Biochemistry Volunteers
We're building a future free of suffering.
Our research targets the root capacity to suffer.
We believe that technology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. We predict that they will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture -- a motivational system based on heritable gradients of intelligent bliss. States of sublime wellbeing are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. Indeed, the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely datable event.
Two hundred years ago, powerful synthetic painkillers and surgical anesthetics were unknown. The notion that physical pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed absurd. Today, most of us in the technically advanced nations take its routine absence for granted. The prospect that psychological pain, too, could ever be banished is equally counter-intuitive. The feasibility of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of social policy and ethical choice.
There are already healthy people with single gene mutations liberating them from reported pain and anxiety. Others have fine-grain damage sensing abilities without the capacity to experience the "badness" of pain. We currently possess the technology to eliminate a great deal of suffering among diverse animal groups sharing highly similar pain genes, from insects to mammals. However, questions remain about how to best proceed given the complex ramifications. There is danger in blindly speeding ahead, but greater danger in blind conservatism. Therefore, Invincible Wellbeing is focused on practical and incremental strategies for preventing suffering in humans and non-humans alike.
The genetic mechanisms driving pain are highly similar between diverse phyla. Thus, rather than helping just one species, such work contributes to minimizing suffering across all sentient life. Suffering may seem like a vast and intractable problem, but we are effectively pursuing low hanging fruit. Our immediate priority is helping animals in contexts where humans control what genes are passed on, and pain can be minimized without reducing evolutionary fitness. However, minimizing and even ending all involuntary suffering does not, in principle, necessitate reducing fitness. Our work is fully aligned with practically enhancing fitness in the wild, and building a future with invincible wellbeing for all.