Introduction
David Pearce, a prominent transhumanist, is
a proponent of Hedonistic Imperative—a moral
obligation on the human species to work towards
ending all involuntary suffering on Earth.
This is an excellent idea!
I’ll briefly sketch out what is it about
and provide my critique.
Scrutiny is a clear signal that there is some
engagement with an idea.
And it may either help strengthen it or show
that it’s untenable and would have to be
replaced by something better.
Either way, I believe this will be a valuable
and an interesting contribution.
Be sure to check out the links.
There you will find a lot more material on
Pearce’s ideas and links to books and articles
I reference throughout this piece.
David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative
Pearce is a negative utilitarian, which means
that he places the most value on minimization
of suffering.
He says that we have a moral obligation to
phase out involuntary suffering completely
and make sentient beings experience positive
states instead.
This is, what he calls, the Hedonistic Imperative.
Involuntary suffering would be a thing of
the past, just like pain during surgery today
is mostly gone through the innovations in
medicine.
This could be accomplished by using various
technological advancements: drugs, genetic
engineering, AI, neurological implants, and
others.
Phasing out pain would require rewriting the
genetic code to remove or replace fragments
that make someone overly sensitive to pain
or prone to low mood.
Then, further modifications would completely
hijack the pain processing centers of the
brain.
Implants would take over the processing of
otherwise painful stimuli to allow the new
people to react to harmful things in their
environment and avoid damage.
Pearce call this entire technological enterprise
“paradise engineering”.
Not only the people of the future would be
experiencing gradations of bliss, but the
entire biosphere would have to be modified
in a similar fashion.
As a vegan, Pearce recognizes that non-human
animals suffer too.
And because there are so many individual animals
in the wild, their suffering is of great proportions.
We have a duty to end all suffering—that
includes helping other species.
He calls this grand plan the abolitionist
project.
This is a wild, yet a noble idea.
Anyone who suggests a way to get rid of suffering,
especially coming with an elaborate plan,
deserves to be heard.
The critique
Now that we have a general understanding of
what is the goal and the foundation of paradise
engineering, let’s take a look at how it
fits the psychological, social, and technological
reality.
Humans are selfish
History and current-day reality show us that,
contrary to Pearce’s perception, technology
is never democratic.
Power is always strongly condensed in small
bubbles.
Money, influence, resources, technology, machines,
even land are owned by a minority.
We are all selfish to some degree, but the
greed of the elites leads to the technology
being in total control of the ones who benefit
from it the most.
We have institutions that guard the descriptions
of inventions in forms of patents.
Bio-engineering conglomerates create efficient
seeds for genetically modified crops that
farmers have to buy each year to sow on their
fields.
Computer and software giants guard their algorithms
and scavenge and steal data.
All of this to gain more power, more market
share, and an advantage over the competitors.
This is a self-sustaining system, running
on a positive feedback loop.
The gas pedal is on the floor, pinned down
by a brick, and there’s no driver behind
the wheel.
This is what we see people do.
It’s much more likely that the high-tech
bio-engineering labs will meet the same fate.
They will be owned by corporations and will
serve the ones willing and able to pay for
the services.
The wide availability of radio, TV, phones,
Internet and personal computers is irrelevant.
The devices are manufactured by corporations;
the content is served by corporations.
The end user is merely a consumer.
Even if we grant that the technology will
be more similar to standard health care system
rather than a luxury plastic surgery, we have
to ask how will we will use it.
We know people will want their children to
be successful, to excel.
What does this mean?
It usually means being better at something
than most other people.
You can expect people of the future to pay
for or choose traits that will get their children
ahead in the social game.
They will want their children to be smarter,
stronger, prettier, but maybe also a bit more
cunning, hawkish, bold.
Traits that will help their offspring get
a better partner and attain the “success”
however they understand it to be.
Intra-species competition is strong in hierarchical
animals, especially in homo sapiens.
People would rather give their children traits
that will allow them to out-compete other
mutants.
This local competition, and competition with
other tribes, races, nations, or even religious
groups, will set the direction of genetic
modification.
We already have news about genetic experimentation
on human beings done in China.
First experiments tried to increase our resilience
towards viruses, such as HIV.
But what will be next?
Genetic engineering may very well share the
fate of nuclear power.
There’s a risk of a new silent war—an
artificial genetic arms race.
This is what we are today.
Who we are now will determine what genetic
code we’ll be writing for our children.
Today, we could completely end poverty.
We could end hunger and starvation.
We have the technology.
We know what to do and how to go about it.
But we don’t.
We won’t…
Inhumanity, or: reconstruction of the human
psyche
By choosing what preferences, character, desires,
sensibilities a new person will have, we are
essentially taking away diversity of human
nature.
When all children will be created by an automated
process that optimizes the genetic code, people
coming out of this factory will be losing
uniqueness.
What personality differences could matter
in a world where there is a small set of perfect
genetic codes?
There won’t be people with strong enough
differences to disagree with each other on
anything important.
People have selfish desires that require a
loser to exist.
Paradise engineering would, therefore, mean
that either perpetrators would violate their
victims without them fully realizing what’s
being done to them, or—more likely—totally
reconstructing human psyche so that no one
would want to impose on anyone else.
Consider a particular example.
A person desiring sexual relations with another
could pursue this activity even without consent
of the other person.
Maybe that person wouldn’t even be able
to deny the advances, as that would require
having a negative attitude towards the proposal.
The only tool she’ll have is the gradient
of bliss.
Either she will be blissfully violated or
the insistent romantic would have to be controlled
away by an implant in his brain, as he himself
would be unable to simulate potential negative
experience from his victim’s point of view
nor would he be capable of predicting negative
consequences that could fall on him.
Gradients of bliss won’t inform him it’s
wrong to impose on someone.
In the world where people see and experience
only gradients of bliss, consent would not
exist.
No one would think of asking for consent,
and no one could deny giving implicit consent.
What this suggest is that the preference architecture
would have to be rewritten and maybe supplanted
by brain implants that would tell us what
to want and not to want at any given moment.
Julio Cabrera explains that moral life is
impossible, for it’s too often the case
that realizing a project of one person necessitates
preventing other people from achieving their
goals.
Cabrera calls this inevitable fact of social
life the moral impediment.
So, if there are inherent conflicts when people
aim for contrary objectives, then how would
happy humans deal with this?
Will they be programmed to want the same things,
not to step on each other's toes?
Without being sensitive to various negative
stimuli and social signals, people wouldn’t
be motivated to keep their hygiene, to sleep,
to drink and eat.
Without fear, what would stop them from walking
into an incoming bus?
Pearce imagines that gradients of bliss should
overtake the motivational system.
However, in our daily lives we don’t do
the most pleasurable things all the time.
We often choose to do things that give us
less satisfaction.
But when we can rely only on the gradients
of bliss, what would stop anyone from doing
something less pleasurable like going into
the traffic and blissfully dying?
The solution to this would take the form of
electronic prostheses—implants in the brain
that would recognize the dangers and take
control of our volition and behavior to steer
us into safety.
These electronic shepherds, as I like to call
them, would de facto control our lives, making
us into very passive experience machines,
unable to rebel.
Pearce has a response to this attack at the
ready.
Supposedly the implants could be deactivated.
But how a person swimming in the soup of bliss
could recognize when to switch off the electronic
shepherd and when to switch it back on?
And after switching off the implant, what’s
left to stop anyone from violating an innocent
person, when the perpetrator is chasing a
higher level of bliss like a junkie?
Lastly, replacing normal motivational system
would break a major component of reinforcement
learning—learning from mistakes and bad
experiences.
Brains would have to be augmented with yet
another prosthetic.
Implants would learn on our behalf, and would
have to control our behavior based on these
learnings.
In the end, what would be left of homo sapiens?
Joyful shells swimming through the gradients
of bliss, controlled by the Matrix.
This would be an inhuman fate for all of us.
Practical considerations
Evolution has been tuning the preference architecture
and motivational and learning systems for
over 500 million years.
They proved to be effective, maybe even approaching
optimal.
How likely it is that we will write better
code that will withstand the test of time?
The genetic code, neurology, the environment,
social sphere are all strongly interlinked.
It’s a complex system of complex systems.
One important characteristic of such dynamical
complex systems is their unpredictability.
The further we look into the future, the less
reliable our predictions become.
This means that accurately predicting the
behavior of complex dynamical systems is inherently
impossible.
What will be the effect of our fiddling with
human DNA?
We will never know beforehand.
In the past we had instances of mega projects
that promised a lot, but ended as horrendous
failures.
What were the ideals of communists who wrote
the scenarios for the future?
And what were the results?
What were the benefits of lobotomy—severing
the connections between critical parts of
the brain—for the treatment of psychiatric
disorders?
What were the adverse effects?
Cases like these don’t justify us in saying
that the paradise engineering will share the
same fate.
They serve as a reminder that when there are
no principles of oversight, no plans for handling
mistakes, no ways of measuring and controlling
the development and use of a new proposed
technology, then there is no guarantee we’ll
see good results.
There are many risks we know about, and many
risks we don’t yet expect.
And we have no procedures in place for dealing
with these risks.
With everyone being blissful, why would anyone
want to have children?
Will we breed only people programmed to want
to procreate, thus considering those who don’t
want to have children as defective?
Will this mean that people of the future will
weed out of existence those they will deem
unworthy?
Or will machines skip the human element in
the decision-making process and take over
the production of humans, or whatever this
creature will be?
It seems like we don’t have enough energy,
time, and resources to implement full scale
Hedonistic Imperative.
It’s unlikely we will sustain advanced technological
civilization for hundreds of years before
we’ll have the means to usher in the utopia.
Fossil fuels will run out, rare earth metals
will become extremely scarce.
We won’t have the fuel to mine the asteroids.
More likely we’ll be struggling on Earth
with a continuously worsening climate and
environment.
The whole plan relies on technology that doesn’t
exist and may never see the light of day.
On animal welfare
When we see someone in pain, we—in a way—can
experience negative feelings ourselves.
When we see someone mistreating an animal,
we see it as cruel—we understand what the
animal is going through.
We empathize.
It’s doubtful that people constantly experiencing
bliss would be capable of empathizing with
farm or wild animals.
Why would joyful people of the future care
about the plight of other species?
Without experiencing suffering, we simply
wouldn’t understand it—we wouldn’t know
what it’s like.
Bliss is ignorance.
Hedonistic Imperative requires putting an
electronic collar on our brain.
It would inform us about potential dangers
and process pain in our stead, so we wouldn’t
have to feel it.
But how other species could understand that
some other type of innocuous signal informs
them about danger?
They would simply experience a lowered level
of pleasure.
Avoidance motivational system and reinforcement
learning based of punishment evolved for hundreds
of millions of years.
So far, no sufficiently detailed alternative
to these processes has been proposed.
Saying “we’ll figure it out” is not
enough.
It has to be shown how an animal would escape
from danger without feeling fear or pain.
We can easily imagine that such genetically
half-lobotomized animals will continue their
existence in death camps we have today.
Could people engineer happy farm animals to
sell and relish in eating their corpses labeled
“happy meat”?
Given the technology they could.
Maybe they will.
Is it acceptable to the people of today, not
yet stupefied by bliss?
Technological Society is itself destructive
If we had the power to micromanage all sentient
life, we could just as well manage ecological
processes without non-human animals.
Instead of creating mutant cyborgs, we could
create simple robots that will keep the plants
in good health.
This would amount extinction of all animals,
maybe with the exclusion of people.
How would a computer designed to make people
avoid damaging themselves even work?
It would have to temporarily take control
of the behavior of the individual.
These machines would have to be designed,
optimized, manufactured, and improved upon
by AI.
Their function would become more and more
invasive.
The implants would gain more and more control
over our lives.
We would be steered by machines to a much
greater degree than people in authoritarian
governments or people in the movie The Matrix.
As Morpheus said to Neo in the movie, “What
is the Matrix?
Control.”
Then what would stop the runaway process of
brain-control to get to its logical conclusion—phasing
out humans entirely?
There are many people who don’t see the
technological advancement as a good thing.
One of the most known critic of the technological
society is Ted Kaczynski, also known as the
Unabomber.
He’s been writing articles and books on
the dangers and detrimental effects of technology
for decades.
In his magnum opus Anti-Tech Revolution: Why
and How, Kaczynski makes a reasoned case that
the progress of technology will lead to extinction
of complex life on Earth.
We can’t predict the development of society
or technology.
This means that we can’t drive them in any
direction of our choosing.
In groups of people there will always arise
self-interested subgroups who will overtake
the institutions and direct them towards gaining
power in the short-term, even to the detriment
of long-term sustainability.
Those systems that will not do that will be
out-competed by the ones that will.
Technology will be shaped by power-struggles
between such groups.
If some technology can be used to gain an
advantage over the competitors, it will be
embraced and used in such a way.
Humans and animals are needed only insofar
as they help the system in developing further.
Once the system is efficient enough, life
will serve no purpose to the system and will
be retired like an old machine.
Kaczynski explains that if technology will
be left to its own devices, we won’t get
any utopia, but an extinction.
We already see a faint image of what will
come.
Technology, and especially IT and genetics,
advances so fast that the law makers cannot
keep up.
Massive data gathering, tracking, breaches
of privacy, use of Artificial Intelligence
to identify people, etc. are now in place.
Deepfake technology was used in India in a
political campaign to lie to voters.
This is how technology is used today.
Because the progress is ever so faster, the
law is being left farther and farther behind.
This means that the advanced genetic engineering
technology will be in use long before society
will gain oversight over it.
With no agreed-upon rules for genetic modification,
societies won’t be able to direct the purpose
of the technology.
Autonomous entities, such as corporations,
will use it as they see fit.
Danger of system malfunction
Pearce presents a very simplistic view of
genetics.
There is no talk about uncontrolled mutations
during fetal development or during the life
of an organism.
There is no mention of evolvability.
Even after the successful genetic re-engineering
of the animal kingdom, mutations will start
accumulating when animals reproduce.
The technological system may not be powerful
enough to monitor any genetic change and its
effect that happen in nature.
This can result in an unmaintainable system.
Normally, any population is genetically diverse.
Most of the time natural selection is “blind”
to this variety of genes.
When something changes in the environment,
some groups die out.
Other groups survive, often due to differences
in their genetic material.
Population has to have a lot of currently
unused genetic code—evolutionary capacitance—to
be adaptable to potential future changes in
the environment.
The artificial writing of the code may not
generate sufficient genetic diversity in each
species to sustain life for long.
Genetic accidents will still be happening.
Genes for knocking out the capacity to suffer
in one species may do something else after
they jump into another species.
There are also unintended consequences of
gene editing.
There are reports that the Chinese twins who
were modified to be resilient to HIV have
their brains changed.
Every gene editing technology damages a chromosome
that is then fixed by the cell.
During this process mutations happen and some
code fragments that were used to introduce
the genetic material into the cell nucleus,
but were not intended to be included into
the DNA, actually can make its way into the
resulting genetic code.
Genetic engineering is an error prone procedure
because of how DNA works.
This may reintroduce the capacity for suffering.
If Pearce would walk away from Omelas, he
should also walk away from paradise engineering,
which—from time to time—will generate
suffering creatures, while the vast majority
will enjoy bliss.
It’s just as likely that genetic experimentation
on humans and other animals will lead to a
dystopia rather than a utopia.
Instead blissful people the Technological
Frankenstein may create inhuman monsters.
Having the technology doesn’t allow us to
predict how it will be used.
System malfunctions will be happening.
Such accidents may destroy the electrical
shepherds that the people will rely on to
avoid harm.
Damage to a finely tuned brain will still
be a possibility, creating suffering.
And finally, the system may accidentally unleash
a genetic mistake upon the world.
We know that mistakes happen, no matter if
its nuclear power plants, autonomous cars,
or genetic engineering.
But the cost of the latter may overwhelm us,
the Genetic Chernobyl may overshadow every
other mistake we have committed until that
day.
When the technology breaks because of some
solar flare or lack of resources or energy,
the hell of the Darwinian life will resume.
When the civilization collapses, as any great
civilization of the past has, people will
steer the process into directions we can’t
even imagine.
All life will depend on this highly advanced
technological system like a patient who depends
on the drip with drugs that keep them alive.
This system is a single point of failure.
And the failure, when it happens, may be catastrophic.
Conclusions
In closing, I’ll briefly rehash the main
points.
People use technology for their own advantage
- to get ahead, to out-compete other people
or entire nations.
There is no reason to suppose that this will
ever change.
Paradise engineering would require a total
reconstruction of the human species.
This would amount to the extinction of homo
sapiens, replacing it with a new cyborg entity
- homo beatus.
People will not want to go extinct.
It’s not clear if it would even be possible
to recreate a new motivational architecture
from scratch, with no pain and suffering.
There doesn’t seem to be enough time, energy,
and other resources to research the needed
technology and implement the abolitionist
project.
Blissful people may not be interested in remodeling
the rest of the biosphere to end the era of
suffering.
It’s also likely that people of the future
will create lobotomized animals, incapable
of experiencing pain, but will still enslave
them and farm them for gustatory pleasure.
The technology that would be needed to allow
people to live, once the painful signals have
been disabled, would be extremely intrusive.
Brains, volition, needs and wants would be
under the control of machines.
Eventually the technology could simply not
need life forms at all.
This would mean the end of all complex life
on Earth.
Such a complicated technological system, on
which everything would depend, would amount
to a life support system.
If something goes wrong with it, then the
entire planet goes down.
This is a single point of failure.
One mistake can lead to a domino effect of
cascading crashes of the entire biosphere.
Some of these points only show that the hedonistic
imperative would be very hard to implement.
People will fight back.
Some points show that the whole abolitionist
project is inherently doomed to failure.
The entire critique is not that deep or innovative.
I think many other people could see similar
gaps in this enterprise.
This means that there will be a lot more push-back
than David Pearce anticipates.
