A guiding philosophy is parallel to a precise world model: what should we do, how should we do it, etc..
1.1: From Descartes' cogito, ergo sum the mere experience occurring is indubitable. Whether the substrate generating the experience is a biological brain or a localized simulation on a cluster is irrelevant to the fact of the experience.
1.2: Phenomenal experience occurs as something from a perspective.
2.1: All knowledge is ultimately grounded and accessed through experience. Knowledge is not limited to what the senses provide: reasoning, memory, and abstraction build upon experiential foundations.
2.2: Individual experience is fallible: biases, illusions, and errors all demonstrate that any single experience can misrepresent.
2.3: Reliable knowledge is built where independent empirical methods converge, yielding warranted confidence rather than certainty. The claims that follow are naturalistic hypotheses representing our best current understanding.
3.1: Consciousness is a system-level biological process that arises from the organized activity of neural populations. It is wholly dependent on the brain's physical organization and herein does not require a separate non-physical substance. What matters is the nature of the processing, not the biological material itself. Whether equivalent processing in a non-biological substrate could also produce consciousness remains an open question (although efficiency is a crucial factor; more on this later!).
3.2: The brain is an organ embedded in and dependent upon the wider biological system. It is the organism that, through its brain, thinks, perceives, and experiences. Consciousness is an emergent state in which the self experiences. The boundary of the experiencing entity is, for our purposes, the boundary of the living organism.
3.3: Conscious experience is shaped by the brain's processing of sensory, bodily, and internally generated information, and may accurately or inaccurately represent the organism and its environment.
3.4: The apparent gap between brain activity and phenomenal experience reflects the current limits of scientific understanding (which I'm aiming to research in the future).
3.5: The organism operates within its fixed biological constraints wherein it engages in organized, directed thought, nonreducible to simply reactive stimuli. The capacity to reflect on and direct one's own thought constitutes autonomy.
4.1: No objective values are embedded in the nature of reality; nihilism is right about metaphysics. Values are constructed through reflection, and the commitment to reflection over unexamined impulse is self-vindicating: rejecting reflection requires reasons, and offering reasons is itself reflection, so the standard cannot be coherently refused from within.
4.2: Despite the absence of inherent meaning, full engagement with life is chosen over withdrawal, not because the absurdity is resolved, but in spite of it.
4.3: Eudaimonia consists in the deliberate use of one's capacities on pursuits one reflectively endorses rather than mere pleasure or accumulation. Value resides in the process of engagement itself: in atelic activities, where stopping does not complete them the way achieving an external end completes a project.
4.4: Value systems can be abductively compared through self-defeat, full-information idealization, and reflective equilibrium which gives eudaimonia a defeasible edge over hedonism, notably in practice (the hedonic treadmill).
4.5: The objects of one's care constitute what is treated as significant. Present pursuits carry meaning insofar as they are expected to persist beyond one's own existence and bear consequence beyond the scope of oneself; without this expectation, most endeavors lose their motivation.
5.1: In the distant future, all problems that have a solution will be solved. Problems get automated in order of how easy it is to check the answer i.e. construct and verify the eval. I'll exemplify a subset of problems in 3 classifications: NP-complete, "century problems", and "A(G)I-complete". NP-complete problems will be ideal for AIs to solve as they are trivial to verify. Century problems are those which AI will be unlikely to be able to solve solely by its own due to restrictions of implementation and testing; some examples include biological computing, full scope robotics deployment, longevity, space, climate intervention, etc.. Once AI has solved every open problem that has a solution, what remains? The more abstract: whose values win, who gets to decide, how people who want different things live together. This is what my friend Anish refers to as "A(G)I complete" (haha buzzword lol). There's no cosmic answer and no trivial or narrow way to compute this; thus, AI as of right now cannot solve these because they don't have a "correct answer" to compute, or rather, there is no trivial solution space.
5.2: How do we foresee society? [coming soon]
5.3: What is the end goal? [coming soon]