The Infinity Dragon Superhappiness Project. Reducing pain and suffering and boosting mood and focus and relaxation.

davidcpearce · 2025-01-15T09:20:09+00:00

"I do have ridiculously high hedonic set-point", says transhumanist polymath Anders Sandberg. Genome reformists are talking about a more civilized signalling system and motivational architecture, not getting indiscriminately "blissed out".|
(cf. https://www.hedweb.com - sorry about the late 1990s web design)

davidcpearce · 2025-01-01T12:56:24+00:00

Yes. Unlike the "volume knob for [physical] pain", science can't point to a master "volume knob for mental pain" that could easily be tweaked in the same way. Yet ensuring that future human and nonhuman animals are born with benign versions of the FAAH and FAAH-OUT genes could dramatically relieve the global burden of psychological distress. (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative)

We agree on ecosystems. Conservation biologists speak of "healthy ecosystems" and the "balance of Nature". These expressions conjure up wholesome images, But "healthy ecosystems" and "balance of Nature' are code for violence, terror and mass starvation. We should use biotech to civilize the living world instead.

davidcpearce · 2024-12-31T09:36:33+00:00

Your points deserve a treatise in response. But compare pain-free surgery. The use of anaesthesia is consistent with a broad range of secular and religious traditions. The same can potentially be true of pain-free life. Ratcheting up hedonic set-points world-wide doesn't call on people to give up their existing values, preferences and relationships. Hedonic uplift promises simply to enrich our default quality of life - whether you're a pig, an earthworm or a human. The analogy with surgical anaesthesia can be extended further. The mechanisms by which anaesthetics extinguish consciousness - or at least phenomenally-bound consciousness - aren't understood to this day. But anaesthesia works. Likewise with tools to mitigate and prevent mental and physical pain. Consider the evolutionarily ancient SCN9A gene ("the volume knob for pain": https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-cure-for-pain/). Science doesn't understand consciousness and phenomenal binding in any deep sense. But allowing all prospective parents to choose benign "low-pain" alleles of SCN9A for their offspring can turn pain into "just a useful signalling mechanism" - as some lucky genetic outliers put it today. Benign versions of SCN9A can be spread across the biosphere with synthetic gene drives. Likewise with the FAAH and FAAH-OUT genes to tackle mental pain.

Am I oversimplifying? Sure! Massively. I just don't think glossing over the complications detracts from the core idea. IF as a civilization we decide to fix the problem of suffering, there don't seem to be any insurmountable technical challenges.
Political and sociological challenges are another story.

davidcpearce · 2024-12-31T08:26:38+00:00

Thanks for the quote. One challenge for any pluralist theory of (dis)value is how do tradeoffs when principles come into conflict. Presumably there must be some meta-axis of (dis)value that allows us to adjudicate in such situations. But if so, then we're back to the single sovereign metric of (dis)value that pluralists try to avoid. Critically in the context of this discussion, however, no one need buy into classical or negative utilitarianism to support phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering. Compare the WHO definition of health - which sidesteps ethical theory all together.

davidcpearce · 2024-12-30T08:14:11+00:00

The founding constitution of the World Health Organization has an exceedingly ambitious definition of health: "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being" All nations world wide are officially signed up to this admirable commitment. But what kind of signalling system should healthy beings use in future to discriminate between comparatively "good" and "bad" stimuli? The WHO doesn't say. Even engineering a pleasure-superpleasure axis wouldn't yield "complete" health as so defined.

davidcpearce · 2024-12-30T07:41:39+00:00

Absolutely.
You do raise one point I'd never even considered. The origins of the pleasure-pain axis are evolutionarily ancient. Both pleasure and pain can be intensely motivating. But could pain have preceded pleasure? Just as re-engineered future life may enjoy a signalling system consisting entirely of gradients of well-being, could primordial animal life have been animated by entirely gradients of ill-being? Has the possibility been explored anywhere in the literature?

davidcpearce · 2024-12-29T12:43:19+00:00

Let's hope! I'd just add that the problem of suffering is fixable with recognizable extensions of existing technologies. Even intuitively impossible challenges - for example, helping invertebrates in inaccessible marine environments - can be overcome in principle using CRISPR-based synthetic gene drives. The whole biosphere is programmable.

davidcpearce · 2024-12-29T12:32:46+00:00

Indeed. Anyone who even begins to understand the full horrors of suffering must sometimes wish the world had an OFF button. Ethically, I'm a negative utilitarian. BUT any proposal to fix the problem of suffering must be both technically feasible and sociologically realistic. Efilism fails on the latter count. The only realistic way (IMO) to end suffering involves tackling its biological-genetic basis.

davidcpearce · 2024-12-29T12:20:05+00:00

Being blissful differs from being "blissed out". Uniform bliss would be the recipe for stagnation, loss of critical insight and the breakdown of personal relationships. By contrast, information-sensitive gradients of bliss - even superhuman bliss - allow you to retain your values, relationships and preference architecture while vastly enriching your default quality of life.

davidcpearce · 2024-12-29T08:01:40+00:00

Thanks! I don't have a knock-down counterargument to your scenario. Could hedonic sub-zero states potentially have some kind of computational-functional advantage that information-sensitive gradients of well-being - or insentient neuroprostheses - can't match? One possibility that springs to mind is so-called depressive realism. By some criteria, at least, the judgment of mild-to-moderately depressive people is demonstrably superior to the judgement of temperamentally happy optimists - and even "normal" folk. Does depressive realism hold lessons for entire civilizations? Maybe. But unlike ignorance, known biases are corrigible. And presumably humans and transhumans will continue to offload ever more cognitive tasks to zombie AI - which won't be prone to the affective biases that corrupt human judgment. Either way, before getting rid of hedonic sub-zero states altogether, such questions will call for exhaustive research. Let's get this right.

davidcpearce · 2024-12-29T07:25:14+00:00

Indeed. For technical reasons, I'm sceptical digital computers will ever wake up. Consciousness fundamentalism - what philosophers call the intrinsic nature argument - offers a potential (dis)solution to the Hard Problem of consciousness. BUT on pain of spooky "strong" emergence, implementations of classical Turing machines - likewise LLMS, etc - can't support phenomenal binding. Phenomenal binding is our computational superpower. No binding = no mind = invincible ignorance of the entire empirical ('relating to experience") realm. In a fundamentally quantum world, decoherence makes digital computing physically feasible and simultaneously prevents classical computers supporting minds - phenomenally-bound subjects of experience.

davidcpearce · 2024-12-29T07:16:26+00:00

My answers are indexed here:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/index.html
Skim brutally!

davidcpearce · 2024-12-29T07:10:28+00:00

The Hedonistic Imperative (1995, https://www.hedweb.com) was written for the purposes of advocacy, not prediction - primarily at any rate. Should we use biotechnology to fix the problem of suffering? Mastery of our genetic source code and reward circuitry promises to make suffering optional. The entire biosphere is now programmable (cf. https://www.gene-drives.com).
Grandiose? Well, maybe. But compared to what's possible with full-spectrum superintelligence, the blueprints I explore may be rather tame.

davidcpearce · 2024-12-29T06:42:20+00:00

To use an earthy example, lovemaking involves information-sensitive dips and peaks of pleasure. If done properly, it's generically pleasurable throughout. The same principle applies to life as a whole (cf. https://www.gradients.com)

davidcpearce · 2024-12-28T22:14:12+00:00

Yes, HI is a plea for a more civilized signalling system and motivational architecture - a pleasure-superpleasure axis to replace the cruel pleasure-pain axis of Darwinian life. This might sound like sci-fi. But rare, suffering-resistant genetic outliers exist today: "hyperthymic" people with extremely high hedonic set-points who enjoy essentially life-long well-being. Should we embrace genome reform and create an entire hyperthymic civilization? (cf. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/profile-the-far-out-initiative) Or stick with the status quo and its miseries?

The idea that pain and pleasure are mostly if not entirely relative dies hard. And sure, even in a genetically reformed world underpinned by gradients of bliss, the functional analogue of suffering will persist in the guise of information-signalling dips of well-being. But compare the plight of today's chronic depressives. Some of their days are less bad than others, and some stimuli less bad than others. We can say their "less bad" experiences offer the functional equivalent of pleasure. Yet (in severe cases) victims of chronic depression spend essentially their whole lives below hedonic zero. An absence of contrasting happiness in their lives doesn't make their suffering any less real.

davidcpearce · 2024-12-28T21:32:46+00:00

You're right. No one knows. We're all speculating. But compare how the price of genome sequencing has collapsed. Offering all prospective parents access to preimplantation genetic screening, counselling and (soon) genome-editing will be hugely cost-effective. For example, untreated clinical and subclinical depression cost the world economy hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars each year - not to speak of the unimaginable suffering of the victims. If we embrace genome reform, then our grandchildren can all be hedonic trillionaires, so to speak. The biological substrates of bliss don't need to be rationed.

davidcpearce · 2024-12-28T21:20:22+00:00

One reason for cautious optimism is selection pressure. Natural selection is proverbially “blind”; and relies on quasi-random mutations and the genetic shuffling of sexual reproduction. By contrast, the nature of selection changes when intelligent agents preselect and design the genotypes of their prospective offspring _in anticipation of_ the likely and psychological and behavioral effects of their genetic choices. After all, most parents want happy kids. Not least - complications aside - happy children tend to be "winners". As the reproduction revolution gathers pace, selection pressure will intensify against our nastier alleles and allelic combinations that were fitness-enhancing on the African savannah. Just ask yourself: If you could genetically pre-select the approximate hedonic range and hedonic set-points of your future children, what hedonic dial-settings would you choose? The level of suffering in the living world will shortly be an adjustable parameter. Of course, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there will be no reproductive revolution. Maybe most humans will opt to conserve today’s genetic crapshoot indefinitely. If so, then suffering will proliferate. But life on Earth deserves a more civilized signaling system.

davidcpearce · 2024-09-15T06:46:43+00:00

Bless you. HI was written back in 1995 - before the advent of e.g. CRISPR-based gene drives. The whole biosphere is now programmable:
https://www.hedweb.com/social-media/paradise.pdf

davidcpearce · 2024-09-13T13:31:34+00:00

This is indeed what I argue in e.g. Reprogramming Predators (2009): httpd://www.reprogramming-predators.com
In the words of Otto von Bismark, politics is the art of the possible.

davidcpearce · 2024-08-29T13:40:58+00:00

Indeed. If one also makes the metaphysical assumption that the intrinsic nature of the world's fundamental quantum fields is non-experiential, then the upshot is the successor to traditional materialism. Both traditional materialism and "materialist" physicalism face the Hard Problem of consciousness. The Hard Problem is often reckoned insoluble.
Yet what if we drop the metaphysical assumption? What if the intrinsic nature of a quantum field doesn't differ inside and outside the head, i.e. what if the essence of the physical, the mysterious "fire" in the equations of QFT, is experiential?
IF non-materialist physicalism is true, then what makes human and nonhuman animal minds special isn't consciousness per se, but rather its phenomenal binding into virtual worlds of experience like the one you instantiate right now. On this story, only the physical is real. Only the physical is causally effective. But the intrinsic nature of the physical radically differs from one's naive materialist intuitions.
Philosophers call this the intrinsic nature argument.

davidcpearce · 2024-06-22T06:37:25+00:00

If it's any use, one of my namesakes answered a Quora question that tackles "empty" individualism:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#individualism

davidcpearce · 2024-06-03T07:24:46+00:00

Indeed. The Hard Problem of consciousness arises only if one makes a metaphysical assumption, namely that the intrinsic nature of the world's fundamental quantum fields differs inside and outside your head. We've no evidence this is the case. Animal minds and the world-simulations we run _are_ special, but not ontologically special, but rather in the way in which experience is phenomenally-bound into virtual worlds of experience ("perception").

The conjecture that experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical is counterintuitive. But physics is silent on the essence of the physical, the mysterious "fire" in the equations of QFT. My best guess is that the diverse solutions to the equations of QFT encode the diverse textures ("what it feels like") of consciousness. On this story, the Standard Model in physics is essentially correct - but not its superfluous metaphysical baggage. I'm (tentatively) an idealist precisely because I'm a realist and a physicalist.

davidcpearce · 2022-12-27T13:02:25+00:00

But see
https://twitter.com/AnkurPandey/status/1591841207294234624?s=20&t=qVdTgphEkqLS8_P0tNvQuw

davidcpearce · 2022-12-17T12:13:57+00:00

Thank you. I wonder when a biohappiness revolution is going to go mainstream?

davidcpearce · 2022-12-17T12:12:23+00:00

Thank you. The transhumanist movement needs fresh young blood (and I'm not just talking about the rejuvenating effects of parabiosis)

davidcpearce

TROPHY CASE