Pain exists because millions of years ago, a monkey that didn't feel pain touched something hot and died. His cousin, who DID feel pain, screamed and lived long enough to make more monkeys. You're descended from the screaming monkey. Congratulations.
Evolution doesn't care if you're happy. It just cares if you reproduced before the tiger ate you. The tiger didn't eat you, so here we are.
David Pearce says we should abolish all suffering forever using genetic engineering. Not reduce suffering. ABOLISH it. Like how you might abolish a committee, except this committee is agony and it's inside every living thing.
The idea is to keep pain's JOB - telling you not to touch hot stoves - but do it with pleasure instead. Right now it works like: "Touch stove → Feel terrible → Don't touch stove." The new version would be: "Touch stove → Feel slightly less wonderful → Don't touch stove." Same information, different delivery system. It's like switching from getting punched to getting a polite note.
This is called the Hedonistic Imperative. Philosophers came up with that name, which is why it sounds like a prog rock album instead of "Let's Stop Hurting Forever."
Pearce says this is technically possible. Two hundred years ago, people thought you couldn't remove physical pain during surgery. Then anesthesia was invented and suddenly you could saw someone's leg off while they took a nice nap. Psychological pain is next. Existential dread will be defeated by gene therapy, which is a sentence that would have gotten you burned as a witch in 1823.
Here's where the money goes:
- Military budget: $2 trillion per year (mostly for killing people better)
- Brain research budget: $13 billion per year (mostly for understanding why we're sad)
That's 154 times more money for bombs than for brains. Goldman Sachs executives got bigger bonuses in one year than America spends annually on understanding how consciousness works. This is like spending your entire paycheck on a really good hammer while living in a tent.
If we gave the military budget to neuroscience, we could probably engineer universal bliss by Thursday. But we don't, because humanity allocates resources like a drunk person playing Monopoly who keeps buying railroads.
The Hedonistic Imperative won't happen because people voted for it in a thoughtful democratic process. It'll happen when someone rich gets tired of being sad and pays for the research. Or when it becomes cheaper to genetically engineer happiness than to keep buying antidepressants. Economics will accomplish what ethics couldn't, which is very on-brand for humanity.
Until then, you're stuck experiencing pain because a million years ago some apes needed it to avoid tigers. The tigers are mostly gone now, but the pain stayed. We're very good at keeping the bad parts of our past while discarding the useful bits.
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