“For a start, soma is a very one-dimensional euphoriant. It gives rise to only a shallow, unempathetic and intellectually uninteresting well-being……It doesn’t in any way promote personal growth. Instead, soma provides a mindless, inauthentic “imbecile happiness” – a vacuous escapism which makes people comfortable with their lack of freedom…..Fortunately, the Net is opening up a vast trans-national free-market in psychotropics. It will eventually sweep away the restrictive practices of old medical drug cartels and their allies in the pharmaceutical industry..The Dark Age of primordial Darwinian life is about to pass into history.”//huxley.net
Humanity+
You can have a silicon etc robot that is responsive to noxious stimuli and there is no indication that it suffers. The “raw feel” of suffering isn’t essential to a functional response. So why must the nasty “raw feel” of suffering always be essential to ours? A dip in well-being can perform the same information-signalling role. Of course, when one talks loosely of turning people into robots, this conjures up images of diminished sensibility, a lack of body sense, whereas with the right prostheses one could have an enhanced body image, a greater responsiveness to a wider range of physical stimuli.//David Pearce@Vanity Fair
Dietary supplements and natural products
as psychotherapeutic agents
Again technology negates today’s moral difficulties, there will be abundance for all, no need to hurt others and a VR paradise available to all, to blot out any remaining unpleasantness in the real world.//huxley.net
human being
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