“Why is there something rather than nothing?” goes the famous question. But David Pearce argues that the answer may be that there is precisely nothing. | bit.ly/3QDFZCx Because amplitudes in quantum mechanics are complex numbers, summing two amplitudes can yield zero.

Hello 2026 m.youtube.com/watch?v=9qoxWi…

Genome editing and AI can fix the problem of suffering at source. Transhuman life can be underpinned by gradients of sublime bliss. Indeed, the whole biosphere will soon be programmable. But overcoming status quo bias - genome reform is “unnatural” - is a daunting challenge.

Unlike a traditional Jain, I’ve never literally swept the ground before my feet with a broom to avoid unwittingly treading on an insect. But as a toddler, I used to rescue ants and worms. Will advanced superintelligences do the equivalent for humans? Or just retire us?

Roll on abolitionist AI:

“The world’s last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event a few centuries from now.” - David Pearce

A Wireheader's Apostasy If you really understand philosophy of mind it is clear that David Pearce's quest to end suffering is misguided at a logical level and also at an ethical level. Suffering is what negative feedback feels like from the inside. You can't end suffering without ending negative feedback. There can't be a clever technical fix for this, because the suffering is the negative feedback in the same way that a rainbow is sunlight reflecting off water droplets. You can't run a brain on "gradients of bliss" and have it feel blissful all the time but also produce the same distribution of outputs across all environments because feeling blissful occasionally serves a function and that function is not supposed to be on all the time - you become a wirehead. Feeling slightly less blissful will simply not motivate you to move your hand off a burning hot plate the way the burn qualia will. This is borne out empirically when you look at people born without pain receptors: they break all their bones, burn themselves, bite their own tongues off, and often die young. People who take drugs stop doing normal-person things, they turn into zombies who just seek the drug and nothing else. Why? Because the drug is a massive, artificial superstimulus of all positive reward signals that your brain's reward architecture is not designed to handle. It drowns out the subtler reward signals you get from smelling a nice flower or having a social event with friends, so you stop doing those things. This is probably why homelessness and drug addiction go hand-in-hand - if you are homeless, it's hard to fix your life and get positive feedback from normal life stimuli, so you start taking drugs to feel something. But once you are on drugs, the reward of the drug is so much bigger than the reward you could get from a normal life activity that it's not that compelling to give up drugs for those activities. It's also deeply immoral to try to turn off all negative feedback, because doing so will turn the world into a sh!thole. I would even include things like political correctness in this, as I think that is best thought of as a form of collective social wireheading. It is actually a really good thing that sick people suffer terribly. It is good that death is often painful and frightening. It is good that romantic rejection stings and makes us feel bad about ourselves. Why? Because if these negative events didn't come with negative qualia, we would not be motivated to avoid them. To be a true transhumanist you must not ask to suffer less, you must ask to suffer more accurately, to be punished more when you fail to live up to your goals and to feel a sweeter reward when you do. And to be a true humanist you must embrace suffering as a force for good in the right circumstances.

When you die and face The Architect: "Well, so did you figure out what your mission was?" "Uh?" "You were meant to reduce as much suffering as possible, didn't you see all the clues? I'm afraid I can't recommend your substrate code for the next level. You missed the point."

"I predict that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event." - David Pearce @webmasterdave

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"Take care of happiness and the problem of meaning takes care of itself" -@webmasterdave

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