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David Pearce Quotes
born 1959 England
David Pearce (born April 1959) is a British philosopher and co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, currently rebranded and incorporated as Humanity+, Inc., and a prominent figure within the transhumanism movement. He approaches ethical issues from a lexical negative utilitarian perspective.
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31 quotes
Depressed or nominally euthymic people are easier for the authorities to control than exuberant life-lovers.
When one is gripped by excruciating physical pain, one is always shocked at just how frightful it can be.
An adequate theory of value should be as true in the gas chambers of Auschwitz as in the philosopher’s study.
Unless the vertebrate central nervous system is genetically recoded, there will be traumas and malaise in utopia - any utopia - too.
Confusion of sapience with sentience can be ethically catastrophic.
The biology of suffering in intelligent agents is a deep underlying source of existential risk – and one that can potentially be overcome.
Conservation biology is an ideology masquerading as a science.
If we already lived in a cruelty-free world, the notion of re-introducing suffering, exploitation and creatures eating each other would seem not so much frightful as unimaginable – no more seriously conceivable than reverting to surgery without anaesthesia today.
Why expect a false theory of the world, i.e. classical physics, to yield a true account of consciousness?
By far my greatest dread in life […] is that (some variant of) the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true.
Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldn't it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code?
It's easy to support the status quo if one is not another of its victims.
Today, empathetic intelligence entails sharing the sorrows of other sentient beings. In our posthuman future, will empathy consist entirely in sharing each other's joys?
Our genetically enriched descendants may regard existence without "dukkha" - the abolition of suffering - as the ethical foundation of any civilised society.
At present ... the difference between an animal-experimenter's laboratory and a torture chamber is often imperceptible from his victims' point of view.
It is easy to romanticise, say, tigers or lions and cats. We admire their magnificent beauty, strength and agility. But we would regard their notional human counterparts as wanton psychopaths of the worst kind.
The Hedonistic Imperative (1995)
Critics would argue that conceiving the end of life as a perpetual cosmic orgasm is the reductio ad absurdum of classical utilitarianism. But will posthuman superintelligence respect human conceptions of absurdity?
Humans already massively intervene in Nature, whether through habitat destruction, captive breeding programs for big cats, "rewilding", etc. So the question is not whether humans should "interfere", but rather what ethical principles should govern our interventions.
[T]he existence of the mind-independent environment beyond one's world-simulation is a theoretical inference, not an empirical observation.
I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences.
Ethics Matters (2012)
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