After all, if eternal hedonism were the sole objective, then a rat with electrodes fixed in its pleasure-centres already points the way forward. In fact, our descendants may find generating generic states of life-long happiness per se trivially easy. The aim of this rational redesign will be to bootstrap our way into fulfilling our second-order desires for who and what we want to become. T oday one can't responsibly advocate the use of psychedelics. Bad trips' are an ever-present possibility.
Informed consent is biologically impossible.
One can't grasp, in advance, the nature of the sorts of experience to which one is nominally consenting. Yet in consequence of this taboo, quite astonishing alien state spaces of consciousness remain off-limits to most of us. Trapped in the squalid psychochemical ghetto of Darwinian life, we lack the necessary wetware to conceptualise radically altered states. Yet when the vertebrate genome gets rewritten, and genetically-preprogrammed bliss becomes the norm of mental health, our veil of ignorance can be safely ripped aside. Armed with exquisite designer-drugs, even the most outlandish realms of psychedelia can then be investigated in depth.