As an empty verbalism, “perpetual bliss” does sound fairly tedious. As Bernard Shaw once remarked, “Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside”. Successful paradise-engineering, however, must be the very antithesis of tedium by its very nature. If the prospect of paradise-engineering sounds unexciting, one has missed the point of what abolishing the substrates of tedium entails. In a different age, religious iconographers were able to derive much greater satisfaction in depicting the tortures of the wicked in Hell than in evoking the curiously anaemic delights of Heaven. Indeed, one could be forgiven for inferring that the eternal happiness of the Saved was dependent on contemplation of the eternal torment of the Damned. Likewise today, the secular equivalent of this syndrome is all too common. Potentially, however, there is no less a diversity of ways of being happy as being wretched. It is a grim reflection of the late-Darwinian human predicament that any notion of perpetual happiness evokes images of monotony. We can conjure up a rich and never-ending diet of disasters with ease. Whatever humanity’s contemporary failures of imagination, within a few generations the experience of boredom will be neurophysiologically impossible. “Against boredom even the gods struggle in vain”, said Nietzsche; but he failed to anticipate biotechnology. From a naturalistic perspective, boredom amounts to just a complex of psychophysical states whose molecular substrate natural selection has chanced upon like any other. A capacity for boredom was retained because of the adaptive value its conditional activation can confer. Its more proximate physiological basis lies in the negative feedback mechanisms underlying the development of tolerance in the brain. These may be expressed in the form either of short-term habituation or a slightly more delayed process of gene-triggered receptor re-regulation. Such mechanisms can bedisabled and replaced. For as is experimentally demonstrable in the laboratory, the intra-cranial strategy of endless stimulation of the pleasure-centres of the brain confirms that happiness, and happiness itself alone, never palls. Out in the wider world, positive emotion just gets (re)directed to focus on and infuse a variety of intentional objects. None of our neocortical patterns is inherently nice or nasty in the absence of its distinctive signature of limbic innervation. Some of these patterns may in time cease to satisfy; stone-age love affairs are cruel. Given the mind-brain identity theory presupposed in this manifesto, however, there is no biological reason why each moment of one’s existence couldn’t have the impact of a breathtaking revelation. As the phenomena of déjà vu, and its rarer cousin jamais vu, strikingly attest, a sense of familiarity or novelty is dissociable from the previouspresence or absence of any particular type of intentional object with which such feelings might more normally be associated. So the kind of thrill one might first have got witnessing, say, the Creation can in principle become a property of every second of one’s life. Cool.
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