Transumanar

David Pearce in Second Life on Utopian Neuroscience, March 23

David Pearce, co-founder of the WTA and creator of HedWeb (The Hedonistic Imperative), gave a talk and a Q/A session in Second Life yesterday March 23, 10am SLT, on Utopian Neuroscience. A summary of David’s talk is on his website Superhappiness.

David promotes nothing less than the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. He argues that the abolition of suffering can be accomplished through Paradise Engineering (The Hedonistic Imperative). David will try to distinguish between the Abolitionist Project -i.e. getting rid of suffering, from a much more controversial claim: “I predict that our superintelligent descendants will be animated by gradients of bliss orders of magnitude richer than anything physiologically accessible today”.

About 35 transhumanists attended the presentation and asked many question on utopian neuroscience, the meaning of happiness, the place of superhappiness among transhumanist goals, existing and available ways to enhance mood and happiness, future developments, and transhumanism in general. There was no time to answer all questions but Dave promised to show up at one of the next SL-Transhumanists office hours to discuss more.

Wikipedia: “David Pearce is a British philosopher and negative utilitarian. He promotes the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. His book-length internet manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative[1] details how he believes the abolition of suffering can be accomplished through “paradise engineering”. A transhumanist vegan, Pearce also calls for the elimination of cruelty to animals. Among his websites, there are many devoted to the plight of animals”.

Video clip of parts of Dave’s talk and Q/A

The next speaker will be Lincoln Cannon of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, on March 30. Starting from this next event we wish to record the full audio of presentations and Q/A sessions and making them available on the web and in SL as mp3 audio podcasts, please get in touch with us if you wish to help.

SL-Transhumanists @ Extropia Core

Posted by on 03/24 at 07:34 AM