JTaylor.

Agatha Heterodyne, mad scientist, floats in midair, surrounded by a ring of machinery. Her hair glows with overflowing life energy, powered by the waters of the Dyne, the river for which her house is named. “Nonsense,” she says. “‘Testing’ is for when you’re still guessing — and now, I HAVE NO NEED TO GUESS.”

To a minor poet of the Greek Anthology, Jorge Luis Borges.

Small Brain: Suffering is a part of life, and we just have to live with it.

Medium Brain: Actually, that’s just learned helplessness! Desire is the root of suffering, and it’s possible to escape suffering by escaping desire through enlightenment.

Big Brain: Actually, that’s just learned helplessness! Desire is only a root of suffering because desires go unmet, but technology and social organization offer the potential to radically sculpt our future light cone so that unmet desires are massively minimized.

Cosmic Brain: Technological methods of mental modification scale even more effectively than traditional psychological enlightenment and technological desire-fulfillment. Therefore, the optimal way to reduce suffering is to use technology to modify and wirehead all minds within our light cone.

Transcendental Brain: Actually, desire isn’t the root of all suffering – physics is the root of all suffering, and we need to consider hacking the laws of physics and/or destroying the universe in order to minimize the amount of suffering contained within fundamental interactions.