Category: Transhumanism
Tags: AIconsciousnessgeneticslongevitytranshumanism
Entities: CRISPRDavid PearceDavid SinclairJamie MetzlNick Bostrom
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hi friends welcome back to the modern wisdom podcast my guest today is David Pierce we're going to be talking all things transhumanism that is not talking
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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 artifact that might have been useful to our ancestors but is
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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 computers
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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 yet I loved the
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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 [Music]
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ladies and gentlemen welcome back I am joined by David Pierce 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
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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 can you tell us what transhumanism is well there are no sacred texts but very simplistically I
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sometimes talk about the three Super's three super source of transhumanism super intelligence this is the idea that it's going to be possible to radically amplify our intelligence and machine
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intelligence and there are different ways one can go about this there are different conceptions of post-humans super intelligence 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 that says
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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
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cryonics or maybe even crazier bikal 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
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on most of all super happiness or self or super well-being this is the idea that it's going to be possible to replace the biology of pain and misery and suffering with life based entirely
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on gradients of intelligent well-being 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
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of transhumanists who would want to add a fourth super they don't agree what that might be after example what about super empathy but I would argue that this is embraced by any sufficiently rich
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conception of super intelligence that a full spectrum super intelligence wouldn't just have an off the scale IQ it would also have a super human capacity for perspective taking empathetic understanding so there in a
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nutshell 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 right yes indeed yes yes I had him on
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not long ago talking about the cutting edge longevity research that he's doing and during that I asked him do you think that human could live for a thousand years and his short answer was yes so it's it's interesting to hear that people from multiple fields very
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different fields from coming out from genetics and gene editing coming at it from this longevity research and then your side as well are all pointing in a similar direction yes I think a lot of
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people psychologically would switch off if one we're to say well look at grandchildren won't go old and die but you will I mean there's something always rule about telling people that science is going to find a cure for aging
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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
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technologies there is one strand of the super longevity aspect of transhumanism that is focused on cryonics and even crazier so what are those two terms for us but essentially sorry I should say
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this is the I this is the idea that if you are suspended in tamal conditions that as so long as irreversible information loss doesn't occur it would be possible to reanimate
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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
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nonetheless I would say a bit a big imponderable is whether that people who are frozen a long time by but a long time I mean hours after their nominal death whether it will be possible to reanimate them that in practice
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deterioration may be too far advanced but in principle at any rate one could have something like cryo and ACO rather than waiting until you're 95 and Gaga have yourself suspended where you are
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still carry say in there in the prime of life it hasn't been done yet but this is this this would be one possible option that sounds an awful lot like a book that I've just about finished have you read children of time by Adrienne Tchaikovsky I blush to say it is now
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many many years since I've read a novel that is 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
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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 jump in and out of it like you'd like you'd get a shower but it
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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 yes once again that's that's
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just a slogan but yes if you think of perhaps today's hedonic Rangers - ten - zero to +10 with -10 being the absolute pit of despair on barrel right
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parable 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
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that let's say stretched from + 72 + hundred now if that sounds too much like a science fiction well that may well be the the case and much more morally urgent I think is focusing on the
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sub-zero states that plague so many lives today that sadly natural selection didn't optimize us for being happy it optimized us for leaving more copies of our genes or evolutionary biologists
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like to say to maximize inclusive genetic fitness and yeah there's no real convincing scientific evidence that on average we are happier or sadder or more or less contented or discontented today
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than we were on the African savannah which is very counterintuitive but yeah the hedonic treadmill is designed he was discontented a lot of the time essentially because it's it's good it's
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good for our genes and if we are serious about getting rid of pain and suffering we're going to have to tackle its genetic biological roots I mean that may sound like crude genetic determinism in
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practice one is going to need a twin-track approach you know everything from basic income to decent accommodation health care and so forth all all the kind of environmental stopgaps yes but if we're ever to get rid of the horrors of depression anxiety
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disorders is actually all the nasty aspects of Darwinian life we're gonna have to edit genetic source code and perhaps the first thing I think we should do is you know prospect prospective parents at the
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moment does one have a genetic crapshoot and recall every child born today is a unique understood genetic experiment or it does one try to load the genetic dice in favor of ons offspring by giving them
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a high hedonic set point high pain threshold and trays 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
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kids I think the best one can do is is is urge them to yeah first of all consider pre-implantation genetic screening and soon CRISPR genome editing yeah I was listening to Jamie Metzl on
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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
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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 in as irresponsible in the same way as parents who don't
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vaccinate their children now that if you had the choice of choosing through IVF or whatever advanced version of that is this what was embryonic selection perhaps pre-implantation genetic screening this isn't the same as as actual genome editing which a lot of
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people regardless more more radical it's simply choosing what mother nature has has has thrown up but ultimately it's it's a false distinction and yes it I think it's a good parallel that yes the most of history yes one just has to add
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trust mother nature God fate Providence or whatnot but increasingly it's to be a matter responsible parents are going to be choosing the genetic makeup trays of their future offspring and the
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very nature of selection pressure is going to change to a 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
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to be selection pressure in favor of life based on gradients of well-being but that's obviously speculative 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
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about this selective birth it may create 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
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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
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had you have told people five thousand 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
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unnatural is this just another frontier or is is there actually something different about what the the movement that we're going towards here well this time it's different but then it always is any of your listeners who are
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thinking of all of the kind of the possible things that can go wrong I think it's it's it's it's a healthy suspicion that yeah there needs to be exhaustive risk/reward analysis you know the thinking of all the conceivable
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things that can that can go can go wrong I mean eligibly there are a lot of people this kind of reflex eugenics the Third Reich race hygiene other people will say brave new world another reason is that when we
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try to imagine the future there was 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
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memories of everything from you know kind of Gattaca or in the case of super intelligence Skynet so yeah I'm you know as I said I very much sympathize with anyone who is
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suspicious and who is pessimistic nonetheless if we are to get rid of the horrific burden of suffering in the world we're gonna have to tackle it in its genetic source essentially ad jeans
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designed us to be unhappy and discontented a lot of the time and then this we actually do edit and genetic source code there is going to be obscene misery and suffering in the world indefinitely I use sometimes surprised
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that we manage to have lives of the degree of happiness that we do given a genetic predisposition yes at times this is it nature seems to just sort of play
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around with the dials and that though sadly there are a very significant minority of people who enjoy kind of chronic misery pain depression equally there are life's temperamental optimists
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and even extreme genetic outliers who spend most of their lives yes extremely happy which is kind of existence proof essentially being temperamental II very
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happy it's a kind of high-risk high-reward 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 Loman low mood you're more likely
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to keep your head down it's kind of low risk low reward and that's very crude dichotomy yeah but yeah most people on balance love life I mean I might given
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my rather gloomy and depressive temperament think of Iranian life as sentient malware but this is very much the minority position and yeah one needn't be a Buddhist or a negative
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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
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zero is going to become technically optional that it sure suffering in one's life sometimes but only sometimes sometimes it can be instructive and valuable but the critical question to
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ask is is it functionally indispensable and as Silicon robots machine intelligence AI progressively eclipses humans in their ever more cognitive domains without the nasty roar feels of
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pain and suffering I think we just have to face up to the fact that you know that suffering is just a ghastly implementation detail of Darwinian life and we ought to be switching to a more civilized signalling system instead yeah
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it's this odd artifact 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
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yesiree 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 call it you know the moral imperative to use biotechnology to sound
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suffering throughout the living world but of course no one needs something snappy and catchy so I think your marketing is better on this one David I think I think works I mean it's not ideal because hedonism can make
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something vaguely shallow and a and a moral stock don't you yeah whereas I do see there is a desperate moral urgency to get getting rid of suffering but in a nutshell yeah it gives the it gives the
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gist the abolitionist project really just alludes to yeah getting rid of suffering in both human and non-human animals for Biotechnology how far one goes beyond this yeah though personally
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I'm a negative utilitarian I think that over riding obligation is to get rid of suffering and then everything else it's a bonus icing on the cake nonetheless yes I do foresee a civilization where they're
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their darkest those are richer than today's peak experiences but that probably strikes most people as science fiction and that anyone from all down-to-earth temperament I would yes a
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stress more the the issue of suffering you 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
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next steps from now and then where does that lead us to in the the longer term like the real far future well a lot of futurology consists of extrapolation which is dangerous and
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sadly though we are just beginning you know the first CRISPR babies if you think of a scandal earth is this Chinese research who did it allegedly without authorization of her well well I was
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thinking more of the the state we now know that not merely did yes don't really did the researcher a able to make the kids protected against HIV that purely inadvertently it seems memory and
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intelligence may have been enhanced no fiends involved in in cognitive augmentation I'm personally rather skeptical that this was a mere oversight in yes so I mean that said yes we are
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starting to pinpoint specific genes and allelic combinations involved in low mood pain sensitivity and even today if we are ethically serious it is possible
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to choose by 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 to polish pain
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altogether well maybe one day it's going to be possible to do so with smart prosthesis 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 SCN nine AG
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SC n9a is a pain modulating gene there's as dozens of different alleles different variations nonsense mutations no pasty to experience pain at all but other mutations high although pain sensitivity
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and by doing this essentially you can ensure that you know if you've ever met the kind of person today's outliers who do the comparison who says that pain it's just a useful signaling mechanism before we get rid of pain
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altogether be possible to kind of ratchet up pain thresholds we need to be done with care for example you know the woods do people with extremely high pain thresholds not show perhaps sufficient empathy for the plight of plight of
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others it's the kind of thing to consider but none of those other things being equal one wants to give kids high pain threshold the other tre I think one would wish to focus on is hedonic
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setpoint I don't accept point this is this approximate level of well-being or ill-being that most people tend to fluctuate around in the course for lifetime and some people have very high he don't accept point other people low
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hit on it 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 her with rather
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particular alleles associated with having a high hedonic set point and do we want to ensure that future our children do have this hedonic high he'd um except for today is genetic crapshoot
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and I think the genetic crapshoot is is unethical of course as well as as well as our kids understandably most of us want to feel better ourselves and I yes of course
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these designer drugs mood brighteners new nootropics there are a number of possible interventions there but at the risk of sounding very boring and conservative given that given the degree of our
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ignorance still I believe in a lot of anyone emails meter watts or pills do you recommend yeah briefer far better to initially at least focus on this Trinity of good sleep discipline optimal aerobic
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exercise and and and diet good nutrition that sounds rather boring but so few people really get these optimal but obviously there are pharmacological interventions
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- 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
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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 or they don't understand how to task manage they don't understand how to
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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 you're going a lot faster in the wrong direction yes and all too many of
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today's drugs rather than cheating the hedonic treadmill actually kicked into gear with it with a vengeance so yes I'm actually though I write about and discuss discuss different mood
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brighteners drugs have well known pitfalls I mean one of the biggest pitfalls unfortunately is that the neurotransmitter system most involve directly involved in hedonic tone whether one feels good or bad is the
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opioid system the mute receptor and opioids obviously have very well-known pitfalls so be much better if we were designed genetically to have high hedonic set points rather than needing
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to repair nature's deficiencies 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 etc etc if people are just
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walking around in this numb state of not knowing what's going on is that not they're not some downstream negatives Oh indeed this is yeah people born with congenital insensitivity to pain lead
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need to leader a cotton-wool existence I mean the wire 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
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threshold there was the case of Joe Cameron this this Scottish lady responsible retired schoolteacher vegan and I came to interested medical professionals because she waved away
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painkillers and the like because she just didn't feel she needed them after what Autry had extremely painful medical procedures he describes childbirth as a mere tickle someone with
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complete insensitivity it seems as though she just naturally has an extremely high pain threshold and genetic and and research suggested that she had mutations in two genes in particular they far and what's being
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christened the far out a gene which are responsible for an and alive the breakdown of an and amide and and amide is literally etymologically blissed
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molecule and she naturally high levels of an and amide and she peers to have gone through life in a state of of mild YouView euphoria but not
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but I but as I said I said that responsible pillar of the local community vegan respire a school teacher and one obviously needs to be extremely wary of
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placing too much faith in individual case case studies but only another example I gave is yeah my transhumanist colleague and the Sandberg who just acknowledge I do have a ridiculously
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high hedonic set point what is this it's back to your your original question what is critical to intelligent behavior to responding adaptively to to noxious stimuli isn't one's absolute place on
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the plane or pay 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 be a adaptively but counter
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intuitively 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 and present preserve it whereas it's depressives who get stuck in iraq the
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experience learned helplessness behavioral despair sometimes so self-destructive behavior but preserving in yeah information sensitivity there just distinction between being blissful
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and and blissed-out 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
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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 the universal basic income that when you take away people what
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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 bean bags and stuff yes yes sorry I mean in the case of universal
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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 it's a balling sprawling welfare bureaucracy but nonetheless I mean that
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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 easy it's very easy to you know to sound off setting the world to rights but yeah I'm
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the whole I don't tackle 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 yeah you've got you've got some some fairly niche down stuff that
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you need to be working on as well I think you can you can leave the politics to to some other people um so one of the things that I'm thinking about straight off the bat having read super intelligence by Nick Bostrom listeners of the show will know that I found the book both testing and very very
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fascinating rather than being selective with our genes 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
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ourselves to the Internet ooh difficult question because this brings us to the nature of consciousness and the binding problem let's jump into it David come on let's your feet first
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into the binding problem my friend we're in at the deep end now okay 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
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aren't we P zombies nothing in the laws of physics is understood today if one assumes that basic understanding of the world quantum field theory describes fields of in sentience rather than
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sentient if what makes that very modest assumption nothing in today's physics and chemistry forbids you and I be talking to each other now and we are both being piece on B's so as the question appears on oh sorry
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philosophical zombies this is 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 the sceptical question how do I know
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that you're not appease I'll be the interesting question is why aren't we be zombies how is it possible for consciousness to have the causal capacity to allow us to pose questions about its existence for instance so yeah
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that's in a nutshell the hard problem the binding problem which probably few 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
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zombies and the population amusing example I mean here is you know the population of United States let's say three head so yeah what's the population of the United States not too sure give
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me one second and I will tell you it's it is three hundred and twenty seven point two million three hundred and TRAI now simply the fact that one has 327 million skull bound mines however they
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intercommunicate nonetheless with no reason to think that the population of the united states is a mind a unitary bound mind or one can't be sure that the population of the USA isn't a unitary
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subjective experience but that kind of strong emergence would be some kind of spooky it's difficult to reconcile with monistic physicalism well the question is why are our brains any different
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after all you and me we are yeah 86 billion membrane bound nerve cells even if you think that individual nerve cells maybe kind of support rudimentary
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consciousness rudimentary experience why aren't we just micro experiential zombies just patterns of mine dust and so yeah that is the the binding problem and yeah Here I am very much out on a
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limb I don't think phenomenal binding is it's a classical phenomenon quantum mind there are powerful arguments against this but less controversial II today's classical digital computers are not
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subjects of experience and simply increasing speed of execution their complexity or even making the massively parallel there's no reason to think that
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sentience is somehow going to switch on so it's less it's it's not a case of I think some Harris talks about it being that with processing power consciousness comes along for the ride and well I mean yeah I suppose a lot of
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researchers sort of a variety researchers do assume that at some time in future our machines will become conscious but personally I think the idea that consciousness arises that some some kind of computational level of
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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 are I ever going to be uploading
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ourselves yes into digital computers blow stress this is obviously a controversial topic you you mentioned yeah Nick's book on super intelligence
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very very crudely there are a bunch transhumanists there there are three quite different conceptions of of super intelligence the fascinating tell us about them okay there is one conception of super intelligence and this is when I
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personally subscribe to that essentially post humans super intelligence will be us that recursively self-improving biological robots are going to edit their own source code and bootstrap our
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way to full spectrum super intelligence critic and critically with the aid of narrow AI that essentially all the all the kind of clever machine you know or all all the stuff one reads about essentially we're going to be
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incorporating it within ourselves neuro chip smart prosthesis and just as you know I could be Kasper off today with a neuro chip and cheating but number that's still one I still likewise there
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is so that this kind of intimate neuro face but I mean yeah yeah I I don't think [Laughter] digital creatures ever going to become conscious per se okay that's one there's one conception of super intelligent
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super intelligence as our ultimately our biological descendants transhumans and post humans then there is another conception of super intelligence associated with Ray Kurzweil that essentially yeah sees us as completely
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merging with our machines possibly involving yes to mind uploading that any distinction between humans now machines will become completely meaningless that's the second conception but there is a third conception of posthuman super
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intelligence originally I came up with by I J good mathematician in the 1960s developed by Eliezer you can't ski and his colleagues at Miri and and put in
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its most Magisterial form by Nick in his book super intelligence which is essentially sees a combination and it's just the combination of Moore's law ie exponential increase in computer
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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 posthuman super
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intelligence there's no particular reason to expect that AI artificial general intelligence will be will be sentient friendly human friendly may it's it's values may be perhaps
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completely orthogonal so I'm glossing over all manner of complications here but if someone does start talking about super intelligence it's it's worth probing what they mean I mean I I for
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instance think that a full spectrum super intelligence will follow such things as it 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
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spaces yeah yeah I I understand that's a it's interesting to hear different stances or different viewpoints on the future super intelligence movement so to
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speak certainly navarre 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
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general intelligence I think people look at stuff like alphago zero and these sort of programs which are simulacrum zuv human intelligence but in an incredibly narrow domain and the domain is getting increasingly complex but not
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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
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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 yes also risk
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well essentially when one is talking about super intelligence in practice one ends up justic obliquely expressing one's own limitations I can't step outside myself and really obviously tell
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you what will be the nature of full spectrum super intelligence I would just urge sherice a degree of caution before assuming that AI is somehow going to to wake up I understand so one of the
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questions that Joe Rogan asked Jamie Matz all the other day was why we have this insatiable to try and improve ourselves do you think that that's the way that were wired and and if that's the case isn't that quite a poetically beautiful way
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for us to transcend our own genetics hi yes so this is back to natural selection designed us to be discontented a lot of the time I wouldn't say all of us at
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least even most of us necessarily spend our try and 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
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things being equal wanting more is Fitness enhancing so so yes yes I understand completely so moving on one question that I really wanted to ask was if you had the
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opportunity to create a wish list of advisers 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 advisers for them and would you be able to tell us why you
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choose those people um I probably could but just not off my head like that it would also be invidious to I would love
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to be able to do so I mean as yet no shall we say billionaire or corporate Colossus as as approached me with a
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funding but yes it's it's in the post David I promise both mate I think it will be so in terms of risks other things that are at the forefront of your of your thinking that you're concerned
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about as we move forward with this are the 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
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towards the the hedonistic imperative yeah by risks and there are some people including some transhumanists who think of life is fundamentally good and we
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don't want to put it all at risk where is my conception of life today frankly is much bleaker that's the non-human animals in our factory farms some slaughterhouses are as sentient as pre-linguistic toddlers
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um what one if one is being more careful one has to say that a pig for example is demonstrably more sapience than pre-linguistic toddler one can't be certain that the pig is as sentient
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nonetheless the actual particular structures neurological structures genes neurotransmitters that mediate our most powerful experiences of panic of pain
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distress are nearly identical so short of radical skepticism or solipsism yes I I am as confident that a big is associate as I am that your your
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sentient and so yes given what I think posterity will recognize as you know crime against sentience of almost unimaginable proportions I think perhaps our most urgent priority right now is
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just to get factory farms and slaughterhouses shutting out Lourdes now moral argument clearly plays a role but I'm quite cynical about human nature I think we're going to need to develop
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hasten the development and commercialization of in-vitro meat meat meat substitutes it's not a distinctively transhumanist technology in vitro meat in vitro meat could be genetically engineered it's much more
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likely to be widely accepted if it's not but yeah essentially I I would see yeah we have this this absolute moral obligation to get factory farms slaughterhouses shut that I think heaven
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knows how will explain what we did to our to it to our grandchildren so yeah I mean though I can happily talk to you about all the wonderful transhumanist technologies and ideas for the future I
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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
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if we're systematically harming others to gratify our own appetites yeah it's 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
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future that degree of perspective I think is something that not a lot of people are are used to doing 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
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for your own enjoyment to eat it's it's a difficult to difficult justification to make yeah I mean personally I yeah it's completely ethically indefensible I mean actually I should add that you know
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by an accident of birth I've never even tasted tasty meat so it's not I mean as I said it's not that I'm trying to parade my moral superiority belief one hasn't got this there's this source of buyers yeah seeing what we are do you know on leads
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some let's say some horrific case of child abuse in the papers and some viscerally is feeling God's this terrible abuse ought to be locked up for to life but then you yet you see you know across the table someone tucking into a bacon sandwich it's yeah yeah if
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I passed the you know the meat counter and a supermarket I I think of a schvitz and I think of child abuse and people are actually own one of these videos about what goes on in factory farms and
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slaughterhouses some people seem genuinely genuinely shocked but yeah you know far worse things go on off-camera yeah it's it's yeah it really is unspeakable yeah fantastic
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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 I'd quite like to find out some more about transhumanism
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and the transhumanist movement oh heavens well I on the spot again Davis I'm not letting you slide sidle out of this one like the government advises things in spite of my low testosterone I ain't
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going to say back in 1995 when the web was young I've had she was nineteen ninety six I set up a mother lode website head web calm h GD w e be calm and though a lot of the material there
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is dated certainly the style nonetheless everything from quarrels about transhumanism to yeah the core of the manifesto together with links to other transhumanist resources and yeah if if
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what if what I've been talking to you about does strike a chord yeah there plenty of hot links there but Chris yeah very much appreciated it it's been great chatting if this
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fantastic head web.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 coming back on to discuss some exciting
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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 fantastic Chris [Music]
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you