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(Huge thanks to @self_made_human for collaborating with me on this post.)
On Extreme Mental States & the Future
Is it possible for one to wash one's dishes in the modern world as reverently as Jesus washed feet? Is it realistic or desirable for the average human being to possess enough mental fortitude to self-immolate in the name of their cause and/or god? These are far out extreme mental states I'm calling on here to be sure. But their extremity or clicheness does not negate the fact that we can be reasonably sure people such as Jesus or the Buddha existed, those with extreme awareness or control of their mind and body.
When thinking of the far future I often see many folks, including transhumanists and techno-optimists, ignoring these critical experiential discoveries. In an ideal scenario everyone could have their material needs provided by automated technology, and we could figure out how to compete for status goods in a non-harmful way. Alternatively, all those who wish to compete for status goods can do so, but opting out for long periods of time is seen as common, healthy, and normal.
At this point, many hand-wave away the importance of thinking of such a future because writing about utopia is cliche, boring, or pointless to ponder about. Critics often invoke the image of a world full of listless, joyful idiots walking around fed and clothed by machines with inane smiles on their faces. (Assuming they even bother to walk, and aren't just sitting around being lotus eaters, hooked on carefully titrated doses of neurotransmitters injected right into their nucleus accumbens. Which, to be fair, sounds like a great time, which is all the more reason I'd run away screaming from someone trying to do that to me, or if they do manage to catch me, pull out a gun, and shoot them and then myself, preferably in that order.)
As it stands, I expect the exploration of new and unique qualia to be one of the great joys of a transhumanist society, all the more for one that isn't constrained by needing to restrain itself to a couple pounds of meat stuck inside the cage of a skull. And it is a very personal endeavor, knowing that superhuman AGI has explored the 500 dimensional qualia space of baseline human minds isn't much good if you can't do it yourself! And there's very good reason to think that such qualia exist, because evolution and even modern pharmaceutical interventions have to restrain themselves to an infinitesimal slice of the possible ones that we could experience.
Humans born with the rare tetrachromat genes can perceive newer, richer, colors just by virtue of having a novel type of cone cell; it turns out if you hook new sensory modalities into the human brain, it almost inevitably figures out what to do with them. On top of that you have weird crossovers that happen in synesthesia, such as seeing sound waves in the air, or tasting colors. Then you can discuss trying to augment lesser known senses such as kinesthesia or thermoception - and boy are there a fuck-ton of sensory experiences left to try! (Not even getting into the senses that non-human animals have.)
Exploring different states of mind, ways of interacting culturally, and striving for happiness are, in my view, the main benefits of such material abundance. One of the great shifts in human evolution came with agriculture, providing enough material wealth and leisure time to enable a greater focus on wealth, writing, and intellectual pursuits.
In many ways, the modern world is an unthinkably beautiful heaven of infinite bliss compared to the world our ancestors inhabited during the long climb to civilization from the start of our species ~200,000 years ago.
If and when we can experience another great shift, how would humans organize themselves differently? Could a society actually operate if every single person inhabited a similar mental state to a Buddhist monk?
I'd argue that society could work out in these states - but doesn't need to. We could have multiple cultures that all go their own way in developing mental states that today are literally unthinkable. People could alter their minds to promote intuitive leaps far more, or the rationality project could succeed and we could have humans that are extremely rigid and logical in their thinking.
We could experiment with playing strange noises or providing exotic sensory experiences that over time shift our perceptions entirely. Pain as a non-voluntary state could be mostly removed from the adult human experience if everyone was equipped with excellent mindfulness techniques from birth. Anyone who wanted could master lucid dreaming, and spend every night flying through scintillating dreamscapes of surpassing beauty.
None of the shifts listed in the preceding two paragraphs even require invoking far-fetched or theoretical technology created in the future. Many of the most potent mental states we already know humans can achieve are currently inaccessible to the majority of us due to our environment and material wealth. Only a small fraction of humans have ever been in a position to explore these states. If this exploration can become a more common activity, we may find that our consciousness is far more malleable than we had previously imagined.
I'd like to believe that this sort of shift in society will even be necessary with the advent of AI taking over more and more tasks from us. I'm not in the camp that thinks AI is conscious or will be any time soon, so even if we no longer have to do practically any physical task, even if AI can out think us in a million different directions, the study and understanding of consciousness could become the only thing left to explore for us.
Eh? It was feet, not shoes; it was for Passover, and there was a moral lesson He wished to impart to the apostles about being "servants of the servants of God".
I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to link up this example with the main body of your post, which is about transhumanism and how we could allegedly have bigger, better mental states, but okay.
Yeah man, I was apparently pretty mistaken to include that. Also I find it hilarious that I put shoes instead of feet, but apparently others didn't!
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