If God could be killed, it’d be dead already

I have been following  Qualia Research Institute and Qualia Computing.  My attention was recently caught by an article on  personal identity views.

I quote from the Abstract:

Personal identity views (closed, empty, open) serve in philosophy the role that conservation laws play in physics. They recast difficult problems in solvable terms, and by expanding our horizon of understanding, they likewise allow us to conceive of new classes of problems. In this context, we posit that philosophy of personal identity is relevant in the realm of ethics by helping us address age-old questions like whether being born is good or bad. We further explore the intersection between philosophy of personal identity and philosophy of time, and discuss the ethical implications of antinatalism in a tenseless open individualist “block-time” universe.

I believe that you may well have to have a tendency towards existential anxiety to be interested in such matters. I have that and I am interested. However I am also wary of endless thinking, endless philosophy.

I have no qualm with “thought experiments” per se ( which have lead to many scientific breakthroughs) but I believe the matters contained in this article are fruitless in terms of speculation unless they can be tested and acted upon.

I like these guys, I like what they have to say. But I would like to see some action. I would like to see some progress towards the “Abolition of Suffering“.

I therefore responded as follows on their website:

While I am interested in your article and indeed in your website as a whole, has the time not come to cease to speculate and to actively progress and investigate how to measure and improve qualia?

You and I and everyone around us (or most of them) are living as “closed individuals”. I do not believe anyone other than a mystic or tripper has witnessed any other type of existence.

And once the meditation or psilocybin trip is over, even those individuals return from unified consciousness back to the state of “closed individual”.

So what needs to be done to eliminate suffering?

Can the beneficial effects of psilocybin be prolonged indefinitely? Can some other method of increasing our joy and decreasing our pain (permanently) be found?

I am not sure that any of the theories you describe above represent any law of physics. I am not sure that any such theory gets us any further forward.

We need to take practical steps and hope that these will confirm or refute such theories.

I am done with theorizing. I want progress.

Perhaps I should become a psychonaut.