Utopian Neuroscience

How happy do you want to be? Happiness is the main emotional state that many people strive to attain through varied and often circuitous routes. The philosopher David Pearce believes in the reductionist view of happiness, that all positive and negative human emotions are the result of an individual's own brain chemistry. He argues that in the future, every mental state imaginable can be categorized and potentially enhanced or improved upon through the applied use of technology (technohedonism). The name of his philosophy is called abolitionism and it is a bioethical movement that seeks to maximize happiness and minimizing involuntary mental suffering in all sentient beings. The movement is based upon Pearce's manifesto, "The Hedonistic Imperative". Recently, Pearce gave a talk about utopian neuroscience in the virtual reality computer game second life and you can read an overview of that talk, including common objections to the project here. Pearce talks about the promise of future technologies in improving the human condition.

"What about happiness - which I'm here going to use as a lame piece of shorthand for emotional well-being in the very richest sense. Is happiness best regarded as a absolute good, or as a positional good, like height? Even talking about posthuman psychological superhealth is morally frivolous. Debating levels of posthuman bliss is akin to mediaeval theologians discussing the different levels of the celestial hierarchy - all those angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, and the like. Back in the real world, there are billions of sentient beings, human and non-human, who suffer varying degrees of ill-being - sometimes extreme ill-being."

Science is getting fairly good at categorizing mental states such as pleasure. The Negative Symptom Initiative is one such attempt at classifying anhedonia ( the inability to experience pleasure) present in schizophrenia, but the scale can readily be appied to measuring the capacity for pleasure in normal people. In that webpage, they mention two types of pleasure, consummatory and anticapatory.

"Consummatory pleasure refers to the experience of pleasant emotions within the contexts of 1) social interactions, 2) physical sensations, and 3) recreational/ vocational activities over the past two weeks. "

So consummatory is how much pleasure you actually get from doing specific acts. While anticipatory pleasure is how much you anticipate doing the pleasurable behaviors.

"Anticipatory pleasure refers to the experience of pleasant emotions while anticipating, imagining, or "looking forward to" future events in the parallel domains of social interactions, physical sensations, and recreational/vocational activities."

They also have specific rating scale items that measure the intensity of felt pleasure (see below). Where do you rate on this scale? Schizophrenics and depressed patients often cannot experience any pleasure whatsoever. They are permanently or semi-permanently stuck at number 6. They literally feel no pleasant emotions and in general are not motivated to do anything since they obtain no reward from doing normal activities.

Item 1: Intensity of the experience of pleasure during social interactions
0) Highly intense experience(s) of pleasure. The experience(s) was/were delightful or deeply satisfying ("amazing").
1) Strong experience(s) of pleasure. The experience(s) was/were very satisfying and fulfilling ("great", "wonderful", "fun").
2) Fairly strong experience(s) of pleasure ("really good", "enjoyable").
3) Moderate experience(s) of pleasure ("good").
4) Mild experience(s) of pleasure (e.g., "nice" or "OK").
5) Fleeting or momentary experience(s) of slight pleasure.
6) No experience(s) of pleasure in any social context or complete emotional indifference or neutrality in the company of people.

I think a rating of zero on this scale is probably somewhat rare for the average person. I am sure that most people would like to have many high intensity experiences of pleasure over the course of the week that were "amazing". Pearce is basically arguing that through the use of technology (gene therapy, deep brain stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation etc.), we can increase our hedonic capacity for reward and make our life that much more pleasurable to live. We can make sure that everyone is at least living their life at zero on the above scale. By activating areas of the brain associated with positive emotions, such as the brain's pleasure center the nucleus accumbens, we can increase the amount of felt pleasure that we experience. There's no universal law saying that pleasure cannot be magnified 10, 100 or 1000 times the capacity that we currently feel. Nothing in the laws of physics prevents it from theoretically being carried out. Mental states can be measured scientifically and they can be magnified or enhanced. Most futurists outline stale technological advancement, but Pearce envisions a future that is truly different and possibly even wonderful beyond our dreams. That is a powerful idea and if true, our lives could really change for the better.