David Pearce (philosopher) Quotes (28 quotes)

David Pearce (philosopher): 28 quotes 0 likes

Famous David Pearce (philosopher) Quotes

“No amount of happiness enjoyed by some organisms can notionally justify the indescribable horrors of Auschwitz. [...] Nor can the fun and games outweigh the sporadic frightfulness of pain and despair that occurs every second of every day. For there's nothing inherently wrong with non-sentience or [...] non-existence; whereas there is something frightfully and self-intimatingly wrong with suffering.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

2.7 Why Be Negative? https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon2.htm#negative*Negative-utilitarianism is only one particular denomination of a broad church to which the reader may well in any case not subscribe. Fortunately, the program can be defended on grounds that utilitarians of all stripes can agree on. So a defence will be mounted against critics of the theory and application of a utilitarian ethic in general. For in practice the most potent and effective means of curing unpleasantness is to ensure that a defining aspect of future states of mind is their permeation with the molecular chemistry of ecstasy: both genetically precoded and pharmacologically fine-tuned. Orthodox utilitarians will doubtless find the cornucopian abundance of bliss this strategy delivers is itself an extra source of moral value. Future generations of native ecstatics are unlikely to disagree.

2.7 Why Be Negative? https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon2.htm#negative
The Hedonistic Imperative https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875 (1995)

“My own sense of how to behave in a simulation has more traditional roots in the theory of perception. I’ve long believed that each of us lives in an egocentric simulation of the world run by the mind/brain. Since the zombies of each (waking) simulation have sentient real world counterparts, one should treat them as though they were real. Nonetheless as an angst-ridden teenager, my dawning acceptance of an inferential realist theory of perception made me feel as if I’d been condemned to solitary confinement for life. The sense of loneliness was indescribable. Naïve realism is better for one’s mental health.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" Origins and Theory of the World Transhumanist Association https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/bostrom20071226", Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 26 Dec. 2007

“Today, empathetic intelligence entails sharing the sorrows of other sentient beings. In our posthuman future, will empathy consist entirely in sharing each other’s joys?”

David Pearce (philosopher)

"What Is Empathetic Superintelligence?" https://www.abolitionist.com/transhumanism/index.htm presentation, 29 Jan. 2011

“[N]othing is too terrible to be true if it is consistent with the laws of nature [...].”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" The Pinprick Argument https://www.utilitarianism.com/pinprick-argument.html", BLTC Research, 2005

“The functional regions of the brain which subserve physical agony, the "pain centres", and the mainly limbic substrates of emotion, appear in phylogenetic terms to be remarkably constant in the vertebrate line. The neural pathways involving serotonin, the periaquaductal grey matter, bradykinin, dynorphin, ATP receptors, the major opioid families, substance P etc all existed long before hominids walked the earth. Not merely is the biochemistry of suffering disturbingly similar where not effectively type-identical across a wide spectrum of vertebrate (and even some invertebrate) species. It is at least possible that members of any species whose members have more pain cells exhibiting greater synaptic density than humans sometimes suffer more atrociously than we do, whatever their notional "intelligence."”

David Pearce (philosopher)

1.9 The Taste of Depravity https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon1.htm#taste
The Hedonistic Imperative https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875 (1995)

“Much more seriously, in those traditional eco-systems that we chose to retain, millions of non-human animals will continue periodically to starve, die horribly of thirst and disease, or even get eaten alive. This is commonly viewed as "natural" and hence basically OK. It would indeed be comforting to think that in some sense this ongoing animal holocaust doesn't matter too much. We often find it convenient to act as though the capacity to suffer were somehow inseparably bound up with linguistic ability or ratiocinative prowess. Yet there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case, and a great deal that it isn't.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

1.9 The Taste of Depravity https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon1.htm#taste
The Hedonistic Imperative https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875 (1995)

David Pearce (philosopher) Quotes about suffering

“A few centuries from now, if involuntary suffering still exists in the world, the explanation for its persistence won't be that we've run out of computational resources to phase out its biological signature, but rather that rational agents – for reasons unknown – will have chosen to preserve it.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" The Radical Plan to Phase out Earth's Predatory Species https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-radical-plan-to-eliminate-earths-predatory-species-1613342963", io9, 30 Jul. 2014

“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 today's peak experiences.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

Quoted in Ethics Matters (2012) by Peter and Charlotte Vardy, p. 114 ISBN 978-0334043911

“Suffering exists only because it was good for our genes. Conditionally-activated negative emotions were fitness-enhancing in the ancestral environment. In the current era, apologists for mental pain are serving as the innocent mouthpieces of the nasty bits of code which spawned them.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" The Good Drug Guide: The Responsible Parent's Guide to Healthy Mood-Boosters for All the Family https://www.hedweb.com/gooddrug.htm", BLTC Research, 2012

“Many city-dwellers have a romanticized conception of the living world. From another perspective, some "conservation biologists" favour e.g. "Pleistocene rewilding". By contrast, I think any truly compassionate person should be horrified at the terrible suffering of Nature "red in tooth and claw."”

David Pearce (philosopher)

Why not aim for a cruelty-free world instead?

" Interview with Pensata Animal https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/interviewoct2009.html", Pensata Animal, 25 Oct. 2009

“If we already lived in a cruelty-free world, the notion of re-introducing suffering, exploitation and creatures eating each other would seem not so much frightful as unimaginable – no more seriously conceivable than reverting to surgery without anaesthesia today.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" Reprogramming Predators https://www.hedweb.com/abolitionist-project/reprogramming-predators.html", BLTC Research, 2009

David Pearce (philosopher) Quotes

David Pearce (philosopher)

1.9 The Taste of Depravity https://www.hedweb.com/animutop.htm
The Hedonistic Imperative https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875 (1995)

Animals , Nature , Disease

“It is easy to romanticise, say, tigers or lions and cats. We admire their magnificent beauty, strength and agility. But we would regard their notional human counterparts as wanton psychopaths of the worst kind.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

1.10 On the Misguided Romanticisation of Feline Psychopaths https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon1.htm#feline
The Hedonistic Imperative https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875 (1995)

Cats , Beauty

“Confusion of sapience with sentience can be ethically catastrophic.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

Social Media Unsorted Postings 2016 https://www.hedweb.com/social-media/2016.html

“[T]he existence of the mind-independent environment beyond one's world-simulation is a theoretical inference, not an empirical observation.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

Postscript to review https://www.hedweb.com/lockwood.htm of Michael Lockwood's Mind, Brain and the Quantum, BLTC Research, Dec. 2016

World

“More controversially, technology can accelerate the transition from harming to helping free-living sentient beings: mankind's fitfully expanding "circle of compassion."”

David Pearce (philosopher)

The civilising process needn't be species-specific but instead extend to free-living dwellers in tomorrow's wildlife parks. Every cubic metre of the biosphere will soon be computationally accessible to surveillance, micro-management and control. Fertility regulation via immunocontraception can replace Darwinian ecosystems governed by starvation and predation. Any species of obligate carnivore we choose to preserve can be genetically and behaviourally tweaked into harmlessness. Asphyxiation, disembowelling, and agonies of being eaten alive can pass into the dustbin of history.

" High-tech Jainism https://www.hedweb.com/transhumanism/neojainism.html", The World Transformed, Jul. 2014

Help

“Humans already massively intervene in Nature, whether through habitat destruction, captive breeding programs for big cats, "rewilding", etc. So the question is not whether humans should "interfere", but rather what ethical principles should govern our interventions.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" The Antispeciesist Revolution https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/pearce20130726", Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 26 Jul. 2013

Cats , Nature , Question

“Some days will be sublime. Others will be merely wonderful. But critically, there will be one particular texture ("what it feels like") of consciousness that will be missing from our lives; and that will be the texture of nastiness.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" Feeling Groovy, Forever https://ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/sirius20120314", Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 14 Mar. 2012

Feeling

“From a young age, I've viewed the animals we abuse and kill as akin - functionally, intellectually and emotionally - to small children. Small children are vulnerable. Typically, they don't need "liberating."”

David Pearce (philosopher)

Infants and toddlers in particular need looking after. The problem - when I was a teenager - was that most of interventions I could think of to alleviate wild animal suffering might easily make things worse in the long run. Thus if we sought to rescue herbivores, then obligate carnivores (and their young) would starve. If we were to phase out carnivorous predators altogether, then there would a population explosion of "prey" species. Lots of herbivores would then starve too. The food chain seemed an inexorable fact of the world - a fact as immutable as, say, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Only after reading Eric Drexler's classic "Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology" did I gradually come to realize that there were technical solutions to all these problems - notably in vitro meat, immunocontraception, neurochips to modulate behaviour, nanobots to manage marine ecosystems, and ultimately rewriting the vertebrate genome.

" Interview with Pensata Animal https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/interviewoct2009.html", Pensata Animal, 25 Oct. 2009

Animals , Children , Age

“Our present-day neurochemical cocktail, we are asked to believe, is the medium through which alien realms of consciousness can be grasped and neutrally appraised from a third-person perspective. Empirical research suggests this optimism is at best naïve.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream https://www.hedweb.com/bokowfil.htm", BLTC Research (2009)

Personality , Optimism

“[H]ere we come to the nub of the issue: the alleged moral force of the term "natural."”

David Pearce (philosopher)

If any creature, by its very nature, causes terrible suffering, albeit unwittingly, is it morally wrong to change that nature? If a civilised human were to come to believe s/he had been committing acts that caused grievous pain for no good reason, then s/he would stop - and want other moral agents to prevent the recurrence of such behaviour. May we assume that the same would be true of a lion, if the lion were morally and cognitively "uplifted" so as to understand the ramifications of what (s)he was doing? Or a house cat tormenting a mouse? Or indeed a human sociopath?

" Reprogramming Predators https://www.hedweb.com/abolitionist-project/reprogramming-predators.html", BLTC Research, 2009

Nature

“When one is gripped by excruciating physical pain, one is always shocked at just how frightful it can be.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" The Abolitionist Project https://www.abolitionist.com/", Talks given at the FHI (Oxford University) and the Charity International Happiness Conference, 2007

Pain

“Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldn't it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code?”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" The Abolitionist Project https://www.abolitionist.com/", Talks given at the FHI (Oxford University) and the Charity International Happiness Conference, 2007

“A lot of people recoil from the word "drugs".”

David Pearce (philosopher)

which is understandable given today's 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 it's 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 smoker's brain finely calibrates its optimal level: there is no uncontrolled dose-escalation.

" The Abolitionist Project https://www.abolitionist.com/", Talks given at the FHI (Oxford University) and the Charity International Happiness Conference, 2007

People

“[U]nlike positive utilitarianism or so-called preference utilitarianism - neither of which can ever be wholly fulfilled - [negative utilitarianism] seems achievable in full.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" The Pinprick Argument https://www.utilitarianism.com/pinprick-argument.html", BLTC Research, 2005

“As the neurobiological basis of feeling and emotion is unravelled, and the human genome decoded and rewritten, it will become purely an issue of post-human decision whether negative modes of consciousness are generated in any form or texture whatsoever.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" The Hedonistic Imperative: Heaven on Earth https://www.paradise-engineering.com/heav2.htm", BLTC Research

Feeling , Decision

“By far my greatest dread in life […] is that (some variant of) the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

Dave's Diary https://www.hedweb.com/davdiary.htm, BLTC Research, May 1996

Life

“It's easy to support the status quo if one is not another of its victims.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

Reply to Meet the people who want to turn predators into herbivores https://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/meet-the-people-who-want-to-turn-predators-into-vegans.html#comment-2393432394, TreeHugger, 4 Dec. 2015

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