aced126
Bluelighter
- Joined
- May 18, 2015
- Messages
- 1,047
I thought I'd make a post where I lay out my thoughts on some things which have made me think a lot recently.
Since taking drugs, I have experienced states of euphoria (and dysphoria) which would have never been achieved normally, and this has made me think about a lot of stuff, mostly to do with the reward system of biological specimens.
My understanding of why a biological reward system is this: it exists to reward us for engaging in evolution-promoting behaviour and reinforces that behaviour. Similarly, nociception exists in us working in reverse (producing pain, a dysphoric sensation) to discourage us from engaging with harmful stimuli.
The way drugs work to create euphoria is by modulating the reward system. For example, amphetamine increases dopamine concentration in the synaptic cleft which eventually inhibits medium spiny neurons in the nucleus accumbens from firing. Inhibition of these neurons creates a phenomenon we perceive as euphoria. They essentially trick our brain into thinking we are doing something which promotes our evolution massively (way more promoting than say eating food), and as a result the behaviour is reinforced massively (hence why people "fiend" for more drugs, "just one more line").
Now before you guys blast me with the how amazingly impossible/impractical this is, I want to say that I know it doesn't sound achievable at least for several centuries or even millennia. I am just concerned with the "ethics" of it.
Anyway, my question is if we could somehow modulate our reward system such that we would be in a constant state of euphoria forever, should we do it? Whether it be using small drug molecules, stimulating the relevant areas of the brain using brain shocks, or even rewriting the human genome as appropriate, would this be something to strive for?
Many of you will think that we would become "used" to the level of euphoria we'd be at, to which I propose an idea for why this could be averted below. For the purposes of the flow of my post, we could just assume that this issue is not a problem for now.
Now, let's hypothetically say that we humans designed a super pill that did just this: put us in a state of conscious bliss forever. What would be the result? The result obviously would be that we stop seeking evolution promoting activities and die out. But my question is this: why is that bad?
When I try to imagine how my idea would play out, it LOOKS horrible. It FEELS terrible. It even feels INTRINSICALLY wrong. It is also incredibly selfish (I do believe however that all our actions we do are eventually for selfish reasons; if no euphoria was gained from donating to a charity and knowing that you helped improve these peoples lives, then you wouldn't do it).
I imagine a picture where the entire human race takes the pill, then succumb into a position of sleep and remain in that position (in blissful apathy) until the cells do not have enough ATP to function. Yes, my idea severely stunts evolution as you can see. But why is that necessarily bad? It feels morally bad, but I'm thinking about it from a purely abstract and analytical sense.
Is the reason I (and probably others) think morally that this idea is ethically stupid as a result of evolution as well? That is to say, has evolution conditioned me to think that non-evolution promoting activities are intrinsically bad, even if they result in euphoria?
Furthermore, has evolution conditioned our morals? Evidence could point that way. I and many others strongly feel that it is intrinsically wrong to kill somebody. This could be evolutionarily consequential, as killing your own race is not good for your own race's survival. As a result of this, has evolution encouraged our laws?
I want to go a bit further into this issue, particularly regarding laws about drug usage. Even though there is a constant feed of evidence stating how many drugs are safe for usage, the drug law still doesn't change. I know many people propose a variety of complex reasons for this, but I thought I'd share my opinions.
When you take certain drugs, the state of appearance you go into is crucial. I once came back home to my parents in a state of amphetamine induced psychosis, and my mum was horrified. She was intrinsically horrified, based on my appearance. When we further discussed the issue, my parents kept describing "the state I was in" and how they said that, regardless of the scientific evidence I presented to them, it upset them to see me like that.
I wondered for a long time why this was so, and then I thought of a situation where I would be horrified.
I imagined my mother in hospital, heavily drugged up on opioids and benzodiazepines of all sorts. She was very unresponsive, and looked like she was in a horrible state. Her eyes were heavily drooping, unlike normally. She looked like a junkie. Yet, in her very brain, all her mu opiate receptors were nicely saturated and she was in a state of bliss. This parallels with my situation I described above, in my opinion. I thought to myself that if this was happening in real life, I'd feel upset, just like she was, and that the only thing which would possibly keep me up was the scientific knowledge that she was having a good time hopefully.
I feel that if you go into a state of appearance where it doesn't look like you'll promote evolution very well, others will intrinsically feel that the state you are in is not one to strive for. I think that's one of the reasons why the law is such that it prevents you from seeing a load of people on various sorts of classes of drugs which "fuck you up". To be fair, alcohol does that as well at high doses, and it doesn't look brilliant when you see a black out drunk on the street stumbling aimlessly, in my opinion. Anyway, I digress...
The next part about my post is trying to address the issue of getting "used" to the happiness, and how I believe this issue is not a problem.
To try and offer a solution, I consider someone depressed and someone who is normally happy. Whatever the mechanism of depression, I observe (you don't have to agree with the assumption I make here) that one of the characteristic traits of the depressed person is his lack of drive and constant anhedonia even in response to normally hedonic activities (eg like eating food) and constant nihilistic thought processes.
I then propose an alternate definition for depression: lack of drive to live. My evidence based on this is that the majority of people who commit suicide are depressed, and that people who commit suicide not only lack the drive to live, but more so possess a drive not to live (from my understanding, suicide takes a lot of determination and you really need to want to go if you are to be successful).
As a result, my alternate defintion for a normal happy person would be this: drive to live.
These types of people don't really get "used" to their current state of happiness. They essentially settle on it.
However a lot of you would agree that "drive" is definitely quantifiable, and we could definitely somehow increase this value.
Definition of a very happy person: increased drive to live.
I think the definition above is very accurately created when one is peaking on a good dose of MDMA. Well into the peak, I feel extremely elated and it stays at this level. If it can stay like this for a few hours, I don't see why it can't forever (given our understanding in neuropsychobiology is good enough to make such systems). The important thing here is that certain activities are heavily rewarding, like talking to people (more so than normal). Thus I hypothesize that one could be in a super-happy like state while still retaining an evolution-promoting reward system which will keep us alive.
So, what do you guys think? Can we keep on increasing and increasing our normal quality of life, while not hindering our drive to live? In regards to the first point I raised, do you think we are morally obliged to keep ourself alive, or do you find it justified that we curl up into a ball of bliss until we die?
Since taking drugs, I have experienced states of euphoria (and dysphoria) which would have never been achieved normally, and this has made me think about a lot of stuff, mostly to do with the reward system of biological specimens.
My understanding of why a biological reward system is this: it exists to reward us for engaging in evolution-promoting behaviour and reinforces that behaviour. Similarly, nociception exists in us working in reverse (producing pain, a dysphoric sensation) to discourage us from engaging with harmful stimuli.
The way drugs work to create euphoria is by modulating the reward system. For example, amphetamine increases dopamine concentration in the synaptic cleft which eventually inhibits medium spiny neurons in the nucleus accumbens from firing. Inhibition of these neurons creates a phenomenon we perceive as euphoria. They essentially trick our brain into thinking we are doing something which promotes our evolution massively (way more promoting than say eating food), and as a result the behaviour is reinforced massively (hence why people "fiend" for more drugs, "just one more line").
Now before you guys blast me with the how amazingly impossible/impractical this is, I want to say that I know it doesn't sound achievable at least for several centuries or even millennia. I am just concerned with the "ethics" of it.
Anyway, my question is if we could somehow modulate our reward system such that we would be in a constant state of euphoria forever, should we do it? Whether it be using small drug molecules, stimulating the relevant areas of the brain using brain shocks, or even rewriting the human genome as appropriate, would this be something to strive for?
Many of you will think that we would become "used" to the level of euphoria we'd be at, to which I propose an idea for why this could be averted below. For the purposes of the flow of my post, we could just assume that this issue is not a problem for now.
Now, let's hypothetically say that we humans designed a super pill that did just this: put us in a state of conscious bliss forever. What would be the result? The result obviously would be that we stop seeking evolution promoting activities and die out. But my question is this: why is that bad?
When I try to imagine how my idea would play out, it LOOKS horrible. It FEELS terrible. It even feels INTRINSICALLY wrong. It is also incredibly selfish (I do believe however that all our actions we do are eventually for selfish reasons; if no euphoria was gained from donating to a charity and knowing that you helped improve these peoples lives, then you wouldn't do it).
I imagine a picture where the entire human race takes the pill, then succumb into a position of sleep and remain in that position (in blissful apathy) until the cells do not have enough ATP to function. Yes, my idea severely stunts evolution as you can see. But why is that necessarily bad? It feels morally bad, but I'm thinking about it from a purely abstract and analytical sense.
Is the reason I (and probably others) think morally that this idea is ethically stupid as a result of evolution as well? That is to say, has evolution conditioned me to think that non-evolution promoting activities are intrinsically bad, even if they result in euphoria?
Furthermore, has evolution conditioned our morals? Evidence could point that way. I and many others strongly feel that it is intrinsically wrong to kill somebody. This could be evolutionarily consequential, as killing your own race is not good for your own race's survival. As a result of this, has evolution encouraged our laws?
I want to go a bit further into this issue, particularly regarding laws about drug usage. Even though there is a constant feed of evidence stating how many drugs are safe for usage, the drug law still doesn't change. I know many people propose a variety of complex reasons for this, but I thought I'd share my opinions.
When you take certain drugs, the state of appearance you go into is crucial. I once came back home to my parents in a state of amphetamine induced psychosis, and my mum was horrified. She was intrinsically horrified, based on my appearance. When we further discussed the issue, my parents kept describing "the state I was in" and how they said that, regardless of the scientific evidence I presented to them, it upset them to see me like that.
I wondered for a long time why this was so, and then I thought of a situation where I would be horrified.
I imagined my mother in hospital, heavily drugged up on opioids and benzodiazepines of all sorts. She was very unresponsive, and looked like she was in a horrible state. Her eyes were heavily drooping, unlike normally. She looked like a junkie. Yet, in her very brain, all her mu opiate receptors were nicely saturated and she was in a state of bliss. This parallels with my situation I described above, in my opinion. I thought to myself that if this was happening in real life, I'd feel upset, just like she was, and that the only thing which would possibly keep me up was the scientific knowledge that she was having a good time hopefully.
I feel that if you go into a state of appearance where it doesn't look like you'll promote evolution very well, others will intrinsically feel that the state you are in is not one to strive for. I think that's one of the reasons why the law is such that it prevents you from seeing a load of people on various sorts of classes of drugs which "fuck you up". To be fair, alcohol does that as well at high doses, and it doesn't look brilliant when you see a black out drunk on the street stumbling aimlessly, in my opinion. Anyway, I digress...
The next part about my post is trying to address the issue of getting "used" to the happiness, and how I believe this issue is not a problem.
To try and offer a solution, I consider someone depressed and someone who is normally happy. Whatever the mechanism of depression, I observe (you don't have to agree with the assumption I make here) that one of the characteristic traits of the depressed person is his lack of drive and constant anhedonia even in response to normally hedonic activities (eg like eating food) and constant nihilistic thought processes.
I then propose an alternate definition for depression: lack of drive to live. My evidence based on this is that the majority of people who commit suicide are depressed, and that people who commit suicide not only lack the drive to live, but more so possess a drive not to live (from my understanding, suicide takes a lot of determination and you really need to want to go if you are to be successful).
As a result, my alternate defintion for a normal happy person would be this: drive to live.
These types of people don't really get "used" to their current state of happiness. They essentially settle on it.
However a lot of you would agree that "drive" is definitely quantifiable, and we could definitely somehow increase this value.
Definition of a very happy person: increased drive to live.
I think the definition above is very accurately created when one is peaking on a good dose of MDMA. Well into the peak, I feel extremely elated and it stays at this level. If it can stay like this for a few hours, I don't see why it can't forever (given our understanding in neuropsychobiology is good enough to make such systems). The important thing here is that certain activities are heavily rewarding, like talking to people (more so than normal). Thus I hypothesize that one could be in a super-happy like state while still retaining an evolution-promoting reward system which will keep us alive.
So, what do you guys think? Can we keep on increasing and increasing our normal quality of life, while not hindering our drive to live? In regards to the first point I raised, do you think we are morally obliged to keep ourself alive, or do you find it justified that we curl up into a ball of bliss until we die?