Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering? by David Pearce

I went to Quaker meeting as a small boy but God never deigned to talk to me. In short, I came from an ethically serious, religious-minded family. They had three children, of whom I’m the eldest. After an affair with a rationalist, she met my father on the rebound. Young ladies who received male visitors were supposed to put their beds outside their rooms to discourage moral turpitude. My mother took her degree at Cambridge after the War. Their daughter, my mother, belonged to the Order of the Cross, a small mystical Christian offshoot who worship God the Father-Mother. Their son, my pacifist vegan uncle, went to prison rather than serve in the armed forces or do war-related work. My grandparents took in members of the Kindertransport before WW2. She converted to vegetarianism with my grandmother rather than sacrifice another family rabbit for the pot: life up north was hard.

My great-grandmother was in the habit of singing the Internationale outside Strangeways in support of imprisoned “conshies” in WW1. My maternal grandparents and great-grandparents came from the slums of Manchester. Their only child, my father, was a Quaker. My paternal grandmother was an Anthroposophist – she converted from Zoroastrianism in 1930. My parents, all four grandparents, and three of my eight great-grandparents were vegetarian. I grew up in the village of Burpham, near Guildford in Surrey. So, where did you grow up? What was your family like?

In this interview independent philosopher David Pearce talks about his grandparents who took in refugees from Kindertransport, lacking a natural spiritual sense, The Selfish Gene, solipsism, getting a scholarship to study Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford, the spectre of Wittgenstein, dropping out, MDMA, physicalism, PiHKLA, panpsychism, sugar-free Red Bull, self-replicating nano-bots, quantum mechanics, The Hedonistic Imperative, Web 3.0, civilising the biosphere, Nick Bostrom, designer babies, civilization and the status-quo bias, Dan Dennett, mind melding, Peter Singer, Turing machines and utility functions, David Chalmers, the identity of Satoshi, the Gettier problem, the Library of Babel, neurodiversity, longtermism, National Socialism, Greta Thunberg, Candide, The Matrix, Blackadder, heroin, and his last meal…

Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering? by David Pearce