Within a few centuries, it will be technically if not ideologically feasible to abolish suffering of any kind. If we wish to do so, then genetic engineering and nanotechnology can be used to banish unpleasant modes of consciousness from the living world. In their place, gradients of life-long, genetically pre-programmed well-being may animate our descendants instead. Millennia if not centuries hence, the world's last aversive experience may even be a precisely dateable event: perhaps a minor pain in an obscure marine invertebrate.
Far-fetched? Right now, the abolitionist project sounds fanciful. The task of redesigning our legacy-wetware still seems daunting. Rewriting the vertebrate genome, and re-engineering the global ecosystem, certainly pose immense scientific challenges even to a technologically advanced civilisation.
The ideological obstacles to a happy world, however, are more formidable still. For we've learned how to rationalise the need for mental pain - even though its nastier varieties blight innumerable lives, and even though its very existence will soon become optional.
Today, any scientific blueprint for getting rid of suffering via biotechnology is likely to be reduced to one of two negative stereotypes. Both stereotypes are disturbing, pervasive, and profoundly ill-conceived. Together, they impoverish our notion of what a Post-Darwinian regime of life-long happiness might be like; and delay its prospect.
- The first stereotype of a pain-free world centres on soma - Aldous Huxley's brilliantly-conceived but spurious evocation of the "ideal pleasure-drug":
"...Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized. Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug. Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant. All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects. Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology. Stability was practically assured..."
Soma is taken by the brainwashed and manipulated dupes of the ruling genetic caste in Brave New World. A cross between a hangoverless tranquilliser and a non-addictive opiate, soma allows Huxley's utopians to enjoy (episodes of) imbecilic, drug-induced bliss to offset their empty consumerist lives. In BNW, soma is a pleasureable cure-all; but it underwrites a static, philistine, loveless society where intellectual progress of any kind has been abolished. Surely we don't want to end up as brave new worlders?
- The second stereotype of life-long bliss strikes us as even more degrading than pharmacological hedonism. It features an intra-cranially self-stimulating rat. The little creature's enraptured frenzy of lever-pressing is eventually followed by death from inanition, self-neglect and immunological collapse. Not just rats, but also fish, chickens, rabbits, guinea pigs, cats, dogs, monkeys and humans have all been found to exhibit electrical self-stimulatory behaviour when given the opportunity to do so. The pleasure-pain axis is an invariant feature of the vertebrate line - and beyond.
In the case of humans, our reward-pathways are (slightly) more anatomically diffuse than the average rodent. At least with present-day electrode-placement techniques, intra-cranial self-stimulation (ICSS) as practised by laboratory humans doesn't lead to uncontrolled hedonistic excess and death. Only depressed or deeply malaise-ridden human subjects compulsively self-stimulate when wired. Ill-defined "ethical constraints", however, are commonly held to forbid the human use of ICSS rather than to mandate its widespread adoption and refinement for "treatment-resistant" depression - even by avowed utilitarians. So instead of using depressed fellow humans, experimenters use rats. Pleasure-crazed rodents have become the symbolic expression of wirehead hedonism - and of all the pitfalls that "unnatural" pleasure entails.
Rats, of course, have a very poor image in our culture. Our mammalian cousins are still widely perceived as "vermin". Thus the sight of a blissed-out, manically self-stimulating rat does not inspire a sense of vicarious happiness in the rest of us. On the contrary, if achieving invincible well-being entails launching a program of world-wide wireheading - or its pharmacological and/or genetic counterparts - then most of us will recoil in distaste.
Yet the Olds' rat, and the image of electronically-triggered bliss, embody a morally catastrophic misconception of the landscape of options for paradise-engineering in the aeons ahead. For the varieties of genetically-coded well-being on offer to our successors needn't be squalid or self-centred. Nor need they be insipid, empty and amoral à la Huxley's Brave New World. Our future modes of well-being can be sublime, cerebral and empathetic - or take forms hitherto unknown.
Instead of being toxic, such exotically enriched states of consciousness can be transformed into the everyday norm of mental health. When it's precision-engineered, hedonic enrichment needn't lead to unbridled orgasmic frenzy. Nor need hedonic enrichment entail getting stuck in a wirehead rut. This is partly because in a naturalistic setting, even the crudest dopaminergic drugs tend to increase exploratory behaviour, will-power and the range of stimuli an organism finds rewarding. Novelty-seeking is normally heightened. Dopaminergics aren't just euphoriants: they also enhance "incentive-motivation". On this basis, our future is likely to be more diverse, not less.
Perhaps surprisingly too, controlled euphoria needn't be inherently "selfish" - i.e. hedonistic in the baser, egoistic sense. Non-neurotoxic and sustainable analogues of empathogen hug-drugs like MDMA ("Ecstasy") - which releases a lot of extra serotonin, dopamine and pro-social oxytocin - may potentially induce extraordinary serenity, empathy and love for others. An arsenal of cognitive enhancers will allow us be smarter too. For feeling blissful isn't the same as being "blissed-out".
Ultimately, however, using drugs or electrodes for psychological superhealth is arguably no better than taking medicines to promote physical superhealth. Such interventions can serve only as dirty and inelegant stopgaps. In an ideal world, our emotional, intellectual and physical well-being would be genetically predestined. A capacity for sustained bliss may be a design-feature of any Post-Darwinian mind. Indeed some futurists predict we will one day live in a paradise where suffering is physiologically inconceivable - a world where we can no more imagine what it is like to suffer than we can presently imagine what it is like to be a bat.
Technofantasy? Quite possibly. Today it is sublime bliss that is effectively inconceivable to most of us.
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