This is an interesting interview - Pearce has some good and important ideas, but I have serious reservations about the idea of eliminating "all forms of unpleasant experience." Then how would we learn and grow? The deepest most profound learning in life often comes from deep and often disturbing suffering. No suffering, no real growth in wisdom and compassion.
This comes from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology (IEET).
David Pearce - Interview: On the nature of consciousness and mind
David Pearce
BY Adam Ford
Posted: Mar 6, 2013
David Pearce is a British utilitarian philosopher. He believes and promotes the idea that there exists a strong ethical imperative for humans to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. His book-length internet manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, pharmacology, and neurosurgery could potentially converge to eliminate all forms of unpleasant experience among human and non-human animals, replacing suffering with gradients of well-being, a project he refers to as “paradise engineering”. A transhumanist and a vegan, Pearce believes that we (or our future posthuman descendants) have a responsibility not only to avoid cruelty to animals within human society but also to alleviate the suffering of animals in the wild.
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