David Pearce stayed in SF between the 24th of September and the 4th of October 2018. He departed for the UK a couple days ago. During this time I had the privilege of hanging out with him and helping to organize some of the events he took part in. The presentation he gave was based on his Quora response titled “24 Predictions for the Year 3000” (slides). The picture below was taken yesterday right before his presentation at the Foresight Institute (I believe there was a video taken, so it should be up on Youtube soon).

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Here are some interesting things he said during his visit that I thought were worth sharing:

If we don’t address the genetic causes of suffering (physical and mental) we will find ourselves in 500 years enjoying material abundance via nanotech, living in a perfect democracy, colonizing space, and still sitting around wondering “Why are we miserable so much of the time? Why can’t we all just get along? Why are we not all happy?”

I wish I could tell you I’ve been busy preparing my own cryptocurrency. “DaveCoin” you see? Unfortunately the domain name davecoin.com is already taken, so all that effort for nothing…

If there were two buttons, one that releases a hedonium shockwave and one that leads to life animated by gradients of bliss and the eradication of suffering, I would press the latter. That said, I wouldn’t be terribly upset if someone presses the former.

People complain that Negative Utilitarians (NU) are dangerous since they prefer non-existence to even a pinprick. But what most don’t realize is that Classical Utilitarians (CU) are no less dangerous to humans. If they were to get their way they’d complain that the matter and energy needed to keep you alive is not a good use of resources relative to the pleasure plasma it could be instead. For some reason the implications of NU are more easily recognizable and talked about than the implications of CU.

If in the year 3000 there is still suffering, that’s not because eliminating it wasn’t possible, but because for whatever reason we chose to preserve it.

Selection pressures make any anti-natalist movement self-limiting, for even the slightest predisposition to not have kids is selected against over time. (*Audience brings up a group-selection argument for why childlessness is adaptive*): Well, group-selection only works in extremely unusual and restricted evolutionary niches. Unless you start using human cloning, we will not be behaving like ants or bees any time soon.

There ought to be a tower in San Francisco called “Institute for Paradise Engineering”!

I feel guilty about talking about my idiosyncratic philosophy of mind so much (i.e. non-materialist physicalism with coherence to bind). On the one hand I think that real theoretical progress can only be done when we all share the same background philosophical assumptions, but on the other hand it distracts from the main message of “Bentham + biotech”. I remain torn by whether to pursue this subject in public.

My philosophy is in agreement with Buddhism (“I Teach Only Suffering and the End of Suffering” – Buddha). If you will, all I’m doing is taking the core message of Buddhism seriously and then figuring out what its realization actually entails (i.e. biotechnology). Alternatively, you can see it as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy: “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat…”. All we are doing is figuring out the implementation details!

Eliminating suffering with modern technology ought to be foot stompingly obvious… but after a while one learns that it’s not wise or productive to stomp on one’s own foot.

“Diogenes’ new tub” (as a concept handle in order to talk about radically new modes of experience with high hedonic tone despite their alien nature).

Although I am not confident we can explain reality, if it is at all possible, I do think we are circling around the correct explanation space (i.e. zero ontology).

If even someone like David Chalmers, who is philosophically literate, insightful, and very bright, had trouble understanding the fact that phenomenal binding is not epiphenomenal, what are the chances that most people will?

I am extremely prude, perhaps the prudest in this room, so forgive my analogy: being animated by gradients of bliss is like the experience of two sensitive lovers making love. If done right, it’s supposed to be pleasant all throughout, but there will still be peaks and troughs.

I do not have a secret agenda here, I promise. I’m a secular rationalist, and I don’t believe in any kind of spirituality. Yet one can imagine future generations identifying, isolating, expressing, and amplifying the molecular substrates of spiritual experiences. Thus perhaps some people might want to add “super-spirituality” to the “3 Ss of transhumanism” (i.e. super-intelligence, super-longevity, and super-happiness).

Although I would like to have a government that doesn’t tell me what I can and can’t take to enrich the quality of my life, I must say that if I had a teenager I would not want them to experiment with anything weird like psychedelics, and I certainly wouldn’t want them to hang out with people who are likely to give them such things. Likewise, most people would agree that preventing people from taking antibiotics when they just have a viral cold is important and that regulation is key here. So I wouldn’t say I’m uniformly libertarian about the use of substances. That said, verifiably informed consenting adults above a certain age should be allowed to do what they please with their inner biochemistry.