jbkjr

“Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” The motivation of this post is to address the persistent conflation between suffering and pain I have observed from members of the EA community, even amongst those who purport to be “suffering-focused” in their ethical motivations. In order to best address the problem of...

In reading the SEP entry on counterfactual theories of causation, I had the following question occur, and I haven't been able to satisfactorily resolve it for myself. An event e is said to causally depend on an event c if and only if e would occur if c were to...

Here’s a description of a future which I understand Rationalists and Effective Altruists in general would endorse as an (if not the) ideal outcome of the labors of humanity: no suffering, minimal pain/displeasure, maximal ‘happiness’ (preferably for an astronomical number of intelligent, sentient minds/beings). (Because we obviously want the best...

You may have heard a few things about “predictive processing” or “the global neuronal workspace,” and you may have read some of Steve Byrnes’ excellent posts about what’s going on computationally in the human brain. But how does it all fit together? How can we begin to arrive at a...

Considering how much I’ve been using “the intentional stance" in my thinking about the nature of agency and goals and discussions of the matter recently, I figured it would be a good idea to, y’know, actually read what Dan Dennett originally wrote about it. While doing so, I realized that...