[Dent]

4.0 "Happy experiences, and the very concept of happiness itself, are possible only because they can be contrasted with melancholy. The very notion of everlasting happiness is incoherent."

Some people endure lifelong emotional depression or physical pain. Quite literally, they are never happy. Understandably, they may blame their misery on the very nature of the world, not just their personal clinical condition. Yet it would be a cruel doctrine which pretended that such people don't really suffer because they can't contrast their sense of desolation with joyful memories. In the grips of despair, they may find the very notion of happiness cognitively meaningless. Conversely, the euphoria of unmixed (hypo)mania is not dependent for its sparkle on recollections of misery. Given the state-dependence of memory, negative emotions may simply be inaccessible to consciousness in such an exalted state. Likewise, it is possible that our perpetually euphoric descendants will find our contrastive notion of unhappiness quite literally inconceivable. For when one is extraordinarily super-well, then it's hard to imagine what it might be like to be chronically mentally ill.

Here's a contemporary parallel. It's possible to undergo, from a variety of causes, a complete bilateral loss of primary, secondary and "associative" visual cortex. People with Anton's Syndrome not only become blind; they are unaware of their sensory deficit. Furthermore, they lose all notion of the meaning of sight. They no longer possess the neurological substrates of the visual concepts by which their past and present condition could be compared and contrasted. Our genetically joyful descendants may, or may not, undergo an analogous loss of cognitive access to the nature and variant textures of suffering. Quite plausibly, they will have gradients of sublimity to animate their lives and infuse their thoughts. So at least they'll be able to make analogies and draw parallels. But fortunately for their sanity and well-being, they won't be able to grasp the true frightfulness lying behind any linguistic remnants of the past that survive into the post-Darwinian era. Such lack of contrast, or even the inconceivability of unpleasant experiences, won't leave tomorrow's native-born ecstatics any less happy; if anything quite the reverse.

It's true that a world whose agents are animated by pleasure gradients will still have the functional equivalent of aversive experience. Yet the "raw feel" of such states may still be more wonderful than anything physiologically possible today.

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