David Pearce is a philosopher & co-founder of the World Transhumanist Organisation, now Humanity+. His work centres on "The Hedonistic Imperative" - a moral obligation to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life."
You can find the video of our conversation here.
We discuss:
- Using biotech to abolish suffering & replace it with gradients of hedonic bliss
- Compassion, Buddhism, negative utilitarianism & the need to systematise benevolence
- The "3 supers" of Transhumanism: super intelligence, super longevity & super happiness + why non-humans should be included
- Growing up as a 3rd generation v*gan in a Quaker household
- Waiting for god to get in touch at 7-8 yrs old then ceasing to believe at 10-11 yrs
- The centrality of compassion to the values of David's family
- Is morality like supporting a football team?
- We can build our ethics on deep intuitions, then extrapolate
- First person suffering is dis-valuable. Hold your hand in iced water!
- The centrality of our perspective as a highly adaptive illusion. The suffering of others is just as salient to them - each of us is not special
- "My morality is a feature of reality"
- A future connected mega-mind might look back on us as ignorant as well as unethical
- A choice to be immoral is also irrational
- Basing our morality on a naturalistic epistemology & spanning "is-ought"
- How nearly everyone disagrees with Sentientism
- Focusing on the good in religion & working on common ground
- The Bible is light on the bio-tech details of how the lion will lie down with the lamb :)
- If god has given us CRISPR, why not use it to show mercy?
- If humans have compassion, surely god's compassion should be even deeper?
- Not being righteous even when you're right
- Having compassion for people you disagree with & naturalistic humility about your own beliefs
- Religious texts don't prohibit the positive use of tech
- We're all amateurs re: understanding consciousness
- Consciousness/sentience as "just" info proc or something more
- Is the USA conscious? (Eric Schwitzgebel)
- Micro-experiential zombies
- Physicalism plus the intrinsic nature of the physical, is experience the "fire in the equations"?
- Falling asleep doesn't destroy consciousness, it breaks binding
- Eric's "crazyism" - stay open minded
- Powerpointism as an alternative to panpsychism :)
- The temptation to fill gaps / address uncertainty with "woo" and mysticism/magic/god
- Even if consciousness is fundamental, it's not "like anything" to be a rock
- Distinction between panpsychism (consciousness attached to fundamental entities) & non-materialist physicalism (experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical)
- Using genetics to give our offspring better lives - for health and to adjust their hedonic set-points
- Ending animal farming "death factories" - laws will outlaw
- Making it easy to do the right thing
- Mitigating wild animal suffering (fertility regulation - immuno-contraception/gene drives). We are already intervening negatively on a massive scale
- SCN-9A gene, the volume knob of pain
- Converting carnivores to herbivores, providing cultured-meat alternatives, without being constrained by species essentialism
- "Nature is pretty" vs. "Compassion for the suffering"
- Moving from "kill them all" to compassionate interventions
- Using our tech capability to tap into the latent compassion of humans.
See the YouTube video for full show notes.
