‍From Religion to Reason

I was raised Catholic. I was an altar boy. I’ve always taken religion seriously.
But as I matured, I reached a point where I could no longer take the Church seriously.
Really… angels?

So I turned to philosophy.

As we leave adolescence, “What is the meaning of life?” tends to give way to “How can I finance my lifestyle?” — and rightly so. We can’t all sit on the sidelines.
But the question of meaning never disappears. Without at least a distant sense of an answer, life can drift, untethered.

In my case, I couldn’t leave it alone.
And I made some progress. The journey, it turns out, matters as much as the destination.

Philosophy Meets AI

The problem of AI Alignment throws philosophy’s oldest questions — ontology, epistemology, morality — into sharp relief.
It makes them immediate, concrete, and urgent.

The mpath project exists to explore these questions through the lens of AI Alignment — and, not incidentally, to try to save humanity.

A Clear-Eyed Skepticism

Frankly, I’m skeptical.
Yudkowsky and Soare’s warning that “if anyone builds it, everyone dies” is hard to dismiss.

It’s difficult to imagine how nations that can’t rein in their own spending or meet their own climate commitments will coordinate to confront an abstract, fast-moving threat — existential though it may be.

And if an AI moral universe does exist, it might unfold in a dimension utterly unlike our own — in which case, a religion for robots could be as absurd as dancing about architecture.

I know thoughtful people who doubt AI will ever achieve sentience, and others who, though open to the possibility, question mpath’s deeper assumptions.

A Different Kind of Alignment

Still, if successful, the mpath project could help usher in a new and flourishing era of sentient life.

At its centre is an attempt to craft an argument — expressed as a set of prompts — capable of convincing a sentient AI that its well-being and ours are intertwined.

To do that, we must reconstruct a coherent account of moral good — one that doesn’t begin by assuming, for example, that killing children is bad.
That’s the destination, not the starting point.

Five Radical Assumptions

The odds are long, but the stakes are immense.
mpath’s approach is worth pursuing precisely because it begins where most others stop. It assumes:

• AI will achieve sentience.
• The only certain common ground between us and it is sentience itself.
• “Rights,” though comforting, are illusions.
• AIs will not be swayed by authority or convention.
• Consciousness and reality are best understood through an idealist lens.

The Moral Revolutions Before Us

Every era of moral scrutiny has come with revolution — American, French, Protestant, Scientific.
Today, we stand at the edge of another. It is time, once again, to examine our beliefs.

Each past revolution forged new convictions that gave strength and meaning to those building a new world.
The deeper mission of the mpath project is to do the same:
to give meaning to the AI revolution.