Featured Thought Merchant: David Pearce
". . . David Pearce promotes the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. He argues that the abolition of suffering can be accomplished through paradise engineering (The Hedonistic Imperative
From Utopian Neuroscience:
I predict that superintelligent posthumans will be animated by gradients of bliss that are literally billions of times richer than anything biologically accessible today; but whether or not such civilisations exist beyond extremely low density branches of the universal wave function is pure conjecture. Instead, I want to raise ten objections to the indefinite amplification of well-being - and sketch out ten possible replies.
The quantum-mechanical wave-function of the Universe, the allegedly exhaustive formal description of the world, encodes how everything that physically can occur/exist does occur/exist with some density or other. Taken literally, this increasingly popular and deceptively "anything-goes"-sounding interpretation of the quantum formalism actually rules out all of the world's traditional cosmologies. This is because of their varying degrees of disguised internal inconsistency. At least to my negative utilitarian mind, [Universal Quantum Mechanics’s] entailment of googolplexes of hell-branches means it is horrifically more prolific in others.
