On this episode of the Utilitarian Podcast, I talk with Andres Gomez Emilsson who is co-director of research at the Qualia Research Institute.

The Qualia Research Institute is a non-profit whose goal is to study consciousness in a scientifically rigorous way.

This podcast begins with a presentation that Andres gave to a group at The Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London

The presentation is about the Symmetry theory of valence, which is a possible explanation of why experiences feel good or bad.

If you’d like to skip straight to my conversation with Andres, you can skip forward approximately an hour and 2 minutes.

In this conversation, we briefly sketch the Symmetry Theory of Valence, and discuss valence as the basis for morality. I ask Andres a number of critical questions about studying consciousness scientifically - isn’t consciousness extremely vague, how did consciousness evolve, how do we rely on people’s reports about their experiences.

We also talk about the connection between the value that we assign to objects in the world, and how we might be misleading ourselves by doing do.

Then we talk about how we might improve valence in the future, and Andres mentions an exciting project they’re working on at Qualia Research Institute.

We talk about the long-term future of valence in the universe, and the influence of AI.

Finally, we discuss a comprehensive world view involving conflict between consciousness and what Andres calls pure replicators - during which we also discuss the nature of personal identity.

If you find these ideas interesting, I encourage you to donate to Qualia Research institute, at qualiaresearchinstitute.org/donate. Among other things, this would help them empirically test the Symmetry Theory of Valence.

Simon Rosenqvist recently completed his PhD in philosophy at Uppsala University and we cover his conclusions in this podcast.

We talk about consciousness in humans, animals and machines

We discuss the best formulation of utilitarianism

And we talk about two problems for utilitarians: the problem of conflicts between the utilitarian judgements and moral intuitions and the problem of action guidance, which is roughly the problem that utilitarianism is not useful when deciding what we should do, since what we should do depends on the consequences of our actions millions of years into the future. 

I talk with Torbjörn Tännsjö about his personal relation to moral philosophy and utilitarianism, moral methodology and the role of intuitions in ethics, moral realism, nihilism and religion, the repugnant conclusion and factory farming, the standing of utilitarianism in academic philosophy and the biggest challenges of the future.