Life 3.0

Utilitarianism: Positive conscious experiences should be maximized and suffering should be minimized. • Diversity: A diverse set of positive experiences is better than many repetitions of the same experience, even if the latter has been identified as the most positive experience possible. • Autonomy: Conscious entities/societies should have the fre

Santa Cruz, and as the California Sun set over the Pacific, we enjoyed dinner with our old friend Anthony Aguirre and persuaded him to join forces with us. He’s not only one of the wisest and most idealistic people I know, but also someone who’s managed to put up with running another nonprofit organization, the Foundational Questions Institute (see

As soon as we consider a wider range of conscious entities with varying degrees of capability and power, we face tricky trade-offs between protecting the weak and “might makes right.”

The autonomy principle underlies many of the freedoms and rights spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 in an attempt to learn lessons from two world wars. This includes freedom of thought, speech and movement, freedom from slavery and torture, the right to life, liberty, security and educatio

I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain ways.

If the information processing itself obeys certain principles, it can give rise to the higher-level emergent phenomenon that we call consciousness.