Modern Wisdom - #076 - David Pearce - Transhumanism; How Biotechnology Can Eradicate Suffering

Episode Date: May 30, 2019

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 - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 artifact 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 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 one or one of transhumanism. So without further ado, please welcome David Pearce. 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 the definition. Can you tell us what transhumanism is? 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 that says that biological robots, misgrow old and die, Reprobots 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 have 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 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 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 of transhumanists who would want to add a fourth super there. 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 super intelligence that a full spectrum of super intelligence wouldn't just have an off the scale IQ it would also have a superhuman capacity for perspective taking empathetic understanding so there in a nutshell fantastic it's no small task I think is one way to kind of summarize 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 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 short answer was yes. So 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. Yes, and this is it. I think a lot of people psychologically would switch off if one with to say, well look at grand children won't go old and die, but you will. There's something always rule 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 aspect to transhumanism that is focused on cryonics and even cryothanasia. What are those two terms for us please? Essentially, sorry, I should say, this is the idea that if you are suspended in optimal

conditions, that as long as irreversible information lost doesn't occur, it would be possible to reanimate you at some future date 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 bit, a big imponderable is whether that people who are frozen a long time, by about a 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 cryoth and aesio, rather than waiting until you're 95 and gaga, have yourself suspended where you are still in the prime of life. It hasn't been done yet, but 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 Adrian Chikovsky? I was asked to say it is now many, many years since I've read a novel. That is cool. So 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 a big vast galactic distances between different different star systems and stuff like that. And they jump

in and out of it like you'd get a shower. But it sounds like the technology for that 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 just a slogan, but yes, if you think of perhaps today's hedonic range as minus 10 to zero to plus 10 with minus 10 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 lets a stretch from plus 70 to plus 100. Now if that sounds too much like a science fiction, well, that may well be the case.

And much more morally urgent, I think, is focusing on the 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 like to say to maximize our 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 than we were on the African savannah, which is very counterintuitive, but yeah, the hedonic treadmill is designed to keep us discontented a lot of the time, essentially because 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 going to 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 you know everything from basic income to decent accommodation, healthcare and so far, all the kind of environmental stopgaps yes but if we're ever to get rid of the horrors of depression, anxiety disorders, these are actually all the nasty aspects of Darwinian life we We're going to have to

edit our genetic source code. And perhaps the first thing I think we should do is, you know, perspective, perspective parents at the moment. Does one have a genetic crap shoot and recall every child born today is a unique undested genetic experiment or does one try to load the genetic dice in favor of ones offspring by giving them a high hedonics at 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 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.

Yeah, I was listening to Jamie Metzel 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 Chris Burr 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 embryonic selection perhaps? Pre-implantation genetic screen. This isn't the same as actual genome editing, which a lot of people regard as more radical. It's simply choosing what Mother Nature has thrown up. But ultimately it's a false distinction. And yes, I think it's a good parallel yes, the most of history, yes, one just has to trust Mother Nature, God, fate, providence or what not. But, increasingly, it's going to be a matter of responsible parents, they're going to be a matter responsible parents are going to be choosing the genetic makeup the trays of their future offspring and the very nature of selection pressure is going to change too. Natural selection, sexual selection, 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 favour of life-based on

gradients of well-being. Well, that's obviously speculative. Yeah, 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 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 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 unnatural. Is this just another frontier, or is there actually something different

about the movement that we're going towards here? 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, inevitably there are a lot of people that kind of reflects eugenics, the third Reich race hygiene. Other people will say brave new world. And the other reason is that when we 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 show half digested memories of everything from you know kind of

Gatica or in the case of super intelligence Skynet, so Yeah, I mean as I said I I very much sympathize with anyone who is suspicious and who is pessimistic nonetheless if we are to get rid of the number less if we are to get rid of the horrific burden of suffering in the world. We're going to have to tackle it in its genetic source. Essentially, Adjean's designed us to be unhappy and discontented a lot of the time. And then, unless we actually do add it to our genetic source code, there is going to be obscene misery and suffering in the world indefinitely. Are you sometimes surprised that we manage to have lives of the

degree of happiness that we do given our genetic predisposition? Yes, at times. I mean, this is it. Nature seems to just sort have played around with the dials and that those sadly there are a very significant minority of people who endure 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 one is more likely to go out do things explore the world take risks and so on if one is more likely to go out, do things, explore the world, take risks and so on. If one is a happy extraverted

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 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 already in life as a sort of sentient malware, but this is very much the minority position. And yeah, one needn't be a Buddhist or a negative you to the terryan to believe that we should aim to prevent and minimize unnecessary suffering. And what seems quite counter intuitive is the idea that all suffering, all experience below hedonics zero is going to become technically optional. That's it. 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 functionally indispensable? And and as Silicon robots, machine intelligence, AI, progressively eclipses humans in ever more cognitive domains without the nasty raw fields of pain and suffering. I think we just have to face up to the fact that, yeah, suffering is just a ghastly implementation, detail of Darwinian life, and we ought to be switching to a more civilized signaling system instead. Yeah, it's this odd artifact that's come along for the ride, hasn't it?

So, I want to talk about the hedonistic imperative and the abolitionist project, both of which you're a big proponent of. Would you be able to explain to the listeners what those are please? Yeah, so 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, we'll need something snappy and catchy. I think your marketing is better on this one, David. I think the hedonistic imperative works better, yeah. I mean, it's not ideal because hedonism can make something vaguely shallow and immoral. I think woodstock, 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 gist. The abolitionist project really just eludes to getting rid of suffering in both human and non-human animals via biotechnology. How far one goes beyond this? Yeah, though personally I'm a negative future the Terrier and I think that overriding obligation is to get rid of suffering and then everything else is about us. I sing on the cake. Nonetheless, yes, I do foresee a civilisation where their darkest loads are richer than today's peak experiences. But that probably strikes most people as science

fiction. And that if anyone were more down to earth temperament, I would yes, stress more the issue of suffering you. I understand. So getting towards the rubber meeting the road, so to speak, 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 longer term, like the real far future? Well, a lot of futureology consists of extrapolation, which is dangerous. And sadly, although we are just beginning, you know, the first CRISPR about babies, if you think of the scandalousies, this Chinese researcher who did it allegedly without authorization.

From the currency. Yeah, well, well, I was thinking more of the state. We now know that not merely did the researcher able to make the kids protected against HIV that purely inadvertently it seems memory and intelligence may have been enhanced and genes involved in cognitive augmentation. I'm personally rather skeptical that this was a mere oversight. Yeah, well, yeah. So, I mean, that said, yes, we are starting to pinpoint specific genes and elic combinations involved in low mood pain sensitivity. And even today, 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 to polish pain altogether? Well, maybe one day it's going to be possible to do so with smart prostheses or literally gradients of bliss, but just for now, even 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 allials, 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 do the comparison who says that pain is just a We need to be done with care, for example, you know, would do people with extremely high pain thresholds not show perhaps a sufficient empathy for the plight of others. That's the kind of thing to consider, but none of those other things being being equal, wants to give kids high pain threshold. The other tray I think one would wish to focus on is a hedonic set point. A hedonic set point 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 a 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 children do have this? Hedonic, high hedonic set point, or today's genetic crapshoot, and I think the genetic crapshoot is unethical. Of course as well as kids understand a very most of us want to feel better ourselves. Yes, of course, designer drugs, mood brightness, new, new tropics. There are a number of possible interventions there, but at the risk of sounding very boring and conservative, given the degree of our ignorance,

still I believe it will not have anyone emails me to what pills do you recommend? Yeah, far better to initially at least focus on this trinity of good sleep discipline, optimal aerobic exercise and diet, good nutrition. That sounds rather boring, but so few people really get these optimal. But obviously there are pharmacological interventions. Two. Yeah, a couple of points there. Firstly, 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 an atropics 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 to-do list, for instance. And it's the equivalent of taking steroids having never been to the gym for us that you're going a lot faster in the wrong direction. Yes, and all too many of today's drugs, rather than cheating the hedonic treadmill, actually, kicky-thin to gear with the vengeance. So yes, I'm actually, though I write about and discuss different mood brightness, drugs have well-known pitfalls.

I mean, one of the biggest pitfalls, unfortunately, is that the neurotransmittersystem 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 very well-known Pitfall so it would be much better if we were designed genetically to have high

Hedonic set points rather than needing 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 walking around in this num state

of not knowing what's going on, is that not some downstream negatives? Oh, indeed. I mean, this is, yeah, people born with congenital insensitivity to pain need to lead a cotton wool existence. I mean, 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 Joe Cameron. Now, this is Scottish lady responsible, sort of retired school teacher, vegan, came to interest to medical professionals because she waved away painkillers and the like because she just didn't feel she needed 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. they far and what's been christened the far out gene which are responsible for an anemide, the breakdown of an anemide.

An anemide is literally etymologically bliss molecule and she has naturally high levels of an and a mind and she appears to have gone through life in a state of of of of mild euphoria but not a but a better I said a responsible pillar of the local community vegan, respire, a school teacher. And one obviously needs to be extremely wary of placing too much faith in individual case studies. But only another example I gave was of my transhumanist colleague, Anders Sandberg, who just,

well, acknowledged, 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? stimuli isn't one's absolute place on the plane or or pressure scale. It's some kind of hedonic gradient. And yeah, one might imagine that people who are just exceptionally happy will be less motivated to be avidaptively. But counterintuitively, this doesn't seem to be the case that other things being equal the more you love life, the more you're motivated to protect and preserve it, whereas it's depressive who get stuck in a rut, the experience learned helplessness,

behavioural despair, sometimes self-destructive behavior, but preserving information sensitivity, the distinction between being blissful and blissed out. Yeah, I think 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 100xMDMA sensations, but a little bit more sober and able to remember what's going on. 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. Yes, yes. It's a, 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, there's a poorling, sprawling welfare bureaucracy, but nonetheless, I mean, the basic can be relatively basic that I don't think about while I went off on a long, a spiel there. It's very easy to, you know, to sound off, setting the world to rights. But, yeah, on the whole, I don't tackle the social issues to the same degree. 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.

Yeah, I understand. I think you've got some fairly niche down stuff that you need to be working on as well. I think you can leave the politics to some other people. 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 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 ourselves to the internet? Oh, 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 go feet first in the binding problem my friend we're in at the deep end now. 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 peace on this? Nothing in the laws of physics has understood today if one assumes that basic understanding of the world, quantum field theory describes fields of incentions rather than incentions. If one makes that very modest assumption, nothing in today's physics and chemistry forbids you and I from talking to each other now and we are both being peace on this.

So that's the question. What's a peace on this? Oh, sorry, philosophical zombies. Oh, okay, yes. 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 piece on, be the interesting question, is why aren't we piece on biz? 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-experential zombies? And the population, I mean, is an example.

I mean, here is, you know, the population of United States, let's say, three, so what's the population of the United States? Not to show, give me one second and I will tell you. It's a population. It is 327.2 million. 312, yeah. Now, simply the fact that one has 327 million skull-bound minds. However, they, into communicates, 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 subject of experience, but that kind of strong emergence would be some kind of spooky. It's a difficult reconcile with monistic physicalism. But the question is, why are our brains any different? After all, you and me, we are 86 billion membrane bound nerve cells. Even if you think that individual nerve cells may be support rudimentary consciousness, rudimentary experience,

why aren't we just micro-experential zombies, just patterns of mind dust? And so, yeah, that is the binding problem. And, yeah, here I am very much out on a limb. I don't think phenomenal binding is a classical phenomenon. Contamined, there are powerful arguments against this. But less controversially, today's classical digital computers are not subjects of experience 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. So it's not a case of, I think Samhary's talks about it being that with processing power consciousness comes along for the ride. Well, I suppose a lot of researchers, sort of a ride 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 kind of computational level of abstraction 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 ourselves, yes, into digital computers, but I stress this is obviously a controversial topic. You mentioned, yeah, Nick's book on super intelligence. Very very crudely there are a amongst transhumanists. There are three quite different conceptions of super intelligence. Fascinating, tell us about it. Okay, there is one conception of super intelligence and this is what I personally subscribe to that essentially post human super intelligence will be us that recursively self-improving biological robots are going to edit their own source code and bootstrap our way to full spectrum super intelligence

critical and critically with the aid of narrow AI, that essentially all the kind of clever machine, all the stuff one reads about, essentially we're going to be incorporating it within ourselves, neurochip smart processes. And just as, I could be Casper of today with a neurochip, okay, that cheating, but number that's still one. Likewise, either is good, so this kind of intimate neuroface, but I mean yeah, I don't think digital computers ever going to become conscious per se. Okay, that's one

computers ever going to become conscious per se. Okay, that's one, that's one conception of super intelligence, super intelligence as our ultimately biological descendants, trans humans and post humans. Then there is another conception of super intelligence associated with Ray Kurtzweil that essentially sees us as completely merging with our machines, possibly involving guests to mind uploading, that any distinction between humans and our machines will become completely meaningless. That's the second conception. But there is a third conception of post-Tuban superintelligence. Originally I came up with by I.J. Goodmap edition in the 1960s,

developed by Eliyza Yukowsky and his colleagues at Meary and put in its most magisterial form by Nick in his book Super Intelligence, uh, which is essentially, uh, these combination, I stress the combination of Moore's law, I.E. exponential increase in computer processing power together with recursively self-improving software based AI. 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 sentience friendly, human friendly. It's values may be perhaps completely orthogonal. So I'm glossing over all manner of complications here, but if someone does start talking about super intelligence, it's worth probing what they mean. I mean, I, for instance,

think that a full spectrum superintelligence will follow such things as exploring radically altered state spaces of So, yeah. Yeah, I understand. That's interesting to hear different stances or different viewpoints on the future superintelligence movement, so to speak. Certainly, Navale, who is a 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 simulacrums of human intelligence, but in an incredibly narrow domain and the domain is getting increasingly complex but not actually wider and he talks about the fact that any progress in general artificial intelligence kind of hasn't really been very many developments and that kind of lends credence towards what you are 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 add on the functions that we need? Yes, I mean, there's always a risk. When, well, essentially, when one is talking about super intelligence, in practice, one ends up just it obliquely expressing one's own limitations. So I can't step outside myself and really, obviously, tell you what will be the nature of full spectrum superintelligence. I would just, shall we say, degree of caution before assuming that AI is somehow going to wake up. I understand. So one of the questions that Joe Roganass, Jamie Metzel, 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 poetically beautiful way for us to transcend our own genetics? Hi, yeah, so this is back to natural 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 trying, trying to improve ourselves, but certainly not many people think, well, I've had enough, I've had enough money or I've had enough reproductive opportunities and so on.

Other things being equal, wanting more is fitness enhancing. So yes, yes. 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? I probably could, but just not off my head like that. It would also be in videos too. Yes, obviously, I would love to be able to do so. I mean, as yet, no, shall we say, yet? No, shall we say billionaire or corporate colossus has approached me with funding, but yes, it's in the post, David, I promise you, it's in the post, mate. I think it will be. So in terms of risks, other things that are at the forefront of your

thinking that you're concerned 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 towards the hedonistic imperative? 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 factory farms and slaughterhouses, are as sentient as pre-linguistic toddlers. Is that correct? 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. So short of radical skepticism or solipsism, yes, I am as confident that a pig is as ancient as I am that you're as ancient. 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 just to get factory farms and slaughterhouses shutting out lord now moral argument clearly plays a role but

I'm quite cynical about human nature. I think we're going to need to develop hasten the development and commercialization of InvitroMeat, Meet Substitutes. It's not a distinctively transhumanist technology InvitroMeat., 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, there's absolutely moral obligation

to get factory farms, slaughterhouses, shots that I think heaven knows how we'll explain 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 be serious about trying to build a happy biosphere 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 future.

That degree of perspective I think is something that not a lot of people are used to doing. And it's obvious that when you do look at it in black and white, you are correct that you're breeding animals to suffer purely for your own enjoyment to eat. It's a difficult justification to make. Yeah, I mean, personally, it's completely ethically independent. Well, I mean, I should add that, you know, by an accident of birth, I've never even tasted it, tasted meat. So it's not, I mean, as I said, it's not as though I'm trying to parade my moral superiority, but if one hasn't got this, this, this source of bias. Yeah, seeing what we are doing, you know, on reads some, let's say some horrific case of child abuse in the

papers and sort of viscerally is feeling good, this terrible abuse ought to be locked up for life. But then you, yeah, you see across the table someone tucking into a bacon sandwich. It's, yeah, but yeah, if I pass the, know the meat counter and the supermarket, I think of Auschwitz and I think of child abuse and yeah, I mean, this is it. When people have actually shown one of these videos about what goes on in factory farms and store to houses, some people seem genuinely, genuinely, sort of shocked,, yeah, you know, far worse things go on off camera. I mean, it's, yeah, that's, yeah, it's, it's, it's, yeah, it really is, uh, uh, unspeakable. Yeah. 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 an interesting discussion and I'd quite like to find out some more about transhumanism and the transhumanist movement. Ooh, heavens. Well, I have put on the spot again, David. You're going to have to put your money where your mouth is. I'm not letting you slide, side of this one like the government advisors thing. In spite of my low testosterone, I'm going to say back in 1995, when the web was young, I patch it was 1996, I set up a mother load website headweb.com, hudwb.com and though a lot of the material there is they did certainly the style nonetheless everything from a quarreurs about transhumanism to the core of the manifesto together with links to other transhumanist resources and yeah if what if what I've been talking to you about, does strike a chord.

Yeah, there are plenty of hot links there. But Chris, yeah, very much appreciated. It's been great chatting. It's been fantastic. Headweb.com will be linked in the show notes below as well as some of the resources which we've been going through today. David, I really found today fascinating. Hopefully, within the next few years, we might be coming back on to discuss some exciting new developments in the world of transhumanism. But for now, we'll catch you later on. Thank you so much for your time. Fantastic, Chris.