RS: You co-founded the WTA. After all these years, what do you think of the evolution of the transhumanist community?

DP: For the first decade of the twenty-first century, the World Transhumanist Association (H+) was the overarching transhumanist organization. Since then, the influence of transhumanist ideas has grown, but the movement itself has splintered.
Do I regret its balkanization?
Yes. For all our transhuman aspirations, transhumanists are still social primates. A shared sense of “us” is rewarding. I miss it. But caution about community-building is in order too. The tightest sense of community is found in religions and cults. Indeed, outsiders have sometimes accused transhumanism of being a cult too. Nothing could be further from the truth. The transhumanist movement has always been exceedingly diverse, sometimes absurdly so:
transhumanist.com

RS: In many ways, you diverge from the consensus in the H+ community, especially regarding AI. I feel that you are more sceptical than most.

DP: Yes, I’m an AGI/ASI sceptic – although I think we’ve barely glimpsed what digital zombies can do. By contrast, the consensus within the transhumanist community is that machine superintelligence is imminent. Within this broad consensus, divisions exist between Kurzweilians, who anticipate an effective fusion between humans and our machines, and MIRI-inspired transhumanists who anticipate pure machine superintelligence – whether sentience-friendly or sentience-unfriendly. Eliezer Yudkowsky is the best-known AI doomer; Nick Bostrom is a (very) cautious optimist. My abiding belief that full-spectrum superintelligence will be our super-sentient, genetically rewritten, neurochipped, AI-enhanced biological transhumans is very much a minority current.
So why my AGI/ASI scepticism?
Well, I’m as overawed by the transformer revolution in AI as anyone. We may anticipate further jaw-dropping revolutions to come. But digital computers are cognitively crippled zombies. Implementations of classical Turing machines – and likewise LLMs, etc. – can’t support phenomenal binding. Phenomenal binding is our computational superpower. No binding = no mind = invincible ignorance of the entire empirical realm. Digital zombies can’t explore the myriad alien state-spaces of consciousness opened by psychedelics: an exploratory journey that has scarcely begun. Phenomenally-bound consciousness is all that each of us ever directly knows. Phenomenally-bound consciousness is what classical digital computers can’t ever know. In a fundamentally quantum world, decoherence makes digital computing physically feasible and simultaneously prevents classical computers from supporting minds – unified, phenomenally-bound subjects of experience. The entire empirical ("relating to experience") realm is computationally inaccessible to digital zombies. Compared to super-sentient full-spectrum superintelligences i.e., our AI-augmented, genetically rewritten biological descendants, digital zombies are just toys – awesome toys, for sure, but not proto-ASIs. The ignorance of sentience in our machines is computationally hardwired. What’s more, as soon as we’re neurochipped, humans will be able to do everything that digital zombies can do – and much more. Posthuman psychedelia is humanly inconceivable:
Alien Consciousnesss

So how do animal minds like us achieve a feat that classical computers can never match? If phenomenal binding isn’t classical, then how does the CNS pull it off?

Well, as far as I can tell, we are quantum minds running classical world-simulations. Contra Roger Penrose and other “dynamical collapse” theorists, the superposition principle of QM doesn’t break down in the CNS or anywhere else. "Cat states" underpin our phenomenally-bound experience of classicality. Only a quantum mind can simulate a phenomenally-bound classical world (cf. Quantum Mind) – what naive realists call “perception”. Only a quantum mind can undergo the phenomenally-bound experience (an "observation") of a definite outcome (cf. the measurement problem). A pack of effectively decohered classical neurons would at most be a micro-experiential zombie, a mere aggregate of Jamesian "mind dust." In contrast to biological nervous systems, classical digital computers can support only micro-experiential zombies, not conscious “whole-brain emulations”, let alone phenomenally-bound ASI super-minds.

I’d just add that if you don’t grok the phenomenal binding problem (cf. Binding Problem), then what I say about quantum mind will be of little interest.

RS: Do you feel isolated within transhumanism?

DP:Crudely speaking, transhumanists believe in creting a “triple S” civilization of superintelligence, superlongevity, and superhappiness. My focus on fixing the problem of suffering by genetically engineering information-sensitive gradients of superhappiness, and ensuring even the humblest of minds can flourish, is the least prominent of the three “supers”.

However, if sometimes I feel isolated within the transhumanist movement, the reason is bioethical – and temperamental. Transhumanists are overwhelmingly life-loving optimists. Life is good. Let’s make it better, not least by radical lifespan extension and intelligence-amplification. I’m unusual among transhumanists in being a deep-dyed pessimist who thinks that life on Earth – and indeed the universal wave function itself – is fundamentally evil. I’m probably the only negative utilitarian (NU) transhumanist.

That said, I’m not exactly a typical NU either. Whereas most NUs dream of putting an end to it all, I recognize that the future belongs to life lovers. NUs and antinatalists must act accordingly. Indeed, I’m probably the only NU antinatalist (cf. Antinatalism) who thinks our future lies in gradients of superhuman bliss.

RS: Do you think that transhumanism currently embraces a great diversity of opinions, or is it at risk of becoming a monoculture?

DP: All intellectual movements have shared background assumptions and unargued presuppositions. Transhumanists are no exception. But I’ve never known a community with such diverse conceptual frameworks. Just consider the World Transhumanist Association itself, which was founded by an ardently life-loving pioneer of existential risk as a serious scientific discipline and a NU button-presser manqué.

Despite this diversity, I can’t rule out our successors will reckon that transhumanists share some underlying delusion – although what this misconception might be I naturally can’t fathom, Maybe our successors will find all members of Homo sapiens as distinct as we find different subspecies of beetle.

RS: You are known as a strong advocate for veganism and animal rights. Are there connections between these two communities, or are you, once again, almost alone among transhumanists in defending these causes?

A commitment to the well-being of all sentience is enshrined in the Transhumanist Declaration (1998, 2009). But most transhumanists aren’t single-mindedly focused on fixing the problem of suffering, let alone extending the abolitionist project to the rest of the animal kingdom. My vision of a pan-species welfare state is sometimes just humoured.

In fairness, a lot of the vegan community itself is still ambivalent about the prospect of herbivorizing the biosphere. Nature is fundamentally good, runs the traditional vegan argument, human interference is fundamentally bad. Given the frightful way that humans treat nonhuman animals in vivisection labs, factory farms and slaughterhouses, the kindest thing humans can do for nonhuman animals is just leave them alone.

I can sympathize with this perspective. But most nonhumans in Nature die horribly as juveniles from starvation or predation. Natural selection is an engine of suffering. David Attenborough wildlife documentaries, narrated in hushed and reverential tones with mood music to match, are slick propaganda videos for pain-ridden Darwinian malware. Only transhumanist technologies of genome reform can reprogram the biosphere and create an animal kingdom animated by gradients of intelligent well-being.

For technical reasons, I think post-Darwinian life will be sublime, a world of paradise engineering: the Hedonocene: AI for Animals 2025 (mp4)
But I will live and die a hardcore negative utilitarian. I trust our very existence can one day be forgotten.

RS: Thank you for your replies! I hope that one day we will have the time further to discuss your philosophy of consciousness, which greatly interests me!

DP: Thank you Rémi. I look forward to it!

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more interviews
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