Two hundred years ago, before the development of potent synthetic pain-killers or surgical anaesthetics, the notion that "physical" pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed no less bizarre. Their productivity may far eclipse our own. So our descendants may live in a civilisation of well-motivated "high-achievers", animated by gradients of bliss. Hyper-dopaminergic states can also increase the range and diversity of actions an organism finds rewarding. States of "dopamine-overdrive" can actually enhance exploratory and goal-directed activity. For it is misleading to contrast social and intellectual development with perpetual happiness. Such stereotypes stigmatise, and falsely discredit, the only remedy for the world's horrors and everyday discontents that is biologically realistic. Today's images of opiate-addled junkies, and the lever-pressing frenzies of intra-cranially self-stimulating rats, are deceptive. Possible objections, both practical and moral, are raised and then rebutted.
A sketch is offered of when, and why, this major evolutionary transition in the history of life is likely to occur.
Life-long happiness of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable can become the genetically-preprogrammed norm of mental health. They can be replaced by a radically different sort of neural architecture. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they served the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. Our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world.
Genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. The abolitionist project is ambitious, implausible, but technically feasible. This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life.
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