What Paradise Is For

Diego’s worldview on transhuman flourishing and the life beyond necessity

At last, the room for which the emergency equipment was purchased.

Diego wants humanity to survive into something worth surviving for: longer lives, richer minds, deeper pleasures, more beautiful worlds, and forms of experience we cannot yet fit inside our biological heads. The technological future is attractive to him because it could enlarge both the world and the beings capable of enjoying it. End the compulsory dying, relieve the suffering, remove the economic treadmill—and then, with considerable enthusiasm, find out what else existence can do.

His ambitions for the interior decoration were already rather specific in 2012:

um palácio dentro de uma nebulosa habitado por todos aqueles que amamos, retirado-lhes todos defeitos que nos incomodam, onde ninguém envelhece ou adoce da mente ou do corpo e todos podem instantaneamente tomar a forma que desejarem por 10 minutos.¹

English translation: a palace inside a nebula, inhabited by everyone we love, with all their bothersome defects removed, where nobody ages or becomes ill in mind or body, and everyone can instantly take whichever form they wish for ten minutes.

This was his proposed minimum threshold for an interesting paradise. The nebula is not an optional upgrade available only to premium subscribers. We have barely entered the lobby.

Heaven has a design problem

In Para Onde Vamos? Concebendo o Design do Paraíso, Diego begins by accusing humanity of having a poor record at designing the place it wants to spend eternity:

Os humanos tem sido péssimos designers de paraísos, utopias, e demais cenários em que há o máximo do que há de bom e o mínimo do que há de ruim.¹

English translation: Humans have been terrible designers of paradises, utopias, and other scenarios containing the most of what is good and the least of what is bad.

He reads historical heavens as revealing the circumstances of their inventors. Hungry people imagine enormous agricultural abundance. Exhausted people imagine rest. People living in deserts imagine gardens. An industrial work ethic eventually finds a way to keep everyone usefully employed in the afterlife. Even death apparently cannot protect you from somebody improving the office culture.

His objection is that the inversion of a local deprivation makes too small a design brief for the future. Removing a torment is good; imagining everything desirable as merely the absence of that torment misses most of the available space. A civilization that has grown accustomed to a particular shortage may not know what to wish for after the shortage disappears.

He takes from Yudkowsky the idea of a future whose virtues would disturb the expectations of its ancestors. A better world could be recognizably better while startling the person who first hoped for it. His own summary is:

Realidade invertida não é paraíso, e paraíso não é um lugar onde me sentiria quentinho e confortável, mas um lugar que ia assustar por suas virtudes.¹

English translation: Inverted reality is not paradise, and paradise is not a place where I would feel warm and comfortable, but a place that would startle me through its virtues.

The point is not to preserve misery so that people appreciate their privileges. It is to permit improvement to outrun present habits. A future powerful enough to repair the human condition ought to be allowed to surprise its designer.

The materials include the human being

An earlier pair of essays, Utopia The Hidden Design (2010), makes a methodological demand: say what the imagined world is allowed to change. Its project ranges extravagantly across physics, cosmology, beauty, and human experience. Those proposed alterations are exercises in constructing an ideal world, not predictions that our universe will oblige.

The more durable idea is that our imagination grants itself permission unevenly. People change the political system in their utopia while leaving the psychology of its citizens almost untouched. They alter laws and architecture more readily than the kinds of being who inhabit them.

It is only natural to extrapolate on our technologies, but consider our psychological nature as unchaged.²

Diego wants that assumption made visible. Human nature explains what works for present humans. It need not mark the final boundary of valuable existence. If bodies and minds can eventually change, the possibilities include new capacities for understanding, enjoyment, affection, exploration, and sustained well-being.

This is also why preserving humanity cannot mean preserving every painful feature of its current implementation. He wants the people and their valuable lives to continue; he does not give every limitation that happened to evolve a permanent conservation order. Aging, constrained attention, distorted motivation, and needless suffering are candidates for alteration, subject to the questions of survival and identity explored elsewhere in the Castle.

Yet he also likes to reverse the exercise. In 2012 he asked LessWrong readers to imagine that radical enhancement, AGI, and biological immortality were impossible. They could still alter architecture, social organization, education, rituals, and institutions. What would their best attainable world look like then? He wanted futurists to exercise neglected muscles, too:

Force your brain to face this counterfactual reality, and make the best world you can given those constraints.³

The scope of improvement changes with the available materials. The appetite for making something good out of them remains.

Pleasure is allowed to be enormous

Diego does not approach pleasure as a slightly embarrassing indulgence to be admitted after the serious virtues have finished speaking. Pleasant experience is part of the point. He expects technological maturity could take it far beyond its current range.

In his 2023 statement on death, he asks the reader to imagine:

a transhuman or posthuman paradise, where the worst mental states feel like a heroin high, and the best mental states feel like the best orgasm that has happened in human or animal history so far.⁴

That is an imagined scale of future experience. The role of the comparison is to break the assumption that tomorrow's possible happiness is bounded by the most comfortable ordinary life available today. Staying alive might preserve access to an entire new range of what it is like to exist.

But his writing also prevents the easy reduction of paradise to a single dial turned indefinitely upward. In Utopia The Hidden Design, he invents an abstract world consisting of infinite pleasure at every point, then says:

Even though it is a World vastly better than ours, it is very much less interesting for all kinds of purposes one might put an utopia to use here.²

He wants enough detail to think with: what happens, who inhabits it, what can they do, and how do those possibilities relate to what they value? His 2012 discussion of beneficial AI likewise worries about a system that strips away the particularities of human desire in search of a simple common denominator. A coherent result could lose the humane content it was supposed to preserve. His warning is:

What if in service of coherence we end up stripping away everything that matters and end up only with our biological drives?⁵

The Castle contains many kinds of goods. Love is not simply a poorly optimized form of eating. Exploration is not an accounting error. A world with enormous pleasure can also contain curiosity, play, beauty, affection, achievement, and the desire to become someone one would like to be. Diego's utopian imagination repeatedly returns to those plural details.

Who issued the employment requirement?

One of the obstacles to imagining abundance is the belief that people require economically necessary jobs to have meaningful lives. Diego regards that as an astonishingly restrictive reading of human possibility.

His 2018 discussion of universal basic income gives the alternative in one sentence:

The natural state of humans is to produce meaning and find patterns and use the patterns as maps to go get yummy, yummy meaning.⁶

He supplies plenty of examples: children, dancing, religion, instruments, sport, defending other people, making them laugh, learning, exploring. Humanity has spent a great deal of time creating things to care about. It does not follow that the process will fail because nobody requires us to complete a timesheet.

In a 2023 discussion of automation, he separates three losses associated with jobs: income; purpose and meaning; and attractiveness to potential partners. They are distinct problems. Solving one should not be refused because another remains. His defense of income support is therefore compatible with taking the social effects of displacement seriously.⁷

The distinction extends into paradise. Providing resources and removing compulsory labor do not dictate a single lifestyle. One person can find meaning in family and continuity; another can rush toward novelty. Diego gives the second temperament its wonderfully economical manifesto:

Weeeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaa! Let's go!⁷

The visitor may now be able to guess which wing of the building has the late-night music.

He knows this territory partly from the inside. Reading Bostrom's Deep Utopia in 2024, he placed himself among those already able to live without ordinary employment and considered what should follow from it. The relevant point here is his interpretation of that freedom:

I'm already in a post instrumental world.⁸

He wanted to return to things he had set aside while concentrating on usefulness: philosophy, instruments, games, inquiry for its own enjoyment. Being relieved of necessity gives those activities more room. Their value does not have to be reauthorized as a contribution to some larger emergency.

There is a pleasing ancestor of this book in that same post. Delighted by a philosophical exchange, he wrote:

If philosophy was always a shared castle 🏰 like this, I would probably be back on that 🐎 horse.⁸

Apparently we have been building this place for a while.

The animals are invited

The goal reaches beyond a comfortable human enclave. Diego's concern with suffering includes the wild world as well as human institutions. He regards predation, disease, and the vast production of miserable lives under natural selection as things intelligence should eventually have the power to change.

His January 2025 exchange about Bryan Johnson includes a direct statement of the destination:

Once we have a superintelligence, the liberation of all sentient beings into cosmic joy, meaning, purpose, fun, excitement, and glory is the main priority. We will all get to live happy lives.⁹

Whatever a reader knows about his disputes over present-day diet, this is the desired endpoint. He is not content with an eternally efficient arrangement for making some beings suffer so others can continue. The future he wants would remove those dependencies and release minds into better lives.

The sequence of nouns matters: joy, meaning, purpose, fun, excitement, glory. Pleasure is emphatic, but it has company. The liberation is from the old restrictions on flourishing, not merely an increase in the amount of matter registered as alive.

This also connects paradise to his wish to restrain destructive selection. If every future inhabitant must continually sacrifice its enjoyments in order to avoid being outcompeted, abundance can be consumed by the contest that produced it. His interest in durable cooperation and higher-level control serves the good lives on this side of the door.

We have already had a few appetizers

Diego's paradise is distant in scale, but his desire for it is recognizable in his enjoyment of the present. He can be moved by things that civilization has made so ordinary that their extraordinary character disappears.

From his 2017 defense of optimism:

There's flying machines that can take you places. There's bubbly drinks that sparkle near your high density tongue nerves.¹⁰

This is practically a transhumanist manifesto printed on a sparkling-water bottle. Technology and evolved sensation meet; a piece of the world becomes more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been. Expand that relation across what bodies can experience, what minds can comprehend, where people can go, and how long they can stay.

The same sensibility appears in his response to the 2024 booster catch that sent him back to films and material about space settlement. What excited him was humanity seeing a shared horizon: cities elsewhere beginning to feel like future events rather than illustrations. Even in futures where AI does not decisively settle everything, he wants exploration, aspiration, and the thrill of finding out what people can build.¹¹

His utopian project is therefore continuous with the very ordinary sentence that there is a lot worth doing here. It magnifies the possibilities rather than demanding contempt for the life he already likes.

In his Deep Utopia reflection he puts it without any cosmic machinery:

There's a lot to do here, above and beyond what needs to be done.

I wouldn't have it any other way.⁸

That is what paradise is for. To make enough room, enough time, and enough kinds of mind for the good things that necessity keeps interrupting.

Please take your preferred form. We begin the nebula tour in ten minutes.

Further doors

• Para Onde Vamos? Concebendo o Design do Paraíso (2012): historical heavens, startling improvement, and the palace in a nebula.
• Utopia The Hidden Design, Parts 1 and 2 (2010): what a utopian exercise permits itself to change.
• Absent Transhumanism and Transformative Technologies, Which Utopia is Left? (2012): the same design appetite under fixed human nature.
• The June 2024 Deep Utopia reflection: leisure, philosophy, and life after instrumental necessity.
• 29 – My Opinions About Death (2023): future flourishing as a reason to preserve access to the future.

Continue: How Diego Decides What Is True