Tuesday, December 30, 2008

From David Pearce: "The contrast between true and false happiness is problematic. Even if the notion is both intelligible and potentially referential, it's not clear that 'natural', selfish-DNA-sculpted minds offer a more authentic consciousness than precision-engineered euphoria. Highly selective and site-specific designer drugs (and, ultimately, genetic engineering) won't make things seem weird or alien. On the contrary, they can deliver a greater sense of realism, verisimilitude and emotional depth to raw states of biochemical bliss than today's parochial conception of Real Life. Future generations will 're-encephalise' emotion to serve us, sentient genetic vehicles, rather than selfish DNA. Our well-being will feel utterly natural; and in common with most things in the natural world, it will be. If desired, too, designer drugs can be used to trigger paroxysms of spiritual enlightenment - or at least the phenomenology thereof - transcending the ecstasies of the holiest mystic or the hyper-religiosity of a temporal-lobe epileptic... so long as neurotransmitter activation of the right sub-receptors triggers the right post-synaptic intra-cellular cascades regulated by the right alleles of the right genes in the right way indefinitely - and this is a technical problem with a technical solution - then we have paradise everlasting, at worst. If we want it, we can enjoy a liquid intensity of awareness far more compelling than our mundane existence as contemporary sleepwalking Homo sapiens. It will be vastly more enjoyable to boot."

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