Title: Hope for future generations

This is an essay written by Alexander Shulgin and it has some pretty cool ideas in it. :jointsmile: I know it's long but you will be glad you took the time to read it. Afterwards, we can all describe how mind-boggling and down-right disrespectful the read was, and look forward to a generation of synthetically-altered emotional-beings...I think.

Beyond MDMA : mental superhealth?

Moore's Law in computing is named after semiconductor engineer and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. It states that processing power in computers doubles every eighteen months or so. Moore's Law has roughly held good since 1965 when it was first propounded. It's a rule-of-thumb about how many transistors we can cram onto successive generations of chip rather than a fundamental truth about Nature. Yet the trend it captures seems set to continue, at least until chip designers run up against the physical constraints of the nanoscale later next decade, or perhaps until quantum computers allow calculations orders of magnitude more powerful than today's toys. Unfortunately, the dizzying rate of technical progress that Moore's law quantifies hasn't been matched by an analogous law of progress for generations of human mental health. On average, we are probably no happier than our malaise-ridden hominid ancestors. We aren't noticeably fonder of each other. By way of consolation, we can take refuge in the pre-scientific notion that happiness is unquantifiable. Yet if such quasi-objective indices of mental health as suicide rates are anything to go by, then we would probably be psychologically better off as hunter-gatherers. Over 800,000 people in the world took their own lives last year. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that this figure will rise to around 1.5 million by the year 2020. Here in the UK, suicide is the most common cause of death for men under 35 years old. Globally, several hundred million people are clinically or "sub-clinically" depressed; and a spectrum of chronic anxiety disorders afflicts further hundreds of millions more. Even as we progressively conquer physical disease as conventionally defined, the toll of psychological distress is still rising. Admittedly, "mental illness" and "mental health" are value-laden, ideologically contested terms. Even the new scientific discipline of biological psychiatry is inescapably culture-bound. Yet "Progress" that doesn't leave us emotionally better off would seem something of a misnomer.
Not merely has there been no discernible growth in average mental health to match the tempo of scientific advance, technophobes claim there never will be such a mental health revolution. As long as we rely on the same legacy wetware to animate our lives, the neo-Luddites and religious fundamentalists may even be right. Our levels of well-being - and ill-being - compute fitness functions that served the inclusive fitness of our DNA in our ancestral environment in Africa. Our genes didn't design us with the emotional welfare of their throwaway vehicles in mind. So the genetically adaptive hedonic treadmill - for many of us better named the dolorous treadmill - ensures that average levels of well-being/ill-being of Darwinian life remain stagnant. Six months after winning the national lottery or becoming quadriplegic in a catastrophic accident, the winner/victim statistically reverts to his or her average level of ill-being/well-being before the win/trauma. Illustrating the treadmill at its most extreme, "locked-in syndrome" leaves its victims paralysed. The subject is fully conscious but unable to move any extremities, talk, or make horizontal eye movements. Yet in the words of James Hall, longest surviving (2002) American victim of a midbrain pontine stroke: "In some ways, my stroke was a blessing....Since my stroke, I've published books, articles, poems. I'm busier and happier than I've ever been." Completely paralysed, Mr Hall communicates by focusing on particular letters that his computer picks up from his limited eye-motions.
Triumph-of-the-human-spirit stories are comforting, up to a point. The downside of emotional homeostasis is that millions of temperamentally depressive and dysthymic people would feel gloomy in the Garden of Eden. Again, this hypothesis isn't easy to test rigorously. The more dramatic manifestations of emotional homeostasis at work are hard to investigate ethically in well-controlled prospective studies. Anecdotes and impressions aren't science. Yet the cumulative evidence for a genetically constrained "set-point" in our pleasure-pain axis is compelling. The dismally low dial-setting doesn't bode well for any utopian project based around mere social reform.
Fortunately there is no reason, in principle, why an analogue of Moore's law can't be implemented in successive generations of the reward circuitry of organic life-forms. The affective, aesthetic, intellectual, interpersonal (and spiritual?) well-being of neurochemical robots like us can be genetically pre-coded. If rationally redesigned, our enlightened successors may view today's "natural" rewards as poor surrogates for genetically underwritten happiness. When the mechanisms underlying bliss and its gradients are understood, the molecular machinery of the sublime can be modulated - and amplified indefinitely. Within a few decades at most, we will be scientifically enlightened enough to redesign the neurochemical pathways of emotion. Meanwhile our pleasure centres are too small for us to flourish; and their functional architecture is inefficient. They needn't be either: our normal homeostatic "set-point" of well-being can be genetically switched up to a far higher plane; and archaic Darwinian notions of mental "illness" and "wellness" consigned to oblivion. Gradients of indescribable happiness can potentially animate our lives no less powerfully than gradients of ill-being. Until this fabulous era dawns, then - to borrow the words of Oscar Wilde - "we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars".
Critically, such gradients of celestial bliss can also be lucid, serene, entactogenic and empathetic - i.e. MDMA-like and better, not manic or vulgarly hedonistic. The godlike powers of tomorrow's biotechnologists will allow the neurological substrates of empathy and self-insight to be permanently up-regulated. Aesthetically, the mundane ugliness of life in the present epoch can be replaced by gradations of hitherto unimaginable beauty. Potentially again, an E-like magic can imbue the texture of normal waking consciousness. If we so wish, our emotional palette can be genetically enriched, mixed and then pharmacologically refined in ways that transcend the crude primary colours of our Darwinian past.
Counter-intuitively, yet indispensably for the long-term evolutionary stability of a ecstatic society of redesigned post-humans, allelic combinations that promote blissful empathy can also potentially be fitness-enhancing - in the technical Darwinian as well as in the popular sense of "fitness". The dawning reproductive era of "designer-babies" promises to be empowering because the capacity for parental love and nurture can be genetically and pharmacologically enhanced, not just levels of personal happiness, health and superintelligence. The age-old scourge of child-neglect (and worse) can be relegated to evolutionary history. Very speculatively, our future offspring may not merely be more loved by their caregivers, but much more "loveable" too. For if given the [genetic] freedom to choose, then parents-to-be may understandably want their offspring to be loving as well as smart and happy.
The prospect of unleashing such parental freedom is disturbing to most of us. Why not leave babymaking, as before, either to the mysterious workings of Providence or the blind shufflings of selfish DNA? Yet now we're imminently free to choose, there is nothing self-evidently morally admirable about playing genetic Russian-roulette with the lifeforms we create. Many of the nastier behaviours and modes of consciousness that so often proved fitness-enhancing in the ancestral environment will cease to be adaptive if the alleles that promote them tend to be shunned by prospective parents intent on creating the children of their dreams. The "nastier" alleles may well get out-competed. Selection pressure will tend to favour a very different range of heritable adaptive traits once evolution is no longer "blind" i.e. when genotypes are parentally chosen or designed in anticipation of their likely effects on a child's behavioural phenotype. If we want to, we can systematically redesign ourselves and choose the traits of our offspring. The details, for sure, are sketchy. Reproductive science and genetic engineering are in their infancy. But Homo sapiens is poised to bootstrap its way out of the cruel Darwinian abyss.
Inevitably, talk of treating humans like organic robots, and then mooting a baseline of mental health many orders of magnitude richer than the Darwinian mind can contemplate, sounds fantastical today. In the context of our traditional conceptual framework, the idea of an analogue of Moore's law for successive generations of human mental health evokes thoughts of cloud-cuckoo-land, not a global health-plan. Set against the daily messiness of our ecstasy-impoverished lives, the prospect of using biotechnology to abolish suffering, and a post-Darwinian transition to paradise-engineering, strikes most of us as fanciful, its liberatory potential just a mirage. At best, such heady words fall lifelessly off the page or screen. Yet a major discontinuity - a momentous evolutionary transition in the development of life on earth - is imminent as the biotechnology revolution unfolds. The advent of genomic medicine is set to challenge the old Darwinian regime of natural selection and the emotionally crippled minds it spawned.
In the long run, genomic medicine can underwrite mental and physical superhealth for everyone. For in principle, lifelong well-being can be genetically hardwired from conception. In the short run, better-designed research tools and therapeutic agents can probe, and then repair, our damaged minds. As chemical stopgaps go, MDMA is a magical revelation. It's perhaps the best aid to insight-oriented psychotherapy ever synthesized. Tragically, when MDMA is used to excess the outcome can be harmful, not healing. So as a weekend club drug, MDMA is seriously flawed. Today, of course, empathogens and entactogens are outlawed for any purpose. The altered states of consciousness they induce are criminalised. People who take such agents are stigmatised as "drug abusers". Yet some MDMA users feel, rightly or wrongly, they've been granted a tantalising glimpse of what true mental health may be like in centuries to come; and an insight into what the rest of us are missing.