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

Chris introduces David Pearce as a major figure in transhumanism and frames the episode around a claim that runs through the whole conversation: suffering of any kind is treated as an artifact useful to our ancestors but something to be transcended as soon as possible. The framing is deliberately strong — the interview opens by promising that humanity not only should but must move toward what Pearce calls the hedonic imperative — and the rest of the episode is largely an attempt to make that claim sound less like science fiction.

Pearce declines to define transhumanism by doctrine. He notes there are no sacred texts, and offers instead what he calls the three supers: superintelligence, super longevity and super happiness. Superintelligence is the possibility of radically amplifying both human and machine intelligence, with several competing conceptions of what post-human superintelligence would be. He is careful to flag that plurality rather than assert a single roadmap.

Super longevity rests on a negative claim: there is no immutable law of nature requiring biological organisms to age and die, and repairable machines can in principle be repaired indefinitely. Pearce adds cryonics and even cryothanasia as a backstop for listeners who suspect they will not live to see the payoff — an unusually candid admission that the timeline matters morally, not just rhetorically.

Super happiness, or super well-being, is the strand Pearce says he focuses on most. The proposal is to replace the biology of pain, misery and suffering with a life built entirely on gradients of intelligent well-being — first in humans, and in the long run throughout the animal kingdom. He treats the other two supers as enablers of this one rather than as ends in themselves.

Asked about a possible fourth super, Pearce mentions super empathy but argues it is already contained in any sufficiently rich conception of superintelligence: a full-spectrum superintelligence would not merely have an off-the-scale IQ, it would also have a superhuman capacity for perspective-taking and empathetic understanding. This is a substantive move — it lets him claim that the empathy objection to transhumanism is answered by definition rather than by argument, which a critic could reasonably contest.

The cryonics discussion supplies the episode's main technical caveat. Pearce describes suspension in optimal conditions, where as long as irreversible information loss does not occur it would be possible to reanimate a person once a cure for whatever killed them exists. He immediately concedes the hard part: destroying information is technically very difficult, and some physicists would call it impossible, but the real imponderable is whether people frozen hours after nominal death can actually be revived, since deterioration may be too advanced in practice. He presents cryothanasia — suspending yourself in the prime of life rather than waiting until you are, in his phrase, 95 and gaga — as one possible option that has not been done.