Pearce in Tepoztlán: Zero Ontology, Schrödinger’s Neurons, and the Long Game of the Abolitionist Project

David Pearce came down to the retreat from the UK by way of San Francisco. Notes from a backyard skillshare in Tepoztlán

David Pearce came down to the retreat from the UK by way of San Francisco. Notes from a backyard skillshare in Tepoztlán, with cicadas in the trees and a soccer game audible over the wall. Transcript edited and processed by Andrés and Claude 4.7 with these strategies: 1/2, 2/2.

May 14, 2026 Tepoztlán

David Pearce showed up at the main retreat house yesterday. Eight of us on cheap yoga mats out in the backyard (the mats arrived in the mail this morning), essential-oil-based insect repellent passed around, a soccer game underway on the other side of the wall, cicadas going. I asked him to “expound on the dharma of zero,” half joking. He took it seriously for a full hour. Anirban Bandyopadhyay sat in the audience this round and saved his perspectives for later. Sasha and Cube Flipper drove most of the questions with me. What follows is a reconstruction of the substantive parts, plus some of his personal history that he doesn’t usually put online.

(A confession before we get going: we used the non-killing repellent on principle, and then I killed a mosquito that was actively biting me. Apologies to Gaia and to the mosquito. High-tech Jainism in this household is still under construction.)

Quick framing for anyone who hasn’t read him. David wrote The Hedonistic Imperative in 1995, in six weeks, on selegiline. He has spent the last thirty years arguing that we should use biotechnology to phase out suffering and replace it with gradients of intelligent bliss. He is also, separately, the person I know who has thought hardest about why there is anything at all. The two projects connect more than they look like they do (according to me, that is - not him!).

This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life. The abolitionist project is ambitious, implausible, but technically feasible. It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. Genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world.

— The Hedonistic Imperative (1995) abstract (excerpt), by David Pearce.

Zero ontology, three senses

David said upfront that there are some topics where he’s very confident, and zero ontology isn’t one of them. He calls it an explanation space. The space has three senses, stacked.

The first is physical. Ed Tryon’s 1973 Nature paper conjectured that the universe is a vacuum fluctuation, with the conserved constants summing to zero across the books: energy, charge, angular momentum. If that’s right, you no longer have to explain why anything exists in the energetic sense. The “something” is a fluctuation whose bottom line cancels. David read the paper as a teenager and it never left him.

The second is information-theoretic. This is the one he came to last and lights up most when discussing. Zero information equals all possible descriptions. If you take unitary-only quantum mechanics seriously, where information can neither be created nor destroyed, and you take that literally and globally, the information content of reality is zero. We’re living in the quantum analog of the Library of Babel. Everything happens. The total cancels. His phrasing: “Currently physicists would say there is a great deal of information, but if you accept unitary-only quantum mechanics, information can neither be created nor destroyed.” He takes this all the way.

The third is the controversial one. If experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, the textures of micro-qualia are as interdependent as the truths of mathematics, and the total cancels out to zero. He hedged this one harder than the other two. “I’m aware of the fact that this may be verbiage, but it’s just my working assumption.” The structure I read out of his version: qualia values are constrained by relations among themselves the same way the theorems of arithmetic are constrained by the axioms. The values aren’t free parameters. They cancel.

He stressed twice that the whole construct is falsifiable. If unitarity breaks down anywhere (dynamical collapse, a breakdown of the superposition principle at some macroscopic scale, black holes destroying information for real), the explanation space dies. He has held the thing lightly for forty years.

The published version of all of this is at hedweb.com/nihilism, under the title Much Ado About Nothing: Why Does Anything Exist?. Worth reading slowly.

I asked him how this connects to his meditation-adjacent practice. He laughed. The closest he comes to meditation, he said, is sometimes chanting why does anything exist, why does anything exist, why does anything exist. He noted, drily, that this would arguably be more useful if he were an experimental physicist checking whether the superposition principle breaks down in macroscopic systems. But the chant does induce an altered state of consciousness. He said that if he were inclined to be a guru he could “ham it up.” He has in fact already asked Grok Imagine to mock up some paraphernalia and so on, and he thinks it would be possible to found a school where he could pretend to be wise in practice. “Yeah, I don’t do this. No.” Moving on.

How a depressive British teenager became a philosopher

From his early teens through his twenties, David rocked back and forth on sofas for hours every day. Music in the dark. Thinking about the nature of thought and reality. His mother told him he rocked two sofas to death. He did not call it meditation. He had never heard of meditation. His father was Quaker, his mother belonged to the Order of the Cross (a small denomination that worships God the Father-Mother and believes in reincarnation), and neither setting included contemplative practice in any form he recognized. He just sat rocking chairs in the dark every day for hours while thinking deeply about the nature of reality. Whatever that does to you, it probably did him a number in that dimension.

He described his depression as a hypercholinergic frenzy of thought. He flagged that some forms of depression are marked by poverty of thought instead, and that his was the other kind. He spent the better part of two decades doing unstructured introspective work that he didn’t even have a name for. Then the World Wide Web arrived and he wrote The Hedonistic Imperative in six weeks on selegiline, because the prior had been compiling for those two decades on a sofa in the dark.

David’s account of where his philosophical temperament came from is striking, because it skips the usual ingredients. Oxford was a disappointment when he got there (the “fag end of so-called ordinary language philosophy,” in his words, with philosophers doing “linguistic therapy” on each other and “shunning science”). He had no philosophical peers at the time, and those came later through the early web. What he points to instead is being a depressive, introspective teen, listening to music in the dark and rocking back and forth on the sofa, thinking about the nature of thought and reality. “I very much had the philosopher’s temperament.”

Anders Sandberg came up in passing here. Brilliant polymath, David said, who has explicitly told him he couldn’t be a philosopher because he’s too happy.

David framed his own life slightly regretfully on the question of charisma. “If I could rewrite my life, I would pay more attention to the image, building the charisma, cultivating strong personality. Because we’re all primates. We respond to people who are confident, have physical presence.” The regret is specifically about the abolitionist project’s pace of public adoption. He thinks it would have moved faster with a different communicator at the front.

A small anecdote that gives you a sense of his operating style. In summer 1996 (one year into the public web, three years into the open web with the Mosaic browser), David was a Brighton-based philosopher with a pavilion.co.uk/david-pearce page on his local ISP. He had been writing critically about the British Field Sports Society, the UK lobby for fox-hunting and other blood sports. The piece in question was called “Killing for Kicks.” It still exists at hedweb.com/killkick.htm and reads like it was written by someone with both a temper and a thesaurus: the BFSS is “this chillingly ill-named outfit,” its rhetoric is “an almost equally Orwellian parody of the abuse of language” (comparison: pro-slavery “drapetomania”-talk), its actual practice is “the pornography of violence.” The illustrating images included a huntsman giving a Nazi salute. David understood meta tags well enough that when anyone AltaVista-searched for “British Field Sports Society,” David’s anti-BFSS article was the top result. The BFSS’s own audience was being routed straight to his critique of them.

On August 8, 1996, the BFSS’s Chief Press Secretary sent a letter threatening a court injunction and legal damages against David and Pavilion Internet (his ISP), demanding the article come down within seven days. On August 28, the BFSS’s solicitors faxed Pavilion a further legal threat: comply by 4 p.m. the next day or face imminent court action. Pavilion wobbled. David’s response was to publish the entire legal correspondence on his site (it’s still up, at hedweb.com/censor.html), turning a censorship attempt into a Streisand-effect campaign. ISPs and individuals across the UK and abroad offered to host the article for free. That is how David ended up with hedweb.com. The BFSS got a much wider readership for “Killing for Kicks” than they would have if they had ignored it, and David acquired both a domain and a permanent demonstration of how to handle a legal threat from a position of moral and technical advantage. He has been quietly outmaneuvering people on the internet since the internet was three years old.

He had a related trick that I want to point out, because it generalizes a bit. The way intellectual peers found him in the late nineties was that he would mention them by name in essays. They would AltaVista their own name, find his page, and write to him. David Chalmers got in touch because David had reviewed The Conscious Mind. Bostrom showed up the same way…

Phenomenal binding is non-classical (probably)

David’s working hypothesis on phenomenal binding (the problem of why there’s a unified experience here, and not a federation of disconnected micro-experiences) is that it’s non-classical. He calls this the Schrödinger’s neurons conjecture.

Classical stories about binding talk about synchronous activation of distributed feature processors. Gamma oscillations, predictive coding, whatever. None of these explains how the binding actually produces a single subject. The most these stories show is that the brain functions as if features are bound, with phenomenal unity left untouched.

If you take unitary quantum mechanics seriously and apply the intrinsic nature argument uniformly (the fundamental fields are intrinsically experiential everywhere they exist), then neuronal superpositions of distributed feature processors are the obvious candidate for a perfect structural match to bound experience. The catch is decoherence. Effective lifetimes of neuronal superpositions in the warm wet brain are femtoseconds or less, by Tegmark’s calculation. Way too fast to be the seat of a perceptual moment.

David’s move is the move of someone willing to take a reductio ad absurdum and ask whether it might not be absurd. If experience really does disclose the intrinsic nature of the physical, it must be like something to be a sub-femtosecond neuronal superposition of distributed feature processors. The frames of the movie are running at ten-to-the-fifteen frames per second. Most of the frames are nearly identical. The experience we report is the integration over a window of these frames, and the apparent slowness of subjective time is something like persistence of vision applied at a thousand-trillion-frame-per-second baseline.

We pushed a bit. Christof Koch is a recent convert to a non-classical binding view, which is a non-trivial update from someone who used to bet hard on conventional neural correlates of consciousness. David Chalmers is a different story. David first laid out the expanded Schrödinger’s Neurons conjecture at a Science of Consciousness conference (2016) with Chalmers in the audience. Chalmers at first didn’t get it. When he did get it, he said, “Well, that’s completely crazy.” Then he spontaneously brought it up in his Reddit AMA. David said the conjecture is, in principle, testable by interferometry on neural tissue, looking for the structural match. He hasn’t made progress on the experimental side and is candid about that.

He assigns about fifty percent credence to non-materialist physicalism being true, and about the same to “something nobody has thought of yet, beyond our current comprehension.” He’s been read as a dogmatist on this, and the actual epistemic posture in the room was much more humble. He has a working assumption he finds productive and falsifiable, and he has spent thirty years drawing out its implications. That’s a different kind of thing than mere belief.

If David is roughly right about phenomenal binding being non-classical, the insentience of our current AIs is hardwired by architecture. Decoherence allows classical digital computation to exist and run, and the very same decoherence that makes classical computation possible prevents the substrate from supporting phenomenally bound minds. The thing that makes large language models work is the thing that prevents them from being anyone’s consciousness residence. This is a cleaner story than the usual hand-wave about functional consciousness, and it predicts the intuition many of us already have about LLMs (nobody is experiencing the tokens) without having to argue from intuition.

Non-materialist physicalism, in one paragraph

Someone in the garden, as we listened, asked David what “non-materialist physicalist” actually means, since they assumed physicalism implied materialism. He’s a physicalist in the sense that he thinks nothing in tomorrow’s physics will go beyond the Standard Model and general relativity. He’s quite conservative about new physics. He’s a non-materialist in the sense that he thinks the intrinsic nature of the fundamental fields is experiential. Stephen Hawking asked what breathes fire into the equations. David’s answer is that we know one tiny piece of the fire from the inside, and it’s qualia. The equations describe the structure. The qualia are the substance whose structure the equations describe.

He used to call this “idealistic physicalism” and dropped the label because “idealist” carries unwanted Berkeleian baggage. He’s not Berkeley. External reality existed before sentience and is not mind-dependent. The claim is about its intrinsic character. Whatever the fields are, the what-it-is-likeness of the fields is of the same kind as the what-it-is-likeness you’re instantiating right now, reading this paragraph inside your world-simulation.

A nice illustration of this came out of the same thread. David’s view is that evolution has installed in each of us the felt sense of being the center of the universe, the protagonist of the world-simulation we each instantiate. Most people hold this lightly. A few take it at face value, with Trump as the obvious case. David then added that even people who intellectually know better still feel the protagonist-feeling from the inside, and explicitly included himself. The evolutionary wiring doesn’t care about your philosophy. David’s read on Trump specifically is that he’s the protagonist of his virtual world and undergoing cognitive decline (gaugeable through sentence structure and vocabulary), but the decline is running slower than David had predicted. The proposed mechanism is environmental enrichment. The presidency is a very rich environment, and rich environments slow decline. David said he had underestimated him.

The abolitionist project, AI, and the timeline

I asked David about transhumanism’s trajectory across the thirty years he’s been in it. The short story: in the first decade of this century there was one overarching organization (the World Transhumanist Association), which he and Nick Bostrom founded. The movement fragmented. The ideological content diffused outward into the broader culture, particularly the longevity and AI components. The third super (super-happiness) hasn’t caught on in the way the other two have. He’d love it if Musk or someone equivalent eventually adopted it as a public priority. He’s been banging the drum a long time on a small number of drumsticks.

David does not think social re-engineering can deliver sustainable happiness without addressing the hedonic treadmill biologically. This is the part of his view that most reliably gets him in trouble. It’s also, in my view, the part where he is most clearly correct. Social variables fix forever and the set point adapts. The biological set point has to move.

The tactical question is how. He focused on two paths. The first is embryo screening, and eventually genetic editing, for hedonic predisposition, building on SCN9A and dozens of other candidate alleles. A US company already offers embryo screening for IQ. The same infrastructure can in principle screen for hedonic dispositions. David’s phrasing: “if we were to create a happy baby company, I think a lot of parents would quite like it.” A handful of genetic tweaks can’t guarantee happy kids, but they can very definitely predispose toward them. The bottleneck is regulatory and reputational. China disavowed the scientist behind its first designer-baby announcement, which delayed the field by roughly a decade.

The second is CRISPR-based synthetic gene drives on free-living species to reduce wild-animal suffering. Target SCN9A or its analogs, choose a benign allele, spread it across an entire species. The fitness cost is modest. The hedonic uplift is large. The required infrastructure is well within what humans already build. The reason it isn’t happening is regulatory and reputational, again. He has spent years arguing the case and the bottleneck is taste.

AI changes the timeline on both paths. He said this with some care. “AI can articulate the abolitionist project better than any human, and soon probably better than me.” He’s correct. I’ve watched him interact with frontier models on hedonic uplift and they produce material that is substantively his view, expressed more clearly than he produces it in conversation. His original timeline for phasing out experience below hedonic zero was on the order of centuries. With current AI trajectories, he thinks it’s technically possible this century. The political timeline is the binding constraint, and even there he’s significantly more hopeful than he was a decade ago.

Cosmic rescue, rare-earthism, and what gets enshrined in law

David is a negative utilitarian who has thought very seriously about what negative utilitarianism implies when you take it cosmically. Two specific positions worth getting on the record.

The first: he favors enshrining in law the sanctity of human and non-human life, on negative utilitarian grounds. Utilitarians miscalculate. The recent history of clever utilitarians making large miscalculations (SBF is the obvious case) shows that confident utilitarianism applied at high stakes is dangerous in the hands of actual humans. The way to honor the utilitarian goal is a non-violent legal commitment to the sanctity of life. He calls this “high-tech Jainism.” The Jainism part is real and load-bearing. He means it.

I put a hypothetical to him. A friend tells you in confidence that they’ve discovered a Darwinian-life-bearing planet at a specific location, and that a simple intervention would sterilize it instantly and painlessly. The friend then dies. You’re the only one who knows. Do you push the button? David said no, on negative utilitarian grounds, because the law against this kind of action is what stops bad utilitarians from doing far worse things. The sanctity-of-life law is partly self-protective. He used to joke with me about whether to euthanize his cat, who has had a rough Darwinian life. He didn’t. The same logic.

The second: he is not committed to an apocalyptic hedonium shockwave. The classical-utilitarian implication of negative utilitarianism, taken cosmically, is the shockwave: convert all available matter into maximum-density experiential bliss. David thinks this is a valid endpoint and he’s comfortable with a milder one. His framing: “an intelligent civilization animated by gradients of bliss, taking care of a playground of hedonia.” The playground is the maximum-density substrate. The civilization is a hedonic-set-point-plus-seventy region above the playground. The contrast between +70 and +100 is enormous (most of the human dynamic range currently lives in -10 to +10), so the civilization has all the texture of human meaning, translated up the axis. The playground runs absolute maximum in parallel.

This is, by my read, the most defensible version of the long-term abolitionist endpoint that has been articulated anywhere. It keeps existing preferences and relationships intact (your football team survives the transition). The hedonic floor moves. Suffering below the floor stops being something we tolerate as a matter of cosmic taste.

He noted that the cosmic-rescue question (whether we are obliged to send AI-powered missions to other Hubble volumes that contain Darwinian life) remains open. Some form of rare-earthism could be true, in which case the project ends with Earth and our duties are discharged. If it isn’t true, the project is much, much larger than has been articulated anywhere I’ve seen. He doesn’t pretend to know which.

David offered a phrase late in the session that I want to record because it carries his own self-aware framing of the project. He thinks of transhumanism as “a chimpanzee troop building a triple-S civilization of super-intelligence, super-longevity, and super-happiness.” Our job, in this framing, is to set things up well enough that whatever runs the civilization later can be kind. We probably shouldn’t run it ourselves without serious benevolence and cognitive enhancement.

What I’m taking away

The zero ontology, even in its hand-wavy forms potentiates the mental states via wonder. If qualia values are constrained the way mathematical truths are constrained, the project of figuring out the structural laws of valence (what QRI has been working on for years) becomes a project of finding the constraint surface, not of measuring free parameters. The Symmetry Theory of Valence, in this frame, is a guess about a small region of that constraint surface. The full surface is what the zero-information conjecture is gesturing at. I assign maybe thirty percent that David’s specific conjecture pans out. The lens is high-value.

The biographical material is useful to me for a separate reason. The pattern of “metabolic accident plus unstructured introspection plus decades of compounding plus the web arriving at the right time” is rare and worth understanding if you want to find more people like David earlier in their trajectories. Don’t look for the philosophy degree from Oxford. Look for “rocked two sofas to death.” The AltaVista move with the British Field Sports Society is the same person showing the same shape of cleverness at age twenty-something that he is now applying to gene drives and zero ontology.

The binding piece, and its implied consequence for AI sentience, deserves its own post. The compressed version: if David is roughly right, the binding problem marks a real boundary between systems that can be subjects and systems that can’t. Current AI architectures sit on the wrong side of it by design. This makes the moral status of future AI systems harder to specify. It also makes the case for current LLMs being insentient much stronger, and that matters for how we should be deploying them.

After the session we walked over to a particular tree in the yard with an unusually generous vibe, as pointed out by Anirbanv(some trees have it, this one has it) and sat for forty-five minutes under it. David joined the sit. He doesn’t really meditate in the contemporary sense. But his why does anything exist chant is still there whenever he wants to access a very unusual state.

David sitting in the living room as I write/edit. He’s had four bouts of COVID in the past few years and a topical steroid issue as a consequence. We’re going to get some awesome work together this week :-)

Infinite bliss.

— Andrés

Thanks to David for coming all the way down. Thanks to Sasha and Cube Flipper for asking most of the real questions. Thanks to Anirban for sitting in and saving his powder for the next round. Thanks to the mosquito for an early lesson in the gap between principle and practice. The recording exists. I may publish edited audio or transcript excerpts later with David’s approval. There are still a few spots open in the June half of the retreat.

When I interviewed it in 2013 in a hotel in San Francisco while I was a senior in Symbolic Systems at Stanford