SUBJECT: Happiness

ASPECT/PERSPECTIVE:
The hedonistic Imperative. David Pearce's speculations on the future of happiness

SUMMARY:

This manifesto combines far-fetched utopian advocacy and cold-headed social-scientific prediction. The Hedonistic Imperative argues that within the next thousand years or so the application of nanotechnology, eugenics, genetic engineering and clinical psychopharmacology will eliminate aversive experience. The biological substrates of suffering will be eradicated.


INTRODUCTION

0.1 The Naturalisation of Heaven.

This manifesto combines far-fetched utopian advocacy and cold-headed social-scientific prediction. The Hedonistic
Imperative argues that within the next thousand years or so the application of nanotechnology, eugenics, genetic
engineering and clinical psychopharmacology will eliminate aversive experience. The biological substrates of
suffering will be eradicated. All its varieties of indescribable awfulness are set to disappear into evolutionary history.
The chemistry of everyday discontents will pass into oblivion too. Instead, the matter and energy of the world will
be sculpted into beings whose otherwise diverse states of mind will share at least one common feature: a sublime and
all-pervasive happiness.

This background feeling of absolute well-being is likely to far surpass anything which human neurochemistry and
imagination now sustain. Yet states of quite magical joy can be biologically purified, multiplied and intensified
indefinitely. Notions of what now passes for tolerably good mental health will be superseded. They will be written
off as mood-congruent cognitive pathologies. Such ugly thoughts were typical of the tragic lives of emotional
primitives from the previous era. In time, the deliberate re-creation of any of today's state-spectrum of normal
waking and dreaming consciousness will be outlawed as cruel and immoral. Such speculation may currently sound
fantastical. Yet the ideas of this manifesto will one day come to be regarded as intellectually trite - albeit morally
urgent. For what might once have been the stuff of millenialist fantasy is set to become a scientifically feasible
research programme. Its adoption or rejection will become, ultimately, a social policy issue. Passively or actively,
we will have to choose just how much suffering we wish to create or conserve - if any - in eras to come.


0.2 Saving Vehicles With Bad Drivers.

Blind selective pressures have acted over hundreds of millions of years. Darwinian evolution has powerfully
favoured the growth of ever more diverse, excruciating, but also more adaptive varieties of psychophysical pain. Its
sheer nastiness effectively spurs and punishes the living vehicles of genetic replicators. In absolute terms, global
suffering is probably still increasing as the population explosion continues. Human ingenuity has struggled, often
vainly, to rationalise and somehow derive value from the most frightful anguish. But over the aeons the very
anguish which intermittently corrodes the well-being of the individual organism has differentially promoted the
inclusive fitness of its DNA. Hence it has tended to get inexorably worse.

Such doom-and-gloom isn't the whole story. The world's horrors can be contrasted with life's more rewarding
experiences. People sometimes have fun. Prolonged depression is rarely adaptive. Yet what Michael Eysenck
describes as the "hedonic treadmill" ensures that very few of us can be very happy for very long. A small minority
of humans do in fact attain states of prolonged euphoria. These states are usually pathologised as (hypo-)manic.
Euphoric (hypo-)mania is liable to be clinically subdued with drugs. These toxic chemicals depress elevated mood to
levels more statistically average for our age. Such flatter, duller, and supposedly healthier levels of affect enable
otherwise euphoric people to function within the norms of contemporary society.

By contrast, and far more typically, a set of cruelly effective negative feedback mechanisms is at work in the central
nervous system. Feedback-inhibition ensures that a majority of people would be periodically bored, depressed or
angst-ridden in a recreated Garden of Eden. Medically prescribed mood-darkeners would be laughably redundant for
the great bulk of humanity. No amount of piecemeal political and economic reform, nor even radical social
engineering, can overcome this biological reality.

Today's billion-and-one alleged routes to happiness are pursued in of the guise of innumerable intentional objects.
[Intentionality in philosophy speak is the 'aboutness' or 'object-directedness' of thought]. All these routes are not
merely vastly circuitous and inefficient. For the most part they just don't, and can't, durably work. At best, they can
serve as superficial palliatives of the human predicament. If the mind/brain's emotional thermostat, as it were, is not
genetically and pharmacologically reset, then even the greatest triumphs and successes will turn to ashes. Lottery
winners, cup-final hat-trick scorers and blissful newly-weds are left time and again to discover this fate anew. Even
those of us who tend to lead a relatively happy sort of existence will, in the course of a lifetime, undergo spells of
profound unhappiness and disappointment.

It would be easy but unwarranted simply to extrapolate past and present trends. Usually, we simply assume that our
descendants will be biologically capable of undergoing distress, even of the most subtle kind. Yet the
neurobiological basis of feeling and emotion is rapidly being unravelled. The human genome is going to get decoded
and rewritten. It will in future become purely an issue of (post-)human decision whether negative modes of
consciousness are generated in any form or texture whatsoever. A terrible but unavoidable fact of organic life then at
last becomes a matter for active moral choice instead. And that choice can be declined.


0.3 Humans Are Not Rats.

One possibility, though not an option to be canvassed here, is that in freeing ourselves from the nightmarish legacy
of our genetic past we might choose to enjoy a lifetime of raw, all-consuming orgasmic bliss. This bliss needn't be
directed at any well-defined intentional objects at all. We, or more likely our robot-serviced descendants, would not
be ecstatic about anything in particular. Our nature would be constitutionally ecstatic. We would simply be happy
about being happy.

The defining image here, perhaps, is the notional human counterpart of the experimenter's lever-pressing rat.
Electrodes are wired into the fibres of its pleasure centres. Notoriously, the rat will indulge in frenzied bouts of
intra-cranial self-stimulation for days on end. The experience is preferred to food, sleep or even sex. The rat is
apparently physiologically incapable of becoming bored, or tolerant to, the rodent equivalent of Heaven. Such
animalistic images are unedifying to all but the most unabashed hedonist. Yet more subtly-engineered human
counterparts of the euphoric rat are perfectly feasible. Centuries hence, any pleasure-maximising ecstatics will be
using their personal freedom to exercise what is, in a utilitarian sense, a legitimate life-style choice.

The "wirehead" option, however, will be only one item drawn from a very large menu. Unfortunately, it is also the
most easily visualised. The option of perpetual intra-cranial self-stimulation will be taken, wrongly, to symbolise the
whole approach The Hedonistic Imperative represents. The utterly serious ethical substance which underlies this
manifesto's proposals may thus too easily be dismissed. For humans, as we are solemnly reminded, are not rats.


0.4 Life In Dopaminergic Overdrive.

The important point to stress in the discussion to follow is that many dopamine-driven states of euphoria can actually
enhance motivated, goal-directed behaviour in general. Hyper-dopaminergic states tend also to increase the range of
activities an organism finds worth pursuing. Outside the pleasure laboratory, such states of necessity focus on
countless different intentional objects. So humanity's future as envisaged in this manifesto is not, or certainly not
just, an eternity spent on elixirs of super-soma or hich-octane pleasure-machines. Nor is it plausible that posterity
will enjoy only the dull, opiated sensibility of the heroin addict. Instead an extraordinarily fertile range of purposeful
and productive activities will most likely be pursued. Better still, our descendants, and in principle perhaps even our
elderly selves, will have the chance to enjoy modes of experience we primitives cruelly lack. For on offer are sights
more majestically beautiful, music more deeply soul-stirring, sex more exquisitely erotic, mystical epiphanies more
awe-inspiring, and love more profoundly intense than anything we can now properly comprehend.

I shall first schematically set out how a naturalistic, secular paradise of essentially everlasting happiness is
biotechnically feasible. Second, I will argue why its realisation is instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory.
Third, I will offer a sketch of when and why such a scenario is likely to come to pass in some guise or other. And,
finally, I shall try to anticipate some of the most common if not always cogent objections that the prospect of
psychochemical nirvana is likely to arouse and attempt to defuse them.


DP Contents : HedWeb
E-mail Dave : davidp@pavilion.co.uk

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SUBMITTED BY: davidp@pavilion.co.uk
REFERENCES & LINKS: http://www.pavilion.co.uk/david-pearce/hedonist.htm

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