Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/2624
60 Fall 2009 h+: Your philosophy of bringing an end to suffering echoes the goals of the Buddha. What provoked you to take the Buddha's philosophy to the most extreme interpretation? DAVID PEARCE: "May all that have life be delivered from suffering," said Gautama Buddha. But is this scientifically feasible? As a teenager, I read The Selfish Gene. Suffering exists only because it helps our DNA leave more copies of itself. I also stumbled across the electrode studies of Olds and Milner on the reward centers of the brain. Uniquely, the experience of pure pleasure shows no physiological tolerance: an important clue. Yet a whole civilization based on intracranial self-stimulation doesn't seem sociologically feasible. Only two other options struck me as viable: pharmacology and genetic engineering. It's hard to see how therapeutic drugs could abolish mental and physical pain altogether unless we're willing to medicate our children from birth. By contrast, germline gene-therapy can potentially deliver a cure. Study of the genetics of mood disorders convinced me that we could edit our source code to recalibrate the hedonic treadmill. In principle, post- genomic medicine can genetically alter our "hedonic set-point" so we enjoy life-long mental health based on gradients of intelligent bliss. A new system of motivation may emerge. More practically, the imminent reproductive revolution of designer babies is likely to exert immense selection pressure in favor of "happy" genotypes. Of course transhumanists have more ambitious goals than abolishing suffering. Thus I predict our super-intelligent descendants will be fired by gradients of bliss orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences every moment of their quasi-immortal lives. But getting rid of all (involuntary) suffering strikes me as the basis of any future civilization. I can't conceive anything more morally urgent. h+: Growing up, what was the most intense suffering you had to endure, and would you retroactively erase the trauma of those memories if you could? DP: Sadness can be very personal. So I'm going to be boringly tight-lipped. Sorry. I'll just say that in the future I think all bad memories will be selectively erased, or at least emotionally defanged after any valuable lessons have been drawn. Actually, I think all mediocre memories will be erasable too — and that includes everything from the Darwinian era. Memories of today's peak experiences will seem banal compared to the textures of everyday life centuries hence. Improved neuroscanning technology will shortly enable us to identify the molecular signature(s) of pure bliss and genetically "over-express" its substrates. Neuroscientists are already homing in on the twin cubic-millimetre sized "hedonic hotspots" in the ventral pallidum and nucleus accumbens of the rodent brain. The equivalent hedonic hotspots in humans may be as large as a cubic centimeter. I suspect they hold the gene expression profile of what makes life seem worth living. If so, there is scope for refinement and intelligent amplification. Our uglier Darwinian emotions can be abolished. Then we can lead lives truly worth remembering. h+: Isn't the goal of cessation of pain and suffering a bit wimpy? Shouldn't every organism be resilient enough to take some pain and suffering over a normal lifetime? DP: Intuitively, one might indeed suppose that lifelong bliss would make us weak. Contrast, for instance, the Eloi with the Morlocks in H.G. Well's The Time Machine. In practice, the opposite is true. "That which does not crush me makes me stronger," said Nietzsche, but the best way to make ourselves stronger short of becoming cyborgs is to amplify our pleasure circuitry and enhance our capacity to anticipate reward. Experimentally, it can be shown that enhancing mesolimbic dopamine function doesn't just make us happier: it also enriches willpower and motivation. This is how novel antidepressants are tested: if effective, they reverse learned helplessness and behavioral despair of clinical depression, the plight of hundreds of millions of people in the world today. Regrettably, low mood is bound up with psychological and physical weakness, just as popular stereotype suggests. Superhappiness confers superhuman resilience. So enriching our reward circuitry promises to enhance our capacity to cope with stress and adversity even as their incidence and severity diminish. Biotech can empower us to become supermen — not in the callous sense of Nietzschean Übermenschen, since our enhanced empathetic capacity can extend to all sentient beings, but in the sense of an indomitable strength of mind. Sadly, millions of people today feel hopelessly crushed by life. h+: How do you think the Buddha would feel about using technology like drugs or genetic engineering as a means towards ending human suffering? DP: It's hard to reconstruct the psychology of a guy who has been dead for 2500 years. Yet Gautama Buddha's interest clearly lay in finding the most effective techniques to end suffering, not in delivering some God-given truth. Buddhism isn't like revealed religion. Gautama Buddha seems to have been pragmatic. Let's try what works. If presented with contemporary biotechnology, I doubt he'd insist we go though the traumas of thousands of rounds of rebirth. I think he'd embrace genetic medicine as a priceless gift and urge us to extend its use to ensure the welfare of all sentient beings, not just ourselves. h+: You're an animal rights activist and a vegan. How do you think protein should be supplied in the future? DP: Jewish Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer described life for factory- farmed animals as "an eternal Treblinka": a world of concentration camps,