this takes us back to the statement Outlander seems to be interested in: superhappiness is meaningless without some suffering to serve as a foil in a manner of speaking. — TheMadFool

Once again, the intuition is deeply rooted. IMO it's just not supported by the empirical evidence. The temperamentally happiest people are simply born that way – and they don't experience deficits of perceived meaning.

Or consider the rarest of the affective psychoses, unipolar euphoric mania. People in the grip of (hypo)mania find life indiscriminately meaningful. Everything is supercharged with significance.

Transhumanists don't advocate or predict a world of (hypo)mania. But if the hyperthymic civilisation I anticipate comes to pass, then its inhabitants won’t need a contrast with suffering to give meaning to their existence, or fully to savour what they enjoy. A pervasive sense of meaning will be built into the fabric of life itself:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#david
In a civilised world, the "foil" should come from information-sensitive dips and peaks of bliss, not from seesawing between pain and pleasure.

Let us hearken back to the basics. There is no love without something to hate. No joy without something to annoy. No fun without something to bore. Is this true or false, — Outlander

Yes, it's a powerful intuition. But if the existence of pain and pleasure were inseparable, then there would be no victims of chronic pain or depression. Chronic pleasure and happiness aren't harder to engineer genetically; but perpetual euphoria wasn't fitness-enhancing in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Biotech is a game-changer. Humanity now has the tools to create life based entirely on information-sensitive gradients of well-being – and eventually superhuman bliss.

I always think that, vegans don't really like food; don't like to cook - and take no pleasure in eating. — counterpunch

I assume you're trolling. But if not, I promise vegans love food as much as meat eaters. Visit a vegan foodie community if you've any doubt.

It's because we are carnivores. — counterpunch

If so, then it's mysterious why scientific studies suggest vegetarians tend to be slimmer, longer-lived and more intelligent than meat-eaters:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#scientificvege
Strict veganism is relatively new. Perhaps see:
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/vegan-meat-life-expectancy-eggs-dairy-research-a7168036.html
("Vegans Live Longer Than Those Who Eat Meat or Eggs")
Many vegans (and indeed non-vegans) do indeed prudently take a B12 supplement. Alternatives are fortified nutritional yeast (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritional_yeast) or the natural plant source Wolffia globosa (cf. "Wolffia globosa–Mankai Plant-Based Protein Contains Bioactive Vitamin B12 and Is Well Absorbed in Humans": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7600829/ ).

But I love food, I love cooking and eating, and you put yourself between me and a pork chop at your peril! — counterpunch

Is the level of pleasure someone derives from harming his victims – human or nonhuman – a morally relevant consideration?

Otherwise, I've got no idea what's going on - and know nothing to compare it with. I'm loaded onto a truck, and driven to an abattoir. Someone puts something near my head and the world disappears in an instant. — counterpunch

Consider e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icOD7hxUGI8
Worse happens off-camera. Animal agriculture is a crime against sentience.

Now you imagine your life as a pig in the wild being ripped apart and eaten alive by a pack of wild dogs. — counterpunch

Hence the case for:
https://www.reprogramming-predators.com/

Any thoughts on the Allan Savory video? He explains why we need animal agriculture. — counterpunch

For a rebuttal, perhaps see e.g.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/04/allan-savorys-ted-talk-is-wrong-and-the-benefits-of-holistic-grazing-have-been-debunked.html
Civilisation will be vegan.

The grass is always greener on the other side. We want what we can't or at least don't have. Perhaps this is what you refer to? This is what it means to be human. The curse of want and desire. Without this, what differentiates a transhuman from a robot clothed in flesh? — Outlander

Some people cannot imagine life could be different. Suffering shapes their conception of the human predicament and life itself. Other people have tasted paradise and want the world to share their vision. Alas, visions of the ideal society often conflict. Environmentally-based utopian experiments fail. In one sense, the biological-genetic strategy of hedonic uplift is tamer. Potentially, elevated pain thresholds, hedonic range and hedonic set-points can underpin a richer personal quality of life for all, but the manifold social, economic and political problems of society are left unaddressed. I'll bang the drum for a biohappiness revolution for as long as I'm able, but unless (like me) you're a negative utilitarian, it's not a panacea. The end of suffering will still be the most momentous revolution in the history of sentience.

I searched hyperthymia - and those are apparently, associated behaviours — counterpunch

Hyperthymia is the opposite of dysthymia (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysthymia). When advocating a hyperthymic civilisation, I'm urging a society where everyone has, at minimum, the high hedonic set-point of today's temperamentally happiest people who aren't manic (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mania). That said, apologies; I'd do well to use less jargon.

Maybe there will come a time when we understand genetics well enough, that the risk of altering the human genome — counterpunch

If prospective parents agreed on a moratorium on genetic experiments, then an indefinite delay of genome-editing too would be wise. But at present most people intend to keep reproducing willy-nilly. Parenthood inevitably creates more involuntary suffering. So the question arises whether it's ethical not to load the genetic dice in favour of the subjects of the experiments. The least controversial option will be universal access to preimplantation genetic screening and counselling. But gene-editing is now feasible too. We shouldn’t just assume that the upshot of responsible editing will be worse than random genetic mutations and the genetic shuffling of traditional sexual reproduction.

I don't wish to debate vegetarianism with you, because I think it's a perfectly valid choice, but it's absolutely not a moral imperative — counterpunch

We'd both that agree stopping child abuse is morally imperative. The abuse of sentient beings of comparable sentience deserves similar priority. Perhaps try to empathise, if only for 30 seconds, with what it feels like to be, say, a factory-farmed pig.

I could maybe imagine your genetic proscription for gradients of superhuman bliss working out in a prosperous sustainable future, but while the world is a basket case barrelling toward extinction, being deliriously happy nonetheless... — counterpunch

To stress, I do not advocate becoming "deliriously happy". Hedonic set-point elevation doesn’t work like that.

I know you keep saying it wouldn't be like that; that we wouldn't lose our ability to navigate a still - hostile environment, but how can you possibly know? — counterpunch

If the touted biohappiness revolution proposed that we should leapfrog ahead and try to create hedonic supermen, then you'd have a point. I hope I've clearly flagged that discussion of a future world animated by gradients of superhuman bliss is speculation. What isn't speculative is the existence of today's extremely high-functioning hedonic outliers – and the strong genetic loading of hyperthymia. The Anders Sandbergs (cf. https://quotefancy.com/quote/1695040/Anders-Sandberg-I-do-have-a-ridiculously-high-hedonic-set-point) of this world have more than adequate navigational skills. It's chronic depressives who often suffer from a broken compass. Responsible recalibration of the hedonic treadmill promises wider engagement with the problems of the world. Not least, passionate life-lovers care more about the future of sentience than depressive nihilists.

Hyperthymics engage in denial to rationalise their overly-positive mood. They lose the ability to navigate rationally, and the consequences can be just as tragic. Suffering doesn't go away just because the person isn't weeping. We are after all social beings, and hyperthymics go around inflicting their risk taking, attention seeking, libidinous psychology on others. — counterpunch

Is it possible you're conflating hyperthymia with mania? Yes, unusually temperamentally happy people have proverbially rose-tinted spectacles. Their affective biases need to be exhaustively researched before there's any bid to create a hyperthymic society. But the kind of temperament I had in mind is exemplified by the author of The Precipice (2020). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity
Extreme life-lovers may take more risks in some ways, but are on guard to avert them in others
(see my disagreement with Toby e.g.
https://www.hedweb.com/social-media/pre2014.html).

Or do you reserve such dehumanising ideas solely for humans? — counterpunch

My describing human and nonhuman animals as sentient organic robots isn't intended to "dehumanise" them. Rather, it's to highlight how our behaviour is mechanistically explicable – and how we can create an architecture of mind that doesn't depend on pain. Inorganic robots don't need a signalling system of sub-zero states to function; re-engineered organic robots can do likewise.

Humans are sentient beings at the top of the food chain. Fish are meat. Humans eat meat, and need to produce it sustainably rather than dredge to oceans to death. I do not condone animals suffering any more than is necessary, but they're mortal, and humane farming is far kinder than nature – which really is red in tooth and claw. Most humans born will reach maturity. That's not so in nature. — counterpunch

Around 20% of humans never eat meat. Humans don't need to eat meat in order to flourish. Instead of harming our fellow creatures, we should be helping them by civilising the biosphere (cf. https://www.gene-drives.com). In the meantime, the cruelties of Nature don't serve as a moral license for humans to add to them via animal agriculture.

Interfering in the human genome, so altering every subsequent human being who will ever live, is a risk that's not justified by depression — counterpunch

Recall that all humans are untested genetic experiments. The germline can be edited – and unedited. But if we don't fix our legacy code, then atrocious suffering will proliferate indefinitely.

if we don't feel the suffering, we will still suffer, but just won't know that we are suffering. — counterpunch

I'm struggling to parse this. Yes, feelings of malaise or discomfort may sometimes be subtle and elusive. But the "raw feels" of outright suffering – whether psychological or physical – are unmistakably nasty by their very nature. "The having is the knowing", as Galen Strawson puts it. Either way, if we replace the biology of hedonically sub-zero states with information-sensitive gradients of well-being, then unpleasant experience will become physically impossible. It won't be missed.

But nevertheless there will always be more bliss to be had, if not is this not a prison your movement attempts to create? People will always seek more pleasure. Will they not? — Outlander

Indeed. Even an “ideal” pleasure drug could be abused. The classic example from fiction is soma (cf. https://www.huxley.net/soma/somaquote.html) in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I hope that establishment pharmacologists and the scientific counterculture alike can develop more effective mood-brighteners to benefit both the psychologically ill and the nominally well. Yet one reason I’ve focused on genetic recalibration and genetically-driven hedonic uplift is precisely to avoid the pitfalls of drug abuse. Whether you're a hyperthymic with an innate hedonic range of, say, 0 to +10 or a posthuman ranging from +90 to +100, you can continue to seek more – where the guise of “more” depends on how your emotions are encephalised. But an elevated hedonic set-point doesn’t pose the personal, interpersonal and societal challenges of endemic drug-taking. Indeed, we don’t know whether posthumans will take psychoactive drugs at all. I often assume that posthumans will take innovative designer drugs in order to explore alien state-spaces of consciousness. However, maybe our successors will opt to be mostly if not entirely drug-free. After all, if there weren’t something fundamentally wrong with our human default state of consciousness, then would we try so hard to change it? It’s tragic that mankind's attempts to do so are often so inept.

I have a sense that suffering helps us navigate, and altering the genetic hedonic pre-disposition would reciprocally alter the genetic basis of suffering, and leave us incapable of overcoming even the slightest obstacle. Like the fat people in the floaty chairs! Or the 30 million dead colonists on Miranda - in the film Serenity, who had unending bliss forced upon them, and just laid down and died. — counterpunch

The pleasure-pain axis plays an indispensable signalling role in organic (but not inorganic) robots. When information-signalling wholly or partly breaks down, as in severe chronic depression or mania, the results are tragic. But consider high-functioning depressives and high-functioning hyperthymics. High-functioning hyperthymics tend to enjoy a vastly richer quality of life. Let's for now set aside futuristic speculation on an advanced civilization based on gradients of superhuman bliss. What are the pros and cons of using gene-editing to create just a hyperthymic society – where everyone enjoys a hedonic set-point and hedonic range comparable to today's genetically privileged hedonic elite?

You mention the fictional colonists of Miranda:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_(2005_film)
Their fate is not a sociologically credible model for a world based on gradients of genetically programmed well-being. Hyperthymics tend to be ardent life-lovers. What's more, the extent to which any of us persevere or "give up" will itself soon be amenable to fine-grained control (cf. "Researchers discover the science behind giving up": https://newsroom.uw.edu/news/researchers-discover-science-behind-giving). If desired, medical science can endow us with fanatical willpower sufficient to appease even the most avid Nietzschean. Depressives are prone to weakness of will and self-neglect.

This is quite aside from the fact that it's an unsystematic application of science, that by rights should start with limitless clean energy, carbon capture, desalination and irrigation, hydrogen fuel, total recycling, fish farming etc; so as to secure a prosperous sustainable future. I know that would make me, genuinely, much happier. — counterpunch

Fish are sentient beings. Intelligent moral agents should enable fish to flourish, not exploit and kill them
(cf. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/18/horrific-footage-reveals-fish-suffocating-to-death-on-industrial-farms-in-italy).
I promise that transhumanists are as keen as anyone on a prosperous, sustainable future. Upgrading our reward circuitry will ensure that sentient beings are better able to enjoy it.

Now, maybe this is a Stockholm-Syndrome approach...But in general I really do think that there may be something to the old idea that undergoing suffering is a condition for a more finely-tuned happiness. — csalisbury

Allow me to pass over where we agree and focus on where we may differ. Each of us must come to terms with the pain and grief in our own lives. Often the anguish is very personal. Uniquely, humans have the ability to rationalise their own suffering and mortality. Rationalisation is normally only partially successful, but it’s a vital psychological crutch. Around 850,000 people each year fail to "rationalise" the unrationalisable and take their own lives. Millions more try to commit suicide and fail. Factory-farmed nonhuman animals lack the cognitive capacity and means to do so.

However, rationalisation can have an insidious effect. If (some) suffering has allegedly been good for us, won’t suffering sometimes have redeeming features for our children and grandchildren – and indeed for all future life? So let’s preserve the biological-genetic status quo. I don't buy this argument; it’s ethically catastrophic. For the first time in history, it's possible to map out the technical blueprint for a living world without suffering. Political genius is now needed to accelerate a post-Darwinian transition. Recall that young children can't rationalise. Nor can nonhuman animals. We should safeguard their interests too. If we are prepared to rewrite our genomes, then happiness can be as "finely-tuned" and information-sensitive as we wish, but on an exalted plane of well-being. Transhuman life will be underpinned by a default hedonic tone beyond today’s “peak experiences”.

One strand of thought that opposes the rationalising impulse is represented by David Benatar's Better Never To Have Been, efilism and “strong” antinatalism:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#main
Alas, the astute depressive realism of their diagnosis isn't matched by any clear-headedness of their prescriptions. I hesitate to say this for fear of sounding messianic, but only transhumanism can solve the problem of suffering. Darwinian malware contains the seeds of its own destruction. A world based on gradients of bliss won’t need today's spurious rationalisations of evil. Let’s genetically eliminate hedonic sub-zero experience altogether.

If I may say so, some Buddhists (Tibetans mostly I suppose) would, at some point, connect the dots and come to the realization that transhumanists are reincarnations of Siddhartha Gautama :smile: They seem to have as of yet failed to make that connection. I hope they do and soon; I'm sure a little help from the 535 million Buddhists around the world will do the transhumanist cause some good. Expect yourselves to be worshipped at some point is what I have to say. — TheMadFool

Hah. You’re very kind. Individual transhumanists are all too human. But your essential point stands. The abolitionist strand in modern transhumanism is really secular Buddhism, minus the metaphysical accretions. Suffering is vile, stupid and computationally redundant.

...and finally, seriously, and like adults, discuss what we really want - superhappiness (supernirvana) - and come up with a good plan how we're going to get there! — TheMadFool

Absolutely.
At the risk of sounding like a crude technological determinist, some strands of the transhumanist agenda are bound to happen anyway. For instance, radical antiaging interventions won’t need selling. Bioconservatives will seize on the chance to stay youthful as eagerly as radical futurists. Today’s lame rationalisations of death and aging will be swept aside. Likewise with AI and the growth of “narrow” superintelligence, immersive VR and so forth. I’m most cautious about timescales for the end of suffering and the third “super” of transhumanism, superhappiness. When scientific understanding of the pleasure-pain axis matures, the end of suffering and a civilisation of superhuman bliss are probably just as inevitable as pain-free surgery. But the sociological and political revolution needed for all prospective parents world-wide to participate in a reproductive revolution of hyperthymic designer babies is fathomlessly complicated. I fantasise about a WHO-sponsored Hundred-Year Plan to defeat the biology of suffering. Almost certainly, this is just utopian dreaming. Political genius is needed to accelerate the project.

Sounds like one helluva party! Who in his right mind can say "no" to that! — TheMadFool

Alas, naysayers exist, even on this forum. But yes, transhuman life based on gradients of superhuman bliss will exceed our wildest expectations.

Thus, happiness and suffering are ultimately about living as long as possible i.e. happiness and suffering, whatever value one may choose to ascribe to them as transhumanists are currently doing, boils down keeping the flame of life burning to the maximum extent possible; in other words, the objective, the end, here seems to be immortality and happiness-suffering are merely the means. — TheMadFool

My view of Darwinian life is so bleak that I'm more likely to quote Heinrich Heine, "Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all." Sorry. But aging and bereavement are sources of such misery that I share the transhumanist goal of their abolition via science. Mastery of our reward circuitry promises to make the nihilistic sentiments of NU antinatalists like me unthinkable.

Both buddhism and transhumanism acknowledge suffering as undesirable and happiness as a desideratum. However, to borrow computing terms, buddhism is about updating as it were our software - leave the world as it is but change/adapt our minds to it in such a way that suffering is minimized and happiness is maximized (I'll leave nirvana out of the discussion for the moment) - and transhumanism is about upgrading our hardware - change the world and also change our brains towards the same ends. — TheMadFool

Yes. Pain and suffering have always been inevitable. Symptomatic relief is sometimes possible, but not far-reaching. But for the first time in history, we can glimpse the prospect of new reward architecture – not just the alleviation of specific external causes of suffering, but any suffering, and even the conceivability of suffering – and not in some mythical afterlife, but here on Earth. If we opt to edit our genomes, the world's last unpleasant experience may be a few centuries away. Pursuing the Noble Eightfold path can't recalibrate the hedonic treadmill or break the food chain, so a pragmatist like Gautama Buddha born today would surely approve. The hardware/software metaphor for the mind-brain shouldn't be taken too literally, but yes, transhumanism promises a revolution in both.

Another distinction between traditional Buddhism and transhumanism is the role of desire. Buddhists equate desire with suffering. Frustrated desires sometimes cause misery. Biotech can do permanently what mu-opioid agonist drugs do fleetingly, namely create serene bliss - an absence of desire that should be distinguished from the anhedonia and amotivational syndrome experienced by many depressives. However, serene bliss is the recipe for a world of lotus-eaters (cf. Tranquilism (2017) by Lucas Gloor: https://longtermrisk.org/tranuilism/). The prospect of quietly savouring beautiful states of consciousness for all eternity doesn't appal me; but expressing delight in idleness is a culturally unacceptable sentiment, for the most part at any rate. Witness the modern cult of "productivity". So it's worth stressing a viable alternative scenario, a world of gradients of superhappiness and hypermotivation. This combination ought not to be possible if the Buddhist diagnosis of our predicament were correct. Pathological manifestations of this combination of traits can be seen today in euphoric mania. Yet it's an empirical fact that the temperamentally happiest "normal" people today typically experience the most desires, not the least. Many depressives experience the opposite syndrome. Maybe in the very long-term future, advanced superbeings will opt to live in perpetual hedonic +100 super-nirvana. But perhaps a more sociologically realistic scenario for the next few eons is hypermotivated bliss – crudely, a world of doing rather than contemplating, and a civilisation where all sentient beings feel profoundly blissful but not "blissed out": https://www.superhappiness.com/

Isn't there a danger that in entertaining transhumanism, we're always 'distracted by expectation' in just this way? — csalisbury

You have a point. I've never read The Beast in the Jungle, but I get the gist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_in_the_Jungle

However, here is a counterargument. Transhumanism at its best aims to promote the well-being of all sentience, or at least all sentience in our forward light-cone. I take a range of pills and potions, and intend to be symbolically cryothanased aged 75 or so with a view to reanimation, but it's not as though I anticipate seeing the Promised Land with any great confidence – quite aside from my scepticism about the metaphysics of enduring personal identity. Rather, our responsibility as intelligent moral agents is to try to ensure that future beings don't suffer in the way that human and nonhuman animals do today. We’re stepping-stones. No one should have to undergo the ravages of aging, witness the death of a loved one, experience psychological illness, or undergo the mundane frustrations and disappointments of Darwinian life. No sentient being should be factory-farmed, perish in the death factories, or starve or fall victim to a predator in Nature. The fact that many / most / all of us will never personally live to see the glorious future of sentience doesn't diminish our obligation to work to that end.

How fast or how long do you think humanity will switch over to transhumanism? — Shawn

I would guess that next century most people will be transhumanists. Presumably, inhabitants of twenty-second century won't use the label "transhumanist" any more than modern humans call ourselves "trans-neanderthal".
If my scepticism about a machine "Intelligence Explosion" is unwarranted, then this timescale is too cautious:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#intelexplos

What lies beyond heaven? — TheMadFool

Posthuman heaven is probably just a foretaste of the wonders in store for sentience. Humans don’t have the conceptual scheme to describe life in a low-grade heavenly civilization with a hedonic range of +10 to +20, let alone a mature heaven with hedonic architecture of mind that spans, say, +90 to +100. The puritanical NU in me sometimes feels it’s morally frivolous to speculate on Heaven+ or Paradise 2.0. Yet if theoretical physicists are allowed to speculate on exotic states of matter and energy, then bioethicists may do so too – and bioethicists may have a keener insight into the long-term future of matter and energy in the cosmos.

But first the unknowns. Neuroscience hasn’t yet deciphered the molecular signature of pure bliss, merely narrowed its location to a single cubic millimetre in the posterior ventral pallidum in rats, scaled up to a cubic centimetre in humans. Next, neuroscience hasn’t cracked the binding problem: https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/binding-interview.html
Unless you’re a strict NU, there’s not much point in creating patterns of blissful mind-dust or mere microexperiential zombies of hedonistic neurons. Rather, we’re trying to create cognitively intact unified subjects of bliss endowed with physically bigger and qualitatively richer here-and-nows. And next, how will tomorrow’s bliss be encephalised? The Darwinian bric-a-brac that helped our genes leave more copies of themselves in the ancestral environment of adaptation has no long-term future. The egocentric virtual worlds run by Darwinian minds may disappear too. But the intentional objects and default state-spaces of consciousness of posthumans are inconceivable to Darwnian primitives. Next, how steep or shallow will be the hedonic gradients of minds in different ranks of posthuman heaven? I sometimes invoke a +70 to a +100 supercivilisation, but this example isn’t a prediction. Rather, a wide hedonic range scanario can be chosen to spike the guns of critics who claim that posthuman heaven would necessarily be less diverse than Darwinian life with our schematic hedonic -10 to 0 to +10. Lastly, will the superpleasure axis continue to preserve a signaling function? Or will mature post-posthumans opt to offload the infrastructure of superheaven to zombie AI, and occupy hedonically “perfect” +100 states of mind indefinitely?

Talk of “perfection” is again likely to raise the hackles of critics worried about homogeneity. But a hedonically “perfect” +100 here-and-now can have humanly unimaginable richness. Monotony is a concept that belongs to the Darwinian era.

The above discussion assumes that advanced posthumans won’t be strict classical utilitarians who opt to engineer a hedonium/utilitronium shockwave. One political compromise is to preserve a bubble of complex civilization underpinned by information-signaling gradients of well-being that is surrounded by an expanding shockwave of pure bliss – not an ideal world by the lights of pure CU, but something close enough.

My hope in this discussion is to invite David Pearce to the discussion or alternatively see if other members can overcome the anxiety of death and live a more rich and happy life. — Shawn

Shawn, thank you for the invite. Defeating death and aging is going to be insanely difficult, but transhumans will be quasi-immortal. Whole-body replacements ("head transplants”) should be possible in a decade or two. Cyborgisation will accelerate. I reckon the biggest technical challenge will be sustaining eternally youthful brains. Yet already, transplanting dopamine-producing nerve cells grown from a patient's own cells back into their brain can relieve motor signs and depressive symptoms in Parkinson’s disease. Aging but nominally healthy humans too could benefit from the enhanced mood, motivation and vitality conferred by implants. Where (if anywhere) do we stop? Thorny issues of the nature of enduring personal (non-)identity can't be dodged:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#parfit

You sound passionate, David. I've asked this before and perhaps you may feel annoyed even by responding again but let this if nothing else be a rhetorical question.

What interests you? Why is that? Perhaps because there is a problem to be solved. Imagine sitting in a room full of "solved" or completed Rubix cubes. Would you not wish for someone if not even yourself to twist one toward unexpected parameters? I once again challenge you to try this setting for yourself. And perhaps you may see, there is fire and water for a reason. — Outlander

Alien state-spaces of consciousness interest me:
https://www.hedweb.com/funpages/sasha-dave.html
A drug-naïve conceptual scheme recognises only two state-spaces, dreaming and waking consciousness. There exist trillions of unexplored state-spaces of consciousness, mutually unintelligible and incommensurable, in part at least. Whereas lucid dreamers have at least glimmerings of an understanding of waking consciousness, the drug-naïve have no insight into what they lack, nor even the privative terms with which to name their ignorance. A post-Galilean science of mind is still a pipedream.

So why stick to wordy scholasticism rather than become a full-time psychonaut? Essentially, dark Darwinian minds can't safely explore psychedelia, nor responsibly urge others to try. For now, most knowledge of reality must remain off-limits. Scientists play around with the mathematical formalism (all science formally reduces to the Standard Model and General Relativity), but science has no real understanding of most of the solutions to the equations. Abolishing the molecular signature of experience below hedonic zero can allow serious investigation of the properties of matter and energy rather than idle word-spinning. The idea that abolishing suffering will abolish intellectual challenge or the growth of knowledge is a myth. Billions of years of investigation lie ahead. But let's investigate the properties of Heaven rather than Hell. And let's first discharge our moral obligation to eradicate suffering:
https://www.abolitionist.com

I do not think it is possible to eliminate the possibility of such pain and still remain living beings. — Metaphysician Undercover

Does suffering define what it means to be human? (cf. "A World Without Pain
Does hurting make us human?" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-without-pain)
If so, then very well: let us become transhuman. I think you'd be on much firmer ground if you focused on the potential pitfalls of life without psychological and physical pain. They are legion. Done ineptly, an architecture of mind based entirely on gradients of bliss isn't just potentially risky for an individual, but a leap into the unknown for civilisation as a whole. Hence the need for exhaustive research.

If your goal is to manipulate the human being towards a more civilized existence, then the propensity for human beings to mistreat others is what you ought to focus on, rather than the capacity for pain. See, you appear to be focused on relieving the symptoms, rather than curing the illness itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

Genetically eradicating the predisposition to suffer is more than symptomatic relief; it's a cure. I'm as keen as anyone on improving human behaviour to humans and nonhuman animals alike. We are quasi-hardwired to cause suffering – and to suffer ourselves in turn. And it's not just enemies who cause grief to each other. See e.g. The Scientific Reason Why We Hurt The Ones We Love Most – https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/aggression-research_n_5532142.
In the long run, maybe universal saintliness can be engineered. But the goal of eradicating suffering is modest in comparison.

If we're already civilised, then what could it even mean to suggest making us more civilised? — Metaphysician Undercover

It’s uncivilised for sentient beings to hurt, harm and kill each other. It’s uncivilised for sentient beings to undergo involuntary pain and suffering – or any experience below hedonic zero. The nature of mature posthuman civilisation is speculative. But I reckon the entire Darwinian era will be best forgotten like a bad dream.

Do you think you'd enjoy it more if you put it on a slightly lower difficulty? — Down The Rabbit Hole

I'm sceptical! Either way, I think the point stands. The end of suffering isn't tantamount to the end of competition, let alone the end of intellectual progress. Sentience deserves a more civilised signalling system.

The issue, in my mind, is not whether suffering is indispensable, but the question of whether we can have gain without the possibility of suffering. If it is the case, as I believe it is, that all actions which could result in a gain, also run some risk of loss, and loss implies suffering, then to avoid suffering requires that we avoid taking any actions which might produce a gain. But if gain is necessary for happiness, and this is inevitable due to biological needs, then the goal of happiness cannot include the elimination of suffering. Therefore the goal of eliminating suffering must have something other than happiness as its final end. What could that final end be? If eliminating suffering is itself the final end, but it can only be brought about at the cost of eliminating happiness, then it's not such a noble goal. — Metaphysician Undercover

Perhaps consider e.g.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/07/alphazero-google-deepmind-ai-beats-champion-program-teaching-itself-to-play-four-hours
Competition doesn't inherently involve suffering. I'd love to win against the program I play chess against, but losing never causes me to suffer. Granted, the idea of zero-sum games, and the pain caused by losing to a human opponent, is so endemic to Darwinian life that it's easy to imagine that it's inherent to competition itself. But life doesn't have to be this way. Hedonic uplift can be combined with recursive intellectual self-improvement. Either way, we should all be free to choose. As biotech matures, no one should be forced to endure the substrates of involuntary suffering.

Have you ever suffered, David? Ever noticed or experienced hardship enough to motivate you to do something .. oh apparently you have as this is the purported moral and intellectual basis of this movement of yours. Where would you be without these occurrences? How impactful do you think they were for spurring positive change? Apparently great, if your mission is so dire. So tell me. What motivation, drive, and desire will others expect in your envisioned world? Any drive to even get out of bed? Any at all? Some may argue, this idea damns those confined by it to an even worse fate then the current mitigated Darwinian hell we have (civilized society, manners, rules, occasional decency, etc.). Your response? — Outlander

What's in question isn't whether suffering in all its guises can sometimes be functionally useful; it sure can. Rather, what needs questioning is the widespread assumption that the "raw feels" of suffering are computationally indispensable. If the indispensability hypothesis were ever demonstrated, then this result would be a revolutionary discovery in computer science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis
For what it's worth, I hold the distinctly unorthodox view that phenomenal binding is non-algorithmic. What's more, the phenomenal unity of experience is often massively adaptive for biological minds. But we need only study the happiest hyperthymics to realise that suffering isn't indispensable to either to cognition or motivation. Neither is happiness, though happier people tend to be better motivated. See too the work of Kent Berridge on the double dissociability of "liking" and "wanting" (cf. https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/research-overview/neuroscience-of-linking-and-wanting/), mu-opioidergic hedonic tone and dopaminergic motivation.

In short, information-sensitive hedonic gradients are the key to intelligent, motivated behaviour – irrespective of one's absolute location on the pleasure-pain axis. And ethically, information-sensitive gradients of bliss are surely preferable to gradients of misery and malaise, the plight of so many sentient beings alive today.

If we remove that pain and suffering, extinguish the possibility of failure, make the AI always lose no matter what, or whatever is required to negate the possibility of suffering, then there is no drive or ambition to better oneself. — Metaphysician Undercover

But to return to the earlier example of playing chess, one can fanatically aspire to improve one's game and play to win even though one will invariably lose. I know of no reason why the "raw feels" of experience below hedonic zero need conserving. After all, our intelligent machines don't need to suffer in order to become smarter or competitively more successful. In future, suffering will be redundant for (trans)humans too.

So what would be the point to continually inducing the joy and pleasure of winning in a person, without requiring the person to actually compete and win, or even do anything, to receive that pleasure? If it is not required to do the good act, to receive the pleasure of doing a good act, then when is anyone ever going to be doing anything good? — Metaphysician Undercover

Two invincibly happy (trans)humans can play competitive chess against each other and both improve their game. Honestly, I don't see the problem!

But you are undermining science as a rationale with your Frankenstein-esque suggestions, that we genetically engineer ourselves into a race of supermen, while ignoring the moral, social, political, economic environmental implications of using science in such a way. You propose genetically enhanced longevity for example, and do not seem to realise that longevity would be problematic in all sorts of ways, not least, environmentally. — counterpunch

In what sense is aiming to phase out the biology of suffering "Frankenstein-esque"? Either way, the biggest obstacle to tackling man-made climate change and environmental degradation is short-termism. Yes, you're right, creating a world where people don't crumble away and perish has implications for the environment. But the impact won't necessarily be as pessimists suppose. Crudely, if you think you're going to be around for hundreds or thousands of years (or more), then you are more likely to care about the long-term fate of the planet than if you reckon it will be someone else's problem.

I don't know where deliriously happy designer babies that live forever comes on such a list of scientifically rational ethical priorities, but I'm pretty sure limitless clean energy from magma is logically prior... — counterpunch

But transhumanists do not advocate "deliriously" happy designer babies. Delirium is inimical to cognition. Rather, they urge information-sensitive gradients of well-being. Intelligence-amplification is one of the core tenets of transhumanism.

Are you saying I would still be depressed because of my mood genes? I could be happy! I'm not, but I think I could be! — counterpunch

Many completely paralysed people with "locked in" syndrome suffer terribly. But the high genetic loading of default hedonic tone together with the negative-feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill mean that a large minority if not a majority of locked-in patients report being happy:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20162-most-locked-in-people-are-happy-survey-finds/
Conversely, some able-bodied people "have it all", yet they are chronically miserable. I'm not trying to downplay the importance of social, economic and political reform in making the world a better place – or protecting the environment. Yet if we're ethically serious about solving the problem of suffering, we'll need to tackle its genetic source.

My question is simple but very urgent/important one:
How can I, as just an ordinary person, can contribute to quicken the progress of Transhumanism? — niki wonoto

Niki, awesome, would you consider getting your own website / YouTube channel with a version in bahasa Indonesia? People tend to be more receptive to a new idea if the message is conveyed in their native language.

Also, do you think Transhumanism will have any possibility to finally become mainstream in public? — niki wonoto

It's been well said that humans tend to overestimate the effects of change in the short-run and underestimate its effects in the long run. Yes, all this grandiose talk about a glorious future civilisation of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness may ring a little hollow when one is forced to confront the problems of everyday life – bills to pay, chores to do, and the messiness of interpersonal relationships. But Darwinian life as we understand it has no long-term future.

How can we really make sure that Transhumanism will really work, instead of failing or eventually got diminished & slowly disappearing as if it never exists, considering how short attention span of our human species/humanity/mankind? — niki wonoto

Cognitive frailty, aging, death and all manner of physical and psychological suffering is "part of what it means to be human". But biotech and IT will shortly make such horrors optional. I don't want to sound like a naïve technological determinist, but just consider: if offered the chance to become immensely smarter, happier and indefinitely youthful, how many people will prefer to be intellectually handicapped, malaise-ridden and decrepit?

At the risk of tempting fate, I'll say it: history is (probably) on our side.

So this "intensely rewarding experience" which we get from succeeding in competition, you designate as seated in a vice, or vices, This would mean that it is a bad rewarding experience which ought to be eliminated. But on what principles do you designate some rewarding experiences as associated with vices, and some as associated with virtues? I would think that if you want to eliminate some such intensely rewarding experiences, and emphasize others, you would require some objective principles for distinguishing the one category, vice, from the other, virtue. — Metaphysician Undercover

Competing against earlier iterations of oneself or an insentient AI doesn't raise ethical problems. More controversial would be competing in zero-sum games against other (trans)humans where losing causes a drop in the well-being of one's opponent without their ever falling below hedonic zero. Such competition is problematic for the classical utilitarian, but not for the negative utilitarian. However, what I'd argue is morally indefensible is demanding that the loser involuntarily suffers when experience below hedonic zero becomes technically optional. Contemplating the pain of a defeated opponent sharpens the relish of some winners today. Let's hope such ill will has no long-term future.

An antirealist about value might contest even this fairly modest principle. My response to the antirealist:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#metaethics.
But as I said, emphasizing hedonic uplift and set-point recalibration over traditional environmental reforms can circumvent most – but not all – of the dilemmas posed by human value-systems and preferences that are logically irreconcilable.

However, it appears to me like such cooperation is more likely to be obtained in the face of serious evil, rather than the effort to obtain some designated good — Metaphysician Undercover

If depression isn’t a serious evil, then I don’t know what is – human “mood genes” are sinister beyond belief. Anyhow, governance by philosophers isn't imminent. Nor is rule by transhumanists, though transhumanist memes appear to be spreading. Sadly, I don't foresee what I'd like to materialise – a Hundred-Year Genetic Plan of worldwide hedonic uplift and recalibration under the auspices of the WHO to fulfil the goal of its founding constitution. What’s more credible is genome-editing to tackle well-recognised monogenetic diseases followed by interventions to tackle a genetic predisposition to abnormal pain-sensitivity, low mood and other forms of mental ill-health. Yes, I find this a disappointingly slow prospect. All of what today pass as enhancement technologies will be recognised by posthumans as remediation.

Wild cards? Well, part of me yearns for the hedonic equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
– a visionary politician who takes a biohappiness revolution from the margins to the mainstream. Alas, I’m not holding my breath.

Let's take an example then, competition. Winning a competition is one of the most intensely rewarding experiences for some people. Even just as a spectator of a sport, having your team win provides a very rewarding experience. But we can't always win, and losing is very disappointing. How do you think it's possible to maintain that intensely rewarding experience, which comes from success, without the possibility of disappointment from failure? It seems like a large part of the rewarding feeling is dependent on the possibility of failure. We can't have everyone winning all the time because there must be losers. And there would be no rewarding experience from success, without the possibility of failure. How could there be if success was already guaranteed? — Metaphysician Undercover

"It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail", said Gore Vidal. “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” Yes, evolution has engineered humans with a predisposition to be competitive, jealous, envious, resentful and other unlovely traits. Their conditional activation has been fitness-enhancing. In the long run, futurists can envisage genetically-rewritten superintelligences without such vices. After all, self-aggrandisement and tribalism reflect primitive cognitive biases, not least the egocentric illusion. Yet what can be done in the meantime?

Well, one of the reasons I've focused on hedonic uplift and set-point recalibration is that the dilemmas of social competition can be side-stepped. Depressives and hyperthymics alike prefer winning to losing. But if you're an extreme hyperthymic, losing doesn’t cause your hedonic tone to dip below zero, just as if you’re a chronic depressive, winning doesn't raise your hedonic tone above zero. So at the risk of sounding like a crude genetic determinist, I say: let's aim to create a hyperthymic society via some biological-genetic tweaking.

I've outlined possible routes to explore such as ACKR3 receptor blockade and kappa opioid receptor antagonism; routine preimplantation genetic screening and counselling for prospective parents; germline gene-tweaking of FAAH and FAAH-OUT genes (etc); and a whole bunch of stuff to help nonhuman animals. If society puts as much effort and financial resources into revolutionising hedonic adaptation as it's doing to defeat COVID, then the hedonic treadmill can become a hedonistic treadmill. Globally boosting hedonic range and hedonic set-points by biological-genetic interventions would certainly be a radical departure from the status quo; but a biohappiness revolution is not nearly as genetically ambitious as a complete transformation of human nature. And complications aside, hedonic uplift doesn't involve creating "losers", the bane of traditional utopianism.

Wow, can you imagine the boredom of being in a spaceship flying to another galaxy? To see what? There must better reasons for wanting an extended life than this. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm inclined to agree. If we accept the contention of Rare Earthers that the rest of our galaxy is lifeless, then the allure of interstellar travel may pall. Granted, the biology of boredom is easier to retire than the biology of aging. Extrasolar space travel doesn't have to consist of decades or centuries of tedium. Even so, what's the point of it all? If lifeless rocks appeal to your sensibilities, then why not live in a barren desert closer to home?

Perhaps it could be argued that vacant ecological niches tend to get filled. It's plausible that an advanced posthuman civilisation will decide to use AI to optimise matter and energy within its cosmological horizon. But here we are well into the realm of science-fiction.

If we remove all suffering, doesn't the extended life just turn into one long boring flight to nowhere. Might as well be an eternal brain in a vat. — Metaphysician Undercover

Here it's possible we may differ. The suggestion one sometimes hears that we should conserve suffering because "heaven" would be tedious is ill-conceived:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#heaven
Perhaps consider the most intensely rewarding experiences of human life. They are experienced as intensely significant by their very nature. Thus no one says, "I feel sublimely happy but my life feels empty and meaningless." Replacing the biology of misery and malaise with life based on information-sensitive gradients of bliss will also solve the problem of meaninglessness. Indeed, despite being a pessimistic, button-pressing negative utilitarian, my tentative prediction is that the least meaningful moments of posthuman life will be experienced as vastly more significant than any human "peak experience" in virtue of their richer hedonic tone.

"Transcendent" meaning is a different question; it's not clear that the idea is even intelligible. But just as I anticipate the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable a few centuries (?) from now, likewise the last time anyone reflects that life is meaningless is likely to be a precisely datable event too. The end of the Darwinian era will be a moral and intellectual watershed in every sense.

In the grand picture of things, 70-80 years is miniscule for a species to collectively survive or undertake grand projects like space exploration or multiplanetary colonies, yes? — Shawn

Yes. Human lifespans are inadequate for interstellar travel, let alone galactic exploration. Human lifespans are inadequate for investigating the billions of alien state-spaces of consciousness accessible to exploration by future psychonauts. Only the drug-naïve (cf. John Horgan's The End of Science (1996)) could believe that the world's greatest intellectual discoveries lie behind rather than ahead of us. I won't pretend the pursuit of knowledge is my motivation for wanting humanity to defeat aging. But then most people – and certainly most transhumanists – aren't negative utilitarians.

It seems strange that people seem to accept these facts as tautological, and instead continue saving money in a bank account instead of investing it in something so fundamental as to live longer or potentially for as long as possible.

Why is this all so? — Shawn

A high capacity for self-deception is probably critical to what now passes for mental health. Until recently, helping people rationalise aging, death and suffering was wholly admirable: nothing could be done about the "natural" order of things. Despite my dark view of Darwinian life (cf. "Pessimism Counts in Favor of Biomedical Enhancement: A Lesson from the Anti-Natalist Philosophy of P. W. Zapffe" by Ole Martin Moen: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12152-021-09458-8), I urge opt-out cryonics, opt-in cryothanasia, and a massive global project to defeat the scourge of aging.

One tool of life-extension is mood-enrichment. Happy people typically live longer.

Thanks for the kind words. They are very much appreciated. A lot to chew on. Let me start with your question:

What makes you sad? Why is that? — Outlander

Knowledge. The suffering in the world (more strictly, the universal wavefuction) appals me. I long for blissful ignorance. Alas, it would be irresponsible to urge invincible ignorance until all the ethical duties of intelligence in the cosmos have been discharged.
Until then, knowledge is a necessary evil.

If the future is sublime or not, will not depend primarily on CRISPR. It will depend primarily on energy technology, carbon capture and storage, desalination and irrigation and recycling technology being applied first. Or do you suggest that people can be blissfully happy with the sky on fire?

Maybe that is your suggestion - and herein lies the question: how far would you go with the genetic toolkit to survive in a world where you've developed genetics to a fine art, but let the environment run to ruin? — counterpunch

There's no tension between radical life-extension, genetic mood-enrichment and responsible stewardship of Earth. For instance, one reason that many people are unwilling to accept even modest personal inconvenience to tackle global warming is the assumption they won't be around personally to suffer the consequences. Let's face it, a 3mm rise in the mean sea levels each year doesn't sound too alarming unless you happen to live on a low-lying island or a coastal floodplain. Therefore willingness to accept tax-hikes for the benefit of posterity is limited. By contrast, indefinite youthful life-spans would also radically lengthen our normal time-horizons. Moreover, troubled people aren't necessarily more environmentally-conscious than unusually happy people. Indeed, other things being equal, the happiest people probably tend to care most about conserving what they conceive as our beautiful planet. After all, paradise (cf. "A Perfect Planet": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Planet) is usually reckoned more worth preserving than purgatory.
In short, I know of no tradeoff.

the answers to "why is it good?" seem vague. — boethius

The claim: aging, death, disease, cognitive infirmity and indeed involuntary suffering of any kind are wrong. A transhumanist civilization of superlongevity, superintelligence and superhappiness can overcome these ancient evils. If we act wisely, then future life will be sublime.

Apologies, you're right. The moral underpinnings of the transhumanist project as outlined are indeed poorly defined. Yet there's another problem. In my answers, I've glossed over differences in personal values among extremely diverse transhumanists:
https://www.transhumanist.com/
The transhumanist movement embraces moral realists and antirealists; the secular and the religious; negative, classical and preference utilitarians; ethical pluralists and agnostics; and folk whose views defy easy categorisation. Only a minority of transhumanists share my NU conviction that our overriding moral obligation is to mitigate, minimise and prevent suffering – everything else being icing on the cake:
https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/sentience-interview.html
What transhumanism isn’t is gung-ho technology-worship. Everyone acknowledges that the potential risks of AI and biotechnology are far-reaching:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#downsides
But we’ll shortly have the technical tools create posthuman paradise – quasi-eternal life animated by gradients of intelligent bliss. On some fairly modest assumptions, life in a "triple s" civilisation will be orders of magnitude better than life today.

".....the god-like super-beings we are destined to become...." But I have heard this rhetoric before and I have seen what happens to the ones who fail to qualify for super-being status. And I am afraid. — Cuthbert

Will God-like superintelligences be akin to Nietzschean Übermenschen – contemptuous of the weak, the vulnerable and the cognitively humble? Or does superhuman intelligence entail a superhuman capacity for perspective-taking and empathic understanding? For sure, talk of an expanding circle of compassion can make proponents sound naive. Most students of history or evolutionary psychology will be sceptical of moral progress too. But we can't just assume that God-like superintelligences will be prey to the egocentric illusion. Ultimately, egocentrism is no more rational than geocentrism – and presumably destined to go the same way:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#purpose

it seems to me that if you do not have a whole raft of qualifying thoughts that you might have added, your whole enterprise goes into question. — tim wood

I could have said much more, e.g. about personal identity (or rather its absence) over time:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#parfit
However, I may be misunderstanding your worry; if so, apologies. Please let me know!

What reason is there to want to prevent death, if not for a fear of it? — Tzeentch

Bereavement and the loss of loved ones cause immense heartache.

O brave new world! — Cuthbert

So they say. But compare:
https://www.huxley.net/

Transcending humanity through reverence of its basic drives: fear of death and desire for pleasure.

This should be called hyperhumanism! — Tzeentch

"Hyperhumanism" might be a more reassuring brand than transhumanism. But the pain-pleasure axis discloses the world's inbuilt metric of (dis)value. It's not some species-specific idiosyncrasy. By contrast, fear of death may be peculiar to a handful of intelligent animal species. Fear and death alike will eventually be preventable.