Tweet
Originally posted by Disliked
4. Objections.
4.0 "Happy experiences, and the very concept of happiness itself, are possible only because they can be contrasted with melancholy. The very notion of everlasting happiness is incoherent."
Some people endure lifelong emotional depression or physical pain. Quite literally, they are never happy. Understandably, they may blame their misery on the very nature of the world, not just their personal clinical condition. Yet it would be a cruel doctrine which pretended that such people don't really suffer because they can't contrast their sense of desolation with joyful memories. In the grips of despair, they may find the very notion of happiness cognitively meaningless. Conversely, the euphoria of unmixed (hypo)mania is not dependent for its sparkle on recollections of misery. Given the state-dependence of memory, negative emotions may simply be inaccessible to consciousness in such an exalted state. Likewise, it is possible that our perpetually euphoric descendants will find our contrastive notion of unhappiness quite literally inconceivable. For when one is extraordinarily super-well, then it's hard to imagine what it might be like to be chronically mentally ill.
Here's a contemporary parallel. It's possible to undergo, from a variety of causes, a complete bilateral loss of primary, secondary and "associative" visual cortex. People with Anton's Syndrome not only become blind; they are unaware of their sensory deficit. Furthermore, they lose all notion of the meaning of sight. They no longer possess the neurological substrates of the visual concepts by which their past and present condition could be compared and contrasted. Our genetically joyful descendants may, or may not, undergo an analogous loss of cognitive access to the nature and variant textures of suffering. Quite plausibly, they will have gradients of sublimity to animate their lives and infuse their thoughts. So at least they'll be able to make analogies and draw parallels. But fortunately for their sanity and well-being, they won't be able to grasp the true frightfulness lying behind any linguistic remnants of the past that survive into the post-Darwinian era. Such lack of contrast, or even the inconceivability of unpleasant experiences, won't leave tomorrow's native-born ecstatics any less happy; if anything quite the reverse.
It's true that a world whose agents are animated by pleasure gradients will still have the functional equivalent of aversive experience. Yet the "raw feel" of such states may still be more wonderful than anything physiologically possible today.
4.0 "Happy experiences, and the very concept of happiness itself, are possible only because they can be contrasted with melancholy. The very notion of everlasting happiness is incoherent."
Some people endure lifelong emotional depression or physical pain. Quite literally, they are never happy. Understandably, they may blame their misery on the very nature of the world, not just their personal clinical condition. Yet it would be a cruel doctrine which pretended that such people don't really suffer because they can't contrast their sense of desolation with joyful memories. In the grips of despair, they may find the very notion of happiness cognitively meaningless. Conversely, the euphoria of unmixed (hypo)mania is not dependent for its sparkle on recollections of misery. Given the state-dependence of memory, negative emotions may simply be inaccessible to consciousness in such an exalted state. Likewise, it is possible that our perpetually euphoric descendants will find our contrastive notion of unhappiness quite literally inconceivable. For when one is extraordinarily super-well, then it's hard to imagine what it might be like to be chronically mentally ill.
Here's a contemporary parallel. It's possible to undergo, from a variety of causes, a complete bilateral loss of primary, secondary and "associative" visual cortex. People with Anton's Syndrome not only become blind; they are unaware of their sensory deficit. Furthermore, they lose all notion of the meaning of sight. They no longer possess the neurological substrates of the visual concepts by which their past and present condition could be compared and contrasted. Our genetically joyful descendants may, or may not, undergo an analogous loss of cognitive access to the nature and variant textures of suffering. Quite plausibly, they will have gradients of sublimity to animate their lives and infuse their thoughts. So at least they'll be able to make analogies and draw parallels. But fortunately for their sanity and well-being, they won't be able to grasp the true frightfulness lying behind any linguistic remnants of the past that survive into the post-Darwinian era. Such lack of contrast, or even the inconceivability of unpleasant experiences, won't leave tomorrow's native-born ecstatics any less happy; if anything quite the reverse.
It's true that a world whose agents are animated by pleasure gradients will still have the functional equivalent of aversive experience. Yet the "raw feel" of such states may still be more wonderful than anything physiologically possible today.
4.7 "I'd get bored of being happy all the time. Variety is indispensable to personal well-being."
As an empty verbalism, "perpetual bliss" does sound fairly tedious. As Bernard Shaw once remarked, "Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside".
Successful paradise-engineering, however, must be the very antithesis of tedium by its very nature. If the the prospect of paradise-engineering sounds unexciting, one has missed the point of what abolishing the substrates of tedium entails. In a different age, religious iconographers were able to derive much greater satisfaction in depicting the tortures of the wicked in Hell than in evoking the curiously anaemic delights of Heaven. Indeed, one could be forgiven for inferring that the eternal happiness of the Saved was dependent on contemplation of the eternal torment of the Damned. Likewise today, the secular equivalent of this syndrome is all too common. Potentially, however, there is no less a diversity of ways of being happy as being wretched. It is a grim reflection of the late-Darwinian human predicament that any notion of perpetual happiness evokes images of monotony. We can conjure up a rich and never-ending diet of disasters with ease.
Whatever humanity's contemporary failures of imagination, within a few generations the experience of boredom will be neurophysiologically impossible. From a naturalistic perspective, boredom amounts to just a complex of psychophysical states whose molecular substrate natural selection has chanced upon like any other. A capacity for boredom was retained because of the adaptive value its conditional activation can confer. Its more proximate physiological basis lies in the negative feedback mechanisms underlying the development of tolerance in the brain. These may be expressed in the form either of short-term habituation or a slightly more delayed process of gene-triggered receptor re-regulation. Such mechanisms can be disabled and replaced.
For as is experimentally demonstrable in the laboratory, the intra-cranial strategy of endless stimulation of the pleasure-centres of the brain confirms that happiness, and happiness itself alone, never palls. Out in the wider world, positive emotion just gets (re)directed to focus on and infuse a variety of intentional objects. None of our neocortical patterns is inherently nice or nasty in the absence of its distinctive signature of limbic innervation. Some of these patterns may in time cease to satisfy; stone-age love affairs are cruel. Given the mind-brain identity theory presupposed in this manifesto, however, there is no biological reason why each moment of one's existence couldn't have the impact of a breathtaking revelation. As the phenomena of déjà vu, and its rarer cousin jamais vu, strikingly attest, a sense of familiarity or novelty is dissociable from the previous presence or absence of any particular type of intentional object with which such feelings might more normally be associated. So the kind of thrill one might first have got witnessing, say, the Creation can in principle become a property of every second of one's life. Cool.
As an empty verbalism, "perpetual bliss" does sound fairly tedious. As Bernard Shaw once remarked, "Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside".
Successful paradise-engineering, however, must be the very antithesis of tedium by its very nature. If the the prospect of paradise-engineering sounds unexciting, one has missed the point of what abolishing the substrates of tedium entails. In a different age, religious iconographers were able to derive much greater satisfaction in depicting the tortures of the wicked in Hell than in evoking the curiously anaemic delights of Heaven. Indeed, one could be forgiven for inferring that the eternal happiness of the Saved was dependent on contemplation of the eternal torment of the Damned. Likewise today, the secular equivalent of this syndrome is all too common. Potentially, however, there is no less a diversity of ways of being happy as being wretched. It is a grim reflection of the late-Darwinian human predicament that any notion of perpetual happiness evokes images of monotony. We can conjure up a rich and never-ending diet of disasters with ease.
Whatever humanity's contemporary failures of imagination, within a few generations the experience of boredom will be neurophysiologically impossible. From a naturalistic perspective, boredom amounts to just a complex of psychophysical states whose molecular substrate natural selection has chanced upon like any other. A capacity for boredom was retained because of the adaptive value its conditional activation can confer. Its more proximate physiological basis lies in the negative feedback mechanisms underlying the development of tolerance in the brain. These may be expressed in the form either of short-term habituation or a slightly more delayed process of gene-triggered receptor re-regulation. Such mechanisms can be disabled and replaced.
For as is experimentally demonstrable in the laboratory, the intra-cranial strategy of endless stimulation of the pleasure-centres of the brain confirms that happiness, and happiness itself alone, never palls. Out in the wider world, positive emotion just gets (re)directed to focus on and infuse a variety of intentional objects. None of our neocortical patterns is inherently nice or nasty in the absence of its distinctive signature of limbic innervation. Some of these patterns may in time cease to satisfy; stone-age love affairs are cruel. Given the mind-brain identity theory presupposed in this manifesto, however, there is no biological reason why each moment of one's existence couldn't have the impact of a breathtaking revelation. As the phenomena of déjà vu, and its rarer cousin jamais vu, strikingly attest, a sense of familiarity or novelty is dissociable from the previous presence or absence of any particular type of intentional object with which such feelings might more normally be associated. So the kind of thrill one might first have got witnessing, say, the Creation can in principle become a property of every second of one's life. Cool.
4.9 "I don't want a lifetime of enforced ecstasy. I want the freedom sometimes to be sad, and not to be enslaved to a false chemical happiness."
It is most unclear how to unpack the notion of "false" happiness. Contaminating the God-given purity of one's soul-stuff with alien chemicals is presumably offensive if one's self-conception is essentially spiritual in character. If, on the other hand, all states of consciousness alike are physically mediated, then it is scarcely coherent to label some neurochemical patterns as inherently false, unreal or inauthentic. Such euphoric states have indeed hitherto been largely inaccessible and genetically maladaptive if prolonged. They are still natural properties of suitably structured metabolic pathways of matter and energy. So in that sense they are all "true", though this is a most infelicitous way of putting it.
It is not, in any case, as though anyone will plausibly be forced to be happy against their will. Just as, historically, many slaves did not challenge the institutional legitimacy of slavery, and many self-confessed sinners believed they deserved to be damned to an eternity of torment in Hell, so many people have been able to convince themselves of the ennobling quality of suffering. They will scarcely be ambushed and hauled in off the streets one day by crack-demented ecstatics and forcibly pumped full of euphoriants. A more apposite question might be what instruments of repression should a coercive State apparatus be entitled to use on behalf of possible bigoted die-hards of the old Darwinian order against people who decide, reasonably enough, that they do wish to live happily ever after. To what degree, and for how long and in what form, should authoritarian reactionaries have the right to compel others to suffer, once emotional primitivism becomes simply one life-style option amongst many?
It is most unclear how to unpack the notion of "false" happiness. Contaminating the God-given purity of one's soul-stuff with alien chemicals is presumably offensive if one's self-conception is essentially spiritual in character. If, on the other hand, all states of consciousness alike are physically mediated, then it is scarcely coherent to label some neurochemical patterns as inherently false, unreal or inauthentic. Such euphoric states have indeed hitherto been largely inaccessible and genetically maladaptive if prolonged. They are still natural properties of suitably structured metabolic pathways of matter and energy. So in that sense they are all "true", though this is a most infelicitous way of putting it.
It is not, in any case, as though anyone will plausibly be forced to be happy against their will. Just as, historically, many slaves did not challenge the institutional legitimacy of slavery, and many self-confessed sinners believed they deserved to be damned to an eternity of torment in Hell, so many people have been able to convince themselves of the ennobling quality of suffering. They will scarcely be ambushed and hauled in off the streets one day by crack-demented ecstatics and forcibly pumped full of euphoriants. A more apposite question might be what instruments of repression should a coercive State apparatus be entitled to use on behalf of possible bigoted die-hards of the old Darwinian order against people who decide, reasonably enough, that they do wish to live happily ever after. To what degree, and for how long and in what form, should authoritarian reactionaries have the right to compel others to suffer, once emotional primitivism becomes simply one life-style option amongst many?
Comment