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Key points
- Happiness is an abstract concept invented by humans.
- Happiness is not a biological pattern that humans can replicate artificially.
- Constant pleasure would be fatal to humans.
The author Yuval Noah Harari suggests in his best-selling book Homo Deus that the next challenges for humanity won't be preventing war, illness, and famine, which have decimated humanity for centuries, but achieving artificial happiness and immortality.
Humans have evolved to maintain a certain level of baseline anxiety and to avoid feeling satisfied or content for any significant length of time. Being happy would affect adversely our chances of survival, which is a crucial problem, given that survival and reproduction are all that matter to nature and evolution.
Still, undeterred by the obvious difficulties found in the path to happiness, humans are determined to chase it, at least those humans who aren't too busy trying to work out where their next meal will be coming from. Those fighting for survival don't concern themselves with abstract ideas such as happiness; their worries are more immediate and tangible.
Having accepted that we simply cannot be happy in our present biological state, Harari believes that one of humanity's great projects for the 21st century will be to ensure global happiness through the "re-engineering" of our species. This would involve, for instance, changing our brain biochemistry in order to enable us to experience constant pleasure.
There are two massive problems associated with this prediction:
Constant pleasure would kill us
Constant pleasure would kill us in no time at all, as the famous experiment by James Olds and Peter Milner demonstrated. These researchers implanted tiny electrodes into the brains of rats that delivered a small electric charge to the pleasure centers deep in the brain whenever the rat pushed a lever. They found that the rat would push the lever thousands of times, so gratified by this strange, magical "pleasure machine" that it forgot to eat or drink and eventually died.
It is easy to forget that everything we do (and I do mean everything) is in order to feel pleasure. Even when we behave altruistically, we do so because ultimately this behavior makes us feel better than behaving selfishly. So the sustained and reliable pleasure accessed by pressing a lever, or by editing our DNA in the future in a very expensive clinic, would have an equal value to a pleasure afforded by any other means. It would represent the end goal of everything and the only objective that matters. And then, like Olds and Milner's rats, the artificially happy individual wouldn't bother about anything else and would simply die of dehydration.
Happiness is not the same as pleasure
Happiness and pleasure are two different concepts. In fact, there is no need to worry about the above scenario because, as I explain in my book, happiness doesn't reside in any specific genes in our DNA, or in any specific region of our brain, so it will not be accessible through artificial interventions like electrical stimulations, pills, or DNA engineering.
Happiness is nothing but an abstract idea invented by humans and not a state of mind that can be replicated biologically. At best, we can induce fleeting and relatively unreliable pleasure, but that is, and will remain, the extent of it.
Harari contends that the next challenges for humanity will be immortality and happiness, but I believe we'll be better off fighting poverty and disease. Happiness will remain elusive however advanced technologically we become, simply because there is no such thing as happiness.
