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24 Predictions

for the Year 3000

David Pearce

Neuroethics Foundation

David’s website: hedweb.com

Design by: Qualia Research Institute

qualiaresearchinstitute.org

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Outline

1. Superhuman Bliss�2. Eternal Youth�3. Full-Spectrum Superintelligence�4. Immersive VR�5. Transhuman Psychedelia�6. Supersentience�7. Reversible Mind-Melding�8. Anti-Speciesist Revolution�9. Programmable Biospheres�10. The Formalism of the TOE is Known�11. Hard Problem of Consciousness Solved�12. Meaning of Life Resolved

13. Beautiful New Emotions�14. Effectively Unlimited Material Abundance�15. Posthuman Aesthetics�16. Gender Transformations�17. Physical Superhealth�18. World Government�19. Historical Amnesia�20. Super-Spirituality�21. The Reproductive Revolution�22. Globish (“English Plus ”)�23. Plans for Galactic Colonization�24. The Momentous “Unknown Unknown”

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#1 Superhuman Bliss

Mastery of our reward circuitry
“Everything that goes up has to come down” turns out to be a false truism courtesy of the genetic sabotage of the hedonic treadmill
Valence Realism: How good/bad an experience feels from the inside (the “raw feels” of experience) is an objective physical fact no less real than the rest mass of an electron

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#2 Eternal Youth

More precisely:

Indefinitely extended youth
Effectively unlimited lifespans

Automated off-world backups

Restoration
“Respawning” in case of catastrophic accidents

“Aging” exists only in the medical archives...

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#3 Full-Spectrum Superintelligences

Flourishing ecology of:

Sentient nonbiological quantum computers
Hyperintelligent digital zombies, and
Full-spectrum transhuman “cyborgs”

Neurochipping makes superintelligence all-pervasive
Universe looks friendly:

Prononia - the belief that the universe is conspiring to help you

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#4 Immersive VR

“Magic” rules
“Augmented Reality” has been superseded by hyperreal virtual worlds with novel laws, dimensions, avatars and narratives
Selection pressures prevent “total escape” being feasible
Infrastructure maintenance is delegated to zombie AI

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#5 Transhuman Psychedelia

Analogues of cognition, volition, and emotion but with richer phenomenology
New fundamental categories of experience discovered via genetic tinkering and pharmacological experimentation
Unlocking modes of consciousness that make “the weirdest DMT trip akin to watching paint dry”

Analogues of cognition, volition and emotion as conceived by humans have been selectively retained, though with a richer phenomenology than our thin logico-linguistic thought. Other fundamental categories of mind have been discovered via genetic tinkering and pharmacological experiment. Such novel faculties are intelligently harnessed in the transhuman CNS. However, the ordinary waking consciousness of Darwinian life has been replaced by state-spaces of mind physiologically inconceivable to Homo sapiens. Gene-editing tools have opened up modes of consciousness that make the weirdest human DMT trip akin to watching paint dry. These disparate states-spaces of consciousness do share one property: they are generically blissful. “Bad trips” as undergone by human psychonauts are physically impossible because in the year 3000 the molecular signature of experience below “hedonic zero” is missing.

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#6 Supersentience

Ultra-high intensity experience
Vast state-spaces of consciousness that have never been recruited for information-signaling purposes get discovered and amplified
We may resemble sleepwalkers compared to our fourth-millennium successors
Today being “awake” pales relative to “posthuman intensity of experience”

The intensity of everyday experience surpasses today’s human imagination. Size doesn’t matter to digital data-processing, but bigger brains with reprogrammed, net-enabled neurons and richer synaptic connectivity can exceed the maximum sentience of small, simple, solipsistic mind-brains shackled by the constraints of the human birth-canal. The theoretical upper limits to phenomenally bound mega-minds, and the ultimate intensity of experience, remain unclear. Intuitively, humans have a dimmer-switch model of consciousness – with e.g. ants and worms subsisting with minimal consciousness and humans at the pinnacle of the Great Chain of Being. Yet Darwinian humans may resemble sleepwalkers compared to our fourth-millennium successors. Today we say we’re “awake”, but mankind doesn’t understand what “posthuman intensity of experience” really means.

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#7 Reversible Mind-Melding

Tatiana and Krista Hogan share a “thalamic bridge”
In the year 3000 cross-species mind-melding technologies (“reversible thalamic bridges”) have led to a revolution in both:

ethics and
decision-theoretic rationality

Personal Identity:

Open Individualism prevails

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#8 The Anti-Speciesist Revolution

Worldwide veganism (or at least invitrotarianism)
Neutral “God’s Eye” perspective-taking capacities have displaced factory-farms, slaughterhouses, and other “crimes against sentience” to the dustbin of history
Contra “species essentialism” transhumans think of other sentient beings as different “manifestations of consciousness”

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#9 Programmable Biospheres

Ecosystem reworked to benefit rather than harm their inhabitants
Cross-species fertility control via immunocontraception has replaced predation, starvation, and disease to regulate population sizes
Utopian “wildlife parks”

Sentient beings help rather than harm each other. The successors of today’s primitive CRISPR genome-editing and synthetic gene drive technologies have reworked the global ecosystem. Darwinian life was nasty, brutish and short. Extreme violence and useless suffering were endemic. In the year 3000, fertility regulation via cross-species immunocontraception has replaced predation, starvation and disease to regulate ecologically sustainable population sizes in utopian “wildlife parks”. The free-living descendants of “charismatic mega-fauna” graze happily with neo-dinosaurs, self-replicating nanobots, and newly minted exotica in surreal garden of edens. Every cubic metre of the biosphere is accessible to benign supervision – “nanny AI” for humble minds who haven’t been neurochipped for superintelligence. Other idyllic biospheres in the Solar System have been programmed from scratch.

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#10 The Formalism of the TOE is Known

The superposition principle as the fundamental principle of quantum mechanics (Dirac)
The key to reality itself?
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Zero ontology
Solutions of the master equation encode subjective modes of experience

No “element of reality” (Einstein) is missing from the formalism of physics.

The solutions to the equations encode the values of consciousness.

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#11 The Hard Problem of Consciousness is Solved

Any satisfactory theory of consciousness should explain:

Its Existence
Binding
Palette of Qualia
Causal Power

By 3000 only one conjecture with predictive power has not been falsified...

The Hard Problem of consciousness was long reckoned insoluble. The Standard Model in physics from which (almost) all else springs was a bit of a mess but stunningly empirically successful at sub-Planckian energy regimes. How could physicalism and the ontological unity of science be reconciled with the existence, classically impossible binding, causal-functional efficacy and diverse palette of phenomenal experience? Mankind’s best theory of the world was inconsistent with one’s own existence, a significant shortcoming. However, all classical- and quantum-mind conjectures with predictive power had been empirically falsified by 3000 – with one exception.

[Which theory is most promising? As with the TOE, you’ll forgive me for skipping the details. In any case, my ideas are probably too idiosyncratic to be of wider interest, but for anyone curious: What is the Quantum Mind?]

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#12 The Meaning of Life Resolved

Depressive states seem/feel “absent of meaning”
Manic and hyperthymic states feel “saturated with significance”
The key to meaning is valence/hedonic tone/bliss
Hence, in the year 3000 every moment is sublimely meaningful

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#13 Beautiful New Emotions

Darwinian emotions have been retired
Novel emotions synthesized

Their “raw feels” encephalised and integrated into the CNS

All emotion is beautiful

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#14 Effectively Unlimited Material Abundance

Molecular nanotechnology manufacturing
Status goods
Artificially scarce digital goods

Played an instrumental role in bootstrapping an economy of abundance but are no longer necessary

Critically: the substrate of pure bliss need to be rationed...

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#15 Posthuman Aesthetics

Molecular signatures of aesthetic experience has been catalogued and studied in depth
Superhuman beauty is the norm in the experience of transhumans
What passed for “Great Art” in the Darwinian era looks like cave painting
Blissful but not “blissed out”

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#16 Gender Transformation

“Gender” is a thing of the past
“Gendered” cognitive styles are universally accessible to all transhumans

empathizing
systematizing

Many transhumans are:

asexual
pan-sexual
hyper-sexual
sexually-inquisitive

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#17 Physical Superhealth

“Better than well”
SCN9A “low pain” alleles
Paradise engineering as a rigorous discipline

In 3000, everyone feels physically and psychologically “better than well”. Darwinian pathologies of the flesh such as fatigue, the “leaden paralysis” of chronic depressives, and bodily malaise of any kind are inconceivable. The (comparatively) benign “low pain” alleles of the SCN9A gene that replaced their nastier ancestral cousins have been superseded by AI-based nociception with optional manual overrides. Multi-sensory bodily “superpowers” are the norm. Everyone loves their body-images in virtual and basement reality alike. Morphological freedom is effectively unbounded. Awesome robolovers, nights of superhuman sensual passion, 48-hour whole-body orgasms, and sexual practices that might raise eyebrows among prudish Darwinians have multiplied. Yet life isn’t a perpetual orgy. Academic subcultures pursue analogues of Mill’s “higher pleasures”. Paradise engineering has become a rigorous discipline. That said, a lot of transhumans are hedonists who essentially want to have superhuman fun. And why not?

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#18 World Government

Policy is offloaded to ultra-intelligent (game-theoretically optimal) zombie AI
Conflict-resolution procedures involve “mind-melds”

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#19 Historical Amnesia

Suffering is literally inconceivable
Posthumans can understand experience below “hedonic zero” only by analogy (“phase transition”)
Will Darwinian life be memorialized or forgotten?
We don’t enjoy reading about the Dark Ages...

The world’s last experience below “hedonic zero” marked a major evolutionary transition in the evolutionary development of life. In 3000, the nature of sub-zero states below Sidgwick’s “natural watershed” isn’t understood except by analogy: some kind of phase transition in consciousness below life’s lowest hedonic floor – a hedonic floor that is being genetically ratcheted upwards as life becomes ever more wonderful. Transhumans are hyper-empathetic. They get off on each other’s joys. Yet paradoxically, transhuman mental superhealth depends on biological immunity to true comprehension of the nasty stuff elsewhere in the universal wavefunction that even mature superintelligence is impotent to change. Maybe the nature of e.g. Darwinian life, and the minds of malaise-ridden primitives in inaccessible Everett branches, doesn’t seem any more interesting than we find books on the Dark Ages. Negative utilitarianism, if it were conceivable, might be viewed as a depressive psychosis. “Life is suffering”, said Gautama Buddha, but fourth millennials feel in the roots of their being that Life is bliss.

Invincible ignorance? Perhaps.

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#20 Super-Spirituality

Refine, amplify, and re-purpose the molecular signatures of spiritual experience
Are these glorified tickles or is there something more to it? Only time will tell…
Perhaps personal identity is key here: Open Individualism and enhanced hedonic tone as the default mode could be the key to Super-Spirituality

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#21 The Reproductive Revolution

Reproduction is uncommon in a post-aging society
Transhumans are “born” from extra-uterine environments
No more reckless genetic experimentation of having “kids the natural way”

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#22 Globish (“English Plus”)

Automated real-time translation lead to… Globish
Spoken, written, or “telepathically” communicated to “humble minds” who have not uplifted…
For others:

Language “translation” attempts between paradigmatically inconmensurable state-spaces of consciousness exist, but...
Untranslatable state-specific concepts abound

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#23 Plans for Galactic Colonization

3rd Millennium Terraforming:

Cryonics, crude reward pathway enhancement, immersive VR, and breakthrough rocket propulsion…
Early stages for nearby solar systems, but...

4th Millennium Space Expansion:

Big Debate: Light-speed Hedonium Seeding vs. Gradients of Bliss Biology
No one objects to replacing unprogrammed matter with the molecular substrate of pure bliss

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#24 The Momentous “Unknown Unknown”

“And then I woke up”
Are we missing the key to the plot for reality as a whole?
Examples:

Buddhist Nirvana, The Second Coming of Christ, Simulation Hypothesis, AI Intelligence Explosion, “The Singularity”, Mysterianism

Ancient skeptics were perhaps more in touch with their level of understanding than intellectual titans like Plato and Aristotle

If you read a text and the author’s last words are “and then I woke up”, everything you’ve read must be interpreted in a new light – semantic holism with a vengeance. By the year 3000, some earth-shattering revelation may have changed everything – some fundamental background assumption of earlier centuries has been overturned that might not have been explicitly represented in our conceptual scheme. If it exists, then I’ve no inkling what this “unknown unknown” might be, unless it lies hidden in the untapped subjective properties of matter and energy. Christian readers might interject “The Second Coming”. Learning the Simulation Hypothesis were true would be a secular example of such a revelation. Some believers in an AI “Intelligence Explosion” speak delphically of “The Singularity”. Whatever – Shakespeare made the point more poetically, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.

As it stands, yes, (24) is almost vacuous. Yet compare how the philosophers of classical antiquity who came closest to recognising their predicament weren’t intellectual titans like Plato or Aristotle, but instead the radical sceptics. The sceptics guessed they were ignorant in ways that transcended the capacity of their conceptual scheme to articulate. By the lights of the fourth millennium, what I’m writing, and what you’re reading, may be stultified by something that humans don’t know and can’t express.

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What next? How can I contribute?

Headquarters
Visiting Scholars
Investigating the molecular substrate of pure bliss

In-vitro “mini brains”
MDMA intracellular signaling

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (taking the “God Helmet” further)
Empirically testing theories for the pleasure-pain axis (valence)
Reverse-engineering “mystical experiences” (felt sense of Open Individualism) and prosocial empathogenic states
“The Manhattan Project of Consciousness”

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Resources

David Pearce’s articles. Salient articles:

The Hedonistic Imperative
The Biointelligence Explosion
Compassionate Biology
Non-materialist Physicalism (an empirically-testable panpsychist theory of consciousness)

Qualia Research Institute
Qualia Computing (Andrés Gómez Emilsson, QRI co-founder). Salient articles:

Open Theory (Mike Johnson, QRI co-founder). Salient articles: