K. Sreeman Reddy

Philosophy | K. Sreeman Reddy

This page details my philosophical beliefs.

“I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, I know that I understand the true philosophy.”

― Baruch Spinoza

  1. Ethics: Threshold deontology, Moral realism (Objective morality), Categorical Imperative, Golden Rule, Ahiṃsā (nonviolence), Abolitionism (commodity status), Abolitionism (involuntary suffering), Veganism, Anticarnism, Anti-animal–industrial complex, Anti-speciesism, Sentiocentrism1, The Drowning Child Argument (the irrelevancy of emotional proximity for moral obligations) and Unconditional compassion towards all sentient beings. [post]
  2. Other: Pantheism, Naturalism, Reductionism, Mathematical Platonism, Scientism, Supervenience physicalism (the last 2 I believe only for the concrete reality not the full reality that includes abstract entities), Scientific realism, The Unreality of Time, Strong Atheism, Eternal oblivion, Antitheism, Antireligion, Antifoundationalism, Self-Respect Movement, Anti-anti-natalism, Anti-lookism, Antisexualism, Asceticism, Transhumanism, Intelligence Amplification, Absurdism, Optimistic nihilism, Hard Incompatibilism, Pacifism
  3. Raison d’être of sapient species2: This is the meaning of life. Arranged in ascending order of hardness. Only the 1st and 2nd ones seem possible for our species in this century.
    1. Understanding the fundamental laws of physics
    2. Eradicating all immorality and involuntary suffering caused by our species (wars, animal agriculture, childhood religious indoctrination [post] etc)
    3. Eradicating all immorality and involuntary suffering in nature not caused by our species. This includes:
      • Death: Achieving immortality either biologically or digitally and then the world government should make everyone (who wants) immortal.
      • Wild animal suffering: We should solve the predation problem and Herbivorize Predators without violating the rights of predators. Then we should give all animals enough cognitive abilities so that they will become sapient and have meaning in their life. Then we should give immortality to all those sapient beings who wants. See PMC10008771, to understand that currently this is much less suffering than animal agriculture. See wildanimalsuffering.org.
    4. Becoming an advanced civilization: As advanced as our laws of physics allow
      • Society should achieve something like the Dyson’s eternal intelligence (it doesn’t work for positive cosmological constant) so that they can espace the heat death of the universe.
      • We should upgrade our body’s energy efficiency. Instead of eating 3 times a day, which is mundane, we should use an efficient process like every million years once, we should take a few grams of matter and a few grams of antimatter, and they slowly annihilate in our stomach.
      • We should use Intelligence Amplification to become much more intelligent than biological humans.
      • Become powerful like the following species: Xeelee, Photino birds, The Culture, Hegemony of Man etc.
  4. Political philosophy: A democratic socialistic federal world government with state atheism and Schwartzberg’s weighted voting must be established to cure the disease of nationalism.
    • AGI dictator: An advanced rational open-source immortal AGI must be appointed as the dictator of the world. This is desired because almost all human politicians will unavoidably have anthropocentric speciesist bias. An AGI will care about all sentient animals within its dominion and will definitely abolish animal agriculture. Each state can democratically elect its own human leader. Any decision relevant to the whole world can be approved only if both the AGI dictator and the Schwartzberg weighted majority vote of human politicians accept it. For example: to do a git commit to the dictator’s open-source code, the before 2 must agree. Any decision relevant to a particular state can be approved only if both the AGI dictator and the local parliament agree. The AGI dictator should be given enough computing resources to be able to chat with every human at the same time and take their suggestions if they are good or explain why they are bad.
    • Military abolitionism: With the creation of a unified world government, the need for individual militaries will be gone, and militaries must be abolished until we discover any alien sapient beings who might attack humans. The money saved can be better used to solve poverty.
    • Economic inequality: Within the world government, rich states must be taxed high, and part of that amount should be given to poor countries with low per capita income. Note that this is not related to retributive justice, where only colonial powers like European countries, Japan, etc, have to pay higher taxes; this is consequentialist justice, where even rich countries like South Korea that have not exploited others must pay higher taxes.
    • Multiplanetary: Whether the unified world government should be upgraded to a unified galactic government, etc, largely depends on how fast space travel becomes. If things like Alcubierre drive turned out to be impossible in quantum gravity, maintaining a galactic federation is not feasible. So, each planet should have separate governments with separate AGI dictators.
  5. Past beliefs: 1) Hinduism (till ~2012), 2) Buddhism (~2012-2013), 3) Negative utilitarianism (till 2021), 4) Rationalism/Empiricism3 (till 2021), 4) Welfarist veganism4 (till mid 2022)
  6. Afraid of: 1) Philosophical skepticism [check Münchhausen trilemma, Gettier problem, Acatalepsy, Solipsism, Ajñana, Pyrrhonism, Ignorabimus, Cartesian doubt and also slightly related things like Problem of induction, Is–ought problem, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems], 2) The amorality of the laws of physics, 3) Death, 4) Having cognitive dissonance and moral blind spots on issues I haven’t thought about and 5) Not living long enough to see any experimental data related to quantum gravity.
  7. Miscellaneous:
    • I think the answer to Why is there anything at all? is an ontological argument that argues for the existence of the laws of physics. In principle, this might look like rationalism, but as a footnote below explains, I am an antifoundationalist. We can’t uniquely deduce the greatest entity (laws of physics) by reason alone. My pantheism is not a religion because I define religion as “any dogmatic belief surrounding afterlife”. [post]
    • I think True Love (= Unconditional compassion towards all sentient beings) is only possible for an omnipotent being, and even then, it is True Love only in one direction, and it is discrimination in the other direction. [post]
    • I really like the elegance of the laws of physics. But I would much rather prefer inelegant moral laws of physics than the elegant amoral laws of physics that exist in reality.
    • Like FM-2030, I think the widespread practice of naming conventions exists only as a relic of humanity’s tribalistic past. If I had high confidence that biologists would drastically increase human lifespan within my lifetime, I would have renamed myself as KSR-12002.
    • I think Alvin Plantinga’s reformed epistemology argument that no basis (arguments, evidence etc) for belief in God is necessary is the most ridiculous argument in the history of human thought. The 2nd most ridiculous argument is the argument from reason by C. S. Lewis.
  8. Inspiring people:
  9. Some philosophy papers
  10. philpapers.org
  11. philosophyexperiments.com
  12. plato.stanford.edu
  13. iep.utm.edu
  14. vegancheatsheet.org and ksr.onl/vegan

  1. Our moral circle expanded from originally consisting of only the males of the same tribe to later include males of the same ethnicity, race, nationality etc and also eventually all humans of all countries, including non males. The last step in our moral evolution will be to include all sentient beings in our moral circle and this is called Sentiocentrism or Sentientism. Plants are not sentient. Most animals are sentient and can suffer. There are a few animals, like sponges, corals, etc, that are not sentient. There are also a few animals, like insects, that we do not yet know if they are sentient. In general, if an animal has a central nervous system then it likely is sentient and can feel pain. Casteism, linguicism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, religionism, racism, sexism, speciesism etc are all tribalistic compared to Sentiocentrism. People very often think their caste or ethnicity or race or species is superior to others and therefore they can oppress others. That is, of course, immoral nonsense.
    Sapiocentrism/Sapientism gives moral weight to all sapient (i.e. capable of abstract thinking) beings. Since we Homo sapiens have never met another sapient (alien) species, in practice, Sapiocentrism = Anthropocentrism, and both are part of Speciesism. Speciesism can be manifest in many different forms, for example, giving some rights to dogs but not giving the same rights to pigs, cows, etc. Check The Edge of Sentience book.
    The gravity of the situation can not be overstated because each year, trillions (1,2,3,4) of sentient animals are needlessly tortured and killed. ↩

  2. By this, I mean this is the meaning of life for any sapient species. For non sapient species I think there is no meaning of life. On this planet, we Homo sapiens are the only sapient species. Nonsapient species are not moral agents, so you can not morally judge them. ↩

  3. After going back and forth between Rationalism vs. Empiricism, I became an antifoundationalist. In the Neurath’s boat simile, I think the situation is even worse because of philosophical skepticism which is like a shark making it harder to gain knowledge. Even if you know swimming, you can’t build the boat from scratch because the shark will eat you. So, you can’t have a single foundation and must use a mixture of reason, empirical data etc. ↩

  4. I stopped being a welfarist and became an abolitionist after reading Gary L. Francione’s six principles. ↩

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