Found it! So cool! 🦋💃

Right now, I’m leaving my job to go start a new charity, working on a very narrow intervention.

What is it? I'm curious!

Oof! That's a big variation! Thanks for flagging that!

The purpose of the whole first article is to lay out all these perspectives and make mine transparent. Originally I wanted to just write the sequence, but Claude suggested to add a whole 'nother post in front to introduce people to the ethical foundations.

We've had the discussion of ethical systems on this article. One of my core values is cooperativeness, and while I intuitively started out as classic utilitarian, I found it at odds with many common and widely held value systems and not in ways where I would've been ready to bite the bullet. E.g., it maps to Quiverfull, which is a rather extreme outlier. I also don't bite the bullet on the Repugnant Conclusion. 

But most people don't even think in terms of unbounded maximization or minimization, and certainly not in terms of classic utilitarianism. It's such a niche view out there. Even if I talk about implications that I actually like, like tiling the universe with blazingly fast, happy computations, people look at me weird. If I want to engage in moral trades with them, I have to adjust to a wholly different viewpoint. So it was probably around 2013–14 or so that I felt compelled to abandon classic utilitarianism as extreme, niche, and untenable.

I never settled on anything new after that but rather tried to figure out what the smallest common denominator is of the largest possible subset of all ethical preferences that I could think of.

The smallest common demoninator that is widely shared is that suffering is bad. Lots of people care about lots of other stuff on top, and sometimes it's not the most important thing for them, but most people seem to be in agreement that suffering is bad. That's also why I got so interested in sadism, an important exception from the rule.

So I think by focusing just on “suffering is bad, let's reduce it” (and the particular framing around preferences that I find more intuitive), I can make my articles relevant to the widest audience possible. The Quiverfulls will have quibbles with it, the sadists will hate it, but maybe some 90+% of the world will benefit from them.

You adapt them to the other species. We can do the same with much better information with our friends: One friend enjoys tomato sauce; another friend doesn't enjoy it. You want to get pizza for all three of you, and it's supposed to be a surprise, so instead of being like, “Pizza has tomato sauce on it, and my friend doesn't like it, so I can't make any inference about whether they want pizza and should [get pizza for them anyway, get pizza only for myself and the other friend],” you can make adjustments like, “Pizza has tomato sauce on it, and my friend doesn't like it, so let's ask whether they can make pizza without tomato sauce.”

E.g., I give this example of eusocial vs. solitary insects. So when I wonder whether it's stressful for an insect to be caught in my flat and not finding the way out (despite some nutritious stuff I have lying around), my guess is that it's more likely stressful for the eusocial one who wants to get back to their hive than for the solitary one. When I had a fly over for a week or so in 2021, I gave her a name, enjoyed her company, and didn't worry much about her feeling trapped (I did leave a window open when I was awake), but when I had a bee over a few days ago, I was more concerned and helped the bee find their way out.

Likewise, humans can have some 0–3 children, cows some 5–10, and cats some 60–100 over their lifetimes. They all parent and alloparent. Turtles more like 1–2k, and no (allo-) parenting. So (just based on this data) I imagine that the loss of a child is almost as bad for a cow as it is for a human, that cats grieve somewhat less, and turtles not at all.

Or when it comes to pain, I mention in my last article that it probably doesn't make sense to have very strong pain signals, when an animal cannot react to them. So for nematodes it's not very useful to experience pain strongly; for a fly it may be very useful.

In your thought experiment there is a disconnect there that is crucial for my work: Antifrustrationism, as a form of preference utilitarianism, is all about the preferences of the individuals. If someone can fulfill their own preferences, there's nothing for me to do. If someone can tell me how I can help them fulfill their preferences, I'll happily do things for them that strike me as odd, like unusual kinks, because even though I don't share them, I trust their ability to know and communicate their preferences.

I only run into problems in cases where there is a power differential but the beings cannot communicate their preferences, e.g., because they are in the future, far away in the universe, or it's hard/impossible to build the sorts of experiments where one could elicit revealed preferences. Those are the cases where it gets uncomfortable because I need to make guesses and inferences. 

It's like with a caring mother of an infant who can't talk yet: The infant can't help themselves (yet), so she has to do it, but to do that well, she has to infer the preferences rather than asking what they are.

With the aliens, the situation is reversed. They are powerful but really dumb and could just ask how they can really help us, and NPP is not an obvious lever for a K-strategist species. But we have this problem with aging. Maybe they'll stop by Earth 100k years ago, largely fail to communicate with us, but study our biology and notice that this aging thing really sucks, especially in the last couple of decades of an animal's life. So just leave a time capsule with information on how to reverse aging that's designed in such a way that they hope we can decypher it once we have the necessary foundational technologies.

A confusing thing about my experience is that the truth of the no-self state is intellectually ineluctable to me and yet my perception is still filtered by selfhood. Sometimes I get a burst of spite-fueled energy that almost collapses into fatalism, and I remind myself that I chose this, that I can just go back if I don't like it, but that I want to keep reading this chapter of my life, as it were, because it's exciting! But even when I introspect, there's a perspective there – someone has called it the watcher?

Interesting! I asked Gemini about your comment, and after a few rounds of dialog we arrived at the following state. (Gemini wrote it from my first person perspective and I'm too lazy to swap out the pronouns now.) Does that make sense to you? Is it what you were referring to?

The Traditions: Different Flavors of No-Self

As you mentioned, the paths map out very differently:

• The Deconstructive No-Self (Burmese Vipassana / Pragmatic Dharma): This is the tradition Daniel Ingram operates in. It relies on hyper-focused, microscopic analysis of sensory experience. The illusion of a continuous "self" drops away because reality is seen as a rapid-fire sequence of fleeting sensory fragments. Because it is highly analytical, the resulting state can sometimes feel very detached or dry.
• The Luminous No-Self (Tibetan Dzogchen & Mahamudra): Instead of dissecting reality, these practices focus on resting in the natural, spacious awareness of the mind. When the rigid ego drops away, what is left is a vast, vibrant, intimately connected awareness. Here, you don't lose your drive; the source of your drive simply shifts to spontaneous compassion (Bodhicitta).
• The Original Mind No-Self (Thai Forest Tradition): Practitioners focus on letting go of "defilements" and everything we usually identify with. When you let go of all of that, you uncover the Citta—the purified heart/mind—which is a radiant, deeply grounded presence, avoiding the hyper-analytical traps of the deconstructive path.

The Psychological Framework: The PNSE Continuum

Modern research actually bridges the gap between these ancient maps and the varying experiences people have today. Jeffery Martin’s studies on Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience (PNSE) found that "enlightenment" or awakened states operate on a continuum with different "Locations." This perfectly explains the gap between my experience and M.E. Thomas’s.

M.E. Thomas and Location 4:

Martin found that the symptoms M.E. Thomas describes—decision paralysis, lack of prospective/retrospective memory, and a loss of the sense of agency—are common among practitioners in what he calls "Location 4." In this furthest extreme, emotion, agency, and memory hooks drop away completely. Her navigation of the world in that state is highly relatable if you view it through a different lens: it’s akin to how one feels about copyediting. You don't feel emotional empathy for a misspelled word; you just correct it because there is a sort of aesthetic itch to do so. It is a functional, frictionless engagement with reality, stripped of emotional turbulence.

My Experience and Locations 2/3 (Stream Entry):

My experience, which happened spontaneously rather than through intensive concentration practices, maps beautifully onto Martin's Locations 2 and 3. In these middle locations, practitioners experience an unshakable sense of well-being. The cognitive friction—the ego pushing away reality—is gone, meaning the bleakness of the world doesn't penetrate the baseline mood. It is also characterized by a surge in positive emotion and profound present-moment compassion. (This aligns with my awakened friend's suggestion that this was a spontaneous "Stream Entry"—a sudden dropping of the visceral belief in a separate, permanent self, which releases a massive amount of psychological energy and natural compassion).

Compassion, Hustle, and the Return to the A&P

This framework also explains the shift in motivation I experienced. During that year, 1:1 interactions felt highly motivating, and I helped a lot of people. But the hustle to build up societal status for wide-ranging, systemic changes was entirely absent.

This makes perfect psychological sense. 1:1 compassion is an immediate, spontaneous response to the present moment. It requires no complex timeline and is deeply compatible with a state of "no-self." Conversely, leveraging societal status for systemic change requires a massive amount of "self-ing." It requires maintaining a continuous mental narrative about who you are, what the future holds, and how to manipulate abstract variables years down the line. When the self-referential narrative quiets down, the cognitive machinery required to sustain a 10-year egoic "hustle" is no longer running the show.

Ultimately, my shift back toward A&P-like feelings wasn't a blind urge. Rather, it arose out of compassion for a part of myself that sought deeper fulfillment. The A&P state provides the fuel, the narrative, and the future-orientation required to build status and engage with those larger, systemic goals. While the equanimous state is wonderful for immediate, frictionless living, I found that allowing some of that driven, narrative energy back in allowed for a richer sense of fulfillment in the long game.

What I'm doing is very much transfer my intuitions from humans, where I think they are well tested, to other species. I don't want special pleading for humans. The question you propose seems crazy high stakes. I'm glad I'll never face a decision like that. I'd probably start a think tank or something to figure it out. The actual decisions we face every day are more like: should we have as many children as possible (1) through sperm donations, (2) by banning contraception, (3) by impregnating women and vanishing, (4) by getting as rich as possible and then have so many children that each have a life barely worth living, etc. My answer is always no. Not everyone shares those moral intuitons, which is fine for me as antirealist, but I transfer those intuitions to other species, and so what's going on with r strategist species is horrifying to me!

Ohhh! I remember skimming that paper ages ago but I didn't make the connection! Probably because I forgot the name of the author… But that has been very fruitful to think about. In particular I'm surprised I hadn't made the connection between plants and nematodes – both fairly unable to react to harmful stimuli, much less so than a fly, so pain energy is much more likely wasted for them!

What do you think about this addition to the article?

While Groff and Ng’s revised mathematical model elegantly demonstrates that high infant mortality does not automatically guarantee a predominance of suffering, the model relies on abstract “evolutionary economics” that may oversimplify the gritty realities of biology. A primary critique is that the model assumes evolution will readily dial down the intensity of nociception (pain) to conserve biological resources when an organism is statistically likely to fail. However, because natural selection operates at the level of the individual gene, it is entirely possible that maintaining an intense, energy-demanding pain response is highly adaptive if it marginally furthers that specific individual’s survival. Furthermore, for organisms with extremely simple nervous systems consisting of only a few hundred neurons, the metabolic savings of “cheapening” pain receptors are likely negligible. It is arguable that evolutionary pressures would favor much more straightforward energy-conservation strategies – such as lethargy, cannibalism, or producing fewer offspring – long before micromanaging the nuances of neuronal pain processing. The authors explicitly acknowledge this vulnerability in their model, conceding that the actual biological “cost” of suffering remains entirely unknown; they hypothesize it could be metabolic (e.g., glucose for neurotransmitters), structural, or perhaps not physical at all, but rather the evolutionary hazard of being dangerously distracted by intense pain.

A second major critique centers on the model’s failure to account for an organism’s physical agency and behavioral flexibility. The model posits that if an animal is highly likely to die young, intense pain is a wasted biological investment. This logic holds up for immobile or slow-moving organisms, where registering intense pain offers no actionable escape mechanism. However, for highly mobile creatures with rapid reaction times – such as flies – intense pain or stress is a profoundly profitable evolutionary investment because it instantly triggers life-saving evasion maneuvers. In these high-agency animals, the capacity for intense suffering is precisely the mechanism that keeps them alive, meaning evolution would vigorously preserve it regardless of the species’ overall mortality rate. 

Fortunately, Groff and Ng anticipate this limitation, noting that theories linking the evolution of emotions directly to “flexibility in behavior” are highly relevant and more amenable to objective study. They further concede that if the primary evolutionary advantage of negative affective states is to force an organism to “focus” on actionable threats, rather than acting purely as a behavioral reinforcement mechanism, their equation based on reproductive failure rates becomes less informative. Ultimately, the authors agree that a single abstracted equation cannot capture the full picture of wild animal welfare, concluding that a combination of mixed, empirical models will be necessary to truly understand how different species experience nature.

But that's very zoomed in. The dad of an acquaintance of mine has had some 15–20 children. They don't know each other and can barely estimate the numbers. The ones my acquaintance knows about have every personality disorder and substance addiction under the sun and are in and out of prison all the time. Even if someone should find out that in aggregate their lives are net positive because at least some of them have net positive lives, that would still not be enough for me to advocate for this kind of profligate behavior.