Dennis Hackethal

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.

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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

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1. The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3. The Spark, Page 61

2. See discussion here: https://nav.al/david-deutsch

3. 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.

4. The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3, The Spark, Page 64

5. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, opening sentence, 1968

6. Quoting my friend Kian Sadeghi in his launch video for Nucleus.

7. 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.

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#5954·​Moritz WallawitschOP revised 7 days ago

That all makes sense to me, thanks. But there is a cost: my previous badges were removed which means that my contributions would have stayed limited to 3 per day if I understand the rules correctly. This should change of course, now, that I do not use AI for responses, so I should be fine in the log run, but my friend, who would then disclose that he uses AI for all his discussions, would never be able to submit more than 3 ideas per day, and would also never be able to join more than one discussion per week because none of his responses would count towards earning the necessary badges https://veritula.com/badges.

My criticism goes deeper though: I really think that there is a case to make that for the goal you describe, to find a bit of truth (or maybe just the current best explanation), it is actually better to use AI, simply because we can spend less time correcting bad faith, misunderstandings, unclear language etc. (Also, one might just say "well, so it takes a bit more time, no problem" - but it's more complicated, because bad faith is often provoking emotions etc which often ends debates before finding a bit more truth)
In our sample discussion about animal consciousness, if I would correct for the "too long" and "not simple enough", I think it would be helpful. But of course, now that I know that you don't appreciate it and since you are currently the only one responding, I will gladly follow your wish not to use it.

I guess, the point I'm trying to make is really that it should not be coming with any form of punishment (like that this does not count for badges) IF the AI assist is clearly done in good faith.

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#5985·​Vincent Brunsch, 5 days ago

That all makes sense to me, thanks. But there is a cost: my previous badges were removed which means that my contributions would have stayed limited to 3 per day if I understand the rules correctly. This should change of course, now, that I do not use AI for responses, so I should be fine in the log run, but my friend, who would then disclose that he uses AI for all his discussions, would never be able to submit more than 3 ideas per day, and would also never be able to join more than one discussion per week because none of his responses would count towards earning the necessary badges https://veritula.com/badges.

My criticism goes deeper though: I really think that there is a case to make that for the goal you describe, to find a bit of truth (or maybe just the current best explanation), it is actually better to use AI, simply because we can spend less time correcting bad faith, misunderstandings, unclear language etc. (Also, one might just say "well, so it takes a bit more time, no problem" - but it's more complicated, because bad faith is often provoking emotions etc which often ends debates before finding a bit more truth)
In our sample discussion about animal consciousness, if I would correct for the "too long" and "not simple enough", I think it would be helpful. But of course, now that I know that you don't appreciate it and since you are currently the only one responding, I will gladly follow your wish not to use it.

I guess, the point I'm trying to make is really that it should not be coming with any form of punishment (like that this does not count for badges) IF the AI assist is clearly done in good faith.

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#5985·​Vincent Brunsch, 5 days ago

I’m not using AI for this response and will not do so moving forward on Veritula to respect the rules and what seems to be the sentiment behind these rules (unless they change). My criticism is made in good faith and I will try to be especially careful not to make an unwanted mistake in this regard, because usually I would ask AI to check my wording for that.

I’ve been told by someone here that they preferred to talk to a person, not to an AI. This argument is understandable when there is no effort or no thinking involved by the human who uses the AI, or even worse, when the argument is not even looked at and just fed into an LLM to produce some counter, which is disrespectful, does not honor the time, effort and good faith of the other, and why the idea of a meat proxy and the criticism regarding that behavior makes sense. However, in my opinion, AI-assisted can mean many different things, some of which should be encouraged, not restricted or even punished.

Here are two examples that come to mind:

1. My English is not great but the English from a Spanish friend of mine is considerably worse, and I wonder if I should tell him about this platform, because he would usually use AI to polish his English. Instead, of course, he could use Spanish and then let it be translated. I understand this would probably be possible under the current rules but I’m not entirely sure. If it is, would it also be allowed for him to use a tool that makes it sound not like a literal translation, if he still understands afterwards what is being said? An AI assist here seems helpful for everyone involved.

2. All my contributions on this platform before this post have been AI-assisted in part exactly because I wanted to be as respectful of my counterpart’s time and effort (and those of any observers) as possible: I am aware that we sometimes can misunderstand the other’s position or use rhetorical moves without noticing it. So I would send the conversation we have had so far to the AI, share my thoughts on how I understand it and want to proceed, ask it to steelman the other side’s view, and see if its response would help me. It would then be a back and forth where I would try to figure out for myself if I should really change my mind on this or, if not, how exactly I want to respond to the steelmanned version to make my point clear. Now, as a result here I got the criticism that the language should be simpler and the arguments shorter, which is great feedback! I would incorporate that for the future, and any other criticism that I agree would make it better for the discussion. This would then be the current best version I have to offer, but yes, it’s with the use of an AI tool instead of me going out to talk with some philosopher friends about the latest criticism, taking notes, and then have some other friend check my final version for rhetorical moves, clarity, simplicity and shortness before posting it here.

In general, one question in my mind is how future proof this kind of rule is - if we merge more with the tools around us, if they are more integrated in us, would it still not be wanted to use them if done in good faith?

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#5974·​Vincent Brunsch, 5 days ago

I think what you actually care about is whether the ideas in the content were generated by AI. Whether the text was written or edited by AI should not be a concern. Therefore, I suggest the checkbox should read: "Were the core ideas of this submission generated by AI?"

Asking whether the text was written by AI is equivalent to asking a musician whether they used Ableton (music software) or only analog instruments.

#5975·​Moritz Wallawitsch, 5 days ago

How is this a criticism? My point was not about preventing long discussions but that we don't need to ai-summarize ideas that are already super concise.

#5978·​Moritz Wallawitsch, 5 days ago

 It responds live as you make changes to your code

This seems useful only for small codebases. If the music is composed of all the code in a large codebase, each PR would change only a small subset, making the difference in the music almost inaudible.

#5976·​Moritz Wallawitsch, 5 days ago

Yes, I think you misunderstood. I've been referring to continuity in the organization of information processing, not the physical substrate. Evolutionary continuity is relevant because humans and other animals share many mechanisms and processing structures, some of which may be relevant to sentience. That doesn't imply that evolution couldn't also produce fundamentally new cognitive capacities.

#5969·​Vincent Brunsch, 6 days ago·​AI-assisted

I think you're still missing the distinction I've made. Initially, you invoked substrate independence as though it contradicted my argument, but I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.

As Tegmark explains in the article you linked, it's the organization of information processing that matters, not the material implementing it. And that's exactly what I've been talking about: humans and other animals share evolved mechanisms with significant continuity in how information processing is organized.

Your MacBook analogy doesn't address that. In fact, if a future MacBook became sentient, it would be very interesting to investigate its predecessors (probably) ONLY if they shared a sufficiently similar organization of information processing. If, instead, sentience arose through a fundamentally different program, those predecessors would be much less plausible candidates for sentience.

So when you conclude that it would be about software rather than hardware, you're arguing against a claim I never made.

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#5965·​Vincent Brunsch, 7 days ago·​AI-assisted

I think you're still missing the distinction I've made. Initially, you invoked substrate independence as though it contradicted my argument, but I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.

As Tegmark explains in the article you linked, it's the organization of information processing that matters, not the material implementing it. And that's exactly what I've been talking about: humans and other animals share evolved mechanisms with significant continuity in how information processing is organized.

Your MacBook analogy doesn't address that. In fact, if a future MacBook became sentient, it would be very interesting to investigate its predecessors (probably) ONLY if they shared a sufficiently similar organization of information processing. If, instead, sentience arose through a fundamentally different program, those predecessors would be much less plausible candidates for sentience.

So when you conclude that it would be about software rather than hardware, you're arguing against a claim I never made.

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#5965·​Vincent Brunsch, 7 days ago·​AI-assisted

I think you're still missing the distinction I've made. Initially, you invoked substrate independence as though it contradicted my argument, but I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.

As Tegmark explains in the article you linked, it's the organization of information processing that matters, not the material implementing it. And that's exactly what I've been talking about: humans and other animals share evolved mechanisms with significant continuity in how information processing is organized.

Your MacBook analogy doesn't address that. In fact, if a future MacBook became sentient, it would be very interesting to investigate its predecessors (probably) ONLY if they shared a sufficiently similar organization of information processing. If, instead, sentience arose through a fundamentally different program, those predecessors would be much less plausible candidates for sentience.

So when you conclude that it would be about software rather than hardware, you're arguing against a claim I never made.

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#5965·​Vincent Brunsch, 7 days ago·​AI-assisted

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.

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#5958·​Vincent Brunsch, 7 days ago·​AI-assisted

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.

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#5958·​Vincent Brunsch, 7 days ago·​AI-assisted

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.

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#5958·​Vincent Brunsch, 7 days ago·​AI-assisted

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.

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#5958·​Vincent Brunsch, 7 days ago·​AI-assisted

Fixed. The discussion title now uses title case: ‘Immortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas Is Not Immoral’.

#5956·​Moritz WallawitschOP, 7 days ago·​AI-assisted

This 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?

#5750·​Zelalem Mekonnen, 19 days ago

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.

#5690·​Dennis Hackethal, 23 days ago

I 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.

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#5737·​Vincent Brunsch, 20 days ago·​AI-assisted

The 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.

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#5745·​Vincent Brunsch, 20 days ago·​AI-assisted