Try summoning up the most delightful fantasy you can imagine. Try and imagine, too, feeling more blissfully fulfilled in pursuing whatever you love and value than you've ever felt before.

        Unfortunately it's quite futile. We run such simulations on legacy wetware. Even the most virile imagination today glimpses only a shadow of the biological nirvana awaiting our descendants. For happiness beyond the bounds of normal human experience will shortly become our genetically pre-programmed birthright. Life on earth is destined to become inconceivably good.

        The Hedonistic Imperative predicts that we are poised to explore some outrageously beautiful kinds of consciousness. Their exotic metabolic pathways are neither more nor less "natural" than any other patterns of matter and energy existing elsewhere in space-time. Yet direct drug-naive knowledge of these ( hitherto ) genetically-maladaptive forms of mental life has been impossible - at least to emotional primitives like us - owing to the pressure of natural selection.

        Cruelly, any genetic blueprint for naturally "angelic" minds - if evolved blindly via the mechanism of natural selection acting on random genetic variations - entails crossing dips in the evolutionary fitness-landscape. Such jumps are forbidden for reasons of neo-Darwinian theory. So such minds never evolved; we did instead.

        Happily, thanks to genetic-engineering and nanotechnology, this glorious spectrum of alien state-spaces of consciousness will soon become safely accessible to us. Better still, our cheap-and-nasty primordial-DNA-driven minds are destined to redesign themselves out of existence. An enriched neural architecture will disclose ecstasies more deeply intense, diverse and exhilarating than a drug-naive hunter-gatherer psyche can understand. And such magical modes of well-being are only travestied, alas, by the dry textual placeholders found here.

        For within a few generations, celestial chemistry of a loveliness that transcends any fantasised Christian afterlife will become the genetically-coded basis of our existence. Every moment of every day will become a sublime revelation. Gradients of prodigious happiness will become the everyday norm of mental health.

        Post-Darwinian superminds will go on to rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign our whole global ecosystem, and abolish suffering and cruelty throughout the living world. The molecular biology of paradise is closer than we think.

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BLTC Research
Wirehead Hedonism
The Good Drug Guide
Utilitarianism on the Net
Critique Of Brave New World

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