“The only real battle in life is between hanging on and letting go.”
―Shannon L. Alder

Imagine if we had gene therapy that allowed us to live lucidly in the moment, intensely pursuing what is worthwhile.

“The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.”
―Shannon L. Alder

If you manage to walk on water or fly through the air, you will be like a fly. If you really want a miracle, bring love to a heart.

What other approaches do we have? Is focusing on the perpetrator enough? Some voices suggest focusing more efforts on victims and prevention, suggesting the creation of tools for potential victims, a sort of technological shield against torture.

It is very worrying to be able to estimate that the total accumulated cases of torture not only do not decrease, but remain the same and even increase as the human population increases exponentially.

But considering the increases in human population in the same periods, the total count of torture cases can yield disappointingly high figures.

Has this approach to the problem worked? If we take into account the probability of being tortured, we can recognize that this indicator has decreased over the centuries and years.

The natural reaction to this problem is to empathize with the victims, despise the aggressors, look for the deep and not so deep causes of the aggression and try to find solutions to those causes.

Recent geopolitical conflicts and current political systems that fail to respect human rights remind us that torture is unfortunately a sad reality well into the 21st century.

I have republished this with new links because the version of the notes stored on Academia.edu is no longer available.

Notes of the talk (in english)
manuherran.com/wp-content/u...
and spanish:
manuherran.com/wp-content/u...
Many thanks to Oscar Horta, Raúl Mella, Sara Abernathy, Duska Sorén and Olaia Freiría for make me feel at home that day.

Skepticism about digital sentience is reasonable, but it can cause astronomical amounts of suffering.

It was a great honor to share the stage with Brian Tomasik on dec. 15, 2016 talking about sentience in machines at University of Santiago de Compostela.

Now that Trump has won and it's going to be the end of the world, maybe it's a good time to consider building a technological shield against intense, involuntary and useless suffering.