I would say that adopting Sam Harris’ stance on morality can be rationally defended as a way of generating better outcomes for most of us. But his stance is far from being founded on arguments and logic as the vid provided at the end shows— Jonas Čeika makes mince meat of Sam.
Also i find strange the syntagm "conscious creators". What’s the meaning and relevance of "creator" here? Do you mean "creators of consciousness" which would make some sense, but it sounds very bizarre. If what you mean is creators of cultural content & artifacts then what about cases such that of an individual who’s completely paralyzed, so much so that unlike Stephen Hawking he cannot exert the minutest motor action to influence his environment—isn’t he part of your moral consideration?
If Sam somehow manages to find a rigorous foundation for his moral science then the next step in my opinion would be to get in touch with the guys at Qualia Research Institute in San Francisco. They believe that valence (the degree of pain-pleasure) is a fundamental aspect of all conscious experiences—human, animal, alien, non-egoic/enlightened, etc. There’s a discussion about the existence of states that are exactly neutral in valence—there’s the term anhedonia that represents a lack of pleasure, but from the patients’ description they seem to be suffering rather than being at "0". QRI now works, among other things, to develop a theory of valence—called Symmetry Theory of Valence. It takes into account numerous scientific experiments and papers from which it appears that symmetry within the activities of the brain is always commensurate with the degree of pleasure/happiness that the subject declares.
How do you assess symmetry within a brain? You use things such as EEG, MEG, fMRI to gather data about the brain activity, you then use a mathematical framework to interpret that data set in such a way that it gives you the degree of symmetry within the brain activity. From experiments we know that the subjects who feel good (strong meditators that meditate during brain imaging; normal subjects being administered drugs during brain imaging; etc) also happen to have a lot of symmetry within their CNS dynamics. What the QRI team wants to do is to continue gathering data from other studies, to do their own experiments granted they manage to raise funding, and continue experimenting with various forms of entrainment.
Right now they use body vests & trousers that emit particular patterns of vibration, a type of glasses that emit particular patterns of light, and music. Using a soft developed by them they correlate these 3 forms of entrainment in speciffic ways in order to induce CNS symmetry via sensory stimulation. They tested the rig on hundreds of people (they went with it at burning man if i remember right) and many people have reported intensities of pleasure similar to potent drugs such as MDMA. They also mention non-invasive procedures that stimulate the vagus nerve with specific intensity and frequency that make the patients feel a considerable increase in subjective wellbeing—which according to the theory, comes as a fact of increasing the CNS symmetry via patterned inputs sent along the vagus nerve (which is very important for influencing brain dynamics).
Brain symmetry can also be modulated via various types of drugs. The QRI team says that each individual brain (according to its particular structure) will react differently to different stimuli and different drugs. One pattern of stimulation that makes someone feel good might make someone else feel miserable. This is also true for chemical drugs but to a lesser degree.
QRI imagines a future where people could go to a medical office where the staff makes an assessment of their CNS via neural imaging & machine learning analysis and then prescribes them the exact substance that will reduce/eliminate dissonance in their brain if they are depressed or anxious. This personalized treatment will eliminate the blind way we prescribe psychiatric medication today. Also, for normal individuals there will be a whole host of non medical non invasive interventions that will either make them feel "slow euphoria" or "fast euphoria". The first is produced when the dominant symmetry happens in the high frequency domain, the second occurs when the dominant symmetry in the brain dynamics is given by slow frequencies. We feel extreme "slow euphoria" when we take something like opium or ketamine, and extreme "fast euphoria" when we take meth or cocaine. Conversely, we can feel "slow dysphoria" which is depression, or "fast dysphoria" which is anxiety—depending in which frequency register our brain is dissonant in. For technical expositions of their work see opentheory.net and for more interesting/less evidence based discussions see qualiacomputing.com — these belong to each of the two founders of QRI.
A critique of Sam Harris’ Moral Landscape https://youtu.be/wxalrwPNkNI
