The following are abstracts from the Hedonistic Imperative
 

"...our descendants, and in principle perhaps even our elderly selves, will have the chance to enjoy modes of experience we emotional primitives cruelly lack : 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..."

"...two hundred years ago, before the development of potent analgesics and surgical anaesthetics, the notion that physical pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed crankish and absurd. Most of us in the urban-industrial western nations now take its daily absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as mental pain, too, could be eradicated is equally counter-intuitive. The biotechnical feasibility of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of social policy and ethical choice..."

"...the kind of thrill one might first have got witnessing say the Creation can in principle become a property of every second of one's life..."

"...at some momentous and exactly datable time, probably well before the end of the fourth millennium and possibly even the third, the last unpleasant experience ever to occur on this planet will take place. It will be, perhaps, a (purely comparatively) minor pain in some (to us) obscure marine invertebrate. For just as the smallpox virus was systematically hunted down to extinction, so the precise molecular signature(s) of aversive experience and its predisposing genes can predictably be hunted down and wiped out as well. The application of nanotechnology, self-reproducing micro-miniaturised robots armed with supercomputer processing power, and ultra-sophisticated genetic engineering, perhaps using retro-viral vectors, will assure the eradication of the root of all evil in its naturalistic guise. The advent of the post-Darwinian era will mark a major transition in the evolution of life..."
 

"...the neurochemistry of pain and malaise which once served the inclusive fitness of our genes will be superseded by a radically different sort of neural architecture. States of happiness and sublime well-being of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable are destined to become the new lifetime norms for mental health..."
 

"...and it won't just be the quality and quantity of consciousness in the world which will be transformed in the early stages of the 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. They will feel they had been 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 whose nature they were physiologically incapable of recognising..."
 

"...day-to-day life will blend the exalted, life-loving euphoria of a potent dopamine agonist with the serene and mystical love of an empathogen such as ecstasy. Yet there is no need to use toxic recreational drugs. We can genetically hardwire a spectrum of empathetic bliss. Cloud-nine happiness can become the new biological default-condition. For it is feasible to combine states of incisive, goal-directed thought with a profound love and regard for others. The homeostatic mechanisms of the post-Darwinian psyche will ensure "peak experiences" are as natural as breathing. Today's norms of psychological health may come to be seen in a different light. After all, they are just a pathological expression of the workings of DNA-driven mind..."
 

"...the sensualist will discover that what had hitherto passed for passionate sex had been merely an 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 serotonergic agents, is not the sort of gene-inspired perversion of consciousness likely to be judged worthy of conservation in the post-Darwinian era. Moreover designer love-philtres and smarter sex-drugs can transform our conception of intimacy. Today's ill-educated fumblings will seem inept by comparison. Sensualists may opt for whole-body orgasms of a frequency, duration and variety that transcends the limp foreplay of their natural ancestors. Whether the sexual adventures of our descendants will be mainly auto-erotic, interpersonal, or take guises we can't currently imagine is a topic for another night. Profound love of many forms - both of oneself and all others - is at least as realistically feasible as the impersonal emotional wasteland occupied by Huxley's utopians...."
 

"...our genetically-enhanced descendants will regard any sort of aversive experience as something akin to hard-core pornography..."
 

"...notions of what now passes for tolerably good mental health will be superseded. They will be written off as mood-congruent cognitive pathologies. Dismally low standards of well-being were typical of emotional primitives from the previous era. But life is destined to get better. In time, the deliberate re-creation of any of today's state-spectrum of normal waking and dreaming consciousness will be outlawed as cruel and immoral..."
 

"...within a few centuries, we will be able to subvert our traditional status as throwaway genetic vehicles. When heaven has been biologically implemented, then the very notion of tampering with our new-won "natural" condition and feeling "drugged" will come to seem perversely immoral. For who would want to contaminate the purity of their ecstatic biological soul-stuff with alien chemical pollutants? Until that era arrives, however, we still need chemical mood-enrichers. Yet given better genes and designer drugs, there's no reason why life shouldn't just get better and better...."
 

"...a lot of people will have internalised too many of the life-impoverishing hang-ups of humanity's biological past to contemplate playing a pioneering role and participating in the era ahead - just as misplaced prudery prevents many people from enjoying sex. Yet life, one may think, should climax in an orgasmic celebration of being, not a fatalistic world-weary fade-out...."

"...an all-pervasive network of virtual realities, however, will enable everybody to have their objects of desire fulfilled, and at minimal cost. Interactive or solipsistic, artistic masterpiece or pornographic wish-fulfilment, an ever-growing software library of virtual worlds will let everyone have their dreams come true. Yet on its own such a scenario wouldn't, mirabile dictu, make most of us much happier for very long. The hedonic treadmill would still grind. For a revolution of rising expectations will eventually lead people to expect, as of right, to enjoy and enact any set of perceptions and narrative structures they choose. We'll expect to do so in virtual worlds which manifest laws, plot-lines and body-images of our own choosing. In the absence of at least a minimal mesolimbic repair-job, then boredom, angst and other dormant negativities would periodically surface to spoil our ostensibly perfect idylls and utopias. For ironically, a mass migration into virtual worlds may come to represent Peripheralism's final fling. Only total control of one's notional surroundings may be enough to convince the sceptic of the futility of pure environmental manipulation in pursuit of lasting happiness. The symbiosis of biologically programmed euphoria and mature virtual reality software engineering, however, is an awesomely good prospect..."
 

"...our genetically-enriched descendants are likely to view us as little better than psychopaths. For the role of key receptor sub-types of the 'civilising neurotransmitter' serotonin, the 'hormone of love' oxytocin, and the 'chocolate amphetamine' phenylethylamine, can be radically enhanced. When naturally loved-up and blissed-out on a richer cocktail of biochemicals than today, our post-human successors will be able, not just to love everyone, but to be perpetually in love with everyone as well. It's been said that when we're in love, we find it astonishing it's possible to love someone else so much - because normally we love each other so little. This indifference, or at best diffuse benevolence, to the rest of the world's population is easily taken for granted in a competitive consumerist society - or on the plains of the harsh African savannah. Quasi-psychopathic callousness forms part of 'normal' archaic mental health. Yet our deficiencies in love are only another grim manifestation of selfish DNA. If humans had collectively shared the greater degree of genetic relatedness common to many of the social insects (haplodiploidy), then we might already "naturally" be able to love each other with greater enthusiasm. Sociobiologists would then explain why we all loved each other so deeply, not so little. Happily, in the future it will be possible to mimic, and then magnify out of all recognition, the kind of altruistic devotion to each other that might have arisen if were we all 100% genetically-related clones. Hints of a capacity for universal love can be glimpsed fleetingly today on the empathogen 'hug-drug' MDMA (ecstasy). But loving each other to bits can also be genetically pre-programmed. It can become innate. For if the right sort of psychochemical cocktail is automatically triggered whenever anyone one knows is present or recollected, then we can combine absolute, unconditional and uninhibited love for each other with a celebration of the diversity of genes and cultures. At present this prospect may seem some way off...."

"...for there is a well-attested correlation between depressed mood and low social status. The manifestations of melancholic depression and, conversely, euphoric mania are also uncannily typical of people occupying omega and alpha status-roles. Evolutionary psychology suggests that depression is part of an adaptive coping process. It involves the passive submission to a prolonged or uncontrollable stress. The persistence into the post-hunter-gatherer era of depressive states continues to foster (relatively) stable hierarchies of social dominance. Yet pecking orders aren't an immutable law of nature. Huxley got it wrong. The project of radically enhancing everyone's mood and motivation is likely to be subversive of authority. It will leave people much less, not more, vulnerable to exploitation by a power elite. In Brave New World, members of the populace are (effectively) the opiated dupes of the ruling authorities. Soma is a pacifying agent of social control. The consequences of genetically pre-programmed happiness, however, will be very different. This is because everyday mental super-health will undermine the biological underpinnings of the dominance- and submission-relationships characteristic of humanity's ancestral environment. Happiness, and an enhanced responsiveness to a wider range of rewards, is empowering. It tends to help people take control of their own lives. Boosting the efficiency of tyrosine hydroxlase, for instance, won't merely act to elevate mood. The consequent enhanced noradrenalin function in the locus coeruleus will tend to diminish subordinate behaviour. Super-well people don't let themselves be bossed around. Contrary to a billion-and-one sci-fi dramas, post-humans aren't doomed perpetually to re-enact the power-plays of hunter-gatherer society..."
 

"...being biologically compelled to suffer, however, as under the present DNA regime, is arguably the greatest indignity of all...."
 

"...sadly, if God exists, then He has chosen cunningly to hide His existence from most of His creatures. Indeed a physicist once noted that things make much more sense if you assume the world was created not by an all-good and all-powerful being, but by one that is 100 percent malevolent yet only 90 percent effective. If He does lurk benevolently in the background, on the other hand, then one must presumably be confident that He is greater in not just the depth but also the range of His compassion than we are... Statistically, the bulk of the world's suffering is undergone by members of other species. Sometimes the anguish is quite ghastly and prolonged. Such suffering doesn't, even notionally, have any redeeming features. It isn't character-building. It never issues in great art and literature. Thus it can't even support the kinds of sophistry we use to rationalise our own ills... Mercifully, however, the pain and malaise of non-humans from the biological Nightmare Era is likely to be phased out too. For there's no need to pay homage to the product of selfish genes as though self-replicating DNA were some sort of secular equivalent to Providence. The genetically pre-programmed well-being of the post-Transition epoch shouldn't, and probably won't, remain arbitrarily species-specific...."
 

"...neurochemically, there's no reason why each moment of one's existence couldn't have the impact of a breathtaking revelation...the exhilarating sense of joy and wonderment one might have experienced witnessing the Creation can become part of the normal biological fabric of everyday life..."
 

"...today one can't responsibly advocate the use of psychedelics. The risks are too high. "Bad trips" are an ever-present possibility. Informed consent is biologically impossible. For psychedelia is not just weirder than the drug-naive mind conceives, it's weirder than the drug-naive mind can conceive. One can't grasp, in advance, the nature of the sorts of experience to which one is nominally consenting. Yet in consequence of this taboo, unimaginably alien state spaces of consciousness remain off-limits to most of us. Trapped in the squalid psychochemical ghetto of Darwinian life, we lack the necessary wetware to conceptualise radically altered states of mind. We haven't even names for the strange new textures of selfhood and introspection that their metabolic pathways disclose; and alas pure reasoning is impotent to access their nature because it lacks the semantic primitives with which to do so. Yet when the vertebrate genome is rewritten, and genetically-preprogrammed bliss becomes the norm of mental health, our veil of ignorance can be safely ripped aside. Armed with exquisite designer-drugs, even the most outlandish realms of psychedelia can then be investigated in depth. The study of consciousness can become a true experimental discipline. And crucially, we can explore other-worldly forms of mental life in the confidence that they will all, without exception, radiate the sparkle of earthly paradise..."
 

"...for 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 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 cure the root of all evil in its naturalistic guise. With the right genes and designer drugs, there's no reason why life shouldn't just get better and better.... "