Marcin
Article
Marcin is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 10, 2024 and May 15, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Marcin’s team will be considering as they try to understand her condition better”; “I intend to talk to Marcin and his team soon and maybe write a post about it”; “I interviewed Marcin to learn more about his project”. It most often appears alongside Far Out Initiative, Apart Research, Marcin Kowrygo.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: February 10, 2024
- Last seen: May 15, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Far Out Initiative (3 shared issues)
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- Apart Research (2 shared issues)
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- Marcin Kowrygo (2 shared issues)
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- 1DaySooner (1 shared issues)
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- 23andme (1 shared issues)
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- @the_megabase (1 shared issues)
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- A Pan-Species Welfare State (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Book Review (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grantees (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Marcin Kowrygo, $50,000, for the Far Out Initiative. Recently a woman in Scotland was found to be incapable of experiencing any physical or psychological suffering2. Scientists sequenced her genome and found a rare mutation affecting the FAAH-OUT pseudogene, which regulates levels of pain-related neurotransmitters. Marcin and his team are working on pharmacologic and genetic interventions that can imitate her condition. If they succeed, they hope to promote them as painkillers, splice them into farm animals to produce cruelty-free meat, or just give them to everyone all the time and end all suffering in the world forever. They are extremely serious about this.
There’s a long history of studying patients with various pain insensitivity syndromes. Many of them die after getting injuries that they don’t catch in time; for example, they might accidentally brush against a candle, light themselves on fire, and not notice until they look down and see the flames. Ms. Cameron is especially interesting because she’s in her seventies, very healthy, and by all accounts has lived a pretty normal life (she does report that she “often burns her arms on the oven”, but seems to catch it faster than people with other variants of her condition). I’ve seen some suggestion that she has something like pain asymbolia, where she still perceives pain but doesn’t find it unpleasant. Maybe she burns her arms because low levels of asymbolic pain aren’t attention-grabbing enough to immediately catch her attention if she’s distracted - but she manages to stay overall alive and healthy because higher levels of pain can grab her attention even without associated unpleasant qualia. This is the sort of thing Marcin’s team will be considering as they try to understand her condition better.
Inline links: pain asymbolia
2: The grant that got the most attention (positive and negative) was the one to the Far Out Initiative to explore a mutation that seems to turn off suffering. I intend to talk to Marcin and his team soon and maybe write a post about it. In the meantime, you can read their FAQ.
Inline links: you can read their FAQ
This started to change around the turn of the decade. In 2017, Pearce came out with a new book, Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering? In 2018, a group of psychonauts founded Qualia Research Institute, which among its many other projects wants to mainstream Pearcian ideas. And finally, the news about FAAH-OUT convinced the small circle of people around Pearce to to stop speculating and try to put some of their ideas into action. III. Marcin Kowrygo, Far Out CEO In this year’s list of ACX Grantees, one got outsized attention:
Inline links: Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering?, mainstream Pearcian ideas
I interviewed Marcin to learn more about his project. He was extremely gracious about the conditions (over a buggy video link, at 3 AM, with me mostly too sick to speak), and did his best to decipher my half-grunted, half-coughed questions and hold up most of the conversation.
In early 2023, suffering abolitionist Michael Sparks founded the Far Out Initiative to further explore FAAH-OUT and its implications. He collected a team of polymath philosophers and biohackers, and recruited Marcin, a neurobiologist and veteran EA, to lead their group.
Inline links: Far Out Initiative