{"id":1233,"date":"2003-06-19T21:36:22","date_gmt":"2003-06-20T04:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/06\/19\/1233.html"},"modified":"2003-06-19T21:36:22","modified_gmt":"2003-06-20T04:36:22","slug":"molecular-biology-of-paradise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/06\/19\/molecular-biology-of-paradise\/","title":{"rendered":"Molecular Biology of Paradise"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Mary Anne was queasy, which led roundaboutly to my finding a quote she'd posted in her journal a while back from Greg van Eekhout about oxytocin, a.k.a. \"the cuddle hormone.\"  I figured I'd find out more about it; a quick Google led me to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oxytocin.org\/\">The  Hedonistic  Imperative<\/a>, a site detailing how to use feel-good chemicals to bring about heaven on Earth:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Try summoning up the most delightful fantasy you can imagine. ... Unfortunately it's quite futile. We run such simulations on legacy wetware.  Even the most virile imagination glimpses only a shadow of the biological nirvana awaiting our descendants.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Oh, my&#8212;is that a virile imagination, or are you just happy to see me?<\/p>\n<p>They certainly don't think small:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life. The abolitionist project is ambitious, implausible, but technically feasible. It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. Nanotechnology and genetic-engineering allow Homo sapiens to  discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Post-humans will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>We've seen that there can be interesting story plots even in utopia.  (<cite>Pacific Edge,<\/cite> <cite>Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,<\/cite> etc.)  But what about in a utopia in which everyone is perpetually blissed-out?  Think of it as a challenge.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mary Anne was queasy, which led roundaboutly to my finding a quote she&#8217;d posted in her journal a while back&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}