David Pearce

Let's use biotechnology to abolish suffering throughout the living world:

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

My 2026 to date:
https://t.co/fkL4R4QkmM
Just training data for zombie AI?

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@InformationBot0 @PhysInHistory Consciousness in all its guises mystifies me. But not the Hard Problem, which strikes me as a byproduct of bad metaphysics and a false direct realist theory of perception.

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@Rahatirtaza Intuitively, a blissful biosphere is utopian fantasy. Or maybe a pain-free world will happen one day, but this century it's just a pipedream. I still stick to my original timescale of centuries. But the transformer revolution in AI blows my mind.

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

Will the whole of Darwinian life best be forgotten like a bad dream?
https://t.co/gc9ARZvWyf

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

Indeed. Therefore, the creation of information ex nihilo is logically impossible. So https://t.co/EP419OA8HH
("Hence, the existence of the perfect complex sphere of Hilbert space requires no information input, rendering its ontological existence logically trivial.")

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@aderbrah @RokoMijic I’m often torn between the ethically desirable and the politically feasible.

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@Adumbrater @RichardDawkins If some kind of dualism is true, then you may be right.
But from a more scientifically orthodox perspective, see e.g.
https://t.co/WplZgictQr

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@Azo7ooo Well, I hope the divine light guides us forward to germline reform and a blissful biosphere.

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@Azo7ooo The more I understand of reality, the more I wish I didn't. But greater knowledge is the only route to lifelong bliss and invincible ignorance.

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

You can see why I’ve been seduced: three naively disparate mysteries - i.e. the binding problem, the problem of definite outcomes, and the mystery of existence itself - and a single principle that explains all three.
But if interferometry fails to reveal a perfect structural match, then the whole theoretical edifice falls apart.

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@InformationBot0 @PhysInHistory I hope AI can come up with an easier way experimentally to (dis)confirm our conjectures.

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@InformationBot0 @PhysInHistory Reality has only one ontological level; and it’s quantum.

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@Adumbrater @RichardDawkins Souls belong to speculative metaphysics - unless Descartes was right about the pineal gland.
But gender identity has a neurological signature, just like sexual orientation.

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@TheEconomist "Contagious"?
Pain-ridden Darwinian malware continues to proliferate.
No one should feel obliged to bring more suffering into the world.
But the "contagion" is ineradicable.
The best we can hope for is to mitigate its severity via germline editing:
https://t.co/46MnbvcSFx

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

Empiricism differs from the empirical method. But here we plunge straight into philosophy, which Hawking famously scorned. Qualia-centric and world-simulationist accounts of our minds differ fundamentally from perceptual direct realism. Many scientists are implicitly direct realists. They conduct experiments and make "observations". Yet such "observations" give rise to mysteries like the alleged "collapse of the wavefunction" and the measurement problem that bedevils the foundations of quantum mechanics. I'd argue that the feature-bound experience of a determinate experimental outcome - say, a live cat - exemplifies the superposition principle rather than its breakdown. A perceptual direct realist (like Schrödinger himself) would disagree.
But we're already philosophising - albeit (I hope) doing scientifically informed philosophy.

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@InformationBot0 @PhysInHistory Orch OR is new physics.
I wasn’t invoking any new physics, just the unitary Schrödinger dynamics.
Orch OR involves a “frame rate” of maybe 40 per second.
A “Schrödinger’s neurons” conjecture involves a “frame rate” of (at least) quadrillions per second.

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@InformationBot0 @PhysInHistory It’s not a question of credentials. No one thinks their ideas gain the recognition they deserve - including double Nobel laureates!

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@InformationBot0 @PhysInHistory Reality baffles me! Sorry.
But see Grok: https://t.co/SOM8opzZRs

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@InformationBot0 @PhysInHistory You could well be right!
But if we assume that the intrinsic nature of the world's fundamental quantum fields is non-experiential, then we face Levine's "explanatory gap" and the Hard Problem of materialist metaphysics.

[David Pearce @webmasterdave]

@InformationBot0 @IAI_TV Quite so.
That's why an increasing number of philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists lake some version of the intrinsic nature argument seriously.