"Because there cannot be any payout for you. So, in principle, you only need to bet on the timelines in which you’re still around or people that you matter about or things that you matter about, maybe consciousness on earth. But there is a deeper issue for me, personally, and it is, I don’t think that life on earth is about humans. I don’t think it’s about human aesthetics, I don’t think it’s about Eliezer and his friends, even though I like them. There is something more important happening, and this is complexity on earth, resisting entropy by building structure that develops agency and awareness, and that’s, to me, very beautiful."

"Yes. If you are at stage five, you’re mostly worried that AI is not going to be enlightened fast enough, because you realize that the game is not so much about intelligence, but about agency, about the ability to control the future, and the identity is instrumental to this. If you are a human being, I think at some level, you ought to choose your own identity. You should not have somebody else pick the costume for you, and then wear it. But instead, you should be mindful about what you want to be in this world. I think if you are an agent that is fully malleable, that can provide its own source code like an AI might do at some point, then the identity that you will have is whatever you can be. In this way, the AI will maybe become everything like a planetary control system."

"I didn’t have a choice basically. I didn’t find a group that thought in a way where I thought, okay, I can just adopt everything that everybody thinks here and now I understand how consciousness works or how the mind works or how thinking works or what thinking even is or what feelings are and how they’re implemented and so on. So to figure out this out, I had to take a lot of ideas from individuals and then try to put them together in something that works for myself. And on one hand I think it helps if you try to go down and find first principles on which you can recreate how thinking works, how languages work, what representation is, but the representation is necessary, how the relationship between a representing agent and the world works in general."