Luke Muehlhauser

Luke Muehlhauser (pictured on the left) and Brad Voytek (pictured on the right).

Luke Muehlhauser is a Senior Research Analyst at the Open Philanthropy Project. His investigative research spans a wide range of topics - especially the social sciences, global catastrophic risks, and technical and philosophical issues that are relevant to Open Philanthropy's overall giving strategy.

He is an atheist who owns the website Common Sense Atheism. He is an outspoken advocate of naturalism. Previously, he was an evangelical Christian.

Muehlhauser was the Executive Director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute which was formerly called the Singularity Institute (see: Atheism, transhumanism and the hypothesized technological singularity and Atheism and consciousness).

Luke Melhauser wrote about a future hypothesized technological singularity:

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When humanity builds machines with greater-than-human intelligence, they will also be better than we are at creating still smarter machines. Those improved machines will be even more capable of improving themselves or their successors. This is a positive feedback loop that could, before losing steam, produce a machine with vastly greater than human intelligence: machine superintelligence. Such a superintelligence would have enormous powers to make the future unlike anything that came before it. Event horizon: All social and technological progress thus far has come from human brains. When technology creates entirely new kinds of intelligence, this will cause the future to be stranger than we can imagine. So there is an ‘event horizon’ in the future beyond which our ability to predict the future rapidly breaks down.

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He concedes that a technological singularity may never occur. See also: Atheism and the problem of consciousness

An article entitled The 25 Most Influential Living Atheists describes the atheist Ray Kurzweil thusly:

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Ray Kurzweil sees technology as fulfilling all aspirations previously ascribed to religion, including immortality. He argues that computing machines will soon outstrip human cognitive capacities, at which point humanity will upload itself onto a new, indestructible digital medium (an atheist version/vision of “resurrection”).

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Luke Muehlhauser quote on human consciousness

See also: Atheism and consciousness and Argument from consciousness

Luke Muehlhauser (pictured in the middle). Seth Shostak (pictured on the left) and Brad Voytek (pictured on the right).

Luke Muehlhauser wrote on human consciousness:

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I assume that some seemingly-core features of human conscious experience are illusions, and thus need to be “explained away” rather than “explained.”... Similarly, I think some core features of consciousness are illusions, and the job of cognitive scientists is not to explain how those features are “real,” but rather to explain why they seem to us to be real (even though they’re not). For example, it seems to us that our conscious experiences have “intrinsic” properties beyond that which could ever be captured by a functional, mechanistic account of consciousness. I agree that our experiences seem to us to have this property, but I think this “seeming” is simply mistaken.

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For more information, please see: The atheist Sam Harris on the problem of consciousness for an atheistic worldview

See also

• Atheism and transhumanism
• Atheism and death anxiety
• Atheism and life after death
• Atheism and death