"In future, nerve cell responsiveness to naturally occurring endogenous opioids can be increased via receptor enrichment in the brain too. In principle, we can modulate their lifelong "overexpression", intermittently heightened (or gently diminished) by whatever kinds of personal and environmental contingencies we judge fit. Both functionally and anatomically, our reward pathways can be made "bigger and better". But intelligent emotional self-mastery will involve re-engineering the mind-brain so we derive the most intense rewards from activities we deem most lastingly worthwhile: i.e. prioritising our higher-order desires over legacy first-order appetites. Natural selection has "encephalised" our emotions to benefit our genes. Rational agents can "re-encephalise" our emotions to benefit us."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Essayists from EnglandPhilosophers from EnglandActivists from the United KingdomTranshumanistsUtilitarians
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
"Utopian Neuroscience", BLTC Research, 2019
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Pearce_(philosopher)
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
David Pearce (philosopher)
81 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by David Pearce (philosopher) →
Related Quotes
"All that matters is the pleasure-pain axis. Pain and pleasure disclose the world's inbuilt metric of (dis)value. Our …"
"[U]nlike positive utilitarianism or so-called preference utilitarianism - neither of which can ever be wholly fulfill…"
"Nature documentaries are mostly travesties of real life. They entertain and edify us with evocative mood-music and tr…"
"By far my greatest dread in life […] is that (some variant of) the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true."
"I argue that what breathes fire into the QM equations is field-theoretic what-it's-likeness: "microqualia" to use a p…"
"As the neurobiological basis of feeling and emotion is unravelled, and the human genome decoded and rewritten, it wil…"
"When Bernard Marx tells the Savage he will try to secure permission for him and his mother to visit the Other Place, …"
"[T]here is no fundamental biological reason why the human genome can't be rewritten to allow everyone to be "in" love…"
"[I]n the wake of the growth of the animal-rights movement, there has recently arisen a hitherto unfelt need to demoni…"
"The negative utilitarian might reply that this formulation of the problem is misleading. We do not live in a notional…"