Quotes by David Pearce

A lot of people recoil from the word drugs - which is understandable given todays noxious street drugs and their uninspiring medical counterparts. Yet even academics and intellectuals in our society typically take the prototypical dumb drug, ethyl alcohol. If its socially acceptable to take a drug that makes you temporarily happy and stupid, then why not rationally design drugs to make people perpetually happier and smarter? Presumably, in order to limit abuse-potential, one would want any ideal pleasure drug to be akin - in one limited but important sense - to nicotine, where the smokers brain finely calibrates its optimal level: there is no uncontrolled dose-escalation.

Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldnt it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code?

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The worlds last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event.

I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than todays peak experiences.

Its not that there are no differences between human and non-human animals, any more than there are no differences between black people and white people, freeborn citizens and slaves, men and women, Jews and gentiles, gays or heterosexuals. The question is rather: are they morally relevant differences? This matters because morally catastrophic consequences can ensue when we latch on to a real but morally irrelevant difference between sentient beings.

“The necessity of the experimental method in scientific investigation of the third-person properties of matter and energy has been recognised since Galileo. The intellectual achievements of physical science, as traditionally conceived, are widely celebrated. By contrast, experimental investigation of the great majority of intrinsic, first-person properties of matter and energy is stigmatised and even criminalised. States of sentience as different as waking from dreaming consciousness are outlawed. Instead of Nobel laureates, research grants and lavish institutional funding, an empirically-driven exploration of the first-person properties of matter and energy plays out mainly within the scientific counterculture.”

“I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than todays peak experiences.”