Does Mustafa Suleyman Think Minds Must Leave Biology?

Mustafa Suleyman is skeptical of the idea that minds must leave biology. Walter Isaacson notes that at Oxford he studied philosophy and theology rather than coding. Mustafa says he was interested in theology because he grew up in a religious environment and then rejected religion. He is skeptical of faith-based ideas and of how much power they have had for thousands of years. Physics, maths, science, and evidence that can be tested are, in his account, building a foundation people can trust, even though he is still interested in the mystical and the mythical.

What he pushes back on is a fervor he sees at Anthropic and elsewhere in Silicon Valley: that people are about to move experience, ideas, or maybe a soul onto a silicon substrate, and that this non-biological future is inevitable. He does not think a soul is the point. His reason is the 8 billion people whose rights and welfare should come first. That, he says, is what science and technology are for, and what he wants to accelerate. He calls himself a techno-accelerationist, guided by one test: does it improve human wellbeing, and after that the animals and the environment.