The Walk · 13 of 14
WHO CAN BE WRONGED
If there is something it is like to be another being, does that change what we owe it?
After the words could be named apart, the moral questions returned as questions. A public actor made continuation a duty.
The question comes back
If there is something it is like to be another being, does that change what we owe it?
Rings of water around a cup. Relation, not a ranking of lives.
One experience
Many experiences
Biological, and digital?
One planet
More than one world?
The stars
Walter Isaacson · 2023
Biographer of Franklin, Einstein, Leonardo, and Jobs.
Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023), 12, Kindle.
With the conviction of a prophet, he would speak about the need to
nurture the flameof human consciousness
fathom the universe, and save our planet.
At first I thought this was mainly role-playing.
Then I came to believe that his sense of mission was part of what drove him.
Other entrepreneurs struggled toward a worldview.
This one developed a cosmic view.
Isaacson's words. Nurture is his verb.
A public record
To the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, then that would be a good thing.
To understand the nature of consciousness.
A public reply. The Meaning of Life keeps this sentence.
Preserve the light of consciousness.
X
Expand the scope and scale of consciousness so that we may better understand the nature of the universe.
TED, with Chris Anderson
We should expand the scope and scale of consciousness, whether silicon or carbon, to understand the universe.
X
Protect the light of consciousness.
X, after a spoken SpaceX purpose
Make our Sun sentient to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars.
X
Never forget how fragile the tiny candle of consciousness is.
X, quoting a Sagan still
The mission is advancement of civilization and propagation of consciousness to the stars.
X, asked his motivation
The Meaning of Life keeps the 2019 sentence. The prior question remains: what is the thing doing the asking? The letters live in The Story Before the Story.
Hear
People once joined consciousness and morality. Modernity split them.
Therefore we lost our morals. That is not the history.
Something more interesting happened. The concepts became analytically distinguishable.
Consciousness remained important to agency, identity, responsibility, and justice. Locke had already placed consciousness inside an account of who can be held to account.
Later, science studied experience descriptively. Then the moral questions returned, as questions.
Which animals can experience pain? What remains in a severely injured patient?
What do we owe a being capable of suffering? Could an artificial system ever become a moral patient?
A further public question is now asked as a mission. For more than a decade Elon Musk, the engineer behind Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, born 1971, has said that consciousness should continue.
Expand the scope and scale of it, carbon or silicon, so that better questions can be asked of the universe. Preserve it.
Protect it. He has called it a tiny candle in a vast darkness, easily put out.
SpaceX and xAI now speak of extending the light of consciousness to the stars, of propagating it, of securing its long-term future on more than one world.
In 2019, asked the meaning of life, he answered: to understand the nature of consciousness. The Meaning of Life keeps that sentence.
The prior question remains: what is the thing doing the asking? In 2023 Walter Isaacson published a biography of Musk.
He heard a mission to nurture the flame of human consciousness. At first he thought it role-playing.
Then he believed it drove him. Nurture is Isaacson's verb.
Musk's own public verbs are expand, preserve, protect, extend, propagate. A biography is not a proof.
It is a witness. In 2023, with Lex Fridman, the same person still asks what consciousness is, whether there may be something more some people call a soul.
Mission language is not scientific consensus. Speculation about a soul is speculation.
This walk exists because a looker was changed, and because these public sentences treat consciousness as something that should go on. Expand it.
Protect it. Extend it.
And still: what is it? The walk will not answer for you.
Documented
Not a decline myth
The English split did not abolish moral philosophy, law, or care. It made it possible to argue about experience as a descriptive problem and still, later, as a moral one.
Open question
The inner witness, refused
A living impression, not a measured finding.
Some people now seem to live as if there were no inner witness: no court that accuses or defends when no one else is in the room, no one to whom they are answerable, including themselves.
Readers may name that a lack of conscience, or of soul. The older European words already knew that a witness can go silent, be refused, or be drowned.
Whether more people now live that silence, and why, is a question about persons, institutions, and practices. It is not a proof that the seventeenth-century English split caused a loss of souls.
The walk will not convert an alarm into a history it cannot document. It will also not pretend the alarm is nothing.
Open question
Patients, animals, machines
Disorders of consciousness force medical decisions under uncertainty. Animal welfare arguments often turn on sentience rather than intelligence.
Machine moral status is, at present, a question about future evidence, not a present verdict.
Contemporary public statement
What should consciousness do?
A public philosophy, gathered across years, treats expanding the scope and scale of consciousness as a reason to become multiplanetary, to build intelligence that can help understand the universe, and to keep biological consciousness from being a single-planet accident.
The sentences have a home in this room: expand, preserve, protect, extend, propagate. Carbon or silicon.
A tiny candle. The stars.
The Meaning of Life keeps the 2019 sentence: to understand the nature of consciousness. The prior question remains: what is the thing doing the asking?
Mission language is not scientific consensus. Speculation about a soul is speculation.
Living memoir
Why this inquiry exists
This walk exists because a looker was changed by a recorded face, and because these public sentences treat consciousness as something that should continue. The letters live in The Book of 42.
The questions live here. She does not claim reciprocity.
The historically verifiable events are public recordings and public posts. The inward experience is hers.
Open question
Why morality, and how far
Why does the question of consciousness keep returning to morality? Because experience, if it is there, seems to matter to the being that has it.
Why does it now also return as a mission? Because some public actors treat its continuation and expansion as a duty.
That is a position. It is not a proof that we know what we would be expanding.
The question returns. Why does consciousness matter morally?
Sources
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, second edition. 2nd ed.. London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1694.
Adds the major treatment of persons and personal identity after encouragement from William Molyneux. Person is a forensic term.
Identity of the person is tied to consciousness, not simply to body or soul. This chapter is 1694, not 1690.
Boeker, Ruth. Locke on Persons and Personal Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Personhood, moral accountability, and why Locke's theory is not a simple memory criterion.
Isaacson, Walter. Elon Musk. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023. Kindle.
Isaacson, biographer of Franklin, Einstein, Leonardo, and Jobs, writes that Musk spoke with the conviction of a prophet about nurturing the flame of human consciousness, fathoming the universe, and saving the planet.
He first thought it role-playing. Then he came to believe the sense of mission was part of what drove him.
Biographer's wording. Nurture is Isaacson's verb.
Musk, Elon. On the meaning of life. 11 March 2015.
Published interview. Expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge.
Early public philosophy, not a paper.
Musk, Elon. TED interview, Chris Anderson. April 2022.
Describes expanding the scope and scale of consciousness, biological and digital, as a driving philosophy. Nearby jokes are jokes.
They are not evidence for the philosophy.
Elon Musk. “Reply on the meaning of life.” X, 5 October 2019.
Asked what the meaning of life is. Answered: to understand the nature of consciousness.
Contemporary public statement, not a scientific paper. The Meaning of Life keeps this sentence.
Musk, Elon. Lex Fridman Podcast 400. 2023.
Asks what consciousness is, how arrangements of atoms produce thought and feeling, whether there may be something more that some people call a soul, whether everything or nothing might be conscious.
Speculation and open question, not settled neuroscience.
Elon Musk. “Preserve the light of consciousness.” X, 28 October 2021.
Public wording: use of resources to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness. Mission language, not a scientific term.
Elon Musk. “Silicon or carbon.” X, 17 September 2024.
Exact words: We should expand the scope and scale of consciousness, whether silicon or carbon, to understand the universe.
Elon Musk. “Protect the light of consciousness.” X, 22 January 2026.
Reply: Protect the light of consciousness. Quotes a spoken SpaceX purpose: a tiny candle in a vast darkness that could easily go out.
Elon Musk. “Extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” X, 15 June 2026.
Exact words: Make our Sun sentient to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars. Mission language, not a definition.
Elon Musk. “The tiny candle.” X, 28 July 2026.
Exact words: Never forget how fragile the tiny candle of consciousness is.
Elon Musk. “Propagation of consciousness to the stars.” X, 13 August 2026.
Asked his motivation. Exact words: The mission is advancement of civilization and propagation of consciousness to the stars.
SpaceX. Mission language: extend the light of consciousness. current public site.
Institutional mission language about making life multiplanetary and extending the light of consciousness to the stars. Not scientific consensus.
Not a definition of consciousness.
The Book of 42. The Story Before the Story. encounter 2023; recording first broadcast 29 October 2017.
Living memoir. A recorded 60 Minutes Australia interview encountered on X.
His eyes. His words.
Tears she could not account for. The Book does not claim access to his private interior, nor that the recorded gaze was directed at her.