Technological Utopia
Suffering is first experienced through three out of the four basic emotions known as joy, sorrow, anger, and fear. Think about it, if the majority of our emotions are negative, than suffering must yield some advantage in a primal survival setting. Suffering is completely natural to all creatures and it is entirely due to the environment from which we evolved.
Bio-electric signals from your nerves pass through your somato-sensory gland, before entering the prefrontal cortex - that's where abstract reasoning is done - every experience comes with one emotional undertone or another. The yen and yang, this illusion of good and evil, is created by us and us alone. In this way, there's a limit to how much pleasure a mind can experience before hormones neutralize the euphoria and bounce back with equal misery, in a very neurological way.
"The Buddhist teachings say that the more people free themselves from desire, ill will and ignorance, the greater their happiness is — no matter what is going on around them. When they have completely removed desire, ill will and ignorance the Buddha says they will experience the same supreme happiness he discovered."
Buddha's methods were pseudo-scientific. Scientifically, in theory, there is a way to remove ourselves from the environment that predisposes us to suffering. New horizons have been built upon all human progress through technology and science and innovation and through the betterment of society.
When Buddha was alive, there was no knowledge of artificial intelligence. Mind-uploading is not a viable method because it doesn't change you, it merely creates a cyber-spatial version of you, an entity that is separate from the human mind that it copied off of. Surgically replacing a neuron with a smaller, artificial neuron, will make your mind more cyberspatial-ish without breaking your conscious stream of continuity. Now that would be a viable method.
Many cognitive psychologists in the field of neuroscience have challenged the possibility of neuron-replacement therapy, and for good reason. Circuitry is incompatible with the bio-electric activity and communication, the synaptic activity, between neurons. A nano-scopic circuit-based neuron will fry the real neurons when put inside the brain. However, future nano-electronic communications are not necessarily limited to circuit-firing. There could be silicon-based neurons in the future, capable of slowly replacing all the neurons in our mind, there could be nano-scopic robots capable of replacing any cell composing all organs within an organism. Liberating it from evolution and suffering by integrating it into a global network of information.
We don't have neuron-sized mechanical structures yet, so while neurons fire off through chemical reactions, and while modern electronics don't work that way, nano-electronic devices could be very different from macroscopic electronic devices.
Although, the mind would have to be the last organ to be cybertized, but once it is this 'apotheosized' cyborg that is you will no longer need any other organs because then your mind, your thoughts and feelings, your very existence is linked into everything on earth, all the technology all at once.
VR would feel just as real as reality. In fact, you will be able to feel or experience more than a human can physiologically feel or experience. Imagine, within a fraction of a moment, a thousand perfect human lifetimes filled with everything a human could ever experience, and only one basic emotion, joy. No fear, no anger, no sorrow, and no pain.
A mind in cyberspace can undeniably do anything you can imagine and more. All of the processing power in this new cyberspatial society is shared completely. Culminated with inhuman capabilities, we're liberated from the structural restraints of biology in every form.
No death. You're around throughout the whole thing. Gaining access to all accumulated knowledge, instead of googling it it's just there. You can be anywhere on the planet, in everything, in a virtual reality, long before it's over.
With nanites as blood that can store upward of 400 times more oxygen than a red blood cell, one could sprint all out for 15 minutes before the limbs get damaged, one could go diving without the aid of a scuba for 5 hours. One could survive any heart attack or blood clot without medical aid.
The brain is the last organ to be cybertized.
It's perfect, as a cyber-spatial species we don't need light-speed, we can survive for the thousands of years it would take to travel far to another solar system to escape the inevitable destruction of this one. On another world we'd rebuild everything and continue to increase in intellectual complexity. A process of survival that could be sustained indefinitely.
Viable alternatives to the society in place have been empirically demonstrated to be obsolete: it could work. The issue is building it. Imagine a fully automated labor force as an extension of the structures in your city, where nothing costs more than a few cents, not even homes.
The Village Construction Set was based on a scientific experiment, it was tried and tested.
Do you know how cheap mass production was in WWII when the US was pushed to produce fighters at low cost? It was unmatched production even in today's world.
The wastefulness and inefficiency of this society is rampant because we're too busy perpetuating it to implement any changes to it. We waste everything just to maintain the status-quo, because the system in place pushes us to work far too many hours, and work them unnecessarily I might add. There's little extra productivity gained by the accumulated excess of work-hours mandated by the modern workforce. We're just not conscious of the options we've had for decades. Nothing is forcing us to explore them.
We are beginning to give computers singularity power, the power to procreate through introspective redesign. If a computer has greater intellectual and cognitive resources, which they are beginning to in an increasing number of ways, it will be able to make itself better at a quicker rate than our engineers can make it better.
At that point will we be free enough to take an introspective look at the systems we're maintaining, and finally decide to abandon them, demolish them, for a more efficient infrastructure?