Yet it created you, did it not? So, it is therefore now, in addition to this, an incredible engine for spreading unimaginable bliss, if your ideas are to be believed. Some bite the hands that feed them, but are you not attempting to amputate it altogether? — Outlander

Hell has an escape-hatch. Reaching it is a daunting challenge. But biotech offers tools of emancipation. Maybe posthumans will indeed enjoy eons of indescribable happiness. I certainly hope so. But Darwinian life is monstrous. No amount of bliss can somehow morally outweigh such obscene suffering. I wish sentient malware like us had never existed. It's not a fruitful thought, I know. May posthumans be spared such knowledge.

You tell us here, against all currently possible odds a heaven of infinite currently unimaginable bliss awaits, if we only listen to you, and if not, a Hell also awaits, a lifetime of Darwinian hell? — Outlander

I spoke in jest. But there's a serious point here. Evolution via natural selection is a fiendish engine for spreading unimaginable suffering. But selection pressure has thrown up a cognitively unique species. Humans are poised to gain mastery over their reward circuitry. Technically, we could phase out the biology of suffering and reprogram the biosphere to create life based gradients of super-bliss – yes, "Heaven" if you like, only much better. What's more, hedonic uplift doesn't involve the proverbial "winners'' and "losers". Biological-genetic elevation of my hedonic set-point doesn't adversely affect you any more than elevation of your hedonic set-point adversely affects me. Contrast the zero-sum status games of Darwinian life ("Hell"). Anyhow, a genetically-driven biohappiness revolution deserves serious scientific and philosophical critique. A big thank you to the organizers of The Philosophy Forum. But to answer your point, this transhumanist vision of post-Darwinian life ("Heaven") also deserves a larger-than-life billionaire or charismatic influencer to take these ideas mainstream.

I'm having a hard time imagining what a hedonic dip would be like that did not involve some form of suffering. How do I remember that times were better without being disappointed with the present moment? — darthbarracuda

Compare the peaks and dips of lovemaking, which (if one isn't celibate) are generically enjoyable throughout.

I don't want the people I care about to suffer either, but if nobody cared if I were gone, that would be a very lonely existence. Loneliness that would have to be eliminated with technology. Companionship would not be genuine. If you feel sad when a loved one is gone, that is good, it is good that you feel bad, because it means your relationship was genuine. — darthbarracuda

Relationships in which one wants a loved one ever to suffer are inherently abusive, another cruel legacy of Darwinian life. Thinking about the biological basis of human relationships can be unsettling, but they are rooted in our endogenous opioid dependence.

It seems like authentic, genuine experiences may not be possible in a world without suffering. Things would no longer have any weight or meaning. Which of course would be a negative feeling that would need to be eliminated. The importance of meaning would be lost, and nobody would even care. — darthbarracuda

The happiest people today typically have the strongest relationships. By contrast, depression undermines relationships not least by robbing the victims of an ability to derive pleasure from the company of friends and family. Critics sometimes say we face a choice between happiness and meaning. It's a false dichotomy. Superhappiness will create a superhuman sense of significance by its very nature:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#david

Sure, and after dark becomes light it's no longer dark. Anything can be changed by this view of "oh after such and such" is applied. We need solutions. Concrete results. At least suggestions. You have a vision, that's great, so does everyone. What will you do in the here and now to see it follows through? — Outlander

I'm a researcher, not the leader of a millenarian cult with messianic delusions. Yes, just setting out a blueprint of what needs to be done feels inadequate. I'd like to do more. But reprogramming the biosphere will take centuries.

Which version don't you agree with? — Down The Rabbit Hole

David Benatar's version of the asymmetry argument purports to show that existence is always comparatively worse than non-existence. After intelligent moral agents phase out the biology of suffering, this claim will no longer hold.

If humans were to abolish all forms of suffering with technology, as you say, I think the only way of fully accomplishing this would be by constraining the limits of consciousness itself. Just like in the early dystopian We, people would have their imaginations removed, or carefully adjusted so that they could only ever imagine pleasurable things. — darthbarracuda

With a hedonic range of, say, +20 to +50, our imaginations could be stunningly enriched.

In which case, humans would be incapable of feeling negative feelings regarding things we usually find important to feel negative feelings towards. For instance, the death of a loved one invokes sadness. Would technologically-enhanced humans feel sadness? — darthbarracuda

I feel entitled to want my death or misfortune to diminish the well-being of loved ones. I don't think I'm entitled to want them to suffer on my account. There can be diminished well-being even in posthuman paradise – although death and aging will eventually disappear, and posthuman hedonic dips can be higher than human hedonic peaks.

What about other feelings, like that of accomplishment, that require some degree of struggle beforehand? Would there be an "accomplishment pill" that people would take when they want to feel accomplished, or a "love pill" when people want to feel loved (even if they have accomplished nothing, and have nobody to love)? — darthbarracuda

Engineering enhanced motivation and a consequent sense of accomplishment is feasible in conjunction with a richer default hedonic tone. The dopamine and opioid neurotransmitter systems are interconnected, but distinct.

Would the removal of all forms of negative feelings include feelings that are important for morality? — darthbarracuda

Information-sensitive gradients of well-being are consistent with a strong personal code of morality and social responsibility. Depression, undermotivation and anhedonia tend to subvert one's values; conversely, depression-resistance makes one stronger, in every sense.

I can imagine a situation in which blissful slaves work constantly, die frequently, all with a happy smile and no sense that what is being done to them is wrong. — darthbarracuda

Low mood is the recipe for subordinate behaviour; elevated mood promotes active citizens:
https://www.huxley.net

How would we be compassionate? — darthbarracuda

Compare a "hug drug" and empathetic euphoriant like MDMA ("Ecstasy"):
https://www.mdma.net

How would we feel guilt? — darthbarracuda

The functional analogues of guilt may be retained; but let's get rid of its ghastly "raw feels":
https://www.gradients.com

I guess what people will want to say/ask/want to see is.. okay David. Go ahead. Do it with your own kids, do whatever it is as you say. — Outlander

Recall I'm a "soft" anti-natalist. I don't feel ethically entitled to bring more suffering into the world, genetically mitigated or otherwise:
https://www.antinatalism.com

And let us all openly observe them before any talk of legislation or anything that involves anybody else.. is involved. Reasonable enough, yes? — Outlander

It's precisely because creating new sentience does involve someone else that we should try to mitigate the harm:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#antinatal

What makes you think we understand enough to prevent suffering in the whole forward light cone? — Down The Rabbit Hole

Just as, tragically, a few genetic tweaks can make someone chronically depressed and pain-ridden, conversely a few genetic tweaks can make someone chronically happy and pain-free. CRISPR-based synthetic gene drives (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive) that defy the naively immutable laws of Mendelian inheritance allow the deliberate spread of such benign alleles to the rest of Nature even if they carry a modest fitness cost to the individual, which is counterintuitive and sounds ecologically illiterate. For sure, I'm omitting many complications. But an architecture of mind based entirely on gradients of well-being is technically feasible, with or without smart prostheses.

To follow up on a question I asked on page 1, after reviewing the material, do you agree with Benatar's Axiological Asymmetry? — Down The Rabbit Hole

As a negative utilitarian, I agree with (a version of) David Benatar's Axiological Asymmetry. A perfect vacuum would be axiologically as well as physically perfect. I just don't think the asymmetry has the "strong" anti-natalist policy implications that Benatar supposes. The nature of selection pressure means the future belongs to life-lovers. Therefore, NUs should work with the broadest possible coalition of life affirmers to create a world where existing sentience can flourish and new life is constitutionally happy, i.e a world based on information-sensitive gradients of bliss. If intelligent beings modify their own source code, then coming into existence doesn't have to be a harm.

How is the gap overcome legally? I've been in the nootropics community for about 10 years, and there's some kind of strong desire to advance human cognition with drugs like the MAPS association or otherwise Neuralink. Yet, legally its hard to overcome some of the problems associated with transhumanity and neoclassical legalism in the West... — Shawn

Yes, the legal obstacles to transhumanism are significant.
For instance, if one is an older person who doesn't want to miss out on transhuman life, then at present it's not lawfully possible to opt for cryothanasia at, say, 75 so one can be cryonically suspended in optimal conditions. If instead you wait until you die "naturally" aged 95 or whatever, then you'll be a shadow of your former self. Your prospects of mind-intact reanimation will be negligible. Effectively irreversible information loss is inevitable.

If you are a responsible prospective parent who wants to choose benign genes for your future children, then currently you can't pre-select benign alleles for your offspring unless you are at risk of passing on an "officially" medically-recognised genetic disorder.

If you are the victim of refractory depression or neuropathic pain, you can't lawfully sign up for a surgical implant and practise "wireheading".

Drugs are another legal minefield. Intellectual progress, let alone the development of full-spectrum superintelligence, depends on developing the study of mind as an experimental discipline: a post-Galilean science of consciousness. After all, one's own consciousness is all one ever directly knows; there's no alternative to the experimental method if one wants to explore both its content and the medium. Classical Turing machines can't help. Digital computers are zombies; despite the AI hype, they can't deliver superintelligence. Likewise, there are tenured professors of mind who are drug-naive. Drug-naivety is the recipe for scholasticism. Most of the best work investigating consciousness is done in the scientific counterculture, not in academia.

That said, dilemmas must be confronted. It's no myth: exploring psychedelics is hazardous: https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#psychedelics
Informed consent to becoming a psychonaut is impossible. And I'm a hypocrite. Woe betide anyone who tries to stop me taking whatever I choose; yet if I were a parent, then I wouldn't want my children's professors to be permitted to introduce them to psychedelics.

The long-term solution to the hazards of experimentation is genetically programmed invincible well-being. All trips will then be good trips – sometimes illuminating, sometimes magical, but always enjoyable in the extreme. But this scenario is still a pipedream. A moratorium on psychedelic research until we re-engineer our reward circuitry is a moratorium on knowledge.
I don't have a satisfactory answer.

Increasing the hedonic "resting level" does not, at least in my theory, eliminate the hedonic treadmill, if one is aware of greater possibility, one is inclined to seek it with body and mind. If one no longer wishes to strive, would you still call this humanity? — Outlander

Not humanity, but transhumanity.
No one ever gets bored of mu-opioidergic activation of their hedonic hotspot in the posterior ventral pallidum. But the genetic or pharmacological equivalent of "wireheading" (a misnomer) is not what I or most other transhumanists advocate. In future, steep or shallow information-sensitive gradients of well-being can be navigated with as much or as little motivation as desired. Indeed, it's worth stressing how hedonic uplift can be combined with dopaminergic hypermotivation to counter the objection that perpetual bliss will necessarily turn us into lotus-eaters.

Well, I think the principal issue is that "suffering" is a very broad, general term, encompassing many types — Metaphysician Undercover

All experience below hedonic zero has something in common. This property deserves to be retired – made physiologically impossible because its molecular substrates are absent. Shortly, its elimination will be technically feasible. Later, its elimination will be sociologically feasible too. A world without suffering may sound "samey". Heaven has intuitively less variety than Hell. However, trillions of magical state-spaces of consciousness await discovery and exploration. Biotech is a godsend; let's use it wisely:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#irreversible

. So to put it bluntly, if you think this process "would be unlikely to pass an ethics committee", why are you discussing it as if it is a viable option? Isn't conspiracy toward something unethical itself unethical? — Metaphysician Undercover

Sorry, I should have clarified. By an "accelerated biointelligence explosion [that] would be unlikely to pass an ethics committee", I had in mind a deliberate project: cloning with variations super-geniuses like von Neumann (https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-unparalleled-genius-of-john-von-neumann-791bb9f42a2d); hothousing the genetically modified clones; and repeating the cycle of cloning with variations in an accelerating process of recursive self-improvement. This scenario is different from "ordinary" parents-to-be using preimplantation genetic screening and counselling and soon a little light genetic tweaking. I don't predict an accelerated biointelligence explosion as distinct from a long-term societal reproductive revolution. The reproductive revolution will be more slow-burning. It will most likely start with remedial gene-editing to cure well-acknowledged genetic diseases that almost no one wants to conserve. But humanity will become more ambitious. Germline interventions to modulate pain-tolerance, depression-resistance, hedonic range, prolonged youthful vitality and different kinds of cognitive ability will follow.

Variety is a very important aspect of life, I'd argue it's the essence of life. And it is the foundation of evolution. The close relationship between variety and life is probably why we find beauty in variety. Beauty is closely related to good, and the pleasure we derive from beauty has much capacity to quell suffering. This is why there is a custom of giving people who are suffering flowers. — Metaphysician Undercover

Genome editing can create richer variety than is possible under a regime of natural selection and the meiotic shuffling of traditional sexual reproduction. But diversity isn't inherently good. Darwinian life offers an unimaginable diversity of ways to suffer.

I don't think that a thing which has been designed not to suffer could even be called alive. — Metaphysician Undercover

I promise Jo Cameron and Anders Sandberg ("I do have a ridiculously high hedonic set-point!") are very much alive. The challenge is to ensure all sentient creatures are so blessed. Well-being should be a design specification of sentience, not a fleeting interlude.

Because the transhumans would be superhuman in some ways, they would be seen as a threat to the naturalists (or whatever you want to call them), and the God-fearers — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, I agree. Ferocious controversy lies ahead.
Recall the first CRISPR babies were produced not to enhance the innate well-being of the gene-edited twins, but to enhance their intelligence with HIV-protection as a cover story (cf. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/21/137309/the-crispr-twins-had-their-brains-altered/). I don't know if the parents of Lulu and Nana were aware of the potential cognitive enhancement that CCR5 deletion confers in "animal models". Yet if they knew, they'd most likely approve. Chinese parents tend to be particularly ambitious for their kids. Here's one of my worries. Other things being equal, intelligence-amplification is admirable; but intelligence is a contested concept (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#iqintelligence). And the kind of intelligence that prospective parents are most likely to want amplified is the mind-blind, "autistic" component of general intelligence captured by "IQ" tests / SAT scores (etc), not social cognition, higher-order intentionality and collaborative problem-solving prowess (cf. https://psychology-tools.com/test/autism-spectrum-quotient). Just consider: would you be more excited by the prospect of becoming the biological parent of a John von Neumann or a Nelson Mandela? Yes, a hypothetical "high IQ" civilisation could potentially be awesome. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines would flourish. Yet there are poorly understood neurological trade-offs between a hyper-systematizing, hyper-masculine, "high-IQ"/AQ cognitive style and an empathetic cognitive style (cf. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-63293-005). If designer babies were left entirely to the discretion of prospective parents, then a "high-IQ" civilisation would also be a high-AQ civilisation. The chequered history of so-called "high IQ" societies (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-IQ_society) doesn't bode well. Note that I'm not making a value-judgement about what AQ is desirable for the individual or for civilisation as a whole, nor saying that high-AQ folk are incapable of empathy. But our current restrictive conception of intelligence is a recipe for the tribalism that intelligent moral agents should aim to transcend. Full-spectrum superintelligences will have a superhuman capacity for perspective-taking – including the perspectives of the unremediated / unenhanced.

More generally, genetically enhancing general intelligence is technically harder than coding for mood enrichment. The only way I know to create an accelerated biointelligence explosion would be unlikely to pass an ethics committee:
https://www.biointelligence-explosion.com
Ethically, I think our most urgent biological-genetic focus should be ending suffering:
https://www.abolitionist.com

Wouldn't there be a vast portion of the human population which for one reason or another would not engage in this designer baby process? I would think that they might even revolt against it. — Metaphysician Undercover

Suppose that a minority of parents do indeed decide they want "designer babies" rather than haphazardly-created babies. The explosive popularity of personal genomics services like 23andMe shows many people are proactive regarding their genetic make-up and genetic family history – and by their partner's genetic code too. Suppose that the genetic basis of pain thresholds, hedonic range, hedonic set-points, antiaging alleles and, yes, alleles and allelic combinations associated with high intelligence becomes better understood. Naturally, most prospective parents want the best for their kids. To be sure, designing life is a bioethical minefield. But what kind of "revolt" from bionconservatives do you anticipate beyond simply continuing to have babies in the cruel, historical manner? No doubt the revolution will be messy. That said, I predict opposition will eventually wither.

Thank you. You are very kind. Some people may be a bit disconcerted that a negative utilitarian should talk so much about happiness, pleasure and even hedonism. But IMO, engineering a world with an architecture of mind based on information-sensitive gradients of well-being will prove to be the most realistic way to end suffering.

I was going to suggest if such a- in my view outlandish- reality would ever come to real and actual practice or fruition.. people would want to see the results for themselves first. — Outlander

Why "outlandish"? For sure, untested genetic experiments conceived in the heat of sexual passion are "normal" today. But there may come a time when creating life via a blind genetic crapshoot will seem akin to child abuse. Recall that Darwinian life is "designed" to suffer. I reckon responsible future parents will want happy children blessed with good code. All sentient beings deserve the maximum genetic opportunity to flourish.

At what point do you think we might cross the threshold between human and superhuman? — Metaphysician Undercover

Biologists define a species as a group of organisms that can reproduce with one another in their natural habitat to produce fertile offspring. We can envisage a future world where most babies are base-edited "designer babies". At some stage, the notional coupling of a gene-edited, AI-augmented transhuman and an archaic human on a reservation would presumably not produce a viable child.

Bioconservatives may be sceptical such a reproductive revolution will ever come to pass. Yet I suspect some kind of reproductive revolution may be inevitable. As humans progressively conquer the aging process later this century and beyond, procreative freedom as traditionally understood will eventually be impossible – whether the carrying capacity of Earth is 15 billion or 150 billion. Babymaking will become a rare and meticulously planned event:
https://www.reproductive-revolution.com

Possibly, you have a more figurative sense of "superhuman" in mind. My definition of the transition from human to transhuman is conventional but not arbitrary. In The Hedonistic Imperative (1995) I predicted, tentatively, that the world's last experience below hedonic zero in our forward light-cone would be a precisely datable event a few centuries from now. The Darwinian era will have ended. A world without psychological and physical pain isn't the same as a mature posthuman civilisation of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness. But the end of suffering will still be a momentous watershed in the evolutionary development of life. I'd argue it's the most ethically important.

Do you believe that there are limits to the extent in which a person is ethically obligated to get involved on someone else's behalf? Do you think there comes a point in which a person is justified in saying, "not my problem"? — darthbarracuda

A good question. IMO a plea of "not my problem" is irrational and immoral. In my view, closed individualism is a false theory of personal identity: https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#individualism
Insofar as you are rational, and insofar it as lies within your power, you should help others as much as you should help your future namesakes ("you"). For sure, there are massive complications. Evolution didn't design us to be rational. Reality seems centred on me. I'm most important, followed by family, friends and allies:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#interpret
Intellectually, I know this is delusional nonsense. But the egocentric illusion is so adaptive that it's effectively hardwired across the animal kingdom. If one aspires to exceed one's design specifications and instead display "moral heroism", then one risks burnout.

What does helping others mean in practice? Well, "technical solutions to ethical problems" is one pithy definition of transhumanism. The biotech and IT revolutions mean that shortly we'll be able to help even the humblest forms of sentience without risk of burnout, and indeed with minimal personal inconvenience. For instance, I'd strenuously urge everyone to go vegan; humanity's depraved treatment of nonhuman animals in factory-farms and slaughterhouses defies description. Yet the most effective way to "veganise" the world will be accelerating the development and commercialisation of cultured meat and animal products. Most people are weakly benevolent; if offered, they'll choose the cruelty-free cultured option. Animal agriculture will presumably be banned after butchery becomes redundant. A similar hard-headed ethical approach is needed to tackle the problem of wild animal suffering. Devoting half one's life to feeding famished herbivores in winter would be too psychologically demanding; piecemeal interventions would also be ineffective and maybe cause more long-term suffering. By contrast, hi-tech solutions to wild animal suffering are easier to implement and potentially much more effective.

I take it that in your perfect world, just sitting quietly in a room alone would be "enough", above hedonic zero. But of course that wouldn't consign us to perpetual inaction as we just sat in a room alone doing nothing forever (like the "wire-heads" in Larry Niven's Known Space universe, who are addicted to direct electronic stimulation of their pleasure centers), because we would still have the opportunity for even more enjoyable experiences if we went out and accomplished things, learned things, taught others, helped them in other ways, etc.

Does that sound about right? — Pfhorrest

Thank you. Lots of complications to unpack here! We now know that wireheading, i.e. intracranial self-stimulation of the mesolimbic dopamine system, simulates the desire centres of the CNS rather than the opioidergic pleasure centres (cf. https://www.paradise-engineering.com/brain/). But let's here use "wireheading" in the popularly accepted sense of unvarying bliss induced by microelectrode stimulation: a perpetual hedonic +10. Short of genetic enhancement, there is no way for human wireheads to exceed the upper bounds of bliss allowed by their existing reward circuitry; but for negative utilitarians, at least, this constraint isn't a moral issue. As a NU, I reckon a entire civilisation of wireheads that had discharged all its responsibilities to eradicate suffering would be morally unimpeachable. However, I don't urge wireheading except in cases of refractory pain and depression. It's not ecologically viable because there will always be strong selection pressure against any predisposition to wirehead. The idea of wireheading appeals mostly to pain-ridden depressives.

Another scenario combines hedonic recalibration with the VR equivalent of Nozick's Experience Machines (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#experiencemachine). Immersive VR may transform life and civilisation. But once again, I don't advocate ubiquitous Experience Machines because of the nature of selection pressure in basement reality. Any predisposition not to plug into full-blown Experience Machines will be genetically adaptive.

However, there is third option that is potentially saleable, ecologically viable and also my tentative prediction for the future of sentience. Genetically-based hedonic uplift and recalibration isn't, strictly speaking, pleasure-maximizing. Recall how today's high-functioning hyperthymics are blissful, but they aren't "blissed out". A civilisation based on information-sensitive gradients of intelligent bliss is not a perfect world by strict classical utilitarian criteria. Recalibrating hedonic range and hedonic set-points in basement reality may even be "conservative", in a sense. Your values, preference architecture and relationships can remain intact even as your default hedonic tone is uplifted. Critical insight and social responsibility can be conserved. Neuroscientific progress can continue unabated too – including perhaps the knowledge of how to create a hedonic +90 to +100 supercivilisation.

Heady stuff. Alas, Darwinian life still has vicious surprises in store.

Does the transhumanist vision ultimately lead to something of a morgue where bodies are stored side-by-side and atop on another — Outlander

A morgue doesn't quite evoke the grandeur of a "triple S" civilisation. But I guess it's conceivable. Even today, we each spend our life encased within the confines of a transcendental skull – not to be confused with the palpable empirical skull whose contours one can feel with one's "virtual" hands (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#lifeillus). Immersive VR or some version of the transcension hypothesis is one trajectory for the future of sentience. Rather than traditional spacefaring yarns – who wants to explore what are really lifeless gas giants or sterile lumps of rock!? – maybe intelligence will turn inwards to explore inner space. The experience of inner space – and especially alien state-spaces of consciousness – can be far bigger, richer and more diverse than interplanetary or hypothetical interstellar travel pursued in ordinary waking consciousness. For what it's worth, I've personally no more desire to spend time on Mars than to live in the Sahara desert.

Anyhow, to answer your question: I don't know. For technical reasons, I think the future lies in gradients of superhuman bliss. I've no credible conception of what guises that bliss will take. It will just be better than your wildest dreams.

So posthumans, as the name suggests, wouldn't exactly be "humans." Posthumans would be so advanced - mentally and physically - that we humans wouldn't be able to relate to them amd vice versa. It would be as if we were replaced by posthumans instead of having evolved into them. — TheMadFool

Yes. Just as a pinprick has something tenuously in common with agony, posthuman well-being will have something even more tenuously in common with human peak experiences. But mastery of the pleasure-pain axis promises a hedonic revolution; some kind of phase change in hedonic tone beyond human comprehension.

Bravo! I sympathize with that sentiment. Sometimes it takes a whole lot of unflagging effort to see the light and this for me is one such instance of deep significance to me. — TheMadFool

After decades of obscurity and fringe status, a policy agenda of compassionate conservation may even be ready to go mainstream. Here is the latest Vox:
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22325435/animal-welfare-wild-animals-movement

I absolutely agree. My own thoughts on this are quite similar. I once made the assertion that the truly psychologically normal humans are those who are clinically depressed for they see the world as it really is - overflowing with pain, suffering, and all manners of abject misery. Who, in faer "right mind", wouldn't be depressed, right? On this view what's passed off as "normal" - contentment and if not that a happy disposition – is actually what real insanity is. In short, psychiatry has completely missed the point which, quite interestingly, some religions like Buddhism, whose central doctrine is that life is suffering, have clearly succeeded in sussing out. — TheMadFool

Well said. In contrast to depressive realism, what passes for mental health is a form of affective psychosis. Yet perhaps we can use biotech and IT to build a world fit for euphoric realism – a world where reality itself seems conspiring to help us.

Why is a constitutionally superhappy human "...arguably a walking oxymoron"? — TheMadFool

Sorry, I should clarify. Even extreme hyperthymics today are still recognisably human. But future beings whose reward circuitry is so enriched that their "darkest depths" are more exalted than our "peak experiences" are not human as ordinarily understood – even if they could produce viable offspring via sexual reproduction with archaic humans, i.e. if they fulfil the normal biological definition of species membership. A similar point could be made if hedonic uplift continues. There may be more than one biohappiness revolution. Members of a civilisation with a hedonic range of, say, +20 to +30 have no real insight into the nature of life in a supercivilisation with a range that extends from a hedonic low of, say, +90 to an ultra-sublime +100. With pleasure, as with pain, "more is different" – qualitatively different.

By way of bolstering my point that an "...enduring identity..." is key to hedonism I'd like to relate an argument made by William Lane Craig which boils down to the claim that human suffering is, as per him, orders of magnitude greater than animal suffering for the reason that people have an "...enduring identity..." I suppose he means to say that being self-aware (enduring identity) there's an added layer to suffering. Granted that William Lane Craig may not be the best authority to cite, I still feel that he makes the case for why hedonism is such a big deal to us humans and by extension to transhumanism. — TheMadFool

As a point of human psychology, you may be right. However, I'd beg to differ with William Lane Craig. The suffering of some larger-brained nonhuman animals may exceed the upper bounds of human suffering (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#feelpain) – and not on account of their conception of enduring identity (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#parfit). This is another reason for compassionate stewardship of Nature rather than traditional conservation biology.

I suppose you have good reasons for recommending (selective) amnesia in re Darwinian life but wouldn't that be counterproductive? Once bitten, twice shy seems to be the adage transhumanism is about - suffering is too much to bear (and happiness is just too irresistible) - and transhumanists have calibrated their response to the problems of Darwinian life accordingly. To forget Darwinian life would be akin to forgetting an important albeit excruciatingly painful lesson which might be detrimental to the transhumanist cause. — TheMadFool

I agree about potential risks. Presumably our successors will recognise too that premature amnesia about Darwinian life could be ethically catastrophic. If so, they will weigh the risks accordingly. But there is a tension between becoming superintelligent and superhappy, just as there is a tension today between being even modestly intelligent and modestly happy. What now passes for mental health depends on partially shutting out empathetic understanding of the suffering of others – even if one dedicates one's life to making the world a better place. Compare how mirror-touch synesthetes may feel your pain as their own. Imagine such understanding generalised. If one could understand even a fraction of the suffering in the world in anything but some abstract, formal sense, then one would go insane. Possibly, there is something that humans understand about reality that our otherwise immensely smarter successors won't grasp.

Correct me if I'm wrong but transhumanism envisions the triad of supers (superintelligence, superlongevity, and superhappiness) to work synergistically, complementing each other as it were to produce an ideal state for humans or even other animals. What if that assumption turns out to be false? — TheMadFool

Yes, talk of a "triple S" civilisation is a useful mnemonic and a snappy slogan for introducing people to transhumanism. But are the "three supers" in tension? After all, a quasi-immortal human is scarcely a full-spectrum superintelligence. A constitutionally superhappy human is arguably a walking oxymoron too. For what it's worth, I'm sceptical this lack of enduring identity matters. Archaic humans don't have enduring metaphysical egos either. "Superlongevity" is best conceived as an allusion to how death, decrepitude and aging won't be a feature of post-Darwinian life. A more serious tension is between superintelligence and superhappiness. I suspect that at some stage, posthumans will opt for selective ignorance of the nature of Darwinian life – maybe even total ignorance. A limited amnesia is probably wise even now. There are some states so inexpressibly awful that no one should try to understand them in any deep sense, just prevent their existence.

Also, it seems that the idea of genetically modifying humans to be incapable of suffering is chilling and disturbing to most people as well. — TheHedoMinimalist

I wonder to what extent hesitancy stems from principled opposition, and how much from mere status quo bias?
People tend to be keener on the idea of Heaven than the tools to get there.
Some suspicion is well motivated. The history of utopian experiments is not encouraging.
"But this time it's different!" say transhumanists. But then it always is.
That said, life based on gradients of intelligent bliss is still my tentative prediction for the long-term future of sentience. Suffering isn't just vile; it's pointless.

What if transhumanism becomes a reality but people use it only for recreational purposes, you know like going to Disney land? — TheMadFool

Consider the core transhumanist "supers", i.e. superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness.
If you became a full-spectrum superintelligence, would you want to regress to being a simpleton for the rest of the week?
If you enjoyed quasi-eternal youth, would you want to crumble away with the progeroid syndrome we call aging?
If you upgraded your reward circuitry and tasted life based on gradients of superhuman bliss, would you want to revert to the misery and malaise of Darwinian life?
Humans may be prone to nostalgia. Transhumans – if they contemplate Darwinian life at all – won't miss it for a moment.
Pitfalls?
I can think of a few...
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#downsides

The devil is in the details indeed, I don't think many traditions would agree that sterilization of our forward light-cone is the most moral course of action for instance... — ChatteringMonkey

Indeed so. Programming a happy biosphere is technically harder than sterilizing the Earth. But I can't see the problem of suffering is soluble in any other way.

In other words, I envision a state, a future state, in which injury/harm to mind and body would simply cause a red light to flash and when something good happens to us, all that does is turn on a green light, the unpleasantness of pain or the pleasantness of pleasure will be taken out of the equation as it were. — TheMadFool

Complete "cyborgisation", i.e. offloading all today's nasty stuff onto smart prostheses, is one option. A manual override is presumably desirable so no one feels they have permanently lost control of their body. But abandoning the signalling role of information-sensitive gradients of well-being too would be an even more revolutionary step: the prospect evokes a more sophisticated version of wireheading rather than full-spectrum superintelligence. At least in my own work, I've never explored what lies beyond a supercivilisation with a hedonic range of, say, +90 to +100. A hedonium / utilitronium shockwave in some guise? Should the abundance of empirical value in the cosmos be maximised as classical utilitarianism dictates? Maximisation is not mandatory by the lights of negative utilitarianism; but I don't rule out that posthumans will view negative utilitarianism as an ancient depressive psychosis, if they even contemplate that perspective at all.

I don't think anything is really 'inherent'. — ChatteringMonkey

An ontic structural realist (cf.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/#OntStrReaOSR) might agree with you. But if someone has no place in their ontology for the inherent ghastliness of my pain, so much the worse for their theory of the world. And I fear I'm typical.

If they serve a signalizing purpose than they themselves are not bad, but the circumstances that lead to agony and despair are — ChatteringMonkey

But their signalling "purpose" is to help our genes leave more copies of themselves. Agony and despair are still terrible even when they fulfil the functional role of maximizing the inclusive fitness of our DNA.

But some malfunctioning smokedetectors are not a reason to get rid of all smokedetection, nor does it make getting rid of smokedetection an end in itself. — ChatteringMonkey

Recall transhumanists / radical abolitionists don't call for abolishing smoke-detection, so to speak. Nociception is vital; the "raw feels" of pain are optional. Or rather, they soon will be...

What's also controversial I'd say is whether we 'should' replace them by a more 'civilised' signaling system. What is deemed more civilized no doubt depends on the perspective you are evaluating it from. — ChatteringMonkey

Perhaps the same might be said of medicine pre- and post-surgical anesthesia. However, a discussion of meta-ethics and the nature of value judgements would take us far afield.

I think, and we touched on this a few pages back, a lot of this discussion comes down to the basic assumption of negative utilitarianism, and whether you buy into it or not. If you don't, the rest of the story doesn't necessarily follow because it builds on that basic assumption. — ChatteringMonkey

I happen to be a negative utilitarian. NU is a relatively unusual ethic of limited influence. An immense range of ethical traditions besides NU can agree, in principle, that a world without suffering would be good. Alas, the devil is in the details...

I agree with you that it might be best for a fairly high profile NU like yourself to teach your fans and people who might be interested in NU that they should prevent children from drowning. I think you can and kinda have created an implicit double message when describing the reasons for why they should prevent the child from drowning. The main reason that you have stated seems to be related to this being a good PR move for NU. But, I don’t think this genuinely teaches your NU fans that they really shouldn’t allow children to die. Rather, you seem to just be teaching them(in a somewhat indirect and implicit way) to not damage the reputation of NU. Your fans are not stupid though. They know that you seem have your reasons for teaching what you teach and I think they would assume that you might actually want them to let a child die even if you can’t express that sentiment without creating a negative outcome that would lead to more suffering. — TheHedoMinimalist

Thanks, you raise some astute but uncomfortable points. Asphyxiation is a ghastly way to die, but even if death were instantaneous, there is something rather chilling about an ethic that seems to say pain-ridden Darwinian humans would be better off not existing. Classical utilitarianism says the same, albeit for different reasons; ideally our matter and energy should be converted into pure, undifferentiated bliss (hedonium).

However, if some version of the abolitionist project ever comes to pass – whether decades, centuries or millennia hence – its completion will presumably owe little to utilitarian ethicists. Maybe the end of suffering will owe as little to utilitarianism as pain-free surgery. I believe that transhuman life based on gradients of bliss will one day seem to be common sense – and in no more need of ideological rationalisation than breathing.

In very no-nonsense terms, life makes an offer we can't refuse - pleasure is just too damned irresistible for us to reject anything that has it as part of the deal and thereby hangs a tale, a tale of diabolical deception — TheMadFool

Yes, well put. In their different ways, pain and pleasure alike are coercive. Any parallel between heroin addicts and the drug naïve is apt to sound strained, but endogenous opioid addiction is just as insidious at corrupting our judgement.

The good news is that thanks to biotech, the substrates of bliss won't need to be rationed. If mankind opts for a genetically-driven biohappiness revolution, then, in principle at least, everyone's a "winner". Contrast the winners and losers of conventional social reforms.

Negative utilitarianism or hedonism is akin to saying that the solution to the problem is getting rid of smokedetection. It just doesn't make sense to me from the get-go. — ChatteringMonkey

Agony and despair are inherently bad, whether they serve a signaling purpose (e.g. a noxious stimulus) or otherwise (e.g. neuropathic pain or lifelong depression).

Almost no one disputes subjectively nasty states can play a signalling role in biological animals. What's controversial is whether they are computationally indispensable or whether they can be functionally replaced by a more civilised signalling system. The development of ever more versatile inorganic robots that lack the ghastly "raw feels" of agony and despair shows an alternative signalling system is feasible. "Cyborgisation" (smart prostheses, etc) and hedonic recalibration aren't mutually exclusive options for tomorrow's (trans)humans. A good start will be ensuring via preimplantation genetic screening and soon gene-editing that all new humans are blessed with the hyperthymia and elevated pain-tolerance ("But pain is just a useful signaling system!") of the luckiest 1% (or 0.1%) of people alive today:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#physical

More futuristic transhuman options, i.e. an architecture of mind based entirely on gradients of bliss, can be explored later this century and beyond. But let's tackle the most morally urgent challenges first.

So, do you think that it should illegal to let a child drown even under circumstances where you don’t have parental duties for that child and you don’t have a particular job that requires you to prevent that child from drowning like a nanny or a lifeguard? — TheHedoMinimalist

Yes.

But, what if a person is a secret NU and he decides to let the child drown? Most of the time, it seems to me that the public wouldn’t know if someone let the child drown because they were a NU since it seems that most NUs only talk about being NUs under an anonymous online identity. Given this, it seems to me that NUs do not actually need to believe that we should prevent people from dying in order to maintain alliances with other ethical theories. Rather, I think they would just need to be collectively dishonest about their willingness to let people die as long as it wouldn’t do anything to worsen the reputation of NU. — TheHedoMinimalist

Such calculated deceit is probably the recipe for more suffering. So it's not NU. Imagine if Gautama Buddha ("I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering”) had urged his devotees to practice deception and put vulnerable people out of their misery if the opportunity arose...

I’m a strict NU. And it’s precisely because I’m strict NU that I favour upholding the sanctity of human and nonhuman life in law. Humans can’t be trusted. The alternative to such legal protections would most likely be more suffering. Imagine if people thought that NU entailed letting toddlers drown! Being an effective NU involves striking alliances with members of other ethical traditions. It involves winning hearts and minds. Winning people over to the abolitionist project is a daunting enough challenge as it is. Anything that hampers this goal should be discouraged.

I think it’s an open question whether or not a negative utilitarian should rescue that child — TheHedoMinimalist

Negative utilitarianism (NU) is compassion systematised. NUs aren’t in the habit of letting small children drown any more than we’re plotting Armageddon. I’m as keen on upholding the sanctity of life in law as your average deontologist. Indeed, I think the principle should be extended to the rest of the animal kingdom, so-called “high-tech Jainism”: https://www.hedweb.com/transhumanism/neojainism.html
The reason for such advocacy is that NU is a consequentialist ethic. Valuing and even sanctifying life is vastly more likely to lead to ideal outcome, i.e. the well-being of all sentience, than cheapening life.

In’t it cost plenty of money to implement any sort of technical fix as a means to end the suffering of wild animals? — TheHedoMinimalist

A pan-species welfare state might cost a trillion dollars or more at today’s prices – maybe almost as much as annual global military expenditure. It’s unrealistic, even if humans weren’t systematically harming nonhumans in factory-farms and slaughterhouses. However, human society is on the brink of a cultured meat revolution. Our “circle of compassion” will expand in its wake. The most expensive free-living organisms to help won’t be the small fast-breeders, as one might naively suppose (cf. https://www.gene-drives.com), but large, slow-breeding vertebrates. I did a costed case-study for free-living elephants a few year’s ago: https://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/elephantcare.html

Any practically-minded person (they exist even on a philosophy forum) is likely to be exasperated. What’s the point of drawing up blueprints that will never be implemented? Yet the exponential growth of computer power means that the price of such interventions will collapse. So it’s good to have a debate now over the merits of traditional conservation biology versus compassionate conservation. Bioethicists need to inform ourselves of what is – and isn’t – technically feasible. On the latter score, at least, the prospects are stunningly good. Biotech can engineer a happy biosphere. Politically, such a project may take hundreds or even thousands of years. But I can’t think of a more worthwhile goal.

Apologies, by “hedonic zero” I just mean emotionally neutral experience that is perceived as neither good nor bad. Hedonic zero is what utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick called the “natural watershed” between good and bad experience – though it’s complicated by “mixed states” such as bitter-sweet nostalgia.

Chess? I enjoy playing against a super-grandmaster. I lose every time. By contrast, I wouldn’t ever enjoy losing against a human opponent. This is because I’m a typical male human primate. Playing chess against other humans is bound up with primate dominance behaviour of the African savannah. I trust future sentience can outgrow such primitive zero-sum games.

Thank you for the link to The Twilight Zone (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nice_Place_to_Visit).
Perhaps see my response to “What if you don’t like it in Heaven?”:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#heaven
In short, if we upgrade our reward circuitry, then all experience will be heavenly by its very nature.

You're moving the goalposts — Noble Dust

Sorry, could you unpack the footballing metaphor for me? What “goalposts”? As far as I know, I’ve consistently been arguing for replacing the biology of pain and suffering with life based on gradients of genetically programmed well-being.

I've just been looking at a list of genetic disorders, and I'm not as happy as I might be wasn't one of them. — counterpunch

Yet depression is a devastating disorder. It has a high genetic loading. Depression is at least as damaging to quality of life as the other genetic disorders listed. According to the WHO, around 300 million people worldwide are clinically depressed. "Sub-clinical” depression afflicts hundreds of millions more. If humanity conserves its existing genome, then depressive disorders will persist indefinitely. The toll of suffering will be unimaginable. Mastery of our genetic source code promises an end to one of the greatest scourges in the whole world. By all means, urge exhaustive research and risk-benefit analysis. But I know of no good ethical reason to conserve such an evil.

So, why base your philosophy, transhumanism, on what you admit is an addiction? — TheMadFool

To the best of my knowledge, there is no alternative. The pleasure-pain axis ensnares us all. Genetically phasing out experience below hedonic zero can make the addiction harmless. The future belongs to opioid-addicted life-lovers, not "hard" antinatalists. Amplifying endogenous opioid function will be vital. Whereas taking exogenous opioids typically subverts human values, raising hedonic range and hedonic set-points can potentially sustain and enrich civilisation.

But I don't want to be pleasure or happiness junkie any more than I want to be addicted to heroin or opium. — TheMadFool

But you are addicted to opioids. Everyone is hooked:
https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/research-overview/neuroscience-of-linking-and-wanting/.
Would-be parents might do well to reflect on how breeding creates new endogenous opioid addicts. For evolutionary reasons, humans are mostly blind to the horror of what they are doing:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#agreeantinatal
Addiction corrupts our judgement. It's treatable, but incurable. Transhumanism offers a potential escape-route.

I’m not seeing how your comparison between animals and small children would even be that compelling when it comes to persuading people that we should care about wild animal suffering. It’s even less compelling to me because I happen to really dislike children. You probably have a better chance convincing me to care about wild animals lol. — TheHedoMinimalist

If a small child were drowning, you would wade into a shallow pond to rescue the child – despite your professed dislike of small children, and your weaker preference not to get your clothes wet? I'm guessing you would do the same if the drowning creature were a dog or pig. Humanity will soon (by which I mean within a century or two) be able to help all nonhuman sentience with an equivalent level of personal inconvenience to the average citizen, maybe less. Technology massively amplifies the effects of even tiny amounts of benevolence (or malevolence).

An ethic of negative or classical utilitarianism mandates compassionate stewardship of the living world. This does not mean that convinced negative or classical utilitarians should urge raising taxes to pay for it. The intelligent utilitarian looks for effective policy options that are politically saleable. I never thought the problem of wild animal suffering would be seriously discussed in my lifetime, but I was wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering . If asked, a great many people are relaxed about the prospect of less suffering in Nature so long as suffering-reduction doesn’t cause them any personal inconvenience. Hence the case for technical fixes.