The APA blog is working with Cliff Sosis of What is it Like to Be a Philosopher? in publishing advance excerpts from Cliff’s long-form interviews with philosophers.
The following is an edited excerpt from the interview with David Pearce.
[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]
In this interview, independent philosopher David Pearce talks about his grandparents who took in refugees from Kindertransport, lacking a natural spiritual sense, The Selfish Gene, solipsism, getting a scholarship to study Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford, the spectre of Wittgenstein, dropping out, MDMA, physicalism, PiHKLA, panpsychism, sugar-free Red Bull, self-replicating nano-bots, quantum mechanics, The Hedonistic Imperative, Web 3.0, civilizing the biosphere, Nick Bostrom, designer babies, civilization and the status-quo bias, Dan Dennett, mind-melding, Peter Singer, Turing machines and utility functions, David Chalmers, the identity of Satoshi, the Gettier problem, the Library of Babel, neurodiversity, longtermism, National Socialism, Greta Thunberg, Candide, The Matrix, Blackadder, heroin, and his last meal…
In 1995, you self-published the Hedonistic Imperative. Tell me about the process of writing The Hedonistic Imperative. What was the plan and goal there?
I wrote The Hedonistic Imperative (HI) in around six weeks. I’d started taking the selective MAO-b inhibitor selegiline (2 x 5mg daily). After countless false dawns and missteps, I had finally banished the melancholia that stained my early youth. Writing involves taking oneself more seriously than the evidence warrants. No, I hadn’t developed messianic delusions; but I believed that HI was the future of sentience—a fairly bold proposal. Originally, my notional audience was analytic philosophers, a limited group. Halfway through writing the manifesto, I realized that the Web allowed one to communicate with anybody and everybody. So, I jazzed it up a bit. The text is still heavy in philosophical academese, and I wouldn’t write anything in the same clotted style today. I think abolitionist.com offers a clearer overview of the abolitionist project.
But the core message of HI, namely that the biology of pain and suffering can and should be replaced by the architecture of mind based entirely on gradients of well-being, is still my credo.
I was uncertain about the title, a nod to Kant. “HI” is not wholly inaccurate: I do indeed advocate (and prophesy) a “hedonistic” civilization underpinned by gradients of superhuman bliss. I would like to have called the manifesto “Our Moral Obligation to Use Biotechnology to Abolish Suffering throughout the Living World”; but alas this wouldn’t have the same ring. Also, back in 1995, the human genome hadn’t been decoded; cultured meat was science fiction; and the idea of synthetic gene drives to tackle inaccessible marine ecosystems was unknown—I was reduced to invoking self-replicating Drexlerian nanobots to rescue marine ecosystems. But the core idea, i.e. all future life in the cosmos can be based entirely on information-sensitive gradients of bliss, was now public.
Did you consider publishing it or try to publish it in a conventional venue?
Not really. Just as some prophets now suppose that Web3 will swallow up Web 1.0 and 2.0, I naively imagined traditional print publishing would soon fade into irrelevance.
Was the reception what you anticipated? Was it an immediate hit?
Compared to the reception accorded some modern “influencer” or TikTok star with a popular dance routine, I guess the impact was modest! But for the first time in my life, my views were noticed beyond my small circle of friends. A young postgrad called Nick Bostrom read HI and got in contact. We set up the World Transhumanist Association/Humanity Plus. Encouraged by the reception, I created a bunch more websites on HI themes. But my motherlode site hedweb.com still flies the flag for a biohappiness revolution—a revolutionary message conveyed in twentieth-century web design that is now quaint.
What did Bostrom say when he wrote you? How has your friendship evolved?
Nick read HI. He emailed a few worries and thoughtful objections. I did my best to respond. We met up and talked. One thing led to another. We set up the World Transhumanist Association (H+) and helped hammer out core transhumanist principles. Yet our preoccupations have always been different. I am primarily focused on phasing out the biology of suffering, with paradise engineering as the icing on the cake. Nick has long been preoccupied by existential risk—a discipline he helped found—and he was interested mainly in HI’s idea of a motivational architecture based entirely of gradients of bliss. I never managed to convert him to vegetarianism—though he supports cultured meat—and Nick thought the idea of fixing wild animal suffering was pretty crazy. But the biggest intellectual gulf between us has always been that Nick thinks of life as fundamentally good, whereas I think of reality itself as fundamentally evil. Nick is appalled by my button-pressing negative utilitarianism. Students of human irony may savor how a founder of existential risk research teamed up with a negative utilitarian who wouldn’t hesitate to initiate a vacuum phase transition—or a utilitronium shockwave—if he got the chance. Darwinian life has many ironies, some crueler than others. I trust that negative utilitarians can disappear into history along with the suffering that spawned them.
Biggest misunderstandings of your views?
Well, sometimes I hear that I want to “exterminate” predators—as distinct from herbivorise and reprogram them. Other critics latch on to my negative utilitarianism: yes, fancifully, I’d press a notional OFF button to bring the Darwinian horror show to an end; but advocating a biohappiness revolution surely makes clear that the way to fix the problem of suffering is a genome reform—not plotting Armageddon, engineering a vacuum phase transition, or even Benatarian “hard” anti-natalism, which falls victim to selection pressure.
Weakest but most popular objections?
You can’t have the sweet without the sour! The weakest objection is also still the most popular. Pleasure and pain are largely if not wholly relative, one is told. Pain and pleasure are as essential to each other as positive and negative electric charges. So, they must balance out.
If pressed, critics acknowledge the existence of tragic people who endure chronic pain and lifelong depression. The reverse syndrome, i.e. architecture of mind and motivation based entirely on information-sensitive gradients of well-being, isn’t obviously more conceptually radical than its opposite. But most people still balk at the possibility. Hence the importance of case studies of extreme hyperthymics. Today’s freakish hedonic outliers could one day be the norm.
Theoretically what, in your mind, are the biggest challenges to the views you outline in the Hedonistic Imperative?
I’m here going to set aside my worries derived from the interpretation of quantum mechanics and the fear we may be living in an Everettian multiverse. Let’s consider just traditional space-time cosmology and our forward light-cone. I think the biggest obstacle to HI is traditional sexual reproduction. If the reproductive revolution of “designer babies” that I anticipate doesn’t come to pass, then pain and suffering will persist indefinitely—and indeed proliferate. This pessimistic worry would be ill-founded if pain and depression were widely recognized as heritable genetic disorders. If (a predisposition to) hedonically sub-zero states were regarded as akin to cystic fibrosis or the sickle cell disease, i.e. genetic disorders to be cured, then their genomic signature would be phased out over the next 100-150 years, perhaps sooner. Sadly, this isn’t the case.
This interview has been edited for length. The full interview will be available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher?
You can get early access to the interview and help support the project here.
Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
