New research project, started April 2023

Quotes

Short Quotes

Daniel Schmachtenberger

“If you’re scaling towards the power of gods, then you have to have the wisdom and the love of gods, or you’ll self destruct.”

“The real existential risk is a loss of the ability to make sense of the world around us: what is worth doing, and what the likely effects of things will be”

“We do have an innate impulse towards agency, towards self actualization. Within a win-lose game structure, that will look like a competitive impulse. But within a win-win structure, that will look like the desire to go beyond my previous capacity.”

– Daniel Schmachtenberger [1]

Long Quotes

"We address two distinct forms of existential risk:

The death of humanity and the death of our humanity.

1) The first form of existential risk is how the term is usually understood: existential risk as the death of the human species. And extinction or near-extinction event. Catastrophic risk refers to events that will cause the death or extreme suffering of large segments of humanity.

2) The second form of existential risk is equally threatening, but more insidious. The death of our humanity might be caused, for example, by a pervasive, digitally mediated environment, based on the lowest common denominator of the human experience, which effectively generates degraded humans without any genuine free will, personhood, or dignity. Protecting and preserving the value of personhood, therefore, must animate efforts to avert the death of our humanity."

- David J. Temple, CosmoErotic Humanism