5. Conclusion.
(Wittgenstein)
5.0 Puppet-Masters Without Strings.
One's attitude to the proposals and predictions of this manifesto will be largely a function of the mood in which it is read. The judgement of our ecstatic descendants is likely to be clear. The self-authenticating value of heavenly states, and the need to offer them universally, will seem compelling. At the other extreme - barring mood-darkening experiments cruel beyond belief - a significant proportion of people diagnosed even today as (sub-)clinically depressed will welcome the prospect of universal happiness. For an era of genetically preprogrammed self-fulfilment seems to promise a release from their malaise. Sadly, salvation will probably arrive too late. This pessimistic verdict has admittedly been pieced together on the basis of anecdotal and impressionistic evidence, not a proper independent study.
Greatest resistance to the prospect of real-life heaven-on-earth will most likely come from medically ill-named "euthymics". "Euthymic" mood is statistically typical of products of the present human genome. It's also a brutish parody of mature post-Darwinian mental health. To someone of this "natural" cast of mind, however, the assent of genetically-enhanced ecstatics to lifelong bliss will count for little. After all, the crack addict in the throes of an uncontrolled cocaine binge is untroubled by self-doubt either. His rational acumen and practical wisdom are seriously open to question. Likewise, any endorsement of the biological programme expressed by depressives can be dismissed too. It's just a cognitive pathology consequent on their morbid state.
So we have a bit of an impasse. In what mood should this manifesto be appraised? Is there a more-or-less cognitively neutral type of affective state from which the moral worth, and/or practical advantages, of all other affective states can best be judged? When does a mere processing-bias or a cognitive filter take on a hallucinatory aspect which means that certain possibilities are intellectually closed to the victim? Could one be living one's whole life in the grip of an affective psychosis?
This discussion can all seem objectionably psychologistic. All that really counts, one will be told severely, is logical rigour of argument. Rationally, mood doesn't matter. So why extend a woolly, touchy-feely invitation to assess the biological project in a blissed-out and presumably uncritical state? Surely the general idea can be understood and appraised well enough right now.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. We are not disembodied inference-engines. Abstract platonic propositions can be accessed only by abstract platonic minds. From a naturalistic perspective, there are only spatio-temporally located thought-episodes. Their causal sequence may partially simulate, but cannot literally instantiate, some notional platonic realm of causally inert abstract inference. Anything that physically tends to optimise one's reasoning processes in the natural world should not be lightly dismissed. For in practice the affective, volitional and cognitive aspects to one's thoughts are only notionally separable. Mood and meaning interpenetrate. One's conception of the very nature of Reality itself depends, in large measure, on where one presently finds oneself in the affective spectrum. There doesn't seem to be any cognitively neutral affective state from which all the others can be judged.
Sadly, medical science cannot hope to resolve the question of Ideal Mental States. Which of an organism's psychophysical processes should be classified as pathological would seem very much a conventional - though not arbitrary - matter of culture, social negotiation and personal prejudice. Mental health and soundness of judgement will tend to be defined, in part, by contemporaneous statistical norms. And if the average hedonic base-line of the species were to be ratcheted upwards substantially via germ-line "paradise-genes", then the nominal good health of one age could be regarded as the profound psychopathology of a more enlightened era. Perhaps we're all very sick indeed.
So if one finds oneself viscerally hostile to the idea of universal happiness, and if by contemporary standards one falls within the statistically normal range in one's emotional repertoire, then just how seriously should one contemplate the following possibility. We are today the victims of what subsequent and better-informed ages will reckon an atavistic mood disorder. It is a historical condition no less epistemically defective than are dream-psychoses from the perspective of the waking state.
Is this worry just the product of idle scepticism? Given the cognitive inaccessibility of most of the generically ecstatic states alluded to here, perhaps one wouldn't know if one were so afflicted. After all, damaged and disfigured minds may have limited self-insight. Nor would one necessarily have the conceptual resources even to grasp what was at stake if one suffered from such a deficiency. Pure, genetically "unearned" bliss of even the mildest flavour militated against the inclusive fitness of one's genes in the past. Happy freaks of nature got eaten or outbred. Is one's potential unease, if not revulsion, at the prospect of paradise an incidental cultural by-product of natural selection? Or has selection pressure ensured one is genetically predisposed to be biased against the idea of enduring bliss in the first instance?
5.1 Could Life Really Have A Happy Ending?
It's time to take stock. Most of the more exotic delights sketched out here will probably never be enjoyed by the reader. They require a level of theoretical understanding and biomedical finesse we simply do not yet command. Many of the practical difficulties to be overcome have been skated over with the kind of blithe disregard for detail that only an ignorance of nitty-gritty technical complexities can bestow. If, however, a single major government or a segment of the global power elite were to sanction the necessary research and development, then sustainable chemically-underwritten euphoria is quite tantalisingly accessible, even now, to those of us who want it as an option. Better still, germ-line therapy can then turn lifelong ecstatic well-being into the hereditary post-human condition.
Admittedly, in the absence of concerted action to promote at least a skeletal world-wide counterpart to the national welfare-state, then the physical plight of much of the world's population means any instant dash to raw, unempathetic euphoria on the part of a materially privileged minority would be premature. It would be selfish in the extreme - though not necessarily more so than the life-styles of competitive individualism, rampant consumerism and incompetent recreational drug-abuse many of us live at present. Yet one of the providential blessings of the biological blueprint for salvation is that - with a decent bit of planning - it can supplant the old, quasi-zero-sum approach to the allocation of life's rewards. If properly managed, the route to felicific enlightenment ahead will soon be open to all. It needn't be the preserve of the affluent few. Nor need it be the reward of just the morally good and "deserving". In fact with a combination of cognitive-enhancers and time-delayed euphoriants, there is no reason why the old age of the sympathetic reader shouldn't herald, not a slow, spirit-sapping decline, but a period of beautiful experiences and glorious self-fulfilment. It can be a time immeasurably richer than anything (s)he has enjoyed before.
Many 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. But life, one may think, should climax in an orgasmic celebration of being, not a fatalistic world-weary fade-out.
Comments, corrections and suggested improvements warmly welcome. Thanks!
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