Would you mind moving to the center? This row likes each other, 2nd row, tightly packed. Excellent. So our first speaker in the information session flown from England. I appreciate David Pearce and people who have flown 10k or more miles. I think you still use miles in the UK, right? And come and present. David Pearce is an author, and is the best information curators on facebook. I encourage you to friend him. People who have links who are repeated by other people. David, thank you very much for joining us. Let's give him a hand.
Thank you Alex. It's very good to be hear. Yes. My particular focus is on the use of biotechnology to abolish all forms of suffering throughput the world. The incentives are going to be animated by gradients of well-being, orders of magnitudes of richer. Article 7 is the well-being of all sentients. I am focused on that. I am not going to try to rattle through all of the key points here. Anyone who wants to, there's 200k words that I have written online. I am just going to say a few words and take any comments or criticisms or questions. So, anyone. Just a little thought experiment. Or a parable if you like. Imagine if we were to discover an alien civilization whose members were animated by gradients of intelligent bliss. Their hedonic treadmill has been re-calibrated so they don't enjoy uniform bliss, but uniform information sensitive gradients. How did this go about? Thanks to Aubrey, they imagined to get rid of aging. One of the side-effects of getting rid of aging was that they had to have a reproductive revolution. Perspective parents had to choose selectively and caredfully to determine what kind of offsprings they wanted to propduce. Hedonic tone. Average set point or well being of their average offspring. There was great selection pressure. The parents wanted their children to be more and more happy, in the most compassionate and intellignetn ways. Over time, with the mastery of the rewards circuitry, they shifted ratcheted things upwards. I want to ask people in effect, what exactly if anything do we think they are missing? Their hedonics are far behind their peak experiences. Maybe they have functional analogs of anxiety and so on. Their texture of experience is more rich. Out of curiousity, we're anthropologists, and we want to know what they eat. Instead of eating meat from lesser beings, from animals, they have total veganism. They eat cultured meats that taste delicious. They don't come from in-tact animals. So there's no suffering. They have a cruelty free lifestyle. A lot of people here eat meat. Why should one keep live animals and factory farms as we do, and slaughter them. Is it somehow unnatural, having cultured meat? And the final thing, perhaps we're curious about the nature of the ecosystem. In which they live, and it's thanks to convergent evolution that there are analogs to herbivores and carnivores in their ancestral environment, and they are preserved in wildlife parks. Instead of carnivores in the traditional sense, they've been re-programmed and tweaked, their dependency of meat has become a dependency on cultured meats. The heriboveres don't have a population explosion. Anything in the wildlife parks are computer-controlled. All forms of suffering have been eliminated. The entire vertebrate genome has been reprogrammed, and the ecosystem redesigned. Which arguments should we use for this alien civilization to convince them to see their simpler creatures, inacting the dramas of the ancestral past. When we enjoy watching wildlife programs, or seeing animals eaten alive. Would it be better if the extraterrestrials to create their ancestral environment in their wildlife park? Rather than talk, I would take questions and comments. So if anyone has got any comments or questions, yes please stick up your hand up, as this fable of an alien civilization is one possible model of our future civilization.
"How do you assess the utilitarian question, how to maximize the relief of suffering for the most number of people, versus concentrating only on a certain number of people?"