Project summary

"Timeless sentientism" as a philosophy argues that we should morally care about not just all humans (regardless of e.g. race, sexuality or where they live), but all sentient beings (including animals and potentially AI or even aliens), and not just those "alive" (literally or figuratively) now, but also those alive in the future. Discrimination based on species (speciesism) is wrong, as is discrimination based on the time period one lives in.

This ebook will make heavy use of thought experiments - like William MacAskill's broken glass thought experiment for longtermism - to argue for sentientism, longtermism and effective altruism (in short, timeless sentientism). Furthermore, it will make the case that we should use evidence-based reasoning to care about and take care of all sentient life living now and in the future. Adopting timeless sentientism means acknowledging Earth's sentient civilization has huge problems. One of the biggest problems is factory farming, which causes massive amounts of suffering to sentient life. Veganism is an obvious thing to argue for here. Furthermore, there are threats to civilization's long-term survival, such as the threats of nuclear war and transformative AI. The ebook will look at potential ways to address these problems. Furthermore, the ebook will argue that Game Theory and Decision Theory lie at the heart of many of these problems, and will show that potential solutions can be found here too (e.g. superrationality/Functional Decision Theory).

As colonizing the Solar System (and beyond) could help protect humanity against existential risks, this ebook will argue for this as well and discuss potential future space travel technologies (like space tethers) that might help with this goal.

Timeless sentientism theoretically implies past lives have moral value too, but until (if ever) we can change the past, this might not matter much in practice. A discussion on the possibility of time machines may be relevant here. If we believe we can, with e.g. 5 years of research, build a time machine and change the past, we should seriously consider it.

What are this project's goals and how will you achieve them?

My aim is to finish this ebook within 2 years after starting the project.

The goal is to inspire readers of this ebook to help build a better civilization for all sentient life, now and in the future. This can take form in many ways: by becoming vegan (or even just eating less meat), by donating 10% of one's income via GiveDirectly, by starting a research institute for aligning AI, fighting climate change in some way, etc.

How will this funding be used?

It will function as my salary during the 2 years (24 months) of doing research for and writing and publishing the ebook.

Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?

It's just me. I have blogged a lot about decision theory, math and science under a $100,000 grant from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. See for example Superrationality: How Decision Theory Resolves Any Dilemma and Achilles, the Tortoise and the Hotel: Exploring the Infinite. A complete list of my Medium blog posts can be found here.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)

Spending too much time on research and writing more and more, leaving not enough time to edit, polish and finishing up the ebook.

What other funding are you or your project getting?

None.