Transhumanism; How Biotechnology Can Eradicate Suffering | David Pearce

David Pearce is a co-founder of Humanity+ and a prominent figure within the transhumanism movement. Where is the future of the human race heading? Will our descendants be at the mercy of random genetic chance for suffering diseases? How about editing the genetic baseline for happiness? Or levels of empathy? Can we use computers to emulate a human brain? What are the ethical implications of Crispr? Expert to hear David's answers these questions and more as we delve into the fascinating world of transhumanism. Extra Stuff: Check out David's Website - https://www.hedweb.com/ The Abolitionist Project - https://www.hedweb.com/abolitionist-project/index.html Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Chris Williamson?

  Hi friends, welcome back to the Modern Wisdom Podcast. My guest today is David Pearce. We're going to be talking all things transhumanism. That is not talking about people changing their genders, but it is exploring some very exciting topic areas which I've wanted to sink my teeth into for a while. So today, expect to learn why suffering of any kind is an artefact that might have been useful to our ancestors, but is something that we need to transcend as soon as possible. How David thinks that humanity not only should, but also must progress towards a more hedonic imperative. The hard problem of consciousness and why we might not be uploading our brains into

• 0:50Chris Williamson?

  computers anytime soon. And a lot of interesting discussions about the implications of CRISPR and gene editing on the whole. We cover a lot of topics that I definitely should have been much more well-educated on, seeing as they have massive implications and are also pretty current to society right now. But yeah, I loved the conversation. David is a massively prominent figure in the transhumanism movement and I feel very privileged to have had him on, teaching us the 101 of transhumanism. So without further ado, please welcome David Pearce.

• 1:38Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I am joined by David Pearce today. David, welcome to the show. Hi Chris, it's good to be with you. Fantastic to have you on today, also nice to hear a familiar accent. So we're talking about transhumanism today. This will be a new venture for a lot of the listeners. So let's start off with a definition. Can you tell us what transhumanism is?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Well, there are no sacred texts, but very simplistically, I sometimes talk about the three supers, three supers of transhumanism. Superintelligence, this is the idea that it's going to be possible to radically amplify our intelligence and machine intelligence, and there are different ways one can go about this, there are different conceptions of post-human superintelligence, but that's one of the three supers. Then there is super longevity, this is the idea that there is no immutable law of nature

• 2:44Speaker 01

  that says that biological robots must grow old and die, whereas silicon robots can be repaired indefinitely, and transhumanists believe in radical life extension, indefinite youth, with the backup of cryonics, or maybe even cryothanasia, for any of your listeners who perhaps of a certain age think that realistically they're not going to make it. And the third super, which is the super I focus on most of all, super happiness, or super wellbeing, this is the idea that it's going to be possible to replace the biology

• 3:25Speaker 01

  of pain and misery and suffering with life-based entirely on gradients of intelligent wellbeing. This is replacing the biology of suffering, not just in humans, but in the long run, the rest of the animal kingdom throughout the living world. Now, as well as those three supers, there are plenty of transhumanists who would want to add a fourth super, that they don't agree what that might be, for example, what about super empathy? But I would argue that this is embraced by any sufficiently rich conception of superintelligence,

• 4:07Speaker 01

  that a full-spectrum superintelligence wouldn't just have an off-the-scale IQ, it would also have a superhuman capacity for perspective-taking, empathetic understanding.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  So there in a nutshell.

• 4:21Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. It's no small task, I think is one way to kind of summarize the the transhumanist movement then. Interestingly, I had Professor David Sinclair on recently, who you may know.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Right, yes, indeed, yes.

• 4:35Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I had him on not long ago, talking about the cutting edge longevity research that he's doing. And during that, I asked him, do you think that a human could live for a thousand years? And his his short answer was yes. So it's it's interesting to hear that people from multiple fields, very different fields from coming out from genetics and gene editing, coming out from this longevity research, and then your side as well, are all pointing in a similar direction.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Yes, and this is it. I think a lot of people psychologically would switch off if one were to say, well, look, our grandchildren won't grow old and die, but you will. I mean, there's something almost cruel about telling people that science is going to find a cure for aging shortly after you're dead. And I know don't know this, unlike most transhumanists, I'm not, shall we say, one of life's temperamental optimists. But nonetheless, as I said, as well as supporting research into anti aging technologies, there is one strand of the super longevity

• 5:46Speaker 01

  aspect of transhumanism that is focused on cryonics and even cryothanasia. So.

• 5:55Chris Williamson?

  What are those two terms for us, please?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Essentially, sorry, I should say, this is the this is the idea that if you are suspended in optimal conditions, that so long as irreversible information loss doesn't occur, it would be possible to reanimate you at some future date, when what when there is a cure for whatever killed you. Now, it is extremely difficult, in a technical sense, to destroy information. Some physicists would say impossible. But nonetheless, I would say a big imponderable is whether that people who are.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Frozen a long time, by about long time, I mean hours after their nominal death, whether it will be possible to reanimate them, that in practice deterioration may be too far advanced. But in principle, at any rate, one could have something like cryothanasia, rather than waiting until you're ninety-five and gaga, have yourself suspended where you are still, shall we say, in the in the prime of life. It hasn't been done yet, but this is, this would be one possible option.

• 7:13Chris Williamson?

  That sounds an awful lot like a book that I've just about finished. Have you read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  I blush to say it is now many, many years since I've read a novel. That is...

• 7:26Chris Williamson?

  Cool. So it was the it was the winner of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and it was the 30th anniversary one as well. So they gave it out to a fantastic book. And in that, they have people who dip in and out of suspended animation, these long sleeps for going across big, vast galactic distances between different, different star systems and stuff like that. And they they jump in and out of it like you'd like you'd get a shower. But it sounds, it sounds like the the technology for that's a little bit further away. So moving on to your particular domain of competence, you were talking about super happiness?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Yes, once again, that's, that's just a slogan. But yes, if you think of perhaps today's hedonic range as minus ten to zero to plus ten, with minus ten being the absolute pit of despair on bearable agony, hedonic zero being emotionally neutral experience, and plus ten being the most wonderful peak experience of your life. Imagine if it were possible to engineer a civilization that, let's say, stretched from plus seventy to plus hundred.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Now, if that sounds too much like, uh, science fiction, well, that may well be the, uh, uh, the case. And much more morally urgent, I think, is focusing on the, the sub-zero states that, uh, plague so many lives, uh, today. Uh, that sadly, natural selection didn't optimize us for being happy, it optimized us for leaving more copies of our genes, or as evolutionary biologists like to say, to maximize our inclusive genetic fitness. Uh, and yeah, there's no real convincing scientific evidence that, on average, uh,

• 9:28Speaker 01

  we are happier or sadder or more or less contented or discontented today than we were on the African savanna, which, uh, is very counterintuitive. But yeah, the hedonic treadmill, uh, is designed to keep us discontented a lot of the time, um, essentially be- because it's, it's good, it's good for our genes. Uh, and if we are ethically serious about getting rid of pain and suffering, we're gonna have to tackle its genetic, uh, biological roots. I mean, that may sound like crude genetic determinism. In practice, one is going to need a twin-track approach, you know, everything from basic,

• 10:12Speaker 01

  uh, income to decent accommodation, healthcare and so forth, all, all the kind of environmental stopgaps, yes. But if we're ever to get rid of the horrors of, uh, depression, anxiety disorders, essentially all the nasty aspects of Darwinian life, we're gonna have to edit our genetic source code and... Perhaps the first thing I think we should do is, you know, prospective parents at the moment. Does one have a genetic crapshoot? And recall, every child born today is a unique, undested genetic experiment.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Or does one try to load the genetic dice in favour of one's offspring by giving them a high hedonic set point, high pain threshold and traits like that? Now, I think there are real ethical questions about whether one really wants to bring more pain and suffering into the world. But given most people do want to have kids, I think the best one can do is urge them to, yeah, first of all, consider pre-implantation genetic screening and soon CRISPR genome editing.

• 11:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I was listening to Jamie Metzl on Joe Rogan just earlier on today. Do you know Jamie? Have you heard of his work? Yes, yes. So I was listening to those two go at it and a lot of these topics came up. I think CRISPR at the moment is kind of a hot topic for the ethical questions that it's offering. But Jamie offered a really interesting point, which was he said in the future, he thinks that parents who potentially have biological, typically biological births, are maybe going to be seen as irresponsible in the same way as parents who don't vaccinate their children now. That if you had the choice of choosing through IVF or whatever advanced version of that is this, what was it embryonic selection perhaps?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Pre-implantation genetic screening. This isn't the same as as actual genome editing, which a lot of people regard as more more radical. It's simply choosing what Mother Nature has. Has has thrown up, but ultimately it's it's it's a false distinction. And yes, I think it it's a good parallel, but uh, yes, the most of history, yes, one just has had to trust mother nature, God, fate, providence or whatnot. But increasingly, it's going to be a matter responsible parents are going to be choosing the genetic makeup, the traits of their future offspring. And the very nature of selection pressure is going to change

• 12:59Speaker 01

  too. I mean, natural selection, sexual selection, it's it's it's blind and based on random genetic variations. Whereas increasingly, as the reproductive revolution unfolds, I think there's going to be selection pressure in favor of life based on gradients of well being. But that's obviously speculative.

• 13:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's it's interesting. I'm sure a lot of people who are listening will be thinking the same as me, which is there's a very odd visceral reaction that I have about this selective birth to it. It make creates these feelings of unease and I can't work out why. And I'm fairly forward thinking with regards to this. I find technological progress exciting, probably above everything else, exciting ahead of scary, probably. So, and even for me, there's something about that. And yet you can draw parallels that had you have told people a thousand years ago that you'd be able to fly across oceans, or had

• 14:02Chris Williamson?

  you have told people 5000 years ago that you'd be able to get an injection that would stop them from dying from all of the things that are constantly killing them and their family, or you could take a pill and it would stop you from feeling sick. All of these things at that point would have been felt or would have been considered unnatural. Is this just another frontier? Or is is there actually something different about the the movement that we're going towards here?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Well, this time it's different, but then it always is. And any of your listeners who are thinking of all of the possible things that can go wrong. I think it's a healthy suspicion that, yeah, there needs to be exhaustive risk-reward analysis. You know, the thinking of all the conceivable things that can go wrong. I mean, evidently, there are a lot of people that kind of reflex, eugenics, the Third Reich, race hygiene. Other people will say brave new world.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Another reason is that when we try to imagine the future, there is a lot of neurological evidence that what we're doing is drawing upon memory. And the memory which we're drawing on is essentially sci-fi, often sci-fi read when we were kids. And sure, half-digested memories of everything from, you know, kind of Gattaca, or in the case of superintelligence, Skynet. So, yeah, I mean, as I said, I very much sympathize with anyone who is suspicious and who is pessimistic.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, if we are to get rid of the horrific burden of suffering in the world, we're going to have to tackle it at its genetic source. Essentially, our genes designed us to be unhappy and discontented a lot of the time. And unless we actually do edit our genetic source code, there is going to be obscene misery and suffering in the world indefinitely.

• 16:14Chris Williamson?

  Are you sometimes surprised that we manage to have lives of the degree of happiness that we do, given our genetic predisposition?

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Yes, at times. I mean, this is it. Nature seems to just sort of play around with the dials. And sadly, there are a very significant minority of people who endure kind of chronic misery, pain, depression. Equally, there are life's temperamental optimists and even extreme genetic outliers who spend most of their lives, yes, extremely happy, which is kind of existence proof. Essentially, being temperamentally very happy, it's a kind of high risk, high reward.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  One is more likely to go out, do things, explore the world, take risks and so on if one is a happy, extroverted go-getter. Whereas if you have low mood, you're more likely to keep your head down. It's a kind of low risk, low reward. I mean, that's a very crude dichotomy. Yeah. But, yeah, most people, on balance, love life. I mean, I might, given my rather gloomy and depressive temperament, think of Darwinian life as sentient malware, but this is very much

• 17:43Speaker 01

  the minority position. And, yeah, one needn't be a Buddhist or a negative utilitarian to believe that we should aim to prevent and minimize unnecessary suffering. And what seems quite counterintuitive is the idea that all suffering, all experience below hedonic zero is going to become technically optional. That, sure, suffering in one's life, sometimes, but only sometimes, sometimes it can be instructive and valuable. But the critical question to ask is, is it

• 18:24Speaker 01

  functionally indispensable? And as silicon robots, machine intelligence, AI progressively eclipses humans in ever more cognitive domains without the nasty raw feels of pain and suffering. I think we just have to face up. To the fact that, yeah, that suffering is just a ghastly implementation detail of Darwinian life, and we ought to be switching to a more civilised signalling system instead.

• 18:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's this odd artefact that's come along for the ride, hasn't it? So, the, I want to talk about the hedonistic imperative and the abolitionist project, both of which you're, you're big proponents of. Would you be able to explain to the listeners what those are, please?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, the hedonistic imperative was the name of an online manifesto I wrote back in 1995. Why the hedonistic imperative? Well, I would really have liked to call it, you know, the moral imperative to use biotechnology to face out suffering throughout the living world. But of course, no, one needs something snappy and catchy, so...

• 19:36Chris Williamson?

  I think your marketing's better on this one, David. I think, I think the hedonistic imperative works better, yeah.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not ideal because hedonism can make something vaguely shallow and amoral.

• 19:50Chris Williamson?

  You think Woodstock, don't you?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, whereas I do see there is a desperate moral urgency to getting, getting rid of suffering. But in a nutshell, yeah, it, it, it gives the, it gives the gist. The abolitionist project really just alludes to, yeah, getting rid of suffering in both human and non-human animals via biotechnology. How far one goes beyond this, uh, yeah, though personally, I'm a negative utilitarian. I think that overriding obligation is to get rid of suffering and then everything else

• 20:31Speaker 01

  is a bonus icing on the cake. Nonetheless, yes, I do foresee a civilisation where their, their darkest lows are richer than today's peak experiences.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  But that probably strikes most people as science fiction. And that if anyone with a more down-to-earth temperament, I would, yes, stress more the the issue of suffering, yeah.

• 20:59Chris Williamson?

  I understand. So getting towards the the rubber meeting the road, so to speak. How how are we beginning to go about that? What's the beginning of the proposed strategy? The next steps from now and then, where does that lead us to in the the longer term, like the real far future?

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of futurology consists of extrapolation, which is dangerous.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  And sadly, although we are just begin, you know, the first CRISPR babies, if you think of the scandal of the is this Chinese researcher who did it allegedly without authorization.

• 21:41Chris Williamson?

  From the parents, yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, he may have got, well, I was thinking more of the the state. We now know that not merely did, yes, not merely did the researcher aim to make the kids protected against HIV, that purely inadvertently, it seems, memory and intelligence may have been enhanced, genes involved in in cognitive augmentation. I'm personally rather skeptical that this was a mere oversight.

• 22:13Chris Williamson?

  Accident, yeah.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  But, yeah, so, so, I mean, that said, yes, we are starting to pinpoint specific genes and allelic combinations involved in low mood, pain sensitivity. And even today, if if we are ethically serious, it is possible to choose via pre-implantation genetic screening or CRISPR genome editing, ensuring that your kid has Let's say, okay, start an extremely high pain threshold. Why not abolish pain altogether? Well, maybe one day it's going to be possible to do so with smart prostheses

• 22:58Speaker 01

  or literally gradients of bliss. But just for now, leaving the sci-fi aside, if you give your kid, let's say, a benign version of the SCN9a gene. SCN9a is a pain-modulating gene that has dozens of different alleles, different variations, nonsense mutations, no capacity to experience pain at all, but other mutations, high or low pain sensitivity. And by doing this, essentially, you can ensure that, you know, if you've ever met the kind of person, today's outliers, who, you know, the kind of person who says that pain is just a useful signalling mechanism.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Before we get rid of pain altogether, it would be possible to kind of ratchet up pain thresholds. Would need to be done with care. For example, you know, would do people with extremely high pain thresholds not show perhaps sufficient empathy for the plight of others? That's the kind of thing to consider. But nonetheless, other things being equal, one wants to give kids a high pain threshold. The other tray I think one would wish to focus on is hedonic set point. Hedonic set point, this is this approximate level of well-being or ill-being

• 24:24Speaker 01

  that most people tend to fluctuate around in the course of a lifetime. And some people have really high hedonic set point, other people low hedonic set point. And though one can't point to a single gene that is decisive here, nonetheless, there are a handful of genes associated with, or rather particular alleles associated with having a high hedonic set point. And do we want to ensure that our future, our children do have this hedonic, high hedonic set point or today's genetic crapshoot? And I think the genetic crapshoot is unethical.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Of course, as well as our, as well as our kids, understandably, most of us want to feel better ourselves. And yes, of course, designer drugs, mood brighteners, nootropics, there are a number of possible interventions there. But at the risk of sounding very boring and conservative, given, given the degree of our ignorance still, believe it or not, if anyone emails me, what, what pills do you recommend? Yeah, pretty far, far better

• 25:52Speaker 01

  to initially at least focus on this trinity of good sleep discipline, optimal aerobic exercise, and, and diet, good nutrition. That's, it sounds rather boring, but so few people really get these optimal. But obviously, there are pharmacological interventions to.

• 26:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, a couple of points there. Firstly, the, the last thing that you touched on about people seeming to think that there needs to be a very fancy solution to a very complicated problem. We often talk about the use of people to do, to jump on the back of nootropics or caffeine abuse in an effort to become more productive, when they're unable to do deep work or stay focused on one task for 10 minutes. They don't understand how to task manage. They don't understand how to capture or process or review their, their to-do list, for instance. And it's the equivalent of taking steroids, having never been to the gym, for us, that you're, you're going a lot faster in the wrong direction.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yes, and all too many of today's drugs, rather than cheating the hedonic treadmill, actually kick it into gear with a vengeance. So, yes, I'm actually, though I write about and discuss discuss different mood brighteners, drugs have well-known pitfalls. I mean, one of the biggest pitfalls, unfortunately, is that the neurotransmitter system most involved, directly involved in hedonic tone, whether one feels good or bad, is the opioid system, the mu opioid receptor. And opioids obviously have a very well-known pitfall. So it would

• 27:44Speaker 01

  be much better if we were designed genetically to have high hedonic set points rather than needing to repair nature's deficiencies.

• 27:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I understand. Moving to the point that you made about pain, one of the first things that comes to mind is surely do we not need pain? I need to know if I put my hand in some hot water, I need to know if a car's run over my foot, et cetera, et cetera. If people are just walking around in this numb state of not knowing what's going on, is that not, are there not some downstream negatives?

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Oh, indeed. This is, yeah, people born with congenital insensitivity to pain need to lead a cotton wool existence. I mean, in the wild, they would just have died, and they're more likely to take risks. However, there are other people who just simply have an extremely high pain threshold. There was the case of Jo Cameron. This Scottish lady, responsible, retired schoolteacher, vegan, came to the interest of medical professionals because she waved away painkillers and the like because she just didn't feel she needed

• 29:00Speaker 01

  them after what ought to be an extremely painful medical procedure. She described childbirth as a mere tickle, rather than someone with complete insensitivity. It seems as though she just naturally has an extremely high pain threshold. And genetic and research suggested that she had mutations in two genes in particular.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Far and what's been christened the far out gene, which are responsible for anandamide, the breakdown of anandamide. Anandamide is literally etymologically bliss molecule, and she has naturally high levels of anandamide. And she appears to have gone through life in a state of mild euphoria, but not, but as I said, a responsible pillar of the local

• 30:07Speaker 01

  community, vegan, a school teacher. One obviously needs to be extremely wary of placing too much faith in individual case studies. But I mean, another example I give is of, yeah, my transhumanist colleague Anders Sandberg, who just, yeah, well, acknowledge, yeah, I do have a ridiculously high hedonic set point. What is, this is back to your original question. What is critical to intelligent behaviour, to responding adaptively, to noxious stimuli?

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Isn't one's absolute place on the plane or pleasure scale, it's some kind of hedonic gradient? And, yeah, one might imagine that people who are just exceptionally happy would be less motivated to behave adaptively. But counterintuitively, this doesn't seem to be the case, that other things being equal, the more, the more you love life, the more you're motivated to protect and preserve it. Whereas it's depressives who get...

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Stuck in a rut, the experience learned helplessness, behavioural despair, sometimes self-destructive behaviour, but preserving, yeah, information sensitivity. The distinction between being blissful and blissed out.

• 31:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think that's, that's something that was in the back of my mind, that if it's a world where essentially everyone's walking around on MDMA, like 100x MDMA sensations, but a little bit more sober and able to remember what's going on, I, I wonder how useful that society would be. I think there's some parallels that can probably be drawn between that as a genetic or pharmacological solution and some of the concerns people have with universal basic income, that when you take away people, what is considered to be people's current reason for living, that they'll be left in this kind of wallowy state where everyone's just lying around eating Skittles on beanbags and stuff like that.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. It's, I mean, in the case of universal basic income, I think it's just a matter of any decent society will have something like universal basic income and get rid of this, this appalling sprawling welfare bureaucracy. But nonetheless, I mean, the basic, yeah, can be relatively basic that I, I don't, well, I won't go off on a long spiel there. It's very, it's very easy to, you know, to sound off setting the world

• 33:06Speaker 01

  to rights. But yeah, on the whole, I don't tackle the, the social issues to the same degree. I mean, I do have. Views on everything from Donald Trump to climate change to you name it. But the point is other people have said it better. So.

• 33:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I understand. I think you've got you've got some some fairly niched down stuff that you need to be working on as well. I think you can you can leave the politics to to some other people. So one of the things that I'm thinking about straight off the bat, having read Superintelligent by Nick Bostrom, listeners of the show will know that I found the book both testing and very, very fascinating. Rather than being selective with our genes or or using particular drugs or whatever it might be to edit the way that we exist in the real world, why not just do whole brain emulation or upload ourselves to the internet?

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Oh, difficult question, because this brings us to the nature of consciousness and the binding problem.

• 34:14Chris Williamson?

  Let's jump into it, David. Come on, let's go feet first into the binding problem, my friend. We're in at the deep end now.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Okay, and the hard problem and the binding problem are worth distinguishing, though they're interrelated. The hard problem is why does consciousness exist at all? Why aren't we P-zombies? Nothing in the laws of physics is understood today. If one assumes that our basic understanding of the world quantum field theory describes fields of insentience rather than sentience, if one makes that very modest assumption, nothing in today's physics and chemistry forbids you and I from be talking to each other now, and we we are both being P-zombies. So that's the question.

• 35:02Chris Williamson?

  What's a P-zombie?

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry, philosophical zombies who acts in exactly the same way as you or me, but isn't conscious, isn't sentient. And I think the interesting question isn't the skeptical question, how do I know that you're not a P-zombie? The interesting question is, why aren't we P-zombies?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  How is it possible for consciousness to have the causal capacity to allow us to pose questions about its existence, for instance? So yeah, that's in a nutshell the hard problem. The binding problem, which probably fewer people are familiar with, is that even if you think that consciousness is absolutely fundamental to the world, why aren't we so-called micro-experiential zombies? And the population, I mean, as an example, I mean, here is, you know, the population of United States, let's say, three, uh, uh, uh, so, yeah, is it, what's the population of the United States?

• 36:08Chris Williamson?

  I'm not too sure. Give me one second and I will tell you.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's.

• 36:12Chris Williamson?

  Population. It is 327.2 million.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  320, yeah. Now, simply the fact that one has 327 million skull-bound minds, however they intercommunicate, nonetheless, we've no reason to think that the population of the United States is a mind, a unitary bound mind. Uh, or one can't be sure that the population of the USA isn't a unitary subject of experience, but that kind of strong emergence would be some kind of spooky. It's difficult to reconcile with monistic physicalism. Um, but the question is, why are our brains any different?

• 37:02Speaker 01

  After all, you and me, we are, uh, yeah, 86 billion membrane-bound nerve cells. Even if you think that individual nerve cells, uh, uh, maybe kind of support rudimentary consciousness, rudimentary experience, why aren't we just micro-experiential zombies, just patterns of mind dust? And so, yeah, that is the the binding problem. And yeah, here I am very much out on a limb. I don't think phenomenal binding is is a classical phenomenon, quantum mind. There are powerful arguments against this.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  But less controversially, today's classical digital computers are not subjects of experience and and simply increasing speed of execution, their complexity, or even making them massively parallel. There's no reason to think that sentience is somehow going to switch on.

• 38:11Chris Williamson?

  So it's it's not a case of, I think Sam Harris talks about it being that with processing power, consciousness comes along for the ride.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  And well, I mean, yeah, I suppose a lot of researchers, a lot of ARI researchers do assume that at some time in future, our machines will become conscious, but personally, I think the idea that consciousness arises at some some kind of computational level of abstraction is is is is is a mistake. And that I don't think classical digital computers are ever going to be more than zombies. So therefore, I don't think you or I are ever going to be uploading ourselves.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Yes, into digital computers, but I stress, this is obviously a controversial topic. Um, you you you mentioned, yeah, Nick's book on superintelligence. Very, very crudely, there are amongst transhumanists, there are there are three quite different conceptions of. Of superintelligence.

• 39:21Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating. Tell us about them.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Okay, there is one conception of superintelligence and this is one I personally subscribe to, that essentially post-human superintelligence will be us, that recursively self-improving biological robots are going to edit their own source code and bootstrap our way to full-spectrum superintelligence, and critically with the aid of narrow AI, that essentially all the clever machine, you know, all the stuff one reads about, essentially we're going to be incorporating it within ourselves, neurochips, smart prostheses.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  And just as, you know, I could be Kasparov today with a neurochip, okay, that's cheating, but nonetheless.

• 40:13Chris Williamson?

  Still one.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  I still, likewise, there is this kind of intimate neuroface, but I mean, yeah, I don't think digital computers are ever going to become conscious per se. Okay, that's one conception of superintelligence, superintelligence as our, ultimately our biological descendants, transhumans and posthumans. Then there is another conception of superintelligence associated with Ray Kurzweil, that essentially, yes, sees us as completely merging with our machines, possibly involving, yes, two mind uploading, that any distinction between humans and our machines will become completely

• 41:00Speaker 01

  meaningless, that's the second conception. But there is a third conception of post-human superintelligence. Originally, I came up with by I.J. Good, mathematician in the 1960s, developed by Eliezer Yukavsky and his colleagues at Miri, and put in its most magisterial form by Nick in his book Superintelligence, which is essentially sees a combination, I suppose the combination of Moore's Law, i.e.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Exponential increase in computer processing power, together with recursively self-improving, software-based AI, that is, software that improves itself in this escalating cycle. And on this conception of post-human superintelligence, there's no particular reason to expect that AI, artificial general intelligence will be will be sentient friendly, human friendly. May its values may be perhaps completely orthogonal. So I'm glossing over all manner of complications here.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  But if someone does start talking about superintelligence, it's it's worth probing what they mean. And I, I, for instance, think that a full-spectrum superintelligence will involve such things as exploring radically altered state spaces of consciousness. And it's it's it's it's unclear what it would mean for a digital zombie to start exploring altered state spaces. So, yeah.

• 42:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I I understand that's um. It's interesting to hear different stances or different viewpoints on the the future superintelligence movement, so to speak. Certainly Naval, who is a big big hero of mine when it comes to the podcasting space. He talks about the fact that recently there hasn't really been an awful lot of movement towards artificial general intelligence. I think people look at stuff like AlphaGo, Zero, and these sort of programs, which are simulacra of human intelligence, but in an incredibly narrow domain. And the domain is getting increasingly complex,

• 43:38Chris Williamson?

  but not actually wider. And he talks about the fact that any progress in general artificial intelligence kind of hasn't that hasn't really been very many. Developments and that kind of lends credence towards what you were saying, which is that you will have the head of the mothership still being reliant on the biological system that we are. And then you're augmenting with the narrow AI within its capabilities to to add on the functions that we need.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, there's always a risk when essentially when one is talking about superintelligence in practice, one ends up just obliquely expressing one's own limitations. So

• 44:26Speaker 01

  I can't step outside myself and really obviously tell you what will be the nature of full spectrum superintelligence. I would just urge, shall we say, a degree of caution before assuming that AI is somehow going to to wake up.

• 44:42Chris Williamson?

  I understand. So one of the questions that Joe Rogan asked Jamie Metzl the other day was why we have this insatiable desire to try and improve ourselves. Do you think that that's the way that we're wired? And if that's the case, isn't that quite a

• 45:01Chris Williamson?

  poetically beautiful way for us to transcend our own genetics?

• 45:06Speaker 01

  I, yes, so this is back to, you know, kind of natural selection designed us to be discontented a lot of the time. I wouldn't say all of us, or at least even most of us necessarily spend our time trying to improve ourselves, but certainly not many people think, well, I've had enough. I've got enough money or I've had enough reproductive opportunities and so on. The others, other things being equal, wanting more is fitness enhancing. So so, yes, yes.

• 45:46Chris Williamson?

  I understand completely. So moving on, one question that I really wanted to ask was if you had the opportunity to create a wish list of advisors to help the government understand the future and where they should be directing research and funds. Would you be able to put together a little dream team of advisors for them? And would you be able to tell us why you'd choose those people?

• 46:10Speaker 01

  I probably could, but just not off my head like that. It would also be invidious too.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Yes, obviously, I would love to be able to do so. I mean, as yet, no, shall we say billionaire or corporate colossus has approached me with funding. But yes, it's.

• 46:41Chris Williamson?

  It's in the post, David, I promise you, it's in the post, mate.

• 46:46Chris Williamson?

  I think it will be. So in terms of risks, are there things that are at the forefront of your of your thinking that you're concerned about as we move forward with this? Are there risks to the way that the project can go, the way that the public perceives it, or more kind of nitty gritty concerns to do with the actual way in which we proceed towards the hedonistic imperative?

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, by risks. And there are some people, including some transhumanists, who think of life as fundamentally good and we don't want to put it all at risk. Whereas my conception of life today, frankly, is much bleaker. That's the non-human animals in our factory farms and slaughterhouses are as sentient as pre-linguistic toddlers.

• 47:48Chris Williamson?

  Is that correct?

• 47:50Speaker 01

  If one is being more careful, one has to say that a pig, for example, is demonstrably more sapient than a pre-linguistic toddler. One can't be certain that the pig is as sentient. Nonetheless, the actual particular structures, neurological structures, genes, neurotransmitters that mediate our most. Powerful experiences of panic, of pain, distress are nearly identical.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  So, short of radical skepticism or solipsism, yes, I am as confident that a pig is as sentient as I am that you're sentient. And so, yes, given what I think posterity will recognize as, you know, a crime against sentience of almost unimaginable proportions, I think perhaps our most urgent priority right now is just to get factory farms and slaughterhouses shut and outlawed. Now, moral argument clearly plays a role, but I'm quite cynical about human nature.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  I think we're going to need to develop, hasten the development and commercialization of in vitro meat, meat substitutes. It's not a distinctively transhumanist technology in vitro meat. In vitro meat could be genetically engineered. It's much more likely to be widely accepted if it's not. But, yeah, essentially, I would see, yeah, we have this absolute moral obligation to get factory farms, slaughterhouses shut, that I think heaven knows how we'll explain

• 49:53Speaker 01

  what we did to our grandchildren. So, yeah, I mean, although I can happily talk to you about all the wonderful transhumanist technologies and ideas for the future, I think part of creating a world based on gradients of intelligent bliss involves... Stopping systematically harming sentient beings. We can't, we can't be serious about trying to build a happy biosphere if we're systematically harming others to gratify our own appetites.

• 50:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a, an interesting perspective to be able to try and take yourself away from your current experience and almost imagine the remembered self looking from the future. That degree of perspective, I think, is something that not a lot of people are, are used to doing. And it's obvious that when you do look at it with, in black and white, you are correct that you're breeding animals to suffer purely for your own enjoyment to eat. It's, it's a difficult, it's a difficult justification to make.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, personally, I, yeah, it's completely ethically indefensible. I mean, I should, I should add that, you know, by an accident of birth, I've never even tasted, tasted meat. So it's not, I mean, as I said, it's not that I'm trying to parade my moral superiority, but if one hasn't got this, this, this source of bias, yes, seeing what we are doing, you know, one reads some, let's say, some horrific case of child abuse in the papers and sort of viscerally is feeling, God, this terrible abuse ought to be locked up for to life. But then you, yeah, you see, you know, across the table, someone tucking into a bacon sandwich. It's, yeah. But yeah, if I pass the, you know, the meat counter

• 51:50Speaker 01

  in a supermarket, I, I think of Auschwitz and I think of child abuse. And, yeah, I mean, this is it. When, when people are actually shown one of these videos about what goes on in factory farms and store to houses, some people seem genuinely, genuinely shocked. But yeah, you know, far worse things go on off camera. I mean,

• 52:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, yeah, it really is unspeakable. Yeah.

• 52:20Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. So David, before we wrap up, I wanted to ask for a suggestion of a book or a resource or a blog, which you would recommend if people think this was a, an interesting discussion. And I'd, I'd quite like to find out some more about transhumanism and the Transhumanism movement.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Ooh heavens. Well, I have-

• 52:42Chris Williamson?

  You're put on the spot again, David. You're gonna have to, you're gonna have to put your money where your mouth is. I'm not letting you slide, sidle out of this one. I like the, the government advisers thing that you got.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  In spite of my low testosterone, I'm going to say, back in 1995, when the web was young, in fact, it was 1996, I set up a motherload website, hedweb.com, H E D W E B dot com. And though a lot of the material there is dated, certainly the style, nonetheless, everything from Quora answers about transhumanism to, yeah, the core of the manifesto, together with links to other transhumanist resources. And yeah, if, if what, if what I've been talking to you about

• 53:31Speaker 01

  does strike a chord, yeah, there are plenty of, of hot links there. But Chris, yeah, very much appreciated. It's, it's been great chatting.

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  It's been fantastic. hedweb.com will be linked in the show notes below as long, as well as some of the resources which we've been going through today. David, I really found today fascinating. Hopefully, within the next, the next few years, we might be, we're coming back on to discuss some exciting new developments in the, in the world of transhumanism. But for now, we'll catch you later on. Thank you so much for your time.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Fantastic, Chris.