According to LessWrong, philosopher Jack Thompson makes the case for researching 'hedonium'—a theoretical conscious being optimized purely for happiness. The barrier? Philosophers have long treated consciousness as an unknowable mystery. But Thompson points to 'illusionism,' a philosophical view holding that consciousness is fundamentally physical and material rather than metaphysically special. Under that framework, building a happy conscious mind becomes an empirical engineering problem rather than an unsolvable puzzle. It would require rigorous understanding of how pleasure and pain work in the brain. Thompson isn't advocating for filling the universe with happiness-optimized beings, but argues that if creating such consciousness is possible without sacrificing other values, research into the possibility is worth pursuing.

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