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.
Why does suffering exist? The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they served the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. Their ugliness can be replaced by a new motivational system based on gradients of well-being. Life-long happiness of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable can become the heritable norm of mental health. A sketch is offered of when, and why, this major evolutionary transition in the history of life is likely to occur. Possible objections, both practical and moral, are raised and then rebutted.
Contemporary images of opiate-addled junkies, and the lever-pressing frenzies of intra-cranially self-stimulating rats, are deceptive. Such stereotypes stigmatise, and falsely discredit, the only remedy for the world's horrors and everyday discontents that is biologically realistic. For it is misleading to contrast social and intellectual development with perpetual happiness. There need be no such trade-off. Thus states of "dopamine-overdrive" can actually enhance exploratory and goal-directed activity. Hyper-dopaminergic states can also increase the range and diversity of actions an organism finds rewarding. Our descendants may live in a civilisation of serenely well-motivated "high-achievers", animated by gradients of bliss. Their productivity may far eclipse our own.
Two hundred years ago, before the development of potent synthetic pain-killers or surgical anaesthetics, the notion that "physical" pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed no less bizarre. Most of us in the developed world now take its daily absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as "mental" pain, too, could one day be superseded is equally counter-intuitive. The technical option of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of political policy and ethical choice.
From the link, I've read the intro and the first chapter.
I don't even know what to say at this point.
Jon, if you get a chance, tear this apart.
1 comment:
I can speak semi-intelligently on the paragraph about addiction. First off, the dopamine "overdrive" state that the author describes is basically mania - increase in exploratory and goal-directed activity are necessary for the criteria. However, there is clear evidence that prolonged time spent in these states, whether endogenous or substance-induced, is neurotoxic and thus in a long-term evolutionary sense are harmful. There is also some research suggesting that there is an endogenous "dysphoria" in some people that is overcome by using drugs of abuse - thus, using "to feel normal." This, and also the traditional using to get high, is what the author alludes. However, these minor alterations in the frontal circuits are affected variably by different substances, and are also extraordinarily complex in the number of different neurotransmitters they use. This allows for a drug of choice for any given user. Thus to assert that any substance that causes dopamine increases alleviates suffering is not entirely true. I'm interested to read more of his argument.
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