0. Introduction.
"Happiness is an illusion; only suffering is real."
(Voltaire)

0.1 The Naturalisation of Heaven.
This manifesto combines far-fetched utopian advocacy with cold-headed social-scientific prediction. The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how nanotechnology and genetic engineering will eliminate aversive experience from the living world. Over the next thousand years or so, the biological substrates of suffering will be eradicated completely. "Physical" and "mental" pain alike are destined to disappear into evolutionary history. The biochemistry of everyday discontents will be genetically phased out too. Instead, matter and energy will be sculpted into perpetually life-loving super-beings. Their states of mind are likely to be incomprehensibly diverse by comparison with today. Yet all will share at least one common feature: a sublime and all-pervasive happiness.
        This feeling of absolute well-being will surpass anything which human neurochemistry and imagination can presently access, let alone sustain. The story gets better. Post-human states of quite magical joy will be biologically purified, multiplied and intensified indefinitely. Notions of what now passes for tolerably good mental health will be superseded. They will be written off as mood-congruent cognitive pathologies of the primordial Darwinian psyche. Such ugly thoughts and feelings will be diagnosed as typical of the tragic lives of emotional primitives from the previous era. In time, the deliberate re-creation of today's state-spectrum of normal waking and dreaming consciousness may be outlawed as cruel and immoral.

        Such speculations may currently sound fantastical. Yet the ideas of this manifesto may one day come to be regarded as intellectually trite - albeit today morally urgent. For what might once have been the stuff of millennialist fantasy is set to become a scientifically feasible research program. Its adoption or rejection will become, ultimately, a social policy issue. Passively or actively, we will have to choose just how much unpleasantness we wish to create or conserve - if any - in eras to come.
 

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0.2 Saving Vehicles With Bad Drivers.
Blind selective pressures have acted on living organisms over hundreds of millions of years. Darwinian evolution has powerfully favoured the growth of ever more diverse, excruciating, but also more adaptive varieties of psychophysical pain. Its sheer nastiness effectively spurs and punishes the living vehicles of genetic replicators. Sadness, anxiety and malaise, too, are frequently good for our genes; they're just psychologically bad for us. In absolute terms, global suffering is probably still increasing as the population explosion continues. Human ingenuity has struggled, often vainly, to rationalise and somehow derive value from the most frightful anguish. But over the aeons the very anguish which intermittently corrodes the well-being of the individual organism has differentially promoted the inclusive fitness of its DNA. Hence it has tended to get inexorably worse.
        Of course such doom-and-gloom isn't the whole picture. The world's horrors can be contrasted with life's more rewarding experiences. People sometimes have fun. Long-lasting depression is rarely adaptive. Yet what Michael Eysenck describes as the "hedonic treadmill" ensures that very few of us can be very happy for very long. An interplay of cruelly effective negative feedback mechanisms is at work in the central nervous system. Feedback-inhibition ensures that a majority of people would be periodically bored, depressed or angst-ridden in a recreated Garden of Eden.

        A small minority of humans do in fact experience states of indefinitely prolonged euphoria. These states of involuntary well-being are usually pathologised as "manic". Unlike unipolar depression, sustained unipolar mania is very rare. Other folk who just have high "hedonic set-points", but who aren't manic or bipolar, are sometimes described as "hyperthymic" instead. This isn't a common mindset either. "Bipolar disorder", on the other hand, is experienced in the course of a lifetime by perhaps one in a hundred people or more. Popularly known as manic-depression, it has several sub-types. Mood characteristically alternates between euphoria and abject despair. Cycles may vary in length. It is a complex genetic condition which runs in families. Typically, bipolarity is marked by a genetic variation in the serotonin transporter as compared to "euthymic" normals. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter involved in sleep, sociability, feeding, activity, mood, and a lot else besides. The serotonin transporter mops up "excess" serotonin released by nerve cells into the synapses. Very crudely, manic states are associated with enhanced dopamine and norepinephrine function; serotonin function is dysregulated or low.

         Sadly, in today's "bipolars" manic exuberance can spin out of control. Euphoria may be accompanied by hyperactivity, sleeplessness, chaotically racing ideas, pressure of speech and grandiose thought. Hyper-sexuality, financial excesses and religious delusions are common. So is rampant egomania. Sometimes dysphoria may occur. In dysphoric mania the manic "high" is actually unpleasant. The excited subject may be angry, agitated, panicky, paranoid, and destructive. When in the grip of classic euphoric mania, however, it's hard to recognise that anyone might think anything is wrong. This is because everything feels abundantly all right. To suppose otherwise is like going to Heaven and then being invited to believe there has been a mistake. It's not credible.

         Today, euphoric (hypo-)mania is liable to be clinically subdued with drugs. ["Hypomania" denotes simply a milder mania.] Toxic "medication" can depress elevated mood to duller but "normal" levels. Such flatter and supposedly healthier levels of emotion enable otherwise euphoric people to function within contemporary society. Compliance with a medically-dictated treatment-regimen (lithium, sodium valproate, carbamazepine etc.) will be enhanced if the victim can be persuaded that euphoric well-being is pathological. (S)he can then look for warning signs and symptoms. By the norms of our genetically-enriched posterity, however, it is the rest of us who are chronically unwell - if not more so. Contemporary standards of mental health are just pathologically low. Our super-well descendants, by contrast, will enjoy a glorious spectrum of new options. They may opt to combine emotional stability, resilience and "serotonergic" serenity, for instance, with the goal-oriented energy, optimism and initiative of a raw "dopaminergic" high. Post-humans will have discovered that euphoric peak experiences can be channelled, controlled and genetically diversified, not just medically suppressed.

        For there is a cruel irony here. Clinically prescribed mood-darkeners would be laughably redundant for the great bulk of humanity. At present, life for billions of genetically "normal" people is often very grim indeed. No amount of piecemeal political and economic reform, nor even radical social engineering, can overcome this biological reality. Today's billion-and-one routes to supposedly lasting happiness are pursued in the guise of innumerable intentional objects. [Intentionality in philosophy-speak is the 'aboutness' or 'object-directedness' of thought]. We convince ourselves that all manner of things would potentially make us happy. All these peripheral routes are not merely vastly circuitous and inefficient. In the main, they just don't, and can't, durably work. At best, they can serve as superficial palliatives of the human predicament. If the mind/brain's emotional thermostat, as it were, is not genetically and pharmacologically reset, then even the greatest triumphs and successes turn to ashes. Lottery winners, cup-final hat-trick scorers and blissful newly-weds are left time and again to discover this fate anew. Even those of us who tend to lead a relatively happy day-to-day existence will, in the course of a lifetime, undergo spells of wretched unhappiness and disappointment.

        It would be easy but unwarranted simply to extrapolate past and present trends into the indefinite future. Usually, we assume without question that our descendants - however different from us in other respects - will be biologically prone to suffer negative states of consciousness. We suppose that future generations will sometimes feel distress, both subtle and crude, just as we have always done ourselves. Yet this assumption may be naive. The neurochemical basis of feeling and emotion is rapidly being unravelled. The human genome is going to get decoded and rewritten. In ages to come, it will become purely an issue of (post-)human decision whether unpleasant modes of consciousness are generated in any form or texture whatsoever. Aversive experience is a sinister anachronism. We will have to decide if we should inflict suffering on ourselves or on others. A terrible but once unavoidable fact of organic life then becomes instead a matter for active moral choice. And that choice can be declined.
 

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0.3 Humans Are Not Rats.
One possibility, though not an option to be canvassed here, is that in freeing ourselves from the nightmarish legacy of our genetic past we might choose to enjoy a lifetime of raw, all-consuming orgasmic bliss. This bliss needn't be directed at any well-defined intentional objects. We - or more likely our robot-serviced descendants - wouldn't be ecstatic about anything in particular. Our nature would be constitutionally ecstatic. Genetically pre-programmed euphoria would be as natural and inevitable as breathing. We would simply be happy about being happy.
        The defining image here, perhaps, is the notional human counterpart of the experimenter's lever-pressing rat. Electrodes can be implanted directly into the mind/brain's pleasure centres. These lie in the meso-limbic dopamine system, the core of the brain's reward circuitry. It extends from the ventral tegmentum to the nucleus accumbens, with projections to the limbic system and orbitofrontal cortex. Notoriously, the wired rat will indulge in frenzied bouts of intra-cranial self-stimulation for days on end. The experience is so wonderful that it takes precedence over food and sleep. It's preferred even to sex. The rat doesn't need to undergo a contrasting "low" to appreciate the "high". The little bundle of joy is apparently incapable of becoming bored with, or physiologically tolerant to, the rodent equivalent of Heaven.

        Such animalistic images are unedifying to all but the most unabashed hedonist. Yet more subtly-engineered human counterparts of the euphoric rat are perfectly feasible. Centuries hence, any pleasure-maximising ecstatics will be using their personal freedom to exercise what is, in a utilitarian sense, a legitimate life-style choice.

        The "wirehead" option, however, will be only one item taken from a very large menu. Unfortunately, it is also the most easily visualised. So the spectre of perpetual intra-cranial self-stimulation will be taken, wrongly, to symbolise the whole approach that The Hedonistic Imperative represents. The utterly serious ethical substance which underlies this manifesto's proposals may thus too easily be dismissed. For humans, as we are solemnly reminded, are not rats.
 

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0.4 Life In Dopaminergic Overdrive.
An important point to stress in the discussion to follow is that many dopamine-driven states of euphoria can actually enhance motivated, goal-directed behaviour in general. Enhanced dopamine function makes one's motivation to act stronger, not weaker. Hyper-dopaminergic states tend also to increase the range of activities an organism finds worth pursuing. Outside the pleasure-laboratory, such states of necessity focus on countless different intentional objects. So humanity's future as envisaged in this manifesto is not, or certainly not just, an eternity spent enraptured on elixirs of super-soma or tanked up on high-octane pleasure-machines. Nor is it plausible that posterity will enjoy only the dullish, opiated sensibility of the heroin addict. Instead, an extraordinarily fertile range of purposeful and productive activities will most likely be pursued. Better still, our descendants, and in principle perhaps even our elderly selves, will have the chance to enjoy modes of experience we primitives cruelly lack. For on offer are sights more majestically beautiful, music more deeply soul-stirring, sex more exquisitely erotic, mystical epiphanies more awe-inspiring, and love more profoundly intense than anything we can now properly comprehend.
        I shall first schematically set out how a naturalistic, secular paradise of effectively everlasting happiness is biotechnically feasible. Second, I will argue why its realisation is instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. Third, I will offer a sketch of when and why such a scenario is likely to come to pass in some guise or other. And, finally, I shall try to anticipate some of the most common if not always cogent objections that the prospect of psychochemical nirvana is likely to arouse, and attempt to defuse them.
 
 

1. How?
"God's in His Heaven -
All's right with the world!"
(Robert Browning)
1.0 Sabotage at the Mill.
To escape from the hedonic treadmill we must first sabotage a small but vicious set of negative feedback mechanisms. These are genetically coded into the mind/brain. Recreational drugs of abuse do not transcend or subvert such mechanisms. On the contrary, they actually bring them into play with a vengeance. Today's quick-and-dirty euphoriants are nonetheless instructive. They give us a tantalising glimpse of what humanity's natural state of consciousness could become if several ugly neural metabolic pathways were inhibited or eliminated.
        A better clue to organic life's emotional future dates from the early 1950's. The unlikely guinea-pigs were veterans at a U.S. tuberculosis sanatorium. Residents prescribed the MAO-inhibiting drug iproniazid were not merely cured of their tuberculosis. After a few weeks of treatment, many of them started to feel exceptionally happy. Doctors described their patients, rather over-colourfully perhaps, as "dancing in the aisles". For the most part, the veterans had not previously been clinically depressed, as distinct from rather crotchety. Nor was their new-found euphoria simply an understandable reaction to restored good health. Moreover, in contrast to most recreational drugs, tolerance to the MAO-inhibitor's mood-brightening side-effect, and the consequent danger of uncontrolled dose-escalation, didn't set in. Instead, it transpires that MAO-inhibitors as a class can induce a benign, long-term re-regulation of several families of nerve-cell receptor proteins involved in making us happy or sad. Quite by accident, modern medicine had stumbled on the sustainably mood-lifting properties of a remarkable and diverse category of drugs, the monoamine oxidase-inhibitors.

        Monoamine oxidase has two main types, uninformatively labelled A and B. It is an enzyme responsible for the deamination of monoamine neurotransmitters such as dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonin. It also deaminates trace amines such as phenylethylamine, found in chocolate and released when one is in love. MAO isoenzyme-A deaminates serotonin, norepinephrine and, to a lesser extent, dopamine. Isoenzyme-B breaks down dopamine and phenylethylamine. The action of monoamine neurotransmitters on the post-synaptic receptors, and the post-transduction intracellular cascade they induce, plays a vital role in mediating mood and emotional experience. Depletion of monoamines in the synaptic vesicles e.g. by the anti-hypertensive drug reserpine, can sometimes precipitate severe and even life-threatening depression. Elevated levels of dopamine, on the other hand, are associated with (hypo-)manic euphoria.

         By modulating the synaptic availability, and consequent receptor re-regulation, of simple neurotransmitters on a long-term basis, the MAO-inhibitors were to serve as the first of a disparate group of drugs uninvitingly categorised as "antidepressants". Some of today's mediocre crop of licensed products, such as the tricyclics, are in general unrewarding to people who aren't rated clinically depressed. They tend to be sedating. Their action dulls, however mildly, the intellect and sensibility. Most traditional therapeutic agents - at least until the development of (relatively) selective serotonin re-uptake blockers such as fluoxetine (Prozac) and noradrenaline reuptake blockers such as reboxetine - are "dirty" and unselective drugs. They have lots of troublesome side-effects. They frequently flatten rather than deepen the emotions. Several brands, such as the older, unselective and irreversible MAO-inhibitors, are potentially dangerous if taken in the absence of rigorous dietary restrictions. All of them, thanks to the puritanical ethos of the medical establishment, have been tested and brought to market with the deliberate additional aim of not inducing a euphoric sense of well-being ("abuse-potential") in the user.

         It is next century's successors to these unpromising-sounding drugs, however, and not today's fast-acting recreational euphoriants, which promise to deliver the world's supposedly "euthymic" population from the sick psycho-chemical ghetto bequeathed by our genetic past. Potent, long-acting mood-brighteners - but not clinical "psychic anaesthetisers" or "quick-hit" street-drugs - will serve as a life-enriching stop-gap until radical gene-therapies enable us to knock out the Darwinian pathologies of consciousness altogether. Time-delayed designer euphoriants will foreshadow an extended product-line of innovative treatments. Collectively, they will cure what sophisticated post-human posterity will recognise as a gene-driven mood-disorder. A lot of the time at present, we just don't - and can't - conceptualise the extent of how unwell we are. For there are powerful arguments to suggest that everyday consciousness, insofar as it is not transcendentally wonderful, is symptomatic of profound psychological ill-health.

        This possibility is not widely acknowledged in public today. Mental illness still carries a stigma. "Of-course-I'm-all-right. There's nothing wrong with me!" one may sometimes snappishly be told. To be depressive is to be fitness-impaired, low-status, a poor choice of mate, and generally uncool. So there are self-protective defence- and denial-mechanisms, as well as a plain failure of the imagination, at work.

        Defensiveness and denial won't be needed for ever. A few generations hence, the intoxicating joy of normal life will be genetically pre-programmed. Psychoactive drugs will be redundant. Pure well-being can potentially become a deep and natural presupposition of everyday life. Undiluted existential happiness will infuse every second of waking and dreaming existence; and pervade every aspect of one's body and psyche. Sadly, the sort of germ-line gene-therapy needed to achieve lifelong, high-functioning euphoria for everyone who thinks they can handle it is still some way off. In the transitional era, chemical mood-uplifters will be essential too.
 

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1.1 The Biological Program.
Grand Meta-Narratives aren't very fashionable at the moment. History can indeed seem like one damn thing after another. The nearest we get these days to some kind of plot or story about where life on earth is heading usually adds up to some simple-minded technological determinism. Nevertheless, a sketch of one possible route by which all sources of negative value will be purged from the world is set out below. Other biological strategies for Cosmic Value-Maximisation(!) - or simply making everyone a great deal happier - are in prospect too. Details and variations matter. Every family of options for naturalising heaven-on-earth needs to be exhaustively researched - and not just idly philosophised about. Yet it is vital to distinguish the overall goal of banishing suffering from our first faltering blueprints of how to achieve it. The technical shortcomings of anything proposed here should not be allowed to taint the overall strategy itself.
        This particular biological program, at least, is inspired by an almost desperate sense of moral urgency, not gung-ho technophilia. For it's worth pausing and trying to practise, quite literally, a few minutes of systematic empathy. Quite agonising things are happening to people like you, me and our loved ones right now. The full horror of some sorts of suffering is literally unspeakable and unimaginably dreadful. Under a "natural" Darwinian regime, truly horrible experiences - as well as endemic low-grade malaise - are both commonplace and inevitable. In Chapter Two, I argue the moral case that they should be stopped. Since 'ought' implies 'can', however, it must first be established that scrapping aversive experience really is a biological option. I argue that the lesson of intracranial self-stimulation studies - despite their disastrously bad contemporary image - is yes.

        The biological blueprint set out below outlines only a cartoonish prototype of a mature post-Darwinian paradise. Its sketch of likely future neuro-scientific breakthroughs may well be wrong both in its few specifics and its projected time-scales. Experts in the relevant specialist fields will doubtless wince, at least in places. For The Hedonistic Imperative consists in a hand-waving, cross-disciplinary romp through dauntingly complex specialist topics. Inevitably, some of the pop neuroscience is simplistic to the point of parody. Eyebrows should be raised, too, at the dogmatic brevity with which various philosophical problems deserving book-length treatment are dispatched in a single sentence. The multitude of practical, medico-legal and socio-political problems which fulfilling our neurochemical Manifest Destiny will entail are largely passed over as well.

         These caveats are important. Yet leaving them aside, the biological program may be divided, somewhat arbitrarily, into three stages. They are here ranked in order of difficulty. Luckily, the stages happen to coincide in relative ethical importance, since crude harm-reduction and pain-abolition is easier to accomplish than refining the architectural subtleties of paradise. Less happily, any biochemical description of the mechanics of the sublime just travesties the nature of the experience itself. The sub-academese prose below unavoidably debases what it aims to evoke. This is because of the contaminated associations of any terms associated with drug-abuse, genetic engineering, eugenics, or even the emotionally frigid atmosphere of the laboratory. Our present perspective on utopian biopsychiatry is jaundiced. For our education-system virtually ignores the psychobiological foundations of all emotional life. Happily, that system also provides the formal tools for us to describe and escape from our predicament.

        What is really needed, above and beyond mere chemical formulae, is a new network of concepts - a user's guide to map out the magically alien realms of consciousness ahead of us. Yet by the time such tools can be developed as new state-spaces of experience are accessed, the revolutionary conceptual scheme they embody will be less urgently needed. One day, we may have thoughts like sunsets. Their brilliance will replace the elusive and phenomenologically thin series of sad little cognitive tickles which we (apparently) shuffle around and via which this manifesto is written and read. In the meantime the sordid, or at best impersonal, vocabulary of chemistry is all we can rely on for communicating how to get things done. An earthly paradise can be achieved only by the profane application of science. It won't happen via the edifying discourses of religion or magic.
 

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1.2 Pumping Up The Volume.
One crude but effective ingredient of the initial stage of the biological program will involve modifying the meso(cortico-)limbic dopamine system. Controversially, and oversimplifying a little since dopamine is not itself a magic "pleasure molecule", the mesolimbic reward pathways serve as the final common pathway for pleasure in the brain. Neuronal dopamine-release may be elicited "naturally" via biochemical transduction-mechanisms. It is usually triggered by adaptive environmental stimuli. On the other hand, dopamine-release may also be induced more directly via the use of recreational drugs. The "rush" of crack cocaine, for instance, falsely signals a huge Darwinian fitness benefit. Either way, although the central nervous system has tens of billions of cells, its mesolimbic wellspring of pleasure, motivation and libido has only some 30-40 thousand; and clearly this isn't nearly enough.
         The axons and dendrites of mesolimbic dopaminergic neurones innervate the higher cortical regions of the brain. They thereby help mediate the genetically adaptive "encephalisation of emotion". This neat little trick has served our DNA, but frequently not us, fiendishly well. Emotional encephalisation convinces its victims that happiness is inseparable from presence or absence of variously innervated types of intentional object. We are happy or sad 'about' things. Entirely non-coincidentally, the realisation of our most emotionally charged types of intentional object tends to promote the inclusive fitness of our genes. Crudely, we like most what's good for them.

         Unfortunately, they don't care about us. Our genes don't look after their vehicles for very long. In adult life, dopaminergic neurons die off at a rate of over 10% per decade. Their death ensures that senescence is marked by a decline in drive, libido, pleasure and the intensity of experience itself. Even in one's youth, the fullest and most beautiful scope for expression of the dopaminergic pleasure-cells is continually frustrated by inhibitory feedback. This derives both from the cells' own pre-synaptic autoreceptors and the processes of other, often less benign, neurons that synapse upon them.

         Thus what must be included in any program of systematic life-enrichment is a strategy of at once multiplying the numbers of, and selectively reducing feedback inhibition on, mesolimbic dopamine cells. Achieving a modest initial hundredfold, say, enrichment of an organism's capacity for well-being is not, needless to add, simply a matter of genetically switching on an uncontrolled proliferation of dopaminergic neurons; though it has to be said that, as causes of death go, a tumour of the pleasure cells has got a certain whimsical appeal. Nor, of course, does a regimen of sustained pleasure-amplification simply entail enhancing the levels of dopamine in the synapses. Excessive post-synaptic stimulation of particular dopamine receptor sub-types is implicated in, for instance, the florid symptoms of schizophrenia. It also marks the psychotic excesses of that ultimate egoist, the crack addict. So crude monotherapy surely won't do the job alone.
 

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1.3 The Civilising Neurotransmitter.
There is a more promising twin-track approach. This consists of boosting sub-types of both dopaminergic and serotonergic function.
        Serotonin has been described as the "civilising neurotransmitter". Such a label is a useful piece of mental shorthand. It's still worth noting that even this simple monoamine has fifteen or more functionally distinct receptor sub-types. Serotonergic dysfunction is associated with irritability, explosive anger, violence, sociopathy, and suicide. Conversely, the extraordinarily deep sense of love, trust and empathy inspired by "the penicillin of the soul", MDMA, is due primarily to the massive release of serotonin which its use provokes. It causes only a modest release of dopamine. Both dopamine- and serotonin-release are needed for the inhibitory effects of MDMA on glutamate-evoked neuronal excitability in the nucleus accumbens to take its full magical effect. In any event, the result of casually popping a pill can be a life-defining revelation. The trouble today is that the magic doesn't last.

         There's no good reason why it shouldn't. A neurobehavioural system evolved to maximise Darwinian fitness can be redesigned to maximise personal well-being instead. On this basis, it would be eminently sensible to develop a delayed-action, non-neurotoxic drug or cocktail-mix of sustainable mood-brighteners. This could make us all very happy and revolutionise our archaic conception of mental health. Day-to-day life in drug-assisted Eden can blend, if we so choose, the most exalted, life-loving euphoria of a potent dopamine agonist with the serene and mystical love of an 'empathogen' or 'entactogen' such as MDMA ("ecstasy"). States of incisive, goal-directed thought can co-exist with a profound love for our fellow beings. If we want, we can make such states biologically natural; and eventually innate. There are good times ahead.

        As hedonic engineering develops into a mature discipline, the generic modes of paradise we opt for can be genetically pre-coded. Native-born ecstatics will flourish. All the wonderful models discussed in this section of HI may come to be viewed as simple-minded prototypes. The innovative, high-specification bio-heavens beyond will be far richer. We lack the semantic competence to talk about them sensibly. Yet however inelegantly our goal may be accomplished at first, the ultimate strategic objective should be the neurochemical precision-engineering of happiness for every sentient organism on the planet.

         Sounds flaky? Yes, but then so, originally, has almost every radical reform movement in history; including, of course, the genuinely flaky ones.
 

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1.4 The Cardinal Importance of Delayed Gratification.
Eventually, well-being will be part of our very nature. A robust network of homeostatic mechanisms will ensure all hereditary ecstatics have gene-coded hedonic set-points way beyond today's puny maxima. In the Transitional Era, however, the widespread use of mind-healing drugs will in practice be unavoidable. Gene-therapy is still in its infancy; and germ-line clinical trials are time-consuming in humans. So crucially, the medically and socially responsible emphasis of the pharmacological arm of the biological transition strategy must be on the (relatively) long-term structural and functional effects in nervous tissue which a delayed-reward euphoriant-mix will induce in the individual mind/brain. Fast-acting recreational highs are a snare and a delusion. We must master - and educate our children in - the pharmacological equivalent of the principle of deferred gratification.
      The delay in therapeutic benefit stemming from gene-triggered receptor re-regulation can actually be very useful. Not merely is the development of tolerance diminished. Uncontrolled and potentially noxious bingeing on a drug occurs when there is minimal delay between ingestion and reward. By contrast, the anticipated gene-switched, up- or down-regulation of the pre- and post-synaptic neuronal receptors in a regimen of sustainable mood-enhancement will generally take up to several weeks to complete. Fortunately, the ingredient of enhanced serotonin function tends to increase patience and impulse-control as well as mood.

         Perhaps a comparison with nicotine can be of use here. In its present setting, the drug is so addictive, not because of the quite minimal "high" induced, but because of the sheer speed of onset of its intrinsically mild hit due to the customary delivery mechanism. The "reward" comes about seven seconds after inhalation. If the whole-body orgasmic rush of even crack-cocaine were delayed for ten days or so after its consumption, then the drug would be far less of a social and medical problem than it is at present. Tragically, most of its current users seem unacquainted with, or have long since forgotten, the concept of delayed reward. They might now be unwilling to wait nearly so long.
 

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1.5 The Molecular Genetics Of Paradise.
         Strategic, species-wide pharmacotherapy of the kind advocated above can be complemented, and synergistically allied, with genetic engineering as it matures from mere tinkering. Gene therapy will be targeted both on somatic cells and, with even greater forethought, the germ-line. If cunningly applied, a combination of the cellular enlargement of the meso-limbic dopamine system, selectively enhanced metabolic function of key intra-cellular sub-types of serotonergic pathway, and the disablement of several countervailing inhibitory feedback processes will put in place the biomolecular architecture for a major transition in human evolution - and life itself.
         The re-engineering of bits of psycho-neural circuitry sketched above may, it is true, seem somewhat ambitious. Perhaps it sounds impossibly futuristic. Comparatively, however, these techniques amount to a primitively inept form of piecemeal tinkering compared to the revolutionary redesign of the mind/brain likely to be undertaken in millennia to come.

         For it won't just be the quality and quantity of consciousness in the world which will be transformed in the early stages of the post-Darwinian Transition. As humanity emerges from the psychochemical Dark Ages, enriched dopaminergic function in particular will sharpen the sheer intensity of every moment of conscious existence. For a generation whose lifetimes span both modes of awareness, it will be as if they had just woken up after sleep-walking through life in a twilit stupor. Thereafter their former mundane and minimal existence will be recalled only as some kind of zombified trance-state. Our own "ordinary" consciousness may be unmasked as a shallow and uninteresting malaise whose properties we were physiologically incapable of recognising 'from the inside'. At present, however, we lack the neural substrates of a capacity to set archaic consciousness in a pre- and post-Darwinian context. "What does the fish know of the sea in which it swims?", remarked Einstein: homely, cracker-barrel-sounding wisdom, perhaps, but then even cracker-barrels yield the occasional nugget.

        Other neurohormones, transcription factors, opioids, tyrosine-hydroxylase activators, oxytocin-releasers, receptor density-regulators, intra-cellular second- and third-messengers, phosphorylated proteins, and genetic repressors and promoters which are implicated in the modulation of mood, emotional tone and psychophysical pain will be reconfigured too as the biological program unfolds. The details are messy and complicated. Naturally, neurotransmitter systems finely interlock. They can be treated in isolation only conceptually and for purposes of expository convenience. They form a complex and delicate interplay of feedback loops that defies easy simplification and synopsis. In centuries to follow, however, they will be collectively enlisted to re-work the texture of experience. Our happiness will be enhanced with ever greater artistry and finesse. Conversely, several vicious triggers of extraordinary nastiness (e.g. bradykinin, substance P) will be banished from the sensorium, one trusts for ever.
 

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1.6 The Re-encephalisation Of Emotion.
These procedures will lay the hedonic foundations for a dizzyingly high ground-state of conscious existence. The most pressing question to examine next is what will - and what should - be done with it? How, and why, should emotion be encephalised in an era when intentionality is no longer tied to furthering the inclusive fitness of self-replicating DNA? What's worth being happy "about"?
      For the real intellectual challenge won't lie ultimately in sheer happiness-maximisation. After all, if eternal bliss were the sole objective, then a rat with electrodes fixed in its pleasure-centres already points the way forward. In fact, our descendants may find generating generic states of life-long happiness per se trivially easy. Most of us, however, are intellectually quite snobbish. We don't want our emotions de-encephalised. We like good moods, but anything resembling the prospect of a perpetual orgasmic frenzy of delight stirs more ambivalent feelings. The limbic innervation of the neocortex has been so adaptive because it allows sophisticated genetic vehicles to feel some intentional objects are inherently good or bad. We want to feel that we are happy for good reasons - genetically self-serving as they may so often be.

      We'll soon be in a position to de-fang this dangerous tendency altogether. But we won't want to abolish it. In generations to come, a primary focus of neuroscientific mind-making will be on remapping the axonal and dendritic arborisation of the neo-cortex which makes the rationalisation of emotion possible. The aim of this rational redesign can be to bootstrap our way into fulfilling our second-order desires for who and what we want to become. What we will ultimately turn into is hard to imagine. One may predict merely that it will be utterly sublime.

         Using biotechnology to select and fine-tune a personality will partly depend on individual taste. One's choice of identity even in paradise will still be tempered by genetic biases, ancient cultural stereotypes, and the latest vagaries of fashion. The lure of hot-button super-normal stimuli will at first be very potent. Yet we may also be enchanted by ideas and modes of experience that today haven't even been conceptualised. Potentially, there are far more things to be happy "about" than we can possibly grasp.

        On a societal level, some form of neuro-architectural planning permission will presumably still be needed for the purposes of orchestrating the multiple microcosms as each designer-heaven takes shape. Yet harmonisation should be more readily accomplished when people are already blissfully and empathetically happy - "all loved up". Neurologically, in fact, there is nothing to stop co-operating with others from being a source of rapturous joy; as alas it isn't always today. When life isn't perceived as an approximation to a zero-sum game, social existence is going to be far easier to co-ordinate.

         Initially, it may be tempting for newly-enlightened ecstatics to seek the idealised realisation of purely traditional objects of delight. Effectively, we'll be able to have anything we've always wanted and more. This includes enjoying the substrates of a vivid sense of reality, a sense of heightened authenticity, and never-ending raw-edged excitement - or intense serenity and spiritual peace. In these early days, subjects may find the idea of fulfilling older conceptions of the good life a reassuring prospect. Prior to their own personal heavenly transition, any paradoxical trepidation coming from candidates for hedonic enrichment should be laid to rest by the following reflection. Nothing we have previously enjoyed will afterwards be unavailable or any less satisfying than before. In fact, we may be motivated to pursue old goals with far greater gusto once weakness of will becomes just an evolutionary curiosity. For weak will-power caused by dopamine hypo-function is one of those neurological deficiencies which effort alone can't overcome. Happily, in Paradise the frailest spirit can move mountains.
 

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1.7 How Could Anything Be So Good?
Perhaps a few examples of early post-Darwinian life are in order.
        The Nature-lover, for instance, will be able to contemplate with awe-struck reverence scenes of overpowering sublimity eclipsing the superficial prettiness on offer before.

         A musician may wish that those of his functional modules which mediate musical appreciation should receive especially rich innervation from his freshly amped-up pleasure system. (S)he might then hear, and have the chance to play, music more exhilarating and numinously beautiful than his or her ancestors ever dreamed of; the celestial music of the spheres heard by privileged medieval mystics will be as a child's toy tin-whistle in comparison.

        The sensualist will discover that what had previously passed for passionate sex had been merely a mildly agreeable piece of foreplay. Erotic pleasure of an intoxicating intensity that mortal flesh has never known will thereafter be enjoyable with a whole gamut of friends and lovers. This will be possible because jealousy, already transiently eliminable today under the influence of various serotonin-releasing agents, is not the sort of gene-inspired perversion of consciousness likely to be judged worthy of conservation in the new era.

         A painter or connoisseur of the visual arts will be able to behold the secular equivalent of the beatific vision in a million different guises, each of indescribable glory. The toy-town lexical tokens we permute today will by then be an archaic residue of little use in evoking their majesty. As language evolves to reflect and navigate ever more exalted planes of being, fresh taxonomies of pleasure-concepts will be pioneered to help define newly-discovered modes of awareness. It sure beats a nine-til-five job.

        As an exercise, the reader may care briefly to summon up the most delightful fantasy (s)he can personally conceive. Agreeable as this may be, states of divine happiness orders of magnitude more beautiful than anything the contemporary mind can access will pervade the very fabric of reality in generations to come. Even the most virile of imaginations can apprehend in only the barest and formal sense the ravishing splendour that lies ahead.
 

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1.8 All We Need Is Love?
Still in a personal vein, fragile self-esteem and shaky self-images will be beautified and recrystallised afresh. For the first time in their lives, in many cases, human beings will be able wholeheartedly to love both themselves and their own bodily self-images. Bruised and mutilated egos can thus be strengthened. They can be regenerated anew from the wreckage of the Darwinian past.
        Love will take on new aspects and incarnations too. For instance, we will be able, not just to love everyone, but to be perpetually in love with everyone, as well; and perhaps we'll be far more worth loving than the corrupted minds our genes program today. It's been said that when in love we find it astonishing that it is possible to love someone else so much, because normally we love each other so little. This indifference, or at best mere diffuse benevolence, to the rest of the population is easily taken for granted amid the harsh social realities of competitive consumer capitalism. Yet our deficiencies in love are only another grim manifestation of selfish (in the technical sense) DNA. If humans had collectively shared the greater degree of genetic relatedness common to many of the social insects (haplodiploidy), then we might already have been "naturally" able to love each other with greater enthusiasm. Sociobiology explains our relative coldness of heart.

        Happily, in future it will be possible to mimic, and then magnify out of all recognition, the kind of altruistic devotion to each other which might have arisen if were we all 100% genetically-related clones. We'll all be able to love each other to bits. A delicious cocktail mix of oxytocin, phenethylamines and opioids - or potent god's-own wonderbrews not yet genetically-coded - can be automatically triggered whenever anyone one knows is present or recollected. Darwinian man, by contrast, will be seen as a mean-minded crypto-psychopath. Our successors will be far kinder. They'll combine absolute, unconditional and uninhibited love for each other with a celebration of the diversity of genes and cultures. At present this prospect seems some way off.

        Another aspect of post-Transition love may be found even more surprising. Individual personal relationships may at last be bonded truly securely, should we so desire. Throughout the ages, dreadful pain has been caused by the soul-destroying cruelties of traditional modes of love. We acknowledge, in the main, that we hurt the most those we love. Yet we often simply can't stop ourselves from doing so. Before very long, if we really care enough, we'll actually be able to do something about it. Whatever their proximate causes, the distal origins of so many relationship break-ups lie, once again, in the competing interests of rival coalitions of genes. Just to take one example, two lovers, perhaps, who years before professed they would rather die than hurt each other, later part in tears and acrimony. The woman may find that with the decline in her reproductive potential over time she is no longer sexually attractive to the man who pledged his undying love. Her partner, quite possibly hating himself for his treachery, finds himself deserting her and their teenage offspring for a younger, sexier woman, and then fathers another family. Lives are destroyed; inclusive genetic fitness is served. Nature is barbarous and futile beyond belief.

        After the Transition, on the other hand, one will be able to love somebody more passionately than ever before. One will be safe in the knowledge that one will never hurt them, nor be hurt by them in turn. True love really can last forever, though responsible couples should take precautions. If one desires a particular relationship to remain uniquely and enduringly special, then the mutually co-ordinated design of each other's neural weight spaces can ensure that a distinctively hill-topped plateau in the new hedonic landscape structurally guarantees that each other's presence is always uniquely fulfilling. Choosing how big a hit we get off each other's presence is not an exact science today. Of course, it is possible that, generations hence, exclusionary pair bonding may seem a quaint anachronism. It may be regarded as just one more vestige of the genetic past which is fated one day to pass away. The example above is recounted to show only how ill-defined worries that anything precious one wants to save will be somehow sacrificed in the post-Transition epoch can be discounted. We've nothing to lose.
 

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1.9 The Taste Of Depravity.
Now before considering the prospects for the more distant future of affective states in the universe, the status of non-human animals must be addressed. This is because most of the world's suffering is undergone by members of other species. A convergence of evidence suggests that the nature and relative extent of organic life's biological capacity to suffer is mediated by key neuronal firing frequencies; cellular, synaptic and receptor densities; and a distinctive neurochemical and functional architecture of the central nervous system. Pain is not rooted in a capacity for a generative syntax.
         Humanity often behaves as though it were. For we presently keep hundreds of millions of other sentient beings in unimaginably frightful conditions. We do so for no better reason than to satisfy our culinary tastes. It has aptly been remarked that if animals had a conception of the Devil, he would surely have human form. Alas this is no mere rhetorical conceit. Contemporary humans deliberately incarcerate and butcher our fellow creatures in a vast, state-sanctioned apparatus of concentration and extermination camps. They are run with mechanised horror for commercial profit. In retrospect, our descendants may view them as a defining feature of our age in a way akin to our own conception of the Third Reich. Analogously, their sheer viciousness and even existence is usually camouflaged behind a morass of bland euphemism. Fortunately for our peace of mind, at least, we find it hard properly to conceive of what we're being spared. Conditions inside the camps and factories are frequently so gruesome that members of the public have to be barred from watching the atrocities that go on inside them.

         For the most part, however, we are willing accomplices in our own ignorance. By our purchases we pay others to commit acts of extreme violence which might otherwise upset our squeamish sensibilities. Ironically, anybody who practises, or connives in, the maltreatment of a helpless and undeveloped infant of our own species is likely to be demonised and reviled. Ordinary decent people will find it "inconceivable" how such an "inhuman" monster could cause such suffering to the young, innocent and helpless. So (s)he will be prosecuted and locked up.

         What we are doing in the death-factories is so vile that a few lines of text can scarcely even hint at its ghastliness. Nevertheless, we are so inured to the notion of exploiting and killing other sentient beings to titillate our palates that many otherwise "sophisticated" people will find the starkness of expression of these paragraphs somehow sensationalistic; or perhaps "emotive", as if the reality of such suffering could properly be otherwise.

        Caring about the plight of the non-human victims of our actions is not a case of sentimental bunny-hugging nor of child-like anthropomorphism. Nor is it a matter of caring more about animals than humans; nor even, as is sometimes suggested with all appearance of seriousness, outright misanthropy. "Tender-minded" people who worry about the torture of non-humans are on balance temperamentally more rather than less inclined to act in an effort to minimise human suffering too. Such contrasts and false antitheses are in any case unhelpful. Simply by abstaining from eating meat, for instance, one can still spend just as much time campaigning for exclusively human causes as one did as a practising meat-eater.

         There is one real glimmer of hope amid the ongoing carnage. Within the next hundred years or so, and possibly sooner, biotechnology will enable the human species cost-effectively to mass-produce edible cellular protein, and indeed all forms of food, of a flavour and texture indistinguishable from, or tastier than, the sanitised animal products we now eat. As our palates become satisfied by other means, the moral arguments for animal rights will start to seem overwhelmingly compelling. The Western(ised) planetary elite will finally start to award the sentient fellow creatures we torture and kill a moral status akin to human infants and toddlers. Veganism, though not in quite the contemporary sense, will become the global norm. Thanks to genetic engineering, the huge reduction in gratuitous suffering forecast here is likely to take place even if none of the other predictions of HI are borne out. If they are, then the humblest snack will taste more delicious than the ambrosial food of the gods. Today's gourmets might as well be feeding on greasy chips.

         Much more seriously, in those traditional eco-systems that we chose to retain, millions of non-human animals will continue periodically to starve, die horribly of thirst and disease, or even get eaten alive. This is commonly viewed as "natural" and hence basically OK. It would indeed be comforting to think that in some sense this ongoing animal holocaust doesn't matter too much. We often find it convenient to act as though the capacity to suffer were somehow inseparably bound up with linguistic ability or ratiocinative prowess. Yet there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case, and a great deal that it isn't.

         The functional regions of the brain which subserve physical agony, the "pain centres", and the mainly limbic substrates of emotion, appear in phylogenetic terms to be remarkably constant in the vertebrate line. The neural pathways involving serotonin, the periaquaductal grey matter, bradykinin, dynorphin, ATP receptors, the major opioid families, substance P etc all existed long before hominids walked the earth. Not merely is the biochemistry of suffering disturbingly similar where not effectively type-identical across a wide spectrum of vertebrate (and even some invertebrate) species. It is at least possible that members of any species whose members have more pain cells exhibiting greater synaptic density than humans sometimes suffer more atrociously than we do, whatever their notional "intelligence". As a utilitarian [technically, an ethical negative-utilitarian - see below), I would have to say, counter-intuitively, that were this to be the case, then such "hyperalgesic" life-forms would intrinsically matter, and they would themselves find that things intrinsically matter, more so than we do. This sounds extravagantly overstated. But it is just the ethical yardstick by which we should be reckoned to matter more than our phenomenologically impoverished silicon etc intellectual mentors centuries hence. One must just hope the disquieting notion that anything, anywhere, can suffer more than humans do is ill-conceived.
 

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1.10 On The Misguided Romanticisation of Feline Psychopaths.
In future, anyhow, the life-forms which exist on this planet will be there purely because we allow them to be so, or choose to create them. This smacks of hubris; it is also true. Increasingly, we are able to configure the matter and energy of the world in any way we so desire consistent with the laws of physics. So the moral and practical question arises: what other organisms, and therefore what other modes of experience, are we going either to create or retain "in the wild" outside the gene-banks and computer software libraries in millennia to come?
        One may suspect that most people could bear the possible loss of a few hundred thousand species of beetle with relative equanimity. Familiar if eugenically-enhanced herbivores, on the other hand, can be allowed to graze securely within the confines of a well-regulated natural habitat. They will best be treated with long-acting depot contraceptives to stop uncontrolled breeding. Their happiness should prove easier to engineer genetically than is possible in humans. This is on the assumption that non-humans are less intellectually fastidious in their pleasures than are, on occasion, some members of our own kind.

         Yet what about the carnivorous species? It is easy to romanticise, say, tigers or lions and cats. We admire their magnificent beauty, strength and agility. But we would regard their notional human counterparts as wanton psychopaths of the worst kind. So just as there is no need to recreate the natural habitat of smart, blond, handsome Nazi storm-troopers who can then prey on their natural victims (and Nazis are a no less natural and noteworthy pattern of matter and energy thrown up in the course of evolution, albeit of a type now fortunately extinct), likewise the practice of continuing to breed pre-programmed feline killing machines in homage to Nature is ethically untenable too. It is not, needless to say, the fault of cats that they are prone to torturing mice; but then, given the equations of physics, it isn't the fault of Nazis they try to persecute Jews. This is no reason to let them continue to do so.

        In a triumph of aestheticism over morality, many animal lovers otherwise sympathetic to the sentiments expressed here will doubtless be aghast at the very idea of losing such loveable companions and time-honoured killers as members of the cat family; but then they are unlikely to be hunted down in terror or physically eaten alive, which lends a rather different perspective to any issue at all.
 

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1.11 The Last Twisted Molecule On Earth?
This meditation on the plight of our fellow species leads to one of the few precise, and potentially falsifiable, predictions to be hazarded here about the next couple of thousand years.
        At some momentous and exactly dateable time, the last unpleasant experience ever to occur on this planet will take place. Possibly, it will be a (purely comparatively) minor pain in some (to us) obscure marine invertebrate. This event will occur well before the end of the fourth millennium. It may even be technically feasible - though in practice unlikely - for us to abolish unpleasantness altogether by the end of the third.

        Heady stuff. Yet just as the smallpox virus was systematically hunted down to extinction, so the precise molecular signature(s) of aversive experience and its predisposing genes will predictably be hunted down and wiped out as well. The systematic application of nanotechnology, self-reproducing micro-miniaturised robots armed with supercomputer processing power, and ultra-sophisticated genetic engineering, perhaps using retro-viral vectors, will abolish the root of all evil in its naturalistic guise.

        Of course, pain and unhappiness apparently take myriad forms. So it might be supposed that an impossibly large hotchpotch of biochemical reactions will have to be eliminated before the emancipatory project can be complete. The difficulty, and more controversially the impossibility, of establishing non-trivial type-type identities between physical and higher mental states would seem to make the task of purging unpleasantness from the world even worse.

        In one respect at least, however, the many faces of misery are deceptive. Like the various nominal sources of happiness, they foster a genetically adaptive delusion. In this case, the delusion is that [Darwinian] fitness-diminishing phenomena are inherently bad. It is an "adaptation" born of the mechanisms by the primary neural processes which mediate emotion physically infiltrate and infuse the neo-cortex. Millions of years of DNA-driven encephalisation have obscured emotion's primitive substrates deep in the mind/brain. These substrates can be coded out. And by striking at the ancient limbic motors of despair, future paradise-engineering specialists should induce its legion of cognitive hangers-on to dissipate too. First in humans and, progressing "down" the phylogenetic tree, eventually in every non-human metazoan as well, all of the incomprehensibly diverse modes of experience a mind/brain can undergo should share the property of being generically delightful. A uniquely vile era in the history of the world will then have drawn to a close.
 

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1.12 The Persistence of Hard-Core Porn?
Quite what vestiges of the past will be archived after nastiness has been purged from our consciousness is hard to guess. Just as we have retained (but one may trust that we will never use) the precise information necessary to re-create the smallpox virus - for we know its entire genome precisely - so records of the phylogeny and molecular architecture of pain and depression will presumably be preserved too.
        It is hard to see why unpleasant types of pattern should ever be physically revived. Perhaps they will remain largely undeciphered. The interpretation of their dangerous and quasi-pornographic formalism may be accessible to our descendants, if at all, only by ill-understood analogy. For post-humans will know about hedonic gradients. After all, insofar as shifting nuances of delight will imbue whatever they think about, pleasure differentials will most plausibly remain the primary motivators to action. So distant generations should be able, in the abstract at least, to conceptualise "pain" and "despair". Such states can be imagined as modes of consciousness far lower in the heavenly hierarchy - a level where a generic property of experience itself undergoes a kind of mysterious phase change. But beyond the ill-defined cross-over point, perhaps, our ecstatic posterity will find the properties of experience on the wrong side of the great divide elusive.

        For their sake, it must be hoped that purebred ecstatics keep any intellectual curiosity about such taboo mysteries in check. They will be in no position to make an informed choice before opting to go slumming in the abyss. Nothing could prepare them for the horror they would find. Fortunately, they will most probably lack our prurient interest in the depraved and obscene.

        It might here be objected that states of comparatively diminished pleasure are tantamount to states of unhappiness. So short of promoting a uniform, action-paralysing level of lifetime happiness, then surely aversive states will be endemic even in the mature post-Darwinian regime.

         This objection is plausible but ill-conceived. When faced with two painful alternatives, one's opting for the lesser of two evils doesn't make a still painful experience somehow pleasurable. Likewise, experiencing the lesser of two delights isn't somehow really painful; it's just that pleasure cells are very greedy indeed, and always avid for more of the same.
 

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1.13 The Growing Pleasures of Homunculi.
        On the assumption that they will indeed always ask for more, what else can be said about the distant future of emotion in the universe? How will post-humans actually spend their lives, and what will it feel like to exist, after Heaven has been biologically domesticated?
         First, a note of caution. Today most of our futurist fantasies focus on hard-core hi-tech. We lap up the world of Star-Trek fantasy-physics. Exotic new emotions, however, are as unimaginable to us as exotic new phenomenal colours. They are just empty, abstract possibilities we can idly gesture at, but no more. Implicitly, we assume that our ancient vertebrate repertoire of fitness-enhancing sentiment will characterise both our post-human descendants and any alien life-forms they encounter. We're even prone to anthropomorphise inorganic robots in the same manner. We assume they'll "feel" superior and "want" to dominate us (shades again of the African savannah!) Yet the emotional economy of a post-Darwinian psyche may be incommensurable with anything that's gone before. Indeed the entire inner life of post-Darwinians may be opaque to our hunter-gatherer minds. The first-person texture of their modes of experience may be nothing like our own in anything but name. Even if we could glimpse the future, perhaps we'd be like cats watching TV. We just wouldn't understand the significance of what was going on.

        Unfortunately, there's no way to map out the extent of our cognitive closure from within. This is frustrating. If quantum cosmologists can theorise about the first 10-43 second after the Big Bang, thirteen billion and more years ago, and still, rightly, be counted as practising hard science, it's a shame that conjectures we do make about the living world a few thousand or million years hence have to be treated, not even as soft science, but as science-fiction. There are too many unknown unknowns to predict with any rational confidence. Merely extrapolating present trends is bound to mislead. The projected time-scales of even relatively predictable biomedical triumphs, e.g. the elimination of the ageing process, are vague. HI may veer towards heady speculation; but by the end of third millennium, life and consciousness may be more foreign to the contemporary imagination than even the most extravagant prediction dreamed up here. On the other hand, for all we know, some variant of the pleasure-principle is a universal - and universally intelligible - signature of sentient life; and its apotheosis in some sort of sublime cosmic orgasm is the ultimate destiny of the Universe. [This may overtax one's credulity; the Big Bang indeed!] We simply don't have enough evidence. That said, we may still incautiously proceed.

        Once suffering has been abolished, the era of old-fashioned moral choices will come to an end. The physiological mechanisms underlying the mind-brain's value-creation processes will be unravelled during the invention of a pain-free world; but the kind of naturalised, mind-dependent value created (and maximised?) by paradise-engineers after the phenomenology of nastiness has disappeared won't embrace ethical categories in a sense we presently understand. The heroic moral urgency will have gone; indeed there is a risk that truly hedonistic themes as discussed in these sections of HI will divert attention away from the utter moral seriousness of the whole post-Darwinian project as conceived today.

         Even so, here's a quick run-down of some of the long-term options.

         First, the present dimensions of the human mind and its affective capabilities are limited by the size of the female birth canal. So long as selection pressures favoured the evolution of more potently nasty biological substrates - primed to trigger adaptive bouts of agony and emotional wretchedness - then the birthing constraint has been one small mercy at least.

        It won't last; but then it won't need to. After the global application of cross-species genetic engineering has ensured that suffering is physiologically impossible, such a restriction of size would only retard the emotional development and maturation of the living world. For healthy [non-hippocampal] neurons, unfortunately, don't reproduce. We have almost a full complement at birth. They die off somewhat erratically thereafter. Once it becomes feasible to nurture the human embryo and foetus from conception to term in an artificial extra-uterine environment, however, then the number as well as quality and synaptic density of nerve cells can be selectively multiplied with a clear utilitarian conscience. So can receptor density, post-synaptic transduction-mechanisms and vital genetic transcription control-factors in the pleasure-pathways. The serotonin-producing subgenual prefrontal cortex can be enlarged and enriched too. Puzzlingly, today's clinically acknowledged depressives have on average over 40% less brain tissue here than controls. This region seems to be critical for the processing of emotions related to complex personal and social situations. Its role should grow. After we've designed more sophisticated and socially responsible neural circuitry, all of our emotionally pre-literate modes of social life may come to be seen as shallow and rudimentary.

         It is unclear quite how many orders of magnitude larger a super-organism's mind/brain could in theory be scaled upwards before running up against insuperable(?) design-constraints. It's unclear, too, whether a "Jupiter brain" could undergo the quantum mechanical coherent states needed to sustain a unitary experiential manifold (cf. Sellars' "grain problem" of consciousness) and thus support a potentially integrated "Jupiter-self". In the meantime, and on a more conservative scale, gigantic societies of hedonistic super-neurons can be grown and self-sculpted to form progressively larger, happier and more richly variegated virtual worlds.

         It might be supposed that access to unparalleled states of whole-body orgasmic euphoria fuelled by a vastly hypertrophied and souped-up pleasure apparatus would be quite enough for anyone. Well, perhaps; it depends on one's circle of acquaintance. Two flavours of happiness always worth distinguishing are blissful satiety and euphoric incentive-motivation. If, as predicted, it's the latter dopaminergic engine of progress which will power the post-Transition era, then the delights cited above will be only a foretaste of further millennial Transitions - and whatever mind-wrenching meta-paradigm shifts their advent entails.

        For a start, the somato-sensory cortex and its bodily "homunculus" currently occupy only a very modest portion of the brain. Its comparatively small size marks it as another obsolescent relic from Darwinian antiquity. Using the great bulk of the cortex to run data-driven egocentric simulations of the external environment, and not just the egocentric body-image of the host vehicle, tended to maximise genetic fitness on the African savannah. With predatory lions long gone, such states of partial self-alienation become less useful. So in future somato-sensory-style cells can be used to seed the other areas of the cortex and its adjacent structures. They can thereby selectively interpenetrate the rest of each person's experiential manifold. Accordingly, whole-body hyper-orgasmic rapture can be optionally extended to impregnate an entire psycho-neural virtual world. The mystic's dream of becoming one with the universe - albeit unwittingly only with his own neural micro-cosmos - can be realised in a total ecstasy of the senses and neurochemical soul. Cosmic indeed.

         Life could get better still. Today the nucleus accumbens and its allied mesolimbic structures don't consist of raw pleasure circuitry. Certain biomolecules (e.g. the dynorphin which accumulates during chronic psychostimulant use and participates in the craving characteristic of cocaine withdrawal), are unpleasant and dysfunctional. They can be genetically edited out. There is a much more exciting possibility as well. Most cortical neurons have no inherent capacity for well-being, let alone autonomous hedonism. As noted, they rely on innervation from the monoaminergic etc neurons to lend an affective tone to whatever functional role and flavour of subjectivity they express. But once the precise molecular signatures of experiential ecstasy are isolated in the pleasure pathways, then their metabolic reactions can be transplanted to other types of neuron too: hedonic democracy.
 

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1.14 Post-Perceptual Consciousness.
Many future intentional foci of delight will be embedded in types of consciousness qualitatively as well as quantitatively alien to pre-Transitional humans. It is chastening to reflect that a seemingly minor variation in structural neuro-protein generates types of experience as disparate as sight and sound. Heaven knows what further incommensurable modes of what-it's-like-ness ("qualia") will come to light when much more far-reaching changes in the architecture of excitable cells are engineered.
        For the Darwinian status quo is poised to crumble. All but a trivial volume of (what one may abstractly conceive as) experiential weight space has hitherto been physiologically out of bounds. There's nothing unnatural about it. But until now, DNA coding for the structures that got us there would have involved crossing genetically maladaptive dips in the fitness landscape. Desert-hopping across it is a process which neo-Darwinian evolution precludes. Natural selection has no foresight. Once such new kinds of consciousness are finally accessed by design, however, they need not be deployed in a traditional role of tracking, or responding to, extraneous environmental patterns. They can first be hedonically colonised; and then artistically explored and reordered, woven into rich narrative structures and wild adventures, awarded new functional roles in the mind/brain, or perhaps just savoured for their intrinsic fascination.

        Old definitions of self and reality are likely to fall apart in unpredictable ways. It's worth recalling how, at present, occurrent thought-episodes are typically decomposed into their nominally cognitive, affective and volitional aspects. The mysterious trinity may prove just trifling variations, each with their own minor nuances, of a much wider phenomenological family of "serial" streams of consciousness. These new serial modes await discovery or biotechnical invention. Some of the new modes may eventually function computationally as quasi-virtual machines spun from massively parallel cerebral consciousness; but the rest needn't play any distinctive functional role at all. Other than to describe all such subtle kinds of what-it's-like-ness as generically delightful when suitably innervated, their nature can't be intelligently speculated upon here. We're just kidding ourselves when we brag about what a rich language we've got today. For it is easy to be seduced by the indefinitely large productive capacity of the early human language-generating mechanism into making a pardonably false assumption. This is that syntax enables one to think and speak about an unlimited variety of things. Yet lying latent among previously inaccessible and maladaptive neurochemical pathways are bound to be immense reaches of experiential hyper-weirdness which - shallow semantic paradoxes aside - can't be properly thought of at all. Their alien exotica will still be cognitively closed off for a long time to come. In the case of unknown hell-states and worse, it may be hoped they will remain impenetrable for ever.

         Such hypothesised new categories of experience will be empirically discovered, generated and decently emotionally encephalised only with the aid of first-personal exploration of their intrinsic properties. Observation without experimentation is not enough. Systematic experimental manipulation of consciousness via psychoactive agents will complement the third-person perspective of physical science. Exploration will be most prudently conducted by ecstatics, native-born or otherwise, rather than by gene-disordered Darwinian minds. This is because genetically undoctored savages like ourselves are liable to go off on worse trips than we're on at present. At any rate, a priori philosophising on psychedelia's possible nature, using our old neurochemical legacy hardware ploughing away in the same old conceptual ruts, simply won't work. Contemporary experience and linguistic description lacks the necessary semantic primitives to do the job. Only semantic primitives drawn from the new modes of experience - not mere inference-churning using our present limited repertoire of concepts - will conceivably allow a theoretical understanding of the psychedelic cosmos. New primitives will be needed as well to understand genuinely novel emotions, sensations, modes of introspection and reflexive self-awareness.

        This isn't yet consensus wisdom. In mainstream academia, any study of consciousness as a true experimental discipline rather than as a topic of scholastic disputation is nearly impossible. Accounts of systematic first-personal manipulation of its only accessible instance is generally reckoned unpublishable and discreditable. Ironically, we mock the obtuseness of Galileo's clerical opponents for refusing to look through his telescope. Yet we treasure our own peace of mind no less dearly; so there is little reason for intellectual complacency. In our repressive drug laws we, too, outlaw and penalise forms of knowledge truly disturbing to the established order. Psychedelics trigger changes of mind which are radically subversive of the existing social, political and academic power-structure and its definitions of reality. The severe penalties for publicly advocating and spreading such dangerous knowledge are not notably more merciful than those of the Inquisition - our prisons are brutal places - though likewise public recantation and penance can sometimes mitigate the full rigour of punishment.

        The psychedelias of post-human ecstatics are too hard to contemplate. Predictions for the more distant future of even affective states in the universe are liable to get wilder too. Not merely are we ignorant of the newly synthesised and discovered emotions that biotechnology will deliver. We can't possibly know what neo-cortical "cognitive" processes they will saturate and enrich.

        Will consciousness in its current guise of phenomenological and quasi-computational mind take on post-cellular or prosthetically enriched forms? Or, in defence of carbon chauvinism, is there a micro-functionalist argument that the unique structure of the carbon atom and its valence properties means that only organic experiential manifolds and their infused emotions are feasible? Will there come, eventually, a post-personal era in which discrete, gene-generated superminds choose progressively to coalesce; or will the fragmented island universes left over from the depths of the Darwinian past continue in semi-autonomous isolation indefinitely? If consciousness is ontologically fundamental to the cosmos, rather than a tacked-on "nomological dangler", do superstrings [M-branes etc] vibrating at energies orders of magnitude higher than ours support modes and intensities of experience correspondingly greater than those of the current low-energy regime? Or do they really lack what-it's-like-ness altogether?

        Needless to say, we don't know the answers to such questions one way or the other. All that will be predicted here with any semblance of confidence is that one ancient, soul-polluting type of experience, the generically unpleasant, will soon go the way of the proverbial dodo.
 
 
 

(Chapter Two can safely be skipped or aggressively skimmed even by the analytic philosophers for whom it was primarily intended. It contains a defence of HI on the basis of, first, practical means-ends rationality and, secondly, ethical negative utilitarianism. The instrumental case from means-ends rationality derives from the broad applicability of psychological hedonism. This isn't here construed as a universal law. It's just a trite everyday rule of thumb: we spend a lot of time trying to make ourselves happy. Often we fail. HI achieves what we're striving for with unique efficiency and success. The ethical utilitarian case for HI, on the other hand, rests partly on a conception of how morality can be naturalised consistently with a recognisably scientific account of the nature of the world. Value is here construed as a distinctive - and biologically maximisable - mode of experience. Its subjective texture is coded by a particular type of biomolecular architecture. That architecture can be enriched and extended. Positive value can be maximised. Negative value can eventually be eliminated. Thus HI, it will be claimed, amounts to rather more than one individual's quirky conjectures and value-judgements. The biological program is also our natural destiny. The coming of the pain-free post-Darwinian Era will mark both a major transition in the evolution of life and the moral foundation of any future civilisation.)
 
 

(Chapter Two can safely be skipped or aggressively skimmed even by the analytic philosophers for whom it was primarily intended. It contains a defence of HI on the basis of, first, practical means-ends rationality and, secondly, ethical negative utilitarianism. The instrumental case from means-ends rationality derives from the broad applicability of psychological hedonism. This isn't here construed as a universal law. It's just a trite everyday rule of thumb: we spend a lot of time trying to make ourselves happy. Often we fail. HI achieves what we're striving for with unique efficiency and success. The ethical utilitarian case for HI, on the other hand, rests partly on a conception of how morality can be naturalised consistently with a recognisably scientific account of the nature of the world. Value is here construed as a distinctive - and biologically maximisable - mode of experience. Its subjective texture is coded by a particular type of biomolecular architecture. That architecture can be enriched and extended. Positive value can be maximised. Negative value can eventually be eliminated. Thus HI, it will be claimed, amounts to rather more than one individual's quirky set of conjectures and value-judgements. The biological program is also our natural destiny. The coming of the pain-free post-Darwinian Era will mark both a major transition in the evolution of life and the moral foundation of any future civilisation.)

2. Why?
"What right have we to be happy?"
(Ibsen)

2.0 The Psychology Of Armchair Hedonism.
So technically, in principle, it can be done. Paradise can be biologically implemented. Ubiquitous well-being is neurochemically feasible. Yet is it really worth having? What's wrong with suffering, anyway? What's so good about happiness? What is the link, if any, between moral value and maximising personal well-being? Are the transcendentally happy states advocated here really any more valuable than the Darwinian status quo? Or are value-judgements intrinsically subjective and truth-valueless?

        There are both practical and ethical reasons for planning a global project to abolish aversive experience. The practical reasons will be tackled first. The ethical case will be argued next, followed by a [skippable; life is short] defence of an ontology of objective values designed to redeem the ethical stance adopted here from the charge of idle subjectivism.

        The instrumental rationality of the biological program derives from nothing more abstruse than some hard-headed means-ends analysis. This analysis is best introduced via an examination of a biologised variant of the theory of psychological hedonism. We all dance away our lives to the tune of the sovereign pleasure-pain axis. It will be argued that for all the complications and anomalies the theory brings in its wake, psychological hedonism contains a substantial core of truth. The point to be kept in mind throughout the qualifications and elaborations to follow is that even goals found worth pursuing only intermittently or inconsistently are still worth pursuing rationally. As it is at present, we pursue the many faces of happiness avidly but with frighteningly irrational, and not infrequently murderous, levels of ineptitude. Fortunately, all the severely sub-optimal little local minima of ill-being in which genetic vehicles get stuck can be replaced by a global maximum of happiness and well-being.

        So what is this alleged inbuilt drive which the biological blueprint finally allows us to achieve?

        Psychological hedonism has been variously regarded as a simple truism, an obvious falsehood, and as so completely vacuous as to be not even wrong. Here it is assumed to be a hypothesis which, properly formulated, is both substantially true and important in its implications. If it were even broadly correct, and if we were all constitutionally motivated by the pursuit, albeit typically under other descriptions, of a generic type of mesolimbic core state that our competing diversity of intentional objects only disguises, then the practical answer to the question "why?" would in essence be simple. Whether or not we should genetically reprogram the hedonic treadmill reduces to a straightforward issue of means-ends rationality. What is the most effective, and more pertinently the only, way to achieve what constitutionally we're already seeking in a multitude of guises? How can these emotionally ideal sorts of meso-limbic mind/brain states we're striving for be achieved and, more importantly, sustained?

        Of course, even if some variant of psychological hedonism were to be in substance correct, it is always open to the sceptic next to ask "but then why be rational?" He might then even (ir?)rationally advance (ir?)rational arguments to support(?) his (in?)consistent position. Yet the self-defeating nature of irrational behaviour, and the variably camouflaged incoherence of irrational thought, means this option will not be explored here in any depth.

        More subtly, it is always open to a critic of the biological program to acknowledge that psychological hedonism may be substantially true, but to hold that there are countervailing moral considerations why it would be good if we failed to achieve what we were [sometimes only unwittingly] after. Hence, on this view, it would be morally preferable for us to continue on a selective basis to act irrationally and ineffectually. In other words, given that the thought that one is a moral agent is psychochemically satisfying, and the proposals canvassed here are found, paradoxically, to be unpleasantly immoral, it would be morally better if the rational biological program outlined in this paper were not adopted.

        All the above, however, presupposes rather than argues the case for the broad accuracy of psychological hedonist hypothesis. The chain of argument to be presented here for its substantial kernel of truth is, at least at face value, extremely weak. This is because one link is going to rely on an appeal to introspection. Since the very word sends a shudder of distaste down many fastidious scientific spines, a few very brief reflections on the nature and epistemological status of the suspect faculty are first in order.
 

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2.1 How To Contemplate An Introspective Void.
Does introspection reliably tell us we're pleasure-seekers and pain-avoiders? If so, is there a better way of achieving what our mind/brains are up to?

        Exteroceptive, so called "perceptual" data are crucial to the empirical method(s) characteristic, and arguably definitive, of the natural sciences. Introspective evidence is generally disparaged by the scientific mandarinate as cognitively worthless. The curiously named "third-person" perspective rules. Yet a distinctive and potentially fitness-enhancing faculty - so central to so many ordinary people's mental life - has presumably been selected for, and not just adventitiously selected, in the course of evolution. Even an unreliable and highly fallible system of neuropsychological self-monitoring could still have conferred differential adaptive value. Any insight, however incomplete, into the underlying causal reasons for one's behaviour can also, by analogy, logical inference or simulation, help one partially to understand and anticipate the behaviour of conspecifics and genetic competitors.

        Methodologically, it is admittedly unclear how introspection can be studied or even defined scientifically. Moreover, though it is an intrinsic part of the natural world, an unfortunate conflation of the two senses of the term "subjective" often leads to its being ontologically downgraded as well as methodologically discounted. Of course, it can't be denied that in trying to offer introspective reports subjects sometimes confabulate. They can demonstrably deceive both themselves and others. The different functional modules of the brain, however tightly integrated, do not simply interpenetrate. Hence the merely locally distributed neuronal ensembles of one particular module can't always know about what's going on in the others, nor report on it if they can. This means verbal sincerity is no guarantee of veracity. Worse still, in initiating some of one's actions, one just doesn't seem to have much in the way of (even illusory) introspective self-insight at all. We've got access to much of the product but very little of the process. Moreover a lot of our nominal actions would appear to be mainly automatic. Many more are not preceded by any notable introspective musings or a hedonic weighing of options and possible consequences. So how can we be said to be "really" seeking happiness?
 

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2.2 The Importance of Banality.

In spite of all the above, it is still worth making a crashingly banal but cardinally important observation. It relates to the implicit criteria one uses in deciding consciously to act in a certain way rather than another when more than one option is perceived to be available. For at face value, one performs, at the very least, an extraordinarily large number of actions because one's image or concept of what they will notionally bring about makes one apparently more satisfied or less dissatisfied, however marginally; and because one's notion of what not doing so would entail is either less satisfying, affectively neutral or more aversive than acting otherwise. There are other, probably more felicitous, ways of formulating the idea, but their gist is essentially the same.

        Banal or otherwise, a knowledge of the existence and nature of this difference in affective tone when one contemplates, and then carries through, alternative courses of action can be derived only from introspection; but is nonetheless important. From a third-person perspective, it is true, biological science can elucidate a physical counterpart to this subjective motivational impression. By experimentally enhancing or attenuating meso-limbic dopamine function, neuropharmacologists can use stimulants or neuroleptics to show the system's pivotal role in determining how the higher vertebrates behave. Neuroscience can even christen certain brain areas "pleasure centres", wire them with electrodes, and then demonstrate their irresistible potency. Yet it is only through correlating, and then identifying, particular types of physiological function and structure with particular modes of subjective experience that biology can attempt to explain how a person acts, rather than just physically behaves, at all.

        Endorsing psychological hedonism as a theory of action - and compulsion in need of biotechnically rationalising - is not the same as saying that one always acts selfishly, or at least not selfishly in the sense of serving only one's own notional interests at the expense of other people's. Selfish genes can sometimes flourish by throwing up unselfconsciously selfless phenotypes. Imagining the happiness of friends and family, for example, can serve as a powerful source of motivation. So, too, can satisfying an idealised self-image of oneself as a moral person. More radically, there is a sense in which even sacrificing one's life for one's family or country isn't anomalous in the context of the hypothesis either. In certain circumstances, the image of living may afford less satisfaction than the image of oneself notionally acting and dying for the sake of others. Hence one opts for (one's emotionally encephalised image of) oblivion.

        What the hypothesis of psychological hedonism doesn't even begin to answer is why the meso (cortico-)limbic dopamine system has the extraordinary and uniquely addictive phenomenology from whose encephalised inspiration, in a sense, our civilisation has been built. Why does it feel so irresistibly good? This question is simply too deep to answer here.
 

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2.3 Vacuous Desires?
Even if it were true for the most part as so defined, might psychological hedonism be tenable only because it is effectively vacuous - "not even wrong"? For what test could possibly falsify the hypothesis? With what states of affairs could it ever be inconsistent?

        I don't think the charge of vacuity can be sustained. There is indeed a close conceptual connection between the theory and our notion of action itself, yet this is a reflection of the theory's empirical adequacy rather than vacuity. Two examples and potential falsifiers may be noted here. First, psychological hedonism helps explain why one can never tire of having one's pleasure centres stimulated, naturally or otherwise, and why the standards of even the most priggish paragon of moral rectitude can deteriorate under the action of drugs such as heroin. The junkie and the total abstainer, whatever they may suppose, do not occupy two ontologically separate realms of being or chemical motivation. We are all dependent on opioids to feel physically and emotionally well. Opioids bind to receptors in the ventral tegmental area of the mesolimbic dopamine system, the mind/brain's final common pathway for pleasure. Here are the cells that call the shots. If they're not happy, the whole organism will be miserable as well until they've got their psychochemical fix. For their cellular processes infiltrate the rest of the mind/brain. The junkie derives his opioid supply exogenously; while the release of endogenous opioids in the rest of us is triggered, and not always very reliably either, by stimuli such as food, sex, exercise and social interaction. We're all still seeking the same core states of psycho-chemical well-being under one description or other.

         Hence even "psychologically" addictive drugs can lead to criminal and compulsive drug-seeking and -taking behaviour if supplies run out, even in formerly high-minded and saintly souls. This is because the over-intoxicated brain re-regulates its cellular receptors and reduces its production of the relevant pleasure-chemicals; this in turn increases the user's reliance on the exogenous route of administration. Strong-minded individuals who are sure they can safely indulge "recreationally" may misunderstand the psychochemical roots of their behaviour. The results of such ill-judgement can of course be disastrous. Fast-acting euphoriants such as crack cocaine can potentially corrupt even the most vehemently moralistic opponent of the hedonistic hypothesis. Getting hooked on heroin or crack may provide, indeed, a most illuminating empirical insight into the nature of human motivation; though there is a strong case to be argued that this is carrying the experimental method too far.

        As a second response to the charge of vacuity, it is worth considering the following thought-experiment. It is (purely epistemically) possible that, keeping the laws of physics constant, the commonly supposed closed causal sufficiency of physical events meant that we found our bodies just behaving, but with none of the phenomenological concomitants of willed action which do in fact accompany much bodily behaviour. If such were the case, then many of the behavioural options one found one's body pursuing might be in one's mind's eye be far more unpleasant in their envisaged consequences than those of their notional alternatives. One wouldn't in this scenario be surprised at what was going on: bodily behaviour might as now be viewed as ultimately a mere product of the playing out of law-like physical interactions. It's just that in this setting any incidental phenomenology would just be along for the ride.

        Given that we do experience a distinctive phenomenology of willed action, however, it doesn't seem consistent with our current understanding of the concept or the experience that one could consciously, phenomenologically act in one way in preference to another simply because one's image of the chosen action and its effects seemed less satisfying than the alternative(s). Even more dubiously coherent would be the notion of someone whose pleasure-pain spectrum was inverted and who acted in the conscious expectation of securing the outcome (s)he least desired. This is not to say that the practical effects of some people's actions don't frequently defeat their intentions. Certainly, too, a person may act in a superficially less satisfying way if (s)he has a more satisfying long-term goal in mind; this is the deceptively puritanical-sounding principle of deferred gratification. But this is a principle which tends only to corroborate rather than undermine the hypothesis at issue.

        The point here is that psychological hedonism presupposes that we act as distinct from merely behave. Its distinctive focus is of course on how we do so from the pleasant, less unpleasant etc occurrent image or concept of the act's anticipated consequences. Yet from the outset there does seem to be an intimate, if often only implicit, conceptual connection between something remarkably like psychological hedonism and our notion(s) of action itself, and in particular of our acting on one perceived choice in preference to another.

        Now even if, implausibly, it were deemed to be analytically true that all action was motivated by desire for anticipated happiness etc, whether overtly or under another description, this wouldn't prove that psychological hedonism was correct. "Paradigm case"-style arguments in the manner of bad old ordinary-language philosophy certainly can't settle the matter. Our terms, "analytic" or otherwise, may simply fail to refer. One can't just define anything into existence. What is definitionally stipulated to be analytically true in one era may be treated as empirically, or even analytically, false in another. So undoubtedly at least as useful as armchair psychology is an empirical investigation of the links between the brain's reward mechanisms and the dopaminergically innervated, pre-frontal motor cortical regions subserving experientially voluntary action. Yet if it weren't for the deliverances of introspection, there could be no notion that even one single creature in the world ever consciously acted, as distinct from insentiently behaved, in the first instance. Behaviourism is intellectually dead, and its grave should be danced on as vigorously as possible.
 

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2.4 A Dirty Window On The Soul.
With this in mind, all I can say is that, most disappointingly, I have never been able introspectively to catch myself acting in one way rather than another when the thought of the rejected alternative was unequivocally more satisfying, or less unsatisfying, than the option chosen. Were this universally the case, then the biological program would be instrumentally rational.

        Could some variant of the pure pleasure-principle be true of anyone, let alone everyone? Now one can easily be in the grip of a false theory which colours one's sincere introspective reports. So there is no need to get hot under the collar if those reports are challenged; one may be genuinely mistaken. But if so, one is mistaken in very distinguished as well as very numerous company. Furthermore, there is no behavioural evidence to suggest that people whose introspective avowals corroborate the hedonistic hypothesis are more likely than anyone else to behave in ways one's culture deems selfish. The deep and subtle conceptual connection between the concept of action and the pleasure-principle may reflect an important feature of the world.

        For if sceptical worries about the Problem of Other Minds may be set aside here as idle, it is natural to assume that in one's core mental attributes one is a representative member of the species. On the unverifiable but cognitively indispensable principle of the uniformity of Nature, it would seem that something so fundamental as the affective coloration of willed action is unlikely to be sporadic, but biologically innate. Given the irreducibly personal nature of subjective what-it's-like-ness, there is no way that natural science can prove that certain causally efficacious decision-making states actually have the differential hedonic tone one's introspection suggests. But there is at least strong presumptive evidence that they do, and that our genes have biased our hedonic encephalisation accordingly. Indeed, it is the substantial overlap between sociobiology's technical genetic definition of selfishness and less formally defined behavioural and psychological usage which suggests, yet again, that one's defining attributes are a reflection of one's status as a disposable genetic vehicle rather than an autonomous moral agent.
 

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2.5 Let's Get Rational.
What is crucial in the context of the biological program mapped out in this paper, however, is not to lose sight of the central and relatively uncontroversial proposition about human motivation. We spend a lot of time trying to make ourselves happy, whether "vicariously" via our emotionally encephalised concepts of other people or from more transparently self-regarding motives. Often, in fact, we are quite candidly explicit about our motivation. "I want to be happy - without hurting anyone on the way" is an astonishingly widespread secular sentiment. Instrumental, means-ends analysis is extremely useful in general as a way of helping us to pursue more rationally and intelligently all kinds of titular goals that we seek only some of the time. So possible counter-examples of people under weird self-destructive compulsions, of weakness of will, and problems caused by the lack of any unitary self are at best a diversion from the practical rationale of the biological strategy. Such anomalous phenomena are certainly intellectually interesting complications for the hypothesis of psychological hedonism if it is construed strictly as a universal generalisation about human motivation. They don't challenge the large-scale instrumental rationality of the intra-cranial strategy as the only way to get everyone happy.

        Thus the practical case for some variant of the biological program, stripped down to its essentials, is as follows. Convergent evidence from realms as disparate as introspection and neurobiology suggests that we all spend (at least much of) our time acting to try and satisfy the insatiable hedonic demands of the meso-limbic dopamine system, albeit under myriad nominal descriptions which spring from the different ways our emotions get encephalised. Everyone likes, if not only likes, the kind of experience which accompanies electrochemical excitations in the mesolimbic dopamine system, even though the idea of "electrochemical excitations in the mesolimbic dopamine system" is not one which is normally accompanied by any great mesolimbic pleasure (cf "the paradox of hedonism"). The earlier arguments of this paper have, I hope, substantiated the claim that what may be dubbed "Peripheralism" is hopelessly less effective than the direct biological route in achieving what we're not always wittingly after. Environmental reformism of any conceivable kind fails, and will invariably fail, to overturn the hedonic treadmill. We've tried it for ages, and it doesn't work. Given our (sometimes) nominally disguised purposes, and given that irrationalism is not a live option, the only countervailing reasons against pursuing the biological program's rational strategic course of action will be moral considerations. So are there any countervailing moral reasons why we shouldn't do what instrumental rationality otherwise dictates? Or instead are their cogent moral as well as practical reasons for adopting the all-out biological panacea? Is universal happiness a bad thing?
 

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2.6 The Morality of Happiness.
I suppose it requires an effort of the imagination on my part to conceive how a Universe in which all humans and non-humans alike led richly fulfilled and joyful lives could be a morally worse place than where we are now. If we were to discover an alien civilisation of ecstatics, would we try to introduce a bit of suffering into their lives to stiffen their moral fibre? I fear the critic, however, is likely to find this remark of only autobiographical significance. The question, (s)he would presumably reply, is where do we go from here, not how would we go from there. And at this point there might seem a danger that this paper will run into an all-consuming quagmire of subjectivism. For whatever other functions they may perform, the hard-headed scientific rationalist will argue, value-judgements don't have propositional content and thus aren't truth-evaluable. The universe may contain some extraordinary things, but objective values aren't among them. After all, what in the world could make such judgements true?

        In the remainder of this section, the course of the argument runs as follows. I shall first define and set