My Current Platform
Michael Anissimov :: Jan. 2004

This page lists some of the traits I either possess or try to possess, things that worry me, and things that don't. Consider it to be a summary of my current memetic (ideological) platform. You'll find statements here ranging from the mundane/boring to the esoteric/technical. Many of the most non-traditional aspects of my belief system are based on various books I highly recommend. Like many active thinkers, I've spent much of my life switching my attention from philosophy to philosophy. What you're seeing here is just the most recent iteration of this continuously ongoing process. That also means I could be wrong about lots of stuff, there is lots of room for improvement, so on and so forth. Please email me with relevant comments or questions!

I am...

A rationalist. I try to be as rational, that is, hold internal representations, beliefs, and models which correlate as accurately as possible to objective reality. The best way to achieve goals is to have the most accurate possible model of the overall system we are working within. Our subjective sensations of realization or satisfaction are mental signals coming from our evolutionarily adapted (imperfect) brains, not direct pipelines to some higher truth. They can only be probabilistically accurate. Since the 70s at least, cognitive scientists have isolated empirically robust mental biases that tend to be human universal; I strongly believe that studying these biases is one powerful path to improving our rationality. "Simply living life and soaking up new experiences" as a path to higher rationality has been attempted millions or billions of times in the past, and has failed. Trying to become a clearer thinker and a smarter person simply by climbing a mountain (or whatever) is a disappointingly inadequate and cliche strategy. It's useless and sad. If we genuinely want to be more rational, and discover the concrete benefits of rational thinking firsthand, we must bite the bullet and hit the books. Many of the best books offer powerful explanatory models for systematic errors in human reasoning; models that sadly fail to emerge even in those with many decades of diverse and intense "life experience". In fact, many books on rationality actually document how and why many "experts" fail to outperform some remarkably plain decision-making strategies in select areas. They should be read! (See the more recent books in the reading list.) Serious rationality can take up as much effort as a part-time job. Also, I consider myself a Bayesian wannabe. If you aren't reading at least 100 pages a week of non-fiction literature, then I will probably question your rationality. And having questionable rationality isn't something to be proud of.

Respectful. I try to speak as intelligently as possible without coming across as condescending. However, when forced to choose between tact or truth, I often choose truth. When I do, it's not to serve some egocentric satisfaction, but a genuine desire to propagate truth, or the closest approximation to the truth at my disposal (when the situation appears otherwise, please tell me so). I follow a set of guidelines known as "Crocker's Rules", which means I permit others to point out my flaws with the confidence I won't become angry or irritated. I want to be corrected, so I can become a better person. (Corny-sounding, but utterly true.) I realize most humans are irrationally attached to their current belief systems (including myself, to some inevitable extent), so I always enter dialogues cautiously and carefully, attempting to present ideas to others in terms they empathize with (without being manipulative). I feel every human on Earth deserves my respect, and try to behave in accordance with that belief.

Utilitarian. Utilitarianism is an decision paradigm for maximizing the fulfillment of a given set of goals; in the original utilitarianism, it was to maximize happiness and minimize pain for the greatest possible number. This was first formally described by John Stuart Mill in the 1860s. It is basically just the application of arithmetic and cost-benefit analysis to ethical systems. Utilitarians label their ultimate goals ("supergoals") with the quality of "utility", then work their way back and try to determine which immediate actions and plans ("subgoals") are likely to best fulfill those goals. The alternative is simply working towards our goals based on immediate cues, short-term whims, and random chance; essentially the default. Although we can theoretically choose any set of goals to apply the utilitarian paradigm to, utilitarianism usually grounds in some version of helping others and/or helping ourselves help others. My personal version of utilitarianism grounds itself in volitional altruism - the act of helping others in ways they want to be helped, with no desire for personal gain. A lot of interesting subgoals spontaneously emerge from this ethical system, subgoals whose existence may be less obvious in the absence of a formal ethical strategy. Since I'm human like everyone else, and will always have predispositions towards taking selfish actions, whether I realize it or not, one subgoal automatically becomes "be on guard for emergent selfishness". Why did I choose altruism as a grounding for my ethical system? Many convergent reasons - a trend towards higher cooperativeness throughout history, a sensation of moral equivalentness between myself and others, an aversiveness to perpetuating humanity's ongoing tendency to be selfish, etc. In the end, what you ground your ethical system is basically a personal choice, but there are undoubtable convergences, and I believe that there are many moral principles that the majority of humanity agrees with on a deep level. Whether this will eventually lead to an "objective morality" is still not crtain.

Utilitarianism deeply ties in with good old common sense. Even if our chance of success were as low as 5%, most human beings would put aside previously planned activities in order to invest a few hours in saving another human being's life. What if we conceived of actions that could save thousands, or millions of lives given a substantial amount of effort? Even if our probability of success were small, it would still be worth doing. I believe in the potential existence of humanity-helping actions, and prefentially seek them out and attempt to contribute to them. I think it's hypocritical that many of us would save a single human being if they were in visible danger, but seek no means to help the many. Like many utilitarians, my ethics operate on a negatively accelerating scale; the disutility of evil (such as torture) exceeds the utility of (currently observable) good (such as the sensation of a scientific discovery or a good meal.) It worries me that, in cognitive psychology studies, it has been shown that most people would invest no more resources to save 100 people at a probability of 99% than they would invest to save those same people at a probability of 5%(!) Individual humans have been "following our heart" for so long that we often fail to notice that the "heart" needs reason and logic in order to truly be consistent with itself and help others effectively.

Volitional. Volition is "will"; a basic factor of interest to many ethical systems, especially those attuned towards what others want (their will). Combined with altruism, we get "volitional altruism", altruism that employs the analysis of volition as a tool in fully accomplishing its goals. "Volitional altruism" means helping people in ways they want to be helped. Without the analysis of volition, it's easy to lose direction and grounding as an altruist. We could theoretically have an ethical system, "volitional selfishness", or something, which uses the idea of volition as a tool to further selfish goals, but we rarely see "volition" used in this way. Volitional altruism, specifically, sees nothing as an end in itself, except for the subjective sensations ("qualia") and spoken opinions of sentient beings (the latter approximates the former). On the basis of an altruistic grounding, I use an interim definition of "volition" to specify maximally altruistic actions based on what sentient beings genuinely feel, and from what they indicate that they want (through words or body language).

My current understanding is that "good" means "helping as many people as possible get what they want (usually lasting happiness or concrete achievements), their way". I believe that all forms of ethics and morality throughout history have slowly been converging to volitional altruism, or something very similar to it. Is there anything to morality aside from volition? Maybe not, but the optimal fulfillment of volition will probably be implemented using nonintuitive methods based on complex, global/local analyses. (Possibly too complex for human-level intelligences to handle. It would be silly for us to assume that all the problems of the universe are built to be humanly solvable.) "Volitional altruism" basically translates to "being concerned with helping others based on their definitions of what they want". Pretty simple.

Philosophical. I sometimes redefine "philosophy" to mean "a certain class of thinking that minimally engages our innate emotional triggers". Philosophy is more about logic than emotion, although the latter does play a certain inevitable part. Mathematics and the sciences also fall into this class, and do indeed blur with philosophy around the edges. (Much of talking and thinking about people, our daily routines, politics, or specific emotion-invoking patterns in the world tend to bend our view of reality slightly; we evolved that way. It's not always evolutionarily adaptive to seek the truth. The best way to become tribal chief (and therefore make lots of babies) is to genuinely believe that you deserve it, even if you objectively don't.) I can be even more coarse and say "philosophy begins where instinct ends". The field called "philosophy" is one that many intellectuals devote a substantial deal of time towards, for good reason. Philosophy is the field that leads to subjective epiphany (yes, emotion again; but some emotions are more... emotional than others) and genuine progress as an individual. Philosophy bends backwards on itself; it's easier to understand when you know more about the mechanisms of your understanding. Science was (and still is) a subfield of philosophy. The desire to philosophize comes from the more subtle and complex of human desires and tendencies. Some philosophizing is useless armchair theorizing, but it's the job of serious philosophers to sort out the real issues from these silly and irrelevant ones. I'm into philosophy because it's extremely useful for seeing the world more clearly, and drawing conclusions that actually turn out to be true from a sea of contradictory evidence and opinions.

Scientific. Science is the rational successor to everyday folk reckoning; a social, collective, cooperative process of experimentation and peer review. Since human beings cannot directly apprehend the more subtle phenomena of the world, we must use abstract models, mathematics, and heuristics to understand the world more accurately (and predict it more reliably!) Like philosophy, science is self-applicable; heuristics (rules of thumb) learned from science can operate as meta-heuristics to modify the underlying judgement functions. Science employs a feedback loop of empirical testing with the external environment and other researchers, converging towards truth more rapidly than feedback loops based on analyzing mental sensations and coincidences using personal folk theories. Scientific theories are only useful to the extent that they accurately predict the behavior of physical systems. (Philosophy of science is worth checking out, too, of course.)

Altruistic. "Altruism" means helping others because you feel that others deserve to be helped; not for personal gain, social recognition, or any other ulterior motive. One interesting rationale for choosing altruism is a desire to move towards an equilibrium state where everyone's needs are basically fulfilled (a "paradise" of sorts?), at which point we can install overarching apparatus to preserve universal safety indefinitely (like "laws", but less prone to abuse than the laws of today, implemented using more subtle and elegant means, and more respectful of individual rights and dignity), and then basically do whatever we want without violating the rights of others. It just seems easier that way. An apparatus needn't be annoying or oppressive if it genuinely protects everyone from unwanted harm, death, suffering, and so on. Just as a metabolism is an essential prerequisite for the existence of complex multicellular organisms, it seems that the guarantee of a bare minimum of natural rights ("principles of choice") is necessary for a genuinely pleasant society. With law and other methods, society has been successively approximating this "ideal" moral state since the beginning of civilization and before (although that does not promise it will continue). We will begin to move towards it rapidly when our ability to manipulate and reorganize matter becomes much more powerful ("ultratechnology"), barring a sufficiently large accident. This would likely require the existence of (nonconscious?) maintainers without observer-biased goal systems. In any case, we must break this awful Darwinian deadlock, and it seems that an opportunity to do so may in fact be historically near.

Searching. I really want more companions to help me pursue my goals, because goals are meant to be shared, and my goals can't be accomplished without the assistance of others. (I wouldn't be surprised if a huge chunk of the people on Earth with specific goals feel exactly this way as well.) I believe that my goals are the convergent outcomes of serious research and thought in philosophy, science, and ethics, and pursue and advocate them unapologetically. But: if you don't understand my goals or don't want to, that's your right (obviously). I can always play nice with people I disagree with, but I can't directly cooperate with these people to achieve concrete goals (too much divergence). Seeking companions is not a pragmatic strategy to acquire influence, but derives itself from a desire to help others and myself accomplish our goals more effectively. If you don't agree with my goals, then please don't mistake me for an elitist; I'm still very interested in opening up dialogue!

Immortalist. I'd like to live as long as I'm I want to, possibly forever, if it becomes technologically possible within my lifetime. This is not because I'm unusually afraid of death, but because I don't think the acceptance of death is a healthy philosophy. I view the acceptance of aging and death, along with making excuses for the event of death, as a musty, obsolete, dying belief system. Just because it's a (presently) necessary evil doesn't make it any less of an evil. The technology to cure aging will be here within the first half of this century (at the longest); those who take advantage of its arrival will survive, those who don't will fade away. The choice seems simple to me; the motive is not selfish, but a straightforward acknowledgement of inevitably changing patterns of life and living. Besides, our lives are too short to do all that we really want to do. As we live longer, we will discover an infinity of new things to do. The only thing that makes people think that living forever would be boring is their failure to imagine fun things to do, or their failure to account for the explosion of new fun things that would become available with higher intelligence and ability to manipulate matter. A wise man once said, "Choosing to live does not require that I be afraid to die, it requires only that I value life." Check out the Immortality Institute for more information on immortalism.

Communicative. Human females are specifically adapted to form bonds with each other through verbal communication. Men evolved to create bonds with each other through demonstrations of physical ability and competitive achievements. In this modern age where brain is more important than brawn, and conflict resolution has more value than "winning", the masculine tendencies of competition and physical demonstrations designed to intimidate or challenge are becoming increasingly obsolete and useless. In "zero-sum" games, where one person winning means that all other players must lose accordingly (like checkers), cross-player communication never serves much of a purpose. Humanity evolved in contexts where zero-sum games were evolutionarily adaptive, but just because we evolved to play them does not mean they are moral (or "pleasant", if words like "moral" bother you). Positive-sum games, on the other hand, are cooperative activities where everyone wins, and high-bandwidth communication is useful to maximize the payoff between all parties participating. As cognitive reengineering and brain-computer interfacing technology become available and becomes increasingly more sophisticate, humans will gain the ability to convey more of our underlying opinions and feelings to others, which will greatly facilitate positive-sum interactions.

Upwinger. As put by buddy John Smart, a fellow upwinger, "I hold a "political" outlook neither right wing, nor left wing, but "up wing", with positions defined very little by traditional political dialog, but primarily by assessing which choices in science and technology will accelerate us most humanely into a better world." I believe it is naive to think that human political opinions are the primary variable in determining whether humanity flourishes or dies out in the 21st century and beyond. Our fate and quality of life is determined primarily by the successive emergence of ever-more-powerful technologies, the policy attitudes we take towards them, and the application (or lack thereof) of robust, freedom-fostering precautions in early and intermediate development stages (where individual activists and small organizations can actually have influence). Traditional politics is not a feasible "leverage point" for doing good in the world, unless you devote your entire life to it (and even then, you can't be certain you'll have an impact). There are just too many people already in the business. It's just so easy to become fixated on the emotional and psuedointellectual issues of politics; why not try something more challenging for a change?

Transhumanist. I view Homo sapiens not as an eternal ideal, but as a beginning of a long road of self-guided intellectual, cognitive, physical, emotional, and "spiritual" evolution and development. As the technologies required to enhance the human body and mind become available during the first half of this century, pioneers will modify themselves and share their experiences with their still-human comrades, prompting them to explore these life-enriching enhancements themselves. If made illegal in one country, the use of these enhancements will simply take place underground or in other countries. If we do not improve our compassion and ethics before we radically improve our ability to exert change over the world and ourselves (inevitable), disaster, extinction, or worse could result. But change is inevitable, and the only way we can go is forward. I do think humanity can manage the arrival of a transhuman era, probably with plenty of help from the transhumans themselves. For more information on transhumanism, see the World Transhumanist Association.

Singularitarian. At some point in the next ten, twenty, or thirty years, the creation of genuinely smarter-than-human intelligence will become technologically possible, either through Artificial Intelligence (AI) or the neurological enhancement of human brains. No evidence exists to suggest that human beings represent an upper limit of intelligence; in fact, current evidence seems to state that the human being is substantially dumber than the smartest physically possible entity - ".000001% as smart" would probably be a laughably generous estimate. When we acquire the appropriate technology, we will add on to minds, create new types of minds evolution could never have crafted, accelerate the processing speed of minds, embed minds in airborne nanotechnology (or whatever), and so on. As soon as we step outside of the human species' characteristic upper bound of smartness, the smarter-than-human beings will begin to create smarter versions of themselves, and the smarter versions will create additional smarter versions, and so on. A positive feedback process that reinforces itself. Depending on your visualization of the feasibility or speed of this process, your projections of the consequences will vary, but as far as I can tell, it represents the most significant issue for mankind to consider and confront right now. If a transhuman intelligence wants to wipe us out, I don't see us as having much of a chance, but since I don't postulate any natural tendency of intelligence to turn selfish, it seems like the appropriate starting conditions (robustly benevolent philosophy) should give rise to profoundly positive outcomes (under my current model). For more information, see the Singularity Institute. For concise intros to transhumanist ideas, see my article "Beyond Defaults" or check out acceleratingfuture.com.

Things that worry me...

Lack of kinder-than-human morality. Our species possesses an upper bound on kindness, compassion, empathy, understanding, and so on. Due to relatively scarce resources, our competitive natures, and other technical difficulties with human nature, human beings never become fully altruistic, or even highly altruistic in large numbers. We lack the neurological-cognitive support for it. You can't run a program if the operating system and hardware isn't compatible with it. Our brain is a finite-state machine unable to implement the program of true decency and kindness (however you define it; it doesn't even matter for the purposes of this point.) If this is truly the case, then in order to have a truly pleasant society, we will eventually need to 1) collectively and consensually reengineer ourselves (our brains, more specifically) to become more altruistic and less competitive, 2) increase the availability of resources so everyone will have what they need, 3) create an overarching safety net that prevents people's volition from being violated. Society has gradually been heading towards this state throughout history, and in the absence of a really big disaster, it seems like we'll eventually reach it. This will begin with the creation of a qualitatively different mind than a human mind - a mind to which kindness and altruism come naturally! This will require either the creation of Artificial Intelligence or heavy-duty neurohacking.

Lack of smarter-than-human ("transhuman") intelligence. Smartness is a quality that brains implement, and humans implement it only to a certain degree. If we develop a general theory of intelligence and determine which hardware features give rise to greater intelligence, it will only be a matter of time before we can invent/create qualitatively better intelligences than history has yet seen. A problem "impossible" to an amateur might be "obvious" to an expert and "so obvious as to be unnoticeable" to a transhuman intelligence. If a thousand chimps cannot solve a problem, that doesn't show that a human couldn't solve it, and if a thousand average physicists cannot solve a problem, that is no guarantee that some Einstein won't walk up and solve it immediately. "Smartness" determines both our capacity to solve problems and to imagine them to begin with. Smartness isn't just about impressing people, but determines the global qualities of an individual. I'm not primarily concerned with the smartness that separates human individuals (used all too often as a tool to suppress dumber people), but with the big steps of smartness that separate cats from plants and humans from chimps. If we can step up beyond human smartness, there's no telling what we'll be capable of. Whatever your goals are, they are bound to more accomplishable if you were qualtiatively smarter (or more interesting yet, you might be able to imagine entirely new and better goals!) The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is currently the only organziation I know of specifically devoted to this goal.

Civilization-wide moral error. Racism. Homophobia. Witch burnings. The Inquisition. The Holocaust. Stalin's gulags. Humanity's multimillion year history of fighting and bloodshed. These activities were rampant either in the past or today, and have left their permanent scar on humanity's moral record. What injustices exist today that we currently regard as normal but will eventually see are horrible, cruel, and immoral? We don't know - we haven't reached that level of moral reasoning yet. But we may one day, hopefully soon. Ideally, our ability to understand what "good" is will increase with our capacity to achieve it. Until then, we will continue to commit wrongdoing unknowingly.

Planetary suffering. 180 million are injured intentionally or unintentionally per year. 20 million children die per year from hunger. 680 million have a mental or physical illness. 25 million are in slavery by force, or by the threat of force. 3 billion live on two dollars or less each day. 1.8 die every second; 150,000 die per day; and 55 million die per year. Millions are tortured horribly on a daily basis. The situation is bad - real bad, and ignoring reality isn't going to solve anything. All these numbers should be at zero, and the only factors preventing that are our own ignorance and lack of initiative and imagination. However long the road seems, why not start down it as quickly as possible? We have major work to do.

"Astronomical Waste". Complicated but morally relevant issue. In the words of philosopher Nick Bostrom, "With very advanced technology, a very large population of people living happy lives could be sustained in the accessible regions of this universe. For every year that development of such technologies and colonization of the universe is delayed, there is therefore an opportunity cost: a potential good, lives worth living, is not being realized. Given some plausible assumptions, this cost is extremely large. However, the lesson for utilitarians is not that we ought to maximize the pace of technological development, but rather that we ought to maximize its safety, i.e. the probability that colonization will eventually occur." The idea of astronomical waste basically points out that there are huge portions of the cosmos that are currently going uncolonized, and it would really suck if they never get filled with sentient beings leading interesting lives. Abstract, but definitely worth thinking about.

Anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is the projection of human characteristics onto nonhuman entities. It's actually not that difficult to identify. The "AIs" in the Matrix were ridiculously anthropomorphic. We naturally tend to anthropomorphize because we evolved to model human minds and human minds only, and our entire experience consists of interaction with and introspection into human minds. If one expects aliens or AIs to possess the precise human-characteristic, evolution-constructed pattern of ambition, jealousy, anger, love, concern, prejudice, disgust, caution, and so on, then they are ridiculously incorrect. Nearly all gods and spirits of mythology have been incredibly anthropomorphic. For further reading, check out Creating Friendly AI chapter two and "Anthropomorphism and Related Phenomena."

Mechanomorphism. A true AI is no more a copy of Windows than a human is an amoeba. Technology is becoming more and more complex, will continue to do so until it matches and then quickly surpasses the complexity of human beings and human culture, and there is nothing shocking about this. Not every piece of technology is going to behave like a toaster or a pair of scissors. Just look at the complex machine you are currently using to access this information. If research dollars were dealt out by theists alone, computers and the Internet might never have come into existence. ("How can a single machine be so complex and do so much? And even if it could, why would people want to use it? This idea is silly.") If progress continues as it has and we avoid blowing ourselves up, then we should accept the eventual existence of mechanical patterns that mimic everything nature can do and more. Animals, plants, landscapes, sentient beings; intelligence will eventually build billions of new varieties just as aesthetic, complex, and interesting as "Mother Nature" has, and in much shorter timeframes, too.

Things that don't worry me...

Suffering in other universes. Modern physics theories suggest that all possible universes exist in a collective arena known as the "multiverse". Our universe, then, is just one of these. This theory may seem unnecessarily complex at fairst glance, but it actually makes our overall model more elegant and realistic; Occam's razor at work in counterintuitive ways. The theory that all possible universes exist would imply that universes exist where massive suffering takes place - the only problem is that, by definition, "universes" are causally separate - they can't influence one another. This means that it is impossible to eliminate suffering in other universes, even though it necessarily exists. This suffering is just like the suffering of the past - there's nothing we can really do about it! We might as well consider suffering in other universes part of "the generalized past", an idea that comes from the SL4 mailing list. It's unfortunate that suffering has to exist somewhere at all times, but this doesn't make it any less necessary to eliminate suffering in our universe.

The "problem" of free will. I'm a compatibilist. Our "free will" is a subjectively viewed decision process that operates under the constraints of the laws of physics and our inherent biological ability to think certain thoughts. Whether or not the bottom level of physics is deterministic (and it is, say t'Hooft and the multiverse theorists), our universal experience with the sensation of making meaningful decisions would not change. To a superhuman being with the ability to visualize the physics of our constituent atoms, we would behave as an entirely predictable system; thoughts, wishes, dreams and all. As the "Frequently Asked Questions About the Meaning of Life" document says, "Free will is a cognitive element representing the basic game-theoretical unit of moral responsibility. It has nothing whatsoever to do with determinism or quantum randomness. [...] The "paradox" of free will arises from a fundamentally flawed visualization of causality. Even if the future is determined, it's still determined by the present. That's us. That's our choices. That's our minds. If the present were different, the future would be different." A buddy of mine, Kip Werking, has written an interesting essay on determinism and free will.

The Government. I can't influence the decisions the government makes or the ultimate outcomes of even the smallest local elections, unless I devote a substantial portion of time to specializing in doing so, and even then my failure to influence politics is probable (considering the base rates of "people who actually influence politics" over "people who want to influence politics".) As far as voting is concerned, most people vote simply to obtain a "satisfied" feeling, so they can announce their choice to their comrades, and because they hold the illusion that their choice is statistically significant. It is not; but I do acknowledge that if everyone held this view, democracy would not work. But they never will, so no worries. Still, the opinion of the majority is not necessarily the best choice, although in this odd world of observer-centric goal systems, it does tend to produce fair outcomes more often than historical alternatives. Instead of viewing The Government as a morally valent leadership circle of alpha males (with some alpha females), I simply view it on the same level as physical and biological rules; something that's just there, that I need to work within. I can't change it significantly, but I can accomplish significant goals within its constraints. The natural ideological trends of the Many are what dictate who gets voted in, not my personal opinion. (And this isn't necessarily a horrible, salient thing, it's just something that happens, like biological evolution or weather patterns.)

The "problem" of consciousness. Consciousness is a particular type of information pattern, just like everything else. (Consciousness is a pretty fuzzy concept, so don't expect me to be saying anything genuinely new here.) It seems to be very closely connected to the concept of intelligence and the idea of an observer. If you suspect consciousness may be related to nonphysical elements, consider how often in the past people attributed events to nonphysical causes and how often they proved themselves wrong when they gained a deeper understanding of the phenomena. Also remember the comment made earlier; the universe has no special obligation to ensure that all problems are humanly solvable (or even humanly imaginable.) Human minds evolved to derive connections where none necessarily exist - so be suspicious of fanciful theories of consciousness. Let's study consciousness when we can create arbitrary types of intelligence and ask them about their conscious experiences (or lack thereof.) My current view is that all neurologically normal humans are conscious, and there exists a nonzero chance that animals are conscious as well (hence the veganism.) I expect sufficiently complex artificial intelligences and cybernetically modified beings to be conscious as well, of course, and tenatively expect consciousness to emerge naturally out of certain critical levels of information processing in memory, perception, concept combination, and reflectivity.

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