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

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
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 it's 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 101 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.

**David Pearce** (1:38)
Hi, Cris, it's good to be with you.

**Chris Williamson** (1:41)
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?

**David Pearce** (2:00)
Well, there are no sacred texts, but very simplistically, I sometimes talk about the 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 posthuman 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 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 cryoethanasia because 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 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 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 super intelligence, that a full spectrum 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.

**Chris Williamson** (4:15)
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.

**David Pearce** (4:28)
Right. Yes, indeed. Yes.

**Chris Williamson** (4:29)
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, bring 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.

**David Pearce** (5:00)
Yes. This is it. I think a lot of people psychologically would switch off if one were to say, well, look, our grandchildren won't go 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 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 of transhumanism that is focused on cryonics and even cryothanasia.