Talk:Interview: Chris Patil

Paradise Engineering
Based on a comment from a reader, I wanted to clarify a point I made on the Paradise Engineering question: By "suffering", I'm referring to emotional distress, e.g., the experience of a broken heart, or guilt following a preventable error, or a great disappointment in life. I'm specifically not talking about physical suffering, on which subject my views on healthy aging and lifespan extension should make my feelings clear.

My understanding of PE is that it would involve the neurochemical manipulation of the human brain to the extent that it is no longer able to experience certain kinds of negative emotions -- I think that would be destructive and dangerous in the extreme. It's important to remember that these emotions aren't simply endpoints; they instruct our behavior, and I would predict that someone who was unable to experience these emotions would be likely to become a sociopath. Anhedonic states are not simply endpoints to be avoided, but rather informative stimuli in themselves. Just as patients with Hansen's disease lose peripheral sensation and are therefore at risk of undetected injury, I suspect that those who become incapable of anhedonia would be unable to learn from a variety of different experiences, leading to behaviors that might induce suffering (whether of a physical or emotional kind) in others.

Fortunately, we're nowhere close to being able to abolish negative emotions without otherwise debilitating the subject -- an Ecstasy tap might work for a day or so until all the serotonin receptors disappeared from their brain; it's unclear whether the subject would be able to do any work in the meantime -- so it will be a while before there's any experimental evidence either way. I'm extremely pessimistic about the prospects for "success" in any case.

-- Chris Patil 18:23, 23 January 2008