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Quantum Ethics.
The Abolitionist Project lays out the case for abolishing suffering via biotechnology; and predicts that our posthuman descendants will live, in effect, happily ever after. A heart-warming tale? Yes, in a sense. However, any rosy conception of the world which this scenario inspires is potentially misleading. Here are three depressing reasons why:
First, on a "block universe" interpretation of the world - mandated by the Theory of General Relativity - the Darwinian Era perpetually occupies the space-time coordinates it does. The pain and suffering of primordial life can't be erased. At best, we are poised merely to determine its boundaries. A full scientific understanding of time remains elusive. Yet barring some unimaginable revolution in our entire logico-conceptual scheme, rational agents can't extinguish the frightful events happening elsewhere in space-time. The past is fixed and unalterable. Admittedly, the feasibility of backward-causation suggested by quantum-mechanical "delayed-choice" experiments is a tantalizing complication to this generalisation. A further complication is that quantum cosmology suggests that future and past quasi-classical histories alike are non-unique. But we can safely state that even the most godlike of our post-human successors can't eradicate their terrible origins.
In practice, even professed utilitarians are much more relaxed about tragedies occurring in what we call the past, especially the distant past, than about what unfolds in the future. This statement of human psychology is reflected in our asymmetric attitudes to our own past and future pain. Compare one's joyful relief on leaving the dentist with one's dread at an imminent dental appointment. By the same token, mature posthumans - for whom the Darwinian Era belongs to distant antiquity - may find the ghastliness of their ancestors' suffering seems less important, "less real" - than everyday Heaven-on-Earth, assuming (problematically) that future life chooses to contemplate its dreadful birth-pangs at all. But whether such primitive nastiness is commemorated or forgotten, the horrors of Darwinian life are a fixture of Reality; and these horrors are not diminished by spatio-temporal distance. Sub specie aeternitatis, all here-and-nows are equally real.
Secondly, our best fundamental theory of the world is quantum mechanics; and our best understanding of the quantum formalism suggests that we live in a Multiverse rather than a classical universe. Post-Everett quantum mechanics [i.e. the universal Schrödinger equation or its relativistic analogue without any ill-motivated "collapse of the wave function"] discloses the existence of a multitude of macroscopic branches rather than a single unique history. The fact that most of these classically inequivalent branches interfere only minimally with each other explains the popular soubriquet "Many Worlds", though the term can mislead the unwary. In the vast majority of these macroscopic world branches, no complex structures can arise, let alone sentient life; the coupling constants of the forces of Nature and other "fundamental" parameters in such branches are wrong. Their sterility still leaves googols of branches where information-bearing self-replicators evolve via natural selection. Critically, in only a small minority of these populated branches of the Multiverse can intelligent agents arise who are able to eradicate the biological substrates of their own suffering. In branches where, for example, a meteorite didn't wipe out the non-avian dinosaurs, Darwinian life "red in tooth and claw" presumably continues indefinitely. This is because only language-using tool-users can ever master the rudiments of science; and then go on to devise the biotechnology needed to rewrite their own genetic code and redesign their global ecosystem. To the best of our knowledge, no reptile could ever do this. Yes, we should beware of naïve, anthropocentric definitions of intelligence; but this cognitive constraint rules out self-emancipation in the overwhelming bulk of branches of the Multiverse that support life.
To advance such a conjecture isn't dogmatically to claim that only members of the genus Homo could ever initiate a post-Darwinian transition. Passage through this choke-point may be possible via species in other biological taxa thanks to the phenomenon of convergent evolution. We simply don't know. Thus if ape-like marsupials were ever to evolve in Australia, for instance, then it is possible that one species would also have stumbled on the suite of adaptations needed to liberate their own phenotypes and then the rest of the living world. But either way, most life-supporting branches of the Multiverse are inaccessible to techno-scientific agency. And TV sci-fi dramas aside, we can't do anything about life in this (comparative) abundance of god-forsaken worlds. Interstellar rescue missions are in theory feasible if sentient life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, and maybe even our local galactic supercluster. [Unless our understanding of physics is fundamentally wrong, the accelerating expansion of the universe precludes full-blown cosmic-engineering] But we can't tamper with other branches of the universal wavefunction. The evolution of the universal wavefunction is continuous, linear, unitary and deterministic. One may hope modern physics is mistaken; but if it isn't, we're stuck.
