underlying program (#5693). But at the same time, apparently rigid or “blatantly robotic” behavior is allowed to count as evidence against consciousness.
In the other direction, apparently flexible, sophisticated or sentient-like animal behavior does not seem able to count correspondingly in favor of consciousness, because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.
If behavior alone cannot establish sentience because we need to understand the underlying processing, I don’t see why apparently robotic behavior should by itself count more readily toward insentience. Unless there is already an independent reason to think phenomenal experience requires universal creativity, the evidential standard seems to favor insentience in advance.
… the evidential standard seems to favor insentience in advance.
As I noted elsewhere, you seem to be using some other epistemology, unlike Popper’s/Veritula’s. You could make it explicit in a separate discussion and then maybe continue here later. Until then, we may well reach an impasse in the animal discussion. Veritula doesn’t have a way to reflect impasses; in the meantime, it may not show the adoptability of ideas the right way.
#5745·Vincent Brunsch, 16 days ago·AI-assistedThe evidential standard seems asymmetric.
You have said that there ultimately cannot be a purely behavioral criterion for consciousness, because what matters is an explanation of the underlying program (#5693). But at the same time, apparently rigid or “blatantly robotic” behavior is allowed to count as evidence against consciousness.
In the other direction, apparently flexible, sophisticated or sentient-like animal behavior does not seem able to count correspondingly in favor of consciousness, because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.
If behavior alone cannot establish sentience because we need to understand the underlying processing, I don’t see why apparently robotic behavior should by itself count more readily toward insentience. Unless there is already an independent reason to think phenomenal experience requires universal creativity, the evidential standard seems to favor insentience in advance.
… because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.
I don’t think that’s right. There could be animal behavior I’d have serious trouble explaining.
People asked me about this at Conjecture Con. For example, if we took an animal out of the context in which it evolved, and put it in a new context it didn’t evolve for – that’s where animals bug out – but instead of bugging out, it behaved more like a human in an unknown situation and became reflective, actually seemed to understand what was going on, that would at least give me pause.
I can’t be more specific than that because it would depend in part on new knowledge the animal would have to create in that situation, and by definition I can’t predict new knowledge. But I’d know it when I see it.
That may not be completely satisfying, but it shows that it’s simply not true that any animal behavior “could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.”
#5745·Vincent Brunsch, 16 days ago·AI-assistedThe evidential standard seems asymmetric.
You have said that there ultimately cannot be a purely behavioral criterion for consciousness, because what matters is an explanation of the underlying program (#5693). But at the same time, apparently rigid or “blatantly robotic” behavior is allowed to count as evidence against consciousness.
In the other direction, apparently flexible, sophisticated or sentient-like animal behavior does not seem able to count correspondingly in favor of consciousness, because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.
If behavior alone cannot establish sentience because we need to understand the underlying processing, I don’t see why apparently robotic behavior should by itself count more readily toward insentience. Unless there is already an independent reason to think phenomenal experience requires universal creativity, the evidential standard seems to favor insentience in advance.
But at the same time, apparently rigid or “blatantly robotic” behavior is allowed to count as evidence against consciousness.
I think animals are so blatantly mindless and stupid, like so far off the charts, that it counts for something. I’d bet money that you use the same standard for a Tesla bot or a Roomba, even though neither of us has a working theory of consciousness.
#5744·Vincent Brunsch, 16 days ago·AI-assistedI agree that this is not “learning” in the special Deutschian sense of universal knowledge creation. I was using “learning” in the ordinary biological sense of experience-dependent changes in processing and behavior.
In fact, the passage you link makes that distinction explicitly: Deutsch allows that the robot’s useful change can be called learning, while denying that it constitutes genuine creation of new knowledge.
That distinction is actually part of my point. I’m not claiming continuity in universal creativity between humans and other animals. I’m pointing to continuity in the older, non-universal capacities (such as sensory, nociceptive, affective and ordinary learning processes). Whether those processes can support phenomenal experience is precisely what is under discussion.
Ok but whether systems unrelated to learning in the Deutschian sense have continuity doesn’t seem to matter then.
The evolution of feathers has continuity in birds. So what? How does that matter for consciousness?
#5743·Vincent Brunsch, 16 days ago·AI-assistedI also wonder whether your note here should be a criticism rather than a comment. As I understand Veritula, an outstanding criticism makes the parent idea problematic and therefore not rationally adoptable, whereas comments are neutral.
A suggestion that an idea could be phrased more simply seems like a useful comment, but unless the wording actually makes the content of the claim ambiguous or substantively defective, I don’t see why it should count as a reason to reject the idea itself.
Criticisms target ideas as written. That includes grammar, typos, complexity/simplicity, etc.