Brave New World Truly Revisited: The Euphenomenological Age
by Alex Vomela
Although it might seem overtly paternalistic of an author to impose on the reader a certain perspective from which she or he should read one’s work, I think that it is of cardinal importance in the case of this novel. Brave New World Truly Revisited: The Euphenomenological Age is not only a piece of fiction, but even more importantly an ethical proposal of utmost urgency. It is a novel that fictionalizes David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative which outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient beings through the use of genetic engineering and biotechnology. By novelizing Pearce’s ethical manifesto, I try to overcome or at least tackle the problem of semantic incompetence. The human mind is just not very apt at putting mere verbal expressions into actual affective phenomenal reality. If one is only told about the magnificence of being on the top of a mountain, one is very likely to miss out on the actual affective phenomenal magnificence. Especially, a work written in a slightly sub-academese though very concise prose as is the case with David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative is largely ineffective at stirring the emotional repertoire of the reader and thereby revealing the actual phenomenal sublimety it aims for. This quite unfortunately lets his truly wonderful ideas appear as merely crude, cold-hearted scientific talk to many readers. This is, I assume, one of the main reasons why people are often not only unimpressed but even estranged by the brilliant insightfulness of David Pearce’s proposals. By employing a florid-emotive prose, I hope to show that below the rigid façade of the Hedonistic Imperative’s philosophical-scientific talk lies an immensely urgent ethical and truly wonderful phenomenal truth. As an additional tool to minimize the unwanted effects of semantic incompetence, I highly encourage the reader to enjoy at least the intellectually less straining parts of my novel with some background music that he would consider deeply soul-stirring and truly beautiful; this was a source of inspiration that I intensively consulted while composing this novel. Foreword
The title of my novel, I think, has great significance of which the reader should be aware. Many people view Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World as an uncannily prophetic piece of fiction that reveals the potentially horrid consequences of unhampered scientific progress, especially genetic engineering. While this interpretation of Huxley’s work is certainly defensible, one should take the context in which this science-fiction novel was produced into account to get a thorough understanding of the significance and meaning of Huxley’s masterpiece. The novel was first published in 1932 after Huxley had written most of it in the period between April and August of 1931. Considering the historical background, it seems obvious that Huxley had many other things in mind than just depicting the possible horrid consequences of rapid scientific-technological progress. Brave New World was certainly, at least, to some degree a fictional attempt to deal with the non-fictional aspects of the grave problems the Western civilization faced at the beginning of the 1930s. After the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, a period of severe economic depression followed that seriously threatened the future of the Western World.
Huxley increasingly grew weary of parliamentary democracy and even announced that humanity should be ruled by ‘men who will compel us to do and suffer what a rational foresight demands!’ He saw stability as the ultimate basis for a well-functioning social system. In contrast to the popular belief that Huxley was a deep sceptic of biotechnology and genetic engineering, it should be noted that he actually did sanction eugenics measures, which are however incomparable to the form of genetic engineering advocated by Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative and in this novel. Huxley put it this way, ‘Any form of order is better than chaos!’ So Brave New World was certainly more fuelled by an effort to find a solution to the seemingly never-ending list of social, political and economic problems that plagued national life in 1931 than by a deep-rooted pessimism about the consequences of the wideuse of psychoactive substances and the application of genetic engineering to human life.
Only after Huxley had witnessed Hitler and ‘The Final Solution’ as well as the grossly inhumanities in Soviet Russia did he radically change his views on eugenics and central planning and wrote Brave New World Revisited, which was first published in 1958. In this non-fictional work Huxley concluded that the world was becoming much more like Brave New World much faster than he thought. Thus, in Brave New World Revisited Huxley much more poignantly realizes what he considers to be the truly prophetic character of Brave New World than he actually did while writing the novel itself.
However, one should keep in mind how dramatically Huxley’s views on human nature and society did change after he had himself begun to regularly use psychedelic substances such as mescaline and lysergic acid diethylamide. In Brave New World, soma is the socially preferred choice of mood-enhancement. It is a cheap uni-dimensional euphoriant that doesn’t make its users feel truly wonderful but rather is an instrument of social control. This repulsive depiction of a chemical mood-enhancer should come as no surprise when one considers that Aldous Huxley had not been personally familiar with any psychoactive substance except ethyl alcohol when he wrote the novel. However, once he had become familiar with the great potentialities of the human nervous system through his experiments with mescaline and LSD, he became an avid advocate of the use of psychedelics. In his last novel Island, which unfortunately never reached great popularity, he depicted a truly paradisiacal society in which people habitually used a fictional substance called Moksha, which was remarkably similar in its psychological profile to the non-fictional substance LSD.
Thus, although in Brave New World genetic engineering and the use of psychoactive substances do not come across as blessings, it is important to put their relatively repulsive depiction into perspective. Huxley did at least at one point of his life advocate eugenics and heavily used and advocated psychedelics for the last years of his life. Besides, Aldous Huxley had a very limited understanding of the actual neurochemical workings and thus the true potentialities of the nervous system. Hence, I think it would be ill-conceived to argue against the proposals put forth by David Pearce in his Hedonistic Imperative and the future scenario I depict in my novel by blindly appealing to Aldous Huxley’s brilliant but certainly not prophetic novel Brave New World.
The other part of the title of my novel, The Euphenomenological Age, also has great significance, perhaps even more then the first part. It would go far beyond the scope of this foreword to instruct the reader in the true meaning of the noun phenomenology and its adjective phenomenological. A substantial part of this novel is dedicated to familiarize the reader with the concept of phenomenology anyway. Thus, I think it suffices, for now, to understand the meaning of this novel’s title by vaguely equating phenomenology with consciousness and consequently phenomenological with conscious. It is further necessary, I believe, to explain the importance of the word-creation ‘euphenomenology’ as distinct from merely phenomenology. The reader might be familiar with words such as euphoria, eulogy, euthymia or perhaps even eudaimonia, the greek word for happiness. Etymologically speaking, all these words are compositions of a root noun and the Greek prefix ‘eu’, which basically means good or positive. Thus, the title The Euphenomenological Age refers to a time-period in the future, in which all conscious experiences will be of a good or positive nature. This might sound very vague or even cryptic, but the novel itself constitutes an effort to elucidate the very meaning of this utopian title.
Although my novel might seem at first overtly romantic or grotesquely utopian, I whole-heartedly hope that the reader can appreciate, upon deep and honest reflection, the supreme moral urgency and phenomenological significance of the Hedonistic Imperative’s message which I so passionately advocate in this novel. As a last point, I want to point out that my work is not neither an exclusive nor an inclusive fictionalization of David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative. It does not capture all the important aspects of his ethical proposals, displays my own interpretation of many of the points he makes and includes various elements that are not endorsed in his manifesto. Thus, I highly encourage the reader to familiarize herself or himself with the Hedonistic Imperative itself as well as with the numerous equally ethically important and intellectually brilliant essays by David Pearce which also served as key sources for my novel and which can be found on his extensive online hedweb imperium, www.hedweb.com.
Alex Vomela, 2008. When Thomas opened his eyes, he first felt the sheer overwhelming intensity of bright light against his retina, which daily lost in this almost violent fashion its nocturnally regained pristine virginity, and only after that fleeting moment of pure perception gained his full waking consciousness, which had to not only bear the energy of electromagnetic radiation as was the case with the retina but also the frenzy bustling activity of perception, affection and cognition. And as soon as enough sensory information had been processed by his billions of nerve cells, his mental machinery came to the firm conclusion that the integrated whole of those millions of bits of sensory information which had invaded Thomas’ corpus in the last few seconds did not encode the construct of matter and energy Thomas was used to encounter upon waking up, namely his beloved wife and a comfortable king-size bed in an expensively furnished bedroom.
* * * "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. Genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world.’
David Pearce
‘On the turning away
From the pale and downtrodden
And the words they say
Which we won't understand
"Don't accept that what's happening
Is just a case of others' suffering
Or you'll find that you're joining in
The turning away"
It's a sin that somehow
Light is changing to shadow
And casting it's shroud
Over all we have known
Unaware how the ranks have grown
Driven on by a heart of stone
We could find that we're all alone
In the dream of the proud
On the wings of the night
As the daytime is stirring
Where the speechless unite
In a silent accord
Using words you will find are strange
And mesmerised as they light the flame
Feel the new wind of change
On the wings of the night
No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It's not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there'll be
No more turning away?’
David Gilmour, Anthony Moore (Pink Floyd)
‘All mind scientists should remember: Primary consciousness
arises from the somato-visceral operating systems of the upper
brainstem.’
Jaak Panksepp
Dedicated to all sentient beings, with special grateful thanks to my very supportive family and David Pearce
Chapter 1
At first Thomas thought to himself that the situation of amnesic puzzlement he found himself in was simply the unpleasant next-morning surprise of a nightly celebration which at his age had become scarce and responsible but still did occur from time to time in a rather pronounced fashion in which a civilized cocktail party escalated into some sort of outrageous college binge-drinking nostalgia. But Thomas felt an unfamiliar feeling of drowsiness, which he could only compare but certainly not equate to a strong liquor hangover. It appeared to Thomas that he had been asleep for years rather than hours. The coherence of his thoughts and memories was for him, as it already had been a few hundred years ago for Descartes, a clear sign that his consciousness was presently in the waking rather than the dreaming state. In a quick but cautious fashion, at least relatively quick and cautious given his slightly incapacitated mental and physical condition, he threw the sheets aside and slowly lifted his body, which at that moment felt to be made of lead rather than organic tissues. And when his visual field shifted to include most of the room he found himself in, Thomas’ confusion gave way to an explosion of neural electrochemical signals mediating an abrupt and powerful feeling of shocking bewilderment.
At this very moment, when Thomas first noticed a complete stranger standing a few feet away from him, no actual thoughts but only sub-neocortically arising perceptions and strong, almost explosive affections inhabited Thomas’ mental realm. During the first few seconds of Thomas’ visual contact with the stranger, the percept of matter and energy sculpting a person lead to an uncontrollable feeling of primordial fear. But this mental constitution was only of a very transient nature and soon many features of the person were conceptualized and analyzed by Thomas’ elaborate neocortex, which dissolved at least his previous anxiety but profoundly deepened his confusion. More and more questions sped through his mind while more and more conceptual details about the human being in front of him emerged. The man seemed to be of a very athletic physical statute and it immediately occurred to Thomas that this man had to be a professional athlete, maybe a runner in the sprint discipline or a regular practitioner of some other physical activity that would shape a human body in such a highly appealing way. But what was far more perplexing and appealing was not the spatial arrangement of the various tissues of which this man was made up but their and his clothes’ surface properties. The man appeared in a glowing radiance which induced a feeling of outstanding beauty. This, however, made the situation decidedly worse for Thomas. Instead of curing his bafflement the other man’s optical magnificence added a subtle feeling of embarrassment since Thomas was not used to be amazed at another man’s appearance in such a manner. The man’s skin was so delicately smooth; no scar or other dermatological element disrupted the perfect continuity of his goldenly colored skin which seemed to be the sublime conclusion to the magnificent three-dimensional tissue-framework resting beneath. But any thoughts and affections regarding the good looks of the stranger were quickly and forcefully pushed away to leave more mental power for the complete clarification of the strangely absurd situation Thomas found himself in.
The most reasonable answer to Thomas was that he found himself in some sort of hospital which would also explain the unusual drowsiness suffusing his mind and body reminding him of some sort of anaesthetic hangover in the context of a hospital setting. However, the thought of being in a hospital and unaware of how he had got here immediately caused a powerful surge of anxiety and uncertainty regarding his family. Thomas was less concerned about himself since no frightening empire of medical technology was mounting up next to his bed and being fused with his body. But before Thomas could give voice to his confused verbal thoughts, the man made a step forward in such a deliberate and courteous manner that Thomas could not have been dismayed even if the man was of such a deeply suspicious appearance as some of the trading partners Thomas had to deal with on a regular basis. The man stretched out his strong but delicate hand whose pristine softness Thomas was eager to feel but at the same time was reluctant to touch in the same way one is hesitant to enter and thereby befoul a landscape covered in a gorgeously silky layer of fresh white powder-snow. And while the man was patiently waiting for Thomas’ silent but obvious internal confusion to give way to some sort of physical action, he smiled in a rather amiable way and finally started to initiate a dialogue by saying, ‘Hello Thomas, I am very pleased to meet you. I am very sorry for the confusion you are experiencing right now, but I can assure you that everything is going to be alright.’ Thomas was about to get up and scream ‘What the hell is going on here, just tell me, I am not a child!’, but somehow the other man’s honest and reassuring appearance as well as the persisting feeling of drowsiness made Thomas continue to listen to the man’s strangely soothing voice.
‘It probably won’t be easy for you to understand and bear at first what I will tell you. I am sure you have seen Larry and Andy Wachowski’s science-fiction movie Matrix, isn’t that right Thomas?’ Thomas just kept staring at the man without giving any sign of conformation although he of course had seen the movie. But even the mentioning of the movie in this already bizarre situation seemed utmost ridiculous to Thomas. However since he really did not have a choice he continued to pay attention to the other man’s utterances, increasingly impatient and wistfully waiting for some clarification instead of weird and inappropriate movie small talk. ‘Well, just to make things at least a little bit easier consider the following analogy for a second. I am Morpheus and you are Neo.’ On the man’s face an expression of deeply felt compassion appeared that seemed so genuine that Thomas could not start laughing out loud at this seemingly odd analogy. The man continued his speech that seemed like inappropriate childish fantasy role-play ‘Thomas, I can’t offer you a blue or red pill, you are somehow forced to take the red one, but I can offer you another pill that will dissolve all confusion, anxiety and aversive feelings you will experience upon discovering more and more about what is going on here. It is absolutely safe, but I understand your worries and so I will leave it here with you. Whenever you feel ready, you can come outside but please be prepared that you will witness something that will appear to you as very strange but certainly wonderful in the end. And please also don’t forget the wonder-pill!” The man friendly touched Thomas’ shoulder who only sat there so utterly perplexed that any reaction was impossible at the moment. The man slowly turned around and as soon as the man had reached the door Thomas was about to scream ‘Wait, what is going on, I want to know! Where is my family, are they alright!’ But the door was closed before Thomas could even utter the first word.
The sound of the closing of the door affectively pushed Thomas down into the abysmal depth of perplexity, fear and desperation. He was entirely unable to move or make any appropriate further steps if that even existed in this uncanny situation. Only myriads of terrifying incapacitating questions and thoughts span through his head. What had happened? Where was he? Where was his family? If only his family was alright, only that really These worrisome verbal thoughts repeatedly went through his head as if some evil demon would hold the replay button for a song one not only disliked but actually deeply hated indefinitely long. And this state of panic-like anxiety was so energy-consuming, even more so utterly existence-consuming that no productive action that could have brought at least some degree of solace was possible. Thomas always was prone to anxiety-like thoughts, but he could usually control them and put them aside as some rather unpleasant but manageable aspect of his psyche. But in this case the anxiety was like a black-hole in his mind completely sucking up the rest of his consciousness and seemingly annihilating it forever.
The pill lying on the shelf next to him for a second seemed like the Godsent antidote to the painful poison of mental misery. But Thomas never did succumb to the weakness of taking chemical synthetics for his problems, thereby cowardly avoiding instead of facing and resolving them. He was however less reluctant to take antibiotics or pain-killers to avoid physical pain since he knew that getting rid of one’s physical ailments was somehow less succumbing and unnatural than using psychic anaesthetics. But if one could just get rid of this awful feeling for just a second, just a second of nothingness; this prospect almost felt wonderful. But he decided to go the route of the brave and honest and fight against his own mind in a natural way. He forced himself to sit down and take one deep breath after another thereby flooding his brain with oxygen and giving it new energy to ridden itself of the virus-like emotions infesting his mind. After a while that seemed more like eternity than the actual five or so minutes it took for the merciless wickedness of aversive feelings that had suffused Thomas’ entire consciousness and cruelly enslaved his entire cognitive machinery to finally or at least temporarily fade away and leave Thomas’ consciousness behind like a battlefield that was certainly repulsive but still somehow inhabitable for productive thoughts.
Thomas decided to remain as sanely calm as possible and to act in a relatively incisive way to find answers to the countless questions painfully scratching his psyche. He put on the clothes that were prepared for him which were of a similar superb texture and surface embellishment as that of the attire of the stranger Thomas had just minutes ago profoundly admired. But given the feeling of pressing urgency, the vast magnificent perceptual and affective potential of Thomas’ mind was reduced to an animal-like survival-based minimum of functioning and thus did not perceive the sensual luxuries of the garments. However, when Thomas actually put on the strange clothes which were made ready for him, the present dullness of his senses was, for a transient moment, overwhelmed by a striking flash, an impetus of millions of electrical signals travelling from all the sensory receptors on his skin all the way to his brain in a fraction of second, where they were phenomenologically endowed with a hedonic gloss resulting in a gratifying sensation of marvellously soft comfort. This short sparkle of sensory pleasure was however immediately and forcefully pushed aside by the all-consuming feeling of anxious urgency that directed Thomas’ existence. He finally reached the door where he stopped for a moment and tried to calm his highly stimulated nervous system down. However, he was painfully aware of the futility of this neocortically-mediated conscious effort to control the dominant and mysterious dynamism of his affections.
When Thomas hastily removed the physical barrier to the world outside the room he had been inhabiting for too long in a state of anxious malaise, he was slightly surprised in a positive way that a white relatively empty room with a table and a few chairs met his eyes instead of some bizarre futuristic scenario which Thomas had already gone through in his presently troubled and not properly working mind. But this ephemeral moment of relief and sanity quickly gave way again to feelings of anxious urgency, worrisome uncertainty and deep confusion. Chapter 2
In the middle of the room there was a table with a few chairs, two of which were occupied by a man, namely the same stranger Thomas had encountered just a few minutes ago, and a woman who invoked an even more soul-stirring sense of beauty in Thomas. She also exuded that sense of authentic, deep-rooted friendliness that strikingly perplexed Thomas who was so used to see through the veneer of deceptiveness in his trading partners whose cold-hearted profit-orientedness came in almost every disguise. And of course Thomas could not deny a strong feeling of arousal and attraction towards that woman even in the face of the present aversive circumstances. That feeling of attraction clearly had a soothing, anxiolytic and mood-lifting impact on Thomas’ distressed consciousness and made him feel physically mobile and mentally agile again.
The man welcomed Thomas by saying in a voice that so perfectly matched his visual appearance of friendly genuineness, ‘Hello Thomas, we are very glad you are here with us now. I hope you are feeling well. Have you decided to consume the pill I have offered you?’ Thomas who now felt much more responsive and motivated to finally clarify the situation and inquire the whereabouts of his family answered in a rather straightforward manner ‘Thank you for your kindness, but I am not the kind of person to take pills unless I know it’s absolutely necessary! Excuse my boldness, but I would really appreciate to hear what is going on here and where my family is! Did I have an accident? What kind of medical institution is that here?’ Only after he had put forth these statements and requests, he noticed the eerie absence of many things typically found in a hospital; in fact, the room he had woken up in as well as this room were lacking any sort of furnishings. But before he could spend more time analyzing the oddity of his present environment, the woman raised her voice for the first time, ‘Thomas, I am very delighted to meet you. I’m Tanja, a researcher here at this institution. David and me will explain everything to you. But we want you to be prepared that it will be very strange. I can only tell you that taking that pill would make things much easier for you. But in any case we will be there for you and help you understand what is going on!’
Thomas couldn’t take anymore of this mysterious, indirect, uninformative and disturbing talk and fell into an affective state of impatient anger, which was only held in check by the extraordinarily friendly appeal of the two strangers. ‘I really can’t take this anymore. Can you please just tell me where my family is and what I am doing here!’ ‘Well Thomas’, started the man again, ‘to put it frankly and directly as you wish, you are in the future, but your family is not!’ Thomas was struck by a feeling of angry bewilderment. The utterances of the man seemed like eerily ludicrous, seductive statements of a sect-leader who had completely lost touch with reality. And all of a sudden Thomas felt the horror of being trapped in the hands of insane unpredictable new-age gurus. And this thought quickly crystallized into a horrific conviction since Thomas more and more realized that the strangeness of the place and the people could only be explained by this scenario. He obviously had become the victim of some sort of esoteric movement that kidnapped people and did……..here his thoughts stopped and were replaced by an all-existence consuming painful panic. But somehow his prefrontal cortex was functioning efficiently enough to come to the conclusion that it was prudent to remain calm and so Thomas managed to suppress a visible bodily response to his emotional distress. In a relatively controlled manner he said
‘OK you both know that it seems to me quite absurd and hard to believe that I am actually in the future. How did I come here, I mean into the future?’ It was hard for Thomas to suppress any undertone of angry cynicism in his response. He carefully watched the strikingly but deceptively beautiful faces of the two people who managed quite well to keep up a charade of sympathy and good intention, Thomas thought. For a moment, Thomas felt proud and self-confident since he had seen so quickly and accurately through the pretence of his opponents. Thus, after all his strong mistrust in people which his job had deeply ingrained into his personality had triumphed again and propelled Thomas forward to be in a not necessarily leading but certainly strategically worthwhile position. The man, whom Thomas thought to be one of the leaders of this sect due to his remarkable allure, raised his mellow voice again, ‘Thomas, I will explain to you now how you’ve come here, but it will seem absurd to you. Just try to listen and I will be very happy to answer all your questions. Just keep in mind that we will be there for you and help you!’ Thomas had to use self-discipline not to let a smirk appear on his face since he almost felt empowered to know that every sentence leaving the man’s lips was a ridiculous lie of a mad-man.
‘In the year 2009, Thomas, you were diagnosed with a very aggressive form of lung cancer, incurable by medical standards at that time. But you were brave and tried to fight it together with your family. But Thomas,’ and here the man paused and looked Thomas into the eyes with such a sincere look of sympathy and compassion that Thomas for a fleeting moment was struck by a paralyzing feeling of emotional agony since he actually believed the man’s words. But he immediately abandoned this thought by convincing himself how silly and dangerous it was for him to believe such a preposterous lunatic. Although the rational part of his consciousness had swiftly returned to a state of self-confident sharp scepticism, his very being was still shaking from the powerful emotional eruptions of soul-torturing pain. ‘Thomas, your family got into a car-accident and although the medical doctors were certainly trying their best…….the medical equipment back at this time was not sophisticated and effective enough to save them.’ Thomas again felt a powerful surge of explosive desperation rising and taking hold of him, but he managed to employ his self-learned way of rational-emotive psychotherapy to control his affections via rational thoughts, successfully only to a meagre degree. But he could not help this persisting feeling of being trapped and unable to escape. He could not let himself fall into a state of apathy and learned helplessness. He had to remain emotionally strong as well as incisively alert.
The man continued with his outpouring of empathy and sympathy, ‘Thomas, when this accident happened you fell into a state of desperation and depression and suicide seemed the only way for you. But then you contacted a good friend of yours who worked for an institute called the Cryonics Lab Inc. whose primary goal was to cryopreserve people who could not be sustained by medical standards at that time.’ When the man brought up his friend Martin who actually worked at this institution, Thomas became once again anxiously worried. He was negatively surprised that they knew actual facts about his life which added a professional aspect to those people’s misguided mad ideas and undertakings which severely concerned Thomas. If they actually had hurt his family, Thomas thought in a rush of desperate anger and worry. ‘Do you remember anything I am telling you, Thomas? Do you remember your friend working at Cryonics Lab Inc.? We don’t know the exact extent of the retrograde amnesia which results from cryopreservation.’ Thomas was very unsure how to respond, but he thought it was wisest to admit that he could remember his friend; otherwise they probably would have known that he was lying and not willing to cooperate, ‘Yes, I certainly do remember my friend.’ That was all Thomas contributed to this rather one-sided dialogue. ‘Do you remember anything else, such as your disease or the accident or anything related Thomas?’
At that point, Thomas’ self-disciplinary effort could not hold back the flood of raging emotional turmoil anymore and helplessly scattered. Thomas jumped up and ran to the door which seemed like the gateway to freedom and sanity, but the thought that the door was locked which Thomas’ hopeful spirit had pushed aside turned out to be painful reality. After Thomas had tried to compulsively open the obviously locked door with the lingering motivational remains of this sudden gush of hopeful energy, he pressed his back against the wall to be in a relatively secure position to defend himself against the potentially harmful measures of the man and woman in the room. But the man had only gotten up and was quietly standing there, exuding a sense of sincere understanding and cooperation even in these utmost parlous circumstances. ‘I know what is going on here’, exclaimed Thomas in a desperate voice, ‘I am an influential man who will be searched for everywhere. If you let me go now, we can arrange a compromise that will be better for us both!’ ‘Thomas,’ responded the man, ‘I can open that door for you, but it would be best for you and the people out there if you would sit down for a minute and listen to me. I can promise you no harm will happen to you.’ Sure, Thomas thought to himself, that was a very convincing assurance. ‘You are in the future. We were finally able to cure and resuscitate you. You have been frozen for…..’ All of a sudden, Thomas’ mind became too weak to defend itself against these arguments, to hold this fortress of sceptical disbelief against these vicious attacks of absurdity. And this mental weakness manifested itself in a complete loss of physical stamina, whereupon Thomas slowly sank down to the floor and starred at the man with an expression of confused emptiness.
The man slowly walked up to him and sat down next to Thomas on the floor. He softly touched Thomas on the shoulder and remained silent for a second before he said, ‘Thomas, I am here to help you get through this. It will be hard for you at first, but we live in a wonderful world that can make you happier than you ever wished for!’ Thomas did not even know anymore what to believe. These grossly utopian, preposterous statements of the man just resonated in Thomas’ head without resulting in any conscious evaluation or emotive response. ‘Do you want to see our world or would you rather listen to me first. It is going to be quite a revelation Thomas!’ Thomas almost rather just continued to listen since he felt so weak and empty as if someone had entirely shut off every single one of his energy circuits so that any movement, any action on his part seemed entirely impossible. But somehow a spark of incisiveness ignited Thomas’ will to act again. He had to see what was going on instead of slowly decaying in this suffocating room. The man seemed to sense Thomas’ revived eagerness to find clarity in this situation of profound confusion and stretched out his hand whose softness and muscularity had already fascinated Thomas earlier. Thomas instinctively grasped it without letting any conscious thoughts of sceptic disbelief interfere and got on his legs again. ‘I will help you Thomas to understand the world awaiting you behind this door!’
After the man had opened the door, Thomas’ consciousness instantly became a lively playground, a wild sparkling dance of intense sensations. An excessive abundance of sensory stimuli bombarded and overwhelmed each single sense organ, all of which had become quite rusty and blunt over the years spent in stern sensual confinement so typical for a member of the busy corporate world. His entire nervous system was rejuvenated, revived, invigorated to, what seemed to Thomas, the highest degree of vividness. The physical monument of matter and energy that lay ahead of Thomas in the form of a corridor was far more bizarrely beautiful and strangely delightful than even the most utopian scenarios Thomas had so picturesquely and thoroughly constructed with his mediocre mental faculty of imagination. Thomas had never had a visionary experience and he had never known what that term actually meant. But the present state of his mind somehow illuminated this hollow term, gave it experiental meaning though certainly not verbally definable. And for more than just a few seconds Thomas simply stood there, not staring holes in the air but letting each of his millions of sensory receptor cells enjoy a bacchanalian feast of lively cellular activity. Chapter 3
What was Thomas seeing there in front of him? Was it all an illusion caused by a potent psychoactive substance he had been unknowingly administered by these people? Or was it the absolute climax of lunacy, a secluded artificial utopia built and held in secret by an obviously powerful esoteric movement of madmen. Or was it…….but Thomas could not even think this scenario of being actually in the future through, a scenario so unlikely and frightening that he rather tried to convince himself that he either was under the influence of powerful drugs or in a prison of outrageous lunatic utopian progress. But although Thomas’ conscious mind was working exorbitantly hard to get rid of unbearable cognitive inconsistencies, he just could not keep the drug-scenario as an actual possibility. Just as one clearly knows if one is awake and not asleep, the absolutely clear coherence of his thoughts and memories as well as his intellectual lucidity were incompatible with a mental state of vivid drug-induced hallucinations, at least Thomas thought so. Thus, he had to accept the fact that what met his senses was actually sculpted of physical matter and energy. Even desperately holding on to the thought that the wondrous world laying ahead of him was only bizarre in a spatial but not in a temporal sense, that he was still in the year 2009 just at a dreadfully strange place, did not prevent Thomas from feeling a heave of crushing dizziness overcoming him. Thomas’ sense of balance faded and his knees again became weak as if someone had eaten away at them. But he was afraid to touch the walls of this utopian corridor to keep himself from falling.
Animals and plants that looked miraculously tropical were all over the place. The life-forms Thomas encountered here were more like the fauna and flora one was likely to find at the antipodes of one’s mind, only accessible through the most exalted forms of human imagination or the uncontrollable outlandishness of vivid dreams. Since Thomas’ lifestyle of barely manageable, mind-narrowing stress and immune-system abusing sleep-deprivation had barred Thomas from tasting either one, the creatures inhabiting this place were completely novel curiosities to Thomas. If he was not in a life-threatening situation that made his cerebral reducing valve work on all turbines to keep his consciousness in a fight-or-flight response state of survival, he could have, no he certainly would have, playfully indulged in this lavish garden of wonders like a child. However, the neural circuits in Thomas’ brain mediating a mental state of alert incisiveness were overtly active to cleanse Thomas’ mental landscape of any voluptuous eruptions of wholly gratifying enjoyment and amazement. The walls Thomas was still hypnotically starring at were made of luxurious materials whose shiny colourful jewel-like radiance truly had transporting power. This obviously highly diligently constructed material displayed outstandingly magnificent surface properties. It was of an aesthetic-artistic rather than a functional nature and seemed quite organic-dynamic. Various plant species entirely unknown to Thomas, who was of course not even familiar with the relatively unspectacular fauna and flora of the temperate zone, but had at least second-hand television-assisted exposure to some plant kingdom exotica, abundantly covered the walls. These plants lushly decorating the already spectacular walls were only structurally similar though not equal to conventional ivy-like twiners; however their coloration was grossly utopian, reminding Thomas of bioart a’ la Eduardo Kac. There were no GFP bunnies hopping around, at least Thomas’ overstrained eyes had not yet caught sight of one, but the vibrating colors of these plants were certainly not natural. Even Thomas, though a botanical illiterate, could say that with a feeling of utmost certainty. It was as if someone had forcefully spun a color sphere so fast that millions of color nuances had sprinkled all over the place, rendering it a remarkable laboratory for experimental color theory. Other-worldly, brilliant flowers blossomed, poking out of the thick colourful architecture of interlacing leave structures, like glowing marvels.
This floral outlandishness would have been sufficient enough to sensually and conceptually knock Thomas down as if he was a laughably weak mental light-weight. But the fairytale creatures of various stunning sizes, shapes and color-patterns including, according to Thomas taxonomical insights, insects, birds, reptiles, amphibians and various others kinds of biological but somehow unnatural entities more deeply and vividly stirred Thomas’ affective repertoire of wonder, confusion and amazement. They were seemingly harmoniously coexisting in what appeared to Thomas mind as a wholly wonderful, fantastically exotic place. However, only for an ephemeral moment were there these thoroughly gratifying feelings of complete acceptance, peaceful wonder and sensual majesty. Then the pressing, anxious urge to get out of this deceptively paradisiacal place cut through Thomas’ rosy-fluffy phenomenal realm like a merciless razor-blade. Thomas’ cognitive faculty was at least partially restored and so he thought what a fortune it had to have cost to build this place. It meant that these people had to be frighteningly influential and powerful.
When he reached that point in his very slow and erratic train of thoughts, he quickly looked at the man. He was standing right next to Thomas, still with this radiant expression of empathy on his face. ‘Thomas, do you want to meet Charlie? I designed him with what we refer here as scheidonian-heplocraidic diligence.’ Adam smiled clearly anticipating the confusion this term would invoke in Thomas, or rather the deepening of confusion it would cause. ‘Let’s just say I put a lot of diligence into designing this marvellous being! Charlie is even for our present standards an exceptional example of a so-called bugelian type of an ecstatic being.’ When the man made a very soft sound reminding Thomas of some sort of call for one’s pet, he heard light vibrations of flapping wings permeate the auditory already richly filled air. Before Thomas’ imagination could get started to envision a novel flying exoticum, something that was again so vastly beyond the most fabulous creature Thomas’ imaginative faculty could have possibly fashioned appeared in the distance, making its way straight towards the man. ‘Flying chimp’ was the best description Thomas could come up with using conventional vocabulary. But Thomas was anxiously aware that this was an euphemistic simplification of the plethora of other-worldly features of this creature which was getting rapidly closer to Thomas.
Although Thomas, being himself a passionate omnivore, was not one of those fanatical animal-lovers who had always seemed quite ludicrous to him, he could not help but being somehow exhilarated by the appearance of this animal. Nevertheless, his present state of mental instability and anxiety caused him to make a step back upon the quickly approaching, seemingly surreal being. But before it had reached the man, it landed and continued its approach in a chimp-like manner of four-legged propulsion. When it came close enough, it again left the floor with a graceful jump and softly landed in the arms of the man who tenderly caught it in a routine-like fashion. He treated it with such compassion and kindness that Thomas was painfully reminded of his family which he was so deeply concerned about. The man and the creature starred in each other’s eyes which worsened this soul-stirring empathic love Thomas all of a sudden felt for his family. This emotional state of empathetic worry was quite alien to Thomas’ consciousness. When had Thomas last just starred into the eyes of his wife or his son, just existed in the completely fulfilled emotional union with his beloved ones, enjoyed such a moment of soul-soothing, deeply gratifying peacefulness and sanity, a moment simply of completeness? If he could only see his family now, know that they were doing well or at least alive. The words of the man about what had happened to them ran like a cold shudder of emotional pain through his body, it was a paralyzing whole-body pain. And still there was this completely irrational feeling of joy about this scene of shared happiness between the man and that other creature. But Thomas managed to get rid of this feeling that seemed just grossly wrong to him at that moment. The man turned towards Thomas and the other-worldly being was looking now straight into Thomas’ eyes, seemingly penetrating their fearful aversion and evoking again a feeling of enjoyment in Thomas. ‘Catch,’ said the man in a jovial manner and before Thomas could put forth an objection to this, the animal jumped towards him. He reflexively opened his arms and soon had this surreal furry being sitting in his arms. Since Thomas had opened his eyes this morning, his mind had been confronted with an exponentially increasing degree of outlandishness; this situation, however, of an enchanted creature sitting in his hands and rubbing its face against Thomas neck was a quantum leap on the outlandishness scale. But despite all the adversity, all the uncertainty, all the grotesqueness of the situation, Thomas could not help but being emotionally stirred, kindly touched from within. He looked down at the being which in spite of its unnatural extravagance, looked so perfectly alive, so filled with joy and so glowing with cuteness. And at this moment, a subtle involuntary smile appeared on Thomas’ face which had been brutally crippled by a spastic look of anxiety and despair for all too long.
The man slowly approached Thomas and gently petted the living thing in Thomas’ arms whereupon it gave an auditory and facial expression of pleasurable exhilaration. ‘See Thomas, although what you see might be very novel to you, it really is more glorious than you can ever imagine. I am what you would call a historian, I know a lot about your times, the Darwinian Ages, and I can promise you already that what is awaiting you here is more magnificent than you could ever imagine!’ What was one supposed to think, to say, to do in such a situation? Thomas’ mind was so profoundly out of balance as if myriad of full-blown explosions had ripped his neural circuits apart, leaving behind a mental wasteland of stupor. They man gently grabbed the wondrously lovely being, looked into its eyes one more time with loving compassionate intensity and then put it down. ‘Thomas, let me show you around. There’s so much for you to see and explore.’ But I can not take anymore of this, I just need to lay down, lay down and sleep, Thomas thought to himself. Just falling asleep would be such an ambrosial relief at the moment, the only liberating remedy. If one could only turn a switch in one’s head and temporarily log out of one’s waking consciousness, leaving behind the heavy burden of emotional turmoil. But as Thomas was used from his brutally sleep-depriving job, even in this situation his mind did hold on to the troubling waking state.
When the man kindly put his hand on Thomas’ shoulder and started to slowly move forwards, Thomas mechanically followed him along with the adorable fury creature, reminding Thomas of a very loyal dog. They slowly walked through this fairyland where each new sight was so sensually intoxicating and overwhelming that Thomas’ consciousness continued to remain in a state of thought-anaesthesia. The corridor they walked through, and Thomas knew that the description ‘corridor’ was an almost ridiculously reductionistic verbal abstraction of this astounding, detail-overloaded architecture, was illuminated in an almost magical way since there was no visible source of light. Rather it was as if the sun brilliantly shone straight through the walls and shed light upon this creation of glory. Thomas became increasingly aware of more delicate details but he felt somehow confined by his not sufficiently fine-grained, rusty senses. In the back of his mind, he was aware of the fact that the extravagance of luxurious details he witnessed was only a minor, a grossly small fraction of the sensual richness on offer here. And for the first time, a subtle feeling of jealous disappointment unfolded upon Thomas’ affective landscape. Why was he doomed to work in a place that seemed to be the most soul-crippling, sense-blunting and emotion- flattening prison, doing nothing all day but evaluating numbers and meeting brutally self-centered, mercilessly profit-oriented shallow creatures who seemed to have lost touch with everything beautiful, while those people here obviously had created an artificial paradise that was the most soul-soothing, life-affirming place? But his self-defensive mind quickly put a stop to this depressing thought. Thomas reminded himself of the fact that he was dealing here with dangerous lunatics who had kidnapped him. But so what? If it wasn’t for his family, he could have as well just let go and completely indulged in this outrageous empire of lunatic but nevertheless deeply wonderful beauty.
Even if the people here in the end were up to something horrible, Thomas confidently considered the scenario in which those people here could actually hurt him sometime soon as highly improbable. He was almost convinced that their seemingly deep-rooted sense of compassion and niceness was authentic; they were only driven by a powerful mad urge for something different than normal life. And at that point, Thomas had to admit, though he couldn’t do that in a clear conscious manner in the midst of his mind but rather had to push that too revolutionary realization far back into the dark corners of his mental realm, that what he had seen so far was actually much more delicate and delightful than what was on offer in his daily environment. All of sudden, the intensity of illumination soared up and Thomas realized that they were obviously approaching a window. Here Thomas who had quite willingly kept the tempo of the man next to him markedly slowed down and then completely stopped for a moment. ‘Yes, Thomas, that’s a very good idea, take a deep breath and be excited about this view. I am myself deeply senso-markianized whenever I see this sight,’ the man’s face was lightened up by an expression of deeply-felt joy and said ‘I mean I am very exhilarated, we nowadays use a quite extended specific vocabulary to describe our feelings, I will explain all about that to you later. But no more talking…… come now and enjoy this marvellous view with me Thomas!’ What was awaiting Thomas behind these walls? Did the overwhelming, vivid, blooming gorgeousness of this place’ interior expand all the way into the fabric of matter and energy outside these walls. For one second, Thomas’ heart beat suddenly soared up, accompanied by a strong affection of wishful-euphoric expectation; an even greater, more expansive, more lavish playground for the senses, with ever-increasing soul-touching beauty. But as quickly and vigorously Thomas’ spirit had started to fly, as harshly it crashed into the abysmal depths of chilling fear. What would that mean, more of that other-worldly, incomprehensible, exotic stuff? And as Thomas moved outside these walls with his thoughts, outside this place of enthralling, luring, intoxicating appeal, his whole consciousness abruptly darkened and Thomas was back in a mental state of anxious alertness. But when Thomas finally had reached the window, he was mercifully freed again, at least for a few seconds, from the vicious claws of aversive emotions. The sheer intensity of sunrays bombarded Thomas’ retina and briskly cleansed his conscious landscape. Only the almost painful, pure bright light of the sun filled Thomas’ phenomenal realm, a salient moment of pure primordial perception. But the pure whiteness of sunlight gradually dissolved into visible patterns of recognizable forms and did not leave Thomas any time for restful sanity. The view that this opening in the walls offered Thomas radically changed something within him. While all the thrilling exotic entities Thomas had encountered up to this point had suffused his emotional realm with a luring fragrance of sensual delight, they had strongly anaesthetized the rational-conceptual part of Thomas’ mind. Up to this moment, when Thomas first glanced out of that window, he had been entirely unable to make any reasonable statement about what was happening to him; his mind had not even made an effort to enter a strenuous, incisive process of rational analysis, of making sense of the gorgeous grotesqueness surrounding Thomas. But when Thomas’ overtly overactive sensory system in delicately complex interaction with other cortical regions finally produced a phenomenal representation of the physical landscape laying ahead of Thomas, tear drops began to roll down his cheeks. With a rapturous, awe-struck whole-body feeling of frightening sublimety, Thomas realized that he actually was in the future.
Finally, they reached the desired destination where Thomas was supposed to find much clarification, an urgently needed relief from the emotional mayhem which he had been forcefully subjected to for the last hours, which he had experienced as an eternal journey taking him both to the realms of heaven and hell. Thomas had witnessed sights so beautiful, so paradisiacal-utopian, so far beyond anything his senses had the opportunity to taste in the 21st century that it almost had been a transporting spiritual revelation. The man, who Thomas by now knew to be David, a utopian equivalent of a 21st century history scholar, was still next to him. Chapter 4
Thomas had by now firmly accepted the appalling truth. He actually had been cryopreserved and was supposedly now the only living human being of the 21st century. This thought continued to vigorously shake the whole framework of his consciousness, as if the most powerful gong was played in the midst of his mind over and over again. But the strong propensity of the human mind to return after a while even in the face of severe adversity to a somewhat neutral bearable affective state enabled Thomas to walk through the hallways of grotesque utopian magnificence, which had completely paralyzed his very existence only a while ago, with an appearance of almost calm familiarity. But of course, to actually describe Thomas’ emotional state as anywhere close to tranquillity would be an almost cruel trivialization of the reality of his mental agony. The room Thomas entered now was a striking fusion of astounding technological triumph and natural aestheticism. Large plasma-like screens were enclosed by wild, organic, but other-worldly floral architecture.
Amidst this colourful jungle of flourishing vegetation, a man was sitting, apparently waiting for the two. David walked towards the other man, starred into his eyes with an expression of the most exalted and compassionate joy, then hugged him with such passionate affection that Thomas had to assume they hadn’t seen each other for years and were the absolute best friends. He sadly could not remember the last time had been so happily stirred by the sight of another human being. He had to confess that the only time another human being could truly ignite his affections was in the case of sexual attraction. But this feeling seemed not only poignantly coarse but also drastically weak in comparison to this outrageous outpouring of brotherly love he witnessed here. Was everyone here blissed-out on drugs? That seemed to be the only possible explanation for the unnaturally happy and empathic appearance of these people. But how could they possibly sustain such outstanding complexity, vastly surpassing the rational-analytical capabilities of Thomas’ mind, if they were all high on drugs?
‘Thomas, please meet my dear friend Adam! He is one of the pioneers of phenomenology-enhancement. He is a specialist in what we call eudian-emphatic state space expansion. Many people today enjoy much more wonderful degrees of eudian-empathy, especially with a richer, more magnificent texture of experience within this state-space thanks to him!’ Then a deeply satisfied smile appeared on his face and he continued, ‘I have myself just recently expanded my neuro-phenomenal eudian-emphatic infrastructure. It is truly breathtaking!’ ‘Yes, Yes my dear Dave, I am extremely glad as well about the rapid unfolding of this superb state-space, and I can say that we are only at the beginning of fabulous new developments!’ Those were Adam’s first words which Thomas could only grasp on a syntactic but not on a semantic level. To Thomas, Adam seemed to be rather some sort of contemplative Buddhist in his lotus-seat position and surrounded by lovely blooming flowers than a top-notch scientist.
‘I am extremely pleased to meet you Thomas! How do you like our world, at least what you have seen so far? I promise, you’ll like it much more as soon as I have introduced you to many of our new wonderful features.’ The man, who was marked by the same outlandish glowing radiance of health, beauty and joy, quickly but gracefully jumped up and came over to Thomas and gave him a big hug. This at first seemed quite inappropriate and brash to Thomas but soon it made him feel comfortable and welcome whereupon he answered the hug with an equally pronounced display of physical closeness. And Thomas had to admit that it felt actually good, this expressed physical friendliness. For a fleeting moment, it actually appeared to him as a strange and deeply lamentable aspect of the social conduct among people of the 21st century. He hadn’t hugged any of his friends in a long time. In fact, a more careful investigation of his episodic memory revealed to Thomas that only under the disinhibiting spell of alcohol intoxication had he been able to exhibit such a degree of close comforting physical approach. ‘Please Thomas, come and sit down here with us.’
David showed Thomas a place to sit down, which was only distantly related in its appearance to what Thomas considered a proper chair. It was a seating-accommodation whose gorgeous, sensually beguiling unorthodoxy was symptomatic of everything here. It was a primarily wooden construct that seemed to naturally grow out of the floor, like a tree that accidentally grew in the form of a seat. The actual place of seating was covered by an ambrosially soft surface of an unrecognizable material and encircled by rich, radiant flowers as well as various exotic plants that seemed to heave up the seat like a glorious throne. But visual splendour was only one astounding aspect of the full sensual richness of this place. Sounds of such soothing loveliness, among which Thomas could clearly discern bird songs and frog concertos reminding him of a tropical forest, as well as an overwhelming plethora of intense, intriguing, novel smells. Then Thomas was suddenly paralyzed by a sudden flash of sublime beauty. A small frog of such immense, brilliant, complex coloration was energetically hoping from on leave to the next. It was like a lively glowing jewel, the essence of visual magnificence distilled and presented in its purest, most penetrating form. ‘A wonderful creature, isn’t it Thomas! It is a slightly modified descendant of the members of the family Dendrobatidae, the poison dart frogs, which already where in their Darwinian state, visual delights. But this here is a sight of even greater glory, especially to our expanded and enriched sense of aesthetic appreciation. I will explain it to you in further detail, but Thomas you have to know that to us everything and especially sights like these are of such pleasurable, deeply satisfying beauty that it will be hard for you to even conceptually understand our wonderful phenomenal landscape. But trust me Thomas, it is very hard for us to understand your affective repertoire as well.’ A distinct expression of deep empathy lightened up the other man’s face when he pronounced the words ‘your affective repertoire’.
Thomas thought with a subtle feeling of melancholic jealousy that this statement was probably true. How could it be otherwise? While he had to spend at least 10 hours a day in a stressfully incisive state of sensual confinement, those people here lived in what could only be described as paradise, at least superficially. So Thomas was mournfully aware of the fact that those people here certainly had a much richer sense of beauty and probably a more satisfied life than he had ever lead. But on the other hand, it appeared to Thomas as a slightly relieving thought that those people obviously were under the spell of psychoactive substances; all they actually experienced was nothing but a fake, a self-deceptive form of well-being. This made Thomas feel a little bit better and self-satisfied. He definitely preferred a life of adversity and struggle, a life full of fear and pain to such a striking place of grotesque beauty. And all of a sudden, his mind broke through this veil of lovely, intoxicating ambrosia that had numbed his cognitive, his critical powers which now finally saw through this sugar-coated veneer straight to the heart of this world. It was an artificial, inhumane world that was superficially nice, even paradisiacal. But if one boiled it down to its very essence it was nothing but artificial insanity. This realization hit Thomas as a shocking truth that however was not that hard to grasp for him; he somehow could accept this fact without much accompanying emotional uproar. Many science-fiction scenarios had outlined a dreary, inhumane future in which humans were either enslaved by technology or destroyed by their own scientific ingenuity. But obviously Aldous Huxley had been the one who had drawn the most prophetic scenario. Humanity had turned itself into a shallow species of intellect-anaesthetized drug-addicts. And given the happy, self-satisfied and pacified tempers of these people, Huxley might haven even been right in this respect, namely that they were all high on something very similar to the one-dimensional cheap euphoriant soma. But at the same time Thomas realized that this comparison was quite faulty in some sense. The fictional characters in Huxley’s work were strongly Pavlovian-conditioned beings, almost like robots. At least so far, these people here appeared to Thomas as more genuinely friendly and insightfully considerate than most people he had met in the 21st century. ‘Please sit down Thomas,’ said David while he was himself letting his body slowly slide down into the luring softness of this peculiar seating accommodation. ’Oh, I have to say I love these seats so much. They are just opening up such a vast and rich comfort-a-plus state-space.’ He closed his eyes for a second and an expression of deeply-felt pleasure appeared on his face, an expression which almost reminded Thomas of sexual pleasure. ‘You have to experience this Thomas, fabulously superb,’ said Adam. Although Thomas felt highly alien at this place now after having had this profound realization, he did not feel fearful or anxious. He was convicted that those people were among the least harmless individuals he had ever met; they were just blissed-out junkies.
Since Thomas was in spite of this realization still in a state of subtle perplexity and disorientation, which he accepted as a relatively adequate emotional coloring of his consciousness given the fact that he was in the future among druggies, he just went along with the instructions given by those people. What else could he have done instead? So he sat down and although he felt estranged at first, he nevertheless could not deny that he was excited to tacitly test the visually signalled softness. And in fact, it was an excessively rewarding feeling that was however only felt for a few seconds after which the negative feedback mechanisms in Thomas’ brain made him get dully used to it, making quite rapidly the sensory stimuli which at first were so intriguingly fascinating uninterestingly trivial. ‘Alright Thomas, we would like to introduce you to a fabulous technology device which enables experiences in immersive virtual reality. Please don’t be afraid Thomas. I want to explain many features of our civilization to you and this can be done just splendidly within the realms of virtual reality.’ And although Thomas felt again uncomfortable and anxious, he told himself that he was unnecessarily overreacting. So he tried relax again and went with the flow of things. ‘Now Thomas, all you have to do is to just relax and in a few seconds you will be together with us immersed in the stimulating, grandiose spheres of virtual reality. Everything will be self-explicatory from then on,’ said David who gave Thomas a last compassionate smile and then laid back in his wondrous tree-like seat. Thomas’ heart beat drastically went up and he felt quite excited in a strange manner. He didn’t know if he should actually look forward to this outlandish experience or consider it as a frightening climax of insanity he didn’t wish to be a witness of. But before he could further ponder on these superfluous questions, he suddenly exited his waking consciousness.
When Thomas opened his eyes again, he had absolutely no idea for how long he had been unconscious, or at least not in his waking state of consciousness. However, it felt as if he had not been gone for more than a second. He somehow regretted the short duration of this pleasant vacation from the strenuous demands that were constantly being placed on his frail emotional endurance. Where was he now? He looked around and saw David and Adam standing next to him in a new, even more strikingly colourful and radiant attire than before and in a state of motivated exaltation. But what had happened to the surroundings? And for a second, he felt a breeze of insanity blowing through his mind. What he was witnessing now certainly closely resembled the vastly outlandish, bizarre realms of psychedelia. There were no concrete, familiar objects, but only forms and patterns of all possible facets of colors. Some of them were static, while others were dynamic, constantly changing jewel-like color-transformations. And Thomas was part of in this pinnacle of fantastic grotesqueness. ‘What do you say Thomas. We had to slightly adapt the program to your neural circuitry, but I hope it is still quite stimulating.’ David walked up to Thomas and put his hand on his shoulder. ‘See you can talk to me and even touch me. We have just exchanged the source of neuronal stimulation. There are still many new better developments ahead in the field of immersive virtual reality but this is already astoundingly great.’ An expression of pure exaltation appeared on Adam’s face and Thomas again wished that he could only for one moment feel this way, a moment of liberating, clean, pure euphoria. Maybe he should try one of their drugs, at least once. He would not be a social misfit and an actual outlaw if he tried a psychotropic substance here. Maybe he should just do, just try it and feel like they do for one moment. Chapter 5
‘Thomas, I will now introduce you to the most fundamental features of our civilization. For you to understand us, you will need however to understand some facts about the human brain. Thomas, please tell me, what do you know about the brain?’ What a perfectly ridiculous question, Thomas thought. Although Thomas did consider himself a man of sophistication, he concerned himself more with the vast intricacies of the market and the global political situation than with the human brain. It seemed to him much more fruitful and manageable to try to reveal the inner workings of an economic system than the unmanageable complexities of the human brain. In his opinion, one could never find out everything about the human physiology in general; it was just too immense to actually understand. And what was the point of it anyways? ‘I am honest with you, I don’t know much about the human brain. I mean I know there are billions of nerve cells and they all work together. But that’s basically it!’ Thomas felt a little bit embarrassed since he had to openly admit that he didn’t know much, which was quite unusual for him. But his mental self-defences quickly kicked in and Thomas immediately soothed his bruised ego by convincing himself that knowledge about the human brain was not that important; after all he wasn’t a medical doctor. ‘Alright Thomas,’ said Adam cordially, ‘I will try to explain to you as much as possible. But please, you always have to remind me when something is unclear to you.’
All of a sudden, a gigantic three-dimensional construct which seemed like a colossal utopian machine magically appeared in front of them as if beamed there. Thomas was frightened, he couldn’t deny that. But only for a moment, then he was actually intrigued by the visually spectacular object in front of him. However, he still hadn’t completely grasped what was truly happening here. His mind had not yet processed the torrent of the billions of bits of information constantly flooding his cerebral cortex. Thomas had not fully understood yet that he was actually immersed in the realms of virtual reality. ‘This, Thomas, is a very elaborate, animated and vastly magnified abstraction of a nerve cell. Although there are many different types with various sizes, shapes and functions, it is for expository convenience, I think, very helpful to depict it in this standardized form. Come with me.’
They walked closer and Thomas could see what apparently were the myriads of labyrinthian cellular and molecular processes going on within this neuron.‘Here we have the soma, the cell-body, Thomas.’ All of a sudden the central part of the neuron, with a somewhat globular shape started to marvellously glow. Thomas was perplexed and amazed; the man seemed to be able through his mere thoughts to modify this object. This realization went through his whole body like feral lightening, electrifying every single cell. Thomas had thought that his mind had finally reached a state of acceptance and resilience. He had witnessed the very essence of strangeness in so many flavours. But this here was again such a novel flavour of bizarreness that it heavily disturbed his mental frame. But he was lucky in a certain sense. Since he was so convinced of the drug-assisted friendliness of these people, his emotional repertoire of fear and anxiety was only mildly activated and he was spared a nightmarish freak-out, at least for now. ‘Within the soma you’ll find myriad different cell structures also referred to as organelles. Here you can see the Golgi apparatus, the rough endoplasmatic reticulum, polysomes, lysosomes, mitochondria and in the centre the nucleus, which includes the cell’s genome. Within the cell nucleus resides all the hereditary information of an organism in the form of the long double-stranded DNA molecule.’ Adam’s speech was accompanied by a vivid visual display of the various verbally mentioned features. Within the centre of the cell a spherical object, the cell-nucleus, began to radiate and a double-stranded helix was magnified which Thomas recognized to be the DNA. ‘Every biological organism is dependent on its genome. It encodes the instructions for how to build an organism. The genetic information an individual carries in each cell of his body together with the stimuli an individual constantly encounters in his external and internal environment shape a biological organism into its actual form of physical and phenomenal existence. You and I and all other biological entities, we are all based on our genome. And Thomas, you will understand it later much better, but for now I can tell you that the vast, fundamental differences between the genomes of all biological entities existing today in the Euphenomenological Age and those having existed in the Darwinian Ages are what makes our civilization so essentially sublimely wonderful.’
The man paused for a second and went up to Thomas, who just stood there mildly perplexed, and looked him straight into the eyes as if he wanted to stare right into the very heart of Thomas’ existence. ‘Thomas, we have made it, we have abolished suffering for every sentient being. I know that some people in the Darwinian Ages had glimpsed into the tantalising spheres of pure emphatic-euphoric well-being, but Thomas,’ and here the man paused and tears appeared in his eyes, tears that indicated such an overwhelming rapturous overjoyed sensation of wholesome, pristine emotional well-being which Thomas had only witnessed during the birth of his children. ‘But Thomas,’ started the man again ‘sentience on earth has finally been lifted out of the shadows of physical and emotional pain into the glorious, heavenly spheres of bliss, forever. We have achieved what one of the most brilliant and prophetic man in the history of the Darwinian Ages, David Pearce, has already proposed!’
Thomas was simultaneously emotionally stirred and appalled to the utmost extent. Thomas was fascinated by that man; he was of such a beautiful and refined physical appearance and seemed to be suffused by the most genuine form of happiness and empathy. But at the same time Thomas was convinced that this man was helplessly blissed-out on drugs, that he was not really himself, not the true Adam; and the things this man was talking about vastly surpassed Thomas’ conceptual framework and appeared to him as highly lunatic. ‘I just hope Thomas that soon you will understand the sublime extent of our achievements!’ Adam made a step back from Thomas but continued to look at him with an expression of almost ecstatic friendliness. ‘Let us continue our journey through the magnificent complexities of the nervous system. Only then can you understand what is actually going here.’
Thomas was highly relieved that the man returned to a less emotionally demanding subject, where his mind could fall into a state of at least affective tranquillity. ‘The soma one could say, Thomas, is the centre of the nerve cell though this is of course a simplification. I will explain to you everything in a simplified way. It would take you years to deeply understand the intricate workings of the nervous system. So I will keep my explanations to the essential minimum, which will help you understand our civilization much better.’ He looked at Thomas in a patient, sympathetic way and then continued his educational soliloquy. ‘On the one side of the soma, you’ll find the dendritic tree.’ Thomas thought that this actually was an apt description, when the branch-like structures growing out of the cell-body lighted up. ‘And on the other side you can see the so-called axon or nerve fiber.’ Although for Thomas all those facts were so perfectly unimportant and trivial in comparison to the startling weirdness of the immediate surroundings; nevertheless he continued to listen or at least gave the impression of being a patient listener since he clearly preferred a monologue of the other man to having to engage in an exhausting dialogue.
‘Each nerve cell is electrically excitable. In the case of the neuron, this means that there is a flux of ions, positively or negatively charged particles, in and out of the nerve cell. However, this happens only along the axon. The signal starts at the so-called axon-hillock and travels all the way down to the axon terminal.’ Suddenly, the massive cell-model in front of him became a lively factory of thousands of molecular processes, and Thomas saw vivid animations of electrical impulses originating at the starting point of the axon and resulting in the release of multitudinous chemicals at the end of it. The various neurons were placed in certain arrangements so that the axon terminal of one neuron communicated with the dendrites of another neuron. ‘So Thomas, now we see a little neural circuitry. In general, when an electrical signal travelling down the axon reaches the axon terminal, a great number of chemicals, which are called neurotransmitters, are released into the so-called synaptic cleft; this is the tiny space between two communicating neurons. The pre-synaptically released neurotransmitters diffuse across the synaptic cleft and subsequently bind to specific molecular arrangements, the post-synaptic receptors, which lie on the dendrites of the neuron that comes next in the information chain. This works like a key-lock system, only neurotransmitters with the appropriate shape can fit into certain receptors. Watch it for a second, Thomas!’ And although all this neurobabble had not truly ignited Thomas’ sense of wonder and curiosity, watching this highly byzantine apparatus of thousands of small but unimaginable daedal molecular processes actually put Thomas’ consciousness, for a transitory moment, back into a state of sparkling child-like fascination. He was blown away, awestruck; a powerful sensual firework was going off in his mind. Adam who could clearly see the sheer amazement in Thomas’ eyes said, ‘I am glad you are exalted by this, Thomas. But you will see, it gets even more fascinating and complicated than that.’
The man considerately paused here to let Thomas indulge in this sensual amusement park; then he devotedly continued to offer Thomas a view into the strangely wonderful world of neurochemical processes. ‘When a neurotransmitter has reached and bound to its target-receptor, like a key that fits into a lock, there are many different responses it can cause. All in all, one can say that this neurotransmitter-receptor binding causes a change in the structure and function of the post-synaptic neuron. Once a neurotransmitter has bound to its appropriate receptor it activates other molecules in the cell which in a cascade-like fashion activate more and more molecules within the cell. The end result is that the expression of the neuron’s genome is altered. So this neurotransmitter-receptor binding causes a change of gene expression which can profoundly alter the biochemical machinery, the very essence, of the post-synaptic nerve cell.’ Again, this lecture-style expository of the workings of a neuron left Thomas unaffected, although he actually could follow what the man was saying very well despite his mental and physical fatigue. Besides, a rapidly intensifying feeling of hunger started to dominate all of Thomas’ other thoughts and emotions. But he was to some extent afraid of asking for something to eat. What would they offer him? It probably would be something so other-worldly uncanny that the subsequently induced feeling of estrangement would subdue any desire to eat. But Thomas had to eat at some point or didn’t he? The beginning of this train of thought, of what would happen if he just did not eat, nastily threw Thomas back into a state of disturbing emotional agony. Thomas was just too feeble and confused at the moment to deal with existential questions. After all, in spite of the unimaginable adversity of the circumstances he found himself in, a powerful will to survive nevertheless suffused every moment of Thomas’ waking consciousness. So he knew that eventually he had to eat in spite of the unwelcome prospect of increasing estrangement; but at the moment the emotional turmoil Thomas expected to go along with the satisfaction of his desire to eat seemed too high a price to pay. So he continued to listen and stare, with his last rapidly dwindling mental resources.
‘But the neurotransmitter-receptor binding does not only cause a change in gene expression. It also leads to the emergence of an electric signal in the post-synaptic neuron or to the suppression of one. Some neurotransmitters play an excitatory whereas others an inhibitory role.’ He smiled and looked at Thomas in an understanding manner as if he knew that the complex workings of the brain were the last thing Thomas really wanted to concern himself with at the moment. But Thomas at the back of his mind somehow trusted Adam’s promise that all this would eventually shed clarifying light on the incomprehensible grotesqueness of this utopian world. ‘Now Thomas, the remarkable thing about a nervous system is that the complex flows of matter and energy throughout it, in the form of neurotransmitter-receptor binding, genome-genome interactions between neurons, the firing of electrical signals and various other molecular mechanisms lead to the emergence of a experiental phenomenal space in which conscious experience can take place such as your consciousness.
Thomas, your experiental space can have certain properties or qualia. For example, colors such as redness or greenness are qualia. They don’t exist in the external physical world as matter and energy. A rose is not itself red as a physical object. Its surface absorbs and reflects certain frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. But they are not red. They are just patterns of matter and energy. However, in your mind redness exists as a phenomenal property which can not be defined in terms of matter and energy. You can not define redness itself by referring to certain wave-lengths of electromagnetic radiation. For example, if one would change the sensory-receptors in your eye, it could be accomplished that the same wave-length of light which formerly caused redness in your mind now causes blueness. The wave-lengths themselves are neither red nor blue, but you experience them as either red or blue; they are qualia in your mind. You can only say what they are like. Thus, the texture of your experiental space is also referred to as the ‘what-it’s-likeness’. The conscious experience of redness is a metaphysical phenomenon, a phenomenal property of your experiental space. Now, all other colors are qualia in the same way.
But what is much more important is the fact that feelings such as joy and pain are also qualia. They can’t be described in terms of matter and energy. They are purely phenomenal, but nevertheless real since you clearly feel them. Now Thomas, although qualia themselves can’t be described in terms of matter and energy, they nevertheless don’t just appear out of nowhere, independent of matter and energy. Instead, phenomenological entities emerge out of certain patterns of matter and energy in an isomorphic manner, meaning that out of a certain matter and energy pattern a corresponding phenomenal property arises. We have learned a lot since the beginning of the 21st century about how patterns of matter and energy and phenomenal entities are correlated. And that is the fundamentally important, the wonderful part as you will soon learn An expression of glowing exaltation and compassionate hope, hope that Thomas would soon understand this sublime significance too, appeared on Adam’s face. ‘Thomas, I have to highlight that again, although the phenomenological entities in your mind, such as redness or pain, can’t be described in terms of matter and energy they are essentially dependent on them. Every phenomenological property of your mind can be precisely matched with a certain specific pattern of energy and matter within your physical brain. This means, no single property exists within your mind’s phenomenology that cannot be matched to a specific matter and energy blueprint, namely neural activity, localized in your brain. A phenomenological entity doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. I know you are familiar with a personal computer. Just think as an analogy of your experiental space as the interface between the computer and you, that which appears on a computer screen. Each item on there is fundamentally different from the bustling activity of electrical circuits going on within the hardware of the computer. However, you will not find any items on your computer screen that are not encoded by electrical patterns within your computers’ hardware. The interface of your computer is not identical to its hardware, but nevertheless each item on a computers’ screen can be precisely matched to a certain arrangement of energy and matter within its hardware. I admit that it is in some sense an imperfect analogy, but I think it at least hints at where I want to guide you.’ He paused here for a second and again looked Thomas straight into the eyes as if he was so eager to communicate in the most direct but also sympathetic way possible. ‘Thomas, every entity in your consciousness has a neural substrate, a blueprint of matter and energy. Every affect you have every felt, every moment of joy and every moment of despair, every sensory item that has inhabited your phenomenal landscape, had a well-defined neural signature. Just consider where we are right now. We find ourselves immersed in the wonderful world of virtual reality. The qualia in your experiental space right now are probably unfamiliar to you, nevertheless they somehow resemble familiar phenomenal elements. Although the colors you see are vastly more brilliant than those encountered in the physical world, they are nonetheless colors. So you see redness over there,’ and the man pointed to a random location where all of a sudden a lovely glowing patch of redness appeared that reminded Thomas of the vivid coloration of a red rose. ‘But see Thomas this redness doesn’t stem from electromagnetic radiation bombarding your retinal sensory receptors. Rather it is caused by our intricate virtual reality technology devices that produce a neural pattern in the brain equivalent or at least very similar to that produced by the stimulation of your light-sensitive cells on the retina. Again, this phenomenal property in your mind redness doesn’t just appear out of nowhere, but emerges out of a neural pattern, induced by virtual reality devices. Nevertheless this redness here is as real as the redness you normally find in your mind. It is a phenomenal entity that does exist since you experience it. What causes the neural pattern underlying it, either physical objects or a virtual reality device, doesn’t influence its ontological status. You experience it, thus it is real.’
All this was far too much for Thomas to actually comprehend. What about love, true passionate love? What about the horridness of emotional agony? What about all those emotions and thoughts that make up a human being? What about the self? What about the soul? Thomas was reluctant to believe that he was nothing more than a pattern of molecular processes, nothing more than matter and energy. ‘But I don’t think I am just matter and energy,’ exclaimed Thomas almost indignantly. ‘That’s exactly the point I want to make Thomas. You are not just matter and energy. You exist on a phenomenal level which is essentially not physical. A feeling of happiness is not the neural substrates encoding it per se. The neural signature of happiness per se is physical and doesn’t have intrinsic value, but your feeling of happiness is a phenomenal property and is indeed intrinsically valuable. Nevertheless your phenomenal ontological status is isomorphically related to your physical ontological status! If you remove the physical basis, you lose the phenomenal property. However, everything else people believe in,’ continued Adam, ‘such as the soul, which is not part of the mind’s phenomenology are of course not necessarily based on neurochemistry, we just have to be agnostic about these concepts. But that is beside the point Thomas. I don’t claim that anyone living in our civilization today has a better soul than anyone who lived in the Darwinian Ages. But I guarantee you, Thomas,’ and here Adam’s face again began to radiate the most pristine form of compassionate exaltation as if brilliantly glowing from deep within ‘that we have made every sentient being’s phenomenology unimaginablely sublime. And I can promise you that we have sublimety also waiting for you!’
At this point a cold shiver of fear acutely undulated Thomas’ relatively tranquil mind. Would they force him to take drugs too, to make him helplessly blissed-out, Thomas thought anxiously. ‘We are getting very close Thomas, to the actual revelation, the crux, the very essence of our Post-Darwinian Euphenomenlogical Age.’ Thomas was slightly confused, to put it euphemistically, about the usage of the terms ‘Euphenomenological’ and ‘Darwinian’ he had already heard so many times from Adam and David. Thomas of course knew about Darwin, a lack of knowledge in this regard would have certainly devastated Thomas’ self-respect in a gruesome manner. But it evaded his cognitive abilities to draw a connection between Darwin and what he heard so far. Did the man try to say, evolution had produced this society? That they were not the slaves of drugs but naturally blissed-out? This thought produced a rush of subtle euphoria; for a moment Thomas thought that he had arrived in a natural, an authentic form of paradise, where everyone was naturally happy and nice. He didn’t know much about evolution, but he kept this vigorously exalting thought in his mind as long as it could withstand the vicious claws of empirical evidence to the contrary. But the growing potency of this pressing feeling of hunger subdued the emotional pleasantness of this euphoric hypothesis. He soon had to ask; the neocortically envisioned unpleasantness of asking for food would soon appear dwindingly weak in comparison to the powerful mesocorticolimbically arising instinctual drive for food. But at the moment he still hoped that either Adam or David would bring this topic up, in which case Thomas would gratefully surrender to his desire.
By the way, Thomas thought, where was David and what was he doing? He looked around in this spatially seemingly unlimited virtual realm and was shockingly perplexed when he saw David just floating around in an ambrosial soft cloud of brightly shining millions of spectacular color nuances with an expression of pure bliss, right next to the visually extravagant, colossal animation of a neural network. This seemed fantastically alien to Thomas; nevertheless the fact that David truly was on the proverbial ‘cloud-nine’ crossed Thomas as a humorous, subtly delightful thought. This just can’t be real! This phrase began to resonate in Thomas’ mind almost like a cognitive theme melody. ‘Are you hungry Thomas? Please tell me whenever you are hungry. I would be delighted to introduce you to some of our gourmet specialities!’ Gong! Here it was, the ultimate juxtaposition of a bane and a boon. ‘Usually Thomas, we have sophisticated surveillance, maintenance and protection, so called SMPs, to control all physiological states of our body while immersed in virtual reality. This fabulously sophisticated design enables us to indulge in these wondrous spheres without having to eat or be concerned with any other bodily necessities. They are taken care of by these SMPs in a very effective and user-friendly way. For example, very detailed blood profiles of available amíno acids, fatty acids, carbohydrates as well as vitamins, minerals and other nutrients are created and appropriately modified to meet the recommended genotype-specific standards for each individual’s optimal physical and mental health. But some precautions and elaborate procedures would have had to be performed on you before that could be done for your body too. We wanted to spare you these probably unpleasant steps, at least for now until you can decide for yourself! So please just tell me, Thomas whenever you feel any bodily necessities such as eating.’ He smiled at Thomas and patiently waited for some informative response on Thomas’ side.
Thomas was just confused; he would have loved to just say ‘Yes, I am starving,’ but the present circumstances didn’t facilitate at all his usual decisiveness which made him the successful business person that he was. Rather any sense of resolution was heavily subdued by the other-worldly novelty of the situation. Se he remained confusedly silent in spite of the almost unbearable desire to eat. ‘Alright Thomas, I will continue to introduce you to the wonderful but hard-to-grasp essence of our Euphenomenological Age. Let me introduce you to the neuro-phenomenological architecture of affective consciousness! I am sure this sounds like a daunting subject for you Thomas, but it is much more wonderful and fundamental than it is daunting.’ Alright, thought Thomas to himself, should I really continue to listen or just zone-out? But Thomas clearly felt a motivational pull towards clarity and understanding. Right now he was unpleasantly suspended in a state of suffocating confusion. Maybe he should put his last dwindling mental resources together and continue to make an effort to comprehend what Adam was about to say.
‘First, it is very important for you to understand the logic behind evolution!’ Thomas felt a stingy feeling of embarrassment. He sort of knew, or at least believed to know the logic behind evolution, but he felt like back in his college years, when a teacher had asked a relatively easy question and Thomas being paralyzingly afraid of embarrassment wouldn’t raise his arm to answer it although in his mind the obvious answer was energetically swirling around, desperately pushing to be released. Thomas also remained silent in this case, although he acknowledge that it was silly since the sympathy and compassion of these people here was entirely incomparable to the vicious schadenfreude of competitive university students who just couldn’t wait for someone to say something ridiculously inappropriate. Adam was considerate and sensitive enough to realize what was going on in Thomas’ head and thus said ‘Well, to make sure you know exactly what I am talking about, I will lay out the crude logic of evolution for you. In honor of the brilliant scientist who first saw through the beautiful veil of nature to its cold-hearted logic, Charles Darwin, I will refer to evolution as Darwinian evolution to contrast it with the sublime form of evolution at work now. Well, Darwinian evolution was nothing more than a process of competition among self-replicating biological entities, namely genes. A gene could mutate over time to a new version. Those new genes that could replicate faster would spread and dominate. Now a new version of a gene could replicate itself faster if the carrier of that particular gene could produce more offspring than the carrier of the older version. Although this is a crude simplification of the complexity of evolution, that is the fundamental logic behind it. Every organism is built in such a way as to maximize his inclusive fitness, which is his ability to ensure the propagation of his genes.
Now, to understand the neuro-phenomenological basis for affective experience, I have to introduce you further to some neurochemical as well as phenomenal concepts. While one can generally say that out of complex neural electrochemical dynamics an experiental space can emerge, specific neural patterns can open sub-spaces and texture these spaces with various qualia. At some point in evolution, a properly functioning central nervous system had evolved. The neural dynamics of a central nervous system, more precisely, the electrochemical field dynamics, enabled the emergence of a unitary experiental manifold with phenomenal properties. At first, a so-called primary experiential space, or you might as well call it consciousness, evolved that opened up two distinct experiental sub-spaces, namely a perceptual and an affective experiental space. These spaces were textured by raw perceptions such as motion, color, shape, etc. and feelings such as pain and pleasure. Why did that happen? Well, the perceptual experiental sub-space was selected for by evolution since it enabled an organism to perceive and orient in the environment. The affective experiental sub-space, in contrast, enabled an organism to feel the biological value of various stimuli.
This is an exceedingly important point here, Thomas, which you should spend all your cognitive resources on to truly understand it. The evolution of an affective experiential space is what in the Darwinian Ages negative utilitarians had viewed as the great bane and classical utilitarians as the great boon of evolution. And in our age we view as the sublime gift of evolution. Why was it at the same time a bane and a boon? Well, Thomas, evolution had coupled functionality with phenomenology.’ Here Adam paused as to place special significance to what he just had said, but only for a second or so after which he fervently continued his revelatory soliloquy ‘What do I mean by that? Let me give you a concrete example. An environmental stimulus that damages an organism’s tissue is a potential threat to the propagation of the organism’s genes. So if a new version of a gene arises which codes for neural substrates that predispose the organism to avoid this noxious stimulus, then this new version of the gene will outcompete its old version since the organism is now more likely to avoid noxious stimuli and thus to produce more offspring. But at what costs! In the course of evolution neural substrates arose that not only functionally in the form of simple reflexive behavioural reactions made an organism avoid noxious stimuli but also consciously via phenomenal intrinsically disvaluable qualia such as pain. By creating a feeling of painful aversion, the organism actually felt the biological disvalue of a noxious stimulus in the form of phenomenal disvalue. In this fashion phenomenal unpleasantness came into existence. This is why negative utilitarians viewed the emergence of an affective experiental space as the great bane of evolution. Had a sufficiently complex nervous system never evolved, there would have never been one single intrinsically disvaluable, unpleasant experience on earth. But in the same manner phenomenal pleasantness did evolve, namely when it was advantageous for the propagation an organism’s genes if that organism could feel the biological value of a stimulus via a phenomenal intrinsically valuable quality such as pleasure. This is how phenomenal pleasantness evolved. Now you might understand why classical utilitarians viewed the emergence of an affective consciousness as the great boon of evolution. If those neural dynamics out of which an affective experiental space emerges had never evolved, there would have never been a single positive feeling in the world.
A world full of organisms with the ability to perceive and think but without the ability to feel is as intrinsically valueless as a world full of zombies!’ Adam looked at Thomas and said with special emphasis, ‘Imagine you could see a beautiful girl. Without an affective experiental space you couldn’t value her at all. No sexual attraction, no arousal, no lust, no love. Only a beautiful girl in your mind! Wouldn’t that be valueless if you can’t feel anything? Imagine you have the most complex philosophical or mathematical revelation, but you can feel nothing, no joy, no appreciation, no significance, just nothing! Wouldn’t such a revelation be intrinsically valueless if no one could ever appreciate it, feel the significance it has? And that’s why we today view the evolution of an affective consciousness as the sublime gift of evolution. Without it the wonderful euphenomenology of our minds could have never become reality. But back in the Darwinian Ages, the coupling of phenomenology with functionality truly was a bane and a boon since it ensured that an organism both was endowed with the capacity for phenomenal pleasantness but also for phenomenal unpleasantness!’
At this point in his speech, a passionate feeling of empathy seemed to magically permeate Adam’s whole existence. Thomas could gradually understand the significance of Adam’s utterances. He realized that existence truly wouldn’t be worthwhile if one couldn’t feel. Just sensation without an accompanying feeling of value was so utterly pointless. So yes Thomas considered the evolution of an ‘affective experiental space’, a terminology that still sounded quite bizarre to him, was truly a blessing. But of course, Adam was right that it sometimes was also a terrible bane!
‘In the course of evolution, the central nervous system became increasingly complex and eventually what might be termed a cognitive experiential space began to emerge. But all sub-spaces, including perceptual, affective and cognitive were unified in one single experiental space; they were highly intertwined and couldn’t be easily distinguished phenomenally even upon careful introspection. However, it is important see that every perceptual and cognitive qualia needed to be combined with an affective qualia to have any significance at all. These perceptual and cognitive qualia so-to-say needed an affective gloss. You will later see Thomas that this is why every moment of our existence is a wonderful sensual and intellectual orgy; not because every perception or thought we have is so intrinsically wonderful, but because their affective coloring is outstandingly sublime.
These experiental sub-spaces are not only phenomenally highly intertwined but also neuro-anatomically. This neuroanatomical interconnection between various experiental sub-space neural substrates is highly complex and requires deep understanding of neuroscience. However, I can reveal to you one example to highlight this, namely the dopamine innervation of the neocortex. While dopamine is a neurotransmitter which is generally speaking involved in sub-neocortical neural systems mediating feelings in the broad category motivation, the neocortex is a very recent neural structure of the brain that is responsible for the outstanding cognitive abilities of human beings. So while dopaminergic neural dynamics are responsible for texturing the affective experiental sub-space, the neural dynamics within the neocortex are responsible for the emergence of cognitive qualia. Now the dopaminergic innervation of the neocortex results phenomenally in the already mentioned affective coloring of thoughts. This is of course a gross simplification but trust me you don’t want to know right now the actual even for our cognitive capacities overwhelming complexities that are actually going on there. I think you can now see that the human experiental space is textured perceptually, affectively and cognitively and that these textures are intertwined.
It is, however, crucial to understand a little more clearly how they are phenomenally interwoven. So again, there are sub-neocortical neural systems out of which an affective consciousness arises, and neocortical neural structures that are responsible for thoughts. Now both influence each other, but how can you describe this phenomenally? To make it simple, the neocortical influence on the affective consciousness can be described as a modification and rationalization capacity of feelings. You can cognitively access and manipulate raw feelings such as pain and pleasure. Thomas, you can cognitively access and slightly modify raw feelings, but the raw feelings nevertheless remain actual feelings, qualia of your experiental manifold. When you feel pain for example, you can rationalize this feeling and just say you don’t mind it. But that means you still feel the pain, maybe a little less phenomenally unpleasant, but it still is there! When someone would grossly torture you, you would still feel the abysmal depths of phenomenal horror, despite any adaptive neocortical modifications and rationalizations. Your neocortex is utterly powerless over the affective texture of your mind! However, the case of influence in the opposite direction is quite different. Evolution ensured that affective states had a dominant influence over one’s thoughts. This is the reason for mood-thought congruence. When your body needs food which you phenomenally experience as hunger, your thoughts start to be centred around this topic. What are you going to eat, how will the food taste and so forth are thoughts induced by an affective state of hunger. That is extremely important to keep in mind Thomas for you to understand the crux of our civilization.
Since in humans the affective and cognitive experiental sub-spaces are interlinked, there is a vast array of fine-grained textural nuances of affective qualia. You probably know all of them, Thomas. Whenever you have feelings of euphoria, amazement, wonder, cheerfulness or simply pleasure, this means your affective experiental space is textured positively. And since you were born during the Darwinian Ages,’ and here Adam paused and looked at Thomas with an expression of outstanding compassionate empathy, ‘in which negative qualia still were nasty properties of any sentient beings’ phenomenal consciousness, you probably know them very well. Anxiety, fear, angst, pain, depression, all these are negative, nasty, gruesome feelings.’ And as soon as Adam had mentioned those feelings, Thomas was reminded of his own, sometimes terrible and nasty phenomenology. He was himself sometimes overcome by sickening feelings of depression, existential-angst or sadness and of course unbearable physical pain. And Thomas thought it impossible that all this nastiness could have really been overcome. It was sadly impossible! What a grotesquely utopian idea, Thomas thought to himself. Life wouldn’t function without at least some forms of suffering! But some forms of phenomenological nastiness were just so unnecessary and unfair such as the suffering of people in the third-world or that of terminally-ill people and their families who had to witness the soul-gnawing horridness of slow, wicked decay of the body and the mind.
‘Well Thomas, let’s more carefully examine the evolutionary roots of human beings, Homo sapiens sapiens. We know that human beings evolved on the African Savannah, starting more than 2 million years before you were born, Thomas. And here comes the inconvenient truth about human evolution. As I have already revealed to you, every organism evolved through the propagation of genes. Roughly speaking, those genes that made an organism better at producing more offspring were the winners. Now, if one considers the environmental circumstances under which human beings evolved and which genes were of advantage there, this leads to a tragic conclusion about human nature, especially about the neuro-phenomenological fabric of emotions! Thomas, there was scarcity of sexual partners, scarcity of food, abundance of aversive stimuli such as predation and climatic factors, complex social interactions and much more features that were potential steppingstones for gene propagation.
Imagine what kinds of behavioural effects would have allowed genetic elements to leave more copies of themselves over time. Let’s assume the offspring of a human being had a new genetic variant of a gene that predisposed his hands to be very delicate, perfectly to play a lovely Mozart sonate. Do you think the carrier of this new version would have had a greater chance to produce more offspring and thus more copies of this delicate-hand gene would have been left in the human population evolving on the planes of the African Savannah? The answer seems to be straightforwardly no! Now Thomas, here we come even closer to the problem of the human condition. The human brain is as much dependent on genes as the hands of an individual. The neurochemistry of the brain is shaped of course by environmental forces too, but genes still are an outstandingly powerful predisposition that shapes the human phenomenology! Now imagine the offspring of a human being did inherit a mutated gene that coded for a strong disposition to have a very delicate phenomenology full of nice qualia such as love, friendliness, euphoria and so forth. Do you think such a ‘delicate phenomneology’ would have lead to a behaviour which helped that individual to produce more offspring and thus more copies of that delicate-mind gene would have been left in the human population, given the harsh conditions on the African Savannah. The answer again is obviously no!
Do you now kind of get where I am hinting at Thomas. The human body, including the human brain, were shaped by a logical principle of competition among self-replicating selfish genes. And the place where this competition was carried out was not a very comfortable one, but the unkind African Savannah. Thus almost all features of a human being are the result of a long struggle of gene rivalry. Thus new gene versions accumulated in the human genome because of a propagation advantage not because they were chosen by the tender, loving foresight of evolution. Well all this wouldn’t be a big ethical problem if we were talking only about the functional or even perceptual or cognitive phenomenal outcome of evolution. It doesn’t seem to make a big difference by itself if we ended up with a population of rough-handed instead of delicate-handed people. Or if only blue-leaved plants had been produced by evolution instead of green-leaved ones. From an ethical, value-perspective both outcomes by themselves seem equally valueless. But when one considers the affective phenomenal outcome of evolution, where something is produced that is either intrinsically valuable or intrinsically disvaluable, then ethical, value-considerations are essential. It doesn’t seem to make a difference if the world was populated by rough-handed or delicate-handed people if no piano did exist. Delicate-handedness is not valuable intrinsically, by itself. It only has instrumental value, meaning that it becomes valuable only if someone likes piano music and there is a piano. And it also seems not valuable intrinsically if the world was populated only by humans who could see thousands of color nuances or understand the theory of general relativity if they completely lacked an affective consciousness endowing them with a sense of significance and appreciation. But it seems clear that it does make an essential difference if the world was populated by delicate-minded people instead of rough-minded people. It doesn’t make a difference because delicate-minded people play the piano better or do anything else better. It simply makes a difference because phenomenal value is intrinsically valuable and phenomenal disvalue is intrinsically disvaluable, whereas it seems clear that delicate-handedness is not valueable by itself.’
Adam paused for a second and looked at Thomas to see if he could at least to some degree his utterances. But this had not been decided yet since there was still a lot of bustling activity going on in Thomas’ brain, far too much to permit an epiphany-like realization yet. ‘I repeat it again Thomas. Imagine a world full of only delicate hands, not even people, only delicate hands by themselves. Would you say this world is more intrinsically valuable than a world full of rough-hands?’ Thomas was unsure so he said ‘Well, one could argue that delicate hands are just intrinsically nicer than rough-hands.’ Adam smiled cheerfully since he realized Thomas was actively engaged to understand what was going on here. ‘This is a good argument, but by saying they are intrinsically nicer you presuppose an affective conscious entity, an observer that feels they are nicer. But the conscious observer might actually feel that rough hands are superior and thus more valuable. But take again the scenario of phenomenal delicateness and roughness or change it into phenomenal value in the form of pleasure and disvalue in the form of pleasure to make it more understandable. Just imagine there was affective consciousness floating around in the universe, not necessarily a human being but some conscious entity that was nothing but pure pleasure and some other conscious entity that was nothing but pure pain. Thus only these two phenomenological properties exist, pleasure and pain. Wouldn’t you agree that there doesn’t need to be an observer who feels which one is more valuable as in the case of the delicate and rough hand scenario? Wouldn’t you agree that the consciousness which feels pleasure perpetually is more valuable than the consciousness who feels pain indefinitely. And the raw feels are the same as the pleasure and pain that you experience.’ He again looked at Thomas with an expression of compassionate hope. And in fact, there was no way Thomas couldn’t see the difference between the two scenarios, the delicate-hand and the delicate-mind one. But he still was unsure how that was really relevant in this case.
‘Now consider again evolution and its outcome. If evolution had produced a world full of rough-hands instead of delicate-hands there wouldn’t be much reason to complain or to try to change something since there was no difference in value. But what if evolution had produced only phenomenal sadness instead of phenomenal happiness? Wouldn’t you feel that something had to be changed, that it would be intrinsically good to move in the direction of more intrinsic value and away from intrinsic disvalue, whereas it would be only instrumentally good, good for something else, to make more delicate-hands.’ Well, put this way Thomas had to agree. But still, this whole talk about intrinsic value and value-maximization seemed so pointlessly speculative and hypothetical, something Thomas would rather expect two existentialists to discuss over a cup of strong black coffee. ‘I still don’t understand where you are really going with this,’ Thomas openly admitted since he was eager to finally get a piece of information that would get his deeply confused mind somewhere.
‘I completely understand Thomas, but this slow creeping towards the wished-for epiphany is important. Now, let’s go back to the evolution of humans on the African savannah and remember the bane and boon of evolution, namely the coupling of functionality and phenomenology. Again, imagine a new gene mutation in an offspring of a human being that made its carrier more vulnerable to tissue-damage. Well, this gene certainly would be functionally superior to its precursor since it would protect its carrier from noxious outside stimuli threatening his physical constitution and thus would leave more copies of itself over time. Thus a growing number of people would be more sensitive to noxious stimuli. However, the functional superiority of this gene would come with a high nasty phenomenal price, namely a higher capacity for suffering.
Another example that poignantly highlights this tragedy: Imagine two gene-variants on the African Savannah, version A that predisposed its carrier to be irritated, aggressive and competitive, whereas version B that predisposed its carrier to be happy and empathic. Which one would you expect to spread? Since version A was functionally better to propagate the carrier’s genes it would outcompete version B. But what disastrous phenomenological consequences would that have. People would be dissatisfied, aggressive and competitive instead of happy and nice towards each other. Do you see that we have a situation here that is functionally superior but is phenomenally nastier, more intrinsically disvaluable? Wouldn’t you agree, Thomas!’ Thomas was confused. He couldn’t really understand how a world full of happy and nice people could exist although he to admit that it would be ‘intrinsically more valuable’; so he answered, ‘But what is a nice phenomenology worth if it is not sustainable. People wouldn’t be able to live in a society.’ Adam emphatically smiled and said ‘I hope you will soon realize that it is possible, Thomas. But for the sake of the example, to think about if the lifestyle of the happy people is actually sustainable is to carry the example too far; it means you forget that this is exactly the problem, namely that functionality and phenomenology were coupled in Darwinian evolution. I just mean assuming everything else is the same and both options would be equally sustainable, wouldn’t it be more intrinsically valuable to have only happy and nice people instead of aggressive and competitive ones. In which world would you rather want to live?’ Adam looked straight into Thomas eyes with a shimmering expression of hope. Thomas had to admit, although his very nature was a fiercely competitive one, he would prefer to be perpetually happy and nice if that was possible. No more painful loosing and mind-crushing disappointments and exhausting struggles to win, which was only satisfying for such a fleeting moment. Yes he definitely would choose the very hypothetical happy and nice scenario.
‘Unfortunately, the scenario we have just outlined is very similar to how it actually happened. Human beings evolved to have a very rich texture of negative qualia such as aggression, jealousy, hate, depression, loneliness, competitiveness and so forth. All these feelings were of functional advantage for our genes, but of a nasty phenomenal nature. Positive feelings unfortunately were of very limited functionality and thus only scarce jewels of our phenomenology. Yes, unsurpassed joy, life-loving euphoria, empathic cheerfulness, etc. were inbuilt in our neuro-phenomenological fabric, but not richly and temporally lasting enough. Especially, the moment-to-moment hedonic tone, the baseline affective coloring of the human experiental space, turned out to be pretty intrinsically valueless. If an individual wasn’t engaging in any important activity, it was of no functional value that the individual felt truly happy or satisfied. A feeling of affective phenomenal emptiness or even adversity, often experienced as the unpleasant feeling ‘boredom’, was most suitable for that purpose. Evolution also ensured that one would usually come back after only a short while to one’s level of relative phenomenal emptiness. It was not advantageous for one’s genes that either the painful loss of a family member or the euphoric victory over another tribe had long-lasting affective consequences. This principle is also referred to as the hedonic treadmill. One can make big steps forward into the direction of true happiness, but in the end one will always realize that the speed of the hedonic treadmill is too fast for one’s own pace.
But unfortunately evolution didn’t make the hedonic treadmill symmetric, but rather adversely asymmetric. It made sure that one could easily slide into the other direction, a perpetual state of suffering was, in contrast to a state of constant bliss, quite functionally advantageous in many situations. Depression as a result of social defeat was better for one’s genes than a motivated tendency for life-threatening fights that couldn’t possibly be won. Great rather than low sensitivity to tissue-damage was also of high functional advantage leading to the phenomenal nastiness of physical pain. Now, of course you might wonder how did evolution ensure all of this? Well, as I have earlier explained to you Thomas, it all depends on the neurochemical fabric of the brain and this fabric is substantially encoded by one’s genes. Genetically-coded neural circuits are wired in such a way that all we have mentioned so far is physical and phenomenal reality. Myriads of negative feedback mechanisms ensure that almost no temporal changes in one’s phenomenological landscape are long-lasting. The complexity of the neural dynamics producing an affective experiental space also explains that a not properly functioning brain is much more likely to lead to aversive feelings and low mood than to the technically hard-to-achieve phenomenon of perpetual well-functioning high spirits. Thus, painfully low-mood was not only an evolutionary adaptive mechanism but constituted in many cases also simply a dysregulation of properly functioning neural circuits.’
If all that was true, Thomas thought to himself, than the outcome of evolution was truly tragic. And it appeared to him as a deeply painful realization that most of that was actually true for him. His moment-to-moment well-being was more neutral than wonderful. Besides, how hard did he have to work for a fleeting moment of blissful joy and how easily did aversive feelings fall into the arms of his consciousness. Anger, aggression and low mood were unwelcome nuisances of daily living. Bliss, joy and love, in contrast, were wished-for friends that barely visited his mental realms. Why hadn’t evolution been just a little bit more generous, that one at least could have gotten up everyday with a smile and a breeze of life-loving euphoria? And those people here not only seemed to get up in the most exalted state of mind, but continued throughout the day a spree of blissful friendliness. How was that possible, especially given what Thomas had just heard? Shouldn’t the hedonic treadmill exude its vicious dominance even here in the furtue?
‘Now Thomas, the reflective capacity of the human mind soon realized that the texture of the human affective experiental space was not the way it should be, not as the conscious individual wished it to be. The human capacity of introspection soon led to the insight that there was a value-disvalue, a pain-pleasure axis along which all human activity was centered. And although many people often didn’t want or just couldn’t realize that one personally always aimed for phenomenal pleasantness instead of nastiness, this soon became a wide-spread and philosophically supported conviction. By the end of the 4th century B.C., all major ancient philosophical schools including Aristotelianism, Epicurism, Stoicism, Hedonism, etc. agreed upon one premise, namely that eudaimonia, the Greek word for phenomenal pleasantness, was the ultimate goal of all human activity. Think about yourself Thomas, would you ever wish during a period of happiness that you would all of sudden feel sad and depressed?’ The fact that Thomas considered this question to be purely rhetorical showed him that it was actually self-evident that he never ever had wished at one of the rare moments of joy, of pure phenomenological pleasantness, that he would all of sudden feel dissatisfied and sad. There never had been a moment like that and he was sure that there never would be such a moment in his life. But on the other hand did he always wish to feel happy? Sometimes he liked to be sad. What about those moments? ‘When one feels sad, in contrast, it is a completely different situation. As I have told you earlier the cognitive and affective spaces are neuroanatomically and phenomenally tightly intertwined. Evolution made sure that one accepts pain and suffering. Imagine a version of a gene that would predispose its carrier to realize the wrongness of pain and try to fight it and another version of a gene that would predispose its carrier to rationalize pain as inevitable and not necessarily wrong. Which carrier would ensure that its genes could spread faster by producing more offspring? The one who could rationalize pain, would be able to put his efforts to other more vital and productive tasks, whereas the other one would be caught in a state of fruitless revolt against the moral wrongness of pain. And exactly that’s what happened during Darwinian evolution. Since pain was inevitable during the Darwinian Ages, many people tried to rationalize pain for their own good. Religions such Christianity or Buddhism were striking examples for the neocortical evaluation of affective states; religions gave pain some positive characteristic of inevitability. Nevertheless, although pain-rationalization was advantageous and preferred by many people, it couldn’t abolish the reality, the phenomenal nastiness of pain! The powerful, evolutionary inbuilt drive of phenomenal value-maximization and the subtle influence of introspective insights were enough to make the history of humankind one big struggle for the betterment of the human phenomenology.
Probably, the most striking attest to the fact that humans did never view their affective consciousness as sufficiently pleasantly textured was the pervasive use of psychoactive substances across all cultures and throughout human history. While in the history of what came to be known as the ‘Western Civilization’ alcohol, nicotine and caffeine were evidence for the shortcomings of one’s evolutionary endowed hedonic repertoire, as you probably know very well yourself’ and here Adam looked jovially at Thomas knowing that Thomas probably had been regularly consuming at least two of these, ‘other cultures employed other biochemicals in an effort to enrich their evolutionarily undernourished affective phenomenology. Various alkaloid-containing plants such as the famous coca plant, potently psychoactive cacti and mushroom species were prepared and used to at least temporarily beatify one’s phenomenology. Unfortunately, those chemical substances were phenomenology-enhancers of low potency and maliciously short duration. If one considers how they evolved, it also seems more obvious why they were not the ideal phenomenology-pharmacoenhancers. All these plant alkaloids evolved as chemical weapons against phytophagous organisms, which were potential threats to these plants. Since insects did share certain neural pathways with humans, these phytophagous-toxins also ‘dysregulated’ the human nervous system. They hijacked the neurochemical pathways to offer their consumers a short glimpse into the spheres of phenomenal heaven, only to fall afterwards back, sometimes even deeper, into the spheres of one’s evolutionary inherited neuro-phenomenological wasteland. So although psychoactive drugs were pervasively used throughout the history of humankind, it was a very ineffective way to substantially and sustainably improve one’s impoverished phenomenology.
Environmental reshufflings were another ineffective way to improve the human condition. Socio-economic, political and technological progress were mistakenly viewed as powerful measures to outsmart the evolutionary paradigm of the hedonic treadmill. This became especially obvious during the enlightenment when the rationale of utilitarianism gained wide-spread recognition especially among scholars and intellectuals. ‘The greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people’ was their slogan. And to achieve this goal, even fantastical ideas such as a hedonic calculus were not put down as lunatic. But the problem was that no one at that time understood the evolutionary-inherited, genetically-coded neuro-phenomenological architecture of their affective experiental space. They thought through environmental reforms they could make people truly happy. What a grossly misconceived notion! They should have been able to gaze about five centuries ahead in time when most of the principles of enlightenment had been put into reality in many parts of the ‘Western World’. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Western World which had accomplished a lot in terms of social, political and technological progress, as you probably know, was far from being a place full of phenomenal pleasantness, as you also know. Hate, jealousy, sadness, despair, aggression and horrible forms of psychopathologies were still prevalent. And had environmental reforms accomplished anything at all in terms of making the human affective experiental space truly wonderful and sublime? Blissful joy, life-loving euphoria and all-life-encompassing love were still precious rarities sadly amiss in many people’s affective realm. And what were the prospects? How could have environmental reforms ever ensured anything better? Surely, people in poverty could have been lifted out of the suppressing realms of low self-worth by earning more money. But what about all those people who had a worthwhile life in terms of environmental and social factors. A wonderful family, nice friends, a well-paid job and a magnificent house! Were those people spared the phenomenal nastiness of having to watch a beloved one die, the emotional pain of losing a child, or the phenomenal unpleasantness of a divorce or a break-up? How could have politics or technological progress ever exempted people from becoming a depressed social loser, from ending up alone and sad. How could have any fabulously sophisticated socio-economic reform prevented the psychopathologies which not only ghastly tormented the psyche of the afflicted but also or even more those of their victims. How could have environmental reforms possibly gotten rid of the unfairness of the sometimes malicious mercilessness of the mood-tormenting dynamics of the female oestrogen cycle? At the beginning of the 21st more than 20 million people in the United States, one of the most civilized and richest countries at that time, were classified as clinically depressed. Most of them were not below the poverty-line, but financially well-off members of the middle and upper-class. Even more people were reading self-help books to improve their unrewarding phenomenology and make