One possibility... though not an option to be canvassed here.. is that in freeing ourselves from the nightmarish legacy of our evolutionary past we might choose to enjoy a lifetime of raw.. all-consuming orgasmic bliss.. This bliss needn't be directed at any well-defined intentional objects.. We - or more likely our robot-serviced descendants - wouldn't be ecstatic about anything in particular.. Our nature would be constitutionally ecstatic.. Genetically pre-programmed euphoria would be as natural and inevitable as breathing. We would simply be happy about being happy...
The defining image here.. perhaps.. is the notional human counterpart of the experimenter's lever-pressing rat.. Microelectrodes can be implanted directly into the mind/brain's pleasure centres.. These lie in the mesolimbic dopamine system.. the core of the brain's reward circuitry.. It extends from the ventral tegmentum to the nucleus accumbens.. with projections to the limbic system and orbitofrontal cortex.. Notoriously... the wired rat will indulge in frenzied bouts of intra-cranial self-stimulation for days on end.. The experience is so wonderful that it takes precedence over food and sleep.. It's preferred even to sex.. The rat doesn't need to undergo a contrasting "low" to appreciate the "high".. The little bundle of joy is apparently incapable of becoming bored with.. or physiologically tolerant to.. the rodent equivalent of Heaven...
Yet more subtly-engineered human counterparts of the euphoric rat are perfectly feasible.. Centuries hence... any pleasure-maximising ecstatics will be using their personal freedom to exercise what is.. in an ethical utilitarian sense.. a legitimate life-style choice...
The "wirehead" option.. however.. will be only one item taken from a very large menu.. Unfortunately.. it is also the most easily visualised. So the spectre of perpetual intra-cranial self-stimulation can easily be taken.. wrongly.. The desperate ethical urgency that underlies the abolitionist project may thus too easily be dismissed.. For humans... as we are solemnly reminded... are not rats..........THI
