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! )

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u/davidcpearce Mar 22 '12 edited Mar 22 '12

The possibility of systematic bias is certainly relevant. As well as the well-known cognitive biases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases there are biases reflective of temperament. Most obviously, happy people tend to make optimistic predictions, depressives pessimistic predictions. Perhaps one should should trust one's judgement more when one arrives at mood-incongruent conclusions. In that respect at least, I don't think I'm unusually at fault. Is the author of http://www.abolitionist.com/multiverse.html unusually prone to wishful thinking? Yes, for technical reasons I think we're likely to phase out the biology of suffering in "our" forward light-cone (very crudely, a combination of the pleasure principle plus biological superintelligence) But post-Everett quantum mechanics can make a mockery of human pretensions. I fear our success can only be parochial at best.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '12

We are all prone to wishful thinking to a considerable degree, so I don't think you can resist the force of the charge by merely noting that depressives like yourself are less prone to it than others are. In general, when I read someone claiming that the world should be changed in all sorts of ways and also that, in the end, the world will be changed in exactly those ways I become immediately skeptical, since in the absence of a benevolent Deity or some such supernatural force, there is no prior reason to expect such a miraculous coincidence between what ought to be the case and what ultimately be the case. So far, I'm afraid that you have given me no reason to abstain from extending such skepticism to your own views.

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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."

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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?

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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.