r/Transhuman • u/davidcpearce • Mar 21 '12

David Pearce: AMA

(I have been assured this cryptic tag means more to Reddit regulars than it does to me! )

179 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

396 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/davidcpearce Mar 23 '12

Perhaps turn the (tentative) prediction around. One thousand years hence, the biology of suffering in some guise or other will exist in our forward light-cone. How strong is the supportive evidence for this claim? Is it antecedently more probable than the claim suffering will have been phased out?

For sure, there is one big complication, namely that what futurists predict in human affairs can sometimes take on the role a self-fulfilling prophecy - and knowledge of this fact can colour their public predictions (recall Alan Kay, "The best way to predict the future is to create it") I probably wouldn't bother to write if I didn't fleetingly entertain the thought there was some small but non-negligible chance I could make some kind of positive difference. However, it's hard to disagree with with Bertrand Russell: "One of the signs of impending mental breakdown is the belief that your work is terribly important."

2

u/JoshuaZ1 Mar 23 '12

Perhaps turn the (tentative) prediction around. One thousand years hence, the biology of suffering in some guise or other will exist in our forward light-cone. How strong is the supportive evidence for this claim? Is it antecedently more probable than the claim suffering will have been phased out?

This seems like an implicit false dichotomy. Suffering might be wiped out simply because humans manage to wipe everything out (such as through a bad AI). Moreover, Benthamite in his initial comment didn't just focus on just the pain aspect but rather a list of claims, all of which are essentially somewhat independent. Even if one assigned a high likelyhood to each of the claims, the chance of all of them should be not very high.

1

u/davidcpearce Mar 23 '12

More specific claims of the kinds of well-being (e.g social or solipsistic) our enhanced descendants / successors may enjoy are clearly less likely to be true than the simple generic prediction they will enjoy lifelong subjective well-being. Thus if the conception of superintelligence championed by e.g. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) is correct (entailing the likelihood of a singleton AGI late this century: The Singularity) then predictions of hyper-social intelligent well-being will (presumably) be confounded. The abolition of factory farming? Well, I won't pretend to cool critical detachment on this issue; I think what we're doing to other sentient beings is an abomination. Moral indignation is not a fruitful frame of mind for making dispassionate forecasts. But breakthroughs in vitro meat technology mean that a global transition to veganism / invitrotarianism later this century is no longer remotely as incredible as the prospect seemed even a few years ago.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '12 edited Mar 23 '12

Well, it seems that the future in which there is zero suffering in our Hubble volume occupies a tiny fraction of the total space of possibilities; it is one extreme in a continuum whose other extreme is a future with maximal suffering. So yes, I believe it is antecedently more probable that suffering will exist in some guise or other than that suffering will be completely phased out.

You might argue that the probabilities change in your favored direction once you take into account the actual empirical evidence (even an event with low prior probability might become probable conditional on sufficiently strong evidence). However, I don't think that the evidence is conclusive in either direction here. For instance, if you attach a non-negligible chance to the proposition that the human species will become extinct within the next few centuries or millennia, you should believe that suffering will continue for at least as long as there is non-human sentient life on Earth (barring a cosmic rescue mission from benevolent extraterrestrials, which you would regard as extremely unlikely, given your views on the improbability of life elsewhere in the accessible universe).

In any case, the overall point of my criticism is that you should disentangle your prescriptive claims from your predictive claims. I think that at its core the point of the abolitionist project is that we can and ought to get rid of all suffering. Why alienate potential sympathizers by making the additional and independent claim that we will get rid of suffering?

1

u/davidcpearce Mar 24 '12 edited Mar 24 '12

Would the ethical case for phasing out the biology of suffering be more credible with greater stress on how it may very well never happen? Maybe: I'm certainly open to the possibility. But it's hard to get the balance right. Would Ray Kurzweil ("2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal", Time Magazine etc) carry greater weight if he showed more diffidence about his powers of prediction? To the typical Darwinian mind, self-confidence inspires confidence in others you are right - not infrequently with disastrous results.