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Pearce is primarily known as the author of The Hedonistic Imperative, a 1995 book-length manifesto in which he theorizes how to "eradicate suffering in all sentient life" through paradise engineering.[11] In Pearce's view, suffering is not necessary for humans and only exists because humanity evolved through methods that emphasized survival, rather than happiness.[12] He writes that mental suffering will someday be seen as a relic of the past, just as physical suffering during surgery was effectively eliminated with the advent of anesthesia.[13] In his work, Pearce outlines how drugs and technologies, including genetic engineering and nanotechnology, could enable the end of suffering in all sentient life.[14] In the short term, Pearce argues, well-being can be helped by designer drugs, especially since safer mood-brighteners are becoming more readily available.[15] In the long-term, however, suffering could be abolished by genetic engineering through biotechnology.[8] Transhumanism In 1998, Pearce co-founded Humanity+, the international transhumanism association, with fellow philosopher Nick Bostrom, now the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.[16] The association, then known as the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), is a nonprofit organization that advocates transhumanism — an international cultural and intellectual movement with an eventual goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.[17] Pearce's ideas have inspired a strain of transhumanism based on paradise engineering.[8] Pearce is vegan, and the increasing number of vegans and vegetarians in the transhumanism movement has been attributed to his influence.[18] BLTC Research Part of a series on Hedonism Thinkers[show] Schools of hedonism[show] Key concepts[show] Related articles[show] v t e Pearce runs a web-hosting company[14] and owns BLTC Research, a series of websites based in Kemptown, Brighton, UK, originally set up by Pearce in 1995 when he published The Hedonistic Imperative. According to the BLTC Research mission statement, the organization publishes online texts in support of paradise engineering and abolishing sentient suffering for future generations.[19][20][21] Essays and articles on the BLTC network of websites feature information on many areas of science, including pharmacology, biopsychiatry and quantum mechanics.[22][23] The websites promote the end of suffering and "high-tech anti-ageing,"[6] among other topics, and have been cited in books written on a variety of subjects, ranging from addiction to aging.[6][22][24][25][26] The BLTC websites also feature biographies and information about people throughout history, including European physician Arnaldus de Villa Nova, Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo and Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, which have also been published as sources on these individuals in a variety of books by authors including Dava Sobel.[25][27][28] Affiliations and appearances Pearce is co-editor of Singularity Hypotheses (Springer, 2012), holds a position on the advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation,[29] is a fellow with the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies,[30] and was, until 2012, a member of the editorial review board of Medical Hypotheses.[31] He has been a speaker at many conferences, including the Singularity Summit, and given talks at the University of Oxford, Lund University and Harvard University. His work has been covered by Vanity Fair,[32] The Economist,[33] H+ Magazine,[4] BBC Radio,[34] and The Daily Telegraph.[35] Quotes "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 world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event."[36] David Pearce is a British independent philosopher.[1][2] 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[3] 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".[4] A transhumanist and a vegan,[5] Pearce believes that we (or future evolutions of humans) have a responsibility not only to avoid cruelty to animals within human society but also to redesign the global ecosystem so that animals do not suffer in the wild.[6] Pearce co-founded Humanity+, then known as the World Transhumanist Association, and is a prominent figure in the transhumanism movement, inspiring a strain of transhumanism based on paradise engineering and ending suffering.[7][8][9] |
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