[wordup] Wireheading - Thanks but I'll keep my pain.

[Adam Shand]

Hopefully the HTML stays legible and yet preserves the links.

Adam.

From: http://www.wireheading.com/

Wirehead Hedonism
The future of mankind ?

A rodent wirehead

"The mind is its own place, and in itself
  Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heaven"
  Satan, in Milton's Paradise Lost

THE WIRED SOCIETY
         Within a few centuries, it will be technically if not 
ideologically feasible to abolish suffering of any kind. If we wish to 
do so, then genetic engineering and nanotechnology can be used to 
banish unpleasant modes of consciousness from the living world. In 
their place, gradients of life-long, genetically pre-programmed 
well-being may animate us instead. Millennia if not centuries hence, 
the world's last aversive experience may even be a precisely dateable 
event: perhaps a minor pain in an obscure marine invertebrate.

          Far-fetched? Right now, the abolitionist project sounds 
fanciful. The task of redesigning our legacy-wetware still seems 
daunting to most of us. Rewriting the vertebrate genome, and 
re-engineering the global ecosystem, certainly pose immense scientific 
challenges.

          The ideological obstacles to a happy world, however, are more 
formidable still. For we've learned how to rationalise the need for 
mental pain - even though its nastier varieties blight innumerable 
lives, and even though its very existence will soon become optional.

  * * *

          Today, any scientific blueprint for getting rid of suffering 
via biotechnology is likely to be reduced to one of two negative 
stereotypes. Both stereotypes are disturbing, pervasive, and profoundly 
ill-conceived. Together, they impoverish our notion of what a 
Post-Darwinian regime of life-long happiness might be like; and delay 
its prospect.

	• 	 The first stereotype of a pain-free world centres on soma - Aldous 
Huxley's brilliantly-conceived but spurious evocation of the "ideal 
pleasure-drug":
  "...Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized. Six 
years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug. 
Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant. All the advantages of 
Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects. Take a holiday from 
reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache 
or a mythology. Stability was practically assured..."
  Soma is taken by the brainwashed and manipulated dupes of the ruling 
genetic caste in Brave New World. A cross between a hangoverless 
tranquilliser and a non-addictive opiate, soma allows Huxley's utopians 
to enjoy (episodes of) imbecilic, drug-induced bliss to offset their 
empty consumerist lives. In BNW, soma is a pleasureable cure-all; but 
it underwrites a static, philistine, loveless society where 
intellectual progress of any kind has been abolished. Surely we don't 
want to end up as brave new worlders?

	• 	The second stereotype of life-long bliss strikes us as even more 
degrading than pharmacological hedonism. It features an intra-cranially 
self-stimulating rat. The little creature's enraptured frenzy of 
lever-pressing is eventually followed by death from inanition, 
self-neglect and immunological collapse. Not just rats, but also fish, 
chickens, rabbits, guinea pigs, cats, dogs, monkeys and humans have all 
been found to exhibit electrical self-stimulatory behaviour when given 
the opportunity to do so. The pleasure-pain axis is an invariant 
feature of the vertebrate line - and beyond.
          In the case of humans, our reward-pathways are somewhat more 
anatomically diffuse than the average rodent. At least with present-day 
electrode-placement techniques, intra-cranial self-stimulation as 
practised by laboratory humans doesn't lead to uncontrolled hedonistic 
excess and death. Only depressed or deeply malaise-ridden human 
subjects compulsively self-stimulate when wired. Ill-defined "ethical 
constraints", however, are commonly held to forbid its use rather than 
to mandate its widespread adoption and refinement - even by avowed 
utilitarians. So instead of using fellow humans, experimenters use 
rats. Pleasure-crazed rodents have become the symbolic expression of 
wirehead hedonism - and of all the pitfalls that "unnatural" pleasure 
entails.

          Rats, of course, have a very poor image in our culture. Our 
mammalian cousins are still widely perceived as "vermin". Thus the 
sight of a blissed-out and manically self-stimulating rat does not 
inspire a sense of vicarious happiness in the rest of us. On the 
contrary, if achieving invincible well-being entails launching a 
program of world-wide wireheading - or its pharmacological and/or 
genetic counterparts - then most of us will recoil in distaste.

          Yet the Olds' rat, and the image of electronically-triggered 
bliss, embody a morally catastrophic misconception of the spectrum of 
options for paradise-engineering in the aeons ahead. This is because 
the varieties of genetically-coded well-being on offer to our 
successors needn't be squalid or self-centred. Nor need they be 
insipid, empty and amoral à la Brave New World. Our future modes of 
well-being can be sublime, cerebral and empathetic.

            In fact, instead of being toxic, such exotically enriched 
states of consciousness can be transformed into the everyday norm of 
mental health. When it's precision-engineered, hedonic enrichment 
needn't lead to unbridled orgasmic frenzy. Nor need it entail getting 
stuck in a wirehead rut. This is because in a naturalistic setting, 
even the crudest dopaminergic drugs tend to increase exploratory 
behaviour, will-power and the range of stimuli an organism finds 
rewarding. Dopaminergics aren't just euphoriants: they also enhance 
"incentive-motivation". Thus our future is likely to be more diverse, 
not less.

          Perhaps more surprisingly, controlled euphoria needn't be 
inherently "selfish" - i.e. hedonistic in the baser, egoistic sense. 
Non-neurotoxic and sustainable analogues of empathogen hug-drugs like 
MDMA ("Ecstasy") - which releases a lot of extra serotonin and some 
extra dopamine - may potentially induce extraordinary serenity, empathy 
and love for others. An arsenal of cognitive enhancers will make us 
smarter too. For being blissful isn't the same as being "blissed-out".

          Ultimately, however, using drugs or electrodes for 
psychological superhealth is no better than taking medicines to promote 
physical superhealth. They can serve only as dirty and inelegant 
stopgaps. In an ideal world, our emotional, intellectual and physical 
well-being will be genetically predestined. It will be a design-feature 
of any Post-Darwinian mind. Indeed some futurists predict we will one 
day live in a paradise where suffering is physiologically 
inconceivable; a world where we can no more imagine what it is like to 
suffer than we can presently imagine what it is like to be a bat.

          Today, of course, it is sublime bliss which is effectively 
inconceivable to most of us.

  INTRA-CRANIAL SELF-STIMULATION

          The story of the biochemical roots of paradise is 
illuminating, but not very edifying. In the 1950s, James Olds and his 
colleagues invented a procedure known as intracranial self-stimulation. 
By implanting a permanent thin wire-electrode in a rat's brain, the 
captive rodent was given the ability to  self-administer a small 
electric shock. The current used is typically less than 0.0005 amperes. 
The pulse lasts for less than a second: the rodent wirehead must press 
the lever again to get another hit. Different placements of the 
electrode elicit different intensities of response. Rates of up to 
10,000 bar-presses an hour may be recorded - but only for pulses 
delivered to the most rewarding brain-areas. An animal will 
self-stimulate for a whole day and night without rest, and cross a 
powerfully electrified grid, to gain access to the lever when its 
reward-centres are wired up.

          Olds mapped the whole brain. Stimulation of some areas - the 
periaqueductal grey matter, for instance - proved aversive: an animal 
will work hard to avoid it. "Aversive" is probably a euphemism: 
electrical pulses to certain neural pathways may be terrifying or 
excruciating. Our victims are being tortured.

          Happily, more regions in the brain are rewarding than 
unpleasant. Yet electrical stimulation of most areas, including the 
great bulk of the neocortex, is motivationally neutral.

          One brain region in particular does seem especially rewarding: 
the medial forebrain bundle. The key neurons in this bundle originate 
in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the basal ganglia. VTA neurons 
manufacture the catecholamine neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is 
transported down the length of the neuron, packaged in synaptic 
vesicles, and released into the synapse. Crucially, VTA neuronal 
pathways project to the nucleus accumbens. VTA dopaminergic neurons are 
under continuous inhibition by the gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) 
system.

          In recent years, a convergence of neuropharmacological 
evidence, clinical research, and electrical stimulation experiments has 
led many researchers to endorse some version of the "final common 
pathway" hypothesis of reward.

          There are anomalies and complications which the 
final-common-pathway hypothesis still has to account for. Any story 
which omits the role and complex interplay of, say, "the love hormone", 
oxytocin; the "chocolate amphetamine", phenylethylamine; the multiple 
receptor sub-types of serotonin, noradrenaline and the opioid families; 
and most crucially of all, the intra-cellular post-synaptic cascade 
within individual neurons, is going to be simplistic. Yet there is 
accumulating evidence that recreational euphoriants, clinically useful 
mood-brighteners, and perhaps all rewarding experiences critically 
depend on the mesolimbic dopamine pathway.

           Even so, there is evidence that our pleasure and desire 
circuitry have distinguishable neural substrates. Some investigators 
believe that the role of the mesolimbic dopamine system is not 
primarily to encode pleasure, but "wanting" i.e. incentive-motivation. 
On this analysis, endorphins and enkephalins, activating opioid 
receptors most especially in the ventral pallidum, are what mediate 
pleasure itself. Mesolimbic dopamine, signalling to the ventral 
pallidum, mediates desire. Thus "dopamine overdrive", whether natural 
or drug-induced, promotes a sense of urgency and a motivation to engage 
with the world, whereas direct activation of mu opioid receptors in the 
ventral pallidum induces emotionally self-sufficient bliss.

          Certainly, the dopamine neurotransmitter is not itself the 
brain's magic pleasure-chemical. Only the intra-cellular cascades 
triggered by neurotransmitter binding to the post-synaptic receptor 
holds the elusive, tantalising key to everlasting happiness; and they 
are not yet fully understood. But it's notable that dopamine D2 
receptor-blocking phenothiazines, for example, and other aversive drugs 
such as kappa opioid agonists, tend to inhibit activity, or increase 
the threshold of stimulation, in the mesolimbic dopamine system. 
Conversely, heroin and cocaine, for instance, both mimic the effects of 
direct electrical stimulation of the reward-pathways.

          Comparing the respective behavioural effects of heroin and 
cocaine is instructive. If rats or monkeys are hooked up to an 
intravenous source of heroin (or other potent mu opioid agonist such as 
fentanyl), the animals will happily self-administer the drug 
indefinitely; but they still find time to sleep and eat. If rats or 
monkeys can self-administer cocaine indefinitely, however, they will do 
virtually nothing else. They continue to push a drug-delivery lever for 
as long as they are physically capable of doing so. Within weeks, if 
not days, they will lose a substantial portion of their body weight - 
up to 40%. Within a month, they will be dead.

          Humans don't have this problem. So what keeps our mesolimbic 
dopamine and opioidergic systems so indolent? Why does a "hedonic 
treadmill" stop us escaping from a genetically-predisposed "set-point" 
of emotional ill-being? Why can't social engineering, politico-economic 
reform or psychotherapy - as distinct from germ-line genetic re-writes 
- make us durably happy?

          Evolution provides some plausible answers. A capacity to 
experience many different flavours of unhappiness - and short-lived 
joys too - was adaptive in the ancestral environment. Thus at least a 
partial explanation of endemic human misery lies in selection-pressure 
and the state of the unreconstructed vertebrate genome. Selfish DNA 
makes its throwaway survival-machines feel discontented a lot of the 
time: a restless discontent is typically good for promoting its 
"inclusive fitness", even if it's bad news for us. Nature simply 
doesn't care; and God has gone missing, presumed dead.

          On the African savannah, naturally happy and un-anxious 
creatures typically got outbred or eaten or both. Rank theory suggests 
that the far greater incidence of the internalised correlate of the 
yielding sub-routine, depression, reflects how low spirits were 
frequently more adaptive among group-living organisms than manic 
self-assertion. Group living can be genetically adaptive, but we've 
paid a very high psychological price.

          Whatever the origins of malaise, today a web of negative 
feedback mechanisms in the CNS conspires to keep well-being - and 
(usually) extreme ill-being - from persisting for very long.

          Life-enriching emotional superhealth will depend on subverting 
these homeostatic mechanisms. The hedonic set-point around which our 
lives fluctuate can be genetically switched to a far higher plateau of 
well-being.

          At the most immediate level, firing in the neurons of the 
ventral tegmental area is held in check mainly by gamma-aminobutyric 
acid (GABA), the major inhibitory neurotransmitter in the vertebrate 
central nervous system.  Opioids act to diminish the braking action of 
GABA on the dopaminergic neurons of the VTA. In consequence, VTA 
neurons release more dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. The reuptake of 
dopamine in the nucleus accumbens is performed by the dopamine 
transporter. The transporter is blocked by cocaine. This induces 
euphoria, augmented by activation of the sigma1 receptors. [Why? We 
don't know. Science has no deep understanding of why sentience - or 
insentience for that matter - exists at all.] Amphetamines block the 
dopamine transporter too; but they also act directly on the 
dopaminergic neurons and promote neurotransmitter release.

          The mesolimbic dopamine pathway passes from the VTA to the 
nucleus accumbens and ascends to the frontal cortex where it innervates 
the higher brain. This is because raw limbic emotional highs and lows - 
in the absence of represented objects, events or properties to be 
(dis)satisfied about - would be genetically useless. To help 
self-replicating DNA differentially leave more copies of itself, the 
textures of subjective niceness and nastiness must infuse our 
representations of the world, and - by our lights - the world itself. 
Hedonic tone must be functionally coupled to motor-responses initiated 
on the basis of the perceived significance of the stimulus to the 
organism, and of the anticipated consequences - adaptively nice or 
nasty - of running neural simulations of alternative courses of action 
that the agent can perform. Hence natural selection has engineered the 
"encephalisation of emotion". We often get happy, sad or worried 
"about" the most obscure notions. One form this encephalisation takes 
is our revulsion at the prospect of turning ourselves into wirehead 
rats - or soma-pacified dupes of a ruling elite. Both scenarios strike 
us as too distasteful seriously to contemplate.

          In any case, wouldn't we get bored of life-long bliss?

          Apparently not. That's what's so revealing about wireheading. 
Unlike food, drink or sex, the experience of pleasure itself exhibits 
no tolerance, even though our particular objects of desire certainly 
do. Thus we can eventually get bored of anything - with a single 
exception. Stimulation of the pleasure-centres never palls. Fire them 
in the right way, and boredom is neurochemically impossible. Its 
substrates are missing. Electrical stimulation of the mesolimbic 
dopamine system is more intensely rewarding than eating, drinking, and 
love-making; and it never gets in the slightest a bit tedious. The 
unlimited raw pleasure of wirehead bliss certainly inspires images of 
monotony in the electrode-na&iumlve; but that's a different story 
altogether.

          Yet are wireheading or supersoma really the only ways to 
ubiquitous ecstasy? Or does posing the very question reflect our 
stunted conception of the diverse family of paradise-engineering 
options in prospect?

          This question isn't an exercise in idle philosophising. As 
molecular neuroscience advances, not just boredom, but pain, terror, 
disgust, jealousy, anxiety, depression, malaise and any form of 
unpleasantness are destined to become truly optional. Their shifting 
gradients played a distinct information-theoretic role in the lives of 
our ancestors in the ancestral environment of adaptation. But their 
individual textures (i.e. "what it feels like", "qualia") can shortly 
be either abolished or genetically shifted to a more exalted plane of 
well-being instead. Our complicity in their awful persistence, and 
ultimately our responsibility for sustaining and creating them in the 
living world, is destined to increase as the new reproductive 
technologies mature and the revolution in post-genomic medicine 
unfolds. The biggest obstacles to a cruelty-free world - a world cured 
of any obligate suffering - are ideological, not technical. Yet 
whatever the exact time-scale of its replacement, in evolutionary terms 
we are on the brink of a Post-Darwinian Transition.



THE POST-DARWINIAN TRANSITION

          Really? In what sense of "Post-Darwinian"?

          Natural selection has previously been "blind". Complications 
aside, genetic mutations and meiotic shufflings are quasi-random i.e. 
random with respect to what is favoured by natural selection. Nature 
has no capacity for foresight or contingency-planning. During the 
primordial Darwinian Era of life on earth, selfishness in the technical 
genetic sense has closely overlapped with selfishness in the popular 
sense: they are easily confused, and indeed technical selfishness is 
unavoidable. But in the new reproductive era - where (suites of) 
alleles will be societally chosen and actively designed in anticipation 
of their likely behavioural effects - the character of 
fitness-enhancing traits will be radically different.

          For a start, the elimination of such evolutionary relics as 
the ageing process will make any form of (post-)human reproduction on 
earth - whether sexual or clonal - a relatively rare and momentous 
event. It's likely that designer post-human babies will be meticulously 
pre-planned. The notion that all reproductive decisions will be 
socially regulated in a post-ageing world is abhorrent to one's 
libertarian instincts; but if they weren't regulated, then the earth 
would soon simply exceed its carrying capacity - whether it is 15 
billion or 150 billion. If reproduction on earth does cease to be a 
personal affair and becomes a (democratically accountable?) 
state-sanctioned choice, then a major shift in the character of 
typically adaptive behavioural traits will inevitably occur. Taking a 
crude genes' eye-view, a variant allele coding for, say, enhanced 
oxytocin expression, or a sub-type of serotonin receptor predisposing 
to unselfishness in the popular sense, will actually carry a higher 
payoff in the technical selfish sense - hugely increasing the 
likelihood that such alleles and their customised successors will be 
differentially pre-selected in preference to alleles promoting, say, 
anti-social behaviour.

         Told like this, of course, the neurochemical story is a 
simplistic parody. It barely even hints at the complex biological, 
socio-economic and political issues at stake. Just who will take the 
decisions, and how? What will be the role in shaping post-human value 
systems, not just of exotic new technologies, but of alien forms of 
emotion whose metabolic pathways and substrates haven't yet been 
disclosed to us? What kinds, if any, of inorganic organisms or 
non-DNA-driven states of consciousness will we want to design and 
implement? What will be the nature of the transitional era - when our 
genetic mastery of emotional mind-making is still incomplete? How can 
we be sure that unknown unknowns won't make things go wrong? True, 
Darwinian life may often be dreadful, but couldn't botched 
paradise-engineering make it even worse? And even if it couldn't, might 
not there be some metaphysical sense in which life in a blissful 
biosphere could still be morally "wrong" - even if it strikes its 
inhabitants as self-evidently right?

          Unfortunately, we will only begin to glimpse the implications 
of Post-Darwinism when paradise-engineering becomes a mature scientific 
discipline and mainstream research tradition. Yet as the vertebrate 
genome is rewritten, the two senses of "selfish" will foreseeably 
diverge. Today they are easily conflated. A tendency to 
quasi-psychopathic callousness to other sentient beings did indeed 
enhance the inclusive fitness of our DNA in the evolutionary past. In 
the new reproductive era, such traits are potentially maladaptive. They 
may even disappear.

          The possibility that we will become not just exceedingly 
happier, but nicer, may sound  too good to be true. Perhaps we'll just 
become happier egotists - in every sense. But if a genetic 
predisposition to niceness becomes systematically fitness-enhancing, 
then genetic selfishness - in the technical sense of "selfish" - 
ensures that benevolence will not just triumph; it will also be 
evolutionarily stable, in the games-theory sense, against "defectors".

          Needless to say, subtleties and technical complexities abound 
here. The very meaning of being "nice" to anyone or anything, for 
instance, is changed if well-being becomes a generic property of mental 
life. Either way, once suffering becomes biologically optional, then 
only sustained and systematic malice towards others could allow us to 
perpetuate it for ever. And although today we may sometimes be 
spiteful, there is no evidence that institutionalised malevolence will 
prevail.

          From an ethical perspective, the task of hastening the 
Post-Darwinian Transition has a desperate moral urgency - brought home 
by studying just how nasty "natural" pain can be. Those who would 
resist the demise of unpleasantness may be asked: is it really 
permissible to compel others to suffer when any form of distress 
becomes purely optional? Should the metabolic pathways of our 
evolutionary past be forced on anyone who prefers an odyssey of 
life-long happiness instead? If so, what means of coercion should be 
employed, and by whom?

           Or is paradise-engineering the only morally serious option? 
And much more fun.
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