"The Metaethics of Joy, Suffering, and Artificial Intelligence" with Brian Tomasik and David Pearce

Or: mind-meld thought experiments show the foundations of ethics are ontologically subjective

“Even if all the technical issues surrounding the creation of an artificial general intelligence or super intelligence are solved, we will still face deeply challenging ethical questions that will have tremendous consequences for earth-originating intelligent life. This is what is meant when it is said that we must do philosophy or ethics on a deadline.” The above quote was spoken seven years ago, a seeming eon in today's AI landscape, to introduce the podcast episodeThe Metaethics of Joy, Suffering, and Artificial Intelligence with Brian Tomasik and David Pearce. Since the deadline of superintelligence has not yet arrived, time still remains to delve into these philosophical issues and further clarify foundational ethical questions. The conversation between Tomasik and Pearce ranges widely, but this review will focus on the core metaethical debate and their discussion of a mind-meld thought experiment which, with some added analysis, helped me refine my own metathetical position.

What is metaethics exactly? Metaethics refers to the study of the foundations of ethics itself, in contrast to normative ethics and applied ethics. Normative ethics refers to the study of ethical principles and theories such as consequentialism (acts are judged based on their consequences), deontological ethics (acts are judged based on whether they conform to our duties/obligations) and virtue ethics (acts are judged by what type of person they cultivate). Applied ethics refers to taking these theories and applying them to concrete situations to determine how one should behave. For example, is it okay to kill animals for food? Different normative ethical theories will produce different answers when applied to that question. In contrast, metaethics seeks to understand ethics itself, inquiring into questions such as whether or not ethical questions have objective answers. This is one of the key disagreements between Pearce and Tomasik and it is a question with huge implications. If ethics turns out to be objective, then perhaps we can expect an artificial superintelligence (ASI) to figure it out on its own and act accordingly. If it is subjective, perhaps the best anyone can hope for is creating an ASI with values similar to their own.

They agree on a suffering focused ethics, but is it objective?

Pearce and Tomasik begin by agreeing that ethics should be focused on alleviating suffering:

David Pearce: My focus has always been on the problem of suffering, a very ancient problem. Buddhism and countless other traditions are preoccupied by the problem of suffering. I'm also a transhumanist and what transhumanism brings to the problem of suffering is the idea that it's possible to use technology, in particular biotechnology, to phase out suffering, not just in humans, throughout the living world and ideally replace them by gradients of intelligent wellbeing....
...
Brian Tomasik: I've been interested in utilitarianism since I was 18 and I discovered the word. I immediately looked it up and was interested to see that the philosophy mirrored some of the things that I had been thinking about up to that point. I became interested in animal ethics and the far future. A year after that, I actually discovered David's writings of the Hedonistic Imperative, along with other factors. His writings helped to inspire me to care more about suffering relative to the creation of happiness. Since then, I've been what you might call suffering-focused, which means I think that the reduction of suffering has more moral priority than other values...

After this initial agreement, the podcast host asked the pair to dive into the foundations for their moral views. They still seem to be in total agreement at this point:

Brian Tomasik: At bottom, the reason that I placed foremost priority on suffering is emotion. Basically, the emotional experience of having suffered myself intensely from time to time and having empathy when I see others suffering intensely. That experience of either feeling it yourself or seeing others in extreme pain carries just a moral valence to me, or a spiritual sensation you might call it, that seems different from the sensation that I feel from anything else. It seems just obvious at an emotional level that, say, torture or being eaten alive by a predatory animal, or things of that nature, have more moral urgency than anything else...
...
David Pearce: I would very much like to echo what Brian was saying there. I mean there is something about the nature of intense suffering. One can't communicate it to someone who hasn't suffered, someone who is for example born with congenital anesthesia or insensitivity to pain, but there is something that is self-intimatingly nasty and disvaluable about suffering. However, evolution hasn't engineered us, of course, to care impartially about the suffering of all sentient beings. My suffering and those of my genetic kin tends to matter far more to me than anything else. So far as we aspire to become transhuman and posthuman, we should be aspiring to this godlike perspective that takes into account the suffering of all sentient beings

The agreement between Pearce and Tomasik on suffering oriented ethics resides in the domain of normative ethics. This agreement sharpens their disagreement in the domain of metaethics, namely, whether or not morality is objective [1]. With Pearce taking an objective stance and Brian a subjective one, this is where the core of the debate starts taking shape. I quote here at length from the discussion (skipping parts I deemed nonessential) since it both cuts to the heart of their disagreement and sounds rather confused. I then attempt to clarify the disagreement with some alternative concepts to those used in the discussion.

David Pearce: I just say it's just built into the nature of let's say agony that agony is disvaluable. Now, you might say that there is nothing in the equations of physics and science that says anything over and above the experience itself, something like redness. Yeah, redness is subjective. It's mind-dependent. Yet, unless one thinks minds don't exist in the physical universe, redness is an objective feature of the natural physical world. I would say that for reasons we simply don’t understand, the pleasure-pain axis discloses the world's inbuilt metric of value and disvalue. It's not an open question whether something like agony is disvaluable to the victim. Now, of course, someone might say, "Well, yes. Agony is disvaluable to you but it's not disvaluable to me." I would say that this reflects an epistemological limitation and that, insofar as you can access what it is like to be me and I'm in agony, then you will appreciate why agony is objectively disvaluable...

Lucas (interviewer): I guess here, you would describe yourself, given these views, as a moral realist or an objectivist.

David Pearce: Yes, yes.

Brian Tomasik: Just to jump in before we get to me. Couldn’t you say that your view is still based on mind-dependence because, at least based on the thing about if somebody else were hooked up to you, that person would appreciate the badness of suffering. That's still just dependent on that other mind’s judgment or even if you have somebody who could mind meld with the whole universe and experience all suffering at once. That would still be the dependence of that mind. That mind is judging it to be a bad thing. Isn't it still mind-depending ultimately?

David: Mind-dependent but I would say that minds are features of the physical world and so, obviously one can argue for some kind of dualism but I'm a monistic physicalist, at least that's my working assumption.

Brian Tomasik: I think objective moral value usually—the definition is usually that it's not mind-dependent. Although, maybe it just depends what definition we're using.

Lucas (interviewer): Just to echo what Brian was saying. The traditional objectivist or more realist view is that the way in which science is the project of interrogating third person facts like what is simply true about the person regardless of what we think about it–in some ways, I think that traditionally the moral realist view is that if morality deals with objective facts, then, these facts are third person objectively true and can be discovered through the methods and tools of ethics. In the same way that someone who might be a mathematical realist would say that one does not invent certain geometric objects rather one discovers them through the application of mathematical reasoning and logic.

David Pearce: Yes. I think it's very tempting to think of first person facts as having some kind of second rate ontological status but as far as I'm concerned, first person facts are real. If someone is in agony or experiencing redness, these are objective facts about the physical world...

...

Brian Tomasik: ...My metaphysical position is anti-realism. I think that moral statements are mind-dependent. They reflect ultimately our own preferences even if they are maybe very spiritual and, like, deep fundamental preferences. I think Occam’s Razor favors this view because it would add complexity to the world for there to be independent truths. I'm not even sure what that would mean. Based on a similar reason, I reject mathematical truths and anything non-physicalist. I think moral truths, mathematical truths and so on can all be thought of as fictional constructions that we make. We can reason within these fictional universes of ethics and mathematics that we construct using physical thought processes. That's my basic metaphysical stance....I think very much of myself as an emotivist. It's very clear to me that what I'm doing when I do ethics is what the emotivist says people are doing. Yes, since I don't believe in moral truth, it would not make sense for me to be gesturing at moral truths. Except maybe in so far as my low level brain wiring intuitively thinks in those terms.

David Pearce: Just to add to this and that, although it is possible to imagine something like spectrum inversion, color inversion, some people who like ice cream and some people who hate ice cream, one thing it isn't possible to do is imagine a civilization in which [the beings have] an inverted pleasure-pain axis [2]. It seems to just be a basic fact about the world that unbearable, agony and despair is experienced as disvaluable and even cases that might appear to contradict this–like, let’s say, the masochist–in fact merely confirm a claim because. Yeah, I mean the masochist enjoys the intensity, [the] rewarding release of endogenous opioids when the masochist undergoes activities that might otherwise be humiliating or painful.

Lucas (interviewer): Right. David, it seems you're making a claim about there being a perfect convergence in the space of all possible minds among the pleasure-pain axis having the same sort of function. I guess I'm potentially just missing the gap or pointing out the gap between that and I guess your cognitivist objectivism?

David Pearce: It seems to be built into the nature of let’s say agony or despair itself that it is disvaluable. It's not “I’m in agony. Is this valuable or not?” It's not an open question...it's built in the nature of the experience itself.

This is the core of the debate and a lot of terms have been thrown around: objective, subjective, realist, anti-realist. I think these terms are being used in confusing ways but that some different concepts can cut through the confusion.

The key 2x2: Objective/Subjective x Ontological/Epistemological

Pearce used the term “objective” in a confusing way that seemed to simply mean “exists” when he said: “Redness is subjective, it’s mind dependent, and yet unless one thinks minds don’t exist in the physical universe, redness is an objective feature of the natural physical world.” A few terms introduced by John Searle [3] can help clear up the confusion. He makes two distinctions between the objective and subjective. The first is ontological, having to do with what exists:

• Ontologically objective phenomena exist independent of minds. Chairs, water, atoms, that sort of thing [4].
• Ontologically subjective phenomena exist only because a subject experiences them. For example, pain is real and it exists by being experienced.

Ontologically objective and subjective features of the universe are both real but they are meaningfully different. Redness, as a mind-dependent experience, is ontologically subjective. Put another way, it's “appearance and existence are identical.” That is, the appearance of redness in consciousness is what makes redness exist. That doesn't make it less real than ontologically objective entities, but there is a meaningful distinction between them.

The second distinction Searle makes is epistemological, having to do with the nature of knowledge:

• Epistemologically subjective knowledge comes from first-person experience. For example, I know that I prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla from directly experiencing it.
• Epistemologically objective knowledge can be gained independent of any particular mind. That is, with the right training, any sufficiently intelligent mind can come to know it. This is the realm of science and rational argument. Note, that it is possible to objectively study ontologically subjective entities. For example, we can objectively study what causes pain, what kinds of brain activity correlate with it etc. The whole field of anesthesiology depends on the epistemologically objective study of the ontologically subjective phenomenon of pain. If you don’t believe this, then you shouldn’t trust anesthesiologists to prevent you from feeling agonizing pain if you ever need surgery. That said, this doesn’t mean that science can tell us anything about the intrinsic nature of the ontologically subjective.

When Pearce says that “it seems to be built into the nature of agony that it is disvaluable,” he is making an ontological claim that suffering is inherently bad. How does he know this? From direct experience. So, it is an epistemologically subjective claim. He (and presumably any conscious being reading this) knows from direct experience that agony is disvaluable. If you changed the experience of agony to be valuable, it wouldn’t be agony anymore. However, that is only a statement about one’s own agony. Ethics relates to the agony of others. Pearce addressed this when he said:

Now, of course, someone might say, “Well, yes. Agony is disvaluable to you but it's not disvaluable to me.” I would say that this reflects an epistemological limitation and that in so far as you can access what it is like to be me and I'm in agony, then you will appreciate why agony is objectively disvaluable.

One person’s inability to directly experience what another person experiences does reflect an epistemological limitation, but that does not tell us whether ethics is epistemologically objective or not. A small child who doesn't know how to read will not be able to use a tape-measure to find out the length of a table. That doesn't mean that the length of the table is not knowable in an epistemologically objective way. It just means the child currently has an epistemological limitation that prevents her from measuring the length of the table. Is the epistemological limitation regarding the experience of another’s suffering fundamentally the same as not knowing how to use a tape measure? This is where some mind-meld thought experiments can help clarify, but first one further distinction will be helpful.

Mind-contingent vs sentience-intrinsic

Later in the discussion, it becomes clearer that what Pearce means by “objective” is something akin to “non-contingent”. He brings up the example of being a fan of the soccer team Manchester United. He wouldn’t take a pill that changed him to be a fan of a different team, but he recognizes that his preference for Manchester United is arbitrary. A slight change to his life circumstances and he would have been a Liverpool fan instead. In contrast, it is impossible to imagine agony being good. It doesn’t appear to be arbitrary. Agony being bad is just the intrinsic nature of the experience. No change in life circumstances or upbringing would make agony intrinsically good.

A very simple model of world and experience can help clarify this distinction (phrased in the second person for clarity): (1) There is some state of affairs in the external world and in your body, (2) Your brain receives data through various sensory organs (both internal and external) from both the world and your body and, in combination with prior knowledge, constructs a model of the current state of affairs, (3) There are qualia (intrinsic experiences) associated with parts of this model, and a subset of the qualia are on the pleasure/pain axis. Schematically:

1. Some state of affairs in the world/body (ontologically objective) → (2) brain's model of the world/body (ontologically subjective) → (3) intrinsic experience/qualia (ontologically subjective)

Both the second and third steps in this schematic are ontologically subjective, but they are meaningfully different. There is nothing contingent or arbitrary about the negativity of negative qualia. Agony is intrinsically bad (instrumentally it could be good in some rare cases, but that doesn't change its intrinsic quality). However, the link between the brain's model and qualia can be arbitrary. A Manchester United fan will experience pleasure when they beat Liverpool while a Liverpool fan will experience displeasure. There is an important distinction between being a fan of a sports team and the experience of suffering even though are both ontologically subjective. Suffering is intrinsically negative, while being a fan of a team is a type of link or association between intrinsically positive/negative qualia and certain beliefs (e.g., that your team won/lost). This distinction seems analogous (or is maybe equivalent) to the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic values. Another way of phrasing this is that suffering is bad for any mind, whereas contingent ontologically subjective phenomena (like being a fan of a team) depend on particular minds. In this sense, I do think suffering is more “real” than fandom and that is probably what Pearce meant in calling it an "objective" phenomenon. To differentiate between these two types of ontologically subjective phenomena, I will introduce two new terms:

• mind-contingent: A mind contingent phenomenon is one that is ontologically subjective and contingent on a specific mind. Examples: being a fan of a certain sports team, preferring chocolate over vanilla ice cream, being able to perceive certain colors.
• sentience-intrinsic: A sentience-intrinsic phenomenon is one that is ontologically subjective and true for any sentient system. The disvalue of agony and the value of pleasure are sentience-intrinsic.

So, I think the basis for Pearce’s moral realism is that agony is sentience-intrinsic and not contingent on any particular mind. When he says “it’s just objectively the case that first person agony is disvaluable,” what he means is there is no way for the person experiencing agony to be mistaken that it is bad, because its badness is intrinsic. If you changed it to not be bad, it wouldn’t be agony any more. If someone else experienced it, they would also agree that it is bad. However, we can't directly share the experiences of others. That is what the term “epistemologically subjective” is meant to pick out. Only the subject of those experiences can know them directly. And that leads to the interesting debate about mind-melds.

Mind-melds and epistemological limitations

In response to Pearce saying that it is impossible for suffering to be experienced as valuable, Brian objects, and this leads to a fascinating disagreement about mind-melds which:

David Pearce: ...it just seems to be built into the nature of agony or despair that they are disvaluable. It's simply not possible to instantiate such states and find it an open question whether they're disvaluable or not.

Brian Tomasik: I don't know if we want to debate now but I think it is possible. I mean we already have examples of one organism who finds the suffering of another organism to be positively valuable.

David Pearce: But they are not mirror-touch synesthetes [5]. They do not accurately perceive what is going on, and insofar as one does—either as a mirror-touch synesthete or from doing the equivalent of a Vulcan mind meld or something like that—one is not going to perceive the disvaluable as valuable. It's an epistemological limitation.

Brian Tomasik: My objection to that is it depends how you hook up the wires between the two minds. Like if you hook up one person suffering to another person’s suffering, then the second person will say it's also bad. But, if you hook up one person’s suffering neurons to another person’s pleasure neurons, then, the second person will say it’s good. It just depends how you hook up the wires.

David Pearce: It's not all or nothing, but if one is, let’s say, a mirror-touch synesthete and someone stubs their toe and you have an experience of pain, it's simply not possible to take pleasure in their stubbing their toe. I think if one does have this notional god's eye perspective, an impartial view from nowhere, that one will act accordingly.

Brian Tomasik: I disagree with that because I think you can always imagine just reversing the motivational wires so to speak. Just flip the wire that says this is bad. Flip it to saying this is good in terms of the agent's motivation.

David Pearce: Right. Yes. I was trying to visualize what this would entail.

Brian Tomasik: Even in a synesthete example, just imagine a brain where the same stimulus currently in normal humans—this stimulus triggers negative emotional responses—just have the neurons hook up to the positive emotional responses instead.

David Pearce: Once again, wouldn’t this be an epistemological limitation rather than some deep metaphysical truth about the world?

Brian Tomasik: Well, it depends how you define epistemology but you could be a psychopath where you correctly predict another organism’s behavior but you don't care. You can have a difference between beliefs and motivations. The beliefs could correctly recognize this, I think, but the motivations could have the wires flipped such that there’s motivation to cause more of the suffering.

David Pearce: It's just that I would say that the psychopath has an epistemological limitation in that the psychopath does not adequately take into account other perspectives. In that sense, psychopath lacks an adequate theory of mind. The psychopath is privileging one particular here and now over other here and nows, which is not metaphysically sustainable.

Their inability to come to an agreement hinges on confusion between the epistemologically subjective and objective. Pearce’s two examples of mirror-touch synesthetes and Vulcan mind meld are actually very different. Mirror-touch synesthetes do not directly feel what others feel. They feel their model of what the other person is feeling as if they were feeling it themselves. Put another way, their mental models of themselves and of others are hooked up to intrinsic experience on the pleasure/pain axis in exactly the same way. In contrast, in a hypothetical mind-meld scenario, the two people (or Vulcans as the case may be) would actually experience the same thing.

If it is possible to “criss-cross” the suffering and pleasure neurons between the two minds, that means they are not sharing epistemological subjectivity. It is a more direct way for one person to get information about what the other person is experiencing but does not convey the experience itself. Tomasik focused on the inverse of a mirror-touch synesthete, which is not essentially different from a real life sadist: the sadist receives an external signal (auditory or visual or whatever) from which he infers that the person is suffering. Some part of his brain is modeling that person’s suffering and the output is “hooked up” to his “pleasure neurons”. Tomasik assumes that the two minds are still distinct and the “mind-meld” here is just a way to more efficiently get information from one mind to the other. Therefore, the information he is talking about is still ontologically objective (measurable electrical impulses). What Pearce wants, on the other hand, is a mind-meld which results in the same epistemologically subjective experience. This would result in the sadist gaining epistemologically subjective access to the intrinsic quality of agony and would then agree it is bad. This is what Pearce means by an “epistemological limitation,” that the intrinsic experience of other sentient beings, the realm of the epistemologically subjective, is closed off to us.

I see two problems with using mind-meld thought experiments to show that suffering is epistemologically objectively bad. First, a mind meld effectively erases the distinction between the two minds. Rather than rendering knowledge of the victim’s agony epistemologically objective, it has just changed who has epistemologically subjective knowledge of it, resulting in a tautology: if he could experience the intrinsically bad experience, he would agree it is bad, because it is intrinsically bad. For Pearce, the “deep metaphysical truth about the world” is that suffering is disvaluable. This is true for the subject experiencing it. But another deep metaphysical truth is that our universe contains multiple subjects who are sometimes in conflict. Even the “impartial view from nowhere” doesn't help. The impartial viewer from nowhere would still need to care about the suffering of others which they aren’t intrinsically experiencing. Maybe Pearce really means a “view from everywhere” which experiences all suffering, but again that doesn’t render the suffering epistemologically objective.

I don't know what Pearce means at the end of the quote that privileging one perspective “is not metaphysically sustainable,” but next time you see a bully about to hurt someone, I suggest yelling “hey, you are privileging your particular here and now over the here and now of that person you are about to hurt and that is not metaphysically sustainable!” Who knows, it might work, or at least confuse him enough to give the would-be victim time to escape.

The second even more serious problem for Pearce’s view is that we can construct a thought experiment in which the sadist gains access to the intrinsic experience of his victim and still decides to cause suffering. Before the mind-meld, the sadist has a mind-contingent association between believing the other person is suffering and experiencing his own pleasure. Assume a mind-meld is performed which causes the sadist to share the intrinsic experience of the victim without changing anything else about his mind. Just like you can enjoy a bite of delicious food while simultaneously experiencing the pain of a stubbed toe, the sadist now simultaneously experiences the pain of the victim and the pleasure from his (now irrefutable) knowledge the victim is in pain. Would the sadist still decide to hurt the victim? It depends on how much pleasure the sadist gets from inflicting pain compared to the agony of experiencing that same pain. I see no reason to rule out the possibility that the sadist would still decide to hurt the victim because it is good for him overall. This thought experiment shows that the goodness or badness of the situation is mind-contingent. The specific mind of the sadist values the situation and the specific mind of the victim doesn't, even though the sadist is also experiencing the pain of the victim.

To summarize, the badness of suffering is ontologically subjective in a sentience-intrinsic way. However, caring about the suffering of others is ontologically subjective in a mind-contingent way. The link between “I believe someone else is suffering” and “that's bad” or “I want to change that state of affairs” only exists for some minds. It seems possible for a sadistic mind to exist which could, through a mind-meld, share an intrinsically negative experience of suffering with another mind and still not want to relieve that suffering because the sadist simultaneously experiences an even stronger pleasure associated with knowing the other is suffering. Even if you think that such a mind is logically impossible, because the suffering is now the sadist’s suffering and it is impossible to value your own suffering, then the mind-meld scenario is just stating a tautology that the sentience-intrinsic disvalue of suffering is bad. Such a tautology cannot lend support to the idea that the disvalue of suffering is epistemologically objective.

A Joking Interlude

Q: How can a law-abiding and lazy sadist maximize his pleasure with minimal effort?
A: Have dinner with a bunch of mirror-touch synesthetes and repeatedly pretend to bite his tongue.

Semi-realist ethics: a partially objective ethics built on minimal epistemologically subjective axioms

Based on the above arguments, axioms for a consequentialist ethics are ontologically subjective and mind-contingent. If you could do some operation on the mind of a sadist to no longer enjoy hurting people, he would no longer be a sadist. You would have changed his mind in a relevant dimension, but not to track something in the ontologically objective world. It would be changing a preference that only exists as a result of his particular mind. Here lies the difference with the epistemological limitation of an illiterate child who can’t use a tape-measure to figure out the length of a table. Learning to read and use a tape-measure will change the child’s mind in a way which enables her to discover features of the ontologically objective world, namely, lengths of things [6]. Altering the sadist’s mind to no longer enjoy hurting people changes his mind-contingent preferences.  

Even if ethical axioms are mind contingent, everything after the axioms could, in theory, be epistemologically objective. Two such axioms could be:

1. The suffering of any sentient creature is intrinsically bad (which doesn’t rule out cases where it is instrumentally good even to the point of being ethically obligatory)
2. The pleasure of any sentient creature is intrinsically good (which doesn’t rule out cases where it is instrumentally bad, even to the point of being ethically forbidden)

If these axioms are accepted, there are lots of conclusions that can then be “derived” objectively, i.e., any mind with the requisite reasoning abilities will come to the same conclusions. I think any non-sadist will agree with these axioms and I’m prepared to call anyone who disagrees with them evil. Such an ethics would be semi-objective. The existence of the axioms would be ontologically subjective and the acceptance of them would be epistemologically subjective, but everything that follows from them would be epistemologically objective, at least in theory [7]. However, further axioms are needed for many decisions (e.g., how to trade-off between suffering and pleasure). These further axioms are hotly contested which is further evidence of their mind-contingency even among empathic people. Part of the reason they are hotly contested is that any set of axioms seems to lead to conclusions that someone finds morally repugnant. A common feature of these situations is the trade-off between intrinsic value and disvalue for different sentient creatures (or potential sentient creatures). Perhaps if one could mind-meld with all sentient creatures, ethical choices would be obvious even in cases when an action simultaneously brings about value for some and disvalue for others, but I doubt it. It would just make the fundamental trade-offs viscerally known. Ethics is hard precisely because it requires painful tradeoffs. For better or for worse, different people will make different choices regarding those tradeoffs.

Where does this leave us with regard to a potential artificial super intelligence? Well, let’s hope we at least don’t create a super intelligent sadist.

Footnotes

[1] In more technical terminology, the host asked whether they are cognitivists or noncognitivists. Taken from the interview, cognitivism “refers to a set of theories which hold that moral sentences express genuine propositions. That means that they can have truth or false values.” In contrast noncognitivism theories which broadly view moral sentences as expressing emotions or other non-objective truths about the world. I don't find these terms particularly helpful, so I don't use them in the main body of the review.

[2] Although it is not the topic of this essay, I think that Pearce is wrong when he says it isn't possible to imagine a civilization in which the people have an inverted pleasure-pain axis. He is assuming the functional role of the pleasure-plain axis, which means he is assuming "psycho-physical harmony" is logically necessary. It seems logically possible for an evil creator to create beings who are functionally equivalent to humans or other animals but experience pain in circumstances in which we experience pleasure and vice versa.

[3] John Searle has beenaccused multiple times of sexual harassment and, as a result,UC Berkeley stripped him of his emeritus status. This is an important reminder that having good or useful ideas does not make someone a good person. I still think it is important to credit the originators of ideas to enable others to investigate their history and to give the misimpression that I came up with them myself.

[4] On some reductionist views, only fundamental particles/fields exist and everything else is illusory. In that case, only those fundamental particles/fields are ontologically objective. Alternatively, under panpsychist or idealist metaphysics, perhaps nothing exists independent of minds. For this essay, I'm assuming that at least fundamental particles/fields exist independent of minds.

[5] Mirror-touch synesthetes are people who viscerally experience what they observe others experiencing.

[6] The fact that length depends on one’s reference frame does not render it subjective either ontologically or epistemologically. It just means length is an ontological property which cannot be separated from it’s reference frame. Two people in the same reference frame will measure the same length and could even predict what people in other reference frames will measure if they know the relevant physics.

[7] This is different from mathematics (at least those branches used in science). Tomasik at one point says he views both ethics and mathematics as “as fictional constructions that we make” which we can “reason within,” but that they are “mind-dependent” without “independent truths.” The difference I see between mathematics and ethics is that the axioms of a mathematical system can be chosen in such a way that they model some aspect of the ontologically objective portion of reality. Then, the theorems derived from them tell us something about that ontologically objective domain. Only certain axioms do this. So, in a sense, those axioms are also ontologically objective. It’s true that you need a mind to find those axioms, but, presumably, any sufficiently intelligent mind will find them. This is not the case for ethical axioms, which are contingent on specific minds.