Foreword 

Although it might seem overtly paternalistic of an author to impose on the reader a certain perspective from which they should read one’s work, I think that it is of cardinal importance in the case of this novel. Brave New World Truly Revisited: The Euphenomenological Age is not only a piece of fiction, but even more importantly, a defense of an ethical proposal of the utmost urgency. That is, it is a novel that fictionalizes David Pearce’s writings, though especially The Hedonistic Imperative, a manifesto that outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient beings through biotechnology (genetic engineering) and other fields of technology (ex. nanotechnology). 

 

By novelizing Pearce’s ethical manifesto, I have tried to overcome or at least tackle the problem of semantic incompetence. Needless to say, the human mind is just not very apt at putting mere verbal expressions into actual affective phenomenal reality. For instance, if one is only verbally told about the magnificence of being on the top of the mountain of progress, one is very likely to miss out on the actual affective phenomenal magnificence, the “raw feels” of superhuman bliss. In this case, a work like The Hedonistic Imperative that is written in slightly sub-academese though very concise prose is largely ineffective at stirring the emotional repertoire of the reader, as can be noted in the phenomenal sublimity it aims for. Though to be fair, Pearce, wise as he is, recognizes this: “Today, discussion of superhuman bliss can seem like the shuffling of empty words. Darwinian minds can’t digest their meaning. The text then sets lifelessly on the page or screen. Tomorrow, intelligent bliss will be part of the texture of everyday life.” 

 

While discussing Pearce’s ideas may quite unfortunately and unjustly portray his truly wonderful ideas as merely crude, cold-hearted scientific talk to a significant number of people, I would like to assure them that this isn’t so at all. However, this is, I assume, one of the main reasons why people are often not only unimpressed, but even estranged by the brilliant insightfulness of Pearce’s proposals. Thus, to rectify the issue, I will be employing florid-emotive prose. I hope to show that below the rigid façade of The Hedonistic Imperative’s philosophical, scientific diction lies an immensely urgent ethical issue and a correspondingly truly wonderful phenomenal truth that can change life as we know it forever for the better. As an additional tool to minimize the unwanted effects of semantic incompetence, I highly encourage the reader to enjoy my novel with some background music that they would consider deeply soul-stirring and truly beautiful; this was a source of inspiration that I intensively consulted while composing this novel to provide myself with transitory glimpses into the conceivable heights of being. 

The title of my novel has symbolic significance of which the reader should be aware. In today’s world, many people view Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as an uncannily prophetic piece of fiction that details the potentially horrid consequences of unhampered scientific progress, especially in the field of genetic engineering. While this specific interpretation of Huxley’s work is certainly defensible, one should take the context in which this science-fiction novel was produced into account to attain a thorough (or at least more detailed and informed) understanding of the significance and meaning of Huxley’s masterpiece. When it comes to the novel, it was first published in 1932, which was after Huxley had written most of it in the period between April and August of 1931. Considering the historical background, it seems obvious that Huxley had many other things in mind than just depicting the possible horrid consequences of rapid scientific progress: Brave New World was certainly, at least to some degree, a fictional attempt to deal with the non-fictional aspects of the grave problems that Western civilization faced at the beginning of the 1930s and which lasted for years afterward, represented by the internal challenges of The Great Depression (and other economic upheavals), the rise of fascism and nazism, and WWII, a catastrophic total war that left more than 70 million people, a majority of them civilians, dead in the wake of battles, genocides, massacres, firebombings, atomic bombs, starvation, hopelessness, and heartbreak. 

In response to all of these problems, Huxley increasingly grew weary of parliamentary democracy, even going so far as to announce that humanity should be ruled by “men who will compel us to do and suffer what a rational foresight demands!” He saw stability as the ultimate basis for a well-functioning social system, given the aforementioned economic crisis. In contrast to the popular belief that Huxley was a deep sceptic of biotechnology and genetic engineering, it should be recognized that he actually did sanction eugenics (which is incomparable to the form of genetic engineering advocated by The Hedonistic Imperative and in this novel). Huxley put it this way: “Any form of order is better than chaos!” So Brave New World was certainly more fuelled by an effort to find a solution to the seemingly never-ending list of social, political, and economic problems that plagued life in 1931 than by a deep-rooted pessimism about the consequences of legally sanctioning psychoactive substances and systematically applying genetic engineering to human (and as Pearce espouses, sentient) life.

Only after Huxley had witnessed Hitler’s “Final Solution” and WWII as well as the gross inhumanities in Soviet Russia did he radically change his aforementioned views on eugenics and central planning. He then wrote Brave New World Revisited, which was first published in 1958. In this non-fiction work, Huxley concluded that the world was becoming like Brave New World at a much faster rate than he had previously anticipated. Thus, in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley much more poignantly realized in retrospect what he considered to be the truly prophetic character of Brave New World than he actually did while writing the novel itself.

One of the most important points to be noted concerning Huxley is how quickly his views on human nature and society changed after he himself began to regularly use psychedelic substances such as mescaline and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). In Brave New World, soma is the socially preferred choice of mood enhancement; it is a cheap uni-dimensional euphoriant that doesn’t make its users feel truly wonderful, given how it is more of a barbiturate than a mood and brain enhancing drug. Of course, it is (in)famous today as a symbol of social control, which has had negative side effects, as it has demonized the potential of biotechnology through its overly simplistic portrayal of what the future is likely to be like. Of course, Huxley’s repulsive depiction of soma should come as no surprise when one considers that Aldous Huxley had not been personally familiar with any psychoactive substance except ethyl alcohol at the time of his writing the novel. However, once he had become familiar with the great potentialities of the human nervous system through his experiments with mescaline and LSD, he became an avid advocate of the use of psychedelics. In Island, his last novel, which unfortunately never became as popular as Brave New World, he depicted a truly paradisiacal society in which people habitually used a fictional substance called Moksha to cooperate and to enjoy happiness, which was remarkably similar in its psychological profile to LSD.

Accordingly, although in Brave New World genetic engineering and the use of psychoactive substances do not come across as blessings, it is important to put their disapproving depiction into perspective, seeing how Huxley did at least at an earlier point of his life advocated for eugenics and near the end of his life heavily used and advocated psychedelics (in fact, he requested and received LSD from his wife as he lay on his deathbed: he left the world doing and enjoying an activity he would likely have frowned upon on his youth). Moreover, and needless to say, Aldous Huxley had a very limited understanding of the actual neurochemical workings and thus the true potentialities of the nervous system. Hence, I think it would be ill-conceived to argue against the proposals put forth by The Hedonistic Imperative and the future I depict in my novel by blindly appealing to Aldous Huxley’s brilliant but certainly not prophetic nor realistic Brave New World.

The other part of the title of my novel, “The Euphenomenological Age,” is more important than the first part. It would go far beyond the scope of this foreword to instruct the reader in the true meaning of the noun “phenomenology” and its adjective “phenomenological.” A substantial part of this novel is dedicated to familiarizing the reader with the concept of phenomenology anyway. Thus, I think it suffices, for now, to understand the meaning of this novel’s title by vaguely equating phenomenology with consciousness and consequently “phenomenological” with “conscious.” It is further necessary, I believe, to explain the importance of the word-creation “euphenomenology” as distinct from mere “phenomenology.” The reader might be familiar with words such as “euphoria,” “eulogy,” “euthymia,” or perhaps even “eudaimonia,” which is the Greek word for happiness. Etymologically speaking, all these words are compositions of the root noun and Greek prefix “eu,” which means “good” or “positive.” Thus, “The Euphenomenological Age” refers to a time period in the future in which all conscious experiences will be fundamentally beautiful and pleasant. While this might sound very vague or even cryptic and concerning, the novel itself constitutes an effort to elucidate the definition of this utopian title.

Although my novel might seem at first extremely unrealistic and akin to a pipe-dream, or grotesquely utopian, I whole-heartedly hope that the reader can appreciate, upon deep and honest reflection and compassion, the supreme moral urgency and phenomenological significance of The Hedonistic Imperative’s message, which I so passionately advocate for in this novel. As a final point, I want to point out that my work is not an exhaustive description of all of the ideas present in The Hedonistic Imperative by David Pearce, not-mentioning all of his other writings, which will be attached at the end of this novel. Moreover, this novel displays my own interpretation of many of the points he makes and includes various elements that were not endorsed in his manifesto. Accordingly, I highly encourage the reader to familiarize herself or himself with The Hedonistic Imperative itself as well as the numerous, equally ethically important, and intellectually brilliant essays by Pearce, which also appropriately served as key sources and inspirations for my novel. They can be found on his extensive website, which, as mentioned before, will be attached at the bottom of this page. 

Alex Vomela, 2008.

 

* * *

"This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life. The abolitionist project is ambitious, implausible, but technically feasible. It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. Genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world.”

David Pearce, The Hedonistic Imperative

 

On the turning away

From the pale and downtrodden

And the words they say

Which we won't understand

Don't accept that what's happening

Is just a case of others' suffering

Or you'll find that you're joining in

The turning away

It's a sin that somehow

Light is changing to shadow

And casting it's shroud

Over all we have known

Unaware how the ranks have grown

Driven on by a heart of stone

We could find that we're all alone

In the dream of the proud

On the wings of the night

As the daytime is stirring

Where the speechless unite

In a silent accord

Using words you will find are strange

And mesmerised as they light the flame

Feel the new wind of change

On the wings of the night

No more turning away

 

From the weak and the weary

No more turning away

From the coldness inside

Just a world that we all must share

It's not enough just to stand and stare

Is it only a dream that there'll be

No more turning away?

David Gilmour, Anthony Moore (Pink Floyd)

 

“All mind scientists should remember: Primary consciousness

arises from the somato-visceral operating systems of the upper

brainstem.”

Jaak Panksepp

 

“And yet even in the hate and turmoil and distresses of the Days of Confusion there must have been earnest enough of the exquisite and glorious possibilities of life. Over the foulest slums the sunset called to the imaginations of men, and from mountain ridges, across great valleys, from cliffs and hillsides and by the uncertain and terrible splendours of the sea, men must have had glimpses of the conceivable and attainable magnificence of being. Every flower petal. Every flower petal, every sunlit leaf, the vitality of young things, the happy moments of the human mind transcending itself in art, all these things must have been material for hope, incentive to effort. And now at last this world!” 

H.G. Wells, Men Like Gods

 

“But the world is growing better. And in the Future-in the long, long ages to come-it will be redeemed! The same spirit of sympathy and fraternity that broke the black man’s manacles and is to-day melting the white woman’s chains will to-morrow emancipate the working man and the ox; and, as the ages bloom and the great wheels of the centuries grind on, the same spirit shall banish Selfishness from the earth, and convert the planet finally into one unbroken and unparalleled spectacle of peace, justice, and solidarity.” 

John Howard Moore, The Universal Kinship

 

“We grow weary sometimes, and discouraged, and feel hope within us slipping away like sands from wave-swept feet. We grow sick of the sneers, sick of the wars and the worms, sick of the cold, horrible altars on which we bleed. But the future-that is the god to whom we feed our vitals-the long, radiant, ever-unfolding, heaven-born future! Oh, the hope of the centuries and centuries to come! It seems sometimes that I can almost see the shining spires of that Celestial Civilisation that man is to build in the ages to come on this earth—that Civilisation that will jewel the land masses of this planet in that sublime time when Science has wrought the miracles of a thousand years, and Man, no longer the savage he now is, breathes Justice and Brotherhood to every being that feels.” 

John Howard Moore, The New Ethics

 

Dedicated to all sentient beings, with special grateful thanks to my very supportive family and David Pearce

 

Chapter 1

 

When Thomas awoke, he immediately felt the sheer overwhelming intensity of bright light against his retina, which awoke in this almost violent fashion from its nocturnally regained pristine condition. After a fleeting moment, Thomas gained his full waking consciousness, which, at that moment, had to not only bear the energy of electromagnetic radiation, as was the case with the retina, but also the frenetic, bustling activity of perception, affection, and cognition of his mind. And as soon as enough sensory information had been processed by his billions of nerve cells, his mental machinery came to the firm conclusion that the integrated whole of those millions of bits of sensory bits which had invaded Thomas’ corpus in the last few seconds did not encode the construct of matter and energy Thomas was used to encounter upon waking up, namely with his beloved wife on a comfortable king-size bed in an expensively furnished bedroom.

Thomas at first thought that the situation of amnesic puzzlement he found himself in was simply the unpleasant next-morning surprise of a nightly celebration which at his age had become scarce, given how he had become responsible in a dullardly manner, but still did occur time to time in a rather pronounced fashion, usually when an initially civilized cocktail party escalated into some sort of outrageous college binge-drinking reminisce. But Thomas felt an unfamiliarly strong feeling of drowsiness, which he could only compare but certainly not equate to a hangover brought about by strong liquor. In fact, Thomas felt that he had been asleep for years rather than hours. The coherence of his thoughts and memories was for him, as it had been some few centuries ago for Descartes, a clear sign that his consciousness was presently in the waking rather than the dreaming state. In a quick but cautious fashion, at least relatively quick and cautious for his then slightly incapacitated mental and physical condition, Thomas threw the sheets aside and slowly lifted his body, which at that moment felt to be made of solid lead rather than organic tissues. And when his visual field shifted to include most of the room he found himself in, Thomas’ confusion gave way to an explosion of neural electrochemical signals mediating an abrupt and powerful feeling of greatly shocking bewilderment.

Thomas immediately noticed a complete stranger standing a few feet away from him: he underwent no actual thoughts, but only arising sub-neocortical perceptions and strong, almost explosive affections. During the first few seconds of Thomas’ visual contact with the stranger, his noting the outline of the matter and energy sculpting that person lead to an uncontrollable feeling of primordial fear. But this mental constitution was only of a very transient nature, and soon many features of the person were conceptualized and properly processed by Thomas’ elaborate neocortex, which dissolved at least his previous anxiety but profoundly deepened his confusion. A series of questions sped through his mind while more conceptual details about the human being in front of him emerged. The man seemed to be of a very athletic physical stature, and it immediately occurred to Thomas that this man had to be some sort of a professional athlete, perhaps a runner in the sprint discipline or a regular practitioner of some other demanding physical activity that could shape a human body in such an appealing way. But what was far more perplexing and attractive was not the spatial arrangement of the various tissues of which this man was made up, but their and his clothes’ surface properties. To clarify, the man appeared in a glowing radiance that induced a feeling of outstanding beauty. This, however, made the situation decidedly worse for Thomas: instead of curing his bafflement, the other man’s optical magnificence added a subtle feeling of embarrassment, seeing how Thomas was not used to being amazed at another man’s appearance in such a manner. Moreover, the man’s skin was so delicately smooth compared to those he was used to seeing; no scar or other dermatological element disrupted the perfect continuity of his goldenly colored skin, which seemed to be the sublime conclusion to the magnificent three-dimensional tissue-framework resting beneath. But any thoughts and admiration regarding the good looks of the stranger were quickly and forcefully pushed away to leave more mental power for the complete clarification of the strangely absurd situation Thomas found himself in.

The most reasonable answer to Thomas was that he found himself in some sort of hospital, which would conveniently explain the unusual drowsiness suffusing his mind and body. However, the thought of being in a hospital and unaware of how he had gotten there immediately caused a powerful surge of anxiety and uncertainty regarding his family: Thomas was less concerned about himself since no frightening empire of medical technology was mounting up next to his bed that was fused with his body. But before Thomas could give voice to his confused thoughts, the man made a step forward in such a deliberate and courteous manner that Thomas could not have been dismayed even if the man was of such a deeply suspicious appearance as some of the trading partners Thomas had to deal with on a regular basis. The man stretched out his firm but delicate hand whose pristine softness Thomas was eager to feel but at the same time was reluctant to touch, in the same way one is hesitant to enter and thereby befoul a landscape covered in a gorgeously silky layer of freshly fallen snow. And while the man was patiently waiting for Thomas’ silent but obvious internal confusion to give way to some sort of physical action, he smiled in a rather amiable way and finally started to initiate a dialogue by saying, “Hello Thomas, I am very pleased to meet you. I am very sorry for the confusion you are experiencing right now, but I can assure you that everything is going to be alright.” 

Thomas, due to his nervous state, was about to get up and scream and demand answers, but the other man’s honest and reassuring appearance and tone as well as his persistent feeling of drowsiness made him continue to listen to the man’s strangely soothing voice.

The man continued: “First, a disclaimer: it probably won’t be easy for you to understand and bear at first what I will tell you. I am sure you have seen Larry and Andy Wachowski’s science-fiction movie The Matrix, isn’t that correct, Thomas?”

Thomas kept staring at the man without giving any sign of confirmation, shocked that he knew his name, although he of course had seen the movie. But even the mentioning of the film in this already bizarre situation seemed extremely ridiculous and surrealistic to Thomas. However, since he really did not have a choice in the matter, he continued to pay attention to the other man’s utterances, increasingly impatient and wistfully waiting for some clarification instead of weird and inappropriate small talk. The man smiled, revealing his pristine white teeth. “Well, just to make things at least a little bit easier for you, consider the following analogy: I am Morpheus and you are Neo.”

An expression of deeply felt compassion appeared on the man’s face that seemed so genuine that Thomas couldn’t find it in himself, even if he wanted to, to start laughing out loud at this seemingly bizarre, perhaps even insane, analogy. The man continued his speech that seemed like inappropriate childish fantasy role-play to Thomas, though he was completely aware of what Thomas was thinking about him: “Thomas, I can’t offer you a blue or red pill, but I can offer you another one that will dissolve all confusion, anxiety, and aversive feelings you will experience upon discovering more and more about what is going on here. It is absolutely safe, but I understand your worries, and so I will leave it here with you. Whenever you feel ready, you can come outside, but please understand that you will witness something that will appear to you as strange, but ultimately wonderful. Again, please don’t forget to consume the wonder-pill!” 

The man amiably patted Thomas, who still only sat there utterly perplexed. The man slowly turned around. As soon as he had reached the door, Thomas was about to inquire about his state of affairs and his family, but the door was firmly closed before he could do so.

The shutting of the door effectively pushed Thomas down into the abysmal depth of perplexity, fear, and desperation. He was entirely unable to move or make any appropriate further steps, assuming the latter even existed as a possibility in this uncanny situation. Only myriads of terrifying incapacitating questions and thoughts raced through his head: What had happened? Where was he? Where was his family? Was he in a mental asylum? Was he going to be subjected to experimentation? Had he been kidnapped? If only his family was alright, if only he could see them again … 

These worrisome thoughts had such power over his mind that it was as if some demon had possessed his faculties and would do so indefinitely for its own sadistic pleasure. And this state of panic-like anxiety was so energy-consuming, even more so utterly existence-consuming, that Thomas believed that attaining any degree of solace was impossible. He was prone to anxiety-like thoughts, but he could usually control them and put them aside as some rather unpleasant but manageable aspect of his psyche. But in this case the anxiety was like a black-hole, completely sucking in the rest of his consciousness and seemingly annihilating it forever.

The pill lying on the shelf next to him for a second seemed like the Godsent antidote to the painful poison of mental misery he was suffering through. But Thomas never previously succumbed to the weakness of taking chemical synthetics for his problems, thereby cowardly avoiding instead of facing and resolving them head-on. He was, however, less reluctant to take antibiotics or painkillers to avoid physical pain, since he knew that getting rid of one’s physical ailments was less cowardly and unnatural than using psychic anesthetics. But if one could just get rid of this awful feeling for just a second, for just a second of peace; this prospect almost felt wonderful to him. However, he decided to go the route of the brave and honest and fight against his own mind in an unenhanced natural way. He forced himself to sit down and take one deep breath after another, flooding his brain with oxygen and providing it with new energy to rid itself of the virus-like emotions infesting his mind. After a while that seemed more like an eternity than the actual five or so minutes it took, the merciless wickedness of aversive feelings that had suffused Thomas’ entire consciousness and cruelly enslaved his entire cognitive machinery temporarily faded away, leaving his consciousness behind like a battlefield that was certainly repulsive but still somehow inhabitable for productive thoughts.

Then, Thomas decided to remain as calm as possible and to act in a relatively incisive way to find answers to the countless questions bothering his psyche. He put on the unblemished clothes that were prepared for him, which were of a superb texture and embellishment as that of the attire that the stranger Thomas had just minutes ago profoundly admired wore. But given the feeling of pressing urgency, the vast magnificent perceptual and affective potential of Thomas’ mind was reduced to an animal-like survival-based minimum of functioning, and thus did not perceive the sensual luxuries of the garments. However, when he actually put on the strange clothes, the present dullness of his senses was, for a transient moment, overwhelmed by a striking flash, an impetus of millions of electrical signals traveling from all the sensory receptors on his skin to his brain in a fraction of second, where they were phenomenologically endowed with a hedonic gloss resulting in a gratifying sensation of marvelously exquisite comfort. This short sparkle of sensory pleasure was, however, immediately and forcefully pushed aside by the all-consuming feeling of anxious urgency that directed Thomas’ current existence. He finally reached the door where the stranger had gone through just a few minutes ago and stopped for a moment, trying to calm his highly stimulated nervous system down. However, he was painfully aware of the futility of this neocortically-mediated effort to control the dominant and mysterious dynamism of his affections.

Chapter 2

When Thomas hastily went through the door to the world outside the room he had been inhabiting for too long in a state of anxious malaise, he was pleasantly surprised that a white, relatively empty room with a table and a few chairs met his eyes instead of some bizarre futuristic scenario which Thomas had already envisaged. But this ephemeral moment of relief and sanity quickly gave way again to feelings of anxious urgency, worrisome uncertainty, and deep confusion.

In the middle of the room was a table with a few chairs, two of which were occupied by a man, namely the same stranger Thomas had encountered just a few minutes ago, and a woman who invoked an even more soul-stirring sense of beauty. Strikingly, she also exuded that sense of authentic, deep-rooted friendliness, which strikingly perplexed Thomas, who was so used to being reliant on his penetrating sight to see through the deceptive veneer of his trading partners, whose cold-hearted profit-orientedness came in almost every conceivable disguise. Thomas, of course, could not deny a strong feeling of arousal and attraction towards the woman, even in the face of his present aversive circumstances. That feeling of attraction clearly had a soothing, anxiolytic, and mood-lifting impact on his distressed consciousness and made him feel physically mobile and mentally agile again.

The man welcomed Thomas by speaking in a voice that so perfectly matched his visual appearance of friendly genuineness. “Hello, Thomas. We are very glad you are here with us now: I hope you are feeling well. Have you decided to consume the pill I have offered you?”

Thomas, who now felt much more responsive and motivated to finally clarify the situation and inquire the whereabouts of his family, answered in a rather straightforward manner. “Thank you for your kindness, but I am not the kind of person to take pills unless I know it’s absolutely necessary. Excuse my boldness, but I would really appreciate hearing what is going on here and where my family is. Did I have an accident? What kind of medical institution is this? Have I had a mental breakdown or something of the sort?” 

Only after he had put forth these statements and requests did he notice the eerie absence of the many things typically found in a hospital; in fact, the room he had woken up in as well as this room was lacking any sort of furnishing. But before he could spend more time analyzing the oddity of his present environment, the woman spoke for the first time. With a beaming, though not naive smile, she greeted, “Thomas, I am very delighted to meet you. I’m Tanja, a researcher here at this institution. David and I will explain everything to you soon. But, as I’m sure David mentioned before to you, we want you to understand that your present circumstances will require some adjustments from you. I can only tell and advise you that taking that pill would make things much easier for you as a person. But, in any case, we will be here for you to help you understand what is going on.” 

Thomas couldn’t take any more of this mysterious, indirect, uninformative, and disturbing talk and fell into an affective state of impatient anger, which was only held in check by the extraordinarily friendly appeal of the two strangers. He gushed, “I really can’t take this anymore. Can you please just tell me where my family is and what I am doing here? What is going on?” 

“Well, Thomas,” started the man again, “to put it as frankly and directly as you wish, you are in the future, but your family is not.” 

Thomas was struck by a feeling of angry bewilderment. The utterances of the man seemed like the eerily ludicrous, seductive statements of a sect-leader who had completely lost touch with reality. All of a sudden, Thomas felt the horror of being trapped in the hands of insane, unpredictable new-age gurus. And this thought quickly crystallized into a horrific conviction, since Thomas more and more believed that the strangeness of the place and the people he had met could only be explained by this scenario. He obviously had become the victim of some sort of esoteric movement that kidnapped people and did … Here his thoughts stopped and were replaced by an all-consuming panic. But his prefrontal cortex was functioning efficiently enough to come to the conclusion that it was prudent to remain calm, so Thomas accordingly managed to suppress a visible bodily response to his emotional distress. In a relatively controlled manner, he said, “I know that both of you know that it seems absurd to me that I am actually in the future. How did I come here, I mean into the future?” 

It was hard for Thomas to suppress an undertone of angry cynicism in his response. He carefully watched the strikingly but deceptively beautiful faces of the two people, whom he believed managed quite well to keep up a charade of sympathy and good intention. For a moment, Thomas felt proud and self-confident, since he had seen so quickly and accurately exposed the pretense of his opponents. Thus, his strong distrust in people, which his job in the financial market had deeply ingrained into his personality, had triumphed again and propelled Thomas forward to be in a not necessarily leading but certainly strategically worthwhile position. The man, whom Thomas thought to be one of the leaders of this sect due to his remarkable allure, raised his mellow voice again. “Thomas, I will explain to you now how you’ve come here, but it will seem absurd to you. Just try to listen and I will be very happy to answer all your questions. Again, please keep in mind that we will be here for you to help you.” 

Thomas had to use self-discipline not to let a smirk appear on his face, since he almost felt empowered to know that every sentence leaving the man’s lips was the ridiculous lie of a lunatic. 

The man who was called David narrated, “In the year 2009, Thomas, you were diagnosed with a very aggressive form of lung cancer, incurable by medical standards at the time. Admirably, you were brave and tried to fight it together with your family. But Thomas,” and here the man paused and looked Thomas into the eyes with such a sincere look of sympathy and compassion that Thomas, for a fleeting moment, was struck by a paralyzing feeling of emotional agony due to his actually believing the man’s words. But he immediately abandoned this thought by convincing himself how silly and dangerous it was for him to believe such an obviously preposterous madman. Although the rational part of his consciousness had swiftly returned to a state of self-confident sharp scepticism, his very being was still shaking from the powerful emotional eruptions of soul-torturing pain. 

The man then resumed, “Thomas, your family, while in the same car, got into a fatal car accident after visiting you in the hospital, and although the emergency-room doctors tried their best … the medical equipment just wasn’t sophisticated and effective enough to revive them.” 

Thomas again felt a powerful surge of explosive desperation in his bosom, but he managed to yet again employ his self-learned rational-emotive psychotherapy to control his affections via rational thoughts, though he was successful to only a meager degree. He just couldn’t seem to escape his persistent feeling of entrapment and ignorance. He knew he could not let himself fall into a state of apathy and learned helplessness. He had to remain emotionally strong as well as incisively alert.

The man continued with his outpouring of empathy and sympathy. “Thomas, when this accident struck, you fell into a state of desperation, and the agony you went through was so great that suicide seemed the only way out of the pain for you. But then you contacted a good friend of yours who worked for an institute called the Cryonics Lab Inc., whose primary goal was to cryopreserve people who could not be sustained by medical standards at that time.” 

When the man brought up his friend Martin, who actually did work at this institution, Thomas once again became anxious. He was surprised that those people knew actual facts about his life, which added a professional aspect to their misguided, mad ideas and undertakings. This worried Thomas: what if they actually had hurt his family and were trying to deceive him to make him into a duped convert to their cause? 

The man gently pressed, “Do you remember anything I am telling you, Thomas? Do you remember your friend Martin? We don’t yet know the exact extent of the retrograde amnesia which results from cryopreservation, but me, Tanja, and the others who opted to revive you believe, given our previous cases of cryonic revival, that you will remember most, if not all, of your life prior to your cryopreservation.” 

Thomas was unsure how to respond, but he thought it was wisest to admit that he could remember his good friend Martin; otherwise, they probably would have known that he was lying and unwilling to cooperate. He blandly stated, “Yes, I certainly do remember my friend.” 

The man added, “Do you remember anything else, such as your disease or the accident?”

At that point, Thomas’ self-disciplinary effort could not hold back the flood of raging emotional turmoil anymore: he jumped up and ran to the door which seemed like the gateway to freedom and sanity, but the possibility that the door might be locked, which Thomas’ hopeful spirit had pushed aside, turned out to be painful reality. After Thomas had tried to compulsively and furiously throw open the bolted door with the lingering motivational remains of this sudden gush of hopeful energy, he pressed his back against the wall to be in a relatively secure position to defend himself against the potentially harmful measures of the man and woman in the room. But the man had only gotten up from his chair and was quietly standing there, exuding a sense of sincere understanding even in this parlous circumstance. 

“I know what is going on here,” exclaimed Thomas in a desperate voice. “I am an influential man who will be searched for everywhere. If you let me go now, we can arrange a compromise that will be better for us both! I promise you and your co-conspirator will receive compensation!” 

“Thomas,” kindly responded the man, “I can open that door for you, but it would be best for you and the people out there if you would sit down for a minute and listen to me. I promise you on my well-being that no harm whatsoever will happen to you.” 

Sure, Thomas thought to himself: that was a very convincing assurance. If he turns out to be lying, he can still try to escape later: as of the current moment, there appears to be no better option than to simply play along and listen. 

“You are in the future. We were finally able to cure and resuscitate you: do you understand the implication? You have been frozen for …” 

Upon being faced with the possibility that the man was indeed telling the truth, Thomas’ mind became too weak to maintain itself, to hold its fortress of sceptical disbelief against what was previously considered to be vicious, absurd attacks to systematically grind him down. This very mental weakness manifested itself in a complete loss of physical mobility, whereupon Thomas slowly sank down to the floor and stared at the man with a lost expression of confused emptiness.

The man slowly walked up to him and sat down on the floor. He gently touched Thomas on the shoulder and remained silent for a moment before continuing, “Thomas, I am here to help you get through this. It will be hard for you at first, but we live in a wonderful world that can make you happier than you ever wished for. If you spend even a day here, you will never want to leave, if you just give it that one day, that one chance, if you will only open your heart and mind.”

Thomas did not even know what to believe anymore. These grossly utopian, preposterous statements of the man just resonated in Thomas’ head without resulting in any conscious evaluation or emotive response. The man, comprehending Thomas’ situation, inquired, “Do you want to see our world or would you rather listen to me first? It is going to be quite a revelation, Thomas! For, you see, the world has been utterly transfigured since you have last seen it. It, and its inhabitants, have been beautified and renewed in ways most of the people of your time couldn’t even comprehend, let alone expect.” 

Thomas would almost have rathered to just continue to listen due to feeling so weak and empty, as if someone had entirely shut off every single one of his neurons so that any movement, any action on his part seemed entirely impossible. But somehow a spark of incisiveness ignited Thomas’ will to act again. He had to see what was going on instead of slowly decaying in this suffocating, enclosed room. The man seemed to sense Thomas’ revived eagerness to find clarity in his situation, and stretched out his hand whose softness and muscularity had already fascinated Thomas just some ten minutes ago. Thomas instinctively grasped it without letting any conscious thoughts of sceptic disbelief interfere: he would give this world its chance, its one day, to inspire him to stay and contribute to it. 

As he turned towards the door, he glanced back at the man, who was now smiling. Glancing at the direction of the door, he uttered, “I will introduce you to the world awaiting you behind this door: as mentioned before, it has been transfigured from the one of the past.” 

Chapter 3

After the man had opened the door, Thomas’ consciousness became a lively playground, a wild sparkling dance of intense sensations. An excessive abundance of sensory stimuli bombarded and overwhelmed each of his single sensory organs, all of which had become quite rusty and blunt over the years spent in stern sensual confinement so typical for a member of the hustling, no-nonsense corporate world. His entire nervous system was rejuvenated, revived, invigorated to, what seemed to Thomas, the highest degree of vividness and excitability. The physical monument of matter and energy that lay ahead of him in the form of a corridor was far more bizarrely beautiful and strangely delightful than even the most utopian scenarios Thomas could previously have picturesquely and thoroughly constructed within his mediocre imagination. Thomas had never had a visionary experience and he had never known what that term actually meant. But the present state of his mind somehow illuminated this erstwhile hollow term, bestowing upon it experiential meaning that was impossible to define by mere words. And for more than just a few seconds, Thomas simply stood there, not staring holes in the air, but letting each of his millions of sensory receptor cells enjoy a bacchanalian feast of lively cellular activity.

What was Thomas seeing there in front of him? Was it all an illusion caused by a potent psychoactive substance he had been unknowingly administered by these people? Or was it the absolute climax of lunacy, a secluded artificial utopia built and held in secret by an obviously powerful esoteric movement of cultists? But although Thomas’ conscious mind was working exorbitantly hard to get rid of unbearable cognitive inconsistencies, he just could not keep the drug scenario as an actual possibility. Just as one clearly knows if one is awake and not asleep, the absolutely clear coherence of his thoughts and memories, as well as his intellectual lucidity, were incompatible with a mental state of vivid drug-induced hallucinations, at least from his own experience. Thus, he had to accept the fact that what his senses were detecting were actually wondrous sculptures of physical matter and energy. Even desperately holding on to the thought that the wondrous world laying ahead of him was only bizarre in a spatial but not a temporal sense, that he was still in the year 2009, just at a dreadfully strange place, did not prevent Thomas from experiencing a heave of crushing dizziness. His sense of balance faded and his knees again became weak, as if someone had eaten away at them. But he was afraid to touch the walls of this utopian corridor to keep himself from falling, given how he knew nothing of their composition. 

Tropical-looking animals and plants were everywhere. The life-forms roaming around that Thomas encountered were more like the fauna and flora one was likely to find at the antipodes of one’s mind, only accessible through the most exalted forms of human imagination or the uncontrollable outlandishness of vivid dreams. Since Thomas’ lifestyle of barely manageable, mind-narrowing stress and immune-system destroying sleep-deprivation had barred him from tasting either one, the creatures inhabiting this place were completely novel curiosities to Thomas. If he did not perceive himself to be in a life-threatening situation that made his cerebral reducing valve work at full capacity to keep his consciousness in a fight-or-flight response state of survival, and if his nerves had not been so worn down from years of soul-crushing labor, he could have—no, he certainly would have—playfully indulged in this lavish garden of wonders like a joyful child. However, the neural circuits in Thomas’ brain mediating a mental state of alert incisiveness were overtly active to cleanse Thomas’ mental landscape of any voluptuous eruptions of wholly gratifying enjoyment and amazement, for life in the world he had come from had instilled in him frugality, self-denial, and cynicism. 

The walls Thomas was still hypnotically staring at were made of luxurious materials whose shiny, colorful, jewel-like radiance truly had transporting power. This diligently constructed material displayed outstandingly magnificent surface properties: it was of an aesthetic-artistic rather than a functional nature and seemed quite organic at its core. Various plant species entirely unknown to Thomas, who was of course not even familiar with the relatively unspectacular fauna and flora of the temperate zone of his world, but had at least second-hand television-assisted exposure to some plant kingdom exotica, abundantly covered the walls. They lushly decorated the already spectacular walls, which were only structurally similar though not equal to conventional ivy-like twiners; however, their coloration was grossly utopian, reminding Thomas of bioart à la Eduardo Kac. There were no GFP bunnies hopping around; at the very least, Thomas’ overstrained eyes had not yet caught sight of one, but the vibrating colors of these plants were certainly not of the variety that could be found in the past. Even Thomas, though a botanical illiterate, could say that with a feeling of utmost certainty: it was as if someone had forcefully spun a color sphere so fast that millions of color nuances had sprinkled all over the place, rendering it a remarkable laboratory for experimental color theory. Other-worldly, brilliant flowers blossomed, poking out of the thick colorful architecture of interlacing leaves like glowing marvels.

This floral outlandishness would have been sufficient enough to sensually and conceptually knock Thomas down as if he was a laughably weak mental lightweight. But the fairytale creatures of various stunning sizes, shapes, and color-patterns including, according to Thomas’ taxonomical insights, insects, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and various other kinds of biological but unnatural entities more deeply and vividly stirred Thomas’ affective repertoire of wonder, confusion, and amazement. They were seemingly harmoniously coexisting in what appeared to Thomas’ mind as a wholly wonderful, fantastically exotic place. However, only for an ephemeral moment were there these thoroughly gratifying feelings of complete acceptance, peaceful wonder, and sensual majesty. Then the pressing, anxious urge to get out of this deceptively paradisiacal place cut through Thomas’ rosy-fluffy phenomenal realm like a merciless razor-blade. Thomas’ cognitive faculty was at least partially restored and so he thought what a fortune it had to have cost to build this place. It meant that these people had to be frighteningly influential and powerful.

When he reached that point in his very slow and erratic train of thoughts, he quickly looked at the man. He was standing right next to Thomas, still with this radiant expression of empathy on his face. He offered, “Thomas, do you want to meet Charlie? I designed him with what we refer to here as scheidonian-heplocraidic diligence.” 

The man smiled, clearly anticipating the confusion this term would invoke in Thomas, or rather the deepening of Thomas’ confusion. Smiling, he innocently described, “Let’s just say I put a lot of diligence into designing this marvelous being! Charlie is even for our present standards an exceptional example of a so-called bugelian type of an ecstatic creature.” 

When the man made a very soft sound reminding Thomas of one calling for one’s pet, he heard light vibrations of flapping wings permeate the already richly filled air. Before Thomas’ imagination could get started to envision a novel flying exoticum, something that was again so vastly beyond the most fabulous creature Thomas’ imaginative faculty could have possibly fashioned appeared in the distance, making its way straight towards the man. “Flying chimp” was the best description Thomas could come up with to describe the creature using conventional vocabulary, but he was anxiously aware that this was an euphemistic simplification of the plethora of other-worldly features of this creature which was getting rapidly closer.

Although Thomas, being himself a passionate omnivore, was not one of those fanatical animal-lovers whose sentiments had always seemed quite ludicrous to him, he could not help but be somehow exhilarated by the appearance of this animal. Nevertheless, his present state of mental instability and anxiety caused him to take a step back out of caution. But before it had reached the man, it landed and continued its approach in a chimp-like manner of four-legged propulsion. When it came close enough, it again left the floor with a graceful jump and softly landed in the arms of the man who tenderly caught it in a routine-like fashion. He treated it with such compassion and kindness that Thomas was painfully reminded of his family that he was so deeply concerned about. The man and the creature stared into each other’s eyes without shame and reproach, but only the great honesty and sympathy, which worsened the soul-stirring concern Thomas felt for his family. This emotional state of empathetic worry was quite alien to Thomas’ consciousness, for when had Thomas last stared into the eyes of his wife or his son, just existed in the completely fulfilled emotional union with his beloved ones, enjoyed such a moment of soul-soothing, deeply gratifying peacefulness and sanity, a moment simply of completeness and wholeness? If he could only see his family now, know that they were doing well or at least alive. 

The words of the man about what had happened to them ran like a cold blade through his body: the regret and remorse he felt translated to physical strain. Yet he still felt joy as he gazed on this scene of shared happiness between the man and the creature. The man turned towards Thomas and the other-worldly being was looking now straight into his eyes, seemingly dissipating their fearful aversion and evoking again a feeling of enjoyment. “Catch,” said the man in a jovial manner, and before Thomas could put forth an objection, the animal jumped towards him. He reflexively opened his arms and soon had this surreal furry being reclining in his arms. Since Thomas had opened his eyes in this world, his mind had been confronted with an exponentially increasing degree of outlandishness; this situation, however, of an enchanted creature resting in his hands and rubbing its face against Thomas’ neck, was a quantum leap in strangeness. But despite all the adversity, all the uncertainty, all the perceived grotesqueness of the situation, Thomas could not help but be emotionally stirred, kindly touched from within. He looked down at the being which, in spite of its unnatural extravagance, looked so perfectly alive, so filled with joy and glowing with cuteness. And at this moment, a subtle involuntary smile appeared on Thomas’ face, which had been brutally crippled by a spastic look of anxiety and despair for all too long.

The man slowly approached Thomas and lovingly petted the living thing in Thomas’ arms, whereupon it gave an auditory and facial expression of exhilaration. “Thomas, although what you see might be very novel to you, it really is more glorious than you can ever have had imagined. I am what you would call a historian. I know a lot about your times, the Darwinian Ages, those terrible times in which struggle, suffering, senescence, stupidity, sociopathy, weakness of will, disease, and starvation abounded, and I can wholeheartedly promise you that what is awaiting you here is more magnificent than anything in that era. We have mastered many sciences to the point where we have reshaped the living world to the well-being of its inhabitants, as you can already see with the being you are holding now.”

What was one supposed to think, to say, to do, in such a situation? Thomas’ mind was profoundly out of balance: it was as if a myriad of full-blown explosions had blown his neural circuits apart, leaving behind a mental wasteland, though not as severe as the lapse he previously suffered. The man gently lifted the wondrously lovely being, looked into its eyes one more time with loving-kindness, and then put it down on the ground. He then turned to Thomas and gestured, “Thomas, let me show you around. There’s so much for you to see and explore.” 

But I can’t take any more of this, I just need to lay down and sleep, Thomas thought. Just falling asleep would be such an ambrosial relief at the moment, the seemingly only liberating remedy for his bewilderment. If one could only turn a switch in one’s head and temporarily log out of one’s waking consciousness, leaving behind the heavy burden of emotional turmoil, Thomas imagined. But as Thomas was used to his brutal, sleep-depriving job, even in this situation his mind did hold on to his troubling waking state.

When the man kindly slowly began to move forward, Thomas mechanically followed him along with the adorable furry creature, which reminded Thomas at that point of a very loyal dog. They slowly walked through this fairyland where each new sight was so sensually intoxicating and overwhelming that Thomas’ consciousness continued to remain in a state of indescribable awe. The corridor they walked through, and Thomas knew that the description “corridor” was an almost ridiculously reductionistic verbal abstraction of this astounding, detail-overloaded architecture, was illuminated in an almost magical way, since there was no visible source of light. Conversely, it was rather as if the sun brilliantly shone straight through the walls and shed light upon this creation of glory. Thomas became increasingly aware of more delicate details in the architecture, but he felt severely confined by his rugged, rusty senses so used to mundane ugliness and austerity. In the back of his mind, he was aware of the fact that the extravagant, luxurious details he had witnessed were only a minor, a grossly small fraction of the sensual richness on offer here. And for the first time, a subtle feeling of jealous disappointment unfolded upon Thomas’ affective landscape: Why was he doomed to work in a place that now, more than ever before, seemed to be the most soul-crippling, sense-blunting, and emotion-flattening prison, doing nothing all day but evaluating numbers and dejectedly meeting brutally self-centered, mercilessly profit-oriented, shallow creatures who seemed to have lost touch with everything beautiful, while the people here obviously had created an artificial paradise that was the most soul-soothing, life-affirming place on Earth? But his self-defensive mind quickly put a stop to this depressing thought. Thomas reminded himself of the fact that he was dealing here with dangerous lunatics who had kidnapped him. But so what? If it wasn’t for his family, he might as well have just let go and completely indulged in this outrageous empire of bizarre but nevertheless truly wonderful beauty.

Even if the people here, in the end, were up to something horrible, Thomas confidently considered the scenario in which those people here could actually hurt him sometime soon as highly improbable, for if they wanted to harm him, they would’ve done so when he was incapacitated: what was the point of reviving him if they were going to use him? He was almost convinced that their seemingly deep-rooted sense of compassion and niceness was authentic; they were only driven by a powerful mad urge for something different than normal life. And at that point, Thomas had to admit, though he couldn’t do that in a clear manner in the midst of his mind, but rather had to push that too revolutionary realization far back into the dark corners of his mental realm, that what he had seen so far was actually much more delicate and delightful than what was on offer in his daily environment. The intensity of illumination then soared up, and Thomas realized that they were obviously approaching a window. Here he, who had quite willingly kept the tempo of the man next to him, markedly slowed down and then momentarily stopped. “Yes, Thomas, that’s a very good idea, taking a deep breath in anticipation of this view. I am myself deeply senso-markianized whenever I see this sight.” 

The man’s face was lit up by an expression of deeply-felt joy. He clarified, “I mean I am very exhilarated: we nowadays use a greatly extended vocabulary to describe our intricate feelings. I will explain all about that to you later, once you have spent enough time here and experienced great happiness and fulfillment yourself. But no more talking: come now and enjoy this marvelous view with me!”

Thomas was curious: what was awaiting him behind these walls? Did the overwhelming, vivid, blooming gorgeousness of this place’s interior expand all the way into the fabric of matter and energy outside these walls? For one second, Thomas’ heartbeat suddenly accelerated, accompanied by a strong affection of wishful-euphoric expectation; an even greater, more expansive, more lavish playground for the senses, with ever-increasing soul-touching beauty? But as quickly and vigorously Thomas’ spirit had started to fly, so as harshly did it crash into the abysmal depths of chilling fear. Would that mean more of that other-worldly, incomprehensible, exotic stuff? And as Thomas moved outside these walls with his thoughts, outside this place of enthralling, luring, intoxicating appeal, his whole consciousness abruptly darkened, making him revert to a mental state of anxious alertness. But when he had finally reached the window, he was mercifully freed again, at least for a few seconds, from the vicious claws of aversive emotions. The sheer intensity of sun rays bombarded Thomas’ retina and briskly cleansed his conscious landscape. Only the almost painful, pure bright light of the sun filled Thomas’ phenomenal realm, a salient moment of pure primordial perception. But the pure whiteness of sunlight gradually dissolved into visible patterns of recognizable forms and did not leave Thomas any time for restful sanity. 

The view that this opening in the walls offered Thomas radically changed something within him. While all the thrilling exotic entities Thomas had encountered up to this point had suffused his emotional realm with a luring fragrance of sensual delight, they had strongly anesthetized the rational-conceptual part of Thomas’ mind. Up to this moment, when Thomas first glanced out of that window, he had been entirely unable to make any reasonable statement about what was happening to him; his mind had not even made an effort to enter a strenuous, incisive process of rational analysis, of making sense of it all. But when Thomas’ overactive sensory system in delicately complex interaction with other cortical regions finally produced a phenomenal representation of the sublime physical landscape laying ahead of him, tears of happiness began to roll down his cheeks. With a rapturous, awe-struck, immersive sense of beautiful sublimity, Thomas realized that he actually was in the future, a future far better than any he thought possible, in the paradisiacal realm which succeeded the Darwinian Ages, that vale of tears whose squalor and what he recognized now as intense privation he had lived in and endured for most of his life. The world had indeed been transfigured and made anew, bringing into Thomas’ mind Revelation 21:4, which he heard while he attended the funeral for his family—“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” 

Chapter 4

Finally, the man and Thomas reached the desired destination, where the latter was supposed to find much clarification, an urgently needed relief from the emotional mayhem which he had been forcefully subjected to for the last hours, during which he had experienced a tour to what seemed like Heaven, only better. Thomas had witnessed sights so beautiful, so paradisiacal, so utopian, so far beyond anything his senses had the opportunity to experience in the 21st century, that it almost had been a transporting spiritual revelation for him. The man, who Thomas knew by now to be David, a utopian equivalent of a 21st-century history scholar, was still next to him.

Thomas had by now firmly accepted the appalling truth: he actually had been cryopreserved and was supposedly now the only living human being of the 21st century who had been revived from stasis. This thought continued to vigorously shake the whole framework of his consciousness, as if the most powerful gong was struck in the midst of his mind over and over again. But the strong propensity of the human mind to adapt even in the face of severe adversity to a somewhat neutral affective state enabled Thomas to walk through the hallways of the utopia he found himself in, which had completely paralyzed his existence only a while ago, with an appearance of almost calm familiarity. But of course, to actually describe Thomas’ emotional state as anywhere close to tranquillity would be an almost cruel trivialization of the reality of his mental agony. The room Thomas entered now was a striking fusion of astounding technological triumph and natural aestheticism, with large plasma-like screens enclosed by wild, organic, other-worldly floral architecture.

Amidst this colorful jungle of flourishing vegetation, a man was sitting, apparently waiting for the two. David walked towards the other man, stared into his eyes with an expression of exalted and empathetic joy, then hugged him with such passionate affection that Thomas had to assume they hadn’t seen each other for years and were the absolute best of friends. He sadly could not remember the last time had been so happily stirred by the sight of another human being, silently admitting that the only time another human being could truly ignite his affections was in the case of sexual attraction. But that kind of stunted feeling seemed not only poignantly coarse, but also drastically weak in comparison to the outrageous outpouring of brotherly love he had just witnessed. Was everyone here blissed-out on drugs? That seemed to be the only possible explanation for the unnaturally happy and empathic appearance of these people. But how could they possibly sustain such outstanding happiness, vastly surpassing the rational-analytical capabilities of Thomas’ mind, if they were all high on drugs?

David turned and gestured, “Thomas, please meet my dear friend Adam. He is one of the pioneers of phenomenological enhancement and is a specialist in what we call eudian-emphatic state space expansion. Many people today enjoy much more wonderful degrees of eudian-empathy, especially with a richer, more magnificent texture of experience within this state-space thanks to him!” 

Then a deeply satisfied smile appeared on David’s face and he continued, “I have myself just recently expanded my neuro-phenomenal eudian-emphatic infrastructure. It is truly breathtaking!”

Adan grinned. “Yes, yes, my dear Dave, I am extremely glad as well about the rapid unfolding of this superb state-space, and I can say that we are only at the beginning of fabulous new developments!” 

Those were Adam’s first words which Thomas could only grasp on a syntactic but not on a semantic level. To Thomas, Adam seemed to be some sort of contemplative Buddhist in his lotus-seat position and surrounded by lovely blooming flowers rather than a top-notch scientist.

Adam shifted his position, gazing upon Thoams as if they were brothers. “Thomas, I am extremely pleased to meet you! How do you like our world, or, at the least, what you have seen so far? I promise that you’ll like it even more, as soon as I have introduced you to the advancements we have made in civilization since you have been alive.” 

The man, who was marked by the same outlandish glowing radiance of health, beauty, and joy as David, quickly but gracefully jumped up, coming to Thomas and giving him a big hug. While this at first seemed quite inappropriate and brash to Thomas, it soon made him feel comfortable and welcome, whereupon he answered the hug with an equally pronounced display of physical tenderness. And Thomas had to admit that he actually enjoyed the experience: for a fleeting moment, the absence of such closeness among the people of the 21st century appeared to him as a strange and deeply lamentable aspect of the social conduct back then. Looking back on his life, he recognized that he hadn’t hugged any of his friends in a long time. In fact, a more careful investigation of his episodic memory disclosed to him that only under the disinhibiting spell of alcohol had he been able to exhibit such a degree of openness. David, noting Thomas’ unhappiness, gestured, “Please, Thomas, come and sit down with us.” 

The place Thomas was supposed to sit on was only distantly related in its appearance to what Thomas considered a proper chair. It was a seating-accommodation whose gorgeous, sensually beguiling unorthodoxy was symptomatic of everything here. That is, it was a primarily wooden construct that seemed to naturally grow out of the floor, like a tree that accidentally grew into the form of a seat. The actual place of seating was covered by an ambrosial surface of, like everything else, an unrecognizable material, and was encircled by rich, radiant flowers, as well as various exotic plants that seemed to heave up the seat like a glorious throne. But visual splendor was only one astounding aspect of the full sensual richness of this place. Sounds of such soothing loveliness were present, among which Thomas could clearly discern the song of birds and the concertos of frogs, which reminded him of a tropical forest. There was also an overwhelming plethora of intense, intriguing, novel smells. Something then caught Thomas’ eye: a small frog of such immense, brilliant, complex coloration was energetically hopping from one leaf to the next. It was like a lively glowing jewel, the essence of visual magnificence distilled and presented in its purest, most penetrating form. David, noticing it too, added, “Isn’t it a wonderful creature? It is a slightly modified descendant of the members of the family Dendrobatidae, the poison dart frogs, which already, in their Darwinian state, visual delights. But this here is a sight of even greater glory, especially to our expanded and enriched sense of aesthetic appreciation. I will explain it to you in further detail, but you have to understand that to us everything and especially sights like these are of such pleasurable, deeply satisfying beauty, that it will be hard for you to even conceptually understand our wonderful phenomenal landscape. But trust me, Thomas, it is very hard for us to understand your affective repertoire as well.” 

Thomas thought with a subtle feeling of melancholic jealousy that this statement was probably true. How could it be otherwise? While he had while alive for most of his life to spend at least 10 hours a day toiling away in a stressfully incisive state of sensual confinement, the people here lived in what could only be described as paradise, even if it was only superficial. Thomas was indeed mournfully aware of the fact that the people here certainly possessed a much richer sense of beauty and probably a more satisfying life than he could ever lead. But on the other hand, it slightly relieved Thomas that they were obviously under the spell of psychoactive substances; all they actually experienced was nothing but a mirage, a fake, self-deceptive form of well-being. This made Thomas feel a little bit better and self-satisfied: he definitely preferred a life of adversity and struggle, a life full of fear and pain, to such a striking place of deception. His mind then broke through this veil of lovely, intoxicating wonder that had numbed his cognitive discernment: his critical powers finally saw through this sugar-coated veneer straight to the heart of this world. It was in fact an artificial, inhuman world that was superficially nice, even paradisiacal. But if one boiled it down to its very essence, it was nothing but artificial insanity. This realization hit Thomas as a shocking truth that was not hard for him to grasp; he somehow could accept this fact without much accompanying emotional uproar. Many science-fiction scenarios had outlined a dreary, inhuman future in which humans were either enslaved by technology or destroyed by their own scientific ingenuity. But obviously, Aldous Huxley had been the one who had drawn the most prophetic forecast: humanity had turned itself into a shallow species of intellect-anesthetized drug addicts. And given the happy, self-satisfied, and pacified tempers of these people, Huxley was indeed right in this respect, namely that everyone here was all high on something very similar to soma, that one-dimensional cheap euphoriant. But Thomas simultaneously realized that this comparison was quite faulty in some sense, seeing how the fictional characters in Huxley’s work were Pavlovian-conditioned, almost like mindless automatons. At least so far, these people here appeared to him as more genuinely friendly and insightfully considerate than virtually everyone he had met in the 21st century, which impressed him greatly. 

David let his body slowly slide down into the alluring softness of the peculiar seating accommodation. In a satisfied way, he beckoned, “Please sit down, Thomas.” 

David, upon settling into the chair, added, “Oh, I have to say that I love these seats greatly. They are just opening up such a vast and rich comfort-a-plus state-space.”

He closed his eyes for a second and an expression of deeply-felt pleasure appeared on his face, an expression which tensely almost reminded Thomas of the sexual kind. Adam encouraged, “You have to experience this too, Thomas: it’s a fabulously superb experience.” 

Although Thomas felt like an alien at this place now after having had his profound realization, he did not feel fearful or anxious. He was convinced that these people were among the least harmless individuals he had ever met; they were lotus-eaters, just blissed-out junkies.

However, since Thomas was in spite of this realization still in a state of subtle perplexity and disorientation, which he accepted as a relatively adequate emotional coloring of his consciousness, given the fact that he was in the future among druggies, he simply proceeded with the instructions given by these people. So he sat down and, although feeling estranged at first, he nevertheless could not deny that he was excited to tacitly test the softness of the chair. It turned out to be an excessively rewarding feeling that was only felt for a few moments by Thomas, after which the negative feedback mechanisms in his brain made him get dully used to it, rapidly making the sensory stimuli which at first were so intriguingly fascinating to him soon become uninterestingly trivial. 

Adam heartened, “Alright, Thomas, we would like to introduce you to a fabulous technological device that enables experiences in immersive virtual reality. Please don’t be afraid: I want to explain many features of our civilization to you, and this can be done just splendidly within the realms of virtual reality.” 

Although Thomas felt uncomfortable and anxious again, he told himself that he was unnecessarily overreacting. Thus, he tried to relax and went with the flow of things. Adam’s voice calmly explained, “Now, Thomas, all you have to do is just relax. In a few seconds, you will be together with us, immersed in the stimulating, grandiose spheres of virtual reality. Everything will be self-explanatory from then on.” 

Thomas’ heartbeat accelerated and he felt quite tantalized, not knowing if he should actually look forward to this outlandish experience or consider it a frightening climax of insanity he didn’t wish to participate in. But before he could further ponder on these superfluous questions, he exited his waking consciousness.

Chapter 5

When Thomas opened his eyes, he had absolutely no idea for how long he had been unconscious, or at least not in his regular, day-to-day waking state. However, it felt as if he had not been gone for more than a second. He somehow regretted the short duration of this pleasant vacation from the strenuous demands that were constantly being placed on his frail emotional endurance. Where was he now? He looked around and saw David and Adam standing next to him in new, even more strikingly colorful and radiant attire than before and in a state of motivated exaltation. But what had happened to their surroundings? For a second, he felt a breeze of insanity blowing through his mind. What he was witnessing now certainly closely resembled the vastly outlandish, bizarre realms of psychedelia. There were no concrete, familiar objects, but only forms and patterns of all possible facets. Some of them were static, while others were dynamic, constantly undergoing jewel-like color transformations. And Thomas was part of this pinnacle of fantastic grotesqueness. 

 

David motioned, “What do you say, Thomas? We had to slightly adapt the program to your neural circuitry, but I hope it is still quite stimulating.”

 

He then walked up to Thomas and encouraged, “See if you can talk to me and touch me. We have just exchanged the source of neuronal stimulation. As of yet, there are still countless better developments ahead in the field of immersive virtual reality, but this is already astoundingly great.” 

 

An expression of pure bliss once again appeared on Adam’s face, and Thomas again wished that he could, if it was only for one moment, feel this way, a moment of liberating, clean, pure euphoria. Maybe he should try one of their drugs once. After all, he would not be a social misfit and an actual outlaw if he tried a psychotropic substance here.

Adam spoke, “Thomas, I will now introduce you to the most fundamental features of our civilization. For you to understand us, you will need to first understand some facts about the human brain. To begin, please tell me what you know of it.” 

What a perfectly ridiculous question, Thomas thought. Although he did consider himself a man of sophistication, he concerned himself more with the vast intricacies of the market and the global political situation than with the human brain. It seemed to him much more fruitful and manageable to try to reveal the inner workings of an economic system than the unmanageable complexities of one’s noggin. In his opinion, one could just never find out everything about human physiology in general; it was just too intricate and complicated to actually grasp. And what was the point of it anyway? 

Thomas proceeded, “To be honest with you, I don’t know much about the human brain. I mean, I know that there are billions of nerve cells and that they all work together. But that’s basically it.” 

Thomas felt a little bit embarrassed since he had to openly admit that he didn’t know much concerning this issue, which was quite unusual for him to do, given his day-to-day environment. But his mental defenses quickly kicked in, and he immediately soothed his bruised ego by convincing himself that knowledge about the human brain was not that important; after all, he wasn’t a medical doctor or anything of the like. 

“Alright, Thomas,” said Adam cordially, “I will try to explain to you as much as possible. But please, please remind me whenever something is unclear to you.”

In a mere moment, a gigantic three-dimensional object which seemed like a colossal utopian machine, appeared in front of them as if it had been teleported there. Thomas was awed, he couldn’t deny that. But that was only for a moment: he quickly became intrigued by the spectacular object in front of him. However, he still hadn’t completely grasped what was truly happening, as his mind had not yet processed the torrent of the billions of bits of information flooding his cerebral cortex. He had not yet fully understood that he was actually immersed in the realms of virtual reality. “This, Thomas, is a very elaborate, animated, and vastly magnified abstraction of a nerve cell. Although there are many different types with various sizes, shapes, and functions, it is helpful to depict them in this standardized form to give you an idea of what they actually do. Come with me.”

They walked closer to it, and Thomas could see what apparently were the myriads of labyrinthian cellular and molecular processes going on within this neuron. “Here we have the soma, the cell body.” 

The central part of the neuron, with a somewhat globular shape, started to marvellously glow. Thomas was perplexed and amazed; the man seemed to be able through his mere thoughts to modify this object. This realization went through his whole body like feral lightning, electrifying every single cell. Thomas had thought that his mind had finally reached a state of acceptance and resilience. He had witnessed the very essence of strangeness in so many flavors. But this here was again such a novel, bizarre encounter that it heavily disturbed his mental framework. But he was lucky in a certain sense: since he was so convinced of the drug-assisted friendliness of these people, his emotional repertoire of fear and anxiety was only mildly activated and he was spared a nightmarish freak-out, at least for now. “Within the soma you’ll find myriad different cell structures, which are also referred to as organelles. Here you can see the Golgi apparatus, the rough endoplasmic reticulum, polysomes, lysosomes, mitochondria, and in the center, the nucleus, which includes the cell’s genome. Within the cell’s nucleus resides all the hereditary information of an organism in the form of the long double-stranded DNA molecule.” 

Adam’s speech was accompanied by a vivid visual display of the various verbally mentioned features. Within the center of the cell a spherical object, the cell-nucleus, began to radiate, and a double-stranded helix was magnified, which Thomas promptly recognized to be DNA. “Every biological organism is dependent on its genome. It encodes the instructions for how to build an organism. The genetic information an individual carries in each cell of their body, together with the stimuli an individual constantly encounters in their external and internal environment, shape a biological organism into its form of physical and phenomenal existence. You and I and all other biological entities, we are all based on our genome and surroundings. And Thomas, you will understand it much better later, but for now I can tell you that the vast, fundamental differences between the genomes of all biological entities existing today in the Euphenomenological Age and those having existed in the Darwinian Ages are what makes our civilization so sublimely wonderful at their core.” 

The man paused for a second and went up to Thomas, who just stood there perplexed, and looked him straight in the eyes, as if he wanted to stare right into the very heart of Thomas’ mind. “Thomas, we have completed the big task, we have abolished pain and suffering in every sentient being within our reach. I know that some people in the Darwinian Ages had glimpsed into the tantalizing spheres of pure emphatic-euphoric well-being, but Thomas,” and here the man paused and tears appeared in his eyes, tears that indicated an overwhelming rapturous, overjoyed sensation of wholesome, pristine emotional well-being, the sort that Thomas had only ever experienced during the birth of his children, and even that it was but a shadow of what he was currently bearing witness to. 

“But Thomas,” started the man again, “sentience on earth has finally been lifted out of the cruel Darwinian abyss into the glorious, heavenly spheres of bliss! We have finally achieved what one of the most brilliant and prophetic individuals in the history of the Darwinian Ages, David Pearce, had proposed centuries ago!” 

Thomas was simultaneously emotionally stirred and appalled to the utmost extent. He was fascinated by that man; he was of such a beautiful and refined physical appearance and seemed to be suffused by the most genuine form of happiness and empathy. But at the same time, he was convinced that this man was helplessly blissed out on drugs, that he was not really himself, not the true Adam; and the things this man was talking about vastly surpassed Thomas’ conceptual framework and appeared to him as insane. Adam made a step back from Thomas but continued to look at him with an expression of ecstatic friendliness. “Let us continue our journey through the magnificent complexities of the nervous system. Only then can you understand what is actually going on here.”

Thomas was highly relieved that the man returned to a less emotionally demanding subject, where his mind could fall into a state of at least affective tranquillity. “Thomas, the soma, one could say, is the center of the nerve cell, though this is of course a huge simplification. I will explain to you everything in a simplified way, as it would take you years to thoroughly comprehend the workings of the nervous system. So I will keep my explanations to the essential minimum, which will help you understand our civilization better.” 

Adam looked at Thomas in a patient, sympathetic way, and then briskly continued his educational soliloquy. “On the one side of the soma, you’ll find the dendritic tree.” 

Thomas thought that this was an apt description when the branch-like structures growing out of the cell-body lighted up. “And on the other side you can see the so-called axon, or nerve fiber.” 

Although for Thomas all those facts were so perfectly unimportant and trivial in comparison to the startling weirdness of his surroundings, he nevertheless continued to listen and to give the impression of a patient listener, since he clearly preferred a monologue than having to engage in an exhausting dialogue himself.

“Each nerve cell is electrically excitable. In the case of the neuron, this means that there is a flux of ions, positively or negatively charged particles, that move into and out of the nerve cell. However, this happens only along the axon. The signal starts at the so-called axon-hillock and travels all the way down to the axon terminal.”

The massive cell model in front of him became a lively factory of thousands of molecular processes, and Thomas saw vivid animations of electrical impulses originating at the starting point of the axon and resulting in the release of multitudinous chemicals at the end of it. The various neurons were placed in certain arrangements so that the axon terminal of one neuron communicated with the dendrites of another neuron. Adam gesticulated, “Now we see a little neural circuitry. In general, when an electrical signal traveling down the axon reaches the axon terminal, a great number of chemicals, which are called neurotransmitters, are released into the so-called synaptic cleft; this is the tiny space between two communicating neurons. The pre-synaptically released neurotransmitters diffuse across the synaptic cleft and subsequently bind to specific molecular arrangements, the post-synaptic receptors, which lie on the dendrites of the neuron that comes next in the information chain. This works like a key-lock system, as only neurotransmitters with the appropriate shape can fit into certain receptors. Observe.”

Although all this neurobabble had not truly ignited Thomas’ sense of wonder and curiosity, watching this highly byzantine apparatus of thousands of small but unimaginable daedal molecular processes occurring put Thomas’ consciousness, for a transitory moment, back into a state of sparkling child-like fascination. He was blown away, awestruck; a powerful firework was going off in his mind. Adam, who could clearly see the sheer amazement in Thomas’ eyes, added, “I am glad you are exalted by this, Thomas. But you will see, it gets even more fascinating and complicated than that.” 

The man considerately paused here to let Thomas indulge in this sensual amusement park before he devotedly offered Thomas a view into the wonderfully strange world of neurochemical processes. “When a neurotransmitter has reached and bound to its target-receptor, like a key that fits into a lock, there are many different responses it can cause. All in all, one can say that this neurotransmitter-receptor binding causes a change in the structure and function of the postsynaptic neuron. Once a neurotransmitter has bound to its appropriate receptor, it activates other molecules in the cell, which in a cascade-like fashion activate more and more molecules within the cell. The end result is that the expression of the neuron’s genome is altered. So this neurotransmitter-receptor binding causes a change of gene expression which can profoundly alter the biochemical machinery, the very essence, of the post-synaptic nerve cell.”

Again, this lecture-style expository of the workings of a neuron left Thomas unaffected, although he actually could follow what the man was saying very well despite his mental and physical fatigue. Besides, a rapidly intensifying feeling of hunger started to dominate all of Thomas’ thoughts and emotions. But he was to some extent afraid of asking for something to eat. What would they offer him? He believed that it would probably be something so other-worldly and uncanny that he felt his desire to eat to be subdued to a significant extent. But Thomas recognized that he did have to eat at some point: the beginning of this train of thought, of what would happen if he just did not eat, nastily threw Thomas back into a state of disturbing emotional stress. At the current moment, Thomas was just too feeble and confused to deal with existential questions. After all, in spite of the circumstances he found himself in, a powerful will to survive nevertheless suffused every moment of Thomas’ waking consciousness. Thus, he knew that eventually he had to eat in spite of the unwelcome prospect of increasing the estrangement he felt, but Thomas still viewed the possible consequences of indulging his hunger to be too great a price to pay. So he continued to listen and stare with his last rapidly dwindling mental resources motivating him to do so. 

“But the neurotransmitter-receptor binding does not only cause a change in gene expression. It also leads to the emergence of an electric signal in the post-synaptic neuron or to the suppression of one. Some neurotransmitters play an excitatory role, whereas others an inhibitory one.” 

Adam smiled and looked at Thomas in an understanding manner, as if he knew that the complex workings of the human brain were the last thing Thomas really wanted to concern himself with at the moment. But Thomas, at the back of his mind, trusted Adam’s promise that all this would eventually shed illuminating light on what seemed to him the incomprehensible grotesqueness of this utopian world. “Now, Thomas, the remarkable thing about the nervous system is that the complex flows of matter and energy throughout it, in the form of neurotransmitter-receptor binding, genome-genome interactions between neurons, and the firing of electrical signals and various other molecular mechanisms, lead to the emergence of an experiential phenomenal space in which conscious experiences can take place, such as your mind right now.

“Thomas, your experiential space can have certain properties, or as they’re now frequently called, qualia. For example, colors such as redness or greenness are qualia. They don’t exist in the external physical world as matter and energy: a rose is not in and of itself red. Rather, its surface absorbs and reflects certain frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. But at the end of the day, it is not red. They are ‘just’ patterns of matter and energy. However, in your mind, redness exists as a phenomenal property that cannot be defined in terms of matter and energy. You cannot define redness itself by referring to certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. For example, if one would change the sensory-receptors in your eye, it could be managed that the same wave-length of light which formerly caused redness in your mind would now trigger blueness. To reiterate, the wave-lengths themselves are neither red nor blue, but you experience them as either red or blue; they are qualia in your mind, the manner in which you experience the world. Thus, the texture of your experiential space can also be referred to as the ‘what-it’s-likeness’. The conscious experience of redness is a metaphysical phenomenon, a phenomenal property of your experiential space. Now, all other colors are qualia in the same way, as well as everything else you experience. 

“But what is much more important, Thomas, is the fact that feelings such as joy and pain are also qualia. They can’t be described in terms of matter and energy; they are purely phenomenal, but nevertheless real, since you clearly feel them. Now Thomas, although qualia themselves can’t be described in terms of matter and energy, they nevertheless don’t just appear out of nowhere, independent of matter and energy. Instead, phenomenological entities emerge out of certain patterns of matter and energy in an isomorphic manner, meaning that a corresponding phenomenal property arises from one’s environment. We have learned a lot since the beginning of the 21st century about how the universe and its phenomenal entities are correlated. And that is the fundamentally important, wonderful part, as you will soon learn.” 

An expression of glowing exaltation and compassionate hope appeared on Adam’s face, leading Thomas to hope that he would soon understand this sublime significance. Adam continued, “Thomas, I must highlight again that, although the phenomenological entities in your mind, such as redness or pain, can’t be described in terms of matter and energy, they are essentially dependent on them. Every phenomenological property of your mind can be precisely matched with a certain specific pattern of energy and matter within your physical brain. This means that no single property exists within your mind’s phenomenology that cannot be matched to a specific matter and energy blueprint, namely neural activity, localized in your brain. Again, a phenomenological entity doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. I know you are familiar with your personal computer. Just think, as an analogy of your experiential space, of the screen, which is the interface between the computer and you. Each item there is different from the bustling activity of electrical circuits going on within the hardware of the computer. However, you will not find any items on your computer screen that are not encoded by electrical patterns within your computers’ hardware. The interface of your computer is not identical to its hardware, but nevertheless, each item on a computers’ screen can be precisely matched to a certain arrangement of energy and matter within the former. I admit that it is a crude analogy, but I think it at least hints at where I want to guide you.” 

Pausing for a second, he then pressed forward, “Thomas, every entity in your consciousness has a neural substrate, a blueprint of matter and energy. Every affect you have ever felt, every moment of joy and every moment of despair, every sensory item that has inhabited your phenomenal landscape, had its corresponding, well-defined neural signature. Just consider where we are right now. We find ourselves immersed in the wonderful world of virtual reality. The qualia in your experiential space right now are probably unfamiliar to you; nevertheless, they somehow resemble familiar phenomenal elements. Although the colors you see are vastly more brilliant than those encountered in the physical world, they are nonetheless colors. So you see redness over there,” and Adam pointed to a random location where, all of a sudden, a lovely glowing patch of redness appeared that reminded Thomas of the vivid coloration of a red rose. 

“But Thomas, this redness doesn’t stem from electromagnetic radiation bombarding your retinal sensory receptors. Rather, it is caused by our intricate virtual reality technology devices that produce a neural pattern in the brain equivalent or at least very similar to that produced by the stimulation of your light-sensitive cells on the retina. Again, this phenomenal property in your mind doesn’t just appear out of nowhere, but emerges out of a neural pattern induced by technology. Nonetheless, the redness here is as real as the sort you normally find. What causes the neural pattern underlying it, either physical objects or a virtual reality device, doesn’t influence its ontological status. You experience it regardless, and thus it is completely real for you.” 

All this was far too much for Thomas to actually comprehend. What about love, true, passionate love? What about the horridness of emotional agony? What about all those emotions and thoughts that make up a human being? What about the self? What about the soul? Thomas was reluctant to believe that he was nothing more than a pattern of molecular processes, nothing more than matter and energy. Thus, he exclaimed almost indignantly, “But I don’t think I am just matter and energy!”

Adam calmly responded, “That’s exactly the point I want to make, Thomas. You are not just matter and energy. You exist on a phenomenal level which is essentially not physical. A feeling of happiness is not the neural substrates encoding it per se. The neural signature of happiness per se is physical and doesn’t have intrinsic value, but your feeling of happiness is a phenomenal property and is indeed intrinsically valuable. Nevertheless, your phenomenal ontological status is isomorphically related to your physical ontological status. If you remove the physical basis, you lose the phenomenal property. However, everything else people believe in, such as the soul, which is not part of the mind’s phenomenology, are of course not necessarily based on neurochemistry or even science. Following this, we just have to be agnostic concerning their existence. But that is beside the point. I don’t claim that anyone living in our civilization today has a better soul, assuming that it exists in the first place, a position that seems ever more strained and tenuous, than anyone who lived in the Darwinian Ages. But I guarantee you, Thomas,” and here Adam’s face again began to radiate the most pristine form of compassionate exaltation, as if a light was brilliantly glowing from deep within him, “that we have made every sentient being’s phenomenology unimaginably sublime. Thomas, conjure up your most personal, idyllic fantasy, a moment which you would sacrifice the rest of your life for just to experience once. Our everyday lives are as superior to that in happiness and meaning as an airplane is to walking by foot in terms of velocity. Moreover, I promise you that we have sublimity beyond your imagination waiting for you as well!”

At this point, a cold shiver of fear acutely undulated Thomas’ relatively tranquil mind. Would they force him to take drugs, and render him helplessly blissed out? 

Adam, noticing Thomas’ ambivalence, continued, “We are getting very close to the actual revelation, the crux, the very essence of our Post-Darwinian Euphenomenlogical Age. Every day that passes brings us ever nearer to paradise, or, to quote the admirable, far-seeing Darwinian John Howard Moore, who was centuries ahead of the dunces of his time, ‘that Civilization that will jewel the land masses of this planet in that sublime time when Science has wrought the miracles of a thousand years, and Man, no longer the savage he now is, breathes Justice and Brotherhood to every being that feels.’”

Thomas was slightly confused, to put it euphemistically, about the usage of the terms ‘Euphenomenological’ and ‘Darwinian’ he had heard so many times from Adam and David. Thomas of course knew about Darwin, given how a lack of knowledge in this regard would have certainly devastated Thomas’ self-respect in a gruesome manner. But it evaded his cognitive abilities to draw a connection between Darwin and what he heard so far. Did the man try to say that evolution had produced this society? That they were not the slaves of drugs but were naturally blissed-out? This thought produced a rush of subtle euphoria: for a moment Thomas thought that he had arrived in a natural, an authentic form of paradise, where everyone was naturally happy and nice. He didn’t know much about evolution, but he kept this vigorously exalting thought in his mind as long as it could withstand the vicious claws of empirical evidence supporting the contrary position. But the growing potency of his pressing feeling of hunger subdued the emotional pleasantness of this euphoric hypothesis. He soon had to ask; the neocortically envisioned unpleasantness of asking for food would soon appear dwindlingly weak in comparison to the powerful mesocorticolimbically arising instinctual drive for food. But at the moment he still hoped that either Adam or David would bring this topic up to spare him embarrassment, in which case Thomas would gratefully surrender to his desire.

By the way, Thomas thought, where was David, and what was he doing? He looked around in this seemingly unlimited virtual realm and was shockingly perplexed when he saw him just floating around on a soft, gentle cloud of millions of spectacular color nuances that shined extravagantly with an expression of pure bliss on his face, right next to the colossal animation of a neural network. This seemed fantastically alien to Thomas; nevertheless, the fact that David truly was on the proverbial “cloud-nine” crossed Thomas as a humorous, delightful thought. This just can’t be real! This phrase began to resonate in Thomas’ mind almost like a cognitive theme melody, and, despite his misgivings, he at least felt happy for David and the other inhabitants of this civilization. 

Adam then finally asked the big question: “Are you hungry, Thomas? I would be delighted to introduce you to some of our gourmet specialties!”

Gong! Here it was, the ultimate juxtaposition of a bane and a boon. Adam resumed, “Usually, Thomas, we have sophisticated surveillance, maintenance, and protection, so-called SMPs, to control all physiological states of our body while immersed in virtual reality. This fabulously sophisticated design enables us to indulge in these wondrous spheres without having to eat or to be concerned with any other bodily necessities. For example, very detailed blood profiles of available amino acids, fatty acids, and carbohydrates, as well as vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients, are created and appropriately modified to meet the recommended genotype-specific standards for each individual’s optimal physical and mental health. But some precautions and elaborate procedures would have had to be performed on you before that could be done for your body. We wanted to spare you these briefly unpleasant steps, at least for now, and so long as you choose to decline this option. Anyhow, please just tell me whenever you feel the weight of any bodily necessities upon you.” 

Thomas was conflicted, for although he would have loved to admit that he was starving, the present circumstances didn’t facilitate his usual decisiveness, which made him the successful businessman that he was. Rather, any sense of resolution was heavily subdued by the novelty of the situation that he thought he had gotten used to before entering the virtual world. Accordingly, he remained confusedly silent in spite of his almost unbearable desire to eat. 

Adam persisted, “Very well, then: I will continue to introduce you to the wonderful but hard-to-grasp essence of our Euphenomenological Age. Let me introduce you to the neuro-phenomenological architecture of affective consciousness! I am sure this sounds like a daunting subject for you, but it is much more wonderful and fundamental than it is daunting.”

Alright, thought Thomas to himself, should I really continue to listen or just zone out? But Thomas clearly felt a motivational pull towards clarity and understanding. Though he was currently unpleasantly suspended in a state of suffocating confusion, he also desired knowledge, and thus made an effort to comprehend what Adam was about to say.

“First, it is very important for you to understand the logic behind evolution. I will be presenting this in a grossly simplified way, of course, but rest assured that the base is identical to how it actually works.”

Thomas felt a stingy feeling of embarrassment. He sort of knew, or at least he believed to have known, the logic behind evolution, but he recollected how back in his college years, when a teacher had asked a relatively easy question concerning it, Thomas, being paralyzingly afraid of embarrassment, wouldn’t raise his arm to answer it, though in his mind the answer was energetically swirling around, desperately pushing to be released. Thomas also remained silent in this case, although he acknowledged that it was silly, since the sympathy and intelligent compassion of the people here were grossly incomparable, in fact diametrically opposed, to the vicious schadenfreude of competitive university students who just couldn’t wait for someone to say something ridiculously inappropriate to promote themselves at the expense of their fellows. Adam was considerate and sensitive enough to realize what was going on in Thomas’ head, and thus said, “Well, to make sure you know exactly what I am talking about, I will lay out the crude logic of evolution for you. In honor of the hugely brilliant scientist who saw through the superficial, outwardly beautiful veil of nature to understand its cold-hearted logic, Charles Darwin, I will refer to evolution as Darwinian evolution to contrast it with the sublime form of evolution at work now. Well, to put it simply, Darwinian evolution was nothing more than a process of competition amongst self-replicating biological entities, namely genes. A gene, a combination of molecules that are great at storing information, code, if you’re inclined towards computer science, is completely unconscious, yet it spurs its hosts to replicate it. It is clear now that however the world began, genes, or DNA, followed not long after. By blind chance, genes found vehicles for themselves—keep in mind again that Darwinian evolution is completely blind. These vehicles are what you would call bodies, and these bodies would compete to survive, thus keeping the present DNA viable: the DNA replicates itself via reproduction for the blind sake of propagation, with no higher purpose in the equation. Genes could mutate over time to new versions, though this would take a very long time. New genes that could replicate faster and survive at higher rates would accordingly spread and dominate: a new version of a gene could replicate itself more efficiently if the carrier of that particular gene could produce more offspring than the carrier of the older variety. Although this is a crude simplification of the complexity of evolution, that is the fundamental logic behind it: every organism is built in such a way as to maximize their genetic inclusive fitness, that is, their ability to ensure the propagation of their genes.

“Now, to understand the neuro-phenomenological basis for affective experience, I have to introduce you further to some neurochemical as well as phenomenal concepts. While one can generally say that out of complex neural electrochemical dynamics an experiential space can emerge, specific neural patterns can open sub-spaces and texture said spaces with various qualia. At some point in evolution, a properly functioning central nervous system had evolved due to that increasing one’s genetic inclusive fitness. The neural dynamics of a central nervous system, or more precisely, the electrochemical field dynamics, enabled the emergence of a unitary experiential manifold with phenomenal properties. At first, a so-called primary experiential space, or what you might call consciousness, evolved that opened up two distinct experiential sub-spaces, namely a perceptual and an affective experiential space. These spaces were textured by raw perceptions such as motion, color, shape, etc., and feelings, which also broke down to belonging to either pain and pleasure. Why did that happen? Well, the perceptual experiential sub-space was selected for by evolution, since it enabled an organism to perceive and orient itself in its environment. As for the affective experiential sub-space, it enabled an organism to feel the biological value of various stimuli.

“Now we will discuss an exceedingly important point which you should use all your cognitive resources on to truly understand. Namely, the evolution of an affective experiential space is what in the Darwinian Age negative utilitarians had viewed as the great bane and classical utilitarians as the great boon of evolution. In our age, we view the affective experiential space as the greatest gift of evolution to us, though we all recognize the validity of the point that negative utilitarians had to make, specifically, that unimaginably horrible, nasty suffering was associated with it in the Darwinian Age. To reiterate, why was it at the same time a bane and a boon? Well, Thomas, evolution had coupled functionality with phenomenology.” 

Here Adam paused as to place special significance to what he just had said, but only for a second or so, after which he fervently continued his revelatory soliloquy. “What do I mean by that? Let me give you a concrete example. An environmental stimulus that damages an organism’s tissue is a potential threat to the propagation of the organism’s genes. So if a new version of a gene arises which codes for neural substrates that predispose the organism to avoid this noxious situation, then this new version of the gene will outcompete its old version, since the organism is now more likely to avoid noxious stimuli and thus to survive and produce more offspring who will also have this gene. But at what cost! In the course of evolution, neural substrates arose that not only functionally in the form of simple reflexive behavioral reactions made an organism avoid noxious stimuli, but also consciously, via intrinsically disvaluable qualia such as pain, enforced the avoidance of certain kinds of behaviors. By creating a feeling of painful aversion, the organism actually felt the biological disvalue of a noxious stimulus in the form of phenomenal disvalue. In this fashion, phenomenal unpleasantness came into existence. This is why negative utilitarians viewed the emergence of an affective experiential space as the great curse of evolution: had a sufficiently complex nervous system never evolved by mere chance, there would have never been a single intrinsically disvaluable, unpleasant experience on Earth. But in the same manner, phenomenal pleasantness did evolve, namely when it was advantageous for the propagation of an organism's genes. This is apparent in how organisms could feel the biological value of an activity via a phenomenal intrinsically valuable quality such as pleasure. This is how phenomenal pleasantness evolved. Now you might understand why classical utilitarians viewed the emergence of an affective consciousness as the great boon of evolution, for if those neural dynamics out of which an affective experiential space emerged had never evolved, there would have never been a single positive feeling in the world.” 

Adam remarked, “In terms of the importance of an affective space, a world full of organisms with the ability to perceive and think, but without the ability to feel, is as intrinsically valueless as a world full of zombies! Imagine you could see a beautiful girl. Without an affective experiential space, you couldn’t value her at all. No sexual attraction, no arousal, no lust, no love. Only a beautiful girl in your mind! Wouldn’t that be valueless if you can’t feel anything? Imagine you have the most complex philosophical or mathematical revelations, but are unable to feel anything: no joy, no appreciation, no significance, just nothing. Wouldn’t such a revelation be intrinsically valueless if no one could ever appreciate it by feeling its significance? And that’s why we today view the evolution of an affective consciousness as the greatest gift of evolution: without it, the wonderful euphenomenology of our minds could have never become reality. But back in the Darwinian Ages, the coupling of phenomenology with functionality truly was a bane and a boon, since it ensured that an organism was both endowed with the capacity for phenomenal pleasantness but also for phenomenal unpleasantness. 

“In the course of evolution, the central nervous system became increasingly complex and eventually what might be termed a cognitive experiential space began to emerge. But all sub-spaces, including the perceptual, affective, and cognitive ones, were unified in a single experiential space; they were highly intertwined and couldn’t be easily distinguished. However, it is important to see that every perceptual and cognitive qualia needed to be combined with an affective qualia to have any significance at all. These perceptual and cognitive qualia, so-to-say, needed an affective gloss. You will later note that this is why every moment of our existence is a wonderful sensual and intellectual garden of delights; this is not because every perception or thought we have is utterly intrinsically wonderful, but because their affective coloring is outstandingly sublime, which ensures we find life valuable today. 

“These experiential sub-spaces are not only phenomenally highly intertwined, but also neuro-anatomically. This neuroanatomical interconnection between various experimental and neural substrates is highly complex and requires a deep understanding of neuroscience. However, I can reveal to you one example to highlight this, namely the dopamine innervation of the neocortex. While dopamine is a neurotransmitter which is, generally speaking, involved in sub-neocortical neural systems mediating feelings in the broad category of motivation, the neocortex is a very recent neural structure of the brain that is responsible for the outstanding cognitive abilities of human beings. So while dopaminergic neural dynamics are responsible for texturing the affective experiential sub-space, the neural dynamics within the neocortex are responsible for the emergence of cognitive qualia. Now the dopaminergic innervation of the neocortex results phenomenally in the already mentioned affective coloring of thoughts. 

“It is, however, crucial to understand a little more clearly how they are phenomenally interwoven. To repeat, there are sub-neocortical neural systems out of which an affective consciousness arises, and neocortical neural structures that are responsible for thoughts. While both influence each other, how can you describe this phenomenally? To put it simply, the neocortical influence on the affective consciousness can be described as a modifier concerning how one feels. Thus, you can cognitively access and rationalize raw feelings such as pain and pleasure. While you can, with your current Darwinian biology, cognitively access and slightly modify your raw feelings, the raw feelings nevertheless remain actual feelings as qualia of your experiential manifold. When you feel pain, you can rationalize this feeling and just say you don’t mind it, but that means you still feel the pain. Even if it’s a little less phenomenally unpleasant, it still is there. When someone was to grossly, brutally, and mercilessly torture you, you would still feel the abysmal depths of phenomenal horror, despite any potential adaptive neocortical modifications and rationalizations. Overall, your neocortex is utterly powerless over the affective texture of your mind. However, the case of influence in the opposite direction is quite different. Evolution ensured that affective states had a dominant influence over one’s thoughts. This is the reason for mood-thought congruence: when your body needs food, which you phenomenally experience as hunger, your thoughts start to be centered around this topic.

“Since in humans the affective and cognitive experiential sub-spaces are interlinked, there is a vast array of fine-grained textural nuances of affective qualia. You probably know some of them, Thomas. Whenever you have feelings of euphoria, amazement, wonder, cheerfulness, or simply pleasure, this means that your affective experiential space is positively textured. And since you were born during the Darwinian Age,” and here Adam paused and looked at Thomas with an expression of great pity, “in which negative qualia were routinely nasty properties of any sentient beings’ phenomenal consciousness, you probably know the abominable ones very well. Anxiety, fear, angst, pain, hate, envy, wrath, shame, indifference, and depression, all of them are negative, nasty, gruesome emotions that we have at last purged from the world.” 

As soon as Adam had mentioned those feelings, Thomas was reminded of his own phenomenology, which was sometimes terrible and nasty. After all, he was himself sometimes overcome by sickening feelings of depression and existential-angst, as well as excruciating physical pain. Yet Thomas still, even in the world he found himself in, thought it impossible that all this nastiness could have really been overcome. What a grotesquely utopian idea, Thomas thought to himself. Life wouldn’t function without at least some form of suffering. But some forms of phenomenological nastiness were just so unnecessary and unfair, such as the suffering of people starving to death or painfully expiring from death-agonies brought about by disease in the third-world, or that of terminally-ill people and their families, the latter of which frequently having to witness the soul-gnawing horridness of the slow, wicked decay of the body and the mind of a loved one. 

“Well, Thomas, let’s more carefully examine the evolutionary roots of human beings, Homo sapiens. We know that they evolved on the African Savannah, starting more than 2 million years before you were born. And here comes the inconvenient truth about human evolution. As I have already revealed to you, every organism evolved through the propagation of its genes. Roughly speaking, the genes that made an organism better at producing more offspring were the winners. Now, if one considers the environmental circumstances under which human beings evolved, and which genes were of advantage on the African savannah, this leads to a tragic conclusion about human nature, especially concerning the neuro-phenomenological fabric of emotions. That is, scarcity of sexual partners and food led to an abundance of aversive stimuli such as predation, starvation, and warfare, all for the sake of gene propagation.

“Imagine what kinds of behavioral effects would have allowed genetic elements to leave more copies of themselves over time. Let’s assume the offspring of a human being had a new genetic variant of a gene that predisposed his hands to be very delicate, so much so that they can play a lovely Mozart sonate. Do you think the carrier of this new version would have had a greater chance to produce more offspring, and thus more copies of this delicate-hand gene would have been left in the human population to evolve on the plains of the African Savannah? The answer seems to be a straightforward no, at least to me: Thomas, here we come even closer to the problem of the human condition. The human brain is as much dependent on genes as the hands of an individual. The neurochemistry of the brain is shaped by environmental forces as well, but genes are still an outstandingly powerful predisposition that shapes human phenomenology! Now imagine the offspring of a human being inheriting a mutated gene that codes a strong disposition to have a very delicate phenomenology full of nice qualia such as love, friendliness, and euphoria. Do you think such a ‘delicate phenomenology’ gene would have led to behavior that helped that individual to produce more offspring who would survive? Would copies of that delicate-mind gene propagate in the human population, given the harsh conditions on the African savannah? Again, the answer is an emphatic no. 

“Do you understand, Thomas? The human body, including the human brain, was shaped by the principle of competition amongst self-replicating selfish genes. And the place where this competition was carried out was not a very comfortable one, but the unkind African savannah. Thus, almost all features of a human being are the result of a long struggle of gene rivalry. New gene versions accumulated in the human genome because of a propagation advantage, not because they were chosen by the tender, loving foresight of evolution, which, at the end of the day, was completely blind and amoral. All this wouldn’t be a major ethical problem if we were only talking about the functional, perceptual, or even cognitive phenomenal outcome of evolution. It doesn’t seem to make a big difference by itself if we ended up with a population of rough-handed instead of delicate-handed people. Or if only blue-leaved plants had been produced by evolution instead of green-leaved ones. From an ethical, value-perspective, both outcomes by themselves seem equally valueless. But when one considers the affective phenomenal outcome of evolution, where something is produced that is either intrinsically valuable or intrinsically disvaluable, then value considerations are essential. It doesn’t seem to make a difference if the world was populated by rough-handed or delicate-handed people if no piano did exist, as delicate-handedness is not valuable intrinsically by itself. To restate, it only has instrumental value, meaning that it becomes valuable only if someone likes piano music and there is a piano available. It would also be intrinsically valueless if the world was populated only by humans who could see thousands of color nuances or understand the theory of general relativity and every other theory in physics as easily as breathing who also completely lacked an affective consciousness that endowed them with a potential to experience happiness. But it should seem clear that it does make an essential difference if the world was populated by delicate-minded instead of rough-minded people: it doesn’t make a difference on the grounds that delicate-minded people play the piano better or perform any one specific task at greater skill. Rather, it simply makes a difference because phenomenal value is intrinsically valuable and phenomenal disvalue intrinsically disvaluable. Thus, you could say that my, and the position of virtually everyone else in this civilization, is that things only matter in regards to the feelings and experiences they generate: what leads to happiness should be avidly pursued, so long as it does no harm to any other sentient being, whereas what leads to pain should be strictly avoided, so long as doing so doesn’t expose others to an even greater harm. Of course, in today’s world such concerns are virtually all obsolete, given how the technological advances we have made have replaced the social workings, privation, and cruelties of the Darwinian Ages.” 

Adam paused for a second and looked at Thomas to see if he could at least to some degree understand his utterances. But there was still a lot of bustling activity going on in Thomas’ brain concerning processing what Adam had spoken. Adam continued, “I repeat again, Thomas. Imagine a world full of only delicate hands, not even people, only delicate hands by themselves. Would you say this world is more intrinsically valuable than a world full of ones that were calloused and rough?” 

Thomas was unsure, so he said, “Well, one could argue that delicate hands are just intrinsically nicer than rough ones.” 

Adam smiled cheerfully once he realized that Thomas was actively trying to understand his words. “That is a decent argument, but by saying they are intrinsically nicer, you presuppose an affective conscious entity, in other words, an observer that feels they are nicer. But the conscious observer might actually feel that rough hands are superior and thus more valuable. But take again the scenario of phenomenal delicateness and roughness: change it respectively into the phenomenal value of pleasure and disvalue to make this scenario more understandable. That is, just imagine there was an affective consciousness floating around in the universe, not necessarily a human being, but some conscious entity that was nothing but pure pleasure, or hedonium, and some other conscious entity that was nothing but pure pain, or dolorium. Thus, only these two phenomenological properties exist, pleasure and pain. Wouldn’t you agree that there doesn’t need to be an observer who feels which one is more valuable, as in the case of the delicate and rough hand scenario? Wouldn’t you agree that the consciousness which feels pleasure perpetually is more valuable than the consciousness that feels pain indefinitely? And their raw feelings encode the same behavioral substrates as pleasure and pain that you currently experience.” 

He again looked at Thomas with an expression of compassionate hope. And in fact, there was no way Thomas couldn’t see the difference between the two scenarios, the one with the delicate hand and the other with the delicate mind. But he was still unsure how what Adam had just said was relevant to them.

“Now, consider again evolution and its outcome. If evolution had produced a world full of rough-hands instead of delicate-hands, there wouldn’t be much reason to complain or to try to change something, since there are no observers and hence no difference in value. But what if evolution had produced only phenomenal sadness instead of phenomenal happiness? Wouldn’t you feel that something had to be changed, that it would be intrinsically good to move in the direction of happiness, intrinsic value, and away from suffering, intrinsic disvalue?”

Thomas agreed. But still, this whole talk about intrinsic value and value-maximization seemed so pointlessly speculative and hypothetical, something Thomas would expect two existentialists to discuss over a cup of strong black coffee. He protested, “I still don’t understand where you are really going with this.” 

“I completely understand, Thomas, but this slow creeping towards the wished-for epiphany is important. Now, let’s go back to the evolution of humans on the African savannah and remember the bane and boon of evolution, namely the coupling of functionality and phenomenology. Again, imagine a new gene mutation in an offspring of a human being that made its carrier more sensitive to tissue damage. Well, this gene certainly would be functionally superior to its precursor since it would protect its carrier from noxious stimuli threatening its physical constitution and would thus leave more copies of itself over time. Accordingly, a growing number of people would be more sensitive to noxious stimuli. However, the functional superiority of this gene would come with a high phenomenal price, namely a higher capacity for pain and suffering.

“Here’s another example that poignantly highlights this tragedy: imagine two gene-variants on the African Savannah, a version A that predisposed its carrier to be irritated, aggressive, and competitive, whereas version B would predispose its carrier to be happy and empathic. Which one would you expect to spread? Since version A is functionally better to propagate the carrier’s genes, it would outcompete version B. But what disastrous phenomenological consequences that would have! People would be dissatisfied, aggressive, vengeful, competitive, and perhaps even cruel, psychopathic, and sadistic instead of exhibiting happiness and niceness towards each other! Do you see that we have a situation here that is functionally superior but is phenomenally nastier, more intrinsically disvaluable? Wouldn’t you agree, Thomas?”

Thomas was confused. He couldn’t really understand how a world full of happy and nice people could exist in the rough real world, although he admitted that it would be “intrinsically more valuable,” so he answered, “But what is a nice phenomenology worth if it is not sustainable? People wouldn’t be able to stably live in a society.” 

Adam smiled and responded, “I hope you will soon realize that it is possible, Thomas. But for the sake of our example, to think if the lifestyle of the happy people is actually sustainable is to carry the example too far; it means you forget that this is exactly the problem, namely that functionality and phenomenology were coupled in Darwinian evolution. Assuming everything else is the same and both options would be equally sustainable, wouldn’t it be more intrinsically valuable to have only happy and nice people instead of aggressive and competitive ones? In which world would you choose to live in?” 

Adam looked straight into Thomas' eyes with a shimmering expression of hope. Thomas had to admit that although his very nature was a fiercely competitive one, he would prefer to be perpetually happy and nice if that was possible and kept his intellect intact. No more painful, mind-crushing, soul-destroying disappointments and exhausting struggles to overcome, which were at their best only momentarily satisfying. 

“Unfortunately, the scenario we have just outlined was very similar, close to identical, in fact, to how it actually happened. Human beings evolved to have a very rich texture of negative qualia such as aggression, jealousy, hate, depression, loneliness, sadism, apathy, competitiveness, selfishness, and so forth. All these feelings were of functional advantage for our genes, but their consequences were obscenely cruel. Positive feelings were of very limited functionality in the emotional wasteland of the Darwinian Ages and were thus only scarce jewels of our phenomenology. Yes, unsurpassed joy, life-loving euphoria, empathic cheerfulness, and other wonderful feelings were inbuilt in our neuro-phenomenological fabric, but they were only fleeting droplets in a river of malaise, mediocrity, and sorrow. This is especially well-captured in how in the emotional baselines of individuals, their moment-to-moment hedonic tone of their experiential space, was usually intrinsically valueless. For past individuals, if they weren’t engaging in any important activity, it was of no functional value that they feel happy or satisfied. A feeling of affective phenomenal emptiness, often experienced as the unpleasant feeling known in the past as ‘boredom,’ was suitable to spur individuals to do activities that would improve their inclusive genetic fitness, or the degree to which they would spread their DNA. Evolution also ensured that one would usually come back, after only a short while, even after one’s greatest victories and achievements, to one’s level of relative phenomenal emptiness. It was not advantageous for one’s genes that either the painful loss of a family member or one’s euphoric victory over another tribe have long-lasting affective consequences. This principle is also referred to as the hedonic treadmill: one can make respectable steps forward into the direction of true happiness, but in the end, one will always realize that the speed of the hedonic treadmill always outmatches one’s pace, regardless of how hard you might try without the aid of sufficiently advanced technology.

“Even worse, evolution didn’t make the hedonic treadmill symmetric in both directions, but rather adversely asymmetric in regards to the individual shackled to it. Evolution made sure that one could easily slide into the other direction: a perpetual state of suffering was, in contrast to a state of constant bliss, quite functionally advantageous in many situations. Depression as a result of social defeat was better for one’s genes than a motivated tendency for life-threatening fights that couldn’t possibly be won: we know in extensive detail today that being susceptible to depression was encoded in the genomes of countless social animals of the past, including humans, in the Darwinian Ages to keep them out of potentially life-threatening combat, hence why depression is almost exclusively ‘for’ social animals that are used to group life. Needless to say, great rather than low sensitivity to tissue damage was also of high functional advantage, leading to the phenomenal nastiness of physical pain. Now, of course, you might wonder how did evolution ensure all of this? Well, as I have earlier explained to you, Thomas, it all depends on the neurochemical fabric of the brain, and this fabric is substantially encoded by one’s genes. Genetically-coded neural circuits are wired in such a way that all we have mentioned so far is physical and phenomenal reality. Myriads of negative feedback mechanisms ensure that almost no temporal changes in one’s phenomenological landscape are long-lasting. The complexity of the neural dynamics producing an affective experiential space also explains that a dysfunctional brain is much likelier to lead to aversive feelings and low mood than perpetual, well-functioning happiness. Thus, low-mood was an evolutionary adaptive mechanism that also appeared in most cases of the malfunctioning of properly functioning neural circuits.”

If all that was true, Thomas thought to himself, then the outcome of evolution was truly tragic, and it appeared to him as a deeply painful realization that most of what had been said was actually true for him. His moment-to-moment feelings were more neutral than wonderful. Besides, how hard he had to work for a fleeting moment of blissful joy and how easily did aversive feelings fall into the arms of his consciousness! Anger, aggression, and low mood were unwelcome nuisances of daily living. Bliss, joy, and love, in contrast, were wished-for friends that barely visited his mental realms. Why hadn’t evolution been just a little bit more generous, that one at least could have gotten up every day with a smile and a breeze of life-loving euphoria? And those people here not only seemed to get up in the most exalted state of mind, but continued throughout the day in a spree of blissful friendliness. How was that possible, especially given what Thomas had just heard? Shouldn’t the hedonic treadmill exude its vicious dominance even here in the future?

“Now Thomas, the reflective capacity of the human mind soon realized that the texture of the human affective experiential space was not the way it should be, that is, not as the conscious individual wished it to be. The human capacity of introspection soon led to the insight that there was value and disvalue, a pleasure-pain axis along which all human, nay, all sentient, activity was centered. And although many people often didn’t want or just couldn’t realize that one personally always aimed for phenomenal pleasantness instead of nastiness, this soon became a widespread and philosophically supported conviction. By the end of the 4th century B.C., all major ancient philosophical schools, including Aristotelianism, Epicurism, Stoicism, Hedonism, etc., agreed upon one premise, namely that eudaimonia, the Greek word for phenomenal pleasantness, was the ultimate goal of all human activity. Think about yourself, Thomas: would you ever wish during a period of happiness that you would suddenly feel sad and depressed?” 

The fact that Thomas considered this question to be purely rhetorical showed him that it was actually self-evident that he never ever had wished at one of the rare moments of joy, of pure phenomenological pleasantness, that he would sink into the mires of severe depression. There never had been a moment like that for him and he was sure that there never would be such a moment, such a scenario, in his life. But on the other hand, did he always wish to feel happy? Sometimes he liked to be sad. Adam, guessing what Thomas was thinking by observing his facial expression, assured, “When one feels sad, in contrast, it is a completely different situation. As I have told you earlier, the cognitive and affective spaces are neuroanatomically and phenomenally intertwined. Darwinian evolution ensured that one accepts pain and suffering: imagine a version of a gene that would predispose its carrier to realize the wrongness of pain and try to fight it and another version of a gene that would predispose its carrier to rationalize pain as inevitable and not necessarily wrong. Which carrier would ensure that its genes would spread faster by producing more offspring? The one who could rationalize pain would be able to put his efforts to other, supposedly more ‘vital’ and ‘productive’ tasks that only had the result of producing even more suffering by ensuring their genetic fitness, whereas the other one would be caught in a state of limited revolt against the moral wrongness of pain without the aid of biotechnology. And that’s exactly what happened during Darwinian evolution. Since pain was largely inevitable during the Darwinian Ages, many people tried to rationalize it for their own good. Religions such as Christianity or Buddhism were striking examples for the neocortical evaluation of affective states; religions gave pain some positive characteristic of inevitability. Nevertheless, although pain-rationalization was advantageous and preferred by many people, it couldn’t abolish its reality, its phenomenal nastiness. The powerful, evolutionarily inbuilt drive of phenomenal value-maximization, and the subtle influence of introspective insights were enough to make the history of humankind one big struggle for the betterment of human phenomenology.

“The most striking case that attested to the fact that humans did never view their affective consciousness as sufficiently pleasantly textured was the pervasive use of psychoactive substances across all cultures throughout human history. In the history of ‘Western Civilization,’ alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine were evidence for the shortcomings of one’s evolutionary endowed hedonic repertoire, as you probably know very well yourself.”

And here Adam looked jovially at Thomas, knowing that Thomas probably had been regularly consuming at least two of these, and which two he could easily guess. He then proceeded, “Other cultures employed other biochemicals in an effort to enrich their evolutionarily undernourished affective phenomenology. Various alkaloid-containing plants such as the famous coca plant and potently psychoactive cacti and mushroom species were prepared and used to at least temporarily beautify one’s phenomenology. Unfortunately, those chemical substances were phenomenology-enhancers of low potency that possessed only maliciously short duration. If one considers how they evolved by natural selection, it also seems more obvious why they were not the ideal phenomenological pharmaceutical enhancers. All these plant alkaloids evolved as chemical weapons against phytophagous organisms, which were potential threats to these plants. Since insects did share certain neural pathways with humans, these phytophagous-toxins also ‘dysregulated’ the human nervous system. They hijacked the neurochemical pathways to offer their consumers a short glimpse into the spheres of phenomenal heaven, only to fall afterward back, sometimes even deeper, into the spheres of one’s evolutionary inherited neuro-phenomenological wasteland. So although psychoactive drugs were pervasively used throughout the history of humankind, it was an extremely ineffective way to substantially and sustainably improve one’s impoverished neurotexture.

“Environmental reshufflings are another ineffective way to improve the human condition. Socio-economic, political, and technological progress were mistakenly viewed as powerful measures to outsmart the evolutionary paradigm of the hedonic treadmill. This became especially obvious during the Enlightenment when the rationale of utilitarianism gained widespread recognition, especially among scholars and intellectuals. ‘The greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people’ was their slogan. And to achieve this goal, even fantastical ideas at the time, such as hedonic calculus, were not put down as insane, indeed they weren’t whatsoever. But the issue was that no one at the time understood the evolutionary-inherited, genetically-coded neuro-phenomenological architecture of their affective experiential space. They thought that environmental reforms by themselves would make people truly happy. What a grossly misconceived notion! They should have been allowed to gaze about five centuries ahead to a time when most of the principles of enlightenment had been put into reality in many parts of the Western World! 

“At the beginning of the 21st century, the Western World, which had accomplished much in terms of social, political, and technological progress, as you probably know, was far from being a place full of phenomenal pleasantness, as I’m sure you have felt yourself. Hate, jealousy, sadness, despair, aggression, and obscene psychopathologies were not only existent but prevalent. And had environmental reforms accomplished anything at all in terms of making the human affective experiential space truly wonderful and sublime? Blissful joy, life-loving euphoria, and all-encompassing love were still precious rarities sadly amiss in many people’s affective realm. And what were the prospects? How could environmental reforms have ever ensured anything better? Surely, people in poverty could have been lifted out of the awful realms of helplessness and corresponding low self-worth by earning more money. But what about all those people who had a worthwhile life in terms of environmental and social factors yet who still felt anywhere from unfulfilled and dissatisfied to miserable and even suicidal? A wonderful family, nice friends, a well-paid job, and a magnificent house, while being fantastic things to have, did not disassemble the hedonic treadmill: far from it. Were those ‘privileged’ people spared the phenomenal nastiness of having to watch a beloved one die, the emotional pain of losing a child, or the phenomenal unpleasantness of a divorce or break-up? How could politics or technological progress exempt people from becoming a depressed social ‘loser,’ from ending up alone and sad? How could any fabulously sophisticated socio-economic reform prevent the psychopathologies which not only ghastly tormented the psyche of the afflicted but also more or less their associates, family, and friends? How could environmental reforms alone possibly get rid of the unfairness of the sometimes malicious mercilessness of the mood-tormenting dynamics of the female oestrogen cycle? At the beginning of the 21st century, more than 20 million people in the United States, one of the most civilized and materially advanced countries at the time, were classified as clinically depressed. Most of them were not below the poverty line, but financially well-off members of the middle and upper-class. Even more people were reading self-help books to improve their unrewarding phenomenology and make their lives more worthwhile: while this was a noble effort, it was far from enough. 

“An even more poignant piece of evidence for the inadequacy of environmental reforms to boost well-being was the fact that studies trying to evaluate differences in the well-being of people from different cultures came to the conclusion that the hedonic tone, the moment-to-moment feeling of happiness or sadness, of hunter-gatherers was probably higher or at least equal to that of civilized Westerners. Thus, thousands of years of human material and social progress without intrinsic advancement and remediation had not really managed to make human life intrinsically more valuable or enjoyable, but even appeared to have made it worse off emotionally. There was a gross mismatch between the environment in which human beings had evolved for more than 2 million years and that in which humans had spent around 15,000 years, namely in agricultural and industrial civilizations. There was an especially striking mismatch between the dietary, athletic, and social aspects of the modern and ancestral environment. Hunter-gatherers were used to a diet rich in nuts, seeds, fresh fruits, and vegetables as well as raw meat. They consumed little saturated fatty acids and sugars. 

“In the modernized Western World, most people were over-nourished and mal-nourished at the same time. Too many saturated fatty acids and sugars were consumed whereas vital nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, etc were routinely neglected. And most people didn’t even acknowledge that this flawed nutritional intake negatively affected not only their physical, but also their mental health. Thus, the evolutionary-inherited low hedonic tone was slightly but constantly lowered through a wrong diet. Besides, human beings in the civilized Western world clearly lacked an appropriate exercise regimen. Hunter-gatherers were quite physically active; they never sat around for hours immobile like many members of the corporate world in the 21st century. This also had a vast impact on their affective experiential space: during vigorous physical exercise the immune system is activated, endogenous opioids released, serotonin axons sprout, and the brain is flooded with thoroughly oxygenated blood, which has the end result of markedly improving one’s affective phenomenology. 

“Moreover, hunter-gatherers constantly lived in big social groups. They were almost never on their own. They used to hunt, raise their children, and rest together. Thus, humans were evolved by natural selection to highly value intimate social contact. However, industrial progress brought about an atomization of social living. At the beginning of the 21st century, as you know, the biggest coherent social adult group was a family, which also split up when one’s offspring reached adulthood. Many people were single, living completely on their own. All in all, many aspects of modern living were in sharp contrast to evolutionary-inherited emotional-instinctive tendencies, which could constantly lower one’s hedonic tone below the already abysmal genetically constrained set-point.

“Thomas, what is technological progress worth by itself if it doesn’t improve the health of sentient beings? In retrospect, this comes as no surprise. In an effort to cheat the evolutionary inherited hedonic treadmill, one can’t just build better and nicer TVs, cars, or computers. In fact, we now know that even immersive virtual reality couldn’t do that, which is probably the best piece of evidence for the elusiveness of the millennial environmental value-maximization program of humankind. Even when you could have everything, when you could live environmentally in paradise, you would soon realize that even when you have all the company, cars, jets, and amenities you can possibly dream of, your hedonic tone isn’t likely to improve by much, if at all.” 

Adam paused to let Thomas envision this scenario. Thomas was at first quite opposed to Adam’s last statement, for he believed that he definitely would have been a very happy person if he could have had anything he wanted. However, he asked himself if his life would truly always be wonderful, sublime, and cheerful. The more Thomas thought it through, the more the ugly truth of what Adam had said revealed itself. Yes, Thomas would live in a place of extraordinary beauty with everything he wanted, but would that make his life truly happier? He might get bored and dissatisfied by not accomplishing anything if his current neuroarchitecture was conserved in its entirety. But before Thomas could navigate even deeper into the potential shortcomings of such a wonderful yet limited prospect, Adam continued, “Fortunately, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the first truly effective reform of the human experiential space started to take place and reduce the phenomenal nastiness bestowed upon the human psyche by Darwinian evolution.

“Before anesthesia was a widespread medical option, surgeries were horrifying experiences of such unimaginable viciousness and agony that it is not only entirely inconceivable for us today to imagine it, but perhaps even for you. However, with the advent of first general anesthesia and, later on, sophisticated local anesthesia, medical procedures could be performed in a much more humane way that didn't necessitate plunging patients into the evolutionary-given, genetically-encoded hellish realms of phenomenal horror. This finally presented a direct improvement of the human condition, the first step into the pain-free Euphenomenological Age we live in today. Most other ingenious inventions before that such as the use of electricity, the telephone, and steam-engine, had only indirectly and ineffectively improved the human affective experiential space. Progress till then had fruitlessly tried to improve the human phenomenal realm, as none of those brilliant inventions had truly made ‘civilized’ humans happier than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. The advent of anesthesia was fundamentally different, for it directly changed the texture of the human affective experiential space. To qualify, although it of course didn’t sustainably beautify minds, it nonetheless had a huge impact on them since it spared countless medical patients the unspeakable dreadfulness of physical pain. But what seems to us now as the most intrinsically valuable invention in the history of humankind till the beginning of the nineteenth century met at the time the heavy resistance of the evolutionary favored, neocortically-mediated rationalization of phenomenal unpleasantness. Namely, the Judaeo-Christian tradition proved to be a powerful temporary obstacle to the actual betterment of human life, as pain was seen as God’s way of cleansing the human soul. ‘Anaesthesia is of the devil’ was a popular sentiment even amongst medical scholars who witnessed the effectiveness of the new, slightly blemished, but nevertheless effective anesthetics such as ether, nitrous oxide, and chloroform.

“However, since the ability to rationalize pain largely had been fuelled on the African Savannah by the absolute inevitability of its phenomenological nastiness, the wonderful possibilities arising with the advent of anesthesia eventually largely subdued the rationalizing of humans in regards to physical pain; it soon became the medical standard, at least throughout the Western World. It quickly became even unthinkably cruel and callous to perform surgery or other painful procedures without anesthesia, the first widely used phenomenological enhancer. The following two centuries in human history proved to be the glorious dawn of the Euphenomenological Age, in which the evolutionary-inherited, genetically-encoded texture of human affective consciousness was ever-more effectively treated before eventually being restructured. Of course, it was also of the paramount moral importance that a multitude of nasty diseases be treated through medical blessings such as aseptic surgery or antibiotics, which appeared not long after the discovery and wide adoption of anesthesia.

Throughout the 20th century, direct phenomenological enhancement targeted in an increasingly effective way the moral wrongness, the intrinsic disvalue of phenomenal unpleasantness, although the path taken was often more felicitous than deliberate. In 1951, in search of an antitubercular medication, isoniazid was discovered as the first phenomenological enhancer classified as an antidepressant. It belonged to a class of pharmacological agents known as monoamine oxidase inhibitors. What was so remarkable about chemicals in this category was the fact that they crudely circumvented the hedonic treadmill. Evolution had ensured that the release of neurotransmitters, which are crucial key players in neural circuits texturing the human affective consciousness, were met by a subsequent destruction through enzyme-degradation. Isoniazid prevented this mechanism of destruction by blocking enzyme-degradation, and thus offset a negative feedback loop evolutionary selected for. The results were phenomenally nice. Improved mood, greater mental energy, and an occasional sense of euphoric jubilation colored the emotional landscape of its users. However, such a crude and relatively unsophisticated pharmacological agent such as isoniazid couldn’t effectively and sustainably cheat the seemingly unmanageable complexities of the affective neuro-phenomenological architecture. Adverse bodily reactions that were potentially lethal were often rationally considered to outweigh the benefits it had to offer. Nonetheless, isoniazid opened the doors for a flood of increasingly effective and sustainable phenomenological enhancers to reduce human suffering bit by bit. By the end of the 20st century, a comprehensive pharmacopoeia existed that had arguably made human life overall more intrinsically valuable, or, as one should rather say, less intrinsically disvaluable, given the fact that the Darwinian Ages was filled with unimaginable suffering, than ever before. While the moment-to-moment well-being of humans had not been yet lifted above the evolutionary-inherited natural hedonic tone that had stayed at about the same level for millennia, the texture of unpleasantness had been at least partially eradicated from many people’s affective landscape through the insightful use of phenomenological enhancers that ranged from general anesthetics and painkillers to psychic anesthetics such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. But, Thomas, although what you have witnessed in terms of actual human phenomenology improvement was noteworthy, the advancement in this regard in the centuries to come fortunately made these pharmacological agents appear as merely slightly more effective than hunter-gatherer herbal tinctures.

“While the mainstream program of phenomenological enhancement was quite successful in regards to the eradication of the phenomenal texture of pain and general unpleasantness, it was almost seen as frivolous and immoral to enrich and amplify the texture of pleasantness. The morally urgently needed mainstream program of pain-reduction was unfortunately vastly less instructive, revealing, and powerful than the century-long, more-or-less underground stream of magic-like phenomenal enrichment through pharmacological agents classified as recreational drugs. While in the Western World, as mentioned before, the toxic and not particularly rewarding agent ethyl alcohol had been known for centuries, increasing degrees of cultural globalization brought novel psychotropic compounds such as cannabis, cocaine, heroin, opium, and a handful of tantalizing agents referred to as psychedelics into the welcoming open arms of people’s undernourished affective consciousness all around the globe. The fact that the cocaine-industry became a multi-million dollar enterprise was striking evidence for how phenomenally unrewarding natural Darwinian consciousness was and how pleasantly the human affective experiential space could potentially be textured. However, all these delusive shortcuts were unable to effectively cheat the hedonic treadmill. Instead, they enabled their consumers to ephemerally escape the vicious claws of inherent negative feedback mechanisms of their nervous system only to be soon afterward caught again and sometimes punished very cruelly, such as their developing a full-fledged addiction and the associated withdrawal symptoms, cravings, and subsequent crashes and antisocial behavior.

“The story of psychedelics is different from that of powerful stimulants such as cocaine. To start, they were not essentially phenomenological enhancers but rather phenomenological twisters. While some people and even certain cultures viewed compounds such as mescaline, psilocybin, or lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, as divine phenomenological glorifiers that could occasionally offer them a safe and physically harmless glimpse into ambrosial spheres of consciousness, it nonetheless remained true that they also threw certain unfortunate individuals into the abysmal depths of torturing insanity and alienation. While a few hundred milligrams of cocaine almost always promised to suffuse one’s affective experiential space with the delightful texture of life-loving euphoria, psychedelic journeys into unknown phenomenal realms were unpredictable. On the whole, however, they were of great phenomenal value for fortunate individuals whose lives was transfigured by their use of psychedelics. Besides, they were of great instructive value for the subsequent development of more predictable, sustainable, and wonderful phenomenological enhancers; they revealed the great wonderful potentialities of the human nervous system which had been accessed hitherto only sporadically and unprofessionally.

“From our present perspective, the most wonderful and path-breaking invention concerning pharmacology in the history of humankind until the 21st century was the chemical substance known as MDMA that was rivalled in historical significance only by the advent of anaesthesia.” 

Adam paused and waited for Thomas to display deep perplexity and outright disagreement. True to his prediction, as soon as he had paused, a frowning, bewildered expression appeared on Thomas’ face which exactly conveyed a protesting attitude that could be expected from Darwinians concerning such an issue. 

From Thomas’ perspective, the statement Adam had made seemed so reckless and misconceived that he didn’t even consider it worthy to be refuted. MDMA, a recreational drug, the most wonderful and sublime invention in all of human pharmacological history till the 21st century! How absurd! How could something like that come out of the mouth of such a seemingly scholarly and remarkably thoughtful person? Thomas couldn’t even conceive of a viewpoint that would make such a statement at least debatable. To put it simply, he was too shocked for words. Fortunately for him, Adam had clearly expected and planned for such a reaction and thus considerately tried to show Thomas the viewpoint from which his statement would not only seem debatable but self-intimating. “Now, Thomas, I know that this statement seems quite extreme and maybe even abstruse. But this is due to the fact that you are probably completely naïve to what life is like with MDMA.”

Without hesitation, Thomas responded with great force, as if he wanted to strengthen his disagreement by sharply distancing himself from this substance, “No, I have never touched it or even heard of it.”

Adam empathically smiled, “There you go: that’s the very issue. The semantic competence of the human mind is very limited. Have you by any chance ever been in the mountains?” 

Although Thomas was not a passionate hiker, he had made quite scenic and impressive trips to the Alps. He affirmed, “Yes I did, in the Alps.” 

“Fabulous: the Alps today still count as one of the most sublime sites on Earth, though you probably could only recognize their outline, seeing how everything else has changed greatly for the better. But to expound my point, imagine someone, seeking to describe their great experience in the Alps, only told you the physical attributes of the area. Do you think you could have felt anything even close to the state of euphoric amazement that probably overwhelmed you when you were actually standing on the top of a mountain with the most exquisite panorama?” 

Without even waiting for a response, Adam pressed forward, “I guess not. You see, that’s what I mean concerning semantic incompetence. Words alone are not enough: they can’t induce sublime feelings by themselves, unless, of course, the listener has a vivid, fertile imagination. Thus, although I can gush all about the MDMA experience, it will be so vastly different from its actual phenomenology that it will be like telling a child what climbing the Alps feels like. 

“So perhaps you want to know why it is that we now consider MDMA one of the most fundamental cornerstones in human history?”

Yes, Thomas thought to himself sarcastically, he really would like to know that, seeing how he had such a hard time conceiving of the possible reasons. 

“Darwinian evolution had two phenomenally tragic flaws. First, as I have already told you, that functionality and phenomenology were coupled with the existence of often horrendous suffering. Secondly, Darwinian evolution made organisms fundamentally egotistical to an extreme degree due to its reigning principle of selfish gene propagation. At the end of the day, that’s the reason why human consciousness turned out to be so nastily textured with self-centeredness, jealousy, competitiveness, and a gross lack of profound empathy and love towards fellow beings that were remote concerning one’s genetic lineage. While evolution ensured that one typically highly valued one’s family, since they were necessary for the propagation of one’s genes, in a phenomenon known as kin selection, as well as one’s friends, since they also indirectly helped one to get better stakes at being reproductively successful, there was no genetic need for one to truly like, appreciate, trust, or love a stranger. As stated before, evolution didn’t endow humans with a rich affective texture of empathy, love, and niceness. While anaesthesia was a great first step towards the abolition of the phenomenal texture of pain, MDMA was the first temporary remedy for the phenomenal egotistic crudeness of the human mind. MDMA takes a special, dear place in the history of phenomenological enhancement due to its being the first substance that suffused the human consciousness with a transcendental, magical, unique, and compassionate texture. Yes, some people did indeed value other drugs more in the Darwinian Ages because they were more subjectively rewarding back than MDMA. But, to emphasize, MDMA was so special because of its enabling Darwinians to temporarily step outside of themselves and their skin while retaining most of their intelligence. In short, MDMA allowed individuals glimpses of truly emphatic social existence. It was famous, or rather infamous to the drug-naive, in the past for its inducing an astounding feeling of closeness and connectedness to one's fellow beings and its triggering an intense emotional comradery and affection well beyond the bounds of everyday experience. It was such a novel and sublime phenomenological enhancement since it completely abolished the texture of evolutionary-inherited, genetically-coded neurotic self-centeredness, even if only for a few hours, and thus effectively opened the doors for a flood of wonderful prosocial feelings that enriched one’s affective consciousness. 

“Unfortunately, since MDMA was neurotoxic, of short duration, and only truly magical during the first few times of consumption, it was not even a half-decent solution to the problem of selfishness. However, in retrospect, this substance was utterly path-breaking in its revealing that a wonderful phenomenal niceness could texture human consciousness and that a truly peaceful and cooperative way of social living was possible, even if the idea sounded insane to most Darwinians of the time. MDMA was the tentative solution to Aldous Huxley’s wonderfully insightful statement that ‘If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.’

“MDMA-consciousness was in another way path-breaking. Besides softening one’s ego-boundary, it also revealed that a completely wonderful affective experiential space could coexist with a high-functioning cognitive consciousness. In contrast to other pharmacological agents known at that time, it didn’t blur the intellect; rather, it could promote an extraordinary clarity of introspective self-insight. It was appropriately coined as an entactogen-empathogen and paved the way for the pending Euphenomenological Revolution. Along with MDMA, one should mention one of its main advocates, the charismatic, admirable, adventurous Californian chemist Alexander Shulgin who was the first true experimental phenomenologist. With his extensive chemical knowledge, he systematically studied the phenomenological effects of synthesized chemical compounds, especially phenethylamines and tryptamines. His novel designer-drugs and sophisticated phenomenological experiments fundamentally changed the course of history.” 

Adam smiled even wider, paused, and took a deep breath, as if the great transcendental insight was about to come.

“At the beginning of the 21st century, a man of stunning brilliance and insightfulness who even today deeply perplexes historians, David Pearce, wrote a manifesto, The Hedonistic Imperative, that is recognized today as the single most important document in the history of sentience. In fact, it is so far-seeing that it will probably hold this place for the indefinite future. In this text, he outlined in a vague but nevertheless path-breaking manner how genetic engineering and nanotechnology could and should be used to first extinguish the texture of phenomenological unpleasantness altogether before suffusing all sentient beings with a sublime texture of phenomenal niceness. Like most path-breaking novelties, the significance of his stunningly insightful postulations wasn’t recognized at first except by a few individuals. His manifesto went in so many respects against powerfully evolutionary-inbuilt psychological mechanisms that it isn’t surprising to us today that people at first usually didn't sympathize with his proposals. Genetic engineering meant the modification of exactly those entities, those genes, which we were built to propagate as our traditional role as disposable, transitory vehicles. Thus, it is not astounding that many self-defence mechanisms in various guises were at work to prevent this beatification of the human emotional repertoire. Besides, people were mostly ignorant of the breathtaking potentialities of the affective experiential space, seeing how most of them were naïve of an MDMA-like phenomenology; as mentioned before, semantic incompetence was a strong counterforce. But, Thomas, the coming centuries changed everything!”

Adam’s voice became increasingly exalted and excited, as if he was to reveal that he would get married. Thomas’ consciousness had become increasingly perturbed. He couldn’t yet or at least didn’t want to understand what Adam meant by genetic engineering and biotechnology. But Adam continued his speech with an ever-growing enthusiasm that was so overwhelming yet sane and coherent, so that Thomas had no will to protest. Adam continued, “There was fast, though not fundamental, progress in the pharmaceutical sector for some time after. Novel and more effective pain-killers were developed that soon consigned physical pain almost into oblivion, at least on the human phenomenological landscape. And an ever-growing arsenal of sophisticated antidepressants such as substance P-inhibitors, NMDA-antagonists, and enkephalin esterase-inhibitors were increasingly effective at abolishing the horrid texture of depression. However, something only changed fundamentally with the advent of pharmacogenomics, a field that combined pharmacology and the study of genetics. This field opened up completely new ways of improving the neuro-phenomenological deficits in an astoundingly effective way.

“However, it did something else that was essential for further development. It revealed the dark side of the evolutionary-inherited genome that codes one’s existence and one’s phenomenology. Once pharmacogenomics became the medical standard, people soon came to realize the harsh, merciless unfairness of the genetic lottery. For instance, people with a genetically-encoded unfortunate composition of a chemical for phenomenal niceness, the serotonin transporter, were prone to have an anxious, low-mood phenomenology. That is, just one single amino-acid difference in the composition of the serotonin transporter opened the neuro-phenomenological doors for some to enjoy a relatively stable, self-confident personality, whereas for others it meant a lifetime of struggle for a happy and confident life. And this is just one example of thousands that highlight the brutally unfair genetic lottery. In the past, many people just naturally lacked an adequate degree of motivation and were thus condemned to a life of either depressive lethargy or exhaustive, unsuccessful, frustrating competition with people on genetically-favored motivational overdrive. People eventually began to realize that what was a conviction in Ancient Greece, namely, that one’s life, or more accurately, phenomenology, was either favored or disfavoured by the gods, represented here by amoral evolution, was essentially true. The etymological origin of the word ‘happiness’, namely how it translates to ‘that which happens to one,’ became poignantly obvious to those who were relatively open-minded and whose thoughts were paralyzed by reactionary prejudices.

“This gross genetic unfairness was soon recognized as an ethical issue of cardinal importance. How was it ethically tenable to keep biotechnological tools that could ensure fairness and an equally pleasant phenomenology for everyone away from people? More and more people started to increasingly rely on sophisticated pharmaceuticals to make up for this disadvantage, legally or illegally. But this turmoil lasted for only a short while when the next path-breaking discovery was made that places itself next to the discovery of anaesthesia and MDMA in terms of historical and phenomenal significance.

“Pearcin was the first sustainable phenomenological glorifier. When it came to its origin, it emerged out of the bustling activity of 21st-century Shulgin-successors and psychonauts who used the growing knowledge about the neuro-phenomenological architecture of the affective experiential space to develop magical pharmaco-cocktails whose exact composition was crucially based on one’s genome. Pearcin was a very sophisticated blend of many different substances with unique pharmacological profiles that worked synergistically together to texture one’s affective space in a wonderful way, especially through the powerful homeostatic tri-monoaminergic, oxytocinergic, and cholinergic neurotransmitter-system improvements that it brought. Overall, Pearcin was an entactogen-empathogen-psychostimulant, very similar phenomenally to MDMA, though with a much more pronounced motivational-drive texture. It basically ensured that through its intensive yet not manic stimulation of their dopaminergic and cholinergic systems, people become highly motivated and intelligent instead of lethargically blissed-out in a manner akin to an opiate addict. And since a world full of happy, motivated, and self-centered people would have likely led to one terrible chaotic culmination under the Darwinian premise of egoistic self-advancement requiring a need for the existence of losers to ensure stable social systems, Pearcin sidestepped all of this through its inculcation of compassion and love. Thus, the strong, though not incapacitating empathogenic aspect of Pearcin ensured that people were motivated in a highly socially responsible manner, sustainably unveiling a new model of social existence. 

“All in all, Pearcin induced not only a feeling of profound authenticity, self-love, and love of other beings, but also a sense of life-loving euphoric motivation. However, its effects took time to work, becoming fully effective in an individual after about three weeks of continuous administration, with the process being similar to how antidepressants were administered. It led to sophisticated receptor re-regulation and wished-for neuro-morphological changes in the brain. Its intricate pharmacokinetics could fill half a book, which is I will spare you the messy details. The people who used it became not only profoundly happy and nice to other people, but were motivated to be active in helping others. In other words, they became ideal effective altruists. A wave of happy philanthropists started to emerge. Rapidly, governments all over the world initiated thousands of clinical trials. But scepticism, reactionary prejudice, caution, and status quo bias persisted even after no negative-side effects were found. However, the phenomenal sublimity and sustainability of Pearcin couldn’t be hampered by irrational orthodoxy, and so it became so rapidly popular that it completely transformed human life. People for the first time in history started to stop being caught up in a neurotic race of self-assertion. Pearcin transformed the world directly phenomenally, which then led to a multitude of positive changes in the social, economic, and environmental attitude of people. Economics, for instance, changed in that externalities, which had never been truly taken into account when making decisions, which subsequently often led to environmentally and socially undesirable outcomes, were now always included in every economic analysis due to deeply empathic thinking on behalf of the ones conducting research.

“After Pearcin-phenomenology had become the standard for waking-consciousness, everything went rapidly towards the realization of the Hedonistic Imperative. The step from pharmacological to genetic phenomenological enhancement was soon considered the most rational and ethical step. Genetic engineering, biotechnology, nanomedicine, and quantum computing had become by then well-understood tools. The technical obstacles for the realization of the Euphenomenological Age were soon overcome. First, somatic gene therapy was employed, but neurodevelopmental confinements urgently called for germ-line genome rewriting and so full-fledged euphenomenological engineering turned human life into a most heavenly mode of existence. And Thomas, soon afterward phylum chauvinism, otherwise known as speciesism, or discrimination against members of other species, was overcome and an ambitious ecosystem restructuring project was initiated to turn all sentient beings into unsurpassedly happy, intelligent, beautiful creatures.” 

A flush of horror overcame Thomas. What was the man saying? All the astounding, lively loveliness that had permeated every bit of matter and energy in this world suddenly degraded into horrid nothingness in Thomas’ eyes. It was all madly artificial! This was Brave New World! 

Thomas had been right with his first assumption that this place here, even worse the whole world, was one big lunatic asylum. Humanity had not only deprived itself of its natural innocence, but all of nature. Thomas was so deeply and painfully shocked that he completely forgot all the sublimity he had witnessed so far. Humans had genetically changed themselves and other beings. Thomas wanted to run, to escape from this insanity. But where should, where could, he possibly go? He was trapped in immersive virtual reality! He did need to get out of here immediately. But then what? And the wave of despair that was covering Thomas beneath it grew higher and heavier, crushing Thomas till he finally gave up the fruitless struggle of soul-shaking desperation. Not even Adam could help Thomas in this situation. How could a 21st century Darwinian possibly cope with such a fundamental revelation? Thomas’ affective experiential space was supposedly the last phenomenological battlefield on earth. Adam, noticing Thomas’ psychological distress, compassionately added, “Thomas, we can help you. Somatic gene therapy can make you a happier, healthier, smarter, livelier, nicer individual than you have ever been. Think about all I have told you! Let’s get back into the physical world: I am sure that will make you more comfortable.”

And without having noticed a discontinuation of his suffering, Thomas found himself back in the physical world. But the crushing feeling of despair didn’t recede. Instead, he felt more anxious than before, since he now recognized there was no way out for him anymore.

“Thomas, let us go around and just observe the world. I assure you that just looking around will assuage your doubts. As mentioned before repeatedly, everything has become wonderful beyond comprehension.” 

What an empty statement, Thomas thought. He understood that the man probably had the best intentions and was convinced that everything here in this world was beautiful. But Thomas now clearly saw the deceptive artificialness and shallowness of what he had once thought to be authentic beauty. No more suffering, but what was the price these people had paid for it. Everyone was nothing more than a slave, a slave of … And here Thomas had to pause and find something these people were enslaved by, something that confined them in their personal growth. Well, it obviously was their own fake happiness. While that sounded bizarre, that was the only possible answer Thomas could come up in the blink of an eye. They, however, were all the same, identical servants of their own fake genes! Adam now appeared to him as both pitifully ignorant and enslaved in his faculties: could he really trust a genetically modified, ‘enhanced,’ human? What would they do to him? He was obviously the last one who hadn’t been intoxicated with their delusions. Or maybe there were more Darwinians left! A rush of euphoric hope ran through Thomas’ body. Was there hope after all for a reversion to the natural, Darwinian world? Maybe he could find other normal, sane people who would help him overcome these madpeople and make the world a natural, better … A lack of full-fledged conviction made Thomas stop at this point of his smoothly running triumphal train of thought. Was that really true? Would a reversion back to the Darwinian world, the world he knew for the vast majority of his life up to this point, make the world a better place? As much as he wanted to make himself believe it would, he couldn’t fully convince himself: all he had seen here so far here was happiness, compassion, love, and beauty. There hadn’t been one sight, one comment, one something that was marked by even the slightest tinge of unpleasantness. No, he had to see more, he had to see the ugly part of this world, that part of it hidden from sight somewhere, to find conviction. Thomas was so anxiously eager to see more that he didn’t even hesitate to become a passenger in a bizarre flying vehicle along with Adam which was obviously routinely used as a means of transportation by the beings of the world he found himself in.

Chapter 6

As soon as they had left what had at first appeared to Thomas as a palace of sensual joy that now only seemed to him a cold frightening vestige of deception, Thomas saw an exquisitely supernatural landscape unfolding itself in front of him, covered in a peaceful golden sun-set glow, that gave the scenery an even more surreally ambrosial, transporting appearance. Thomas felt as if he had gotten a straight shot of full-blown amazement right into the heart of his affective consciousness. They flew above something he couldn’t properly sensually process, let alone emotionally or intellectually grasp. It was literally an urban jungle. Skyscrapers of bizarrely fantastic geometrical shapes and surface structures were blushing out of the ground next to gigantic otherworldly trees that condensed to a jungle and back again into lovely meadows. Everything was just so beautiful, so gloriously pristine beyond comprehension. The air was filled with flying creatures. Thomas had seen so-called birds of paradise before when he had been on a vacation to Papua New Guinea, but the creatures inhabiting the troposphere now were even more appropriately labeled this way. Besides, Thomas couldn’t believe that some of the birds, which were vastly larger than anything he had seen before, could hold their stunningly graceful, heavy bodies up in the air. It was a truly extravagant ornithological fair. But there were many other winged creatures that bore more resemblance to butterflies and dragonflies than to birds, though not in their respective sizes. David, with a facial expression of pure jubilation, asked, “Aren’t these creatures superb, Thomas?” 

While Thomas wanted to exclaim yes, Adam’s question had again turned a switch in Thomas’ mind. He had been zoned out, suspended in sensual enchantment. But now his phenomenological realm abruptly darkened again and the fact that all these creatures were genetically engineered suddenly rose to phenomenal dominance.

Thomas responded, “Aren’t you intrigued too, Adam, about how everything here is artificial? Everything here is fake. All these living creatures, though I don’t doubt that they’re beautiful, are all designed, all made by humans, aren’t they?” 

Adam answered without hesitation, “That’s true, Thomas, but isn’t that even more reason to be grateful? Isn’t something that is designed with careful, dedicated, emphatic foresight more wonderful than something that is the outcome of blind gene-competition in the relentless Darwinian struggle?”

Thomas called out, “But that’s unnatural!” 

Adam poignantly replied, “I see what you mean: to ascribe some anthropomorphized character to so-called ‘Mother Nature’ was a common sentiment back in the 21st century. But one needs to be careful when using the term ‘nature.’ It stands in need of an exact definition which most people who used it could not give.” 

Thomas thought for a second regarding his definition and retorted, “Well, I simply define ‘natural’ as all that which has not been touched by humans.” 

A feeling of subtle self-assertion unfolded within him, since he had given a satisfactory powerful answer as he could’ve done. 

Adam promptly responded, “Well, I guess that’s the answer most people would have given back in your era. But there is a fundamental issue, since it’s a very ‘random’ definition. Consider a spider that makes a web. Is this web any more unnatural than a human being making iron out of ore? Why should it be? Or ants destroying plants and bringing them to their nest to cultivate fungi? That is natural, but anything humans produce is automatically unnatural?” 

Thomas had to think, for he couldn’t be defeated that easily. “No, I mean it more in the sense of what humans actually destroy, namely the rainforest and whole animal species through urbanization and so on.” 

Adam, in a completely nice and unsarcastic manner, obviously intent on showing Thomas the errors with his specific definition, asked, “Well, isn’t then a volcanic eruption also unnatural?” 

Thomas self-defensively challenged, “Well, how then would you define nature?” 

Adam detailed, “If one really wants to use the term ‘nature’ in a reasonable manner, it probably would be best to equate it with the cosmos. Nature is simply all the matter and energy in the universe. This definition entails that humans can’t, even if they want to, produce anything unnatural. They are part of nature and everything they produce is also a part of nature. A car is no more ‘unnatural’ than a rock untouched by humans lying near the side of what those in your era would have called a highway.” 

Adam studied Thomas’ facial expression, wistfully waiting for an approving or at least an understanding sign. Thomas didn’t know any further argument or rhetorical technique to help himself. If one really thought about it, it appeared that humans actually couldn’t produce anything unnatural. But in this case, an atomic bomb would be as natural as a spider-web, which sounded bizarrely absurd, not to mention morally wrong. He prodded, “But don’t you think that there is a difference between, for example, an atomic bomb and a spider web? One can destroy millions of lives at once with an atomic bomb, whereas a spider-web is needed for a spider to survive and kills a few flies at most!” 

Adam commented, “Oh Thomas, yes, there is a huge comparative difference in regards to their direct qualities, but not so in terms of morality. See, the naturalistic fallacy was an ethically catastrophic mistake many people used to make back in the Darwinian Ages. To equate what is natural with what is morally good is, to put it simply, dangerous. One couldn’t look anywhere in nature without finding something utterly ghastly. Brutality, murder, genocide, infanticide, homicide, famine, and so on are all perfectly natural. Many male animals, such as tigers and hyenas, kill and subsequently even cannibalize the offspring of reproductive rivals. Female organisms of some species arbitrarily murder and cannibalize some of their offspring due to it leading to a higher rate of survival for the rest of their children. There were insidious poisons in Darwinian nature that could rapidly kill thousands of individuals at once, not to mention natural disasters like wildfires, earthquakes, and plagues that caused untold suffering and devastation in their wake. So as you can see, Thomas, something being natural in the sense that you use it doesn’t mean that it is morally good at all.” 

Thomas was again astonished, since he actually considered these statements rational and consistent: how could he possibly refute them? He turned to his mind for answers, but found none that satisfied him. That still didn't prevent him from inquiring, “But aren’t you afraid that something might go terribly wrong, like in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park? If you play God and tinker with an individuals’ genome, couldn’t something go extremely wrong with fatal consequences?”

Adam answered, “That’s a very good and important consideration. When it comes to any course of action one takes involving oneself and others, one should always clearly know the risks and the benefits. That principle has always been a crucial consideration in the story of technological and social progress. Indeed, sometimes it turned out that the predicted benefit-risk ratio was much lower than the actual one, with terrible resultant consequences. But we must consider two important factors here. First, that of preparedness and the knowledge and tools at hand: imagine you told someone at the beginning of the 20th century that you have a medication for his low spirits that you yourself synthesized, an SSRI, for instance. Do you think that it would have spread like a blessing through the world? Most certainly not! People at that time just didn’t understand the complexities of the human brain enough to be very sure what the risks and benefits were. If people had started at the beginning of the 21st century to perform genetic engineering on humans and other sentient beings, that probably would have led to terrible consequences, seeing how the knowledge at that time was inadequate. 

“The second consideration you should consider is that of the fundamental nature of the actors and participants: after Pearcin had fundamentally changed the affective and cognitive phenomenology of people to the point where sympathy was the guiding principle in people’s decisions, scientists genuinely, out of the goodness of their hearts, considered the well-being of other sentient beings as much as their own. Careless or even half-planned experimentation on less privileged individuals was completely unthinkable after Pearcin-consciousness had replaced the self-centered, egotistical crudeness of Darwinian consciousness. Scientists had become highly motivated and empathic, something that no amount of pure philosophizing or even moral education could’ve accomplished on their own. They worked together in a truly cooperative fashion, not driven by a desire for prestige, power, and money, but by an inner urge to improve the health and living standards of other living creatures. So today thousands of researchers work together in a highly motivated, cooperative, open, and intelligent manner to ensure that very little goes wrong. Moreover, when it comes to what ‘goes wrong’ in our world, the severity of the phrase has decreased greatly: whereas in the Darwinian Ages it could mean anything from mild disappointment to one being permanently crippled or even killed, in the present era it refers to the results being good but not to the desired point. Of course, getting to the scientific advancement of your world necessitated countless false dawns, disappointments, and mistakes, yet you likely don’t curse the benefits for that purpose: in our universe, the laws of physics make the lives of countless creatures difficult to varying degrees, from being ‘merely’ irksome to being filled with paralyzing pain. As of today we still don’t think we can change the laws of physics due to their being preconditions of our reality, but we are doing everything we can to make the world a better place for all sentient beings. We do everything within our power and act in completely good faith: our consciences rest easy in that we are trying our best for everyone. ‘May all that have life be delivered from suffering,’ said that sublime, compassionate, noble individual known as Siddhartha Gautama millennia ago, and everything we are doing is to fulfill that beautiful wish of his. Besides, Thomas, you should also keep in mind that all people now are empathic, motivated, and intelligent. They don’t carelessly abuse scientific advancements for their own personal gain, but rather to help everyone they can as well as take pride in their work without being obnoxious or arrogant. Isn’t that wonderful and transcending instead of frightening and wrong?”

Thomas was emotionally stirred. This world suddenly seemed so real and possible: this was no fool’s utopia, but a genuine paradise that had emerged tenuously from the world he had lived in. But nevertheless, he still felt that everything was resting on untested assumptions that he needed to clarify as soon as possible, given how he was presently suspended between sharp scepticism and euphoric hope. Needless to say, he wanted answers, and definite ones at that. Then another problematic aspect erupted in Thomas' mind which again fuelled his sceptical attitude. “But what if an individual is born who is selfish and cruel and who will dominate every one of you emphatics? Are you never afraid that might happen?” 

Adam laughed cordially, as if he was completely convinced this would never happen. This made Thomas feel almost enraged: how could he so lightly dismiss such a horrible scenario? Adam, noticing his disconcertment, gently assured, “Thomas, this is a very justified worry on your side. After all, most Germans in the Third Reich were innocent players of an evil game. One very intelligent but grossly misguided individual managed to indoctrinate and brainwash millions of people to support his bloodthirsty agenda, which resulted in tens of millions of fatalities and an unimaginable amount of suffering and injustice. With our current neuroarchitecture, could this happen again? That is, right now? Most certainly not! Consider again the neuro-phenomenological basis for cruelty and selfishness: very specific neural dynamics are needed for feelings like hatred and cruelty to arise. We know today exactly, in precise detail, how neural substrates have to be genetically encoded so that such horrid feelings are completely impossible. Consequently, no aversive feelings can even potentially emerge in any of us. This is neuro-phenomenologically ensured: appropriate genetic measures ensure that no individual will ever in their life have ghastly, horrid feelings and thoughts that could harm others. After all, we live in the Euphenomenological Age now, Thomas. Everything we feel and think is necessarily wonderful and sublime. And the well-being of other sentient beings matters to us as much as our own!” 

Adam’s words were accompanied by a magical look of rapturous joy. He was obviously so convinced of what he was saying that Thomas was beginning to be deeply touched. Yes, there remained much confusion and scepticism, but nevertheless, a warm feeling of acceptance was slowly unfolding in his mind. Maybe, just maybe, he could eventually accept that this truly and essentially was a paradisiacal world. It actually made sense, concerning what Adam just had said. But Adam momentarily halted his sermon and said, “Thomas, observe!” 

The vehicle they were on flew closer to the ground and Thomas stared at what he would definitely describe as the most ambrosial, heavenly, transcendental view that he had ever encountered. Tears trickled from his eyes. Meadows so rich, so radiant and so bright, a kaleidoscopic ocean of divine, lovely blossoming flowers that were not only the most visually enticing, jewel-like sculptures of matter and energy Thomas had ever witnessed, but also provided the most delightful olfactory therapy to his troubled mind. He was awe-struck, filled with euphoric amazement that rapturously permeated his whole body, as if it was carried in his blood to every cell. And the most emotionally stirring, the most soul-soothing element of this heavenly scenery were the other-worldly creatures inhabiting what could only be referred to as the physical manifestation of pure beauty. Thomas saw lovely sheep-like beings pleasurably grazing, endearing bunny-like creatures hopping around, and other organisms he couldn’t even begin to describe immersed in what appeared to him as soul-unifying communions. Even more impressively, all this occurred next to feline creatures which exhibited, no, which vastly surpassed, the aesthetic elegance displayed by the most impressive, dominant Siberian tiger that had ever existed. With amazement, Thomas realized that none of the herbivore creatures were even slightly afraid of the felines next to them: Isaiah’s proverbial prophecy that the lion shall one day lie down next to the lamb without violence had, miraculously and seemingly against all conceivable odds, become reality. How was that possible, such an incomprehensible display of paradisiacal peacefulness and existential joy? Thomas kept staring and he even wanted to keep doing so forever, for he never wanted to lose this soul-curing sight of the most genuine Platonic form of joyful peacefulness. Thomas was sensually, emotionally, and intellectually blown away.

Their flight was also a journey of unimaginable majesty. Everything Thomas saw colored his consciousness with such a rosy, lovely texture that he had completely forgotten his previous reservations. All thoughts about how this was possible now seemed unimportant, as nothing more than wonderfully irrelevant pieces of cognition buried under a triumphal blast of phenomenal amazement. He and Adam finally landed, and he felt almost too weak to get up and start walking again. The overwhelming splendor of this world was so intoxicating to him that he felt heavily sedated by its very presence. In his heart, he wished he could just go back one more time to that divine meadow and lay there forever, forever immersed in soul-satisfying serenity. But this proved to be just a fleeting piece of lovely imagination, for Thomas needed to find clarification, or at least something he could hold onto. At the moment he appeared to reenter a painfully ambivalent state, Adam comforted, “Come, Thomas: let’s walk around. I will show you many more details that will make you understand how wonderful life is here!” 

Thomas followed, humbled by what he had previously seen.

There was again the amazing, bustling activity of myriads of stunning forms of life, a delicate compilation of the most sensually and emotionally inspiring fauna and flora. It was a breathtaking exhibition of utopian extravagance and magnificence. But something had changed: Thomas now saw other human beings, which alleviated his loneliness. However, this feeling was of a very transient nature: would he ever understand these people here? They were not as he earlier had thought, that is, blissed out on drugs, but rather blissed-out as a matter of their genetic constitution. They were designed to be happy, compassionate, intelligent, and long-lived. He saw groups of people sitting in groups, laughing and exuding a sense of pure cheerfulness and freedom. Some were giggling and didn't stop; this, however, didn’t appear to Thomas as a form of uncontrolled insane mania, but rather a most wonderful, sane type of well-being. He saw other people in a contemplative manner, radiating Buddhist-like inner peace. Suddenly, he saw a group of about fifteen people passionately dancing around, singing loudly yet articulately and with perfect pitch, all the while being almost completely nude. Thomas watched them with awe. But it wasn’t just the striking elegance of their movements that so deeply stirred Thomas; it was their whole, general appearance. Some of these lovely moving humans were girls of such wonderful beauty that Thomas’ mind fixated on how such a thing was possible, even with technology. At this moment, Thomas felt, for the first time in his entire life, a whole-body rapture of animalistic sexual arousal coupled with the most pristine feeling of emphatic-euphoric cleanness. Thomas couldn’t stop staring at these beautiful creatures, whose gold-colored, flawless bodies of the most exquisitely erotic forms swirled around, as if to lure him into their arms. Every move they made caused a deeply gratifying wave of explosive erotic arousal and soul-touching love rippling through his being. He just couldn’t stop staring; there was this almost uncontrollable compulsion to run over to them to passionately embrace them and then make love to them, forever. But the thought alone of even touching their more than perfect, radiantly glowing skin that unfolded itself in divinely gorgeous curves to compose the most delicately erotic body was almost too overwhelmingly unbearable for Thomas, for next to them he felt misshapen, dirty, uncouth, calloused, inexperienced, and yes, nervous. 

But Thomas’ crudely stern neocortex was still strong enough to cause a quick spastic turn away from these truly paradisiacal angels. Although Thomas had escaped from their immediate sphere of almost irresistible allure, the feelings of arousal and love he felt more than just lingered on Thomas’ phenomenal landscape. He couldn’t help but ask Adam, though he felt very embarrassed to do so, “Do people here still have sex? What about those girls over there, are they all,” and here Thomas hesitated, but finally couldn’t resist asking, “are they all virgins or do they also have sex?” 

Thomas felt deeply ashamed the moment his words left his lips, and it almost appeared to him that he had befouled these lovely creatures by merely asking such a base question. 

Adam good-naturedly laughed, replying, “Oh, Thomas, how could you possibly know? People, and all other living creatures, for that matter, nowadays enjoy sex much more often and more gratifyingly than people in the Darwinian Ages. Let me give you again an analogy. To quote Timothy Leary, a Darwinian who was a heavy user of the powerful psychedelic substance LSD, ‘Compared with sex under LSD, the way you have been making love – no matter how ecstatic the pleasure you think you think you get from it – is like making love to a department-store-dummy.’ So you see certain potent phenomenological pharmacoenhancers in this Darwinian already revealed to him that the exquisiteness and intensity of both sexual intercourse and climax could be vastly enriched. Nowadays, the texture of the most exalted erotic feelings experienced by a Darwinian individual seems much less rewarding to us than it seemed to Timothy Leary to copulate in a chemically unassisted Darwinian state of mind. We have a breathtakingly delicate neuro-phenomenological architecture for erotic, and other, feelings.

“And we also have a much vaster array of modes for sexual intercourse. While orgies were seen as frivolous back in the Darwinian Ages, today many people enjoy them of both supreme erotic and emphatic character. People can truly love many individuals at the same time and thus can express their expansive, all-life encompassing feelings of erotic-emphatic love by indulging in one big climactic orgy. But many other modes of sexual fulfillment exist nowadays. Many people still prefer the ancient, monogamous way of bonding. And while in Darwinian times the intensity of the first prickling, overwhelming euphoric sensations of love quickly subsided and gave way to a more-or-less monotonous existence for the pair, couples here can experience these wonderful feelings of pure love indefinitely if they so choose. Other people enjoy marvelous forms of psychedelic autoeroticism in the spheres of immersive virtual reality where they can make love that feels unbelievably authentic and fulfilling than their most deeply wished fantasy.” 

Thomas couldn’t believe all that. He more and more felt a vigorous energetic arousal to taste the ambrosial delights offered in this world. However, new emotionally intoxicating sights made Thomas soon forget, at least temporarily, about the most erotic sight he had ever witnessed. He walked with Adam and passed a loving couple sitting in a floral construct that seemed like the perfect lover’s nest who were gazing tenderly into each other's eyes whilst holding hands and slipping moment to moment into passionate but gentle kiss-sprees.

How was such aesthetic, erotic, emphatic, euphoric, wonderful glory possible? How could the people here even function? Were they truly happy? And was it justifiable that they were happy? Did they never get bored? Were they all the same? Did they have a personal identity? Did they ever feel authentic? Were they even human anymore: were they missing out? And how was this all possible, given the complexity of the brain? All these questions sped through Thomas’ mind, so he didn’t know which one he should inquire to Adam. He decided to blurt them all out: “How can these people function? How is such a complex civilization possible if everyone here is so happy all the time? What about productivity, discipline, and efficiency? Honestly, if I was given the chase, I myself would just lie around all day, doing nothing but being happy or having sex! And what if these people encounter noxious stimuli; how do they manage themselves effectively?” 

Adam answered, “All of the points you have brought up are valid: inducing mass bliss that doesn’t cripple intelligent agency was a very big challenge, as Pearce recognized centuries ago. After all, how could we overcome the evolutionarily-ensured coupling of phenomenology and functionality? Well, there was a very easy intuitive solution to this issue that proved a little more complicated to realize neuro-phenomenologically!

“To clarify, we basically realized what David Pearce had already proposed at the beginning of the 21st century. Evolution ensured the pursuit of biologically valuable stimuli that would help an organism propagate its genes through the pursuit of feelings of value and the avoidance of biologically disvaluable stimuli through their being coupled with disvalue. However, from an ethical, truly humane value perspective, it would be so much better to switch from a value-disvalue dichotomy to value, or pleasure, gradients. And that’s exactly what we did! We have ensured a neuro-phenomenological system of gradients of bliss: now all sentient beings constantly feel happy, though they are not strung out, given how they enjoy life to different degrees to help them adapt to any situation they find themselves in. Consequently, we do have an information-sensitive system, and a very effective, not to mention heavenly, one at that. As I have already told you, we are not all blissed-out as you might suspect, Thomas. We are not on one big plateau of orgasmic bliss; on the contrary, we function very efficiently through gradients of bliss. Let’s consider the example of a healthy individual on cocaine as an imperfect but still useful analogy. By way of explanation, cocaine can make one feel very euphoric and happy while one is enjoying its benefits, but one still can experience different degrees of bliss. The recipient will still desire sex due to it leading to even greater happiness for him. If he realized he had lost his wallet, he would fervently search for it, since he would feel worse off without it. Nevertheless, he would feel throughout his cocaine-fuelled high exalted and happy whilst still being capable of responding more or less appropriately to stimuli in their environment. 

“Of course, this analogy is quite misleading because cocaine was unsophisticatedly crude and incomparable to our present neuro-euphenomenological architecture. But it is nevertheless instructive. We function very well in an environment of stimuli of varying degrees of positive significance. What matters is that our hedonic tone, our moment-to-moment well-being, has been sublimely lifted by orders of magnitude. However, through dips of well-being, we can still decide between different actions which will subsequently make us happy to different degrees. And we find so many things so outrageously wonderful that different people have different preferences and thus do different things. But they all share the phenomenological property of deeply-felt happiness and compassion so that although everyone here passionately indulges in what they truly prefer, no one acts without thoroughly and intelligently evaluating their actions in accordance with the well-being of others.” 

Adam, having answered Thomas’ question, smiled back at him and waited for a response or a new question. Thomas, however, needed some time to let these statements sink into his brain; he needed to sceptically scrutinize them. It seemed to be such a wonderful way of dealing with the world. Instead of managing everything through pain or happiness, one manages life by feeling either just good or very good. What a great idea it actually was, Thomas thought, reminding him of a remark he had heard while in the business world: an ideal solution is simple yet extremely effective, one that, when not only discovered but widely embraced, will leave individuals asking how they managed their lives, tasks, and enjoyments so long without it. That sentiment, he viewed, embodied Pearce’s ideal of intelligent lives through information-sensitive gradients of bliss. Additionally, he felt sorry that he had never even heard of David Pearce in his life in the Darwinian Ages. How sad that he was now regarded with such admiration by not just all of humanity, but all sentience, all living creatures that had the capacity to do so while being virtually and grossly neglected back in the Darwinian Ages! But Thomas then thought of all the great prophetic thinkers in human history who had suffered similar fates: Nicolaus Copernicus, who believed and expounded the idea of Earth possessing a heliocentric orbit, Galileo Galilei, who found that other planets had moons as well, Giordano Bruno, who discovered that Earth was not the only world in the universe and was burnt alive on charges of heresy, Thomas Paine, an expounder of human rights and democratic principles who was abandoned by the country he dedicated his life to for his compassion and consistency, Charles Darwin, the discoverer of evolution by natural selection, Louis Pasteur, the discoverer of vaccines who was ridiculed for years for his theory, John Brown, the abolitionist who fought a personal war against slavery and paid for it with his life, Ignaz Semmelweis, who popularized handwashing and was savagely mocked for it for years until he went insane and died in an asylum of physical injuries, Horace Wells, the father of anaesthesia, who faced crass, moronic objections to the gift he had given to the world and who ended up taking his own life in an abject state, John Howard Moore, who urged taking into consideration of all living, feeling creatures and who was ignored by the masses of his time, and Nikola Tesla, who revolutionized the world through his discovery and promotion of alternating current, only to run into repeated financial trouble due to the poverty and incredulity of the imaginations of his contemporaries, among others. 

All of these admirable individuals had something in common: they were not only neglected, but openly ridiculed, mocked, and scorned in the time following their proposing their fabulous ideas. Human imagination and openness for fundamentally new, innovative ideas was just unfortunately not just extremely limited, but violently reactionary and bigoted. However, though intellectual and ethical progress may appear to be a distant dream at times, it nonetheless remained true that they would eventually triumph, even after delays of decades and centuries. And in that form those who dedicated themselves to the pursuit of truth live on: they die not because the ideas they supported and taught to others resulted from their efforts. Though their lives by themselves are truly gone, their wisdom and goodness continue to exist and create a better world: their spirits not only metaphorically walk abroad, but are now more prominent than ever before. After all, it was by their effort that such a wonderful world had come into fruition: if they were only alive to see the current state of the world, they would see all of their strivings as not only vindicated but fundamentally justified. 

But although Thomas was deeply inspired by the idea of living with gradients of well-being instead of having to bear the dichotomy of pleasure and pain, he nevertheless wondered if these people were not missing out on attributes that constituted their being human.

He spoke, “Adam, I do think the idea of gradients of bliss is wonderful. Here, at least, it obviously works extremely well. I can see all this love and peace, but it seems superficial and fake to me: these people sometimes act like they’re drunk or on drugs. Do you ever feel like you’re truly yourself?” 

Adam exclaimed, “Thomas, there is not one moment in anyone’s life anymore in which rich individuality, confidence, and self-regard don’t suffuse one’s whole phenomenological realm. The feeling of being truly oneself, alive, and whole is based on very complex neural dynamics. While alcohol, opium, and many other psychoactive substances usually lead to feelings of depersonalization, wonderful phenomenology-enhancers such as MDMA or, even more pronouncedly, Pearcin intensify this feeling of being oneself and feeling completely and utterly alive. Today, the feelings of depersonalization and derealization are impossible to have. Sophisticatedly wired neural systems ensure that authenticity and vitality are intensely possessed and felt in every moment of one’s conscious existence.” 

If that was actually true, thought Thomas, how wonderful it must feel. He increasingly felt a powerful urge to feel like that, even if it was just for one moment, to see if it was actually possible. He just wanted to try a substance and see if he could truly reach his neurochemical potential. Conceptually, however, it seemed so difficult to envision for him, in no small way due to his being used to, even as a “privileged” member of the Darwinian Ages, totally deprived of such wondrous opportunities. 

Thomas, still rebellious, spurted, “But isn’t everyone the same? Everyone here seems identical, equally happy! How can there be diversity without pain and suffering? And what about personal freedom and growth? How can I choose who I want to be if I’m a genetically engineered person?” 

Adam calmly answered, “Thomas, the situation here couldn’t be more different than that. But first ask yourself this: if everyone feels truly authentic, happy, fulfilled, realized, and unique, is there really a need for them to be truly different? I don’t think so, but this is beside the point, since everyone is very different here: the gaps between the average individual here is much greater than the largely arbitrary differences concerning those of your time, the Darwinian Ages, due to our greater imaginations, personalities, and abilities. In regards to our policies, we obviously don’t make the genetic code of every sentient being the same. There is an effectively unlimited number of possibilities of how neural circuits can be wired. We have just ensured that no one can experience aversive feelings anymore: only sublime state-spaces can be felt, and intensely so. So yes, there are vast differences in people’s preferences, thoughts, hobbies, and emotional nuances. 

“Just look around, Thomas. You see very lively and active people, whereas others are contemplative, David and I are very motivated scholars and you would regard us by your standards as heavy workaholics. But we are all so unimaginably happy every moment of our lives. There are very productive and creative artists, athletes, philosophers, architects, scientists, mathematicians, entertainers, amongst countless others of all imaginable tastes and flavors; the list just doesn’t end, even for our imaginations. We now know more than ever before regarding happiness, and what Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once said, specifically, that we have no idea what great states of happiness and delights lay in store for us, is a monumental truth concerning the world. Arthur Schopenhauer, a pessimistic though uncannily accurate philosopher, wrote in his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, that the Darwinian Ages was a time where misery was so common and intense that it was easy to describe various hells, yet when it came to describing paradises, the imaginations of authors usually missed the mark due to their lacking appropriate material in their everyday lives. Not so for the world as it has now become, Thomas. The big difference between this world and the Darwinian Ages is that everyone can completely fulfill their innermost desires in a superhealthy manner and develop themselves without being faced with deprivation, distress, and suffering. Besides, Thomas, we find a much wider range of environmental stimuli significant and worth pursuing compared, in no way meant to offend, to Darwinians such as yourself. 

“Yes, I know the sentiment that everyone could become whatever he wanted to be through hard work and determination was a very widespread one in the Darwinian Ages. However, it was more neo-cortically-mediated wishful thinking than affective phenomenal reality: genes were outstandingly strong dispositions that shaped one’s personality in a very deterministic manner. As I have already pointed out, at the beginning of the 21st century, it was already known that there was a serotonin transporter polymorphism that largely predisposed people either to be happy and social or depressive and anti-social. People with a certain amino acid sequence of the serotonin transporter were much more likely to have a depressive and anxious temper. Yes, of course, these people could work very hard and achieve a multitude of things. But the phenomenological price they had to pay was very high. They had to go a very difficult path; they would only rarely be in a great mood or enjoy dealing with others. They truly were genetic losers, which evolution ensured to exist through stable genetic polymorphisms that usually paid off in terms of reproductive opportunities at the end of the day. There are many other examples of genetic polymorphisms with tragic, cruel, and unfair phenomenal consequences. So personal freedom and self-determination in the Darwinian Ages were not much more than empty verbalisms. And then, of course, you have poverty and want, which made the lives of virtually every living being in the Darwinian Ages very difficult: wild animals frequently starved to death or died of parasitic infections and disease while humans scrambled for paid tasks to enable themselves and those close to them to avoid a similar fate. 

“Regressing to the idea of phenomenology, evolution didn’t enable neocortical cognitive abilities to have influential power over sub-neocortically arising emotional-instinctive feelings. Yes, one could attempt to follow Leo Tolstoy’s saying, ‘If you want to be happy, be’! But that was nothing more than an empty, though well-meaning, neo-cortically supported verbalism that ignored the strong neuro-phenomenal independence of the sub-neocortically arising affective experiential space. One could say all day long that one was truly happy, but one usually and unfortunately wouldn’t feel its actual phenomenal texture. If it was otherwise, antidepressants, which did much more to abolish the texture of phenomenal unpleasantness than cognitive-emotive self-help, certainly would never have become as popular as it was during the Darwinian Ages.

“But Thomas, today personal freedom and self-determination have actual phenomenal significance since one can truly become whoever one wants to be. First, we have genetically designed a neocortical neural system that has a strong influence over affective neural structures. So one now can actually choose how one wants to feel and be: I can more-or-less freely choose how my affective experiential space is textured. But while this neuro-phenomenal tool of emotional self-selection is plastic only to a certain degree, which still vastly surpasses the meager degree of Darwinian emotion-selection plasticity, we can make striking changes to how we feel in the short-run through pharmacology or long-lastingly via gene therapy: no more bruised and shattered self-images exist. People are no longer perpetually tortured by unattainable ideal self-images: everyone can be whoever they want here, in fact usually vastly surpassing their role models if said individuals lived during the Darwinian Ages. Deeply satisfied self-acceptance and self-love suffuse every moment of one’s existence here in the Euphenomenological Age. Life has become one wonderful, soul-satisfying climax of self-discovery and self-realization that happens in the most emphatic, compassionate manner possible, and in no way in the brutal, Darwinian, self-centered, antisocial way of purely egoistic self-assertion, boasting, slander, and struggle. 

“Besides, people don’t have to spend one second of their lives doing something they don’t thoroughly enjoy. Everything that is essential for the well-functioning of our world but that we have decided is not worth personally doing has been automated through insentient machines. You know yourself how many people in the Darwinian Ages had to perform menial labor that was absolutely unenriching and soul-sapping for those who had to stomach it. Sitting all day in a cubicle and doing nothing but filling out paperwork was a curse, not a blessing, for one’s mind. Again, it was rationalized by Darwinian society. It was better for people to soothe their own minds by convincing themselves that they should be grateful to have a job in the first place than to lament the fundamental phenomenal unpleasantness of their existence if they could do comparatively little to change their situation. But in retrospect, such scenarios no longer exist, and the traditional work environment is all but extinct, and no one, not even the most industrious worker today, who would make your most motivated Darwinian look like an inanimate stone, wishes for it to return.” 

This was a brutal blow for Thomas: his self-defense mechanisms ephemerally flared up, trying to vehemently refute Adam’s statement, but were soon subdued by a feeling of self-honesty. Yes, thought Thomas, his job was merely an existential necessity rather than a deeply fulfilling activity. Did he really thoroughly enjoy every moment of his work? Thomas, however, poignantly and clearly realized that he should have rather phrased the question in this manner: did he ever thoroughly enjoy doing his job? And wasn’t every moment that he didn’t thoroughly enjoy his life in some sense a lost moment if it didn't benefit the health of others? He thought about the economic principle of opportunity cost: a firm not only has to take the actual costs of production for a good into account, but also the lost financial gain from producing something else, something that might be much more worthwhile and profitable to produce. At the end of the day, didn’t the same principle apply with even more significance to the well-being of sentient creatures?

“Almost everyone in the Darwinian Ages,” continued Adam, “looked forward to the so-called weekend. But in our Euphenomenological Age, the weekend has become wholly obsolete. Every moment of everyone’s life is filled with a soul-satisfying sense of purpose, love, communion, and joy. We all love our existence so dearly that death is for us very unwelcome.” 

Death! Thomas couldn’t believe that he heard that word out of Adam’s mouth with such ease. So there was still a bad side to life after all: ghastliness still existed in paradise. Thomas probed, “You all die at some point?” 

Adam honestly nodded, “Yes, we unfortunately do. Anti-aging research and gerontology is progressing very quickly: humans nowadays live centuries longer than those in the Darwinian Ages. However, we eventually still perish, although this setup might soon be extinct, just like suffering, selfishness, laziness, and ignorance, for science is rapidly progressing and is likely to abolish aging altogether soon enough. Of course, those who want to be reanimated, which is virtually everyone, are always given the option of being put into cryonic storage upon clinical death: cryothanasia also exists as an additional safeguard. Thus, individuals who are still technically dead receive a second chance at life: if things go even half-well, they may reenter the world at some point and be reunited with their loved ones. Regardless, death by itself, compared to what it was like in the Darwinian Ages, doesn’t evoke any negative feelings in us. If a loved one dies, we experience a very gross dip in our well-being, but nevertheless, we are not sad or depressed. Would you truly want anyone you love to suffer when you die? Or would you rather want him to just deeply miss you because they truly cared for you whilst nevertheless still feeling happy?”

Thomas was confused. If he actually considered this scenario, he had to agree. If one loved someone dearly, one would never want that someone to suffer, even if one were to die. Appropriately, one would miss the deceased while not going through suffering. Still incredulous, Thomas pushed, “But how is that possible? I don’t understand.” 

Adam elucidated, “Well, think again about our gradients of bliss neuro-phenomenology. We can feel much less happy if something functionally bad occurs. Accordingly, if a loved one dies, one feels much less happy and deeply misses that individual. But our affective experiential space is never unpleasantly textured. Soul-wrenching sadness, depression, and pain are completely unknown to us.” 

Thomas thought, but wasn’t being sad sometimes a very soul-soothing state of mind? Wasn’t it wrong that one’s surviving loved ones were deprived of the opportunity of ever feeling sad to honor one’s memory? He raised the question, “I just wonder if you ever feel that you would like to know what it feels like to be sad or in pain. I myself sometimes like being sad: are you not missing out on something that is essentially human?” 

“Well, Thomas, to be perfectly honest, no one in this world would ever want to feel pain or misery. We all know what it feels like to be less happy through our gradients of bliss neuroarchitecture: we experience dips of well-being, and just thinking about choosing to feel much less happy to the point where one’s phenomenal texture changes from well-being to ill-being is unthinkable to everyone here. Everyone could, if he wanted to through genetic engineering, create neural structures that would texture their phenomenology negatively, but no one in the history of the Euphenomenological Age has ever done that, and I assure you no one, at least in their right mind, ever will: while there were plenty of critics to the idea of individuals gaining complete mastery over their emotions, intellect, and physique, after the transition to such a society where such proficiency became taken for granted, reversing what we have now to the past is literally inconceivable, or at least as conceivable as you voluntarily, in a ‘sane’ state of mind, to undergo open-heart surgery without anesthesia, antiseptics, and a trained, resourceful surgeon. Curiosity alone could never overcome the powerful inherent tendency to feel happy rather than sad. 

“Now, you say that you like to be sad sometimes. First, this is a neocortically-mediated rationalization that doesn’t fundamentally alter the actual phenomenal unpleasantness of the raw feeling of sadness. What you describe as ‘liking’ to be sad is not the ‘raw feel’ of sadness or pain but rather the affective textures that go along with it, such as the positive feelings of deep love, peacefulness, tranquillity, soul-soothing yearning, and nostalgia for those you love and have loved. However, all these positive aspects of being sad can still be felt without unhappiness. We today feel true authentic love whose depth and intensity are far beyond those a Darwinian could possibly comprehend with their undernourished neuro-phenomenology, much less experience. We still do cry out of consummate love and joy, often for hours, when we are deeply, that is, pleasantly, touched by those we love. We still passionately yearn and cherish memories. Besides, today we use sophisticated phenomenological pharmacoenhancers that enable humans to accentuate and enrich the texture of certain state-spaces. One can, for example, take powerful, sustainable psychostimulants, empathogens, entactogens, nootropics, psychedelics, etc. One will still always feel happy, empathic, euphoric, and motivated, but one can also precisely change the exact textural composition of one’s phenomenology to completely suit one’s taste. Thus, if one wants to spend an evening of romance instead of a day of enjoying the weak, inhibitory, and aphrodisiac effects of ethyl alcohol, one can take an aphrodisiac that will fill every waking moment with a serotonin-oxytocin-mediated surge of the most heavenly affection that is unfortunately quite inconceivable to even describe to you. So no one here misses out on anything positive: the only thing absent in the emotional repository of living beings here is emotional pain.”

Thomas was interested, but he was loath to dismiss his belief that people could be truly happy and experience passionate love without the need for gene therapy or drugs. With strong conviction, Thomas spoke, “But what about all those people in the Darwinian Ages who were actually happy and satisfied? They could experience love in wonderful ways and didn’t need genetic engineering or sophisticated drug cocktails.” 

Adam reassured, “I am sure, Thomas, that some people in the Darwinian Ages were quite happy and could experience deep love. But there are two things you must keep in mind. First, all those individuals were very lucky, since many other people who were abandoned, betrayed, ignored, or abused in their search for love had to undergo terrible emotional pain, agony that was so horrid that many of them chose suicide to terminate their suffering. And what if a loved one of those happy people died? They would usually of course suffer terribly: just read one of those novels penned in the Darwinian Ages that discussed lost love, two of the most prominent being The Raven and Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe. And how could that have ever been changed through mere environmental reforms? Should this useless suffering be allowed to continue indefinitely? Only a fundamental restructuring of the neuro-phenomenological architecture of the affective consciousness could sustainably lift everyone out of Darwinian squalor. Why should just a few lucky individuals enjoy life, at least for a time, while countless others writhe, mentally wounded or even crippled, in the wasteland of emotional deprivation? Why shouldn’t all people, all living creatures, be truly happy and able to experience the profoundest love? 

“How do we know that we are all really happier than people at the beginning of the 21st century? This can be answered by again appealing to our vastly different brains. A Darwinian who took, for example, MDMA would momentarily have an extremely elevated serotonin and oxytocin levels and a slightly activated dopamine system. The matter was actually far more complicated than that, but let’s just focus on the crux of the point I want to make. Thus, if a Darwinian was ‘naturally’ feeling good, they would nevertheless feel so much better on MDMA, since it would activate certain neurochemical processes that evolution prevented humans from experiencing under any environmental circumstances due to it not being conducive to their survival and reproduction. Only certain moments of regular life, for example, the birth of one’s child, were similar, and that was, again, only because it benefited one’s inclusive genetic fitness, as can be noted by how many of life’s happiest moments come hand-in-hand with the act and process of reproduction. Conversely, living beings are no longer throwaway, disposable vehicles for DNA replication: the neural fabric of our brains is much richer and sophisticated than that of people in the Darwinian Ages so that we necessarily feel much better and act nicer towards each other, not to mention our enjoying a much larger palette of pleasures. 

“Thomas, I think it’s time for me to give you a short overview of what we have done in this respect for the sake of clarification. First of all, the nervous system of people today gets intentionally shaped into a formidable construct of matter and energy from the very beginning. Neurodevelopment happens in a much more refined manner: it is marked by an elaborate form of synaptogenesis, where dendritic arborization occurs in a manner that ensures an affluence of proper synaptic connections way beyond the meager Darwinian level of synaptic richness. Precise, advantageous neuronal selection, migration, and myelination ensure that no malfunctioning circuits exist from the beginning. The pruning of synapses is very clean and the possibility of potentially harmful neural overexcitation that could lead to mental illnesses has been genetically eradicated. Overall, we have a much more prosperous, flourishing, and homeostatically harmonious trimonoaminergic system. Serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine work together in a fantastic harmony that ensures a sublime phenomenology. Negative feedback, the fuel of the hedonic treadmill, has been abolished where it is unwanted. This has been accomplished through the unimaginable precise and systematic purging of the ‘auto-receptor burden,’ which, figuratively spoken, was ancestrally used to brutally put an end to every neuron’s neurotransmittoral liveliness. More scientifically put, we genetically eradicated autoreceptors, somatodendritic as well as synaptic, in specific areas of the brain where they hampered neurochemical processes which were responsible for coding wonderful phenomenal well-being: we engineered certain nerve cells to do what old-fashioned phenomenological pharmacoenhancers such as MDMA already did, that is, overpoweringly release mood-boosting neurotransmitters constantly and without negative repercussions, an ingenious design of glorious phenomenal benefit. 

“Of course, the process of doing so was very complicated, so we proceeded with due caution when we embarked on this scientific journey. The Darwinian mind already had some pleasures known to it. Chiefly, it used its own morphine, the beta-endorphin, its own marijuana, known as anandamide, and many other endogenous substances that made up an elaborate endogenous polypharmacy. However, evolution didn’t design the mind to be able to perpetually experience the delightful phenomenal effects of these endogenously administered drugs: only minute amounts of them were produced that were released, as mentioned before, chiefly when individuals did activities that led to or facilitated their DNA replicating. They were, so-to-say, the chains with which our genes enslaved us. 

“While back in the beginnings of neuropsychopharmacology the trimonoaminergic system was the main target for phenomenological enhancement, an eye-opening plethora of other neurotransmitter systems has been targeted so far. But not only has the process of neurotransmission been astonishingly improved, but also the efficiency of signal transduction has risen. To get a little more specific, one of the striking differences between our Post-Darwinian neuro-euphenomenology and the Darwinian neuro-phenomenology concerns the neural architecture of so-called hedonic spots. A key player in this respect is the phylogenetically well-conserved mesocorticolimbic dopamine system. First, we have to distinguish between two separate neural systems, the dopaminergic and opioidergic, both of whose texture affected one’s affective experiential space, though the way in which they affected it was difficult to discern. While the mesolimbic dopamine system generally textures the affective consciousness with the qualia of ‘wanting’, the mesolimbic opioid system colors one’s affective space with the qualia of ‘liking’. However, the qualia of ‘wanting’ can be experienced in many different phenomenal flavors, ranging from the weak desire to eat to the most exalted feeling of life-loving euphoria. While the qualia of ‘liking’ refers to the ‘raw feeling’ of pleasure, it can vary as well in its phenomenal character, existing from the mild pleasure gained from eating to the sublime pleasure of a full-blown orgasm. Thus, these two qualia can be phenomenologically intertwined, leading to a texture of subjectively rewarding feelings. So we have enhanced both the dopaminergic and opioidergic systems with much finesse.

“The mesolimbic system is a complex neural construct with many substructures. Especially important for phenomenological enhancement was the restructuring of its shell. Thomas, there is a lot of overwhelming complexity that requires a deep understanding of neurochemistry, so I will spare you the exact details. But I still want to mention some wonderful features of our heavenly neuro-phenomenological architecture: in the medial shell of the nucleus accumbens, which is part of the mesolimbic system, there are special types of neurons called GABAergic medium spiny projection neurons, which fire quite vigorously in both the rostral and dorsal part of the medial shell of the nucleus accumbens. Now, dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens disrupts the firing of these GABAergic medium spiny projection neurons, leading to quite magnificent phenomenal effects, namely a feeling of wanting that can take on the guises of the already mentioned various textural flavors. If these neurons are strongly disrupted in the rostral part of the medial shell of the nucleus accumbens, an ambrosial feeling of euphoric bliss is the consequence. In the Darwinian Ages, such a feeling was very rare and completely encephalized. That is, evolution ensured that only objects of high fitness value, that is, activities that would powerfully propagate one’s genes, such as having intercourse with sexual partners, would induce such a feeling. Later in the Darwinian Ages, powerful dopaminergic drugs such as cocaine, which unfortunately couldn’t sustainably introduce euphoric bliss, were utilized by individuals willing to cheat the hedonic treadmill. 

“However, if the firing of glutamate neurons in the dorsal part of the medial shell of the nucleus accumbens was to be disrupted, this led to a feeling of aversion. Take the analogy of a car moving forwards and backward for an organism moving to the signals of its endogenous opioid system. Evolution by natural selection ensures that the car stands pretty much still when nothing happens if its surface is smooth and flat. If a potentially aversive stimulus is experienced, the backward drive is put in and the car tries to get away from it and phenomenological unpleasantness. If a potentially beneficial stimulus is encountered, the car is put in the forward drive and moves towards phenomenological pleasantness. However, we have done three ingenious things to ensure the most pleasant phenomenology. Namely, we increased the number of mesolimbic dopamine neurons substantially, then tuned up the constant firing of dopamine neurons in the rostral part of the medial shell of the nucleus accumbens, and finally got rid of glutamate firing disruption in the dorsal part, thereby abolishing phenomenal unpleasantness. Of course, a lot more had to be done to ensure a complete lack of phenomenal unpleasantness in every sentient being. But this was a very important first step. Now, as I have already mentioned, a constant feeling of euphoric bliss would prevent us from intelligently interacting with our environment. Thus, to maintain our intellects, although we have vastly tuned up the dopamine firing rates, we have also ensured differential firing rates to mediate information sensitivity. This is the neural basis for our phenomenal system of gradients of bliss. 

“We have also insightfully and efficiently reconfigured the neural substrates for phenomenal liking. There is a large hedonic hotspot network that stretches throughout the brain, with three components as the fundamental key players, namely the rostral dorsal region of the medial shell of the nucleus accumbens, the caudal portion of the ventral pallidum, and the parabrachial nucleus of the brainstem pons. Here the firing rates of opioidergic and endocannabinoidergic neurons texture one’s affective space with pleasure. Again, what we have accomplished is a higher moment-to-moment, de-encephalized feeling of emotional well-being. Imagine you’re eating one of your favorite foods. Now dissociate the phenomenology in your brain from the food. We now feel just as good or even better without having to eat. But again, gradients of pleasure mediated through differential firing rates of opioidergic and endocannabinoidergic neurons ensure that we feel even better when we eat or perform certain activities. Isn’t that wonderful, Thomas? We have retained, no, enhanced our intelligence, motivation, and compassion while augmenting our well-being!” 

Thomas was blown away. All that neurobabble sounded so scientific and convincing. He believed that Adam knew exactly what he was talking about, for he radiantly exuded a sense of genuine, friendly trust-worthiness that he had never encountered before.

But if all Adam described was true, then these people, these Post-Darwinians, actually felt better than Darwinians ever could, since their brains were intelligently and wonderfully designed instead of just being nonsensically scrambled together by the crude, mindless, indifferent evolutionary logic of competition and resulting adaptation among selfish genes. 

Adam pressed forward, “But Thomas, the fabulous redesign of the mesolimbic dopamine system was a fundamental but nevertheless small step in comparison to the full scope of phenomenological enhancement. The serotonin and oxytocin systems, both of which were necessary for the full magic of our affective consciousness, proved much more complicated to restructure. As already mentioned, by the beginning of the 21st century fifteen naturally occurring serotonin receptor subtypes had been identified and this number gradually increased. Today, we know thirty-seven different serotonin receptor subtypes; most of them, however, were designed through human ingenuity and not by evolution. Very efficient signal transduction cascades that are coupled with these receptors allow access to very richly textured new state-spaces and sub-state-spaces of consciousness. We have, for example, four magnificent distinct emphatic-euphoric sub-state-spaces. It is a personal taste which one prefers, and they can be accessed through sophisticated phenomenological pharmacoenhancers and somatic gene therapy. I, for example, love the so-called y4-emphatic-euphoric sub-state space. What does it feel like? I can’t tell you that; it is entirely inconceivable to you, for now at least. Conjure up your deepest personal fantasy; a single moment in that sub-state space would put it to shame. Or more seriously, take an individual destroyed and weathered by the sufferings and turmoil of a Darwinian world and put them in our care: a few minutes in that variant of consciousness will enable them not only to be fully healed but completely invigorated and transfigured beyond all psychical recognition. Here even the frailest spirit can move mountains; everyone is at their best, or at least close to it, and they give and receive love on a scale that is impossible to even ask from Darwinians. 

“Today we have fantastic immersive virtual reality programs that can translate one’s phenomenology into representational objects so that one doesn’t need to solely rely on language to share one’s experience. But this virtual reality tool relies on the fact that people can access similar phenomenological realms. You are unfortunately completely unfamiliar with them, but I promise you, we have entire universes waiting for you.” 

With a tilt of his head, Adam gently asked, “Have you ever thought about making use of our phenomenological enhancement technology?”

Thomas was briefly paralyzed and speechless. While he did genuinely want to experience their neuroarchitecture, he was also worried. Of course, he recognized that even one ephemeral glimpse into the phenomenal realms they referred to as euphenomenology would likely dissolve all of his worries and scepticism. 

In the end, shouldn’t he be obligated to see what he was missing out on, to experience the world of Post-Darwinians? How could one argue verbally if the crux of the argument was not verbal in nature but experiential? Wouldn’t it be irrational for Thomas to keep on arguing with empty a priori arguments instead of powerful empirical data? Wouldn’t it be inadequate for him to hold up bland scientific claims without performing experiments of the most literal hands-on nature? Wasn’t it equally insufficient for him to argue against phenomenological enhancement without having ever, not even once, empirically tested it out, tried it out for himself with an open mind? Thomas then realized his previous opinion, the opinion he had held less than an hour ago, changed: he no longer considered better living through technology abolishing suffering and introducing superhappiness a weakness, a helpless succumbing to one’s quirks, but rather a self-empowering, rational, and even outright essential act. After all, what else is technology for? And nature being frequently woefully cruel called for it being used as such once intelligent moral agents have acquired the necessary means to do so. “Yes,” exclaimed Thomas in an almost inappropriately loud and energetic way. “I am willing to see what your lives are actually like: what do I have to do?” 

Adam walked to Thomas and hugged him as if he was his brother, which took away many of Thomas’ remaining doubts. Tears of gratitude appeared in Adam’s eyes when he said with a voice of pure emphatic exaltation, “I am so unimaginably happy, Thomas, that you have decided to pursue this option. You will feel so happy, so compassionate, so alive, that you will love living in a way you never thought possible before. You will be able to think about your family with undiluted love and cherish the memories you have of them: there are many options open for you to actively pursue. But to give you an initial hint of the biological paradise that awaits you, you should take a short-acting pharmacoenhancer that is suited to your genome. I will immediately have a magical elixir specifically tailored for you prepared.” 

Adam was glowing with joy and Thomas was visibly marked by excitement, though he was still slightly confused and anxious, even after all he had experienced.

Adam continued, “Thomas, before you are transfigured through phenomenal sublimity, we should get something to eat to assure an optimal availability of vital nutrients for both your physical and mental well-being. Besides, you will see what culinary specialties are on offer here. Are you hungry?”

Although the anxious excitement Thomas was suffused with had largely subdued his desire to eat, Adam’s mentioning of food empowered his lingering affective remains of hunger. But he desired food not only because of his raw feeling of wanting in the form of the strong desire to eat, but also out of an encephalized, neocortically-mediated cognitive motivation, seeing how it would be very wise to nourish his body before fundamentally transcending into something better. The anticipated strangeness of the food awaiting him only slightly held back his potent encephalized affective urge. Thomas answered in the affirmative, “I would love to get something to eat!”

Since he now felt somewhat intimate with Adam, he added, “But I have to admit that I am a little bit afraid that the food you are used to will be bizarrely novel to me.”

Adam, who was overcome upon observing this displayed intimacy on Thomas’ side, immediately replied, “Oh Thomas, don’t be afraid: you will love our food, I guarantee that!” 

While they were walking through a garden of utterly bizarre yet homely sensual delights to an advanced, utopian version of what Thomas would have called a restaurant, Adam continued, “You have to know, Thomas, that our diet here is very different from what you were used to in the Darwinian Ages. To put it in Darwinian terms, we are all vegans here: we know that only a diminishingly small fraction of people were vegans back in the Darwinian Ages. Thomas, while this will indeed sound very strange to you, those living today cannot, absolutely cannot, truly understand how that was possible. We do indeed have some cognitive grasp of the ultimate evolutionary reasons behind it, but it still evades our conceptual and hence emotional imagination of how it was once considered fully acceptable to harm members of other species on the grounds of their biology.

“Thomas, we truly love every single sentient being and embrace it in our hearts with affection. It is so deeply against our very nature to reduce the happiness of another living creature that it is absolutely inconceivable to us what was going on in the Darwinian Ages, the intra and interspecies attitudes and behaviors that could, in Darwinian terms, only be described as horrid atrocities. Whereas in the past it was legal to eat products, especially flesh, that came from the bodies of other living, feeling creatures, today that is completely and utterly outlawed. Moreover, historians today puzzle over the myopia of those of the past: how could they only condemn ignoble atrocities against members of their own species while ignoring those against other groups of sentient beings? Indeed, many condemned the concentration and death camps of the German Nazis and the labor camps of the Soviet and Chinese Communists while ignoring the Eternal Treblinka, to quote the expansive, ethically consistent Isaac Bashevis Singer, in their own homes, backyards, kitchens, and towns! But John Howard Moore answered the incredulity of our historians centuries ago when he wrote that living beings are usually only partially emancipated: progress occurs only fitfully, and even then with massive struggle in the campaign to create a better future.”

Thomas, himself an avid meat-eater, wondered how one could possibly know that a nonhuman animal’s phenomenal texture was even close to that of a human being. How could one equate or even compare the “raw feelings,” the intensity of suffering of human beings, with those of nonhuman animals? Now that he thought about it, such a comparison was probably quite speculative and a blatant example of romantic anthropomorphism. What if plants could also feel? Then one had to miserably die of starvation or simply accept the fact that some beings always had to suffer for others to flourish. Thomas clearly felt relieved, though a subtle, agonizing feeling of self-serving deception still lingered in his mind. So he questioned, almost in a state of wrath, “But how do you justify this attitude? It is clear that other humans suffer, for they can express their pain. One thus has, so-to-say, proof of the phenomenal horridness they are subject to. Animals can’t do that. They lack so many phenomenal properties we have. On what evidence do you base your argument?” 

Adam, solemnly listening to Thomas’ words, responded, “It is true, Thomas, that we don’t have any actual infallible epistemological evidence that animals have an experiential space similar to ours. But if one is epistemologically exact, there is no evidence either that anyone except oneself exists, or that even if other beings exist, that they are actually sentient. It is possible to imagine another person to be absolutely devoid of phenomenology, but to still properly function. This is, obviously, just a hypothetical epistemological scenario, but it is nonetheless conceivable. But we still act as if other people have a phenomenology similar to one’s own due to linguistic exchange and body language. However, what about human toddlers? They can’t express their feelings with words, but nevertheless, it was usually and fortunately assumed in the Darwinian Ages by humans that they had feelings similar to one’s own. What about dogs and cats, which had been cherished dearly by a significant number of humans but could not verbally express their phenomenology? Thomas, remember that I revealed to you that an affective experiential space emerges out of sub-neocortically neuronal substrates, or more precisely, out of the ancient somato-visceral operating systems of the upper brainstem. The similarity of neural substrates out of which phenomenal unpleasantness emerged had been strikingly conserved down the vertebrate line in the Darwinian Ages due to it improving one’s inclusive genetic fitness. To reemphasize, this makes absolute sense if you again take into account how evolution coupled functionality and phenomenology: it ensured that a central nervous system created a primary consciousness with functional superiority to merely reflexive behavior of an unconscious mass. All the species of sentient life that were being systematically, routinely abused, incarcerated, tortured, exploited, sexually assaulted for the sake of stealing their resulting offspring, murdered, and devoured throughout the Darwinian Ages by human beings in factory farms, slaughterhouses, rodeos, vivisection and ‘research’ labs, confined spaces, and zoos such as cows, sheep, pigs, goats, chickens, fish, dogs, cats, rabbits, gorillas, and so on, had very similar neural blueprints for pain to that of humans. In general, there is ample reason to believe that sentient beings with a central nervous system have a unitary experiential space, which means they can experience a continuous strand of suffering throughout their lives. While other sentient beings, which lack the sophisticated structure of a central nervous system, such as crustaceans, probably don’t have a continuous experiential space, they nevertheless still have neural substrates out of which some form of pain can emerge. But as I have said, the phenomenology of this sort of pain appears to have been vastly different from that of beings endowed with a complex central nervous system, though this does not at all discount the pain they endured. It is now in wide consensus that all sentient beings deserve consideration, that of other species as well as our own. Of course, we aren’t humans anymore, so I couldn’t say ‘the human species,’ but I’m sure you understand what I’m trying to say, so long as your mind hasn’t been crippled by preconceived prejudices born out of self-interest. Do you understand now, Thomas?” 

And here Adam accordingly stopped and looked at Thomas with an expression of empathy and hope for his understanding. Everything Adam had just said seemed rational and made sense to Thomas. Thomas, of course, had no way of actually verifying the accuracy of the statements Adam just had made, so he could technically either accept or reject them. Of course, the lure of conveniently rejecting everything Adam had said so far, that all the sentient beings Thomas had ever consumed in his life had not suffered or at least only underwent just a minuscule amount of pain that was not even remotely comparable to the phenomenal nastiness of the suffering Thomas had had to endure throughout his life, was alluring. It would have been wonderfully convenient for him to believe that. But Thomas was simply unable to hold this belief in his mind as an honest conviction, for he would feel sickeningly deceived by his own mind. The pure, pristine form of what seemed to be genuine compassion, concern, and love that Thomas had witnessed and received from everyone, without exception, in the world he was now in utterly convinced him that they only wanted to help him: they would not try to purposely make him feel bad, or try to induce a guilt-trip in him for their amusement. Upon realizing the abominations in the face of largely irrefutable evidence he had unconsciously committed throughout the course of his life in the Darwinian Ages, he felt not only ashamed, but mentally crushed, emotionally soul-rotten, entirely suffused, riddled, and infested by a sickening, nauseating feeling of culpability. 

Adam, upon taking heed of his mental state, consoled, “Thomas, please don’t feel guilty about what you have unwittingly done: virtually none of the otherwise decent people who were directly or indirectly supporting the horridness of the Darwinian Interspecies Massacre were actually to blame for this unimaginable catastrophe. The Buddha once stated that ignorance is the greatest evil. That was very well said, for most of those who were, in Darwinian terms, guilty for the treatment of nonhuman animals in the Darwinian Ages, couldn’t have acted otherwise: every action that could be deemed evil comes from selfishness and ignorance. That is, no one actually chooses or even wants to be selfish and ignorant: Darwinians were selfish and ignorant due to their genetic makeup, biochemistry, and social conditioning, meaning they couldn’t have done otherwise. It was none other than Pearce himself who once wrote in a piece concerning non-human animal rights, The Post-Darwinian Transition, that ‘Under the eye of eternity, even a Hitler or a Pol Pot is no more guilty - or innocent - than a smallpox virus. For we are all animals. Our behavior is exhaustively described by a set of natural laws which we didn't choose and of whose playing out we are all a part.’ Many other glorious thinkers and individuals throughout history, including Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Baruch Spinoza, Bertrand Russell, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Sophocles, Charles Darwin, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Joseph Priestley, John Howard Moore, and Voltaire all said roughly the same thing, that is, they supported determinism, though their precise wordings obviously varied. Of course, the high likelihood of determinism being an accurate worldview was of absolutely no comfort whatsoever to both the humans and nonhumans who suffered horrendously in the Darwinian Ages, yet today we do everything we can to honor their memory, namely by doing whatever is within our power to ensure the well-being of all accessible sentience. 

“And that we have achieved: in our Euphenomenological Age, Pearce’s wonderfully ambitious Abolitionist Project to eradicate phenomenological unpleasantness altogether has been completed! We have not only purged emotional despair from the erstwhile human mind but from the affective consciousness of every sentient being on Earth: to correct myself, I’m being somewhat brash here. Regardless, transhuman civilization has employed the most sophisticated forms of biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and quantum-computing to utilize soma and germ-line gene therapy to abolish suffering and create superhappiness in even the humblest creature, down even to the deepest corner of the ocean to spare any sentient being pain. However, there might still be a few yet undiscovered, hidden sentient beings that are susceptible to suffering. At the current moment, there is an intensive global effort to clarify this. We will soon know, and if indeed there are any living beings who are still withering in suffering, we will immediately set out to transfigure them. But, on a lighter note, it is now known with absolute certainty that all vertebrate inhabitants of planet Earth enjoy every moment of their existence in unimaginably delightful, fulfilling, and intelligent realms of consciousness. Thomas, isn’t that something to celebrate, to strive for?” 

Adam started to light-heartedly dance next to Thomas and sincerely smiled, partially unveiling the unimaginable happiness behind his glad visage. When Thomas thought again of the heavenly scenes of the purest forms of loveliness he had encountered, such as the rich meadow inhabited by endearing, intelligent creatures, he was touched within: how could one ever harm these charming creatures and others like them? How could one ever kill them for gustatory delectations: how could an individual, including him in the past, cause another living creature a lifetime of distress just for a transient moment of crude pleasure? Such a thing appeared in all its crudeness and wickedness to Thomas in the corresponding intensity of its associated phenomenal dreadfulness.

Adam continued his narration: “Thomas, as you can see, the sentient beings living on Earth are now spared the consciousness-crippling viciousness characteristic of life in the Darwinian Ages. What we eat is now only phenomenally empty. That is, we grow them in laboratories, thus avoiding all of the cruelties associated with traditional methods of growing and harvesting food. Moreover, the food we now eat, by virtue of being precisely engineered, also tastes about a thousand-fold better than the best steak you have ever eaten in your life up to now. As I have already mentioned, we have a vastly enriched gustatory architecture that enables us to experience new, magnified, insanely pleasurable delights in regards to taste. Although it, unfortunately, won’t taste as good to you with your current biochemistry, I can promise you, Thomas,” and here Adam smiled jovially, “that you’ll love it nonetheless and even more so once you inhabit our phenomenal realms!” 

Thomas eagerly nodded his head, for he wanted to eat to assuage his gnawing hunger, to enjoy a pristine, fulfilling meal completely free of the exploitation of other living creatures.

After a short walk, Adam and Thomas reached what was referred to as a Gustatorium, which was, expectedly, as outlandishly wondrous as everything else in its vicinity. There were lucid screens on which Thomas could glimpse strange visual patterns. Adam guided, “Now, Thomas, what you can see here are interactive, personalized taste creators. We can choose through these ingenious devices the exact gustatory phenomenology of the food we consume. So everyone is their own all-powerful cook. Since this progress does require some expertise, due to its requiring the exact genetic make-up and one’s nutritional condition, as indicated by one’s blood test, to provide one with one’s ideal meal that is fine-tuned to one’s richly textured gustatory state space, I will give you a generalized meal, though I’m sure it will still be beyond enjoyable for someone who, until just a few hours ago, spent his entire existence in the Darwinian Ages.” 

And indeed the food was so! Thomas was reluctant to take his first bite since the sustenance looked so perfectly aesthetic. But as soon as he realized that he should have been reluctant when he had barbarously, thoughtlessly minced the flesh of other sentient beings in the past, he pushed past his fears and took a large bite with a feeling of relief and guiltlessness. He was then overwhelmed by sheer pleasure and enjoyment. As to its exact contents, what it actually tasted he couldn’t properly describe: all he could not about it was that it was a brilliantly balanced mixture of flavors that exceeded his sterile imagination for what constituted good cuisine. Thomas continued to eat with great, overpowering, enthusiastic fervor.

Chapter 7

After he had satisfied his hunger, his mind, which still contained a feeling of food-induced well-being, felt rejuvenated, empowering him to take the next step. Adam and Thomas continued to sit at the Gustatorium for a few more minutes, with Thomas actively enjoying in silence his marvelous surroundings as well as the fabulous aftertaste of the grandiose food he had consumed with such passion. 

 

“Now, Thomas,” Adam finally said in a cheerful tone, “are you ready to dwell in truly wonderful phenomenal spheres that have been completely unknown to you as of yet?”

 

Thomas, of course, was not really ready: how could he possibly have felt prepared to do something like that? How could a caterpillar really prepare itself to transfigure itself into a butterfly? Nonetheless, Thomas, with an almost trembling voice, spoke confidently, “Yes I am!” 

 

Adam beckoned, “Come with me, Thomas: I’ll take you to a wonderful place!”

 

They walked for about ten minutes, and on the way Adam picked up, specifically prepared for Thomas, a phenomenological pharmacoenhancer. Thomas had a prickling feeling everywhere in his body: he was shaking and sweating profusely. Adam put his arm around Thomas’ shoulder and comforted with a quiet, soothing voice, “Thomas, it will feel just wonderful! It will unveil happiness that you never thought possible, and will open the path to paradise. Just trust me, Thomas.” 

 

Adam led Thomas to a little hill from where one would have a breathtaking, panoramic view of the ambrosial landscape. They sat down on what reminded Thomas of a park bench, but only faintly due to its pleasant unearthliness. They were encircled by floral exotica of sensual glory. About five meters away bunnies were good-naturedly chasing each other without a care in the world and without fear of all of the stresses of the Darwinian Ages that was in retrospect just some centuries ago. Thomas, thinking to himself, knew that there was probably no place that could have provided a more positive environmental backdrop for his phenomenal transfiguration.

Adam, glancing upwards at the sky, then retrieved from a pristine container a pill that was exquisitely shaped and colored. It appeared to Thomas in the most alluring light. Was this the end of his Darwinian existence? Would he, from now on, be spared the maliciousness of phenomenal unpleasantness? Would, from now on, every moment of his existence be suffused with pure, unadulterated, authentic life-loving euphoria, goal-directed incisiveness, unstoppable determination, profound self-love, and deeply-felt, sympathetic, emphatic love of other beings? And would he not only retain his present intellect but witness it grow light-years past its current boundaries? Most importantly, would it make him the kind of person he should’ve been his entire life? This seemed a wonderful prospect well beyond his comprehension and appreciation that still appeared to him as wishful thinking. 

The silence broke with Adam passing the pill and a glass of deliciously sweet fluid that served as water. Smiling, he instructed, “Thomas, you can chew or just swallow the pill: it doesn’t make a difference. It will take about twenty minutes for you to feel the first changes in your consciousness. The pill will be readily taken up by your gastrointestinal tract and transported via your bloodstream to your brain, where it will easily cross the blood-brain barrier and transfigure your neuro-phenomenology by bringing about profound, life-enriching, amazing changes. Enjoy, Thomas!”

Adam placed the pill and the glass of liquid into Thomas’ strongly trembling and profusely sweating hands. Thomas’ heartbeat and blood pressure were skyrocketing. Waves of anxious excitement sprinted up and down his body. He stared at the pill for a second and then rapidly swallowed it with a sip of the radiant liquid. Remaining seated, the next twenty minutes seemed like an eternity to him. 

Then, out of the blue, the texture of his phenomenology began to gradually but intensely change. A big grin grew on Thomas’ face, and teardrops slowly ran down his cheeks. What he felt isn’t what we would call happiness, or even complete elation, for it was orders of magnitudes more powerful. As the happiness and love for himself and others deepened as he was biochemically, fundamentally enriched beyond all comparison, he took a moment of silence of thankfulness and gratitude to honor and hold in memory all those who lived, suffered, and died in the Darwinian Ages and who, at best, experienced only a drop of what he was currently experiencing: a single moment of life in the Euphenomenological Age would wipe away all their regrets, sufferings, disappointments, sorrows, and traumas. The numerous wounds Thomas had received from life in the Darwinian Ages were completely healed and soothed: all of his previous sufferings appeared to him as vague dreams compared to the intensity of the heavenly, blissful, compassionate life he was going to live and had only experienced for some seconds. Indeed, what he felt at that moment could only be verbally hinted at in the words of Alexander Shulgin commenting on his MDMA experiences: “I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria. I have never felt so great, or believed this to be possible. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience. Everyone must get to experience a profound state like this. I feel totally peaceful. I have lived all my life to get here, and I feel I have come home. I am complete.” 

And Thomas had finally arrived in paradise: he was, at long last, home.

 

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Neuroaffective Enhancers
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Brave New World Revisited (1958) by Aldous Huxley