I've been looking into negative utilitarianism and it's variations recently but I can't get this possible counterexample off my mind and I'm wondering if someone has an answer.

If you are unfamiliar, negative utilitarianism posits that the minimization of suffering is the only thing that is morally obligatory. But in that spirit, wouldn't it logically follow that murdering someone would minimize their suffering because they wouldn't have the opportunity to experience the suffering they would surely experience if they were to continue to live. I'm hoping I'm missing something or misinterpreting negative utilitarianism, because I think this is a little bit more serious than just a typical utilitarian repugnant conclusion.

How does experience work? How can we heal discomfort, learn effectively, have fun, or be happy?

MECHANISMS OF EXPERIENCE

The image includes it all. https://imgur.com/a/ngwLEFr Let’s start from the beginning.

What is the only thing we can be certain about? What seems like the only fundamental truth? There is currently some kind of experience happening. Let’s look into it. This is a model I like the most: There is a 3D world that changes as time passes. It has an outside and inside world. We can see that by vision. There are also sounds coming from inside and outside. Then in experience we can have sense of our body when we scan it, getting messages from the body, and also touch, taste and smell. We have thoughts made of language, visual thoughts and feelings. We can experience raw senses or our concept, our image of them. We have a sense of us in the center, and sense of others and the world. All of that is inside (and made of) awareness. We can pay attention to one or more things, observe, and manipulate them.

That is exactly the yellow lines on the picture. What does the picture represent? To put it simply, orange blobs are neurons, that find patterns, compress incoming data, and learn to respond to their environment. Brown lines are connections between the neurons. What are the yellow lines? Thats exactly what I started with – Our unified conscious experience, it's like an operating system that is running at all times and gets turned off in deep sleep. Our internal world simulation that we construct to make sense of the internal and external world. When the operating system is on, from the sides come requested memories, signals what to pay attention to, what is valued, and also raw sensations. What comes out is actions to think a memory, redirect the mind or move the body in the external world. Those are the blue waves. What happens when the blue brain waves, aka sensations, interact with our experience? Our experience finds out if its supposted to be there – how surprising it is. If its not surprising, we go on about our day. If we suddenly see a giant rainbow fluffy unicorn hugging us, that might be slightly surprising! The surprise can feel bad or also good. As a consequence, we shift our expectations that encountering such unicorn isn’t as unlikely!

HAPPINESS

How does happiness work? When does experience feel pleasant? When it does not feel blocked. When we’re in a smooth flow state of life. When we can live life to the fullest! When our basic needs are satisfied. When we selfactualize. When we can do things that make us happy. When we don’t feel stuck, when we feel free, when we can grow. When we can just stresslessly be and relax. When things are going as we assume. When we love what is. When we can easily adapt. When our values are satisfied. When there isn’t sense of something being wrong. When our internal parts are communicating with other parts and are not isolated. When there are no hurts parts from trauma, panicking anxious parts from uncertainity, or depresed parts giving up from thinking that they are unsuccesful. When everything feels in harmony, generating sense of meaning and being satisfied with current experience.

MEDITATION

When we meditate, we can observe and have insight about the the details of our experience. We can notice everything that I’ve written so far. We can learn to be more mindful of experience. We can focus on breath and relax the thinking mind this way. We can just observe thoughts come and go without being them or interfering with them. We can see the mental constructedness of the self, of our personality and identity, of our likes and dislikes. We can calm down panicking parts by acceptance. We can heal spiky hurt parts with love. We can transform or deepen or interconnect our beliefs and knowledge by pondering or letting the automatic subconscious mind do it for us. We can reduce our uncertainity about us and the world. We can energize an imagined mental construct by meditating on it, such as healing light or buddha of compassion. We can cultivate interconnectedness and selflove, love for others or everything there is by sending love and kindness. We can align how we interpret, and what we do now and in everyday life, with our goals and higher meaning. We can cultivate sense of transcendental meaning. We can dissolve the fear of death by realistically imagining that you're dying.

DECONSTRUCTION AND RECONSTRUCTION

We can energize the background of the whole awareness with chanting or doing nothing. We can quiet the conceptual thinking mind and dissolve and unify all the distinct senses into pure nothingness, into pure expanded awareness, into pure void and love, when we let go and see the mental constructedness of concepts, thoughts, sensations, and everything, when we dissolve sense of time, space, center, boundary, directions, and attention trying to grab sensations by letting go of the sense of doer and experiencer, even sense of there being an awareness, or sense of any being at all, sense of existing and there being some existence, letting everything unfold without blockages, friction, inteference, by surrendering, by noticing the whole senses at once, by noticing everything's thinness, lightness, expansiveness beyond the constructed boundary. This is all extremely pleasant and free, as it’s just raw uninterrupted flow not judged by any stressed conceptual contractions. Even perception, conceptualizing perception, consciousness itself can turn off. 5-MeO-DMT also dissolves and unifies all senses into flow of oneness. This sense of unity, sense of deep refreshing, can be achieved via other activities too, such as dancing, singing, playing an instrument, excercising, doing sport, nondual philosophy, message, sauna, sex, praying – many possibilities! The advatages of meditation is that it can cultivate sense of unconditional freedom, unity, love, stressfreeness and happiness that is stable in any conditions. After dissolving our whole internal world simulation, when the operating system is staring again, we can play with our deepest assumptions about what is! For example transforming “The world is terrible place, I fear and hate everything!” to strenghtened stable “Everything is beautiful, astonishing, miracle, gift! I love everything!”, or “I know everything!” to “Fundamental reality is unknowable!” We can fall in love with the belief that absolute reality is unknowable, as everything that we experience is our attempt at approximating reality. Like, is there even any reality? Is that just another arbitrary asumption? Is the sense of assumptions even connected to anything fundamental????? What the f*ck Is this? I am ALIVE? Are you even ALIVE? We go on in our """ordinary""" days in this absolute MYSTERY? WHY IS THERE ANYTHING AT ALL? WTFFFF? LIKE WOOW! AND I LOVE THAT WOOOOW! I LOVE ALL WOOOOW THAT WILL COME! IS TIME EVEN REAL? NOTHING AND EVERYTHING IS REAL! WHY IS THERE CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE????? WHAT WHY WHO WHEN WHERE WTF???? WE KNOW NOTHING AND EVERYTHING???? OMMGGGGGG WOOOOOOAAAAAAAWWe're in this loving mystery together in one interconnected system called nature! I'm in love with light depth of everything that is!

SUBTANCES

Other substances are magical too! MDMA adds bonus love. Psychedelics can too, they overall tend to weaken, transform or strenghten assumptions and add more fuel to play with everything and scatter attention. Stimulants enhance and fuel narrow attention on a mental object with added clarity. Dissociatives turn off mechanisms and parts of experience.

WHAT IS EXPERIENCE?

Experience is like an orchestra, a lot of instruments plying being aligned by a director. An ecosystem of internal animals that learn, interact with eachother by communicating, giving eachother hugs, or battle and eat eachother, or form interacting coordinated communities with leaders and leaders of leaders. All sensations are toys and baby angel's love arrows and pink fluffy unicorns playing in the playground of awareness! Internal ecosystem of cute pets that you can play with and give love to! Hurricanes interfering with eachother. Black holes sucking planets. Galaxies merging. Screen with movie. Reflections in a mirror. Indestructible still mountain. Smooth waves in a vast still silent boundaryless deep ocean. Infinite sky with clouds just being there. Groundless ground. Organisms, structures resisting disorder. Interacting particles in a field.

For version infused with technical notes and references, checkout my book: https://qualiaresearch.miraheze.org/wiki/Unified_Happiness_SuperMetaEngineering_using_Computational_MetaNeuroPsychological_Free_Energy_Principlal_Annealed_Topological_Biochemical_Electromagnetic_Predictive_Consonant_Symmetrical_Field-like_Ocean-like_Groundless_Ground_Gestalt

Or on Twitter: https://twitter.com/burny_tech/status/1647659603197411333

Hello! I recently made a Qualia Research wiki! https://qualiaresearch.miraheze.org/wiki/Effective_Wellbeing_Engineering

Effective Mental Wellbeing Engineering! Let's Reverse-Engineer the Nature of Mind and Suffering! Science of Happiness, Motivation, Enlightenment! Neurophenomenology, Technology!

Discord chatting server: https://discord.com/invite/RA93VXhMeG

My today's video on the nature of suffering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbvtdmTcHSg

Video's summary: "Happiness is maintained by biological hardware being maintained by smart self-regulation."

• Minimize stress by satisfying hardwired basic homeostasis needs of the organism (air, water, healthy food, sleep, security, resources for survival, friendship, family, social connection (belonging in general), intimacy, libido, respect, self-esteem, status, recognition, sense of agency, freedom, self-actualization, status, dominance, nurturing, legitimacy, affiliation, competence, exploration, aesthetics, exercise, hygiene...)
• Don't fall into a hedonic treadmill and unexpected reward hijacking traps that hijack your basic needs such as resulting in loneliness
• Solution: Implement self-regulation ability by weakening the model of self (default mode network), strengthening agency (central executive network), using deconstructive and concentration meditation, not "burn out" by training relaxation meditation too. Modelling selfregulation on top of selfregulation.

"Happiness is symmetrical dynamics in the topology of brain waves/neuron networks." "Happiness is flow."

• Transcendental, nonduality memeplexes are perfect for maximizing this: "I am all." "I am none." "All is one." "We're all interconnected." "There is no ground to all." "Emptiness is form." "All happens for a reason." "Every is part of a whole." "We're part of higher context." "All ises and isnts arent." "Mind is like an ocean." "Reality escapes all concepts." "It's all x."
• Solutions: Surrounding yourself with those memeplexes, implement the dynamics using counterfactual conditioning deconstructive meditation or/and underfitting neurotechnology such as 5-MeO-DMT
• Bad kind of ego dissolution is deconstruction with a lack of symmetrical dynamics, interconnectedness under everything, no self-regulation
• No thinking works, ultra thinking collapses into pleasant or unpleasant chaos through transcendence depending on underlying interconnectedness

"Stress, suffering is pinch points in the topology of brain waves, energy blockages", which are:

• Dukkha (predicting different things than those that are actually there)
• Solutions: acceptance, seeing the reason behind everything (physics, "karma"), everything happening just as if was predicted, adapting instead of resisting, weakening the need to predict using deconstructive meditation, training lower expectations by weakening some basic needs such as status, "Reality is a dance partner", "Everything is nature's perfect unfoldment"
• Tanha (sensation grabby unwholesome blob)
• Solution: train less hyper fixation by training emptiness, focus on wholesomeness in unwholesomeness
• Solution to both: noticing them in your space of sensation by training noting concentration self-regulation through deconstructive meditation and dissolving their causes, minimize their appearance by meditating on love, kindness, care, gratefulness, connection

"Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you positive valence. Happiness is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you positive valence."

• Perfect memeplex for maximizing this: "Emptiness is form."
• Emptiness is that everything is mental construction without internally concretely seeing meaning (predicting positive valence) in each of them, so, no narrowing happens.
• Form is that all that is are those mental constructions and therefore seeing meaning in all of them simultaneously in the most general sense, so, expansion over all that is happens.
• If one really anneals this belief, all that happens (all sensations) in his experience is predicted to be just constant positive valence which reinforces itself in a feedback loop kind of way.
• Every task (any subset of experienced qualia) is seen as extremely meaningful and free.
• Ontology agnostic empirical bayesianism is close to this. Being confident in beliefs but also humble about them. Most important properties of mental constructions seem to be how predictive they are (if theyre predicting things in the future states of your inner world simulation) and how much positive valence experiencing them adds to the experience in relation to current aesthetics/ontology.

"Happiness is learned, love, attraction, liking, experience of nothingness,..."

• Learning to see pleasantness in all sensations, Jhanas are feedback loop exponential buildup of seeing pleasantness in pleasantness started by seeing pleasantness in breath for example.

Explained more: https://qualiaresearch.miraheze.org/wiki/Wellbeing

Hello! Qualia Research Institue community behind for example

• Science on reducing suffering https://qualiacomputing.com/tag/suffering/ https://thequaliaresearchinstitute.org/research-publications

• The Aesthetic of the Meta-Aesthetic: the Meaning Nexus Between Memeplexes w/ Andrés Gómez Emilsson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6DqFX3UbJY

is creating a Discord server, so, if anyone is interested in their antisuffering EA aligned philosophical, phenomological, neuroscientific, psychedelic, mathematical etc. work and community, you can join!

QRI discord server invite: https://discord.gg/RA93VXhMeG

Welcome to the center of bliss!

• This community is centered around everything that we experience, in other words, qualia! Let's experience the most interesting and pleasant life, help others do so by eliminating suffering, or if you want to know everything, all through the lens of

• rationalism, effective altruism, transhumanism, hedonistic imperative, stoicism, metamodernism,...

• psychology, neuroscience, phenomenology, philosophy, mathematics, physics, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, memetics, cybernetics, chaos theory, complex dynamical systems theory, game theory,...

• meditation, trance, altered states of mind,...

• visual art, poetry, and so on!

• There is no limit to lenses through which you can live your life to the fullest, build knowledge and apply the successful methods in practice!

• We can all collaborate by sharing the contents of our minds or the internet and have fun together!

• Be kind, polite, don't discriminate against anyone or any group of people.

• Don't discuss any illegal substance sources.

• socialium: Socialize with other sentient beings! Tell us, what has been occupying your mind recently? What is the last thing that made you happy? What are your hobbies? What are you working on? What do you want to improve?

• introductions: If you want, you can introduce yourself to others. Tell us what you like doing, you will maybe find more similar-minded people than you would expect! Maybe your niche is much more normal here!

• rationalium: Science! Research! Empiric data! Models! Show us if you do or read any scientific work, that has maybe influenced your life in a very good way! Share with others, give tips and tricks! Let's reverse engineer the world together!

• qualiastreamium: Share endlessly novel, exuberant, lovely, dynamic, intimate, expressive narrative stream that never fails to entertain and engage! Every piece of philosophical or poetic art is unique and amazing on its own! Share what you've read or watched and love or what you've made! Everything is welcome!

• artium: Show us your or someone else's beautiful stimulating abstract or concrete visual expressions of our inner world simulations! Maybe drawings? Animated fractal mathematical art? Everything works! Generate infinite positive valence symmetrical bliss!

• hedonium: Share your extremely cute pets or beautiful nature full of euclidian or hyperbolic symmetry!

• historium: Let's build game theoretically stable supercooperation cluster with diverse memeplexes! In other words, let's get written down in history by collaborating on making the world a better place by for example putting antisuffering technology into practice as a community that is more effective than individuals!

• memeium: I like memes, you probably like memes, memes are universal! Culture!

• offtopic: Discuss anything else that doesn't seem aligned with other channels.

• altered-state-sitting: Are you in an altered state and want to chat about anything that's on your mind? Feel free to!

• wellbeing: Do you want to achieve some goal when it comes to mental wellbeing? Maybe others can point you in an effective direction!

• hello Be sure to check out Qualia computing, Qualia Research Institute and Andres' youtube channel if you haven't yet! https://qualiacomputing.com/ https://thequaliaresearchinstitute.org/ https://www.youtube.com/c/Andr%C3%A9sG%C3%B3mezEmilsson

• If you know anyone that seems to be aligned with all of this, you can give an invite link to grow this community full of beautiful people!

• You can use voice channels to call as well!

Infinite hedonium!

Hello everyone!

I hope you are staying stone- and pain-free! (kidney stones may not sound obviously very HI-related, but bear with me - as you'll see in the links below, this condition is a particularly large and possibly tractable source of suffering in the world)...

Have you ever suffered from kidney stones? If so, and if you have a few minutes, please answer this survey: https://forms.gle/vturJqf83JZfATEp9

Context: I work at a non-profit that investigates cost-effective interventions for very painful conditions. We are now running a pilot project on kidney stones and we would love to get some data we could use to guide our research efforts. In particular, if you have tried one or more treatments for kidney stones (of any sort! from drinking much more water to surgery to supplements) we would absolutely love to hear from you.

See example previous outputs of this research group:

• Cluster Headache Frequency Follows a Long-Tail Distribution

• Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering

• and a motivating short story based off of Scott's Unsong

Thank you so very much in advance! I sincerely hope this information is of use to other "stoners" in the world. Cheers!

Ps. please forward to friends and family with kidney stones! Thank you!!

I've been meaning to read this book but I just can't read books with a Kindle or on a laptop. It really strains my eyes and my brain just can't process it that way. Call me old-fashioned but I enjoy reading books as just a physical book. But I can't seem to find a physical copy of the "Hedonistic Imperative" anywhere. Amazon only has a Kindle version - which is free, which is great by the way, but I haven't read it yet because I just can't read books this way.

A group of volunteers are hosting the next two online meetups for networking and working on initiatives for the long-term goal of abolishing suffering. (The meetup is inspired by David Pearce’s abolitionist project.)

One can work on their own ideas as well as choose a project from the list of proposed initiatives. Newcomers are especially encouraged to participate.

Read more in the corresponding announcement pages:

• 19 Sep, 14:00 UTC: FB event or Google Docs
• 3 Oct, 8:00 UTC: FB event or Google Docs

Hope to see you there :)