Heaven Is a Headspace

“Even if everything that traditional futurists have asked for is delivered — eternal youth, unlimited material wealth, morphological freedom, superintelligence, immersive VR, molecular nanotechnology, etc. — there is no evidence that our subjective quality of life would on average significantly surpass the quality of life of […] a New Guinea tribesman today.”

— David Pearce, The Abolitionist Project

Almost every serious conversation about the future — AI, climate, geopolitics, longevity — is a conversation about rearranging the world outside the skull. Very little of it concerns the underlying brain-mechanism that decides how any arrangement will actually feel from the inside.

There is a vision aimed at these. It is very un-prominent and doesn’t even have a standard name. In this post I’ll call it Paradise Engineering.

Before dismissing this vision, it is worth looking at the underlying first principles of happiness.

One: humans chase positive states. Earned. Delicious. Fascinating. Beautiful. Satisfying. We have an enormous, finely graded lexicon for how things feel to us, and a comparatively crude one for what things are. The language tells you what we are actually tracking.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t act upon principles and altruistically, but positive emotions are the main driver of our conscious action. Just think of eating, consuming, creating or your own dream-life.

Two: those states are neural events. Whether something is earned or delicious or fascinating is not a property of the thing. It is a description of what your brain did with sensory and contextual input.

Consider “attractive.” Show a baboon a photograph of a woman generally regarded as beautiful and he will find her unremarkable at best. The feeling is mutual. Nothing about attractiveness lives in the object; it lives in a specific evolved circuit, and other circuits run other software. Or take depression, where a life with no external problem at all can be experienced as unbearable. The world stays the same. The processing changes, and with it everything that matters.

Three: neural events are physical, and physics is editable. Thought and perception run on action potentials, which run on ions moving across membranes. The brain mechanics are very complicated, yes. But not magic. And the tools to manipulate brain mechanisms are rapidly evolving: SSRIs, ketamine, transcranial stimulation, deep brain stimulation, gene editing, brain–computer interfaces.

The conclusion: if how good your life feels is a physical state, it is a state that can, in principle, be set.

“The world of the superhappy is quite different from the human world.”

Billions of animals are killed every year to produce a few seconds of pleasant activity in a human mouth and a human reward circuit. Billionaires buy superyachts and private jets for a status signal that fades within weeks. Children scroll until two in the morning for a series of small spikes in the ventral striatum. In each case we are paying an enormous external cost — ecological, moral, personal — for a tiny, temporary internal gain.

Read that way, paradise engineering is not a drug fantasy. It is an efficiency argument. We are already spending the world on our reward circuits. We are simply doing it with catastrophic overhead, because the only lever we ever had was the world.

Nobody needs to shovel sugar or drink themselves numb to feel all right. Unconditional wellbeing paired with intact concern for ecological, social and intergenerational problems is not obviously a worse configuration than the one we have. We might create a society that is more happy, healthy and responsible.

Wireheading

“A 48-year-old woman with a stimulating electrode implanted in the right thalamic nucleus ventralis posterolateralis developed compulsive self-stimulation associated with erotic sensations and changes in autonomic and neurologic function. This case establishes the potential for addiction to deep brain stimulation […].”

This is an excerpt from the abstract of a study from 1986. The patient ended up self-stimulating throughout the day, “neglecting personal hygiene and family commitments,” through cardiac episodes and neurological symptoms. By the time of the study she had lost eleven IQ points.

David Pearce, the philosopher behind the term “paradise engineering,” knows this and rejects it. His proposal is not a permanent orgasm; it is “information-sensitive gradients of bliss.” You would still prefer some things to others, still be moved, still be motivated. Everything would simply happen above zero. Whether that is engineerable is an open question!

Are emotions the destination, or the instrument we navigate by?

The suspicion in regard to paradise engineering is that suffering carries information we cannot afford to lose: about ourselves, about each other, about what makes a moment worth living.

Think for example of loneliness. On the one hand loneliness is a huge problem and a really bad feeling. On the other hand it moves people to socialise, creating connections and shared experiences.

Changing the map and compass means changing purpose and therefore humanity. That is not necessarily wrong: humanity is not the crown of creation.

But if we start altering our navigation system for a meaningful life, we need an adequate answer to how it gets recalibrated. If the compass itself is re-aimed, which seems likely, we need an adequate answer to where it should point.

For all of human history, the question “how do we feel better?” had exactly one available answer: rearrange the world. That constraint was so total that we mistook it for the question itself. It is now dissolving, and we may need to answer the question of meaning in the first place.