High-Tech Jainism
by Andrés Gómez Emilsson and David Pearce
Written together at the QRI retreat in Tepoztlán, in the days before our 10-day jhana retreat starting Monday, in a context where the schedule includes 2 hours of meditation a day + exercise + 6 hours of co-working sessions and daily skillshares. The narrating “I” is Andrés. David is the co-author whose arguments run through the piece. Based on multiple transcripts + careful editorial suggestions by Dave and quite a bit of raw Andrés prose (in case you can’t tell, haha!) :-)
Here is a question that arose this week, forced by the practicalities involved in encountering Centurion scorpions in our Tepoztlán house in the presence of David Pearce: what policy protects human beings, and lets them flourish, in a world that also contains full-spectrum supersentient superintelligence, minds as far beyond us in qualia-generality and causal power as we stand beyond a scorpion? Put the two jumps side by side: the gap from a human to such a being could be roughly the gap from a scorpion to a human, except that this time we are the scorpion.
The reflex is to say the second pair has nothing in common worth the comparison. But in the grand scheme a human and a scorpion are close kin. Each is an island universe, a phenomenal world-simulation rendered and felt from the inside, running on the pleasure-pain axis that natural selection bolted onto everything with a nervous system, which in David’s phrase discloses the world’s inbuilt metric of value. Each was built by a blind optimizer to propagate genes, not to be happy. And each turns vicious on occasion, the scorpion by reflex and the human by something we flatter with longer names. The scorpion stings, but the human, given the chance, will do far worse things.
So the question a superintelligence will one day face about us is the question we face nightly about the scorpion on the wall. Here is a small island universe with a pleasure-pain axis, occasionally dangerous, mostly just trying to survive until the morning, stuck in the rat race of Darwinian life. Do you reprogram it, or do you retire it? David’s way of putting this is that humans are very humble minds compared to our successors, that bugs matter, and that life-loving humans had better hope those successors practice high-tech Jainism toward us. The mercy we would beg to receive, if the larger mind ever paused over us, is the mercy we owe the smaller one tonight.
High-Tech Jainism, in Jainpop (not to be confused with Buddhapop) style
The world’s last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event
we self-edit the source code till the suffering is spent
no more below hedonic zero, no more Darwinian dread
sublime well-being pre-programmed, gradients of bliss instead
take the Purple Pill with me, stay lucid, stay in love
well-being of all sentience raining sweet from up above
high-tech Jainism, baby, never hurt a single soul
paradise engineering, making every creature whole
full-spectrum superintelligence, Triple S and superhappy high
cosmic rescue mission, we will abolish every cry
we’ll redesign the living world, the predators reprogrammed kind
immunocontraception, leave the agony behind
the circle of compassion reaching every distant star
blissful but not blissed out, raise the hedonic bar
across the forward light-cone, through the Hubble volume wide
living in Heaven’s fun, my love, post-Darwinian, aliveLyrics of “High-Tech Jainism” (see original essay written in 2014) co-developed by David, Andrés, and Suno :-)
The scorpions indoors
This is not abstract for us this summer. The houses where we are running the retreat in Tepoztlán have scorpions that we encounter with a cadence of ~.5 per day, and “reprogram or retire” has a nightly, embodied form.
We got ultraviolet flashlights (thank you Hunter!) a few days ago, and at night I decided to show the retreat participants how to find them. Under ordinary light the place reads as mostly clear with a handful of sightings (about one every other day), which is unpleasant but survivable. Under UV the outer walls of the garden looked like a kind of horror-themed rave... We saw five scorpions in three minutes, each glowing the unmistakable blue-green of a cuticle that fluoresces, perched on the troweled stucco of a house that has stood since before I was born. They had always been there, really. The flashlight merely revised our sense of what had been true the whole time…
Our centurions are almost certainly Centruroides limpidus, the striped bark scorpion that causes more stings than any other species in Mexico and that has, in the dry phrasing of the toxinology literature, a tendency to live side by side with humans. The country logs around 300,000 stings a year, and Morelos, the state we are in, is reliably among the worst, with cases in the tens of thousands annually. The genus repays a little study, because the folk image of a scorpion misleads here. The dangerous Centruroides are not the bulky dark brutes that look the part. They are the slender, pale, modestly sized ones with thin pincers and a thin tail, carrying a venom of small peptides optimized to jam the voltage-gated sodium channels of whatever nervous system is unlucky enough to take the sting. They are bark scorpions, which is to say climbers, which is why they appear on walls and ceilings and fold themselves into shoes and bedding rather than appearing on the floor (though this still happens on occasion). They hunt at night and shun the light, and they are thigmotactic, and happiest wedged into a crevice with something pressing on every side, which a stone-and-stucco house offers from edge to edge. They glow because their cuticle throws back ultraviolet as that blue-green, a quirk of arthropod chemistry with no settled purpose for the animal, which exists, as far as I can tell, mainly to make my flashlight work.
So when one turns up in the bathroom the household runs a protocol we worked out carefully:
Protocol for Scorpions Found Indoors at the Current QRI Tepoztlán Retreat
Put on shoes. Tell someone. Spot it with the UV light. Slow it and start killing it by shooting a stream of soapy water and rubbing alcohol with a pre-loaded syringe, crush it quickly with a blunt stick, then lift the remains with a plastic bag or a piece of firm paper, never a tissue, since the sting can still come through a tissue. Flush it and sanitize the instruments and floor/wall where it was crushed.
David was untroubled by the scorpions. What unsettled him was the protocol. He is the man who as a child rescued injured ants and desiccated worms, who now carries a beetle outdoors on a folded tissue and would sooner absorb a small risk than take a small life, and he watched the stick come down with the disappointment of someone watching a future he has given his life to preventing.
That disappointment is the seed of everything we want to think through here.
What high-tech Jainism actually is
David coined the phrase in 2014 and worked it through again in a 2023 interview. The devout Jain sweeps the ground before sitting so as not to crush what cannot be seen, strains water before drinking, wears a cloth over the mouth so as not to inhale a gnat. This is ahimsa carried to the edge of what iron-age technology allowed, a whole life reorganized around the welfare of minds most people never notice. The high-tech part asks what the same vow looks like once a species can self-edit its own genetic source code. Where the monk had a broom and a water strainer, the program reaches for genome reform, preimplantation screening for benign low-pain alleles, cross-species immunocontraception, and the genetic herbivorizing of obligate carnivores, spread across the living world through gene drives. The aim, set out across The Hedonistic Imperative, The Abolitionist Project, and Reprogramming Predators, is to phase out experience below hedonic zero and rebuild the biosphere on information-sensitive gradients of intelligent bliss, a pan-species welfare state where the scorpion keeps its place in the world but loses the venom that can kill a child or a wise old man.
David’s underlying ethic is negative utilitarianism (whereas I am ultimately agnostic, though I do abide by a suffering-focused ethic and pragmatically and morally want to recruit hyper-pleasurable states for many reasons and value them deeply), the conviction that our overriding obligation is to prevent and abolish suffering in our forward light-cone. But “negative utilitarian” is a terrible brand. It sounds bleak and dour, and it drags every conversation into the same sterile thought experiment about whether one should therefore want to switch off the cosmos with a tastefully painless Doomsday device. “High-tech Jainism” was chosen partly to escape that gravity well and partly to kill the canard that abolitionists want to exterminate the lion and the snake. The intent is the reverse. Phasing out predation non-violently via contraceptives is consistent with the sanctity of life, and on David’s reading it is mandated by it. He will tell you, deadpan, that he himself only infrequently uses a broom (see a long conversation with him on exactly this more than a decade ago). I have had time to sit with the idea since I was a teen and encountered his essays online, and I should say plainly that I share the destination without reservation. Hand me a button that turns every Centruroides on my walls into a creature incapable of harming or being harmed (with secondary and tertiary side-effects, including ecosystem dynamic system adaptation etc. etc. etc.), and I press it before you finish the sentence. We do not disagree about where we are going.
We disagree about the policy in the interval between now and then.
The interval
Almost all of ethics happens in the interval. Visionary ethics describes the destination, the redeemed world worth wanting. Transitional ethics governs the long unredeemed stretch before we arrive, when the tools that would let you keep your hands clean do not yet exist and the obligations of tonight refuse to wait for them. The scorpion hiding between the bed and the wall is a transitional-ethics problem in its purest form. The world with the button has not shipped. There is a venomous animal a few feet from where someone will set down a bare foot, and no future welfare state can be summoned to deal with it at 2am.
And the bare foot is rarely mine. This is the part that is hard to feel from the outside, so let me put you in my shoes, which I have just checked with the UV light before putting on. I am the main organizer on-site of the retreat. I invited these people here. Some of them are deep in retreat, slowed by practice or by medication, not at their sharpest about where they step at night, and a few of them are about to go through states in which they could not reliably tell a scorpion from a shoelace. If one of them is stung in the dark and sleeps through it, the call I make tonight is the reason. A lone adult who wants to scoop a Centruroides onto a magazine and walk it out into the garden is spending only his own luck, and he is welcome to it. The instant I write that gesture into a policy for a roomful of vulnerable strangers, I am the one spending their luck, not mine. Responsibility for others changes the math, because the variable I am minimizing is no longer my own exposure but the worst thing that can happen to the least careful person under my roof.
David’s instinct is to act now as though the destination had already arrived. Mine is to act according to the world that obtains, to log the loss honestly and then protect the person. To show you why the second is right, and right for reasons David’s own position underwrites, I have to show you the machinery I use to make these calls.
The micromort backbone
For years my mental hygiene has run on actuarial tables and on pricing activities in micromorts, where one micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of death. I tell the language models to be absolutely pedantic, to assume I am neurodivergent and want multiple decimals, and not to round anything off for my comfort (I’m the kind of person who actually cares about orders of magnitude). They (sometimes) oblige with beautiful, well-researched, actuarial-like tables. I once had a model design my daily walk this way (and I suggest you do similarly). Given map data, per-street collision counts, and crime (mostly phone-snatching) statistics in different street segments, it found a roughly micromort-minimizing 45-minute route that also happens to pass a store, because the small hit of dopamine from going to fetch something raises the odds I actually take the walk, and the walk itself buys back a couple micromorts through exercise against the long-tail risks of a bus or a mugging. On certain blocks the same analysis just says: looks empty, but a lot of phones get taken here, pocket your phone. None of that is visible while you stand on the corner, and the careful statistic-driven analysis often gives you counterintuitive results (did you know about 1 percent of deaths in the United States are the result of car crashes?).
This is the backbone I want under the policies at a retreat. The pitch to attendees is simple: some of these rules will feel counterintuitive, and what they do is shave down the bulk of the likely harms and clip the long tails at once. For the scorpions there are two questions and they have opposite answers, so it pays to separate them. The first is how likely a sting is at all. The official statistics are no help, because they are drawn from a profile that is the photographic negative of ours: small children, men carrying and stacking firewood, homes with free-range hens and stored corn and palm-leaf or sheet-metal roofs, and, tellingly, people who take no action to prevent stings at all. We are eleven numerate adults in masonry-and-tile houses who sweep with UV, check our shoes, and keep the beds off the wall. But our house is also visibly dense, five on the garden walls in three minutes and eight or nine indoor sightings (including the one next to a bed) in three weeks, so the honest input is our own observed encounter rate rather than the national average. Run that through, and without any protocol the group faces roughly a coin-flip, call it a 45 percent chance that someone among the eleven is stung over the two months. With the layered protocol that roughly halves, to something like 20 percent. Around 99.8 percent of any sting that might happen would, at worst, be very painful rather than a medical emergency. Scorpions sit outside the Schmidt sting pain index, which only rates bees, wasps, and ants, but the bark-scorpion sting is well documented: an immediate burning hit followed by intense throbbing and hours of hypersensitivity to touch, comfortably above the honey bee that anchors Schmidt at a 2, and nothing like the bullet ant at the top.
The scenario worth engineering against is narrow and grim. Someone wobbly, fresh out of a deep sit or taking drugs sedated by medication, pulls on a shoe a scorpion has climbed into, takes the sting on the foot without registering it, lies down, and sleeps through the hours the venom needs to become a medical emergency. So the policy is straightforward: shoes go somewhere scorpions cannot reach, or shoes get checked, even though checking shoes is mildly absurd and faintly paranoid. The number is low precisely because we keep it low. Taking action is the one risk factor that we can (and do) control.
Here is the second question: I first ran this in pure micromorts, where one micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of death, and by that measure the scorpion risk is practically insignificant for us. Anchored to our own observed encounter rate, a healthy adult’s whole-retreat risk of dying from a scorpion comes out in the low single digits of micromorts. Set it beside the thing none of us think twice about, the daily round trip between the retreat locations that crosses the main Tepoztlán road each way, sometimes on foot and sometimes by car, which runs close to seven micromorts over the eight weeks. The two are the same order of magnitude. On death alone the scorpions are no scarier than walking to the store, which is to say not very, and a careless policy versus a careful one barely moves the figure. By that measure David is right to be unbothered and the protocol looks like theater.
But death is the wrong unit for this decision. Almost none of the harm I am actually managing is death. It is the sting that nobody dies from and that still disturbs the retreat: minutes to hours of four-to-eight-out-of-ten pain, a possible night drive down the mountain to an emergency room, a participant hauled out of a deep state and a wave of fear rippling through a roomful of people in jhana or on 5-MeO... Micromorts cannot see any of that, because micromorts only count the dead (similar to how QALYs don’t see cluster headaches).
Run the same model for expected disruptive events and the winner flips. Here the two honest sting-rate estimates diverge most, so I bracket them. On the cautious official-anchored rate the disruption risk is small, low single-digit percentages across the season. On the rate I actually observe in this house it is a coin-flip: without the protocol, roughly a 40 percent chance of at least one severe-pain episode, a quarter chance of someone losing a day or more of practice, around one in five of an acute panic or dysregulation event inside the container, and better than one in ten of an emergency-room trip. Reality sits between, almost certainly nearer the high end for a house as dense as ours. The layered protocol roughly halves each of those figures wherever they land. So the two metrics point in different directions and both are true at once: on death the scorpions barely register and barely respond to policy, while on disruption they range from minor to even-odds and the policy roughly halves the damage. The protocol might be barely justified by the deaths it prevents. BUT… it is highly justified by the possible wrecked weeks, and by the worst thing that can happen to the least careful person under my roof, which is exactly the variable a retreat organizer is on the hook for. The full first-pass calculation, done with Claude and worth every grain of salt that implies, is in the appendix.
Two things keep this honest rather than naive. The first is that I put a high and explicit price on the vibe (I have a separate piece on the price of a vibe). There are people who are rich and accomplished whose Thanksgiving table is quietly miserable to sit at, and people with almost nothing whose company is a balm, and a serious optimizer of wellbeing treats that gap as a massive value difference rather than an afterthought. A retreat whose vibe is the sanctity of life is producing something precious, and a protocol that grinds scorpions into the floor in front of everyone could damage that atmosphere badly enough to be worth avoiding for that reason alone.
The second is that I weight the long-term evolution of sentience as a term in the objective function, which sounds grandiose until you notice it is the same instinct that makes the shoe-check matter. I will also admit that some of the shoe-checking is security theater, a performance of what a conscientious organizer does (yeah, I mean, this is important to do for many reasons, like developing the wholesomely good habit of protecting those one is in charge of ). Security theater is not worthless because an attendee who goes home feeling they were cared for, that the organizers were not so ideologically pure they left people exposed, carries that forward, and the credibility of the whole project rides partly on that impression.
Don’t become a fumigator
Here is the part David and Jains and Buddhists get absolutely right, and something the micromort table cannot see on its own. If you do have to kill the animal, the thing to guard against is not the death, but the proceduralization of the death. The fumigator who works through a house clinically, this then this then this, has stopped attending to what he is doing, and that emptied-out efficiency is the same machinery that runs the animal holocaust of the factory farm. The horror is partly the normalized assembly line that made each life be perceived as totally weightless :-( So the protocol has to stay embodied. You mark the kill as an unfortunate trade that genuinely had to be made, you feel the cost, and you refuse to let it go smooth and automatic in your hands. This is also, not by accident, what two hours of daily sitting does to a person. It makes the casual extinguishing of a small life much harder to perform on autopilot, which is a feature or a liability depending on whether you are the meditator or the scorpion.
Buddhism offers a clean analysis here: it weighs the mind before it weighs the act. Killing is unwholesome and a scorpion falls under the precept, so there is no clean exemption that zeroes the karma. But the weight tracks the malice in the mind far more than the mechanics of the deed. Killing out of fear or convenience is one thing; killing with relish is far heavier. To kill reluctantly, in order to shield the helpless, while still feeling the cost rather than learning not to, is lighter than either, though never weightless. There is a Mahayana story I discussed with David: the bodhisattva captain on a ship of five hundred merchants who discovers a robber set on murdering them all. He kills the robber, knowing the act loads heavy karma onto himself, and he does it as much to spare the robber the unimaginably worse karma of five hundred murders as to save the merchants. Killing does not go clean when the arithmetic favors it. What the story teaches is that you can act under tragic necessity and still refuse to pretend the act was free, and that you carry the residue yourself rather than push it onto people less able to hold it. As the person responsible for a household, that is roughly the role I have taken.
Why a utilitarian makes life sacred
David said the thing that reorganized the conversation for me. I had been needling him, pointing out that “whatever it takes” runs straight into trade-offs and cost-effectiveness, that his worldview was meeting a hard constraint, that he sounded less like a utilitarian and more like a priest. He answered without flinching. On strict negative-utilitarian grounds, he said, the best route to minimizing suffering is to enshrine in law the sanctity of sentient life, human and nonhuman. The claim is exact and worth keeping in his terms. The sanctity of life is a legal fiction adopted on consequentialist grounds: given the frailties of human nature, treating sentient life as inviolate yields better outcomes by the negative utilitarian’s own criteria than any regime that lets you weigh each killing on its merits. He grants that treating Darwinian malware like us as though it were sacred can stick in the craw, and he reads the twentieth century as decisive evidence that the legislative framework is wise anyway. Philosophers call this indirect utilitarianism. David notes, accurately, that indirect negative utilitarianism just collapses back into negative utilitarianism, so he is endorsing the plain article.
Sit with how strange and how correct that is. A man whose foundational commitment is the abolition of suffering, who would in principle weigh any life against any other, arguing that we should hard-code life as near-inviolable into our institutions. The resolution is that the hard rule is the utilitarian move. This is two-level thinking of the kind R. M. Hare described. At the critical level you may reason in pure consequences, but the disposition you want running in fallible agents at the intuitive level is a near-absolute reverence for life, because agents who price each killing case by case produce far worse outcomes than agents fenced in by a bright line. The bright line is a Schelling fence. Permit case-by-case killing on utilitarian grounds and the category of permissible killing erodes under motivated reasoning until it has swallowed things no honest ledger would have allowed. A society visibly precommitted to the sanctity of life is more trustworthy and lower-variance, and spared the slow arms race of ever more elaborate justifications (following the letter rather than the spirit of the rules). The sacredness is load-bearing social technology, and a utilitarian who understands game theory should want it installed and should want it to feel like more than a calculation, because a reverence you can switch off when convenient is no constraint at all.
This is also, David likes to point out, why he flew the Jain banner rather than the Buddhist one. The Buddha did not think like a lawyer. The ambiguity over whether monks could eat meat offered as alms handed self-serving rationalization its opening, and the result is that less than half the world’s Buddhists are even vegetarian. The sanctity-of-life rule is an attempt to leave rationalization no such opening. It is the lawyer’s instinct turned to mercy.
The shape recurs in law and in karma alike. The law attaches harm to a named actor who must answer for it, and the karmic ledger attaches it to a mind that must carry it. The sanctity-of-life norm belongs to the same family, insisting that even a justified killing leaves a mark. Each is a refusal to let the cost of an act quietly vanish, and the refusal is wiser than any single calculation that would override it.
Now return to where we began. If we would beg a superintelligence to keep us, cognitively humble and occasionally dangerous as we are, inside the circle of compassion, then how I treat the scorpion tonight is a rehearsal for the norm I want encoded in whatever succeeds us. There is a hard-nosed version of this in current AI safety, the proposal that we install reverence for all sentient life as a core constraint in artificial agents, and a constraint we visibly keep ourselves is far more credible than one we merely recommend. The stick in my hand and the alignment of a future mind rhyme, because both turn on what the strong owe the weak when the weak can do nothing whatsoever to enforce it.
And it settles the reprogram-or-retire question in the direction David has argued for decades, the same direction as the Herbivorize Predators project he advises. Confronted with a vicious scorpion or a vicious human, the abolitionist chooses reform over retirement. You do not exterminate the species or execute the man. You relocate the individual tonight, and over the longer arc you reach for fertility regulation by immunocontraception, for obligate carnivores genetically and behaviourally tweaked into harmlessness, for an ethic of compassionate stewardship in place of the snuff-movie logic of orthodox conservation biology (don’t pretend “conservation biology” is morally neutral - it’s laden with background philosophical assumptions that are highly dubious when examined carefully).
High-tech Jainism is the refusal to retire anyone, scaled up and down the whole ladder of minds, and held to even on the nights when retirement would be cheaper.
One note of self-suspicion, because the inquiry demands it and David modeled it first. He emphasized, unprompted, that he might be running on motivated cognition here, that high-tech Jainism is a domain where he holds standing while the jhanas and the attainments are a domain where he feels barely on the foothills, so some of the fervor could be ordinary status-seeking in ethical dress. He was right that this does not discredit the argument and right that it belongs on the record. The mirror-image hazard is mine. I have run a lot of this very reasoning (micromort analysis, legal liability, etc.) past language models, and as David dryly observed, they are all subtly sycophantic, the more so toward people whose work they have read, so I discount the warm glow of their agreement accordingly (Claude has read all Qualia Computing posts and all Hedweb essays! Claude knows our [semantic-embedding] minds better than almost anyone). Being open about the pragmatism is part of the hedge. It is much harder to be charged with hypocrisy when you have stated the trade-offs out loud instead of smuggling them in.
The walk, the masks, and a harmless catching stick
A few days ago we walked through Tepoztlán. We were masking going into the store, partly out of general micromort hygiene and partly because we are running covid and flu A and B tests as we tighten the container for the coming jhana retreat, where a single chest infection could wreck weeks of careful work for a roomful of people. We were after prunes and settled for cranberries. When we arrived back to the residence, I discussed this topic with a participant and the desire to create a cheap plastic bug-catcher, a kind of long-handle topped that could “trap painlessly” a scorption. Turns out this exists: a soft flexible bristles that close gently around an animal so you can lift it and carry it outside without touching it or crushing it.
I had set myself a bar in conversation with David. I would back a non-lethal protocol the moment someone showed me a method that was something like 99.9% effective and cheap, because anything less reliable just hands the failure mode back to me in a worse form, a frightened venomous animal flicked loose into a couch by a wobbly hand, now lost somewhere in a room where people sleep. The stick is not perfect… really… but it might be most of the way there, and it gets there by attacking the exact two variables that made bare-hand relocation reckless for this crowd. It removes the need for fine motor dexterity, and it puts half a meter of standoff between the soft and the venomous. It drops the cost of mercy below the threshold where mercy has to be traded against safety. So we are ordering a stack of them for the retreat (I assume the board of directors will be OK with this purchase… partly because, er, David himself is on that board).
None of this would have happened without David. Left to my own micromort tables I would have polished the blunt protocol, the UV light and the syringe and the flush, and called the matter closed. It was his refusal to let the killing become routine, the quiet pressure of a man taking beetles out on a tissue and looking at me silently asking “DO BETTER” while the rest of us were in the search of blunt killing machines, that turned “find a safer way” from a sentimental wish into an active engineering target. The grabber still has to be earned. It has to be tested for real on fast Centruroides under retreat conditions, not on the docile house spider in the product photo, and if it fails the bar I set, I keep looking. “Innovate a better safe method” is now a standing item rather than a settled question, which is precisely the move David’s whole project is trying to produce at every scale of mind. (つ╥﹏╥)つ
That is what high-tech Jainism looks like in practice, in miniature. Not a manifesto! It’s a tool that lets a clumsy person after a meditation trance comedown spare a life they would otherwise have had to take. The abolitionist project is this same gesture scaled to a biosphere, the patient lowering of the cost of compassion until the old forced choices dissolve. I want to be honest that the stick does not retire the blunt protocol. For the fast scorpion already halfway under the furniture when you spot it, the deterministic option stays on the table, because a loose venomous animal in a room of possibly [functionally] sedated meditators is worse than a clean death. What changes is how we conceptualize the default. With the grabber by the door, relocation becomes the thing you reach for first, and killing retreats to the cases the tool genuinely cannot handle.
One subject, one light
There is a last view worth sharing, and I will keep it short, because it either lands for you or it does not. I hold a view I have defended at length elsewhere, that the boundary of the separate self is an artifact and that the same subject looks out from behind every pair of eyes, the scorpion’s included. WE ARE ALL THE SAME FIELD OF UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS. Take it seriously and the choice in the bathroom acquires a vertiginous symmetry. The fear in the animal and the safety of the sleeper are states of one transcendental subject, and to act is to decide which of its own experiences it will carry tonight. The pan-species welfare state stops looking like charity handed outward from us to them. It becomes the work of a single subject lowering the total suffering it undergoes everywhere at once, and the kill under the stick is a local and tragic move inside that very project, the same I choosing, in a moment it cannot yet save both, to spare the one who can suffer more and for longer.
The flashlight that lit up my walls and the gene drive David dreams of are the same kind of instrument. One makes visible what was always there, the other makes editable what we had taken as fixed, and both are ways of refusing the comfortable dark. For now I keep the UV light by the door beside the grabber, one to find them and one to carry them out, and I hold to the only ending that makes the whole strange enterprise worth it. The day the cost of mercy finally drops to zero, switching off the light and leaving the scorpion in peace on its wall will not be a sacrifice and will not be a calculation. It will be what anyone does. And if we get it right at this scale, on these walls, with these small dangerous island universes, perhaps we will have earned the same mercy from whatever comes after us.
David flies back to San Francisco today for the inaugural conference of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness (https://cimc.ai/) in Berkeley. The scorpions remain low-level constant environmental hazard.
Further reading by David Pearce: The Hedonistic Imperative, The Abolitionist Project, High-Tech Jainism and the 2023 interview on it, Reprogramming Predators, and a key conversation recorded years ago on compassionate ecosystems. On personal identity, my own Open Individualism and Antinatalism.
Appendix: a first-pass risk estimate
A caveat before any number. This is a back-of-the-envelope model I built with Claude in a single sitting, not a vetted risk assessment. Every input is an order-of-magnitude guess, several of them mine rather than the literature’s, and the output moves a lot if you move the assumptions. I am publishing it because a stated, falsifiable estimate beats a vibe, and because the qualitative shape survives almost any reasonable change to the inputs even when the exact figures will not. Treat it as a worked argument, not a measurement.
The model tracks two very different things, and the whole lesson is that they disagree. One is death, priced in micromorts, where one micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of dying. The other is disruption, the expected count of nonfatal but retreat-wrecking events: a severe-pain episode, a night drive to an emergency room, a lost day of practice, an acute panic or dysregulation event inside a deep state.
Anchoring the sting rate, two ways. The hardest input is how likely a sting is at all, and two honest methods disagree by about a hundredfold, so I report both as a bracket rather than pretend to one number. The low end is official-anchored: Mexico’s national rate of about 234 stings per 100,000 a year, doubled for Morelos, then cut by a factor of ten for the risk profile the epidemiology actually points out and that is the photographic negative of ours (children under five, firewood handling, free-range poultry and stored corn, palm or sheet-metal roofs, field labor, no preventive action). That puts the group’s season-long sting probability under one percent. The high end is observed-anchored, taken from our own house: about eight or nine indoor sightings (and killings) over twenty-one nights among roughly ~8-12 sleepers, perhaps a third of them genuinely within contact range, a contact becoming a sting maybe six percent of the time unprotected. That puts the group’s season-long sting probability near 45 percent. The truth sits between, and probably nearer the high end for this house, because the official figure counts only stings that reach a clinic and a careful adult’s mild sting never does. The reassuring fact is that the decision does not depend on resolving the gap as the conclusion holds at both ends.
From stings to deaths. Expected death is P(stung) times P(death given a sting). For a healthy adult with a hospital reachable I put case fatality near 1 in 20,000, since deaths from Centruroides limpidus now concentrate in small children, the elderly, and delayed-care cases; for a vulnerable person I use 1 in 3,000, and a real group is a blend of the two. Multiplied through, the official rate makes scorpion death a hundredth of a micromort and the observed rate makes it a few micromorts. Either way it lands at or below the daily commute, never far above it.
From stings to disruption. Conditioning on a sting having happened, I assign rough escalation rates: severe acute pain about 0.85, systemic or neurotoxic symptoms about 0.15, an emergency-room trip about 0.20, a lost retreat-day about 0.50, and an acute panic or dysregulation event inside a jhana or 5-MeO container about 0.40. These are judgment calls, the softest numbers in the model, and they should be read as ranges. Folded over the bracketed sting counts they give the disruption table below, which is where the two rate bases diverge most: negligible on the official rate, a coin-flip on the observed one.
The everyday baseline, the real route. Our daily round trip runs from our two current locations, about 1.5 km each way, crossing the main Tepoztlán road once in each direction, done once or twice a day, sometimes on foot and sometimes by car. A single crossing of a busy road prices near 0.05 micromorts, cross-checked against Mexican pedestrian mortality of about 7 per 100,000 a year. Two crossings per walked round trip, the on-foot exposure between, and the small driving risk on car days (Mexican roads run an order of magnitude deadlier per kilometre than US roads), summed over 56 days at roughly one-and-a-half trips a day, comes to about 7 micromorts. Exercise on the walked days quietly buys some of that back. The commute almost never produces a nonfatal disruptive event of the retreat-wrecking kind, so its disruption column is effectively zero.
What falls out. The conclusion is robust to which sting rate you believe, which is the whole reason to show both. On death, the scorpions are at or below the daily commute on either basis, so for anyone the scorpions are at most about as dangerous as walking to the store, and the choice of policy moves the figure by only a few micromorts. On disruption, the official rate says the scorpions are negligible and the observed rate says they are a coin-flip across the season, and reality is somewhere in between, almost certainly closer to the coin-flip for a house as dense as ours. The commute, by contrast, essentially never delivers a wrecked week. So the honest bottom line is that the protocol barely touches the death column on any basis, and roughly halves a disruption risk that ranges from small to even-odds. That is the honest account of what the protocol is actually for.
Death, per person over the 56-day retreat (micromorts), by policy and how vulnerable the group is:
Disruption, group of 11 over the season (probability of at least one such event), on each sting-rate basis:
Death rows use case fatality of about 1/20,000 (robust adult) and 1/3,000 (vulnerable), blended by composition. Disruption rows are shown on both sting-rate bases: the official-anchored low end and the observed-in-house high end, with the escalation rates behind them first-pass judgment calls. The point of showing both is that the decision survives either: death stays at or below the commute on any basis, and the protocol roughly halves a disruption risk that ranges from negligible to a coin-flip. Levels are a bit wobbly and depend on a lot factors BUT the ordering is robust.
Infinite bliss! To All Beings! Including Scorpions! Thank you Dave for your beautiful energy and moral nudge ;-) Much love and have a safe trip!
This was so beautifully put. The perspective of lowering total suffering regardless of which point of view is experiencing it is such a great framework to approach this problem with.
Went back to re-read your linked article on Open Individualism and Antinatalism. Slightly confused — isn’t open individualism a form of eternalism, i.e., one eternal subject?