u/SaltFlat4844

Given Sam’s podcast has dried up and it’s now incredibly boring and repetitive, I thought I’d share some podcasts I’ve been binging recently and which others might like, specifically if you’re into Sam’s podcasts where he discusses philosophy, consciousness, ethics, and science (rather than geo-politics):

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman
Sentientism
The Dissenter
Brain in a Vat
Building a Science of Consciousness
Within Reason

Sam argues that conscious states are the ultimate source of value, yet he spends enormous amounts of time discussing methods that produce relatively modest changes in consciousness (meditation, philosophy, psychedelics) and almost no time discussing technologies that could eventually produce far larger changes. Why?

This is something I've wondered about for a while. So much of Sam's focus on ethics and morality is about, putting it as simply as possible, increasing well-being.

He frames much of his own intellectual journey in these terms: taking MDMA and realising how much better one could feel in the world; pursuing meditative practice; and speaking about all of it through the prism of feeling better, being more at ease, and suffering less. This has led to his meditation app and all the amazing work he has done in promoting mindfulness.

But to me there's something curious about all this. I've been listening to and reading Sam for nearly two decades, and he's produced enormous amounts of content on mindfulness, consciousness, psychedelics, and his conception of the moral landscape, which is essentially a hedonic landscape of pleasure and pain, or well-being and its opposite.

Given his commitment to increasing well-being, why does he devote almost no time to transhumanist ideas and initiatives, such as those advanced by David Pearce and others, that advocate exploring ways of increasing well-being through biotechnology and other emerging technologies?

Mindfulness undoubtedly has its uses, but Sam also knows that its efficacy in reducing extreme suffering is limited, or at least highly inconsistent. He has alluded to this himself on a few occasions (although I can't remember exactly where), suggesting that mindfulness has its limits and that medication may sometimes be necessary.

Crucially, he also knows that only a minuscule fraction of sentient beings can avail themselves of the benefits of mindfulness even in principle. No non-human animals can meditate, and many human beings cannot either, whether because of intellectual disability, severe mental illness, lack of time, or other barriers.

There are so many fascinating thinkers he could speak with about these questions, yet he seems to return repeatedly to the same subjects. He often speaks about aiming for the ‘centre of the bullseye’, but it seems to me that he avoids the very centre itself: the direct pursuit of hedonic uplift and the eventual abolition of involuntary suffering through biotechnology over the coming centuries.

So why isn't Sam a suffering-focused transhumanist?

Has anyone read his book and can shed some light on this. Sentience means capacity for subjective experience. Pollan said he thinks plants are sentient (but not conscious) and as supporting evidence cited various examples of plants responding to stimuli and so on. Does this mean he thinks computers and heat-seeking missiles are sentient too?