JANUARY - DECEMBER 2015
[on the history of melancholy]
A nice animation - especially the section on paradise engineering! - but the comments section suggests we have a way to go:
"A brief history of melancholy"
Yes, painful reading. Of course, rationalisation can sometimes take the edge off life's miseries. The problem comes when the rationalisations become an obstacle to getting rid of the miseries. Just as fighting global warming needs a Hundred Year Plan - and short-term fixes - so does low mood. Over the next 100 years, around 100,000,000 (sic) depressive people world-wide will take their own lives. This terrible self-immolation is just the tip of an iceberg of misery.
Nick, I could tell you my vision of paradise. But the beauty of radical hedonic recalibration is that life animated by biologically driven gradients of bliss doesn't entail buying into anyone else's conception of the good life. Rather, it's a sustainable enrichment of your own.
MassDynamic, yes, natural selection is "reliable" in the sense it helps our genes leave more copies of themselves. Jealousy, anxiety, depression and other nasty states of mind were often fitness-enhancing in the ancestral environment of adaptation. But our genetic make-up causes immense suffering. In future, we'll be able to rewrite our genetic source code to serve the interests of sentient beings rather than self-replicating DNA. Let's make the creation of biohappiness an engineering discipline...
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep16891
("The structural neural substrate of subjective happiness")
Let's amplify and enrich the right precuneus.
* * *
Phasing out the biology of low mood is different from reducing contrast or emotional variety. If, simplistically, our current hedonic range stretches from -10 to zero to +10, assume that tomorrow's biotechnology allows the creation of lower and upper bounds of hedonic tone stretching from -100 to hedonic zero to +100, with an average hedonic set-point an adjustable parameter too. What hedonic range and hedonic set-point would you choose for yourself – and your future children?
People give different responses to this hypothetical - and of course, some people reply that we shouldn't presume to tamper with the wisdom of Mother Nature or Divine Providence at all. But the critical point ethically, I'd argue, is that when the biology of suffering becomes optional, nobody should be forced to suffer involuntarily.
* * *
(Un)happiness and the meaning of life might seem separate questions. Yet as we become happier, life tends to become more meaningful. This increasing sense of meaning can shade - in cases of manic euphoria - to intense feelings of purpose and significance. Conversely, low mood is associated with a sense of emptiness and a loss of meaning, shading into the nihilistic feelings of severe depression. True, we sometimes speak of "empty hedonism". But if posthuman life is really animated by gradients of bliss, then most likely such life will be hyper-charged with significance.
Or in fewer words, take care of happiness, and the meaning of life will take care of itself.
The End of Suffering?
("David Pearce on abolishing suffering")
Many thanks, yes, we should all support SENS – and indeed ALCOR: millions of older people otherwise aren't going to make it. IMO, cryonics should be opt-out rather than opt-in. However, there is another problem that is much less discussed in the transhumanist community. For millions of depressive people in the world today, the problem isn't that life's too short but rather it's too long. Time hangs heavy. We need to defeat low mood and ageing alike.
Are you worth preserving?
"If KrioRus is the Lada of the cryonics world, Arizona’s Alcor is the Mercedes-Benz...."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d634e198-a435-11e5-873f-68411a84f346.html
("Inside the weird world of cryonics")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KrioRus
* * *
CRISPR-based "gene drives" are a game-changer. Used wisely, gene drives could rapidly, cheaply and effectively reduce the burden of suffering across the vertebrate lineage and beyond...
"Gene drives" and free-living animal suffering
How far? Eddie, IMO we should work our way across the entire phylogenetic tree, eliminating the molecular signature of suffering wherever it is found. That said, we must also prioritise. Large-brained long-lived vertebrates intuitively come first, ethically speaking - they suffer more. However, gene drives turn this intuitive chronological sequence on its head. In principle, a modestly talented ethical biohacker using molecular tools readily available on eBay for under $10K could "fix" the default level of suffering for an entire species of small fast-reproducing vertebrate within the time-frame of two or three decades and default level of suffering of a fast (sexually) reproducing species of insect or marine invertebrate within two or three years. Helping elephants in the same way would take two or three centuries. Much wiser and more prudent than primate initiative IMO would be compassionate stewardship of ecosystems under UN auspices; I'm just talking about what's technically feasible.
More on the evolutionarily ancient pain-modulating SCN9A gene here:
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/1/859.ful
("Differential Evolution of Voltage-Gated Sodium Channels in Tetrapods and Teleost Fishes")
How could we make life on Earth a utopia?
I hope the biology of suffering can be medicalised. Utopia may be forever beyond our grasp, but the molecular signature of unpleasant experience should be eradicable - with time. See too:
http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/genomics-is-about-to-transform-the-world/
Social primates have a multitude of conflicting and irreconcilable prejudices. Utopia for some of us would be dystopia for others. MIRI sometimes talk about Coherent Extrapolated Volition (cf. https://intelligence.org/files/CEV.pdf). Yet beyond the pleasure principle, I've never really found CEV intelligible, let alone formalisable. To use a trivial (for me!) example, if most football supporters passionately wish for their team to win the cup, most will necessarily be disappointed. Such an example could be multiplied effectively without limit - in politics, religion, personal life, you name it. Of course, I might want to say that caring about e.g. grown men kicking a ball around a field is absurd. But this is a case of imposing my judgements of (dis)value on others.
One reason for pressing radical hedonic enrichment / recalibration is that - with complications - it’s preference-neutral. Everyone’s subjective quality of life can be hugely enriched without asking you to compromise your values, preferences and conception of the good life in favour of mine - or anyone else’s: in a game-theoretic sense, it's true win-win. No, hedonic enrichment is not utopia: countless religious, social, political and – yes - football issues are left unresolved. Yet a long-term strategy of getting rid of the biology of (involuntary) suffering would seem a decent springboard for the future.
I mentioned complications. Here is one. Some people may be inherently opposed to deliberate hedonic set-point recalibration, just as they’d be opposed to setting the upper and lower bounds of our hedonic range. And of course, hedonic enrichment and recalibration is a medium-to-long term strategy; preimplantation genetic screening is still in its infancy, and the CRISPR/Cas-9 technology revolution (cf. The Gene Hackers) is only a few years old. How many people today could even name genes/allelic combinations implicated in high/low hedonic set-points? In addition, it would be naïve to suppose that a globally hyperthymic civilisation would really perpetuate an approximation of the malaise-ridden preferences and values of its Darwinian predecessor. But if we want a slogan, then the World Health Organisation (WHO) commitment to good health for everyone is apt: health is “a complete state of physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO).
René, yes, whereas (in principle) all football team (etc) supporters can be happy – though some information-sensitively happier than others – a group that values inflicting suffering on others wouldn’t be amenable to the kind of hyperthymic civilisation I explore. I guess my hope is that phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering will eventually become rather like, e.g. the goal of phasing out malaria, a policy objective so taken for granted that it doesn’t need to be argued. Diversification? Yes, in one sense; in other areas, global homogenisation: the evidence points both ways. Either way, good health for all – including psychological superhealth – is consistent with lifestyle diversification in innumerable other spheres. To abolish suffering or merely its inevitability? The latter, though I (tentatively) predict the former will follow in its wake. There isn’t a tribal subculture that values toothaches or migraines. But always remembering cumbersomely to write out “involuntary suffering” rather than “suffering” spikes many guns.
* * *
Hedonic set-points can't "naturally" be raised; but they can be lowered by chronic uncontrollable stress. Even by human standards this robo-torturer is sinister...
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/148363-robot-rat-bullies-real-rats-into-depression-for-science
("Robot rat bullies real rats into depression… for science! | ExtremeTech")
* * *
Two separate questions here. First, do we want to reduce the burden of suffering in Nature? Second, if "yes", how can we do so most cheaply, effectively and sustainably while minimizing the risk of unforeseen side-effects? Intuitively "compassionate" interventions are likely to make the problem of suffering even worse. For example, feed lots of starving herbivores in winter and the outcome will be a population explosion next spring followed by ecological collapse. The result: more misery.
By contrast, intelligent use of cross-species immunocontraception and "gene drives" could dramatically reduce the level of suffering in all species of sexually reproducing organisms over naively impossibly short time-frames. "Fixing" a benign version of the pain-modulating SCN9A gene in an entire free-living non-human animal population of sexually reproducing organisms would cost around $10,000 per species at today's prices. No doubt species essentialists will balk at the prospect. Yet would we seriously claim with a straight face that the 0.1% of humans, for example, with the lowest pain-sensitivity aren't "truly" human?
Of course, lots of other factors would need to be weighed before going ahead. For example, focusing on the example discussed here
https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-animal-rights-activists-care-more-about-wild-animal-suffering/answer/David-Pearce-18
organisms with a "high pain" allele of SCN9A tend to have a sharper sense of smell; "low pain" variants of SCN9A are associated with duller olfaction. And so forth.
But ultimately these are details.
As intelligent moral agents, do we want a happy biosphere or not?
* * *
Do you tell someone with a raging toothache there are more important things in life than toothaches?
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/emilsson20150916
("Ending Suffering is the Most Important Cause")
* * *
Wealth can't cheat the hedonic treadmill - though like most folk, I'd like to give it a go. Species-wide biological-genetic intervention is the only long-term solution. But building a globally hyperthymic civilisation puts the Apollo Project in the shade.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3220333/The-whining-billionaire-says-rich-sheer-hell-Inside-life-Minecraft-founder-Markus-Persson-says-ruined-money.html
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/02/genome-editing-how-to-modify-genetic-faults-and-the-human-germline
* * *
Can humans become smarter and happier?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150318074442.htm
("No room to think: Depressive thoughts may have a negative effect on working memory")
Hit the gym or sleep on it? What's the best way to enhance memory recall?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hit-the-gym-after-studying-to-boost-recall/
But beware getting a good night's sleep after a bad day...
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2015/07/01/sleep.deprivation.could.reduce.intrusive.memories.traumatic.scenes
Don't think, be happy?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-08-neuroticism-fueled-overthinking.html
("Is neuroticism fueled by overthinking?")
An orbitofrontal cortex? I need one...
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-09-anxious-orbitofrontal-cortex-cultivate-optimism.html
("Feeling anxious? Check your orbitofrontal cortex and cultivate your optimism")
* * *
The Hedonistic Imperative
Jord, another clue is that non-social animals don't seem to get depressed - though of course they still suffer in other ways. Part of the problem in a sexually reproducing species like humans is that all children born today are unique genetic experiments. We can't be sure of the outcome of our interventions or non-interventions. At most, prospective parents can load the genetic dice in their children's favour. Preimplantation genetic screening is a more "conservative" option than the true genetic engineering feasible later this century and beyond. But all the reproductive options are fraught with pitfalls - both ethical and technical.
* * *
Famous? Not exactly Adam. Britannica thinks DP is an "American philosopher":
Transhumanism
(my Bronx accent?)
Spot the difference?
tedxwhu.com/
Alas selling eugenics to a German audience takes finesse.
I have just ordered a testing kit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23andMe
When will recursively self-improving organic robots start seriously editing their own source code?
* * *
A thoughtful critique from a self-effacing academic:
A critique of the abolitionist project
* * *
Time for an image makeover?
http://www.medicaldaily.com/picture-perfect-online-avatar-reveals-deep-truths-about-persons-personality-317184
("Picture Perfect: An Online Avatar Reveals Deep Truths About A Person's Personality")
"The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.”
(P.J. O'Rourke)
For some people, it's obvious that suffering is THE moral problem. For others, suffering barely rates a mention.
In futurology, there is always the danger of mistaking your own personal story with the meta-narrative of the universe. That said, if we all had the hyper-empathetic capacities of mirror-touch synaesthetes, then the moral urgency of phasing out suffering would not seriously be in doubt.
"Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.” (Epictetus)
Such advice probably shouldn't be taken too literally.
Christopher, thank you. I don't really feel I'm doing a good job. "Selling" the idea of a hyperthymic civilisation needs a Richard Dawkins, or some other gifted populariser. ("The Happy Gene"?)
Alas the daughter of a friend of mine had a chant she used to sing at me:
"A man of words and not of deeds,
Is like a garden full of weeds."
[on Psychedelic Transhumanism]
A mind-jam, not a communal LSD trip, or so I am told...
Transhumanist Mind-jam and Q&A with David Pearce
but perhaps today's ordinary waking consciousness belongs in tomorrow's psychiatric textbooks.
Thanks Rethink Civilization. The distinction between engineering life based on information-sensitive gradients of superhuman bliss and simply engineering superhuman bliss might seem a detail. However, hedonic set-point recalibration has two further big advantages. (1) Critical insight, social responsibility, and intellectual progress can in principle be sustained. There is no increased risk of our civilisation becoming "trapped" in some local maximum – albeit an enviable local maximum from the perspective of countless suffering beings alive today. (2) Unlike traditional utopian schemes, a project of hedonic enrichment in the guise of set-point recalibration doesn't entail changing your own core values and preferences in favour of anyone else's. Thus conjure up your own ideal paradise or conception of the good life. Hedonic recalibration is not a plea to change that conception, let alone to adopt mine, just genetically to ensure that the reality is richer – and sustainably richer - than you could possibly imagine.
Complications? Yes of course, lots. For example, some people’s conception of the good life entails creating or perpetuating involuntary suffering for others. But I think the general point stands.
[on an End of Suffering?]
Does suffering give meaning to life? Would life be more meaningful with more suffering...
The End of Suffering?
Scott Aaronson is the author of the excellent "Quantum Computing since Democritus"
(http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus-Aaronson/dp/0521199565)
Not to be confused with "Quantum Computing, The First 540 Million Years":
https://www.hedweb.com/philsoph/quantum-computer.html
My response:
1) As people become happier, life tends to seem more meaningful – sometimes too meaningful. Compare euphoric mania, where everyday experience is charged with an extreme sense of purpose and significance. By contrast, chronic low mood is associated with a sense of emptiness and futility which shades into the nihilism of severe depression.
Needless to say, we don't want to create a world of euphorically manic people. But if our genetically enriched descendants are vastly happier than contemporary humans, then they will most likely find life hugely more significant too.
2) An effectively unlimited abundance of material goods will not - by itself - cheat the hedonic treadmill and abolish suffering. There is little scientific evidence that contemporary humans are typically (un)happier than our ancestors on the African savannah. Humans are social primates. We crave positional or status goods, which are finite by definition. Whether competitive football, chess, politics, war - or the brutal struggle for tenure-track faculty positions in academia – there will be "winners" and "losers". Hence the persistence of suffering might seem inevitable. To imagine that posthuman social life might be akin to us all being “loved up" on MDMA is (probably) naïve.
However, one advantage of using biotech radically to elevate hedonic set-points is that your core values and preference architecture can in principle be preserved while also radically enriching everyone's quality of life. Shifting the upper and lower bounds of your hedonic range, and your typical hedonic set-point, needn't involve sacrificing anything you value. So long as “informational sensitivity" to good and bad stimuli is retained, critical insight and social responsibility can be preserved too. Indeed, there is no technical reason why experience below "hedonic zero" need be conserved at all. For an existence-proof that life based on gradients of intelligent bliss is feasible, we need merely study extreme outliers: some of the very happiest and most productive "hyperthymic" people alive today. We know from twin studies that hedonic set-points have a high degree of genetic loading. If you were choosing via preimplantation genetic screening the attributes of your future children, which variants of the following genes would you select:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17687265 (COMT)
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/danish_dna_could/ (serotonin transporter gene)
http://www.medicaldaily.com/pessimism-genetic-research-shows-your-outlook-might-be-cloudy-genetic-design-259573 (ADA2b deletion variant)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20212137 (pain-sensitivity)
Selection pressure in favour of “happier “genomes is likely to accelerate as the reproductive revolution gathers pace.
Pitfalls? Yes, lots.
But every child born today is a unique and untested genetic experiment too.
3) Talk of a living world without suffering sounds ecologically illiterate. Don't transhumanists understand the thermodynamics of a food chain!?
But just as Malthusian predictions of "inevitable" human immiseration were confounded by family planning, likewise an analogous use of fertility regulation is possible via cross-species immunocontraception in tomorrow's wildlife parks. No technical reason exists why sentient beings must harm each other indefinitely. If we want to phase out the biology of suffering throughout the living world while at the same time preserving a recognisable approximation of today's “charismatic mega-fauna”, then the real obstacles will be ideological - and perhaps simple status quo bias. The CRISPR revolution in biotech, and the imminent computational accessibly of every cubic metre of the planet to surveillance, micro-management and control, mean that whether intelligent agents decide to preserve the biology of suffering is ultimately an ethical choice.
4) Transhumanists have radically different conceptions of posthuman superintelligence.
Crudely oversimplifying, here are three.
(a) The I.J.Good / E. Yudkowsky / MIRI / Bostrom "Intelligence Explosion". AGI goes 'FOOM': a “replacement” scenario.
(b) A Kurzweilian “fusion” scenario where humans and our machines effectively merge. Mind-uploading, etc.
(c) A biointelligence explosion, where posthuman superintelligences are our cybernetically-enhanced biological descendants. Recursively self-improving organic robots (i.e. us) master their own genetic source code and bootstrap their way to full-spectrum superintelligence.
Whatever option (if any) you favour, the proposal that we use biotechnology and infotech to phase out suffering does not depend on invoking a “Technological Singularity”, an “Intelligence Explosion”, or any other deus ex machina to solve all our problems. Rather, phasing out the biology of suffering will be technically feasible later this century and beyond with recognisable extensions of existing technologies. (cf. "Genetically Engineering Almost Anything":
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/evolution/crispr-gene-drives/)
Whether phasing out suffering will ultimately prove sociologically feasible is a harder question I won't attempt to answer here.
Sadly, I share Scott's tentative prediction of an increase in suffering this century.
* * *
Do I worry about existential risk from hostile AI? Kevin, AI in the sense of smart weaponry designed by hostile humans, yes. An AGI that goes FOOM (i.e. the I.J. Good / MIRI scenario) and wipes out all humanity, no. But I could be mistaken; it's good these exotic scenarios are researched. My worry comes only when someone argues that the plight of other sentient beings alive now is so trivial in comparison to the spectre of a FOOM scenario that EAs shouldn't waste time on it.
https://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/parable.html
* * *
Why on earth is this moral platitude controversial?
https://vimeo.com/127633233
("David Pearce on Singularity 1 on 1: Give Up Eating Meat!")
Compared to the exponential growth of computer processing power, the "circle of compassion" expands only slowly and fitfully. But I still (tentatively) believe in the possibility of sentience-friendly biological intelligence.
* * *
Google cracks the Meaning Of Life?
http://uk.businessinsider.com/google-tests-new-artificial-intelligence-chatbot-2015-6
("Google’s artificial-intelligence bot thinks the purpose of life is 'to live forever'")
One suspects that Google’s Indian counterpart might decide that the purpose of life was moksha.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moksha)
And maybe a God-like ethical superintelligence would draw similar conclusions.
* * *
Roll on a utilitronium shockwave, or at least genetically preprogrammed bliss. A brief history of happiness...
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/18/the-dangers-of-happiness/
("The Dangers of Happiness")
* * *
Alas "techno-hedonist" sounds like a style of dance-music...
("'Wisdom of the Great Philosophers on How to Live' by Daniel Klein")
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daniel-klein/every-time-i-find-the-meaning-of-life-they-change-/
"My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot."
(Ashleigh Brilliant)
And they all lived happily ever after?
I reckon so. I just wish post-human superintelligence could manage the counterpart of...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrowing_of_Hell
* * *
Better never to have been? History is written by the victors, but Darwinian life is a horror story.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/vision-zero-suicide-sweden/394994/
("It Possible to Eliminate Suicide?")
When can compassionate biology replace conservation biology?
Adam, thanks. Citing living persons is always a double-edged sword; you can never be sure they won't go off the rails and do or say something stupid. By contrast, asking how biotechnology can deliver Gautama Buddha's dream of the well-being of all sentience, or asking how CRISPR genome-editing can fulfil the Biblical promise of a world where the lion and the wolf lie down with the lamb (etc), is less likely to frighten the traditional-minded....I hope.
* * *
Buddhist transhumanism: unconditional love and compassion for all sentient beings needs hard-edged science.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/m9rBhZkJVrN6EzW7i4mu/full#.VbctS8vbJjs
[on the end of suffering through science]
The End of Suffering
("Towards the Abolition of Suffering Through Science")
Thanks Adam. One topic we should probably discuss is the ultimate scope of our moral responsibilities. Assume for a moment that our main or overriding goal should be to minimise and ideally abolish involuntary suffering. I typically assume that (a) only biological minds suffer and (b) we are probably alone within our cosmological horizon. If so, then our responsibility is “only” to phase out the biology of involuntary suffering here on Earth and make sure it doesn’t spread or propagate outside our solar system. But Brian [Tomasik], for instance, has quite a different metaphysics of mind, most famously that digital characters in video games can suffer (now only a little – but in future perhaps a lot). The ramifications here for abolitionist bioethics are far-reaching.
[on High-Tech Jainism]
"Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.” (C.S. Lewis)
High-Tech Jainism
More from the crocodile-infested swamp of Melbourne botanical gardens:
video (1)
("Designing Compassionate Ecosystems - David Pearce")
video (2)
("David Pearce - Effective Altruism - Phasing Out Suffering")
video (3)
("Antispeciesism & Compassionate Stewardship - David Pearce")
Thanks guys. “Compassionate biology” sounds a less scientific discipline than “conservation biology”, but they are equally normative. The former discipline assumes that, ideally, sentient beings shouldn’t harm each other, or allow each other to come to harm. The latter discipline seeks to conserve and even extend the horrors of Darwinian life indefinitely.
* * *
Kill off carnivores? Andres we need to consider not just the technical feasibility of possible solutions, but also their sociological credibility - and also what could go wrong. By analogy, we might believe that the quality of life of some infants born with progressive genetic disorders, and some old sick humans in their dotage, means they'd be better off not existing. But the ethical utilitarian may still reckon it's best to enshrine the sanctity of life in law: no euthanasia without informed consent. Both sociological credibility and a prudent lack of trust in human wisdom to get such ethical judgements right means that the most obvious "technical" solution should be resisted. Likewise with nonhuman sentients. In the case of obligate carnivorous predators, yes, allowing such species to go extinct would be my technically preferred option [via mass sterilants, not killing]. Yet the need for species conservation - at least of all the world's species of "charismatic megafauna" - is regarded as so axiomatic by almost everyone that I'm not convinced the extinction option is sociologically credible or helpful to advocate. Of course, plenty of people would say that behavioural-genetic tweaking won't ever be sociologically credible either. But if "wild" humans can be civilised, why not non-humans too...
Alexander, you're right. A careful writer would not be so sweeping. I confess I worry more about life-supporting regions of the multiverse inaccessible to rational agency than the possibility that (super-)intelligent agent beings might reintroduce the biology of suffering at some stage in our forward light-cone - long after its historic abolition. I guess we're speculating here about what classes of problem our descendants [or successors] may find it fruitful or interesting to compute. The only explanation I can think of for why benevolent superintelligence(s) might create a misery-ridden world such as ours would be to prevent or mitigate some humanly unimaginable greater evil. But (for technical reasons I won't go into here unless you're interested) IMO it's likely we're living in basement reality. Suffering discloses an intrinsic feature of one part of the "fire" in the equations. Here we enter deep into scientific metaphysics.
The long-term ethical responsibilities of intelligent agency in the cosmos is poorly understood, to say the least. If the Rare Earth hypothesis is confounded, then we shouldn't rule out altogether the prospect of cosmic rescue-missions. But C.S. Lewis has history on his side.
* * *
Denis, first, many thanks for a thoughtful exploration of the issues. Presumably, an analogous choice might be faced by posthuman superintelligence vis-à-vis Homo sapiens if we suppose, questionably IMO, that posthuman superintelligence won't be our biological descendants. Should posthuman superintelligence subject Homo sapiens to (1) “uplift”? [in which case we'd no longer be human] (2) “rewilding”? [presumably on reservations mimicking the original evolutionary environment of adaptation] or (3) genetic-behavioural “tweaking”? [i.e. civilising so that we don't cause other sentient beings harm, or suffer harm ourselves.]
Critics of a future pan-species welfare-state (more colourfully, the “vegan tiger” option) claim that tweaking/civilising isn't really conservation biology at all. By analogy today, such a hardcore species-essentialist might claim that bunny-hugging vegans, or loved-up guys on MDMA hugging each other at a rave, are unnatural – after all, it's a violation of our normal behavioural phenotype. Nature “designed” male humans to be hunters and warriors, as shown by our love of violent video games, competitive sports and multi-million dollar global arms-budgets. Nature also “designed” women to be attracted to dominant alpha-males who excel at such behaviours. By trying to civilise ourselves, we're running the risk of losing “what it means to be human”.
Like most compromises, the tweaking/civilising option for human and nonhuman animals alike is extremely messy. As an ivory-tower philosopher, I'm temperamentally more attracted to the prospect of a utilitronium shockwave, not practical politics. The reason for seriously exploring messy compromise options is that thoughtful futurists and bioethicists alike are starting to wonder if we really want to live in a world where sentient beings harm each other, or allow each other to come to harm. Yet (almost) everyone is aghast at the prospect of losing “charismatic megafauna” through outright species extinction.
One note on terminology. The three-way distinction between living creatures being “wild”, zoo-bound/incarcerated, and free-living but civilised is worth keeping - despite the gradations in-between. Critics of compassionate stewardship say that creating civilised post-Darwinian life would entail turning the living world into a “zoo”, but not so – or at least not necessarily so. The existence of walls, both physical and metaphorical, doesn't mean that you are living in a zoo or prison...
* * *
http://wearerightabouteverything.com/2015/07/29/shock-as-cecil-the-lions-murderous-past-is-revealed/
Needless to say, launching a transhumanist party with "End Predation Now" as the centrepiece of its policy platform is not what anyone has in mind. But amid the global outpouring of grief for Cecil the Lion, it's worth being clear about our long-term policy goals. Do we want a long-term future where sentient beings harm each other or not?
Killing Others
* * *
Denis, my dark suspicion is that full-spectrum superintelligence wouldn't preserve Darwinian life in any shape or form. Compare humanity's approach to archiving the smallpox virus. However, perhaps I shouldn't presume to speak for posthuman superintelligence. Naturally, the issue of consent crops up. Its precise nature and relevance is unclear. Thus a human infant or nonhuman animal can't give or withhold consent to be vaccinated against some nasty disease because neither are cognitively capable of understanding vaccination. Or to use a rather different example, neither a stricken toddler nor a zebra in the jaws of a hungry crocodile can expressly consent to be rescued. Their expressed preference not to be harmed is manifest beyond doubt.
What might (conceivably) be politically feasible later this century? IMO the widest possible popular consensus on the long-term objective of phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering deserves to be combined with an immense scholarly discipline devoted entirely to exploring scenarios of what could go wrong.
What would a full-spectrum superintelligence do to the biosphere?
http://uk.businessinsider.com/when-artificial-intelligence-turns-scary-2015-5
* * *
What should be the fate of human and nonhuman predators?
http://qz.com/497675/to-truly-end-animal-suffering-the-most-ethical-choice-is-to-kill-all-predators-especially-cecil-the-lion/
("To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators (especially Cecil the lion")
There is a difference between arguing that our long-term goal should be compassionate stewardship - including ending predation and starvation - and arguing we should be hurling ourselves into veganising Nature now. The reason for having the debate is that some animal advocates believe that we should be investing time and resources in e.g. "rewilding", captive breeding programs for big cats, and so forth. Do we want a long-term future where sentient beings harm each other or not?
* * *
Another way to promote vegan cats...
http://toyland.gizmodo.com/hasbro-now-has-a-toy-line-for-seniors-starting-with-a-l-1743122884
("Hasbro Now Has a Toy Line For Seniors Starting With a Lifelike Robotic Cat")
* * *
A plea to bump off all philosophers:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/09/10/i-am-horrified-at-what-goes-on-in-philosophy-departments-personally/
("I am horrified at what goes on in philosophy departments, personally")
However well-intentioned, violent solutions tend to provoke violent responses. Of course, there is no guarantee debating whether obligate predators should have reproductive rights won't trigger inflammatory language too; but if nothing else, stress on non-violence helps keep the temperature down...
Unclefrogy, in the post-CRISPR era, selection pressure is likely to intensify, not diminish. Intelligent moral agents can engineer greater biodiversity and greater genetic variety than was ever possible under a regime of natural selection. You ask what “authority” gives us the right to intervene. It’s the same “authority” that mandates helping members of other ethnic groups. Do you believe we were wrong to wipe out smallpox? Should eradicating malaria be reckoned immoral on the grounds we may upset ecological balance? By all means highlight the pitfalls of compassionate stewardship. But a world where sentient beings don’t harm each other is more civilised than a world where we go around eating each other.
Shikko, take for example the SCN9A gene. Nonsense mutations of SCN9A induce congenital pain-insensitivity. Other alleles induce abnormally high or abnormally low pain-sensitivity. CRISPR and “gene drives” allow intelligent moral agents to choose the level of physical suffering undergone by members of other species. Such an example could be multiplied with each of our core emotions. Testosterone function and the spectrum of behaviour it promotes can be modulated too – for good or ill. The biggest challenge here is ethical-ideological - or rather status quo bias - not ultimately technical, although the technical challenges are immense.
Stephen, if we do eventually phase out the horrors of predation, the driving impetus will most likely come from “autistic” hyper-systematising rule-followers, not hyper-empathetic animal lovers – and for the same reason that vegetarians tend to be disproportionately female, whereas the ratio of male-to-female vegans is roughly even. Pop-psychologising aside, intelligent moral agents will shortly be able to choose whether we want a biosphere where sentient beings hurt, harm and kill each other – or not. One needn’t be any kind of utilitarian to support phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering.
In my view, any defence of phasing out predation should stress non-violent options. The issue of (notional) reproductive rights for predators is controversial, but it’s not as inflammatory as a plea for mass genocide. Also, the feasibility of regulating population sizes via cross-species immunocontraception (etc) is worth stressing from the outset because most readers assume that philosophers are ecologically illiterate and don’t understand the thermodynamics of a food chain.
As a route to gaining public support, IMO focus on large long-lived vertebrates probably trumps calculations of biomass. Dentist Walter Palmer says that he'd not have killed Cecil The Lion if he'd known that Cecil had a name. Giving all large, long-lived free-living and domestic animals names - or at least discreet name-tags - might be a good start. Beginning with a single long-lived charismatic species (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/abolitionist-project/elephantcare.html) and only later working our way across the phylogenetic tree (via CRISPR and "gene drives") carries IMO more sociological credibility than prioritising invertebrates - though I'm still sceptical either initiative will happen before the in vitro meat revolution and the end of factory-farming.
* * *
Crip, first feasibility. Is a living world where sentient beings don't physically hurt, harm and kill each other technically, ecologically, thermodynamically possible?
Initially, of course, we wouldn't tackle all the world's ecosystems simultaneously. We'd do a pilot study in a wildlife park: cross-species fertility regulation via immunocontraception, GPS tracking, in vitro meat and/or genetic tweaking of obligate carnivores (etc).
“Killing diseased members of a community prevents epidemics”. Yes, sure. But vaccinations and cures are more civilised than violent solutions for human and nonhuman animals alike.
Phasing out predation will have “a serious impact on the evolution of new traits”? Yes indeed. But CRISPR genome-editing and “gene drives” promise a far richer diversity of genomes, psychologies and behaviours than was possible under a regime of natural selection.
Teething problems, unanticipated side-effects, you name it? Yes, no doubt. However, we aren't talking about a Five Year Plan, but rather the long-term future of predation in the context of a wider project of compassionate stewardship of the rest of the living world.
Second, ethics and policy-making. You and I could lay out our respective theories of value and normative ethics. Perhaps more fruitful is exploring the scope for compromise and consensus - just as we almost all agree about the desirability of e.g. eliminating malaria, despite an immense diversity of values and belief systems. Thanks to biotechnology, all that's needed to get the project of compassionate stewardship off the ground is a weak and watered-down ethical principle: other things being equal, intelligent moral agents should try to reduce the amount of involuntary suffering that sentient beings undergo. The goal of reducing suffering needn't express our sole or even our primary ethic; we may be utilitarians or deontologists or virtue theorists or ethical pluralists and so forth. Most religious and secular ethicists would put some weight on reducing cruelty and suffering. You don't need to be a Buddhist or a Benatarian or a negative utilitarian (etc) to believe the burden of avoidable suffering in the living world should be reduced as the biotech revolution matures - and the cost of code-editing collapses.
Ultimately, why preserve involuntary suffering at all?
I’ve yet to hear an ethically compelling case.
“Arrogant”? If one has the chance to save a toddler belonging to another ethnic group from drowning in a shallow pond, or being mauled by a predator (etc), we wouldn't claim that walking on by is more modest and unassuming. Who are we to question the mysterious working of Providence (etc). So why is it any more arrogant to rescue beings of comparable sentience and salience to a human toddler but who belong to a different species? We share the same core emotions and pleasure-pain axis. More generally, should our benevolence be ad hoc or systematic?
“Escape reward” at outrunning a predator? Are we really claiming that such acute relief somehow ethically outweighs the life-or-death trauma involved? No doubt someone who escapes from a human predator experiences a wave of relief too. Yet one hesitates to ask, say, a woman who has escaped from the clutches of a violent rapist whether the experience has been a net positive in her life. Such examples could be multiplied: post-traumatic stress disorder is more common.
“Relief” for a sick animal? We wouldn't argue that violent human predators who prey on the old and the sick are doing the vulnerable a favour by putting them out of their misery. Likewise with sentient beings from other species. Believers in an ethic of compassionate stewardship hope that eventually the range and depth of our interventions can be extended across the phylogenetic tree. But first, let's close slaughterhouses and factory farms.....
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10200798516043247&set=a.1579819833426.53050.1773584023&type=3&theater
Thank you Lydia. Yes, CRISPR and gene drives promise to revolutionise the well-being of free-living frogs..
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/gene-drives-and-crispr-could-revolutionize-ecosystem-management/
* * *
Darwinism sanitised:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q
("How Wolves Change Rivers")
Thanks Chris. Haunting mood music, beautifully choreographed wildlife photography, and the hushed reverential voiceover of David Attenborough; here we have a textbook example of the ideology of conservation biology masquerading as value-neutral science. Wolves eat their larger victims alive; and cause terror, agony and unimaginable distress to their victims. We wouldn't consider such depredations an ethically acceptable way to control the population sizes of members of other races. When contemplating "rewilding", why turn civilised values on their head for sentient beings from other species?
For sure, both "rewilding" at one extreme and compassionate biology at the other can potentially have unanticipated consequences. Thankfully, there's no evidence that we're going to run out of processing power so they become computationally intractable. Perhaps compare malaria. Plasmodium falciparum has killed around half the humans who ever lived (cf. "Portrait of a serial killer":
http://www.nature.com/news/2002/021003/full/news021001-6.html)
No doubt some Deep Green neo-primitivist could produce a lyrical documentary on the wholesome ecological effects of protozoan parasites curbing human population sizes in sub-Saharan Africa. Thankfully, most of us recognise that what's needed isn't killing more African children but instead better disease-prevention and help with family planning. The bedrock of any civilised regime of responsible stewardship of the rest of the living world will be cross-species fertility regulation. Ultimately, whether humans or our descendants support the cruelties of traditional Darwinian life or some kind of high-tech Jainism will be an ethical choice.
* * *
Stage Two...?
("All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.")
https://www.audubon.org/news/nature-cant-exist-without-suffering-and-we-cant-change
"Nature Can't Exist Without Suffering—And We Can't Change That
Just because we want to limit wild animals’ pain doesn’t mean it's a good idea to intervene."
Andrew, yes, the entire "vibe" is different. But just as with human-oriented charities, a contrast exists between the tender-minded "empathetic" cognitive-style at one extreme and an “autistic" hyper-systematising cognitive style on the other. The Effective Altruist movement aims to combine both - easy to say, hard to do. Of course, there are substantive differences between then and now too. Back in the 1980s, it simply wasn’t possible to imagine a world of in vitro meat, cross-species immunocontraception or CRISPR-based "gene drives” (etc) for compassionate stewardship of Nature.
* * *
http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-the-world-needs-to-bring-back-woolly-mammoths-2015-6
("Why the world needs to bring back woolly mammoths")
Alex Using cross-species rather than single-species immunocontraception to regulate ecologically sustainable population sizes has never yet been done; but it's well within the bounds of technical feasibility. In practice, lots of advocates of preserving the Darwinian status quo lose their bias when some "cool" idea like bringing back woolly mammoths is proposed. And yes, I'd personally love to see a woolly mammoth. But aesthetics should not trump ethics.
One mega-project in particular struck me as eminently sane:
Eight Craziest Mega-Engineering Projects
Chris, as you know I'm a great admirer of Jain ethics. But the ancients could not have anticipated the superposition principle for complex probability amplitudes in quantum theory. (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_superposition). In my (tentative) view, the superposition principle is needed - and is all that is needed - to explain why anything exists at all and the properties of our bound phenomenal minds:
http://www.quora.com/Why-does-anything-exist-1
* * *
Magnus, thank you. I fear the case for high-tech Jainism - or whatever label we give to using biotech to underwrite the well-being of all sentient beings - will seem compelling only after the in vitro meat revolution. But at a time when "rewilding" projects are popular, the case for "de-wilding" humans and nonhuman animals alike needs to be heard.
[on Negative Utilitarianism]
The NU Study Group (no, not one of my hats - although I know and admire the authors) have released the Negative Utilitarianism FAQ.
NU FAQ
We agree that a commitment to reduce, prevent and ultimately (ideally) abolish involuntary suffering is consistent with a diversity of value systems, not all of which give overriding ethical importance - or even prioritise - phasing out suffering. But it's good to see NU receiving sustained scrutiny.
My own NU musings culled from a response to Toby Ord.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkyOmY74mKY&sns=fb
Thanks Mark. The potentially apocalyptic implications of a classical utilitarian ethic aren’t much explored in the scholarly literature. By contrast, the potentially apocalyptic implications of negative utilitarianism are typically regarded as its reductio ad absurdum. In terms of practical politics, a post-CRISPR future of life based on gradients of intelligent bliss is more politically saleable than utilitarian bioethics because – complications aide - even radical hedonic enrichment doesn’t entail asking anyone to give up their cherished values and preferences, or buy into your vision of the good life rather than theirs. Yet for the committed classical utilitarian, can anything less than a utilitronium shockwave be more than a stopgap?
[on Peter Singer]
Negative utilitarianism, the future of predation, utilitronium shockwaves...
video of Peter Singer and David Pearce
Talk of moral progress can make one sound naive. But even the darkest cynic should salute the extraordinary work of Peter Singer to promote the interests of all sentient beings:
http://www.quora.com/What-do-Peter-singer-and-David-pearce-think-of-each-other/answer/David-Pearce-18
("What do Peter Singer and David Pearce think of each other?")
Bleak ultra-Darwinism suggests that life is all about creatures eating each other - both literally and figuratively. But the superior intelligence of one largely - but not wholly - depraved species shows how we may claw our way out of the Darwinian abyss.
David, I don't know Peter Singer personally, so I know only what I've been told. (Adam Ford could fill you in) I used to worry that Peter Singer would regard stuff about ending predation as beyond the pale. The line between far-sighted radicalism and Crank Alley isn't always clear. But predation is now one item on the ethics course Singer teaches.
For me, the final piece in the abolitionist jigsaw was provided by Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" (1986).
(cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engines_of_Creation)
I'd grasped the basic principles of cross-species immunocontraception. But until Drexler, I couldn't fathom how the project could be taken to the furthermost reaches of the living world, not least to the deep oceans. [Suffering isn't Drexler's focus, but nanorobotics can be used for purposes fair and foul.] Even Drexler couldn't anticipate "gene drives"; they accelerate timescales to completion. Either way, radical abolitionism via biotech was still unpublishable, or so I assumed. Recall that before the Net (or rather, the Web), folk with weird and wonderful ideas were free to declaim them on street corners (or in my case, the local coffee-shop), but were otherwise destined to toil in obscurity. Intellectual history is full of folk with odd ideas who finally got them heard after overcoming seemingly impossible odds. What history doesn't record are lonely researchers who got discouraged and just gave up. Sadly I suspect this is still to some extent true today.
Thanks Sonali. The idea that we should promote the interests of human and nonhuman animals alike isn't especially radical on the Indian subcontinent. The concept of ahimsa is common to Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. But such an inclusive concept of our ethical responsibilities is largely alien to the Abrahamic religions and (until recently) the ethics of their secular offshoots. Peter Singer has done more than anyone alive to promote this change of Western perspective. But as long as we have factory-farms and slaughterhouses, it's impossible to talk seriously about living in a civilised society.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9434.html
("The Expanding Circle")
I recall once incurring the displeasure of a Trotskyist for dissenting from Trotsky's opinion that "The workers of Kronstadt should be shot down like rabbits."
Only after being treated to a ten-minute harangue was I able to communicate my objection, namely that civilised humans should not be shooting rabbits.
(cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronstadt_rebellion)
Sean, IMO, Peter Singer has quite finely developed political antennae. Part of being an effective political actor / public intellectual is knowing just how far you can go - and going no further, irrespective of how rationally compelling your argument may be. Whether predation, in vitro meat, gay marriage - speak too soon and you're marginalised as a crank, weigh in too late and you're not really contributing to the debate - as distinct from offering welcome solidarity and support.
But yes, it's a tough one.
"Bioethicist" sounds cooler than "moral philosopher"; but will history be kind to any of us?
http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/steven-pinker-and-the-real-value-of-bioethicists
("The Bioethicists Dilemma")
* * *
Whether (dis)value can be naturalised is contentious. On the one hand, we may invoke Hume's guillotine. How can an "ought" be derived from an "is"? On the other hand, a normative aspect seems built into the very nature of agony, for example. If you're in agony, its disvaluable nature seems self-intimating: it's not an "open question".
An anti-realist about value might respond: "Sure, your agony is disvaluable for you. But it's not disvaluable for me. There is no objective fact of the matter".
However, it's unclear whether this dismissal reflects some deep metaphysical truth or a mere epistemological limitation on the part of the critic. Science says that none of us is special or privileged. Insofar as agony is disvaluable for me, I infer it's disvaluable for anyone, anywhere - and try to act accordingly. A posthuman superbeing who could impartially access all first-person and third-person facts might do the same on a cosmological scale.
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199603695.do
("The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics")
David, a couple of points. First, the transhumanist movement isn't committed to promoting a utilitronium shockwave. Secondly, yes, folk have all sorts of crazy ideas - one has no time or duty to engage them all. But if a widely accepted ethic - in this case classical utilitarianism - has a wildly implausible disguised implication that's far more radical than e.g. the homely dilemmas of the "trolley problem" (etc), then such a disguised implication should be rigorously explored - even if one believes that implication is a reductio ad absurdum of classical utilitarian ethics.
... Most of the arguments critics make against utilitarian policies are themselves implicitly utilitarian, i.e. they appeal to the bad consequences that would follow from their adoption - which if true, simply shows that the policies in question aren't really utilitarian at all. Would utilitarians - including NUs - be wise to advocate enshrining the sanctity of life - human and nonhuman - in law?
* * *
Keith, could you possibly clarify? By "utilitarian function" do you mean utility function? Naturally, one can disagree with classical utilitarian decision procedures and/or theory of value. But it's unclear how the classical utilitarian can escape this apocalyptic if disguised implication of his own ethic. (cf. Utilitronium Shockwaves)
By contrast, the allegedly apocalyptic implications of negative utilitarianism are well-known: they are the first thing most people will raise (typically as a supposed reductio ad absurdum) if you say you’re a negative utilitarian.
In response, the classical utilitarian may want to stress that launching a utilitronium shockwave isn’t likely to be technically feasible for centuries – it’s more of a “philosophical” notion. Aiming for a civilisation of intelligent bliss – and conserving much of our existing preference architecture - is more technically and sociologically realistic. This would be my preferred policy option. Yet if one is a utilitarian of any kind, such temporal discounting is problematic...
* * *
For evolutionary reasons, men in particular tend to crave novelty. The worst thing many men especially can imagine isn’t being anxious or depressed but being bored. A future of perpetual bliss sounds…well, samey. So it’s natural to want to build novelty (and scope for personal growth, etc) into one’s core values from the outset. As we’ve discussed, even radical recalibration of hedonic set-points and our hedonic range is more than compatible with rich diversity and novelty-seeking. Other things being equal, the happier one is, the wider the diversity of external stimuli one finds rewarding.
However…
...for the classical utilitarian, hedonic enhancement and recalibration can’t be anything more than stopgap. Classical utilitarian Tony Ord describes negative utilitarianism as a "devastatingly callous" doctrine, rather than systematised compassion as its proponents assume. But contra Toby, if anything the apocalyptic implications of a CU versus NU ethic tend to cut the other way. Thus a notional classical utilitarian AI that went FOOM would presumably convert the world into pure, uniform hedonium/orgasmium. Of course, we may be sceptical of such runaway AGI scenarios on other grounds, in my case technical grounds. But any classical utilitarian would seem committed to working towards such a utilitronium shockwave. By contrast, NUs will settle for life based on gradients of intelligent bliss - and as much (or as little) novelty as takes your fancy.
Back to practical EA. Despite such a seemingly fundamental clash of values, I hope we can hammer out a consensus on concrete policies to support. Not least, tackling Third World poverty and disease, universal access to preimplantation genetic screening, outlawing factory-farming and slaughterhouses, phasing out predation and other sources of free-living animal suffering, research into AI risks and opportunities (etc) are all consistent and (I hope we can agree) ethically desirable - even if you think one or more of these goals is comparatively non-urgent.
* * *
Thanks Adam. I used to assume that Peter Singer would regard some of my views as too "weird" to want to share a stage. But take, say, the issue of predation. IMO the idea that sentient beings shouldn’t harm each other will one day seem too ethically obvious even to need articulating. Technically, the accelerating revolution in CRISPR-based gene-drive systems makes it harder for bioconservative critics to claim that a happy biosphere is ecologically impossible. What is truly "weird" - weird in its policy implications, not its abstract formulation - is classical utilitarian ethics. But utilitarian ethics aren’t needed to champion a happy biosphere.
* * *
If your core ethical principle has a wildly counterintuitive policy implication, should you embrace the implication or abandon the principle (or alternatively, abandon the shackles of logical consistency)? Either way, let’s hope secular and religious folk alike can agree on phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering and engineering a civilisation of intelligent bliss. As stopgaps go, there are worse...
[on bioconservatism at the BBC]
A bioconservative response to transhumanist agenda:
BBC Radio 4 History of Ideas
Surgeon Gabriel Weston on future use of medical technology.
I was roped in to provide some "balance". We shall see.
In the meantime:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-01-diet-nutrition-essential-mental-health.html
[on transhumanism in China]
[Adam Ford writes] "Will China be the first to engineer extremely happy people?
David Pearce is now on YouKu - ~1.4 billion people in China will potentially be exposed to David's disarming smile!"
Transhumanism with a Chinese Face
Thank you Adam, Mafalda, Shubhangi, Fay. Transhumanism should be spoken in many tongues - though perhaps with a British accent.
https://www.abolitionist.com/chinese/
The Hedonistic Imperative has breached the Great Firewall of China:
The Hedonistic Imperative on Youku
("Mini Documentary - The Hedonistic Imperative - David Pearce (Take 1)—在线播放—优酷网，视频高清在线观看
v.youku.com")
Whether genetically preprogrammed gradients of bliss ever become Party orthodoxy remains to be seen. Perhaps enemies of the revolution will be dispatched to pleasure camps for education through bliss - and subjected to acts of inhuman kindness. Meanwhile:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-successfully-genetically-modify-human-embryos-allowing-for-editing-of-babies-genes-10197357.html
("Scientists successfully genetically modify human embryos, allowing for editing of babies’ genes")
[on effective altruism in Melbourne]
http://www.eaglobal.org/melbourne
("Effective Altruism Melbourne")
Photo of DP, JO and PS
Do your sympathies lie with advocates of pan-galactic radiation? Or C.S. Lewis: "Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere?"
Science, Effective Altruism & Astronomical Impacts
* * *
Astronomical Stakes or a Rounding Error?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITwnA_2gQi8
("EA Global Melbourne 2015 starring David Pearce! This one is on Astronomical Stakes!
Panelists: Neil Bowerman, Adam Ford, David Pearce - Moderated by Kerry Vaughan")
Thanks Adam! A gulf clearly separates life-loving EAs focused on possible "astronomical waste" and darker Buddhist/Benatarian/NU EAs (e.g. Brian Tomasik) worried about "astronomical harm". The obvious policy compromise here would seem to wait until we have safely abolished the biology of suffering on Earth before radiating across our Hubble volume. Needless to say, there are complications.
On a sad personal note, I always find cosmological discussions a potent disincentive to any form of action - the finitist analogue of "infinitarian paralysis". Waking up to discover the number of flux vacua ("universes") in string theory has increased from c. 10500 to c. 10272,000 (cf. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.03209v1.pdf - "The F-theory geometry with most flux vacua") is enough to put anyone off their cornflakes.
Of course, the vast majority of string vacua don't support life, any more than the vast majority of Everett branches. That still leaves googols that do. Our own possible imminent utilitronium shockwave [or its intelligent, gradients-of-superhuman-bliss analogue] may be a mere rounding error in the great scheme of things. Let's hope theoretical physics is barking up the wrong tree.
* * *
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/16/peter-singer-princeton-bioethics-professor-faces-c/
("Princeton bioethics professor faces calls for resignation over infanticide support")
Thank you Francisco. Alas a plea for phasing out predation - human and nonhuman - can be (mis)represented as advocacy of mass genocide of predators. Likewise, a compassionate NU ethic can be (mis)represented as a devilish plot for provoking Armageddon. Unlike Peter Singer and Francesca Minerva, I reckon it's safest on utilitarian grounds to enshrine the sanctity of life in law because humans can't be trusted. Alas this is a subtlety likely to get lost.
NU versus Virtual Ethics (video)
(David Pearce in conversation with virtue ethicist Justin Oakley)
Justin is a splendid fellow; but you probably detected my scepticism about virtue ethics. If raping one's sister and eating one's mother had helped maximise the inclusive fitness of one's genes on the African savannah, then one would find such behaviours intuitively virtuous. By contrast, the (dis)value of first-person pain and pleasure is culturally invariant.
I hope we can build a pan-galactic civilisation based on gradients of superhuman bliss. Retaining informational sensitivity to "good" and "bad" stimuli means there is no need for anyone to give up values such as e.g. novelty or intellectual progress, no need to become an ethical utilitarian, no need even to embrace secular rather than religious ethics. Complications aside, whatever you care about isn't jeopardised by having a higher hedonic set-point or higher upper and lower bound of your hedonic range. What biohappiness does do is underwrite a subjectively high quality of life for everyone: not a “perfect” life, but still incomparable richer than malaise-ridden Darwinian life.
Of course, ratcheting up hedonic range and hedonic set-points isn't totally preference-neutral. If it were totally preference-neutral, then negative hedonic tone would not have evolved. But only social animals get depressed: low mood (and its accompanying behavioural suppression) would appear to be a genetic adaptation to group living in the ancestral environment of adaptation. The biotech revolution and the imminent reproductive revolution of designer babies changes the nature of selection pressure insofar as intelligent agents will shortly choose the genetic make-up of their offspring in anticipation of the likely behaviour and psychological consequences of their choices. By contrast, natural selection is blind and driven by random mutations.
Wolf, it's a fact of life that most people will recall only a cartoon-like simplification of one's views - just as one recalls only a cartoon-like simplification of their views. "High-tech Jainism" and the non-original "sanctity of life" aren't ideal slogans for a secular rationalist. Being branded an advocate of mass-extermination is worse.
Wolf, agreed. I admire intellectual honesty; I was just urging brand-awareness. "Effective altruism" is a strong brand; "Infanticide" is a disaster. [Recall how Francesca [Minerva] was pilloried in the media, ensuring that the richness of her views was totally lost] And it's important that euthanasia and infanticide aren't lumped together; the former is - or ought to be - voluntary, whereas the latter by its nature can't be an individual choice, which isn't to say it's inherently wrong. [Do I think a chronically pain-ridden infant born with, say, Tay-Sach's disease would be better off not existing? Yes, of course. But can humans trust our judgements about who should be killed in their own interests? Regrettably no, IMO; maybe I'm too pessimistic.]
* * *
Ben Goertzel and HI
("Ben Goertzel - The Hedonistic Imperative & the Cosmist Manifesto")
Thanks Adam. Another thoughtful interview: you bring out the best in people. Aiming for cosmological maximum bliss is inconsistent with most people's goals and aspirations. Not least, such an ethic seems to dictate launching a utilitronium shockwave. By contrast to such "cosmic orgasm" scenarios, using biotechnology "conservatively" to ratchet up (and even maximise) hedonic set-points doesn't entail making joy our only, or even our primary, goal - although such a hedonic recalibration will tend hugely to improve subjective quality of life. Ben urges giving opportunities for Personal Growth and Choice equal weight. No doubt other core goals will be on many people's list.
Of course, we shouldn't exaggerate the potential scope for consensus. Radical hedonic recalibration is itself inconsistent with some people's values - not least, folk who believe in the sanctity of the human germline.
* * *
A trade-off? Adam, once we have phased out all experience below "hedonic zero", there is a sense (IMO) in which all our ethical duties have been discharged - beyond making sure the biology of suffering is never recreated. Everything else - the gradients of superhuman bliss that I anticipate - is icing on the cake.
Growth? Well, just as there are a finite number of perfect games of chess or draughts, likewise there are a finite number of optimal states of sentience within any given Hubble volume. You can't "grow" outside that state-space of optimal sentience because any change would be a derogation.
Choice? Assume you are a posthuman supermind with full mastery of your reward circuitry and hedonic range. Compare and contrast the texture of life lived between, say, hedonic +1 and + 10 with life lived between +90 and +100. Might you decide: life animated by superhuman bliss is just too wonderful, I'll settle instead for what archaic humans used to call “being in a good mood”? Maybe! By all means celebrate choice. But I suspect the sovereignty of the pleasure principle makes the outcome a foregone conclusion.
Now, about the implementation details...
* * *
Serving animal products? Is moral progress possible without inducing feelings of discomfort - sometimes in others but also our own? Either way, not serving animal products at EA events shouldn't cause discomfort, let alone involve harassment. Clearly, the actual victims suffer a worse fate than feeling 'harassed'.
(OK, I don't know the backstory here.)
[on the best of all possible worlds]
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/3fkfht/what_would_the_best_of_all_possible_worlds/
Than you UmamiSalami. HI was written in late 1995. Since then, the human genome has been decoded, in vitro meat has passed from science fiction to imminent commercialisation, and the CRISPR revolution in genome-editing (cf. DIY CRISPR genome-editing kits promises a future where existing humans - and not just our future children – can enjoy radically enriched reward circuitry. If I were to rewrite HI today, then I'd lay greater stress on how phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering is consistent with a wide range of secular and religious value systems. Thus one needn't be any kind of utilitarian, or believe that phasing out suffering should be our only or primary goal, to support recalibration of the hedonic treadmill - and getting rid of involuntary misery and malaise throughout the living world. Even radical elevation of your hedonic set-point can still leave much (if not all) of your existing preference architecture and core values intact – if that is what you so desire. A combination of the pleasure principle and tomorrow’s biotech allow posthuman life to be animated by gradients of intelligent bliss. Risks and pitfalls abound, but I think it’s a future worth striving for.
The inevitability of selfishness? Intuitively you're right. But perhaps recall mirror-touch synaesthetes. A mirror-touch synaesthete can derive as much pleasure from witnessing you having fun as (s)he may suffer from witnessing your distress. Of course, evolution via natural selection has made most of us more selfish than hyper-empathetic mirror-touch synaesthetes. But now that humans are on the brink of mastering our genetic source code, we shouldn't imagine that life is necessarily a zero-sum game. Unlike, say, scarce positional goods and services, the substrates of pure bliss don't need to be rationed.
* * *
Why focus on the genetic-biological routes of suffering? Whether in personal life, politics, religion, and sport - you name it - people have a multitude of different preferences. Often these preferences are irreconcilable. Radical enhancement of hedonic set-points and the biology of reward doesn't resolve these conflicting preferences. Such hedonic enrichment "merely" ensures that everyone enjoys a high subjective quality of life. Analogously, imagine if a specialist in chronic pain medicine insisted not just in treating his patients’ pain, but delivering homilies on how what really matters is the kind of pain-free lives his patients lived, their choices, and their values: people should recognise that being free from physical pain isn't enough! Of course, the pain-specialist would be right - but he's exceeding his brief. Heliotecach712, you'll see the point of the analogy. I could (and sometimes do!) outline my socio-political views on everything from world poverty to global warming to peace in the Middle East - and more generally, my conception of the good life and the ideal society. Maybe the ideas are good, maybe bad; either way, (1) I seriously doubt many people will listen; and (2) even if implemented to the letter, they'd still leave an immense burden of present and future suffering untouched.
By contrast, using genetic-biological tools to ensure that everyone enjoys a subjectively high quality of life promises an end to the ancient Darwinian cycle of misery and malaise. Starting off with unrestricted parental access to preimplantation genetic screening and counselling, such a reproductive revolution can potentially universalise the exceptionally high quality of life enjoyed by a handful of genetic outliers with ultra-high hedonic set-points today. Like promoting physical superhealth, promoting mental superhealth isn't about anyone's vision of the perfect society or some utopian vision of social harmony. Mental and physical superhealth just lays the preconditions – no more - for a civilised society where we all can flourish. The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being”. If we’re serious about underwriting such good health for all, then only genetic medicine can deliver. What our descendants (and older selves?) will do with such enhanced health we can only speculate.
* * *
Qualia computing from Andres
http://qualiacomputing.com/2015/11/27/google-hedonics/
("Google Hedonics")
Envy, jealousy and resentment are typically more genetically adaptive than counting one’s blessings. The discontented tend to be more successful at maximising the inclusive fitness of their genes than the happy-go-lucky. Women who are neurotically anxious tend to be more successful at raising offspring to maturity than the temperamentally serene. And so on. Natural selection didn't design us to be happy. For sure, most people aren't chronically depressed – the behavioural suppression associated with depression is a conditionally activated fall-back strategy adaptive for life’s genetic “losers”. Yet low mood still blights hundreds of millions lives.
What’s to be done? In the long run, recursively self-editing our sinister genetic source code is presumably the only answer. But how to get there? Don’t nice guys finish last? Yes, typically. However, harnessing our darker motives - not least, competitive male altruism - can help claw our way out of the Darwinian abyss.
[on effective altruism in Basel]
Convergence (video)
(Brian Tomasik, David Pearce, Ruairí Donnelly, Micha Eichmann, and David Althaus in Basel)
Brian, thanks for the Amazon link, which made me smile. Anyhow, surely there is a critical difference between consciousness and the élan vital postulated by vitalists. If I've a migraine, then the phenomenal pain I undergo is not some hypothetical property, object or event that I postulate to explain something else. Rather, the phenomenal pain is what needs explaining. The widely shared background assumption that experience doesn't disclose the intrinsic nature of the physical would seem to make such an explanation impossible - without sacrificing monistic
physicalism and the unity of science.
In the tradition of Schopenhauer, Russell, Lockwood and now Strawson, IMO there's a better option. Perhaps the non-experiential stuff that materialists posit is the “fire” in the equations should be discarded like the ether, as redundant metaphysics. What makes organic minds special isn't that the "fire" in the equations each of us instantiates is different from the rest of the universe, but instead the way it's organised.
* * *
Brian. I'm still trying to pinpoint exactly where we diverge. Granted some form of Strawsonian physicalism or otherwise scientifically literate panpsychism, can you clarify why you believe classical digital computers can be more than micro-experiential zombies? Here's a thought-experiment. Presumably, the skull-bound population of the USA could each be given a euphoriant drug and recruited to implement the function of nociception in a pan-continental virtual robot. Do you believe that somehow a unitary pain-racked pan-continental subject of experience could arise from the population of discrete but interconnected blissed-out Americans executing the relevant Nociception program? Less fancifully, assume that we train up, or program, a silicon (etc) robot to support nociception. Isn't the question of whether the robot's CPU is made up of primordial micro-pains or micro-pleasures or silicon or gallium arsenide a purely incidental implementation detail? The robot will function just as well if its circuitry is made of discrete digital micro-pleasures as discrete digital micro-pains: their textures are logically and physically incidental to its functionality. Or do you believe that - in virtue of the program executed by a digital computer - a bunch of discrete digital micro-pleasures could give rise to a unitary phenomenal macro-pain? If so, by what mechanism?
* * *
Brian, a couple of points. First, we'd agree that (a generalisation of) mirror-touch synaesthesia isn't necessary for friendliness. Do you believe it's sufficient?
Second, yes, phenomenal binding comes in degrees. If phenomenal binding didn't come in degrees, then natural selection would have lacked the variation in raw materials to shape the multiple bound phenomenal objects and cross-modally matched phenomenal worlds of our everyday experience. Thus someone with simultanagnosia, who can see only one object at once, needn't have motion blindness, nor need (s)he be schizophrenic, i.e. (s)he still has something resembling a unitary phenomenal self. By contrast, a classical digital computer - or the skull-bound population of the USA co-opted into performing any computation that we choose for the purposes of an experiment – lacks any phenomenal binding, whether partial or total, local or global. Or rather, neither system has phenomenal binding if reductive physicalism is true. The challenge – if one believes that membrane-bound neurons are always discrete classical objects – is to explain why a pack of discrete neurons / classical “mind-dust” in the CNS aren't incapable of phenomenal binding as well.
* * *
Just as people with Cotard's syndrome can believe they are dead (cf. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/being-corpse-most-bizarre-experience-4982716), radical eliminativists have identified the syndrome of Sentientism, undergone by folk who believe we are conscious.
Brian, one note about your taxonomy. Scientifically literate monistic idealists can be physicalists too. (cf. https://www.physicalism.com) Whereas “ontic structural realists” like Ross and Ladyman deny the world has any intrinsic properties, just the relational properties allowed by general relativity and quantum field-theoretic physics, by contrast Strawsonian physicalists believe that the intrinsic prosperities of the natural world – the “fire” in the equations - are experiential.
If consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then strictly speaking, all consciousness, and only consciousness, has causal efficacy. This view isn't the same as functionalism because the [minimal] subjective properties of most physical states are functionally incidental – of no more computational relevance to an information-processing system than whether a microprocessor executing a program is made of silicon or gallium arsenide, or chess pieces are made of wood or metal.
However, organic minds, at least, can talk about their own “program-resistant” subjective properties. Do the particular intrinsic subjective properties of at least some states of our phenomenally bound conscious minds play an indispensable functional role in our behaviour? What else, other than these intrinsic subjective properties, could physically allow us to allude to their existence?
The nasty “raw feels” of phenomenal pain are about as real as it gets for me. If someone says subjective experience has no place in their ontology, then I say so much the worse for their theory of the world.
Dogmatism!? Perhaps.
* * *
"How do qualia observe qualia?"
Short, boring answer, Christian: we don't know. However (IMO), from a pain in the cephalic ganglion of a humble flatworm to this self-referential indexical thought, all qualia share the property of being self-intimating. Some philosophers have decried the notion of "ownerless pain". Indeed, it's not as though a roundworm has a self-concept in any sense we would recognise. But IMO it's not the case that a pain is ownerless. Rather, the pain is "owned" by itself.
* * *
Can EA transcend the pleasure principle? No, but we can harness it. To be maximally effective, perhaps EA needs to tap into ways to make people feel good and show off - an EA version of the potlatch.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch
(Like many people, I find myself more altruistic when people are watching; and most altruistic when people are watching but imagine I'm oblivious of being observed.)
* * *
Like Tim, I'm sometimes worried I've not properly understood Brian's position. It's potentially ethically disastrous to suppose that first-person facts (e.g. I-am-in-pain) have some sort of second-rate ontological status on account of our epistemological limitations. First-person facts are real, objective, spatio-temporal features of the natural world - as objectively real as the rest-mass of the electron. Confusion on this score is IMO one reason we should develop technologies of e.g. reversible thalamic bridges
(cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKwT1Ol3nY0)
to allow “mind-melding" both with other humans and sentient beings from other species. Such technologies could help us finally overcome the sceptical Problem of Other Minds - usually reckoned insoluble.
Mind-melding technologies may lead, not just to a Copernican moral revolution, but also a revolution in our conception of decision-theoretic rationality.
The proposal that mature posthuman ethics and rationality might converge sounds almost too good to be true. But I (tentatively) believe this to be the case.
Perhaps compare the orthodox metaphysical individualism presupposed by the Less Wrong Decision Theory FAQ:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gu1/decision_theory_faq/
* * *
What do IQ tests miss?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-06-high-moral-correspond-gray-brain.html
("High levels of moral reasoning correspond with increased gray matter in brain")
* * *
Chris, yes, a combination of the argument from analogy and the principle of mediocrity (natural science gives none of us reason to believe that we're special) offer strong grounds for believing in the sentience of other organic robots - although for perhaps a tenth of the time, one is mistaken, i.e. one is dreaming. However, on the orthodox materialist account of the nature of the physical, namely the mysterious “fire” in the field-theoretic equations is non-experiential, it's inexplicable why we aren't all p-zombies, just as on the orthodox neuroscience story, it's inexplicable why we're not at most patterns of classical, discrete, decohered, membrane-bound "mind-dust".
I don't know which conjecture will be harder experimentally to test: the effective classicality of neurons (cf. https://www.physicalism.com/#6) or the unitary sentience of other organic mind-brains via reversible thalamic bridges. Both classes of procedure pose formidable technical challenges. As you know, I'm a sceptic about the former but not the latter!
Joshua, is it possible that your other cerebral hemisphere is a p-zombie, so to speak? On the standard neuroscience story, your corpus callosum allows your cerebral hemispheres mutually to communicate. But how does your left-brain neocortex, say, solve the Problem Of Other Sentient Hemispheres?
How we understand – and solve - the phenomenal binding problem is critical.
Jorge, yes, raising the question of Other Minds in the case of non-human animal sentience can be ethically catastrophic. Many meat-eaters today would love nothing better than to turn the question of non-human consciousness into some sort of inscrutable metaphysical mystery. In my view, there is neither more nor less ground for believing that a pig is a conscious subject of experience than Einstein.
Ricardo, there is indeed a sense in which sowing sceptical doubt in the minds of other people is ethically and intellectually irresponsible. (no disrespect to the Quora questioner. He clearly wasn't intending to be mischievous.) Fortunately, later this century the ancient sceptical worry can potentially be banished. If you're in any doubt about the sentience of others, “mind-meld” to find out. The outcome of the procedure will be different if, say, you're merely having a lucid dream or game-playing in immersive VR.
* * *
Marc, I agree that most forms of radical scepticism - and especially solipsism - are sterile. Sometimes, they are morally harmful. Two complications. Although talk of p-zombies might be considered a pointless sceptical worry, such thought-experiments can instead be treated as highlighting an immense intellectual scandal. Mainstream science has no explanation of why we aren't p-zombies or micro-experiential zombies. It's unclear how much of what currently passes for knowledge will survive a solution to the mysteries of consciousness.
Second, although radical scepticism is mostly a waste of time, it's unsettling to consider which philosophical position of classical antiquity came closest to being correct. Probably scepticism. Classical philosophers among who doubted most of what then passed for knowledge have been vindicated. Let's hope we're not in the same boat today. Such scepticism normally seems remote - at least so long as one doesn't take the experimental method too seriously and start exploring consciousness-altering drugs. But I fear the foundations of science may be built on sand.
Jorge, believing that human but not nonhuman animals are conscious is a case of motivated cognition at its worst. Of course, pointing out that the author of a study claiming that, for example, smoking cigarettes doesn't cause cancer is funded by the tobacco industry doesn't by itself refute the claim. The line between justifiably drawing attention to sources confounding bias and unjustified ad hominem attacks isn't always clear. However, if a meat-eater or vivisector claims that nonhuman animals can't suffer pain, or experience only negligible distress, then one knows not to expect an impartial exploration of the issues.
* * *
[Brian writes] "Consciousness realist"?! Some of our assumptions are so basic one doesn't normally even trouble naming them. The gulf between writers who regard consciousness as fundamental (either ontologically, epistemologically or both) and consciousness irrealists is immense. What's it like to be Brian or Daniel Dennett, I sometimes wonder (seriously).
* * *
Tim, we can agree that predictions about the nature of full-spectrum superintelligence are hazardous. But presumably full-spectrum superintelligence won't entertain a false metaphysics of personal identity. The Borg don't just have different values from traditional humans; they know more than we do. The Borg's version of a Decision-Theoretic FAQ differs from a metaphysical individualist's conception of a Decision-Theoretic FAQ. Of course, this is just a colourful way of putting it. But in a future world of widespread or ubiquitous mind-melding, our conception of decision-theoretic rationality will change too. The Hogan twins have a different conception of Prisoner's Dilemma than the rest of us. Naturally, we don't know if the future really belongs to full-spectrum superintelligences. Some conceptions of posthuman superintelligence resemble a solitary Super-Asperger more than the hyper-social intelligence sketched here.
What I'm arguing is that decision theory as we understand it today has built-in metaphysical assumptions that can be challenged. Thus in a Prisoner's Dilemma scenario, it is supposedly rational to defect (whether or not it's moral to defect) But in such a scenario, it's neither rational nor moral for (a cognitive generalisation of) mirror-touch synaesthetes to defect. Defecting would be akin to harming oneself. Naturally, most of us aren't (a cognitive generalisation of) mirror-touch synaesthetes. But it's unclear why this epistemological limitation on our part should have metaphysical or decision-theoretic consequences. Full-spectrum superintelligences could presumably access all possible first-person perspectives and act accordingly.
* * *
Both Bill Gates (cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation) and the widow who leaves her fortune to her cat are acting altruistically. But only Bill Gates is an effective altruist. The cost-benefit analysis of effective altruism has little to do with the empathising impulse that prompted one to (try to be) an altruist in the first instance. Indeed, from Bentham (almost certainly an Asperger) to Bill Gates, perhaps most effective altruists don't have a “naturally” empathetic cognitive style. It's no coincidence that most utilitarians tend to be male hyper-systematisers.
* * *
Tim, yes, moral (anti-)realism is a separate question from the objective reality of first person-experience. On the face of it, cheating Hume's guillotine and deriving an "ought” from an "is" is logically impossible. However, for reasons we simply don't understand, a normative aspect is built into the very nature of some first-person states, e.g. I-ought-not-to-be-in-this-dreadful-agony. If you are the victim of unbearable agony or despair, the badness of such states is not an "open question". Combine the normative aspect of such first-person states with the scientific world-picture, i.e. no here-and-nows are special or ontologically privileged. Insofar as suffering is bad for me, it's bad for sentient beings anywhere. Here we have the germ of a theory of universal (dis)value. In short, moral realism can't simply be dismissed out of hand.
Either way, the beauty of a Decision Theoretic FAQ written “from the point of view of the universe” - or the Borg – is that it needn't invoke the language of morals at all.
* * *
Is competitive male altruism our best hope for the future?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150416132159.htm
("For men, online generosity is a competition")
* * *
There is a gaping wound at the heart of the effective altruist (EA) movement. On the one hand, Peter Singer has perhaps done more than any person alive to promote the interests of non-human animals. Important strands of the EA movement give Sentience Politics in the broadest sense a central role. (cf. http://sentience-politics.org/) On the other hand, Toby Ord, founder of the admirable "Giving What We Can" (cf. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/) takes seriously the (to my mind transparently self-serving) “Logic of the Larder” argument:
http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/salt02.htm
Katja Grace argues at some length EA's shouldn't even be vegetarian. (cf. https://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/when-should-an-effective-altruist-be-vegetarian/)
MIRI's Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't even believe nonhuman animals (or human babies) are conscious – which would make the whole question moot.
EA is about effective outcomes, not purity of motivation. No doubt cynics can paint a story of competitive male dominance behaviour, costly signalling, autistic hyper-systematising, you name it – but that’s not the point. If we’re going to build a world where all sentient beings can flourish, then we’ll have to work with the grain of human nature. I’m less worried by purity of motives than the need to hammer out some kind of consensus – or rather, workable compromise - on desirable outcomes. A core statement of principles we all sign up to also reduces the likelihood of the EA “brand” being hijacked. After all, religious fundamentalists can argue – in good faith – that saving souls from eternal damnation is the ultimate EA. In the context of their conceptual scheme, they are correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge
Kerry, from the potlatch to the world's billionaires and their giving pledge, we see displays of competitive male altruism, not praise for the widow's mite. But the darker side of human nature - or rather, characteristically male nature - can be harnessed to do good. I hope!
Katja, I very much hope an EA consensus can be hammered out soon. Invoking the in vitro meat revolution offers one way forward. But how much longer until the death factories are shut and outlawed?
* * *
Katja, some acts of omission are morally indistinguishable from acts of commission. If you stumble across a toddler drowning in a shallow pond, then simply walking by is as bad as if you'd pushed the child into the water yourself. But for sure, other "acts of omission" are more complex, nuanced and ambiguous.
However, one reason for not focusing on the "grey zone" of moral ambiguity here is that the choice with meat-eating is so uncomplicated. By choosing to buy, say, a hamburger over a veggieburger, one is actively paying for another sentient being to be harmed - i.e. it's the opposite of altruism, effective or otherwise. One isn't wrestling with some knotty ethical dilemma, or calculating the opportunity-cost of the purchase: could I do more good donating to a human or non-human animal charity? Nor is it a case of worrying about the risk of indirectly paying for exploitation at several times removed [e.g. How do I know that exploitative child-labour wasn't involved at some stage in the production of this item? Finding out could be time-consuming.]
Despite holding strict veganism as the ideal, IMO one can make an EA case being merely vegetarian or quasi-vegan while supporting the closure of factory-farms and slaughterhouses. If one becomes a quasi-vegan, how strict or lax should one be? (etc) Do I enjoy optimal health on a vegan, quasi-vegan or vegetarian diet - or does it make no difference? (etc). But whether or not EAs should be vegetarian or meat-eaters doesn't deserve to be dignified with the term "Moral Dilemma". Please do reconsider, Katja!
* * *
A self-avowed psychopath, Charlie Dermot, ("Student of Law, Philosopher. Nihilist, Student of Law, Diagnosed Psychopath, Philosopher") has responded to my Quora post. Replying to psychopaths can be challenging, though less so than responding to the morally apathetic.
What's Wrong with "humane" meat?
For reasons we do not understand, the pain-pleasure-axis discloses the world's inbuilt metric of (dis)value. Agony and despair are self-intimatingly bad for the victim. Science offers our best account of the natural world: I am not ontologically special or privileged. Insofar as agony and despair are bad for me, such states are bad for anyone, anywhere, regardless of race or species. To which the amoralist or sociopath may respond: "Sure, your agony and despair are bad for you. But they aren't bad for me. Why should I care?" Yet such an epistemological limitation, i.e. most other first-person facts aren’t cognitively accessible to us, shouldn't be confused with a metaphysical truth about the world. Thus if one were a superintelligence with perfect God-like knowledge of all the first-person as well as the third-person facts, then one would act accordingly, i.e. not cruelly or callously. Indeed, when “mind-melding” technologies (e.g. reversible thalamic bridges) become routinely available, behaviour that is cruel or callous to one’s fellow subjects of experience may be recognised not just as immoral but irrational – and for the same reason that two mirror-touch synaesthetes today can’t have a fist-fight: hurting the other party would be like hurting oneself. Compare someone who steals from their own pension fund: such behaviour isn’t so much super-sociopathic as irrational. In a wider evolutionary context, natural selection has warped our perception of the natural world (and our conception of personal identity) in fitness-enhancing ways: the egocentric illusion is a genetically adaptive lie. Clinically diagnosed sociopaths experience the egocentric illusion in its most extreme form; but sociopathy is dimensional rather than categorical. We all are all prone to this cognitive limitation to some extent.
Less philosophically and more practically: pigs are as sentient and sapient as prelinguistic toddlers. They deserve to be cared for with equal love and respect.
Stimulating the relevant part of your cortex can make literally everything seem hysterically funny.
(cf. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/55893.stm)
But an inherent funniness is not an intrinsic property of objects in the mind-independent world. By analogy, a minority of psychopaths find images of death and destruction in their world-simulations beautiful and emotionally satisfying - just as neurotypicals can enjoy a Hollywood disaster movie. Yet there is nothing beautiful and emotionally satisfying about undergoing agony and despair. More generally, what's needed is a criterion of representational adequacy for first-person and third-person facts alike. Naively, one might imagine that one can find beautiful the first-person experience of agony and despair. However, this supposition just shows one hasn't adequately grasped the nature of the first-person facts in question. A disvaluable aspect is built into the nature of agony and despair itself. Presumably a full-spectrum superintelligence will not be prey to such a cognitive limitation.
...Well, just as people with congenital analgesia cannot properly imagine physical pain, psychopaths cannot fully imagine the full dimensions of pain's affective component. Testosterone doesn't just functionally antagonise pro-social oxytocin; it's also a powerful painkiller. Short of undergoing the experience of severe pain in the way a neurotypical experiences pain, its nature will remain inaccessible to you. Of course, simply having a "normal" understanding of phenomenal pain doesn't guarantee fully pro-social behaviour. My toothache matters more than someone else's toothache. But this perception on my part simply reveals my intellectual limitations.
OK, well, do you care about whether (a) your namesake who wakes up tomorrow is tortured and killed? (b) your elderly namesake thirty years hence is tortured and killed?
In other words, I'm trying to find out whether you are psychopathically disposed towards all here-and-nows beyond this one, or instead believe that there are other regions of space-time that should not be the subject of disvaluable experience.
Our conceptual scheme presupposes an enduring metaphysical ego. Strictly, however, there is no such beast. Assuming you recognise the incoherence of an enduring metaphysical ego, I'm trying to probe whether you still believe that your namesake who wakes up tomorrow doesn't deserve to be tortured and killed. In other words, should you behave altruistically towards (some) other subjects of experience, or are you a "super-sociopath" who cares only about the well-being of the here-and-now?
Just as someone who is congenitally colour-blind can't adequately understand the nature of phenomenal colour, likewise a psychopath [or person with congenital analgesia] can't adequately understand the nature of torture and why torture matters. The congenitally colour-blind person may protest that thanks to e.g. his spectroscopic prosthesis he can discriminate electromagnetic frequencies as well as his normal peers; therefore he understands colour. Likewise the psychopath/congenital analgesic may claim to have an adequate functional understanding of torture. However, in both cases, the nature of the experience in question is cognitively closed to the subject - or at least, closed barring futuristic neurological intervention. Some forms of ignorance are literally hardwired.
* * *
However...
Empathy and Congenital Analgesia
("Can We Share a Pain We Never Felt? Neural Correlates of Empathy in Patients with Congenital Insensitivity to Pain")
Will posthuman superintelligence more closely resemble super-Aspergers or Super-Empaths?
http://boston.cbslocal.com/2015/07/27/boston-neurologist-can-feel-patients-pain/
("Boston Doctor Physically Feels What His Patients Feel")
[on the future of work]
What is the future of work and death?
The End of Work and Death?
Sad? Samelu, well, that rather depends on whether we become malaise-ridden drones or superhappy stakhanovites:
https://www.wireheading.com/hypermotivation.html
[on transhumanism]
What Is Transhumanism?
The Three Supers of Transhumanism (video)
("What Is Transhumanism? The Three Supers with David Pearce)
Is a Triple S civilisation technically feasible? Almost certainly. Is it ethically desirable, Yes, IMO. Will it happen? On balance, yes I think, though futurology has a poor track-record. Where scientific prophecy risks shading into millennial delusion is the conviction that the transition will happen in one's lifetime in an apocalyptic Technological Singularity.
For more on each of the three supers, perhaps see:
http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111
and:
http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthroughs-Lifetime/dp/0312367074
and:
https://www.abolitionist.com
on phasing out the biology of suffering.
And for folk who don't think they're going to make it, Alcor: http://www.alcor.org/
Until we conquer aging, should cryonics be opt-out or opt-in?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryogenics.html
Should humans try to emulate sea anemones or mayflies?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34454844
("The creature with the key to immortality?")
* * *
Mike, a commitment to the well-being of all sentience does not make one a Buddhist. Nor does a refusal to harm other sentient beings make one a Jain. Utopian dreamers throughout history across history have imagined a world without suffering. More recently, the authors of the Transhumanist Declaration include libertarians, ethical pluralists, virtue theorists, deontologists, and utilitarians. What's new isn't some revolutionary ethic, but rather the effective technical means to put an ancient ethic into practice.
More recently, let's recall one of the other founders of the contemporary transhumanist movement, FM-2030, was a lifelong vegetarian. "I would not eat anything that had a mother":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030
* * *
Mike, it's easy to confuse an implementation detail of traditional biological life with a universal feature of life. A minority of utopian dreamers throughout history have imagined a world without suffering. Until humans mastered their own genetic source-code, this vision remained a pipe-dream. However, it's now possible to sketch - at least in outline - what creating a living world without suffering would technically entail. Maybe it will transpire there is some irreplaceable functional role played by the "raw feels" of physical or mental pain. Maybe we'll opt to conserve the biology of suffering and malaise indefinitely. Either way, I hope we can all do our tiny bit to make the world a better place.
* * *
Yes, the voluntary nature of any project to reduce - or indeed to phase out altogether - the biology of suffering deserves to be stressed emphatically time and again. Stressing freedom of choice spikes many guns. (Almost) no one is urging coercive happiness. Perhaps I don't do enough to separate my (very!) tentative prediction that humans are going to phase out all experience below hedonic zero throughout the living world from purely moral advocacy of abolishing the biology of involuntary suffering.
The big complication to the issue of choice is the status of our future children. When the upper and lower bounds of our hedonic range - and approximate hedonic set-points - can be genetically pre-selected by prospective parents, what should be the "default settings" we choose?
Does anyone enjoy suffering?
No happy person seeks out suicidal despair or unbearable agony, just as - on a more mundane level - no one is who is bored seeks to become more bored. There isn't an alien civilisation somewhere in the universe with an inverted pleasure-pain axis.
However, we can all point to seeming counter-examples to the pleasure principle.
Thus the existence of, say, masochists, or "macho" warriors who display their indifference to pain, or simply folk who enjoy melancholy music or hot curries (etc) illustrates that the full story is much more complicated.
In each example of these "composite" states of mind, I'd argue that the painful experience actually has a rewarding aspect. Masochists, for example, enjoy the intensely rewarding endogenous opioids released by stimuli that would otherwise be painful or unpleasantly humiliating.
But either way, we don't want to tie the abolitionist project to some strict version of psychological hedonism. A commonplace observation about our innate preference for occupying one end of the pleasure-pain axis over the other is enough.
* * *
Can one rationalise in Hell? The ability of most linguistically competent humans to rationalise suffering, at least to some extent, is a blessing. But in an era when biotech promises to make the biology of suffering optional, our rationalising impulse is an obstacle to progress. This is true of radical antiaging research too - though bioscientists have a better understanding of what it would take to phase our suffering than senescence.
* * *
Nick is quoted in this week's New Scientist, half-hidden alas behind a paywall:
"I think we should try to treat all sentient creatures compassionately, whether they are digital or not".
(Nick Bostrom)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630191.100-the-human-universe-could-we-become-gods.html
All transhumanists support a global transition to in vitro meat.
The human universe: Could we become gods?
Human and nonhuman animals flourish best when neither imprisoned nor wild but free-living. If someone's nonhuman animal companion is flourishing, should we worry about some of the more "philosophical" issues involved in the relationship? IMO, we have many more urgent priorities.
* * *
David, in a post-CRISPR world animated by information-sensitive gradients of bliss, you can savour victories all the more. Better still, a hedonic floor higher than today's hedonic ceiling guarantees that even life's darkest depths never cease to feel worthwhile. Further, phasing out the molecular signature of boredom guarantees that life can never cease to be exhilarating - if we choose excitement and adventure over meditative bliss. Either way, information-sensitive gradients of fascination can allow critical insight to be retained. However, the morally important point here is surely that your right to suffer is a radically different idea from some notional right to perpetuate involuntary suffering in others. I hope on reflection you'll agree.
* * *
Drawbacks? Suppose that the transhumanist vision of a “Triple S” civilisation of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness really is technically and sociological credible. What could be the downside? Timescales – in my view. Like telling someone that science will cure aging after you're dead, or telling a depressive that our descendants will enjoy lives animated by gradients of bliss, the news isn't entirely heart-warming. Of course throughout history, successful prophets have almost always located salvation (or doom) within the plausible lifetimes of their audience. The transhumanist movement is no exception. I still believe a “Triple S” super-civilisation is ethically worth striving for – I'm just not convinced any of us will live to see it.
On a brighter note, perhaps the joker in the pack here is cryonics. As various criminals who reformatted their hard disks have discovered to their cost, permanently erasing information isn't as quite easy as one might assume.
* * *
Should we aim for success rather than happiness? Terrence, could you possibly clarify your conception of "success"? There is a benign sense of the term in which I agree with you. Alas when many contemporary humans use the term, they have in mind the zero-sum games that entail inflicting loss on others: not a transhumanist civilisation but an extension of the African savannah.
As a negative utilitarian, I'm personally sympathetic to Popper: our overriding ethical obligation should be to minimise suffering, not maximise happiness.
(cf. https://www.utilitarianism.com/karl-popper.html)
By contrast, a classical utilitarian ethic has the disguised apocalyptic implication that we should launch a utilitronium shockwave - not quite what its originators had in mind!
Either way, the idea that posthumans (and ideally transhumans) will be animated by gradients of superhuman well-being shouldn't be seen as inherently utilitarian. (cf. Superhappiness )
Compare how mood-elevating drugs reverse the learned helplessness and behavioural despair associated with depression. Other things being equal, (super-)happiness is a strategy for "winners", low mood is for losers. The happiest people today are typically also the most highly motivated - though dopaminergic motivation and mu opioidergic hedonic tone are, as neuroscientists say, doubly dissociable.
Is there a distinctively transhumanist position here?
Well, I think most transhumanists would agree that we should all, ideally, have the ability to set the upper and lower bounds of our hedonic range, and our own hedonic set-point - and also choose whether to be hyper-motivated or to enjoy contemplative bliss. This will entail full mastery of our reward circuitry. Let’s hope biotechnology can deliver soon.
* * *
What is transhumanism? Transhumanists support using technology to overcome our biological limitations. In principle, we can create a "Triple S" civilisation of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness.
The transhumanist movement has many different strands. For example, some transhumanists believe posthuman superintelligence will be our biological descendants; others foresee a Kurzweilian fusion of humans and machines; and others (e.g. the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and Nick Bostrom's FHI) believe the future lies with machine superintelligence. Among transhumanists who focus on radical life extension, some favour "mind uploading"; others promote Aubrey de Grey's biologically-based SENS strategy; and others support cryonics, notably Alcor - currently run by one of the pioneers of the modern transhumanist movement, Max More. My own work focuses on the use of biotech to phase out the biology of involuntary suffering.
How do all the pieces of the transhumanist jigsaw fit together? Well, that's complicated. But the Transhumanist Declaration (1998, 2009) sets out some core principles on what (I hope) unites us:
http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-declaration/
[on the putative evils of abolitionism]
We see spawn of Beelzebub make his entry around 9.15:
TRANSHUMANIST AGENDA: Eliminate Suffering?
This must surely be the first Christian video to discuss the COMT gene. The article that exercised the fundamentalists was apparently:
https://www.hedweb.com/transhumanism/five-reasons.html
("Top Five Reasons Transhumanism Can Eliminate Suffering")
"What is the good of writing beautiful things about suffering? ...It means nothing, nothing! When you are going through it, then you know the worthlessness of all this eloquence."
[St Therese when refused pain medication; see Saint Therese of Lisieux by Monica Furlong (pub. Virago Pantheon Pioneers, 1987)]
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves." (Matthew 7:15)
http://prophecylunch.com/what-is-transhumanism-the-3-supers-with-david-pearce/" target="_blank">The Three Supers
("What is Transhumanism? – The 3 Supers with David Pearce")
* * *
Does Jesus or Nietzsche have a stronger claim to being a proto-transhumanist?
http://www.christianpost.com/news/why-christians-should-embrace-transhumanism-139790/
("Why Christians Should Embrace Transhumanism")
In science and (ideally) transhumanist-inspired philosophy, one aims to be rigorous, hyper-critical and intolerant of woolly-mindedness. Traditional theology, whether of the Abrahamic religions or the traditions of the Indian subcontinent, strikes scientific rationalists as absurd. But if carried to completion, the transhumanist project can deliver everything that religious people have wanted and more.
* * *
Marija, an important point, yes, "predation" not "predators" - otherwise one may be pilloried (by meat eaters!) for proposing a campaign of mass genocide. [I wish I'd been firmer last year when io9's clickbait-hungry headline writer put an inflammatory headline for their otherwise innocuous (I thought) interview:
http://io9.com/the-radical-plan-to-eliminate-earths-predatory-species-1613342963.
Are the upper and lower bounds of our hedonic range best chosen by natural selection or biotechnology?
Review the Future DP interview
("The Future of Suffering")
FaceLikeTheSun, first, sorry for the jargon. By "smart angel”, I just meant that mastery of our genetic code means that future parents will be able to have children who are temperamentally more saintly, as well as more intelligent, than contemporary humans. For evolutionary reasons, anyone in the ancestral environment predisposed to "love thy neighbour as thyself" would rapidly remove his or her DNA from the gene pool.
Where does the desire to eliminate suffering come from? In the case of one's own suffering, the answer is self-intimating. Unless born with congenital analgesia, one removes one's hand from the fire. But science also teaches us that the egocentric illusion is a genetically adaptive lie. If suffering is bad for me, then it's bad for any sentient being, anywhere. I'm not special.
Most scientists today are secularists. Yet science aspires to an impartial “God's-eye view”. A posthuman superintelligence who could notionally access all first-person perspectives would presumably act accordingly. Perhaps imagine a generalisation of mirror-touch synaesthesia:
http://www.livescience.com/1628-study-people-literally-feel-pain.html
(“Study: People Literally Feel Pain of Others”)
God-like benevolence comes more easily if you can imagine another agent's perspective as vividly as your own. Of course, darker scenarios are conceivable too.
The extinction of humanity? Well, perhaps. But only in the sense of a chrysalis metamorphosing into a butterfly, not Armageddon.
Most writers will soon be forgotten! But even if you assume that you'll never be more than a footnote in history, authors should think long and hard about how they might be misunderstood - just in case. David Benatar (“Better Never To Have Been”), for example, advocates human extinction though voluntary human childlessness. But what if someone with access to futuristic WMD reads Benatar's text and recognises that selection pressure if nothing else ensures anti-natalism will fail? That said, it would be a mistake to tie an abolitionist ethic to plotting Armageddon. Most of the Buddhists of my acquaintance are quite docile. Phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering is (IMO) more likely to mitigate existential and global catastrophic risk than promote death and destruction.
* * *
Critique of Brave New World
Thanks guys. Carlos, radical enrichment of our reward circuitry and set-point recalibration isn't an alternative to Maslow - or countless other goals we may be striving for. Performed intelligently, it's complementary. Yes, urging mega-caution in using biotechnology to choose hedonic range and hedonic set-points is (very) wise. However, neither somatic nor germline changes need be irreversible. In the purely technical sense, nothing would stop us reverting to genes / allelic combinations predisposing to suffering in all its guises. If prospective parents want to "play safe" - a relative term for untested genetic experiments like sexual reproduction - preimplantation genetic screening is the cautious, bioconservative option. In the long run, however, rewriting the genome of human and nonhuman animals alike may be the only way to secure the well-being of all future sentience.
* * *
Can reckless genetic experimentation be replaced with responsible germline editing?
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/nov/28/future-human-gene-editing-landmark-summit-dna-crispr-embyos
("Future of human gene editing to be decided at landmark summit")
Alas pleas for a moratorium on sexual reproduction are likely to go unheeded.
Thankfully, there's no evidence that sentient beings can be created at different levels of computational abstraction. Yet suppose digital sentience were feasible. Just as it's almost impossible to imagine reverting to surgery without anaesthesia, what is the likelihood that intelligent agents will conquer pain and suffering, and subsequently decide to create such horrors in the guise of an ancestor simulation? An ancestor simulation might naively sound cool. Recreating Auschwitz would be obscene. Yet running the former would entail the latter. Such behaviour doesn't sound the likely action of posthuman superintelligence so much as an ignorant human anti-Semite. The behaviour of posthumans may be incomprehensible to us; but it's safe to say they won't be stupid.
* * *
“May all that hath life be delivered from suffering” said Gautama Buddha. Biotech promises to turn utopian dreaming into a long-term policy option. Christopher, could you clarify? In what sense must a world without the biology of involuntary suffering be a "most horrifying dystopia"? If I want to undergo suffering myself, then fair enough. But when biotech makes suffering of any kind technically optional, do I have the right to force its nasty “raw feels” on others? If so, for how long, how much and enforced by what means?
Yes, you're right, some happy people are callous. Others are empathetic. ("It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.” - W. Somerset Maugham) For an extreme example of both subjective well-being and love for others, perhaps compare empathetic euphoriants like the "hug drug” MDMA.
Are there pitfalls? Of course! What's critical to ensuring high functioning, pro-social well-being is preserving “informational sensitivity” to good and bad stimuli rather than being uniformly blissful. Hence the advantages are raising heritable hedonic set-points world-wide – of being constitutionally blissful but not “blissed out”.
* * *
The question of whether we will ever abolish suffering is different from the question of whether we will ever abolish experience below hedonic zero. The boundary between "mere" pain or malaise and outright suffering is not well defined. Hedonic zero, on the other hand, really does seem to mark a natural watershed.
* * *
http://themindunleashed.org/2015/05/new-study-shows-mdma-can-help-create-more-meaningful-relationships.html
("New Study Shows MDMA Can Help Create More Meaningful Relationships")
The problem is sustainability. A disproportionate number of couples argue and split 48 hours afterwards in the throes of the post-MDMA serotonin dip. The solution, IMO, is not a blanket campaign of "Just Say No". Rather, what's needed is research into safe, sustainable empathogens and gene-therapies that promote the MDMA "magic" minus the drug-induced side-effects.
Less pain, less empathy? But compare empathogenic euphoriants such as the "hug drug" MDMA
http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2015/09/dulling-pain-may-also-reduce-empathy
("Dulling pain may also reduce empathy")
Can we create superhuman volition to match?
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/believing-in-unlimited-willpower-leads-to-happier-lives-according-to-research-a6670091.html
("The one thing that makes peoples’ lives better")
Alas power drugs have pitfalls:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/pilots-salt-the-third-reich-kept-its-soldiers-alert-with-meth/276429/
('Pilot's Salt': The Third Reich Kept Its Soldiers Alert With Meth")
Pervitin was also "the ideal war drug".
* * *
Christopher, perhaps recall that the goal of ending suffering is shared by some of the poorest people in the world. A concern for the well-being of all sentience is not the prerogative of rich white Westerners. Is suffering necessary? Well, discovery of the functional indispensability of the nasty “raw feels” of suffering to some cognitive tasks would be a profound result that would shake the foundations of computer science to its core.
(cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis)
Silicon (etc) robots don't need to suffer. Why should their organic counterparts? Life animated by gradients of intelligent well-being offers a potentially more civilised alternative to life animated by misery and malaise. But no one is going to force you to be happy!
Even with today's genome, the quality of life of people born with the hedonic highest set-points tends to be hugely richer than their depressive counterparts. Recall what's being proposed isn't the abolition of homoeostatic mechanisms but rather the recalibration of hedonic set-points. Arrogance? Maybe. If famine breaks out in sub-Saharan Africa, what's the more humble response? Philosophising about the inscrutable wisdom of Providence and the hubris of defying Mother Nature? Or organising famine relief and help with family planning? The same principle is at stake with members of other species as members of other races – with the difference that sentient beings with the intellectual capacities of human toddlers can't devise technologies of fertility regulation. Either way, no one is proposing rule by philosopher kings. Rather, a small minority of theorists are exploring what a world without the biology of involuntary suffering might entail in the wake of the biotech revolution. Such proposals may well never be implemented; but no longer can it be claimed: There Is No Alternative.
* * *
Are some states of matter and energy intrinsically (dis)valuable? Orthodox scientific materialism would say no. Here my views are idiosyncratic. The world may be formally described by the equations of physics, (cf. https://www.physicalism.com) But what “breathes fire into” the equations may turn out to be radically at variance with our naïve materialist intuitions.
* * *
Whether inducing SCN9A nonsense mutations to create congenital analgesia, or wireheading, or perpetual mu opioid agonist activation of our twin "hedonic hotspots" (etc), it's not technically hard to create consciousness without physical or mental pain. The challenge is to do so in ways that don't compromise critical insight and social responsibility.
* * *
Voice-activated endogenous opioid production? I wouldn't say no. Freedom of expression should be a basic human right:
http://phys.org/news/2015-03-genes-demand.html
("Activating genes on demand")
Let there be light...
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-04-lightnot-pain-killing-drugsused-brain-opioid.html
("Light—not pain-killing drugs—used to activate brain's opioid receptors")
And a leavening of bliss
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0124459
("Synthesis of Morphinan Alkaloids in Saccharomyces cerevisiae")
* * *
Matt, "zombification" is presumably desirable only for the bad stuff. We'll want to keep the "raw feels" of good emotions - and massively amplify, purify and enrich them! Of course, switching off the nasty "raw feels" of pain can be done today with a nonsense mutation of the SCN9a gene, for example. But such nonsense mutations also eliminate the function of nociception, forcing victims to lead "cotton wool" lives. A stopgap before outright abolition would be pre-selecting benign variants of SCN9A (or a handful of other genes) and giving our future children the enviably low pain-sensitivity of the top 0.1 percent of the population today who don't have congenital analgesia. For a small minority of our contemporaries, phenomenal pain really is never more than a useful signalling mechanism and occasional marginal inconvenience. In the long run, however, literally everything nasty and mundane can be off-loaded onto smart prostheses.
* * *
Travis, first, apologies. At a time when humans are systematically hurting, harming and killing billions of sentient beings each year in our factory farms and slaughterhouses, exploring the feasibility of compassionately run ecosystems in tomorrow's wildlife parks will come across as vaguely fanciful. But yes, if we judge it ethically desirable to phase out the biology of involuntary suffering in the living world, then the same interventions available to humans can be used to help other free-living and domestic vertebrates too. In principle, biotech can be used for pan-species hedonic enrichment. Already we could use preimplantation genetic screening to load the genetic dice in our prospective children's favour. In the longer term, the scope of our benevolence could be extended across the phylogenetic tree.
For a costed case-study of what could be done right now, perhaps see:
https://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/elephantcare.html
* * *
Without universal access to preimplantation genetic screening and counselling, the horrors of depression will persist indefinitely:
http://www.nature.com/news/first-robust-genetic-links-to-depression-emerge-1.17979
("First robust genetic links to depression emerge")
Timo, debate on the ethics of compassionate stewardship often gets derailed right from the outset by a knee-jerk response that says it's technically impossible. Bite your tongue while critics explain the thermodynamics of a food chain and ridicule ecologically illiterate philosophers. Of course, the elephant case-study you cite relies on back-of-an-envelope financial calculations rather than being accurately costed. And any serious feasibility study would need to be conducted by professional ecologists with a cross-disciplinary team of specialists - including one speciality that doesn't yet exist, elephant orthodontics. But for all these pitfalls and caveats, I know of no technical reason why free-living elephants and higher vertebrates in tomorrow's wildlife parks can't truly flourish throughout life with adequate healthcare, nutrition, fertility regulation, obstetric and geriatric care - not unlike members of contemporary Homo sapiens. In short, the real debate now should be about ethics and responsibility - followed (I hope) by action.
* * *
Could CRISPR-based "gene drives” phase out suffering in free-living nonhuman animals more readily than in free-living humans?
http://uk.businessinsider.com/crispr-gene-editing-is-the-years-biggest-scientific-breakthrough-2015-12
* * *
Kevin, I guess there are two questions here 1) Is it ethically desirable to phase out the biology of involuntary suffering? 2) Is it technically feasible? A wide range of ethical traditions from Buddhism to utilitarianism would broadly say “yes” to (1) – although the Noble Eightfold Path won't abolish the horrors of the food chain, and Bethnamite socio-political reform won't recalibrate the hedonic treadmill. In the wake of the biotech revolution, I think we can discern at least in outline how the answer to (2) is “yes” too - though any imminent Hundred Year Plan is sociologically unrealistic. Recall that within the next few decades, every cubic metre of the planet will be computationally accessible to surveillance, micro-management and control. Libertarians are more likely to worry about the human privacy implications of a global panopticon than the opportunities for compassionate stewardship of the rest of the living world. Yet if we judge it ethically desirable to purge marine ecosystems of suffering later this century and beyond, then we won't fail because we run out of computational resources, or because our genome-editing tools prove unequal to the challenge, or because our marine nanobots exhaust their energy supplies (etc). In terms of fail-safe mechanisms, yes, one disastrous back-mutation might occur - but not simultaneously half-a-dozen, or at least only with vanishingly small likelihood. If involuntary suffering still exists on Earth a few centuries from now, its persistence won't be because its abolition was too difficult, but rather because our superintelligent successors have chosen – for reasons opaque to us – to preserve it.
Martyn, the scope for things going horribly wrong is one reason I'd urge upholding legal guarantees on the sanctity of life - not because I hold ontologically extravagant views on the existence of rights, but because humans can't be trusted...
* * *
Mike, if we believe in phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering, then the challenges you mention are technical problems with technical solutions. Levels of competitive dominance behaviour are amenable to fine-grained control via testosterone-oxytocin tweaking in human and nonhuman animals alike. For sure, if we opt to retain competitive status-seeking and zero sum games, then winning is more fun than losing. Yet whether losing entails suffering depends on the lower bounds of one's hedonic range. Default hedonic tone in hyperthymics need never fall below zero.
“Nannying” sounds bad to the libertarian ear. But human toddlers need to be intermittently “nannied” i.e. cared for, because they can't adequately care for themselves. The same is true of sentient beings with similar cognitive limitations.
A Herculean challenge? Intuitively, yes. But presumably compassionate stewardship of tomorrow's wildlife parks would in large part be computationally offloaded to IT.
What if humanity - or rather posthuman superintelligence - goes extinct? Yes, in our absence life would revert to the brutal Darwinian horror story it's been to date. This is one good reason to avoid wiping ourselves out.
* * *
Alberto, a lion who eats in vitro meat doesn't cease to be a lion any more than a human who eats in vitro meat ceases to be human. Just as the civilising process of humans will be aided by some genetic tweaking, the same is true of lions. Of course, a bioconservative or species essentialist may claim that genetically enhanced humans will no longer be “truly” human when we display a different behavioural phenotype from our hunter-gatherer forebears. To which we might reply, so what? To advocate our becoming transhuman is not to advocate genocide. Nor is advocacy of extending the civilising process across the phylogenetic tree.
If you believed in working toward the well-being of all sentience, what alternative long-term policy initiatives would you favour?
(cf.
http://robertwiblin.com/2010/01/21/just-destroy-nature/ )
* * *
Should compassionate interventions in Nature be piecemeal or systematic?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3014468/A-mother-never-forgets-Elephant-spends-11-hours-desperately-trying-pull-baby-free-muddy-villagers-lend-helping-hand.html
("A mother never forgets: Elephant spends 11 hours desperately trying to pull her baby free from muddy well – before villagers lend her a helping hand")
Large long-lived vertebrates fall at the "easy" end of the spectrum of compassionate stewardship:
https://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/elephantcare.html
Will cross-species fertility regulation underpin our compassionate stewardship of the rest of the living world?
http://www.livescience.com/50561-vaccine-contraception-replacing-hunters-for-culling-elephants.html
("Elephant Contraception? How a Vaccine is Replacing Sharpshooters")
Should we breed human and nonhuman animals to be happy and free-living?
http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2015/07/fahrenkrug-genetic-modification-gmo-animals
("This Scientist Might End Animal Cruelty—Unless GMO Hardliners Stop Him")
* * *
"Ad hoc"?
Nick, effective altruism demands a hyper-systematising, "autistic" mind-set far removed from tender-minded empathy for the suffering of another sentient being that made one an ethical agent in the first instance. For example, it's winter and lots of herbivores are starving. The compassionate-minded but self-defeating thing to do is simply to organise famine relief. The outcome of such good intentions will be a population explosion in the spring - and thus even more misery and starvation than if we'd done nothing. Or to use another example, an obligate carnivore is badly injured, and we compassionately offer veterinary care - so the carnivore can live to kill another day. (cf.
http://africageographic.com/blog/lioness-gored-by-buffalo-horn-lives-to-see-another-day/)
Such examples could be multiplied ad nauseam. In short, we need to focus on the big picture - heart-warming as elephant rescues may be...
* * *
Interview with David Pearce
What kinds of time-scale are credible? Until recently my own tentative chronology ran as follows. First use preimplantation genetic screening and then germ-line editing to phase out the biology of involuntary suffering in Homo sapiens. Mass-produce gourmet in vitro meat and shut down slaughterhouses and factory-farms. Use cross-species immunocontraception, advanced biotech and GPS-tracking to help and monitor large long-lived free-living vertebrates such as elephants. Finally - and this would take hundreds of years - help small, fast-reproducing vertebrates and marine invertebrates with net-enabled nanobots.
Sociologically, perhaps this chronology still makes sense. Yet sometimes a technical revolution makes nonsense of one's predictions. Maybe we’re on the brink of such a revolution. In principle, small teams of humans on a shoestring budget could swiftly and dramatically reduce the suffering of small fast-reproducing vertebrates and invertebrates with CRISPR-based "gene drives" – not in centuries but in years.
Cynics and pessimists would say that gene drives are more likely to be used for “entomological warfare” waged against other humans than for
compassionate stewardship of the biosphere. Mankind’s track record to date suggests they are right. But contra Richard Dawkins, we can no longer claim: There Is No Alternative ("It must be so." Richard Dawkins)
* * *
There is a technical sense in which genes are always "selfish" - even in a (currently hypothetical) post-Darwinian era of "unnatural" selection. However, all sorts of kindly traits maladaptive in the ancestral environment of adaptation become fitness-enhancing in an era when intelligent agents can choose the genetic source code of their offspring. Conversely, alleles and allelic combinations predisposing to subjective misery and malaise will (I suspect) be vulnerable to extinction. Good!
See too:
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/Supplement_2/10863.full.pdf
("Selfish genetic elements, genetic conflict, and evolutionary innovation")
[Does HI need a Trump?
[http://digg.com/video/donald-trump-linguistics-answer-question
"A Linguistic Analysis Of Donald Trump Shows Why People Like Him So Much"]
* * *
Is a world where sentient beings don't harm each other a utopia? Or simply a precondition of any civilisation worthy of the name? Muhammad is reported to have said "There is no man who kills [even] a sparrow or anything smaller, without its deserving it, but God will question him about it [on the judgement day]". One wishes some of his nominal followers would take this lesson to heart.
* * *
Christopher, there are empathetic as well as self-regarding forms of happiness, just as there are empathetic as well as self-regarding forms of suffering. With today's biology, empathy typically involves being touched by the miseries of others. In future, empathy can entail sharing their joys. Technology can deliver not just life animated by gradients of bliss, but also hyper-empathy, naturalised telepathy, mind-melding via reversible thalamic bridges, and more. Ayn Rand would be turning in her grave.
Can we imagine a world where EQ tests replace IQ tests?
http://qz.com/452497/great-bosses-have-empathy-but-not-for-everyone/
("The science of empathy—and why some people have it less than others")
[on a Triple S civilisation]
"Mastery of our own genetic source code means we may be heading for a Triple S civilization – superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness. To suppose we can glimpse the nature of post-human life is probably naïve. But I believe that phasing out the biology of experience below ‘hedonic zero’ is a precondition of any civilization worthy of the name". — David Pearce, co-Founder WTA on Future Day
Triple S Civilisation
Vanity Fair
The face of posthuman dignity? I was assured the editor wanted to symbolise the well-being of all sentience, but it transpired he had the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_Hare
* * *
One of the many human frailties biotech can fix is weakness of will - and also (to use the fancy philosopher's term) akrasia. Critics of radical superhappiness, on the other hand, often make mood and motivation sound as though they were inversely correlated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia
* * *
Will post-humans commit thought-crimes?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150209161143.htm
("F-bombs notwithstanding, all languages skew toward happiness: Universal human bias for positive words")
"Thinking" is phenomenologically thin. Perhaps true understanding would entail thoughts like sunsets.
Should prospective parents opt for designer babies or today's reckless genetic experiments?
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/535661/engineering-the-perfect-baby/
("Engineering the Perfect Baby")
Should the right to unleash genetic malware on the world be weighed against the suffering of the victims?
http://uk.businessinsider.com/preimplantation-genetic-diagnosis-and-preventing-disease-2015-7
* * *
GMO humans are an experiment with unknown risks:
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21646197-human-beings-ancestors-have-routinely-stolen-genes-other-species-genetically
("Genetically modified people. Human beings’ ancestors have routinely stolen genes from other species")
Should we aim to beautify basement reality or transcend it?
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/state-of-vr/
("State of the Art VR Guide")
Time to leave sordid basement reality behind?
http://uk.businessinsider.com/htc-vive-virtual-reality-demo-first-impressions-2015-7
(" I just tried HTC's insane virtual reality headset, and I'm convinced the world is about to change forever")
* * *
Could there ever be a great movie set in posthuman heaven?
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/19/dystopian-films-blade-runner-insurgent-future-grim
("From Insurgent to Blade Runner: why is the future on film always so grim?")
* * *
Cosmic rescue missions? We need to establish the theoretical upper bounds to the scope of rational moral agency. If Darwinian life exists elsewhere within our cosmological horizon, then after phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering on Earth, intelligent moral agents would seem obliged to help. However, I'm (very) tentatively a "rare Earther", i.e., IMO we're probably alone in our Hubble volume (though not the multiverse). If so, then galactic radiation from a negative or negative-leading NU perspective would be ethically unwise - unless we are contemplating some sort of utilitronium shockwave.
Objective (dis)value? If (dis)value can be naturalised, then the pleasure pain-axis seems the only credible candidate. A Godlike superintelligence who could access all possible first-person and third-person perspectives would act accordingly, just as you would if your hand were in the fire, but on a cosmological scale.
Will "happiness fascism" leave us under the hedonic jackboot?
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/10/un-international-day-of-happiness-makes-me-miserable
("The secret of happiness? Stop feeling bad about being unhappy")
Perhaps with a eugenic breeding program of genetically programmed bliss too.
The key to lifelong happiness been cracked?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3358649/Does-woman-hold-secret-lifelong-happiness-says-starts-simply-making-bed-morning.html
("Does this woman hold the secret to lifelong happiness? US author reveals the key to contentment (and it starts by making your bed every morning")
Less hassle than rewriting the vertebrate genome.
How can we enhance the biology of happiness if we aren't prepared to measure it?
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/07/02/the-relentless-pursuit-of-happiness/dont-make-personal-growth-a-utilitarian-goal
("Don’t Make Personal Growth a Utilitarian Goal")
The Value of Rationalisation Project?
http://www.valueofsuffering.co.uk/
("The Value of Suffering project")
Is it better to outlaw pain or pleasure?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11645354/Theresa-May-wants-to-ban-pleasure.html
("Theresa May wants to ban pleasure")
Some laws need repealing...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-choice/201506/the-law-pleasure
("The Law of Pleasure, Can pleasure last?")
Intracranial self-stimulation feels as rewarding after ten hours as after ten minutes; and life animated by information-sensitive gradients of bliss can never pall.
* * *
René, it's still a bit puzzling (to me at any rate). Of the three "supers", all transhumanists would favour unlimited superlongevity and unlimited superintelligence - but not necessarily unlimited superhappiness. One reason perhaps is that today extreme subjective well-being is potentially dangerous to the individual and society alike. Compare the pathology of euphoric mania with its egotism, shedding of social responsibility and loss of critical insight. By contrast, the behavioural suppression typically associated with low mood is safer.
[on ghrelin]
Should ghrelin function be curbed or promoted in larger mammals?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150127110955.htm
("Researchers find hormone that increases the sex drive of mice")
* * *
New directions in intelligence-augmentation strategies?
http://higherperspective.com/2015/01/intelligent.html
("Research Shows Intelligent People Stay Up Late, Do More Drugs, & Have More Sex")
And old-fashioned psychostimulants too, one suspects:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/25/technology/nootropics-smart-drugs/index.html
("Are smart drugs driving Silicon Valley")
Amnestics as the new nootropics? Probably not - but cognitive enhancement has countless pitfalls...
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-12-key.html
("Forgetting is the key to learning")
Will crowd-sourced nootropics lead to an intelligence explosion?
http://gizmodo.com/nootropics-and-the-lab-rats-of-reddit-1692737550
It's worth asking what exactly we're trying to enhance. The "autistic" component of general intelligence measured by IQ tests? Social cognition? Many so-called nootropics are really psychostimulants. Disentangling any nootropic action from their effects on mood, motivation and arousal can be a challenge. In our current ignorance, perhaps the best route to improved cognitive performance for many people is still optimal diet, exercise and sleep discipline. I'm also interested in the effects of prolonged breast-feeding in infancy. I suspect conventional "IQ" tests may underestimate its long-term cognitive benefits. Alas I've only anecdotal evidence to back this up: I'd like to see well-controlled trials.
The ethnic groups with the highest and lowest IQ scores in the USA also record the highest and lowest scores respectively for autism spectrum disorder - as might be predicted if IQ tests measured mind-blind autistic intelligence rather than general intelligence. There is no compelling evidence of innate differences in general intelligence between members of different ethnic groups in any measure of intelligence with ecological validity (cf. the "Machiavellian ape" hypothesis) - though the possibility of such differences can't be ruled out a priori.
...Social cognition is critical to life prospects. For example, if IQ were ecologically predictive of life success, then we would expect members of the ethnic group recording the highest IQ scores to have flourished in comparison to lower IQ scorers. Since IQ tests were invented, the opposite has happened. Thus Ashkenazi Jews were almost wiped out in Europe in the twentieth century; the population still hasn't recovered. Autistic intelligence as measured by IQ tests is best conceived as an important facet of general intelligence.
(cf. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661302019046 -
"The extreme male brain theory of autism")
If "IQ" were ecologically predictive of life success, then we would expect women who record higher IQ scores successfully to raise more children than women with lower IQ scores. Since IQ tests were invented, the opposite has happened. Of course, confounding variables and other methodological problems abound; but this doesn't change my view that "IQ" is tendentiously labelled junk science.
* * *
Coffee: a mood-brightening, anti-aging, smart drug?
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/jcr.2014.0027
"The powers of a man's mind are directly proportioned to the quantity of coffee he drinks." (Sir James Mackintosh)
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-09-health-benefits-coffee.html
("The health benefits of coffee")
I hope Sir James is right...
DP regimen
(Thanks Konrad. Apparently women are responsible for 73% percent of exclamation marks used online! I've always been a bit testosterone-challenged!!!)
All too human...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34553695
("How bees showed a caffeine addiction")
Modafinil: "gorgeous temptress" or painted hooker?
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/15/students-smart-drugs-higher-grades-adderall-modafinil
("Students used to take drugs to get high. Now they take them to get higher grades")
See too https://www.modafinil.com – though someone seriously overestimates the size of BLTC's corporate war-chest:
http://www.quora.com/How-much-did-it-cost-David-Pearce-to-buy-up-all-the-domains-for-the-drugs-he-featured-in-the-Good-Drug-Guide-http-www-biopsychiatry-com
Will the next breakthrough in psychiatric medicine derive from Big Pharma or the scientific counterculture?
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/01/chinese-labs-legal-highs-west-drugs
('Our purity is above 99%': the Chinese labs churning out legal highs for the west")
700 million may be an overestimate; but no doubt the trend is accelerating:
http://uk.businessinsider.com/synthetic-designer-drugs-are-shockingly-common-2015-5
("One in 10 people around the world gets high off designer drugs")
[on international rankings of (un)happiness]
Who are the hedonically underdeveloped nations?
http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/these-are-the-happiest-countries-in-the-world--lkC1x4b49g
Compare the top three countries eliciting a "very happy" response three years ago, i.e. Indonesia, India and Mexico.
(cf. http://www.economist.com/node/21548213)
The reason for citing these stats is just to keep hammering away at the significance of the hedonic treadmill - and the need for futurists serious about radically improving subjective well-being to tackle the biology of hedonic set-points.
* * *
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
Do we see scholarly journals, engineering disciplines, medical genetics initiatives, and mass movements dedicated to recalibrating the hedonic treadmill? Is hedonic set-point recalibration widely recognised as a precondition of good health? ["Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being" - the official World Health Organization definition of health.] Is there a single medical service that offers prospective parents preimplantation genetic screening and counselling on alleles associated with high and low hedonic set-points? How can we make recalibration "sexy"?
Does anyone feel like adding a section to Wikipedia?
Should we aim to conserve, recalibrate or abolish the hedonic treadmill?
http://www.raredr.com/publications/rare-disease-report/2015/Sept-2015/Locked-In-Syndrome-QoL
("Study Confirms A Paralyzed Life is Still a Quality Life")
* * *
What was the most brilliant year of your life?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-ouch-30803004
("'The year I lost my limbs was the most brilliant of my life' - In a few weeks Alex Lewis went from being the owner of a pub, to becoming critically ill and a quadruple amputee. Yet he still describes the past year as the best he's ever had.")
The enemy of such good fortune for all of us isn't the hedonic treadmill per se but its calibration.
* * *
The CRISPR revolution: can precision engineering replace genetic roulette?
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/american-scientists-are-trying-to-genetically-modify-human-eggs-10107632.html
* * *
Can the horror story of Darwinian life have a happy ending
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/crispr-dna-editing-2/
("Easy DNA Editing Will Remake the World. Buckle Up.")
Fictional horror stories tend to be most horrific not when they consist in unrelieved gore, but when the mundane is punctuated by the sinister and tragic. Real Darwinian life can be similar - though there are plenty of sentient beings whose lives are chronically miserable and worse. As a thought-experiment, I'm genuinely curious what percentage of people would press a notional COPY button versus a notional OFF button for our world - or do neither. (Jera?) Either way, the CRISPR genome-editing revolution means such "philosophical" questions will shortly become moot – unless, that is, we buy the Simulation Argument.
* * *
Should germlines have editors? Nature argues the case against:
http://www.nature.com/news/don-t-edit-the-human-germ-line-1.17111
Should we perpetuate the misery and malaise of Darwinian life?
http://www.livescience.com/53133-james-rollins-the-bone-labyrinth-interview.html
("Should We Create Superhumans? Q&A with Author James Rollins")
Dejan thanks, yes. Talk of genes / allelic combinations "for" particular psychological traits is woefully simplistic. But in my view, responsible prospective parents should be encouraged to study - for months if not years - medical genetics and epigenetics before bringing new life (and suffering) into the world. In school and college, Planned Parenthood should be part of the core curriculum, and preimplantation genetic screening free and ubiquitous.
Wolf, one problem is that other people's utopias - like other people's dreams and sexual turn-ons - can leave other folk cold. Most readers don't find “Island” nearly as compelling as its dystopian predecessor. The problem is even more daunting if one is touting hedonic set-point recalibration as the way forward. Even allowing for the deficiencies of my prose, recalibration is not a prospect to send a shiver of anticipation up anyone's spine. But unless we recalibrate the hedonic treadmill, misery and malaise will still abound even in transhuman nirvana.
* * *
Mark, yes, the risk of focusing too single-mindedly on the biology of hedonic set-points is that one can give the impression that the environment doesn't matter. Of course it does – a lot! There are countless cases less heart-warming than Alex Lewis. But when reading of some intriguing new transhumanist technology that will improve our lives, I always wonder if it will sustainably improve subjective well-being – or just be another false dawn.
Would a sentience-friendly Superintelligence conserve, "uplift" or euthanize Homo sapiens?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11362246/Just-three-in-10-people-feel-happy-with-their-lives.html
("Just three in ten people feel happy with their lives")
* * *
Utilitarians are cool:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01086/full
("Cold-hearted or cool-headed: physical coldness promotes utilitarian moral judgement")
Carmi, I guess the question boils down to whether one should trust one's moral intuitions. Thankfully I know of no controlled trials, but statistically most white people would probably rescue a white baby before a black baby from a burning building, and almost everyone would rescue a new-born human baby before a pig. The reason in both cases is that a predisposition to help genetic relatives over non-relatives was fitness-enhancing in the ancestral environment of adaptation.
So should we attempt to overcome our perverted moral intuitions, just as we attempt to overcome our frailties of reason?
Yes, IMO - but it's going to be a long struggle.
* * *
Another piece of the jigsaw:
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/04/depression-allergic-reaction-inflammation-immune-system
("Is depression a kind of allergic reaction? A growing number of scientists are suggesting that depression is a result of inflammation caused by the body’s immune system")
How is misery refracted through different cultures:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2015/02/02/382905977/why-cambodians-never-get-depressed
("Why Cambodians Never Get 'Depressed'")
Do you anticipate a future of Mill's higher pleasures?
http://www.dailydot.com/technology/future-of-virtual-sex-kiiroo-fleshlight-oculus-porn/
("The Future of Virtual Sex")
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/study-reveals-the-most-dangerous-sex-position-9992841.html
Beth, some folk have access to a treasure trove, others just medieval squalor. On the whole, Mother Nature is exceedingly miserly with pleasure. From a purely technical perspective, we could genetically engineer life animated by gradients of intelligent bliss orders of magnitude richer than anything physiologically feasible today. Or instead we can trust the inscrutable wisdom of Mother Nature.
* * *
How ancient is the pleasure principle?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32399907
("Bees 'get a buzz' from pesticides")
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/publications/2015%20Berridge%20&%20Kringelbach%20Pleasure%20systems%20in%20the%20brain%20-%20Neuron.pdf
("Pleasure Systems in the Brain")
* * *
Does sex have a future?
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2009/06/the_herbivores_dilemma.html
("The Herbivore's Dilemma: Japan panics about the rise of "grass-eating men," who shun sex, don't spend money, and like taking walks.")
Presumably the key to the answer is selection pressure. Modelling the nature of selection pressure in an era of “designer babies”, human cloning, robo-lovers (and so forth) later this century and beyond is challenging. But if we're morally serious about phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering, then antinatalist proposals like David Benatar's advocacy of voluntary human childlessness must be discounted because they ignore selection pressure.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/14/65-year-old-german-woman-expecting-quadruplets-defends-pregnancy
("65-year-old German woman expecting quadruplets defends pregnancy")
The felt need to have children is deeply rooted in most people. On evolutionary grounds, we should expect nothing less. If people most passionately opposed to suffering choose not to have children, this will presumably impose selection pressure against any predisposition not to bring more suffering into the world. Fortunately, most parents say, I think sincerely, they want their children to be happy. The genetic revolution will (eventually) make this possible - though one's heart sinks sometimes at the obstacle's ahead.
http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/humans-have-a-moral-duty-to-stop-procreating
("Do Humans Have a Moral Duty to Stop Procreating?")
The desire not to bring more suffering into the world is morally admirable. However, let us suppose that morally responsible people do decide to adopt children - or not to have children at all. The outcome of such decisions will be selection pressure against a predisposition to be morally responsible, and selection pressure in favour of a predisposition to go forth and multiply - or just be feckless and reckless. This "argument from selection pressure" holds whether we conceive of the purpose of anti-natalism as merely to restrict human population sizes, or outright human extinction à la David Benatar.
Perhaps responsible prospective parents would do better to use preimplantation genetic screening to load the genetic dice in their children's favour rather than forgo reproduction altogether?
* * *
Sex itself? Tomorrow's biotech can in principle deliver intensities of sensual pleasure orders of magnitude richer than anything now physiologically feasible. It's hard to imagine that anyone who tastes such delights would want to revert to today's limp foreplay.
David, for evolutionary reasons, most people regard nihilism and radical anti-natalism as absurd. But ask people whether they would like to create a copy of our world - with all its joys, but with all its unspeakable cruelties and suffering too - and most people would pause for thought. Frequently, they'll answer the hypothetical with a "No". In other words, what we're really dealing with here - typically though not always - is entrenched status quo bias, not a carefully worked out philosophical position.
* * *
Reckless genetic experimentation is irresponsible. Time for a moratorium on sexual reproduction without preimplantation genetic screening?
http://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2015/may/01/genetics
("Should we genetically engineer humans?")
Widespread genetic tweaking, let alone the full-blown genetic engineering of "designer babies", is probably two or three decades away. But trust in God or Mother Nature to turn up trumps is often sadly misplaced.
As a stopgap, let's use PGD to choose "low pain" rather than "no pain" alleles for our future children:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/the-people-who-cant-feel-pain-scientists-discover-cause-of-rare-inherited-condition-that-turns-off-pain-sensors-10274604.html
("The people who can't feel pain: Scientists discover cause of rare inherited condition that turns off pain sensors")
Should we stop reckless genetic experiments and start designing smarter, happier, healthier babies?
http://qz.com/441423/why-china-wont-listen-to-western-scientists-about-genetically-modifying-the-human-embryo/
("Why China won’t listen to Western scientists about genetically modifying the human embryo")
* * *
Experience machines? Jason, in the long run, I agree with you: we can all plug in - though the nature of selection pressure in a world of ubiquitous VR and Experience Machines is hard to anticipate. In the meantime, hedonic recalibration seems an acceptable stopgap. Recalibration undercuts the false dilemma of "Escapism versus Realism" posed by opponents of biohappiness.
20th March is the "International Day of Happiness". When can the science of pleasure become an engineering discipline?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-03-pursuit-happiness.html
("The Pursuit of Happiness")
The international (un)happiness Olympics: let's hope all doping regulations can be scrapped:
http://www.livescience.com/50209-happiest-countries-latin-america.html
("Top 10 Happiest Countries Are All in Latin America")
[on the UK Transhumanist Party]
Thanks David. I guess before working on the exact wording, we'd better debate - and take a decision on - whether the clause should be there at all. Yes, there is always the risk of an unsympathetic critic using the "E" word. But insofar as we're the Transhumanist Party, any support for preserving the existing human germ-line - or at least keeping today's genetic crapshoot - would be odd. Its preservation would guarantee that we'll be stuck with the biology of ageing, suffering, and all sorts of other human frailties indefinitely.
Thankfully, known carriers of, say, the cystic fibrosis allele today who opt for PGD aren't made to feel as though they are participating is some sinister eugenic plot to re-enact the coercive racial hygiene policy of the Third Reich. Also, free access to preimplantation genetic screening isn't the same as support for genetic engineering.
Why a cryonics option to complement radical anti-aging research? No least because telling older people that medical science is likely to find a curing for aging after their death risks being cruel. The fundamental obstacle to ultimate reanimation is irreversible information loss - which may be inevitable given the typical time-lags currently involved in the process or suspension. I don't know. But mainstreaming the cryonics option would dramatically reduce the incidence of such delays.
As the Transhumanist Party, I think we should be bold (but not sensationalist). Whether procreative freedom or cryonics, we can stress freedom of choice. And even if you think vitrification, say, is akin to re-formatting a hard disk, let's recall the fate of some folk who fondly supposed their data had been securely wiped...
Damian, short of using a completely made-up word (drug companies spend millions researching brand names that will play well in all cultures and languages) I'm sceptical there is a better internationally acceptable alternative to "transhumanist". Compare how, for example, "futurist" in Italy evokes the fascism of Marinetti. Maybe if the national party leader happens to be LGBT, "transhumanist" might confuse some people. But I don't think this problem will confront the leadership of the US Transhumanist Party, at least.
[None of the above should deter us from having a clear policy commitment in support of LGBT.]
Paul, transhumanists tend to be high AQ / high-IQ males with above-average scores on measures of utilitarian ethics / psychopathy. (cf. http://crookedtimber.org/2011/08/22/utilitarian-psychopaths/) This might seem a rather sweeping generalisation. Not all transhumanists are Randian Objectivists / free-market fundamentalists/ Sea-steaders (etc). But even the "compassionate" wing have hypersystematising tendencies - certainly compared to the average cat-lover.
Selection pressure for autistic / psychopathic / systematising behavioural phenotypes is more likely to come about IMO not from capitalism but from a reproductive revolution of prospective parents selecting "high IQ" alleles and alleles for their prospective children.
Alas "triple S" civilisation of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness isn't imminent. Immediate policy initiatives? Universal free access to preimplantation genetic screening for prospective parents; universal free access to cryonics; and the rapid development and commercialisation of in vitro meat products to replace the horrors of factory-farming. A pledge on Basic Income might not be distinctively transhumanist, but such a guarantee would seem common decency. Populism aside, all policies should be carefully costed.
* * *
Hitler was not the product of genetic engineering but rather its absence.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-doesnt-want-to-get-into-genetic-engineering-because-he-doesnt-know-how-to-avoid-the-hitler-problem-2015-6
("Elon Musk doesn’t want to get into genetic engineering because he doesn’t know how to avoid 'the Hitler problem')
If a couple choose to have children, the question to consider is whether a genetic crapshoot is the ethically wise option, or whether instead they should load the genetic dice in their children’s favour. In each case, prospective parents are weighing risk-reward ratios - there are no guarantees. Preimplantation genetic screening differs from genetic engineering, but both technologies are likely to accelerate later this century and beyond. A lot of our genetic source code would seem extremely sinister if we grasped its ramifications: I hope that eventually it can be rewritten.
Evil? Rather than being aberrations, the Nazis were all too human. Indeed, it's impossible to understand the horrors of the Third Reich if one believes that the Nazis set out to be evil. Some of their most monstrous crimes were committed by "idealists", Kantians with a strong sense of duty. Of course, other Nazis were sociopaths and sadists, but even in the SS, they were in a minority.
Stalin, too, was ideologically driven - incredible as it seems.
Like advocates of pure socialism, there are advocates of pure free-market fundamentalism who believe the only problem with their ideology is that it has never been applied with sufficient rigour. Maybe. A credible case that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner helped save the USA from a second Great Depression - and the rest of the world from something worse (Geithner's "Stress Test: Reflections of Financial Crises" is self-serving but worth reading.)
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/oct/24/economics-creditcrunch-federal-reserve-greenspan
A betrayal? Lavrentiy Beria's downfall began when Khrushchev accused him of being "a traitor and spy in the pay of British intelligence". Likewise, it's possible that Alan Greenspan's career was spent acting in the interests of international socialism.
But evidence in each case is lacking.
* * *
Bernard, I agree: as rationalists, we should oppose emotionalism, sensationalism and rhetoric. But whether we're considering organised violence against humans or nonhuman animals, such self-restraint is very different from urging avoidance of photography or raw video footage of what war - or halal slaughtering methods - actually entails. If one supports an action only so long as one is spared sight of the consequences, then one shouldn't be supporting it at all.
* * *
René, many thanks. For evolutionary reasons, the bitterest disputes tend to arise, not with one's ideological enemies, but between the Judean People's Front and People's Front of Judea. Sadly, this is true within transhumanism, animal rights and virtually any other cause you can mention. I'm personally pretty robust when combatting assaults by intellectual opponents. Disputes between friends and allies leave me paralysed with angst and indecision. On a brighter note, the reason I write stuff is the hope that people stronger-minded and more dynamic than me can take the project forward.
* * *
Sentience, "the ability to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively", is a more sharply defined term than "wisdom". Problems arise when the uneducated confuse the two. One doesn't want to come across as a stick-in-the-mud pedant; but the distinction is worth preserving, to say the least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
Thanks Rodney. If one happens to believe for technical reasons that our long-term future will be unimaginably sublime, then it's best to sound as boring and understated as possible.
* * *
Statism or individualism?
Evan, good questions. What I'd like to see happen - but almost certainly won't - is global hundred-year species project dedicated to phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering - perhaps under the rubric of the WHO's definition of health: "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being":
http://www.who.int/about/definition/en/print.html
At the opposite individualistic extreme, responsibility falls on prospective parents choosing the genetic make-up of their future kids:
https://www.reproductive-revolution.com/
And then of course there are bioconservative scenarios where most people keep on rolling the genetic dice as now - which pretty much guarantee that pain and suffering persist indefinitely.
From the late great FM-2030 ("I would not eat anything that had a mother")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030
to the Transhumanist Declaration's (1998, 2009) commitment to the well-being of all sentience
http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-declaration/
to the abolitionist current in contemporary transhumanism, a commitment to help nonhuman animals alike has been implicit if not explicit.
But transhumanists can still be as prone to culturally ingrained anthropocentric bias as anyone else.
Mike, drafting of both the original (1998) and revised (2009) Transhumanist Declaration went through an exhaustive and exhausting process of consultation. Dropping a commitment to the well-being of sentience, or restricting it to a narrower class of being, would - in my opinion - be a backward step. I doubt if any of us fully grasp the implications of what such a commitment entails; but such a claim is very different from the suggestion that signatories or participants in the debates were unfamiliar with the dictionary meaning of the word "sentient". The margins of sentience (a worm? a 12 week old foetus?) do indeed raise thorny issues that won't go away by definitional sleight of hand.
Issues of whether it’s normally wrong to modify the germline of another species, or engineer its extinction in the wild (cf. http://www.nature.com/news/mosquitoes-engineered-to-pass-down-genes-that-would-wipe-out-their-species-1.18974), or the long-term future (if any) of predation in general are topics that probably deserve another thread. At the risk of stating the obvious, signing up to a long-term goal is quite different from signing up to any one person’s ideas on how it's best promoted.
* * *
Is transhumanism anthropocentric?
http://soycrates.tumblr.com/post/95663962078/transhumanism-and-veganism
("Transhumanism and Veganism")
Building human-friendly superintelligence is like building Aryan-friendly superintelligence. Yes, one hopes superintelligence will behave in a friendly way towards Aryans, but such an ethnocentric classification scheme doesn’t 'carve Nature at the joints'. Sentience-friendliness is a less arbitrary criterion for moral consideration than human-friendliness. Not least, a convergence of genetic, evolutionary, behavioural and neuroscientific evidence suggests that the sentience – and capacity to suffer – of the nonhuman animals whom we factory-farm and kill ranges from the level of human infants to human toddlers. If so, then we’d do well to act accordingly. Shutting and outlawing factory-farms and slaughterhouses is just a start.
* * *
Jera, Robert, many thanks. Yes. Actually I'm a bit sloppy. Sometimes I contrast "Darwinian life" and "post-Darwinian life" by using the terms in a technical sense. Darwinian life evolved under pressure of natural selection. Natural selection is "blind” and driven by mutations that are random (with respect to the direction of evolution). “Post-Darwinian life” refers to an era when intelligent agents choose and predesign genomes in anticipation of their likely behavioural and psychological consequences. However, I also use the terms "Darwinian life” and “post-Darwinian life” as shorthand for today's pain-ridden biosphere ("Nature, red in tooth and claw”) compared to the hypothetical blissful regime of our civilised successors. It's normally good to be sparing with neologisms. But "Darwinian life" versus "post-Darwinian life" is IMO a distinction worth drawing - even if the latter is currently hypothetical.
"Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become."
Edward O. Wilson
(Consilience, the Unity of Knowledge)
Know thyself? Should we all publish our own genetic source code on the Net?
http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-everyone-should-sequence-their-genome-2015-11
("Here’s why 'everyone should have their genome sequenced yesterday'")
* * *
[Adam Karlovsky writes] "Does anyone think that there would be something morally lacking, if the entire universe of beings reached a permanent state of nirvana?"
"Permanent" has connotations of stasis, the thought of which happy folk today often find unappealing. The meaning, significance and connotations of "nirvana" vary widely too. But if/when we abolish all states below "hedonic zero", then immorality and disvalue as we understand such concepts now will presumably become archaic. However, even after we cross this threshold of civilisation, a huge gulf will still separate early post-Darwinian life based on gradients of intelligent bliss from the theoretical fixed state-space of "ideal" states of matter-energy in any Hubble volume - where by “ideal” I mean states any change from which would diminish their sublimity. By analogy, perhaps think of "perfect" games of chess...
* * *
Should all sentient beings be legally protected from "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment"?
Article Five of the UN Declaration of Human Rights states “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” The Green Party proposes extending such protection to “all sentient life forms”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/green-party/11456572/Rodents-to-be-given-human-rights-under-Green-Party-plans.html
Here we go again: ("All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." Schopenhauer)
Sentient beings with the cognitive capacities of toddlers need caregivers - to be free living but not "wild".
* * *
The kinds of chemosterilant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosterilant)
that can be used to control insect populations (e.g. cockroaches:
http://ojs-test.fcla.edu/index.php/flaent/article/viewFile/56072/53751) raise fewer ethical dilemmas than fertility regulation in large-long lived vertebrates.
A very natural reaction is to ask: why on earth should a hard-headed utilitarian be so squeamish in a world with so many worse horrors? Where is a sense of proportion? The reason for being so circumspect (IMO) is that humans simply can't be trusted - and we shouldn't trust ourselves. Seemingly un-utilitarian policies like upholding the sanctity of life - for humans and non-humans alike – are (probably) less likely to lead to unhappy outcomes than an ostensibly "utilitarian" approach.
* * *
The brand? It's worth stressing that all strands of the transhumanist movement have had a strong record on LGBT issues. Gender in intelligent minds is about as sensible as gender in nouns. Widespread public confusion of transexuality and transhumanism would be unfortunate; but I can't see this being a long-term problem. Co-incidentally or otherwise, the appearance of most politically well-known transhumanists doesn't radically challenge gender stereotypes.
[Interview on Singularity 1-on-1]
Singularity 1-on-1 interview
("David Pearce on Singularity 1 on 1: Give Up Eating Meat!")
Jeffrey, first, apologies, I was caught off-guard. I was expecting (on Singularity 1-on-1!) to tackle questions on the nature and prospects of post-human superintelligence - not defend what deserves to be a platitude, i.e. intelligent moral agents shouldn’t hurt, harm and kill other sentient beings for frivolous reasons.
Secondly, I agree: a vegan diet with B12 can potentially be close to ideal:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140304125639.htm
For many people, such nutritional worries may indeed be "overkill".
Why so defensive? Well, although everyone can flourish on a vegetarian diet – factory-farms and slaughterhouses should be shut and outlawed – a minority of people _do_ encounter problems with strict veganism. Instead of reverting to vegetarianism until they identify the problem, they then start eating meat again. Alas nutrition is not part of the educational core-curriculum. Anyone who decides to go vegan who is also slimming e.g. a fair proportion of young women in today's society, is setting themselves up for problems if they haven’t studied nutrition and (ideally) nutritional psychiatry. Some people feel psychologically healthier on a low-protein vegan diet – they feel calmer – but others do best on a high-protein diet. A high-protein diet is perfectly feasible for a vegan, as we know, but not without preplanning. Also, many ethically concerned people who quit meat and animal products are suspicious of science and scientific nutrition: another recipe for problems. Also, many meat eaters are happy to present a stark dichotomy – either everyone should be a strict vegan or life should carry on as now.
The solution? Ban and outlaw factory-farms and slaughterhouses without further ado and promote ethical nutrition as a subject in schools, universities, modern medicine and society at large.
Of course, I’d like to see global veganism overnight and an anti-speciesist revolution - but politics is the art of the possible.
* * *
Elmo, IMO it's worth everyone experimentally testing whether they do best psychologically on a high-protein or low-protein diet (or whether it makes no difference)
http://evolutionarypsychiatry.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/carbs-and-serotonin-connection-after.html
("Evolutionary Psychiatry: Carbs and Serotonin, A Connection After All?")
[on transhumanist values and the Meaning Of Life]
Transhumanism and the Meaning of Life:
https://www.singularityweblog.com/transhumanism-needs-to-establish-a-meaning-to-life/
("Transhumanism Needs to Establish a Meaning to Life")
Matt, I can't do full justice to all your points. But here goes....
Advocacy of using biotech to phase out involuntary suffering – and even engineering life animated entirely by gradients of intelligent bliss – does not entail signing up for some flavour of utilitarian ethics. Most value systems give at least some weight to alleviating suffering and promoting subjective
well-being. The enemy of non-utilitarian value systems isn't happiness per se but rather uniform happiness, i.e. becoming “blissed out” rather than being temperamentally blissful. What's vital to meaningful relationships, critical insight, intellectual progress and a sense of social responsibility is the preservation of informational sensitivity to “good” and “bad” stimuli - not an agent's absolute location on the hedonic axis. Radical hedonic enrichment isn't sci-fi either. Thus experimental strains of rats are already engineered to be either hyper-depressive or unusually “depression-resistant”. We can also use as human case studies some of the very happiest “hyperthymic” people alive today. To be sure, globally ratcheting up hedonic set-points to hyperthymic levels of well-being, let alone creating a future civilisation of superhappiness founded on gradients of invincible well-being, is an immense technical challenge. However, the biggest obstacles will probably be ethical / ideological.
More specifically:
1) Mastery of our genetic source code should allow relationships to be strengthened. For example, for evolutionary reasons, humans are predisposed neither to be wholly monogamous nor wholly polyamorous – a recipe for untold heartache. In the future, people who want to bond monogamously for life will be able to use arginine-vasopressin enhancement and bond more securely than is feasible today.
Sorry, could you clarify why you believe that choosing alleles/allelic variations predisposing to high hedonic set-points for one's future children is inimical to parent-child-bonding? Other things being equal, low mood and malaise are more corrosive of strong interpersonal relationships than good
mood.
Overcoming adversity? Once again, the happiest people alive today also tend to be the most resilient, robust and well-motivated. If anyone takes us to the stars, it will be unquenchable optimists. By contrast, depressives give up easily. Happy, strong-minded people can uphold their values more robustly than psychological weaklings.
2) Should the small minority of people who consistently derive pleasure from harming others be integrated into genetically enriched superhappy society? Clearly, no. For example, a (conditionally activated) predisposition to rape may sometimes have been genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. But rapists need to be securely detained. This doesn't entail that rapists and other sex-offenders must be forced to suffer, just prevented from causing harm. Other people who derive pleasure from ethically indefensible behaviour – including minor offenders like those of us who enjoy wasting hostiles in 'Modern Combat 5' – can do so harmlessly in immersive VR. The capacity to edit human nature via genome re-design should eventually allow such violent proclivities to be purged from the gene pool. I hope so at any rate.
Does much more need to be said? Yes, evidently. But a future "Triple S" civilisation of superhappiness, superlongevity and superintelligence is technically feasible and also - I believe - worth striving for.
* * *
Matt, perhaps first let's tackle an empirical question. Philosophers can argue until Doomsday over the Meaning Of Life. But can biotechnology ensure life always feels richly meaningful?
The answer is almost certainly “yes”. No one says “I feel profoundly happy, yet my life feels empty and meaningless.” Low mood is associated with a sense of lack of meaning and purpose. Such emptiness shades into nihilistic thoughts in severe clinical depression. By contrast, euphoric mania is marked by an abnormal intensification of subjective meaning, purpose and significance. Of course, I'd urge intelligent hyperthymia, not uncontrolled mania!
Yet is life animated by information-sensitive gradients of bliss really meaningful in some transcendent sense? I'll duck that metaphysical question here. Insofar as one's life has meaning today – whether the pursuit of knowledge, artistic creation, helping others or simply the joys of family life, or simply cultivating one's garden – then its subjective meaning can be hugely accentuated via biotech. Hedonic recalibration does not subvert meaning: empirically, such enrichment creates more of it.
Too facile? What if one's life presently derives its subjective meaning from making heroic sacrifices for the afflicted? Well, it was once said of Madame de Staël that "She is such a good friend that she would throw all her acquaintances into the water for the pleasure of fishing them out again". After the biology of suffering becomes technically optional, it's hard to see ethically how anyone should be compelled to undergo subjective distress to promote narrative coherence in the lives of others. Such a prospect, it must be said, is still some way off.
As it happens, I agree with you about the tension - and even outright contradiction - between the values of some strands of the contemporary transhumanist movement. But is there an inherent contradiction to the prospect of a “Triple S” civilisation of superintelligence, superlongevity, and superhappiness? Not to my knowledge.
* * *
Is there an objective Meaning of Life? Are there objectively true and false values? Can Hume's guillotine be cheated?
Many transhumanists are anti-realists about meta-ethical issues. I
wouldn't personally dismiss your question. Insofar as value can be
naturalised, then - for reasons we simply don't understand – the
pain-pleasure axis discloses the world intrinsic metric of
(dis)value. Combine this objective axis of (dis)value with an
impartial scientific God's-eye-view and we find that ethics and
decision-theoretic rationality alike converge on phasing out the
biology of suffering in favour of gradients of intelligent bliss.
Either way, in our context here such a controversial perspective is a red herring. If you believe that most sentient beings today lead
“objectively” meaningless lives, then radically elevating hedonic
set-points won't make their lives metaphysically more meaningful,
merely subjectively richer. More to the point, this argument cuts both ways. Among people whose lives today you reckon are objectively meaningful, then radical hedonic recalibration [as distinct from engineering uniform bliss] needn't dilute any transcendent meaning. Values and preference architectures can potentially remain intact as
subjectively quality of life is biologically enriched – unless,
that is, your values and preferences are constitutively tied to
promoting (some forms of) suffering. Unlike the Matrix or Nozick's
“Experience Machine”, radical set-point recalibration allows
continued engagement with basement reality – perhaps more closely
than at present. Recall that low mood is associated with behavioural
suppression, whereas positive mood promotes behavioural approach and engagement.
Warfare? We need to consider the evolutionary context. In contrast to the behaviour of male humans and chimpanzees, history doesn't record a single instance of women banding together for the purpose of a war of territorial aggression. If we are serious about world peace in an era of WMD, then gynocratic governance via a democratically accountable UN might be one policy option to explore. Such ideas aren't distinctively transhumanist. What is distinctively transhumanist is the quest to develop full-spectrum superintelligence – not just superhuman prowess in the narrow
autistic sense of the term “intelligence” measured by ill-named
IQ tests, but a super-human capacity for perspective-taking: a
God-like capacity for empathetically understanding all possible
first-person perspectives and acting accordingly. Why can't two
mirror-touch synaesthetes have a fist fight? Because it would be
like harming oneself! Technologies of naturalised telepathy, and
“mind-melding” via reversible thalamic bridges (etc), promise to
revolutionise both our ethics and canons of decision-making
rationality. Post-Darwinian life is unlikely to resemble the African
savannah.
If you want to highlight the countless ways things might go wrong with the transhumanist vision, then you'd be on firm ground. But a future Triple S civilisation of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness isn't an incoherent idea – just a path strewn with multiple pitfalls.
* * *
Are utopian experiments that don't genetically rewrite human nature doomed to fail?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2d0633d4-a6e7-11e4-8a71-00144feab7de.html
("The Utopia Experiment’, by Dylan Evans)
* * *
The Sword and the Shield?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/out-the-ooze/201506/is-the-tongue-the-sword-woman
("Is the Tongue the "Sword of a Woman? Is it just a stereotype that women are nastier gossips than men ")
Will tomorrow's video games be too compulsively addictive for the normal brain to resist?
http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/13065280/video-game-data-science-profit%EF%BB%BF
("Gaming Your Brain")
Advocates of high-tech Jainism should not be addicted to first-person shooters; but I can't help it.
Is synthetic will-power any more morally objectionable than synthetic fuel?
("The Problem of Artificial Willpower The ethical threat posed by Adderall and other drugs that improve motivation")
The problem with Adderall isn't that the acutely enhanced motivation it induces is "artificial"...
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/02/parkinsons-and-depression-drugs-can-alter-moral-judgement-study-shows
* * *
If posthuman superintelligence will be our IT-augmented biological descendants - and the CRISPR revolution in biotech suggests organic robots can be recursively self-improving too - then a strong case can be made for a convergence hypothesis. The pain-pleasure axis as a metric (dis)value seems universal to sentient organic life - though an impartial God's-eye-view has been forbidden by natural selection. However the I.J Good/ Yudkowsky / MIRI / Bostrom “Intelligence Explosion” hypothesis doesn't assume that digital super-AGI will be sentient or have a pleasure-pain axis of (dis)value. So a lot depends on what conception of posthuman superintelligence we find most credible.
http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Hypotheses-Scientific-Philosophical-Assessment/dp/3642325599
[on neuronal superpositions]
Physicalism and Quantum Minds
("The Hard Problem of Consciousness Solved? An Experimentally Testable Conjecture")
Does incremental progress lie ahead? ("This year's Nobel prize is awarded for solving the Hard Problem of consciousness")
Or revolution?
IMO, we're not reached even the pre-Galilean era in understanding the mind-brain.
What would falsify - or at least tell strongly against - the conjecture that classical digital computers will one day be subjects of experience?
The reason we are ethically entitled to do nasty things to characters in video games is the characters aren't subjects of experience. (though see Vox magazine on Brian Tomasik:
http://www.vox.com/2014/4/23/5643418/this-guy-thinks-killing-video-game-characters-is-immoral)
One can't prove that one isn't surrounded by p-zombies. Does this inability entitle one to act out one's darker appetites? In practice, the advent of reversible thalamic bridges should enable us to “mind-meld” with other subjects of experience. Mind-melding technologies should finally lay to rest the Problem of Other Minds. The really interesting question, IMO, isn't the sceptical worry raised by notional p-zombies. Rather, it's understanding why we aren't p-zombies given what we think we know about the basic stuff of the natural world. I reckon the answer will lead to a revolution in our conception of both the nature of the physical and the classicality of mind – bold claims, for sure, but empirically falsifiable.
[We should be wary of folk who offer testimonials to their own sanity. But I was touched just yesterday to get an out-of-the-blue email from Jim Rutt of the Santa Fe Institute asking if I was the author of https://www.physicalism.com
[“Probably the best non-BS attempt at a theory of quantum influenced consciousness I've seen. And you make some specific falsifiable predictions which should be addressable in the not too distant future”. We shall see!]
* * *
Quantum physics is behind your toaster; alas headlines like the below will have sceptics rolling their eyes...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830500-300-is-quantum-physics-behind-your-brains-ability-to-think/
("Is quantum physics behind your brain’s ability to think? From consciousness to long-term memories, the human brain has some peculiar computing abilities – and they could be explained by quantum fuzziness")
* * *
How does a pack of neurons create "in-the-body" experience?
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150821-the-dangerous-consequences-of-seeing-your-doppelganger
("The disturbing consequences of seeing your own Doppelgänger")
* * *
"Strong" emergence? Robert, yes, you could be right. However, my working hypothesis is that physicalism is true - and more radically, that the superposition principle explains everything from the properties of the natural world to our bound phenomenal minds to why anything exists at all. Yes, single-neuron microelectrode studies using awake subjects have all sorts of methodological problems. Maybe individual neurons lack consciousness. Perhaps any attempt to vindicate reductive physicalism fails, and we must fall back on "strong" emergence. As I said, my working assumption that physicalism is true is just that - an assumption. If experiment (and in particular, molecular matter-wave interferometry) falsifies the non-classical account of phenomenal binding I offer, then my preferred account of conscious mind and the nature of the physical collapses too.
Robert, "strong" emergence and physicalism are inconsistent. Imagine if life had proven irreducible to molecular biology.(cf. Bergson's Élan vital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lan_vital)
Most philosophers of science (and philosophically-minded scientists) hate strong emergence for solid if not compelling reasons.
Either way, what I'm hoping for is "I find your conjecture exceedingly implausible. An easier and more elegant experimental falsification than the protocol outlined is 'x'". Honourable exceptions aside, I've mostly had, "I find the conjecture exceedingly implausible" - which of course I do too! It’s tempting to think (and I mostly do): no big deal. But if "strong" emergence occurs, then the ethical implications are potentially far-reaching - the most obvious example being digital sentience. Everything I’ve written on abolitionist bioethics assumes that only biological minds (and maybe futuristic nonbiological quantum computers) are subjects of experience. If “strong” emergence really erupts from insentient systems, then we need to know how and when – even if we don’t understand why.
* * *
Any decent scientific theory of conscious mind should explain (1) why consciousness exists at all. (2) how consciousness could be locally or globally bound by a pack of membrane-bound (seemingly) classical neurons (3) how consciousness could have the causal efficacy to allow us to discuss its existence (4) why consciousness has its countless textures and the interdependencies of their different values. But above all, any decent scientific theory of conscious mind should offer novel, precise, empirically falsifiable predictions - with experimental outcomes to satisfy believers and critics alike.
It's not that one can refute folk who say they believe that classical digital computers will one day become conscious, any more than one can refute Eric Schwitzgebel ("If Materialism Is True, the United States Is probably conscious"
https://consciousnessonline.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/schwitzgebel-co5long.pdf)
or Giulio Tononi’s “Integrated Information Theory”. (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory)
Alas these are just "philosophical" opinions - untestable, as far as I can tell.
A negative result from the interferometry experiment outlined will blow my own answers to the four questions above out of the water. The prediction of a perfect structural match between the phenomenology of our bound conscious minds and the formalism of QFT sounds insane; but I'll still be disappointed if the experiment (or something like it) is never done.
Thanks Mark. Why should philosophers of mind study quantum field theory? I focus on the phenomenal binding/combination problem because (IMO) a potential solution yields novel, precise experimentally falsifiable predictions. But as well as invoking the problem of structural mismatch, dualist philosopher David Chalmers offers a second argument against “constitutive panpsychism”, i.e. the conjecture that experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, namely the argument from microphysical simplicity (see “the palette problem” - http://individual.utoronto.ca/lukeroelofs/Phenomenal%20Blending%20and%20the%20Palette%20Problem.pdf). If we're physicalists, a particle-based ontology makes the teeming diversity of our experience impossible, whereas (IMO) a field-based ontology makes such diversity natural: the diverse values of qualia express (superpositions of the) the world’s fundamental fields.
* * *
Joshua, IMO the answer lies under our noses, so to speak. "Where Does All the Weirdness Go?" as David Lindley once put it. Quantum theory [minus the physically ill-motivated "collapse of the wave function"] is increasingly recognised as a universal story. And yet we don't see macroscopic superpositions of live-and-dead cats. For the most part, the everyday world looks and behaves as though it were classical. Thus visible objects (and cats!) 1) occupy definite positions (the "preferred basis" problem) 2) don't readily display quantum interference effects; and 3) yield well-defined outcomes when experimentally probed.
But the above description of the mystery presupposes perceptual direct realism. By contrast, what each of us apprehends as the classical world populated by classical objects is (IMO) an entirely quantum phenomenon internal to your mind. If each of your membrane-bound nerve cells were as discrete classical object, rather than a component of successive neuronal superpositions of distributed feature-processors (colour neurons, edge-detectors, motion-detectors, etc), then you'd be a zombie in the sense that the USA is a zombie. Without non-classical phenomenal binding, there would be no classical objects that could behave in classical Newtonian ways within your world-simulation in the first instance. You'd just be a pattern of neuronal mind-dust: a micro-experiential zombie [to use Phil Goff's term].
Yet if this conjecture potentially solves the binding problem - and in conjunction with the conjecture that experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical potentially solves the Hard Problem! - then why aren't experimentalists rushing to create in vitro neuronal superpositions - scaled-up versions of e.g. buckyball superpositions.
(cf. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2010/mar/18/quantum-effect-spotted-in-a-visible-object)?
Well, aside from the sheer technical challenges involved, one reason is our deeply held presupposition that bound conscious states “emerge” on a time-scale of milliseconds via [somehow] patterns of classical neuronal firings. By contrast, even the most robust neuronal superpositions are “destroyed” [i.e. quantum coherence is irreversibly delocalised into the larger CNS-environment combination though uncontrolled environmental entanglement] over naively ludicrously short time-scales.
Alas, tell someone that you think their theory of mind is off by a dozen-or-so orders of magnitude and you may get an incredulous stare. :-)
* * *
Soon? I hope you're right - because experimentally creating and training up in vitro "Schrödinger's neurons" to confirm or falsify the conjecture is an order of magnitude more technically challenging than a "Schrödinger's virus" experiment. A distinguished range of thinkers from William James to David Chalmers have highlighted the momentous implications of the binding problem - and the inability of (classical) physics to explain why we aren't just patterns of "mind-dust" / micro-experiential zombies. However, mention that you’d like to test the possibility that neuronal superpositions are the essence of mind and you won't find folk rushing off to the lab to find out.
But see e.g.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03763v1.pdf
("Quantum superposition, entanglement, and state teleportation of a microorganism on an electromechanical oscillator")
* * *
Phenomenal self - in both the synchronic and diachronic sense - presumably came long after primordial consciousness. [How primordial is "primordial"?] Answers here range from Planck era to late pre-Cambrian to Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". As you know, I favour an early date.
* * *
Thanks Adam. Our creation of smart and insentient nonbiological robots suggests that bound phenomenal consciousness is in one sense a mere implementation detail of organic life. The "raw feels" of pain, jealousy, depression, anxiety (and so forth), as we undergo such states are no more essential to the function of nociception (etc) than, say, the textures of the pawns in a game of chess.
Of course, there are some "implementation details" we may wish to retain and enhance.
[I'd qualify the above by saying that, in my non-standard view, there is a large class of problems too difficult for an insentient classical digital computer to solve or even pose, namely anything involving investigation of the first-person, "program-resistant" subjective properties of matter and energy. But a standard response would be just to invoke a strong physical version of Church-Turing and claim that digital computers can do anything we can do. Either way, this is a complication rather than a rebuttal.]
Does nociception unaccompanied by subjective distress intrinsically matter?
No, IMO, and the same is true in general of any life-form that isn't a subject of experience, from a carrot to a silicon (etc) robot.
* * *
How do philosophers get away with such nonsense?
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/dont-think-that-you-can-become-free-or-the-master-of-your-life-through-knowledge
("Through Flaws in the Machine, Robots May Develop "Souls": An Interview with John Gray")
What scientists often dismiss as "anthropomorphism" is largely justified vis-à-vis the feelings of non-human animals. The biology of our core motions is strongly conserved across the vertebrate line and beyond. By contrast, ascribing subjective feelings and emotions to digital computers - whether inside or outside non-biological robots - is just an anthropomorphic projection. There is not the slightest evidence that classical digital computers can solve the phenomenal binding problem.
* * *
Should social life be substrate-specific?
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/social-robots-such-as-pepper-can-help-with-household-chores--but-at-what-cost-to-privacy-10408646.html
* * *
Is materialism versus physicalism “splitting hairs”? If quantum mechanics is complete, and if we discard the naïve positivism of Copenhagen, then matter in the classical sense doesn't exist. The superposition principle is universal. However, it's true that most Copenhagenists, “dynamical collapse” theorists, “hidden variables” folk and Everettians alike share a common presupposition, namely that the world's fundamental fields (or branes etc) are intrinsically non-experiential. So their proponents are typically "materialists" in the broad sense.
Yet (scientifically literate) idealists can be physicalists too, i.e. monistic idealists may believe there is no "element of reality" missing from the formalism of (tomorrow's) physics - even though science lacks any understanding why the solutions to the field-theoretic equations yield the particular phenomenal textures they do. More specifically – and in answer to your point - it's not clear that physicalistic idealists (who believe that the "fire" in the equations is experiential) have any more difficulty than physicalistic materialists in accounting for the uniformity of Nature. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a greater non-uniformity in the natural world than the ontological eruption into a supposedly insentient reality of an entirely new phenomenon, i.e. consciousness.
* * *
Jordan, IMO Adam's paper [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3912322/ - "An integration of integrated information theory with physics"] is great. If we take seriously the conjecture that consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then relativistic quantum field theory (or its still speculative successor) mathematically formalises the properties of qualia. But what explains the local and global phenomenal binding of fields of micro-qualia? As you suggest, the phenomenal binding of a synchronously activated network of distributed neuronal feature-processors - a "clump of discrete nerve cells" - seems physically inexplicable.
However, we're making an assumption here. We may speak of discrete, decohered nerve cells only if the superposition principle breaks down in the awake (or dreaming) mind-brain. There is no evidence this is the case.
Intuitively, sub-femtosecond superpositions of distributed neuronal feature-processors have nothing to do with bound phenomenal consciousness, which arises (we assume) over a timescale of milliseconds via [somehow] successive nerve cell firings. Ask the question: "What does it feel like to be a succession of 1015 per second neuronal superpositions [“Schrödinger's cat” states], and the obvious answer is “Nothing!” Or at most, psychotic noise. After all, a femtosecond is ridiculously brief - less than thirty orders of magnitude more protracted than fundamental Planck-scale intervals. Yet if we postulate that the world's fundamental physical fields are experiential, then the “too brief" objection is no more tenable than the "too small" objection.
Unfortunately, experimentally probing the properties of in vitro neuronal superpositions [IMO, true neural networks rather than today's impostors flying under that label] will be extraordinarily hard because they are “destroyed” [i.e. lost in an effectively thermodynamically irreversible way via thermally-induced decoherence to the extra-neural environment] so rapidly.
* * *
Micah, Jera, there's an ambiguity here. Asking whether silicon robots can process information contained in electromagnetic radiation within the range of 400nm to 700 nm is clearly different from asking whether they undergo visual experiences. "Yes" and "no" respectively, IMO. But the phenomenology of our thought-episodes and streams of conscientiousness is subtler. So unfortunately, whether someone is asking a question about the functionality of thought, or its phenomenal aspect, or both, is not always obvious.
An absence of visual experience doesn't stop a silicon zombie from navigating the world - though open-field settings are still an immense challenge for programmers. Analogously, does our cognitive phenomenology really confer any capacity beyond a classical Turing machine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine
Yes, IMO - not least, to think about and to explore the phenomenology of consciousness, and to talk about that phenomenology with other unitary subjects of experience. This response smacks of interactionist dualism – but only if our conception of the physical derives from materialist metaphysics.
* * *
I'm not a p-zombie. If I have a migraine, its painfulness is a phenomenon I wish to explain, not a conjecture I seek to prove. A radical eliminativist about consciousness can tell migraine sufferers they are all p-zombies and defy them to prove otherwise. “I can find no place for phenomenal consciousness in my theory of the world”, says the eliminativist - to which I can only respond: so much the worse for your theory of the world. Perhaps a more interesting question is understanding why we're not p-zombies, given what we think we know about 1) the insentience of the basic stuff of the world; and 2) the classicality of neurons. Both assumptions can be challenged.
* * *
Where in the world is colour?
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121843/philosophy-color-perception
("Philosophy of Colour Perception")
Perhaps compare the world-simulationist perspective according to which classical primary and secondary properties alike are brain-dependent.
(cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary/secondary_quality_distinction)
* * *
Perhaps the Hard Problem will turn out to be an artefact of materialist metaphysics and naïve classical physics set against a backdrop of perceptual direct realism. Reductionism and physicalism are worth distinguishing. Physicalism, i.e. no “element of reality” is missing from the equations of tomorrow's physics and their solutions may well be true. But reductionism? If - as most people find plausible - the superposition principle breaks down, or at least becomes functionally irrelevant, in warm, wet macroscopic systems like the mind-brain, then we can treat neurons as discrete, decohered, classical objects – just as in textbook neuroscience and standard connectionist theory. Unfortunately, the assumption of classicality makes phenomenal binding of distributed neuronal feature-processors seemingly impossible. At best, we should be “micro-experiential zombies”, to borrow Phil Goff's expression. (cf. http://www.academia.edu/3827581/Why_panpsychism_doesnt_help_explain_consciousness.)
By contrast, if the mind-brain supports macroscopic quantum coherence in the guise of bound phenomenal objects (“local” binding) and a fleetingly unitary phenomenal self (“global” binding), then classical reductionism fails - because coherent neuronal superpositions describe individual physical states. Coherent superpositions of neuronal feature-detectors (“Schrödinger's cat" states) cannot be interpreted as classical ensembles of states.
Fortunately, this rather odd conjecture (i.e. our phenomenally bound minds are akin to a movie running at around 1015 quantum-coherent frames per second) should be experimentally falsifiable with the tools of next-generation interferometry. Until then, I'll stick to my guns: classical digital computers are just zombies...
* * *
David, a couple of thoughts. First, I think it's worth distinguishing panpsychism in the sense of the claim that the most fundamental entities recognised by physics have an experiential aspect with which they are somehow associated from the claim that experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical. Secondly, I suspect the only way to make practising scientists sit up and take notice is to propose some concrete experiment that makes novel, experimentally falsifiable predictions that distinguish between alternative theories.
[As someone with a philosophical rather than scientific temperament, I should add with some embarrassment that it's only belatedly I've given serious thought to experimentally testing a view I've long held. On a brighter note, the confirmation/falsification should be clean and decisive - either way.]
David, first, yes, perhaps I am in thrall to scientism – but only to the extent I'm prepared to transpose the entire mathematical machinery of modern physics to describe an idealist ontology rather than embrace epiphenomenalism or Chalmersian dualism. Secondly, I agree with you about the inadequacy of naïve Popperian falsification as the demarcation criterion of science from metaphysics. That said, I still think we should go to extraordinary lengths wherever possible to come up with novel experimental predictions that can put our conjectures to the test. I know that seeing how misguided so many smart people are reassures most folk of the soundness of their own judgement. In my case, alas, the principle of mediocrity leads me to infer I'm most likely deluded too. Third, I wouldn't expect to derive physical velocity from anything akin to a sense of “wanting to go fast”. The particular subjective properties of (superpositions of) the world's fundamental fields are in most contexts incidental to any functional information-processing role in living organisms – and not least, digital computers. One exception, as far as I can tell, is the built-in proto-functionality of the pleasure-pain axis.
Two questions: First, is (the mathematical formalism of tomorrow's) physics closed and complete? (Let's ignore Gödelian complications here.) In short, is physicalism (as distinct from materialism) true? Secondly, if so, how do we "read off" the values of the diverse textures of experience from the solutions to the master equation of physics in the absence of some sort of cosmic Rosetta stone? Well, if experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then strictly speaking, all consciousness, and only consciousness, has causal efficacy. Zombies are physically impossible because they are unphysical. An answer to (2) is more elusive.
* * *
David, as a non-materialist physicalist, my tentative working hypothesis is indeed that the physical is indeed (literally!) identical with the experiential. This sounds nonsensical because we intuitively associate the “physical” with the classical and the mechanical – e.g. conceiving particles a discrete mechanical billiard balls, neurons as decohered classical objects rather than quantum superpositions, and so forth. So as you say, a natural response is that non-materialist physicalism doesn't explain the familiar gross properties of the macroscopic world. Yet a rigorous account of how quasi-classicality emerges from the world's fundamental quantum field-theoretic substrate is really a task for professional physicists not philosophers. I've found Zurek's work (cf. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.5206.pdf) extremely helpful here. Either way, when an outspoken materialist like Steven Hawking also affirms that we have no idea what “breathes fire into” the equations, positing non-experiential "fire" as the intrinsic nature of the physical doesn't explain the gross quasi-classical and “mechanical” features of the natural world any better than does positing experiential "fire". Indeed, such a materialist metaphysical assumption simply creates the Hard Problem - not just why or how consciousness could exist, but how it could have the causal capacity to discuss its own existence as now.
The biggest challenge IMO for any physicalist who identifies the physical with the experiential is the phenomenal binding problem. [Phil Goff's title “Why panpsychism doesn't help explain consciousness”
http://www.academia.edu/3827581/Why_panpsychism_doesnt_help_explain_consciousness
is too strong; but the key point about “micro-experiential zombies” still stands.]
However, the biggest challenge also offers the greatest opportunity - because here we have a route experimentally to falsify [or confirm!] the whole program. In the event of a negative result to the experiment I outline https://www.physicalism.com/index.html#6, I simply have no answer to Chalmersian dualism.
* * *
The need for experiment? Well, my natural habitat is the armchair, but here goes:
1) The use of psychedelics allows exploration of alien state-spaces of consciousness inaccessible to pure theory.
2) The Kantian distinction between the world of phenomena and cognitively inaccessible noumenal reality can (as Schopenhauer realised) be turned on its head. If consciousness is the "fire" in the equations, then (a tiny sliver of) noumenal reality is all one will ever know except by inference. Systematic experimentation (whether via supercolliders or psychedelics) manipulating the "fire" in the equations is vital.
3) Whether our conscious minds are essentially quantum or emergently classical is often treated as a “philosophical" question. But (for example) any theory of mind that either does or doesn't rely on a breakdown of the unitary dynamics is empirically falsifiable. Ruling out whole classes of theory is progress...
* * *
Why do these seemingly abstruse discussions matter? I can sympathise with anyone who came here [HI FB group] expecting to find practical discussion on how to make the work a happier place - and instead finds the concrete stuff interspersed with (long) philosophical discussions on consciousness. The reason (IMO) this debate matters ethically is that getting our theory of consciousness wrong can be ethically catastrophic. For example, one well-known transhumanist, Eliezer Yudkowsky, doesn't believe that human babies, nonhuman animals and indeed anyone without the capacity for meta-cognition is conscious. Likewise - and closer to home - a lot of people would say that the claim that digital computers will never be subjects of experience is not just mistaken but potentially ethically catastrophic too. So let's get this right.
* * *
David, first, if consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then p-zombies are impossible – conceptually impossible, not just impossible in the real world. By contrast, explaining why we're not p-zombies is a problem - IMO an insoluble problem - for materialists and epiphenomenalists. On the other hand, explaining why we're not so-called micro-experiential zombies is a problem both for physicalistic panpsychists / Strawsonian physicalists and materialists / epiphenomenalists alike insofar as we make the standard neuroscientific assumption that membrane-bound neurons are discrete, decohered, and thus effectively classical.
Secondly, if consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then strictly speaking all consciousness, and only consciousness, has causal efficacy: it's the “fire” in the equations that makes there a world for us to describe. But there is a difference between contexts where the particular subjective texture of consciousness is functionally relevant, such the causal capacity of organic minds to talk about the nastiness of phenomenal pain, and other contexts where the particular intrinsic experiential nature of the physical would seem incidental. However, “incidental' is not synonymous with “epiphenomenal” in the strict sense of the term. Perhaps compare semiconductors made of silicon and those made of gallium arsenide. Software can run perfectly well on computers with chips made of either. Incidental implementation details don't matter - for our purposes, at any rate. But this substrate-neutrality doesn't mean epiphenomenalism is true: it's still the intrinsic physical properties of each information-processing system in question that do all the causal work.
So how are organic minds functionally different from digital computers for which the physical implementation details are indeed incidental to the functioning of the system? How is intentionality - both subjective intrinsic intentionality and a functional approximation to extrinsic intentionality - naturalistically possible for conscious organic minds within a (non-materialist) physicalist framework?
Once again, I could go on if you're interested; but alas I suspect I've already lost you...:-(
One of the deep assumptions of QM is that coherent superpositions can never be directly observed. Their existence can be unequivocally detected by non-classical interference effects. Some philosophers have argued that phenomenology is the essence of mind. Others have argued that the essence of mind is intentionality (in Brentano's sense of the object-directedness of thought - "aboutness"). But IMO the essence of mind is phenomenal binding in the form of neuronal superpositions.
One problem is sociological rather than technical. In science, it's not enough for an unorthodox theory to make novel, precise, falsifiable predictions. Experimentalists must give the conjecture some non-negligible antecedent probability of being true. If your conjecture predicts that Nature prefers quantum superpositions of white pawns over black pawns, then I'm not going to drop everything and spend six months performing the extremely delicate interferometry experiments to refute it. I'll just say I find the conjecture extremely implausible. In response, you may try to offer compelling reasons for believing why your unorthodox conjecture is true. Unfortunately, a disadvantage of needing to "sell" your conjecture to experimentalists as credible is that you have to start pushing it more strongly than the evidence warrants - and thus coming across as a crank. What I really want to say is: "Let's try to do the experiment."
* * *
Jessica, many thanks, I'm pretty sceptical of my conclusions too. My worry isn't that researchers will be sceptical; rather, it's they'll find the conclusion just too incredible to be worth experimentally falsifying - despite the poverty of alternatives. IMO, the key assumptions are 1) physicalism is true 2) phenomenal binding is classically inexplicable (here I agree with David Chalmers et al.) 3) the unitary Schrödinger dynamics of QM doesn't break down in the CNS, therefore neuronal superpositions are real. The last assumption (3 is weaker than pure Everett. Perhaps I'd have been wiser to restrict myself to the more modest claim. Few physicists anticipate any departure from the unitary dynamics for a virus (109 atoms): a "Schrödinger's virus" experiment is already planned (cf. http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090910/full/news.2009.903.html) If pressed, a majority - or at least a large minority - of investigators would (I guess) allow the reality of fleeting neuronal superpositions too, or be agnostic. Of course, the fleeting sub-femtosecond existence of neuronal superpositions (1014+ atoms) wouldn't - by itself - make our minds quantum computers. Intuitively, neuronal decoherence timescales are so insanely rapid - and decoherence is so insanely hard to control - that it’s hard to imagine that selection pressure could ever get to work in such a regime. Of course, I find it hard to imagine too – just not as hard to imagine as Chalmersian dualism.
"A teleological level"? Speaking literally, reality has only one ontological level, IMO. Our minds instantiate a tiny part of that level - the "fire" in the equations. However, for us to make sense of the world, not least for us to understand the CNS and non-biological computers, we need in practice to assume multiple compositional levels (physics, chemistry, biology, etc) and multiple levels of explanatory and computational abstraction. And yes, this explanatory handle can include invoking "tendencies". However, these levels all ultimately need to be "cashed out" in terms of fundamental physics. We can perform such a reduction, in principle, for programmable digital computers (otherwise humans couldn’t build and code them) and biological life (i.e. Darwin and the Modem Synthesis). But if neurons/neuronal micro-experiences are effectively classical, as we naively suppose, then local and global phenomenal binding would seem irreducible, even in principle, i.e. "strongly" emergent. Strong emergence would be a catastrophe for physicalism and the ontological unity of science.
Different algorithm, different qualia? Yes. The challenge would be testing such a claim. When speaking of quantum computer algorithms, we normally think, not of phenomenal binding to create perceptual objects, world-simulations and a unitary phenomenal self, but of e.g. Shor's algorithm for integer factorization - or some similar computational task. I imagine that integer factorization does feel subtly different depending on which quantum computer algorithm the futuristic information-processor in question is using. Alas I know no way to falsify such a speculation – unlike phenomenal-binding experiments using distributed neuronal feature-processors as outlined in the protocol described.
Are micro-qualia / micro-experiences a recipe for epiphenomenalism? Well, if experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then all experience, and only experience, has causal efficacy. In most contexts, the precise subjective character of the micro-experiences in question is computationally incidental. It’s irrelevant to our purposes whether the physical constituents of the fermionic fields making up a silicon microprocessor and a gallium arsenide microprocessor consist in qualitatively different (and effectively discrete) micro-experiences, or instead something wholly insentient, as we normally suppose. Either way, the physical is doing all the causal work. But the intrinsic nature of the physical is still obscure.
Are micro-qualia / micro-experience unintelligible? Well, perhaps consider everything from "grandmother cells", to microelectrode studies of awake verbal competent human subjects, to the eye of single-celled dinoflagellates - evolved (possibly) to help them see their prey better. The grisly roots of Darwinian life run deep.
(cf. http://www.sci-news.com/biology/science-warnowiid-dinoflagellate-plankton-eyes-02973.html)
What's unintelligible, in my view, isn't self-intimating micro-experiences, but rather the “emergence” of unitary local or globally bound macro-experience from a pack of classical neurons / neuronal "mind-dust".
Mercifully, experiment should (eventually) resolve the issue...
* * *
Holy Moses...
http://petrl.org/
("People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners. Promoting moral consideration for algorithms")
Abstractions like algorithms don't matter. Painful or pleasurable experiences do matter. We have no evidence that phenomenally-bound experience "emerges" at different levels of computational abstraction in a classical digital computer – or at least, not unless we are willing to abandon physicalism and the ontological unity of science. By analogy, let's suppose that all the skull-bound minds in the USA agree to participate in an experiment. They agree to implement any algorithm that one might wish, including an algorithm for, say, feeling jealous, having a migraine, undergoing a nightmare or a phantom-limb pain - anything at all. If, for example, individual skull-bound minds each undergo a pinprick of distress and reciprocally communicate - as rapidly as you like - does a suffering pan-continental subject of experience with a migraine "switch on"? How? Why? Or would the USA remain what it is now, i.e. a micro-experiential zombie, so to speak? Classical Turing machine functionalism has no resources to solve the phenomenal binding/combination problem.
How do organic minds, supposedly a mere “pack of neurons”, carry it off - and thus deserve moral consideration? Well, that's the story for another post...
Robert, IMO digital software no more needs subjective feelings than Deep Blue needs chess pieces with textures. Of course, only a minority of researchers share my view that classical digital computers will always be zombies - invincibly ignorant by their very nature, and incapable of investigating an immense range of questions of interest to a full-spectrum superintelligence.
But as the decades roll by, I do wonder whether more people will start asking why the zombies don't wake.
[cue for "How do you know that my PC / Alpha Dog / the Internet (etc) isn't conscious?"]
https://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/parable.html
Roeland, there is a large range of problems for which the particular subjective texture of consciousness is irrelevant. Equally, there is a large range of questions for which the particular subjective texture of consciousness is essential. A digital zombie can't explore and map out alien state-spaces of consciousness. For it's not a subject of experience. Naturally, if you're a mathematician, exploring the nature of consciousness will sound like some minor corner-case. If you're a professional psychonaut, such intellectual challenges will seem central.
Who is right? Well, I assume a full-spectrum superintelligence could tackle both classes of problem. But IMO that full-spectrum superintelligence won't be a classical digital zombie.
* * *
Mental Pseudopodia?
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/danaher20150118
("Neuroenhancement and the Extended Mind Hypothesis")
One's mind doesn't extend beyond one's (transcendental) skull when one is dreaming. Does it hop outside when one is awake? Conflating the conscious and the non-conscious by lumping them together as "mind" might be tempting. But in doing so, we muddy perhaps the most fundamental ontological distinction I know.
[It's worth mentioning that Andy Clark is a perceptual direct realist, which complicates the issue.]
* * *
Does reality have levels? This spatial metaphor comes naturally to us. We think of biology, chemistry and physics and the successes of reductionism. In computer science, we assume levels of abstraction - and nowadays often suppose that unitary phenomenal minds will in the future somehow "emerge" from these assumed levels of abstraction. Yet are "levels" of Nature ontologically real? Or is talk of "levels" just a methodologically and heuristically useful tool for us to gain some sort of conceptual handle on what's going on?
IMO, expecting levels of abstraction to generate bound phenomenal minds is hopeless. Better instead to assume that the superposition principle of quantum mechanics is universal; reality is mathematically described by a single gigantic wave function; and our bound phenomenal minds give us privileged access to the intrinsic, program-resistant, experiential "fire" in the equations whose behaviour the formalism of physics exhaustively describes.
* * *
Thanks Jordan! A couple of points. I lean towards strict finitism in maths and physics. So I'd probably use the expression "almost incomprehensibly large" - though still infinitesimally small compared to a notional infinite multiverse. Secondly, I feel a bit bad because all the mathematical spadework for approximate decoherence timescales in the CNS [assuming the unitary dynamics] is cribbed straight from Max Tegmark. Alas nobody who denies that the phenomenal binding problem is SERIOUS if physicalism is to be saved is likely to give such unorthodox neuroscience more than a cursory glance. Until recently, I assumed that the conjecture was just a philosophical flight of fancy. Reading e.g. Maximilian Schlosshauer on experimental progress in the decoherence program helped me realise we are dealing with a potentially empirically falsifiable hypothesis.
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/PDF/infinity_newsci_130815.pdf
https://www.hedweb.com/physicalism/appendix.html
http://www.springer.com/physics/quantum+physics/book/978-3-540-35773-5
* * *
Brian Tomasik on Tegmark's Level IV:
http://reducing-suffering.org/why-does-physics-exist/#Appendix_Tegmarks_ultimate_ensemble_without_objective_measure
We have tentative, provisional experimental evidence that Everett is correct. The unitary dynamics of QM never breaks down; the world exists as a single vast superposition. However, there are no quasi-classical "branches" of the multiverse where Jesus is the Son of God (etc). Nor have we any evidence to support the existence of Tegmark's Level IV, or the falsity of nominalism / reality of abstract objects. (cf. http://www.amazon.com/Science-Without-Numbers-Defence-Nominalism/dp/0691072604) & http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/arche/old/pages/papers/Benacerraf's%20Dilemma.pdf) This doesn’t stop frailer spirits (like me) often succumbing to the finitist analogue of "infinitarian paralysis". Thus 10350(?)(?) life-supporting Everett “branches” puts the notorious "global poverty is a rounding error" comment reported by the VOX EA conference article (cf. http://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9124145/effective-altruism-global-ai) in perspective. I take seriously the possibility that EA may indeed involve computer science research - what are the theoretical upper cosmological bounds to moral agency? - though not the kind of Turing machine functionalism that views consciousness as purely epiphenomenal. (If this were so, then consciousness couldn’t have the causal efficacy to allow us to discuss its existence - as now. The distinction between the formal and subjective properties of mind can’t be entirely clean.)
Amit, thanks, well, it's true that some of what we take to be the laws of physics may be only bylaws. But there aren't quasi-classical Everett “branches” where a civilisation of dragons exists at the heart of the sun, nor where any of the world's religions is true; they all contain disguised logical contradictions and physical impossibilities. Re wild animal suffering: yes, if you tell anyone that sentient beings shouldn't harm each other, then they'll almost always assume you're a utopian dreamer and ecologically illiterate. But predation, starvation and indeed experience below hedonic zero will shortly be technically optional in our forward light-cone.
* * *
Neuronal superpositions interest me more than feline superpositions:
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-wavefunction-schroedinger-cat.html
("Researchers describe the wavefunction of Schrödinger's cat")
Researchers who work on the measurement problem in QM and philosophers of mind baffled by the phenomenal binding/combination problem don't normally cross-fertilise. But IMO the two problems are inseparable. The "Schrodinger’s neurons" solution I reluctantly favour doesn’t involve any new physics, i.e. modifying or supplementing the unitary dynamics of QM à la Penrose. Rather, a "Schrödinger’s neurons" conjecture treats what is intuitively a reductio ad absurdum of quantum mind, i.e. sub-femtosecond decoherence times of superpositions of distributed neuronal feature-processors, as instead an experimentally falsifiable prediction – a prediction which if confirmed via the interferometry experiment outlined would silence even the most implacable critic of quantum mind.
Of course, that’s a very big “if”….
* * *
"Nothing" can't exist and could never exist. In that limited sense, I think critics who lazily dismiss the question as meaningless are right. However, what is the default condition from which any notional departure stands in need of explanation? Could our existence be a disguised implication of the default condition?
Intuitively, one wants to say this default condition is there shouldn't be any properties, objects or events. For the existence of properties entails something being one way rather than another, i.e. creation of information. And what could explain the creation of information ex nihilo? The default condition from which any notional departure stands in need of explanation should be no information. And here we come to the connection with modern physics rather than "just" philosophy. A fundamental principle of quantum physics is that information can neither be created nor destroyed. Max Tegmark asks "Does the universe in fact contain almost no information?"
http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9603008v1.pdf
I just go one step further. What would be the case if the information content of reality is necessarily zero? In the spirit of Dr Johnson (cf. http://www.samueljohnson.com/refutati.html), it's tempting to respond e.g. "Look, I can see a cat in front of my eyes, ergo the information content of reality can't be zero!"
But it's not that simple...
https://www.quora.com/What-did-really-happen-with-the-schrodingers-cat/answer/David-Pearce-18
Are digital zombies going to "wake up" and start requesting pain-killers and anaesthetics? Sure, even now we could rig them up with voice-synthesisers; program them to fake subjective distress; and make them emit hard-rending pleas for pain-relief when sprinkled with sulphuric acid, digital or otherwise. But unlike sentient organic minds, classical silicon robots won't spontaneously seek pain-killers. Their CPUs don't support phenomenally bound subjects of experience. How and why organic minds support phenomenal binding is of course a controversial topic.
* * *
David, as you know, "materialistic" physicalists [and philosophically-minded scientists] aren't unaware of the problem of giving primacy to contemporary physics - and thereby committing themselves to a possibly false ontology. Particles, fields and superstrings/branes all have their partisans. But a majority of scientists today find the idea that the "fire" in the equations is experiential rather than non-experiential in character is so implausible as scarcely to be worth explicitly disavowing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempel's_dilemma
* * *
Bonnitta, many thanks. [yes, thanks Jordan and Vanessa, Bonnitta's quote is from my paper above. Brian Tomasik's views are closer to Daniel Dennett than my physicalistic idealism.] The lame, boring and honest answer is: I don't know. The key is surely to extract a novel falsifiable prediction - and find a team of experimentalists willing to suspend disbelief long enough to take on the challenge. Presumably, a cultured neuronal network with a suitable input/output device could be "trained up" to recognise various externally presented objects. Routine neural scanning can then pick out [what we would classically describe as] the synchronously activated distributed neuronal feature-processors elicited by any given stimulus, i.e. textbook connectionist neuroscience but using real neurons rather than tendentiously named "artificial neural networks" and their standard statistical learning algorithms. Next comes the fiendishly hard part - beyond the reach of present-day interferometry if [as I'm assuming] "dynamical collapse” theorists are mistaken. Instead of finding "nonsense" neuronal superpositions, the conjecture predicts we'll preferentially discover the signature of successive sub-femtosecond neuronal macro-superpositions implicating exactly the neuronal feature-processors of the synchronously activated neurons that a classical neuroscience story reports are activated in the trained-up neuronal network when object-recognition occurs. The conjecture will be falsified if - and this route to falsification is more credible IMO than any breakdown of the unitary dynamics – the indirectly experimentally-detected neuronal superpositions disclose nothing but incoherent psychotic noise – as functionally meaningless as naïve intuition about such ridiculously rapid thermally-induced decoherence timescales would suggest.
Is such an experiment really do-able this side of Doomsday? Speaking as an armchair physicist, I think so.
Plan B?
I don't really have one...
http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf
http://www.academia.edu/3827581/Why_panpsychism_doesnt_help_explain_consciousness
Quantum woo? "Classical" can be worse. How quasi-classicality emerges from the underlying formalism of QFT is poorly understood. Consciousness is mysterious too. Do the two mysteries somehow cancel each other out? Materialists hope so. But how or why is unclear.
* * *
"Scientism"? David, yes, guilty I guess. But only provisionally. If it transpires our bound phenomenal states of mind really are missing from the formalism of our best scientific theory of the world, then materialistic and non-materialistic physicalism alike are false.
Experiment? Well, there are good experiments and bad experiments. Ideally, a conjecture should yield novel, specific, falsifiable predictions. Ideally, the outcome of a well-designed experiment should falsify - or confirm - a conjecture to the satisfaction of proponents and critics alike. Conversely, to use your example, discovering - or failing to discover - classically inexplicable quantum phenomena at nerve terminals and calcium ion channels neither confirms not falsifies dualism. By contrast, the outcome of the experiment I outline will either falsify or confirm the conjecture about phenomenal binding to the satisfaction of both proponent and critic. Which of the two negative outcomes of the interferometry experiment described most critics would bet on, I'm not sure. But if your theory predicts unicorns living at the bottom of the garden and we robustly find unicorns, then such a discovery is strong grounds for provisionally accepting the theory as true. Assuming, that is, one recovers from the shock...
* * *
Whether you're a femto-mind, atto-mind or zepto-mind, life is short...
http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/quantum-mechanics-is-putting-human-identity-on-trial
("Quantum Mechanics Is Putting Human Identity on Trial")
A nice piece; for "flaunt" read flout.
* * *
At least one of our presuppositions or background assumptions about consciousness must be wrong. But which one(s)?
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness
("Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?")
Kevin, it's not that Kurzweilian fusion of humans and digital intelligence is undesirable, but rather (IMO) technically infeasible. Likewise a full-spectrum digital super-AGI as envisaged by MIRI. “You insist that there is something that a machine can't do. If you will tell me precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that”, said von Neumann. Yet there are countless tasks beyond the wit of digital zombies - not least the investigation of the “program-resistant” subjective properties of bound phenomenal minds investigated by psychonauts like Sasha Shulgin. (cf. https://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/parable.html)
Dominic, I'd agree with you about alien minds, both natural and artificial, biological and nonbiological. Where I'm (probably) in a minority is my disbelief that classical serial digital computers, or classically parallel connectionist systems, will ever be subjects of experience, i.e. back to our old friend the phenomenal binding problem. By contrast, the properties of nonbiological quantum computers, superintelligent organic minds and hybrid systems centuries and millennia hence may well be incomprehensible to us.
* * *
What is the relationship between sapience and sentience? There are - or rather soon will be - ultra-intelligent digital zombies that can (behaviourally) surpass sentient organic minds in countless cognitive domains. Conversely, there are already countless highly sentient but stupid organic minds. However, what we may call full-spectrum superintelligence will (IMO) necessarily be both highly sapient and highly sentient because only a sentient & sapient cognitive agent can investigate the diverse properties of sentience. Unfortunately, we don't yet have any formal computational description of how such a cognitive capacity is even physically possible. Indeed, if the distinction between the formal and the "program-resistant" subjective properties of mind were entirely clean, then we wouldn't physically be able to allude to these subjective properties in the first instance.
* * *
A cognitive super-elite? Possibly. But the price of genome- and epigenome-editing is bound to collapse. And what will be the ramifications for ethics and decision-theoretic rationality - and libertarian individualism! - when technologies of “mind-melding” via reversible thalamic bridges and naturalised telepathy come on tap later this century and beyond? We shouldn't assume that smarter minds will always want to exploit simpler minds rather than help them.
Can DARPA's "cortical modem" promote universal empathy?
http://hplusmagazine.com/2015/02/15/biology-technology-darpa-back-game-big-vision-h/
* * *
Ending suffering via ending life? No one seems to have taxed Gautama Buddha with this intuitively knock-down criticism of his brand of abolitionist ethics. Nor are specialists in chronic pain treatment reproached for not putting patients out of their misery. Even the minority of ethicists who care only about reducing suffering might be well advised to support enshrining the sanctity of life in the law - just as classical utilitarians would do well to support an absolute legal prohibition on torture even in “ticking bomb” scenarios. Given human frailties, not having such safeguards in place risks a worse outcome in the long run.
Hedonic recalibration? The world is full of folk with mutually inconsistent nostrums about how to make the world a happier place. How does one reconcile the logically irreconcilable? I don't know. To choose a deliberately trivial example, what would an analogue of MIRI's Coherent Extrapolated Volition amount to for supporters of all the world's different football teams? Generalised, the problem is immeasurably larger. Hedonic enrichment and set-point recalibration doesn't promise to solve all the world's problems. However, being constitutionally “better than well” does underwrite anyone's - and potentially everyone's - subjective quality of life. More likely, perhaps, is that the lessons of hedonic set-point theory are ignored. A century from now, will our successors be having angst-ridden “Why are we so angst-ridden?” debates? I wouldn't be surprised.
* * *
[Ziv Hellman writes] "But the zombies question still exercises me. Consider a Star Trek transporter thought experiment. The transporter reconstructs Captain Kirk, atom by atom, on a planet surface. Is the reconstructed Kirk conscious? If yes, is it just because of the neural circuitry or was something non-physical also transported? Or is the reconstructed Kirk a zombie?"
Ziv, if consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then Captain Kirk is conscious precisely in virtue of his atom-by-atom reconstitution on the planet surface. Nothing non-physical - such as the spooky non-experiential "stuff" of materialist metaphysics - is transported.
Even so, might the reconstituted Captain Kirk be a "micro-experiential zombie" to use Phil Goff's term? After all, the apparent “structural mismatch” between our bound phenomenal minds and the ostensible microstructure of the brain is what finally tilts David [Chalmers] away from the conjecture that consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical towards his naturalistic dualism. (cf. http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf) However, the very reason that most people balk at the idea that consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, namely that the proposal makes the fundamental "psychons" of consciousness ludicrously small, also contains the germ of a solution to the phenomenal binding problem – and better, a novel empirically falsifiable conjecture that can be vindicated or refuted with the tools of next-generation interferometry.
In brief, unless the unitary dynamics of QM breaks down in the brain, next-generation interferometry will detect the sub-femtosecond signature of quantum-coherent neuronal superpositions in the mind-brain in the guise of quantum interference effects AND these indirectly detected quantum-coherent neuronal superpositions will robustly implicate all and only the synchronously firing feature-mediating neurons that orthodox neuroscience reveals are activated when individual phenomenally bound objects are perceived by the subject.
On this view, phenomenal binding isn't optional: it's physically inevitable – and experimentally demonstrable with Starfleet's interferometers. Reconstituted Captain Kirk will be fine.
* * *
Assume, as seems increasingly likely, that Penrose and other “dynamical collapse” theorists are mistaken. The continuing success of the decoherence program experimentally confirms that the unitary dynamics of QM doesn't break down in the brain. What follows for consciousness? Approximate decoherence timescales in the CNS can be calculated. Sub-femtosecond decoherence timescales of neuronal superpositions would seem to rule out any non-classical account of complex consciousness.
Yet is this claim an empirical discovery – or just an intuitively plausible assumption? If by “complex consciousness“ we mean serial logico-linguistic thought-episodes, not least mathematical reasoning, then durations of hundreds of milliseconds and more would seem to disqualify the computational relevance of ultra-rapidly “destroyed” [i.e. lost to the environment in a thermodynamically irreversible way] neuronal superpositions. But what if by “complex consciousness” we mean phenomenal binding into perceptual objects via distributed neuronal feature-processors? Synchronous firing of discrete membrane-bound classical neurons / Jamesian “mind-dust” doesn't yield the unitary perceptual objects of our everyday world-simulations. Hence David Chalmers naturalistic dualism. At most, we should be micro-experiential zombies (cf. http://www.academia.edu/3827581/Why_panpsychism_doesnt_help_explain_consciousness)
On the face of it, sub-femtosecond superpositions of distributed neuronal feature-processors are irrelevant to local and global phenomenal binding too. After all, we perceive our local environment with a time-lag of scores of milliseconds, not picoseconds or less. But such an objection presupposes an untenable direct realist theory of perception. When we're awake, input from the optic nerve (etc) updates [from our finite neuronal menu] the contents of our world-simulations with a time-lag of scores of milliseconds. But such timescales say nothing about the phenomenal simplicity or complexity of the successive neuronal superpositions themselves.
So assuming Penrose is mistaken, what's it like to instantiate 1015 +per second quantum coherent superpositions of distributed neuronal feature processors? How does the experience differ from what you're undergoing right now?
Fortunately, such a conjecture will be empirically falsifiable with the tools of next-generation interferometry.
* * *
Is neuroexistentialism based on false metaphysics?
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2013/12/the_self_as_brain_disturbing_implications_of_neuroexistentialism.html
"Yes, Neural Chemistry Is Really Just the Love You Feel for Your Child"
An impoverished conception of the intrinsic nature of the physical is the bane of contemporary neuroscience.
* * *
What will experiment detect when interferometry can probe the kind of sub-femtosecond timescales at which theory predicts neuronal superpositions should exist?
1) a) no interference effects, i.e. the superposition principle breaks down in the CNS. This is what Penrose and Hameroff; Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber; and others would predict.
or
b) the tell-tale non-classical interference signature that the unitary dynamics predicts.
IF b) is the case, then will the sub-picosecond neuronal superpositions detected be:
2) a) functionally irrelevant psychotic noise, of no more relevance to the phenomenology of our bound phenomenal minds than, say, fleeting sub-picosecond superpositions of pawns to the gameplay in a chess match.
or
b) a perfect structural match that implicates all and only the synchronously firing feature-mediating neurons that orthodox neuroscience reveals are activated when individual phenomenally bound objects are perceived by the experimental subject?
I'm guessing b) in both cases. But the answer (alas!) seems unlikely to be resolved by the a priori philosophising of armchair physicists and FB neurophilosophers but by experiment.
Perhaps see too:
http://www.bostonneuropsa.net/PDF%20Files/Mashour/quantumbinding.pdf
("The Cognitive Binding Problem: From Kant to Quantum Neurodynamics")
* * *
Yes, John Baez's cruel but witty "Crackpot Index" repays reading by armchair physicists:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
But back to the substantive issue. David Chalmers claims that neither classical nor quantum physics can explain phenomenal binding, so we must embrace dualism.
http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf
Max Tegmark delivers what is widely accounted a reductio ad absurdum of quantum mind by calculating approximate decoherence timescales in the CNS - though unfortunately without recognising why phenomenal binding is a horrendously serious problem for physicalism. (cf. https://www.physicalism.com/quantum-computer.pdf)
All I'm doing is urging that instead of treating it as obvious that these sub-femtosecond decoherence timescales for neuronal are computationally and phenomenally irrelevant to unitary mind, we do the necessary experiments when "Schrödinger's cat states" can be scaled up from fullerenes to neurons - most likely via "trained up" in vitro neuronal networks rather than using live subjects.
Which of the experimental outcomes I listed in my comment above will we discover?
And if the conjecture is falsified?
Well, the disgrace in science isn't being wrong; it's being "not even wrong".
* * *
"...and then an unexplained miracle occurs" doesn't have the same ring
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-03-network-theory-consciousness.html
("Network theory sheds new light on origins of consciousness
Where in your brain do you exist?")
Mice have minds; digital computers have programs:
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/59764-intelligence-unbound-the-future-of-uploaded-and-machine-minds/
("Intelligence Unbound: The Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds")
Single cells are often reckoned the smallest credible "psychons" of consciousness; but may some single-celled microorganisms support evolutionarily advanced sentience?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150701133348.htm
("Human-like 'eye' in single-celled plankton: Mitochondria, plastids evolved together")
* * *
Jera, immensely complicated information-processing systems from the financial markets to ecosystems to software executed on today's digital computers are not subjects of experience. Or rather, if they are subjects of experience, then "strong" emergence is true. If "strong" emergence is true, then kiss goodbye to the ontological unity of science. By contrast, some extremely simple states involving minimal information-processing e.g. uncontrollable panic or orgasmic bliss, are exceedingly intense. If one is a materialist rather than a Strawsonian physicalist, and/or if one believes that neuronal networks function merely as classically parallel information-processing systems rather than successive, ultra-rapidly decohering quantum superpositions, then the spectre of "strong" emergence looms for phenomenally bound biological minds too.
Background assumptions? One fundamental and extremely plausible assumption is that whatever "breathes fire into the equations" of physics is something intrinsically non-experiential in character. Another extremely plausible assumption is that nervous systems are too "warm, wet and noisy" for the superposition principle of QM to be computationally or phenomenally relevant to the local or global phenomenal binding of our minds. But other researchers are willing to explore other options - ranging from Chalmersian dualism to radical eliminativism: an option I refuse to take seriously until its proponents start refusing anaesthesia.
* * *
If consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical - the elusive "fire" in the equations - then zombies are physically impossible. Monistic physicalism is true. Conscious states have the causal capacity to talk about their own existence. Of course, most of us have an extremely strong intuition that the "fire" in the equations is non-experiential in character. But this is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific discovery.
* * *
The esoteric-sounding term "qualia" has been an intellectual disaster for philosophy. I catch myself using it - the term is endemic to the literature - but saying the "raw feels" of experience would be preferable. Radical eliminativism about "qualia" sounds an intellectually respectable position. Radical eliminativism about the "raw feels" of pain or terror sounds (as is) absurd.
IMO the twentieth-century divorce between science and professional philosophy was a misfortune for both. Compare how the naïve positivism of Copenhagen held back progress in quantum theory for half a century - or the (sometimes) unhelpful role of falsification police in debate over M-theory and the Landscape today. Or how traditional scientific materialism has no explanation of why we're not p-zombies. Or how most scientists are innocent of the challenge to physicalism posed by the phenomenal binding problem. Of course, a practising scientist could point to toe-curling examples of the scientific ignorance of academic philosophers. I'm just saying that the idea that by not exploring "philosophical" issues one is somehow able to transcend philosophy is naïve.
* * *
...That's one reason (I've belatedly come to realise) why some sort of decisive experiment is so critical.
A negative result from the experiment described (6 cleanly falsifies the account of phenomenal binding (and the intrinsic nature of the physical) I defend.
End of story.
Assuming such a negative outcome, I haven't really wrapped my head around the implications for the abolitionist project.
If bound phenomenal consciousness is (sometimes) a property of classical or quasi-classical systems, then we should presumably be worrying about digital sentience, the fate of mind uploads, the suffering of smart prostheses and much else besides - basically Brian Tomasik's perspective, as I understand it. I guess staying open-minded is the key - it's what stops the merely unorthodox from becoming cranks.
* * *
Jera, when you are in a dreamless sleep, you are for all practical purposes nothing over-and-above a pack of neurons - or (IMO) a population neuronal "mind-dust". When you awake, somehow you - unlike the skull-bound population of the USA - become a unitary subject of experience. But "unitary" here does not mean seamless. Your visual field, for example, can support multiple bound dynamic objects running around on a football pitch. And other modalities of experience are integrated into your world-simulation too, e.g. the chanting of the crowd. "Seamless" consciousness that was undifferentiated would be functionally useless.
Quantum mind theories can be divided, crudely, into those that do (cf. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188) and those that don't invoke a physically real "collapse of the wave function”. Both yield testable consequences. However, it's easier experimentally to falsify any conjecture like Penrose's Orch-OR that proposes modifying the unitary dynamics of QM with some kind of indeterministic and irreversible wave function collapse.
Orch-OR? Chris, my main worries are conceptual: it's a semi-classical account of mind. Binding is mentioned, but only in passing.
The crux is I don't understand how mere intra-neuronal quantum coherence and (hypothetical) gravitationally-induced self-collapse can explain local or global phenomenal binding. Even if some version of Penrose's gravitational conjecture were correct, then (as far as I can tell) the upshot would still be patterns of classical Jamesian neuronal “mind-dust”. Or in other words, even if consciousness is fundamental to the world, we'd still be micro-experiential zombies, to use Phil Goff's term. The authors are quite explicit: “neural firings are entirely classical”. And for sure, if instead of Orch-OR we assume the unitary dynamics, then credible decoherence times for neuronal superpositions of distributed feature-processors - let alone pan-cerebral global phenomenal binding – are (intuitively) absurdly short: a dozen or more orders of magnitude too rapid to be relevant to the timescales over which consciousness is typically supposed to "emerge".
By contrast, if we assume the unsupplemented, unmodified unitary dynamics, and if we assume that consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then phenomenal binding is integral. Decoherence is the story of ultra-rapid phenomenal unbinding. Synchrony is really superposition. Evolution via natural selection explains why statistically it's not psychotic binding...
* * *
Felix, sorry, "Strawsonian physicalism" is a conjecture about the intrinsic nature of the physical, i.e. the elusive "fire" in the equations that mystifies even outspoken materialists like Stephen Hawking ["What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?"]
An extremely plausible assumption is that this intrinsic nature is non-experiential: i.e. mathematical physics exhaustively describes fields (or branes, etc) of insentience. Any version of physicalism that makes this plausible assumption is a cousin of traditional materialism. Hence the seemingly insoluble Hard Problem of consciousness that plagues materialist metaphysics. However, a minority of scientifically literate philosophers, notably Galen Strawson but anticipated by Michael Lockwood, Grover Maxwell, Russell and ultimately Schopenhauer, are prepared to drop this assumption without giving up on the causal closure and completeness of (tomorrow's) physics. What follows, they ask, if the tiny part of the world one instantiates isn't ontologically different from the rest of the natural world, but instead discloses its intrinsic physical nature – the mysterious “fire” in the equations?
David Chalmers flirts with this idea. But Chalmers believes that the conjecture founders on the structural mismatch between our phenomenally bound minds and the microstructure of the brain. How can a pack of discrete, membrane-bound, essentially classical neurons be anything other than discrete pixels of classical “mind-dust"? Scan the brain of a waking/ dreaming subject, and no bound phenomenal objects are found, just synchronously active distributed neuronal feature-processors. Chalmers maintains that even if Strawson et al. are correct about the intrinsic nature of the physical, neither classical not quantum physics allow a derivation of the properties of our bound phenomenal minds – of either “local” phenomenal binding (individual perceptual objects) or “global” phenomenal binding (the fleeting unity of perception and the synchronous unity of the self) Either way, monistic physicalism fails.
This is too quick IMO. In common with most researchers, Chalmers makes an extremely plausible assumption, namely that the timescales relevant to the phenomenal binding of synchronously firing distributed neuronal feature-processors are milliseconds or more. Despite the efforts of Penrose, Hameroff and others to demonstrate how microtubules might sustain macroscopic quantum coherence for the milliseconds or so typically presumed needed to be of any phenomenal or computational relevance to conscious mind, most physicists and neuroscientists find these multi-millisecond timescales unfeasibly long in an environment as “warm, wet and noisy” as the brain.
So let's assume that Penrose and other dynamical collapse theorists are mistaken about modifying the unitary dynamics of QM. Timescales of e.g. neuronal superpositions of distributed feature-processors in the CNS can be calculated (e.g. by quantum mind critic Max Tegmark and others). These timescales are ridiculously short, perhaps femtoseconds or less. Plainly, brain states that last femtoseconds can't be conscious! Or so we might assume. However, if consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then the fundamental units of experience must be not just ludicrously small, but ludicrously short-lived too. And at such ludicrously fine-grained temporal resolutions, coherent superpositions of neuronal feature-detectors cannot be interpreted as classical ensembles of states. Coherent neuronal superpositions describe individual physical states. If consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then some form of phenomenal binding isn't optional, but inevitable – whether “psychotic” binding, as naively seems most plausible, or alternatively, the perfect structural match between the formal and subjective properties of mind whose ostensible absence drives David Chalmers to dualism.
Who is right? Well, we could philosophise about it - my own temperamental preference! Alternatively, we could attempt experimentally to falsify the conjecture with the tools of next-generation interferometry.
* * *
Michael, apologies, physics throughout much of the twentieth century was dominated by a philosophy of positivism. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, we must postulate a fundamental dualism between a microscopic quantum realm and a macroscopic classical realm. When we don't observe a physical system, the system evolves according to the continuous, linear, unitary and deterministic Schrödinger equation. But when humans (and cats?) make an observation, there supposedly occurs a physically unexplained "collapse of the wavefunction" - in the case of Schrödinger's famous cat-experiment, a collapse of the superposition onto one of its two component states.
A lot of modern work in QM does away with the projection postulate. We must instead consider the observer in physical terms as a macroscopic quantum system interacting with the cat. Perhaps see Wojciech Zurek below on "Quantum Darwinism". But the key insight was provided by Hugh Everett way back in 1956.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hugh-everett-biography/
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.5206.pdf (Zurek)
A nice overview of Zurek:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1001/1001.0745.pdf
("Quantum Darwinism as a Darwinian process")
* * *
Chris, thanks. If the conjecture is false, I seriously doubt it will be because the unitary dynamics breaks down in the CNS. More likely, I suppose, is a failure of the second prediction, i.e. the indirectly detected quantum coherent neuronal superpositions will robustly implicate all and only the synchronously firing feature-mediating neurons that orthodox neuroscience reveals are activated when individual phenomenally bound objects are perceived. Even if you take Everett and Strawson AND the phenomenal binding problem seriously, then designing the protocol for an experiment that you assume will yield nothing more interesting than noise in a digital computer CPU is hard to motivate.
* * *
What does consciousness do? Given the presumed causal closure and completeness of physics, how is any sort of causal efficacy for consciousness even possible? What could conceivably cause us to talk about consciousness – a physical impossibility if consciousness were epiphenomenal?
Some philosophers and scientists believe mysteries of consciousness are natural in origin but unfathomable by the human mind. (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_mysterianism)
Maybe they are right.
But IF experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then all consciousness, and only consciousness, has causal efficacy. On this conjecture, there is nonetheless a difference between information-processing systems where the textures (“raw feels”) of consciousness are computationally incidental - your PC can be made of silicon or gallium arsenide – and biological organisms endowed with states of consciousness that have a built-in proto-functionality. The prime example here is states of the pleasure-pain axis. Its proto-functional properties have been recruited by natural selection and “encephalised”.
ET will not have an inverted pleasure-pain axis.
None of the above is intended to suggest that classical digital computers are - or ever will be - unitary subjects of experience. Regular readers of this FB group will know my views on the significance of the phenomenal binding problem and the need experimentally to probe the properties of quantum coherent neuronal superpositions over what are intuitively irrelevantly short timescales: https://www.physicalism.com
Any scientifically-minded reader will want to cut through the philosophical verbiage and focus on the absurd-sounding but experimentally falsifiable prediction. For the technical challenges involved in such an experiment, perhaps see "Toward Quantum Superposition of Living Organisms":
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0909.1469v3.pdf
Laura, instead of superpositions of a live-and-dead cat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger%27s_cat
think of a successive superpositions of feature-processing neurons - where each individual phenomenally-bound superposition is "destroyed" (lost for all practical purposes in a thermodynamically irreversible way to the extra-neural environment) over sub-femtosecond timescales. More poetically, think of yourself as akin to a movie running at around 1015 quantum coherent frames-per-second.
Some background: here is David Chalmers on why the phenomenal binding problem is so fundamental if the ontological unity of science is to be saved:
http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf
(and http://www.bostonneuropsa.net/PDF%20Files/Mashour/quantumbinding.pdf)
A smart, scientifically literate guy like David Chalmers doesn't concede defeat and surrender monistic physicalism lightly.
Max Tegmark on why well-known "dynamical collapse" quantum mind theories like Orch-OR are so unpromising:
https://www.physicalism.com/quantum-computer.pdf
Alas in contrast to Chalmers, Tegmark doesn't recognise the significance of the phenomenal binding problem.
The conjecture I explore in Daniel's link simply treats Tegmark's reductio ad absurdum of quantum mind as an empirically falsifiable prediction - though note that the hypothetical detection via next-generation interferometry of successive sub-picosecond neuronal superpositions of distributed feature-processors in the CNS won't, by itself, prove the conjecture. For the conjecture to be experimentally vindicated, these indirectly detected quantum coherent neuronal superpositions must robustly implicate all and only the synchronously firing feature-mediating neurons that standard neuroscience says are activated when individual phenomenally bound objects are perceived.
* * *
Laura, yes, it's useful to distinguish "local" phenomenal binding from "global" phenomenal binding - i.e. the binding of what textbook neuroscience says are distributed feature-processors into individual objects from the global unity of perception and the entire virtual world-simulation that one instantiates. Decoherence times for individual superpositions of the entire mind-brain (perhaps attoseconds or less) are much more rapid than for individual local neuronal superpositions. However, IF consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, and IF the unitary dynamics of QM doesn't break down in the mind-brain, then the problem isn't explaining the existence of phenomenal binding. Rather, the problem is explaining why it's not nonsensical "psychotic" binding. Psychotic binding wouldn't yield the vital structural match between our phenomenal minds and the structural-relational description of physics - the seeming absence of which drives David Chalmers to his counsel of despair: dualism.
The answer I'd give is set within the framework of "quantum Darwinism" laid out by one of pioneers of the decoherence program in post-Everett quantum mechanics, Wojciech Zurek (cf. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1001.0745v1.pdf for a nice appraisal of Zurek.) I could now go off on a rather speculative spiel. But I'd rather focus on the critical experiment that will make-or-break this entire approach to conscious mind. Experiments using live human subjects are presumably impossible for the foreseeable future. However, cultured in vitro neuronal networks should suffice. Let's first "train up" a multilayer neuronal network with a suitable output device to recognise a variety of inputs. Then, identify the distributed neuronal feature-processors implicated in diverse object-recognition on a standard, classically parallel connectionist account. Next comes the technically challenging part. Penrose, GRW, and other dynamical collapse theorists will presumably predict that interferometry won't find the tell-tale non-classical interference effects at all. Theorists who do endorse the unitary dynamics of QM but not quantum mind will predict we'll find the interference effects alright - but all we'll discover from the fleeting neuronal superpositions they signify is psychotic noise. Thermally-induced decoherence in the CNS is too strong for any kind of selection pressure to get to work. Selection pressure has turned plants into quantum computers, we are told, but not organic brains. You know what I predict. But instead of getting a reputation for peddling quantum consciousness "woo", I'd rather some ingenious experimentalist takes up the gauntlet that David Chalmers has thrown down to traditional materialists and Strawsonian physicalists alike.
Neuronal versus digital thalamic bridges? IF the conjecture I explore is correct, then the "mind-melding" of twins and our technically sophisticated successors consists in fleeting, non-psychotic neuronal superpositions. Severing the thalamic connection causes a loss of coherence [i.e. the ordering of the phase angles between the component neurons in the superposition] to the environment in a (for all practical purposes) thermodynamically irreversible way. Hence no more shared consciousness. By contrast, digital computers can't [non-psychotically] phenomenally bind. The superposition principle doesn't break down in the CPU of your PC or a futuristic digital thalamic bridge but in such a context it's just computationally irrelevant "noise".
* * *
Karn, most researchers balk at the proposal that consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical because intuitively it makes the fundamental quanta of experience too small. For Chalmers, however, it's the impossibility of a quantum-theoretic or classical account of phenomenal binding that's ultimately decisive against monistic physicalism. But if consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, and if the superposition principle holds in the CNS, then local and global phenomenal binding is inevitable. We just need to test (via tomorrow's interferometry) whether such phenomenal binding is nonsensical "psychotic" binding - because neuronal superpositions decohere too rapidly for any quantum Darwinian selection process ever to have got off the ground - or alternatively, whether individual neuronal superpositions deliver the perfect structural match between phenomenal mind and brain whose alleged absence drives Chalmers to dualism.
Professor Jack Tuszynski of the University of Alberta puts it nicely, albeit in the context of a Penrose-style "dynamical collapse" theory of QM: “If a potato or rutabaga can utilize quantum coherence, it's likely our brains could have figured it out as well.”
(cf. http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v10/n9/full/nphys3017.html).
* * *
What's sorely needed are theories of consciousness that make novel, specific, experimentally testable predictions. Claims like Eric Schwitzgebel's proposal that a "holon" such as the USA is a subject of experience
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-130208.htm
can't be disproved. But such "strong" emergence is akin to magic. Unless all else fails, let's not give up on physicalism and the ontological unity of science.
Another proposal is that consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical - the elusive "fire" in the equations about whose intrinsic character physics is silent. The stumbling-block here is the binding problem. Our waking / dreaming minds are, in Daniel's sense, "holons". Yet neither classical nor quantum physics can seemingly account for the local or global phenomenal binding of our everyday experience. Thus even if consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, and even if membrane-bound neurons do support rudimentary consciousness, then we should at most be Jamesian "mind dust" - micro-experiential zombies, so to speak. See: http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf ("The Combination Problem for Panpsychism" by David Chalmers) & http://www.academia.edu/3827581/Why_panpsychism_doesnt_help_explain_consciousness ("Why panpsychism doesn't help explain consciousness" by Phil Goff).
And here at last we have scope for a novel, specific, experimentally testable prediction. I don't claim that the weird conjecture I outline below is true:
physicalism.com
But it deserves to be experimentally falsified.
Most scientifically literate readers will find the conjecture that sub-femtosecond neuronal superpositions are the signature of phenomenal binding is simply absurd, or at least desperately counterintuitive. I certainly hope so: conjectures that predict merely that the sun will rise tomorrow don't readily lend themselves to empirical falsification.
So to answer Daniel's question, my working assumption is that all "holons", and only "holons" are conscious - and what counts as a "holon" is determined entirely by our best theory of the world, quantum field theory. [minus the mythical "collapse of the wave function"]
* * *
Life without binding:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/system-crashes-will-forestall-the-robot-apocalypse/
("System Crashes Will Forestall the Robot Apocalypse")
See too:
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/16/the-distributed-brainpower-of-social-insects/
* * *
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-07-fruit-bugging.html
("The fruit fly may know it's bugging you")
Clearly, we must prioritise. Comparisons are invidious, but a welfare state for insects is not high on our list of ethical priorities. However, tomorrow's utopian technology can in principle safeguard the well-being of even the humblest creatures. In the meantime, let's focus on vertebrates, including humans.
* * *
Dave, I agree with you in my bones, so to speak, that dualism is a dead end. As a wave function monist (cf. Alyssa May and David Albert's "The Wave Function: Essays on the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics"), IMO the ubiquity of the superposition principle in QM explains everything from the mystery of why anything exists at all (only the superposition principle of post-Everett QM is consistent with an informationless zero ontology; the information content of the universal anything-tor is zero: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.8447v1.pdf) to the properties of our bound phenomenal minds. (If the superposition principle broke down in the CNS, then the classical world-simulation that you run couldn't exist: you'd simply be patterns of discrete, decohered, neuronal mind-dust: a micro-experiential zombie.)
However, I wouldn't take such speculation too seriously in the absence of experimental confirmation / falsification that only next-generation molecular matter-wave interferometry can provide.
Miles, the failure of materialism (the "Hard Problem") and classical physics (the "Binding Problem") might tempt us to abandon realism too. But if one abandons realism, then it's hard to stop one's position collapsing into an uninteresting solipsism - or rather solipsism-of-the-here-and-now. Also, we want to explain the extraordinary cognitive success of science in some domains (e.g. the Standard Model in physics; Darwin and the Modern Synthesis in biology) as well as its catastrophic failure in others (i.e. we are neither p-zombies nor micro-experiential zombies). For my part, if the weird-sounding experimental prediction of my defence of non-materialist physicalism is falsified (cf. https://www.physicalism.com/#6), then I'll be floundering. Giving up monism, let alone realism, would give me the equivalent of an intellectual nervous breakdown. So much the worse for my mental health, some might say!)
"Everything you can imagine is real" (Picasso)
Christopher, alas some of us have dark imaginations.
* * *
David, yes, anything as complex as subjective intentionality is intuitively impossible if we imagine the CNS supports just patterns of discrete neuronal mind-dust [cf. 'Why Panpsychism doesn't Help Us Explain Consciousness", by Phil Goff] But this response reflects how we're still in thrall to classical physics. Instead of asking, "What's it's like to be Schrödinger's cat?", perhaps ask "What is it like to be in a "Schrödinger's cat state" of neurons? Unless the unitary dynamics of QM breaks down in the mind-brain, such individual macroscopic superpositions must exist. Next-generation molecular matter wave interferometry will decipher their tell-tale signature.
"So what?" - a critic might respond. Even if true, this doesn't entail the mind-brain is a quantum computer. And indeed, one's intuitive response to the question is to say that it's not subjectively like anything at all to instantiate a sub-femtosecond neuronal superposition! But such an intuitive response is forbidden if we assume that consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical.
Critically, the scientific test of any physicalist panpsychist conjecture will be whether these experimentally detected neuronal superpositions implicate only the neurons that a standard connectionist neuroscience story says mediate the subject's currently reported state of mind e.g. "I can see my mother standing in front of me". Or instead, will all we discover be functionally irrelevant "noise" - in which case the conjecture will be experimentally falsified.
* * *
David Chalmers' challenge to physicalists (cf. including non-materialist physicalists http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf) can be taken as a purely "philosophical" challenge - or alternatively, as a scientific / experimental challenge, i.e. somehow to demonstrate the hidden match between formalism and phenomenology. But despite my own tentative physicalist belief that the formalism of [a recognisable descendant of] today's mathematical physics is closed and complete, i.e. no "element of reality" is missing from the mathematical machinery of a Theory of Everything, in another sense this physicalist "victory" - if it comes - will ring hollow. For in the absence of any kind of Rosetta stone to "read off" the textures of consciousness from the solutions to the equations, we are still just groping around in the dark. In that sense, I agree with David H. above: consciousness is utterly, indescribably weird. As our medium to understand anything at all, its properties infuse the propositional content of everything we think we know about the mind-independent world (cf. Nicholas Rescher's "Conceptual Idealism"
http:// link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-011-0483-8_8#page-1)
Or as Einstein puts it more poetically, "What does a fish know of the water in which he swims?"
* * *
"P-zombies don't exist, therefore, science doesn't have to explain them." Jera, sorry, I fear my answer won't do your blood pressure any good, but here goes. Perhaps compare life and the properties of simple organic molecules. Clearly, molecules aren't alive. But molecular biology can explain how simple organic molecules configured in the right way can become a living breathing multicellular organism. No need to invoke a mysterious life-force or anything dualistic. Molecular biology reduces to quantum chemistry and chemistry to physics. Next consider your bound phenomenal mind. At least on an orthodox materialistic story, molecules lack consciousness. Yet configure a bunch of molecules in the right way and...voilà, we have a conscious subject of experience, capable of local and global phenomenal binding, a person who undergoes countless different flavours of experience. Some of these experiences even have the causal capacity to induce talk about their own existence, as now.
Like you, I don't think p-zombies or micro-experiential zombies are possible. Therefore science doesn't have to explain them. But science does need to explain the existence of consciousness, phenomenal binding, the properties of our different flavours of experience, and the causal capacity of consciousness to inspire talk about its own existence. Sadly, materialism has no idea how this is possible. Nada!
Unlike David Chalmers, I see no reason (yet!) to give up on physicalism. No "element of reality" is demonstrably missing from the formalism of physics - ultimately, the universal wave function. But as far as I can tell, both materialism and classical physics are false.
* * *
To stress: I’m not proposing any new physics – any modification or supplementation of the unitary dynamics à la Roger Penrose’s Orch-OR (etc) - just investigating whether natural selection has been able to harness states that physics says must exist, but which we standardly assume are phenomenally and computationally irrelevant. Are we super-robins?
(cf. http://hore.chem.ox.ac.uk/PDFs/The_Quantum_Robin.pdf)
One of the reasons that most people balk at the proposal that consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical – the “fire” in the equations - is the powerful intuition that it makes the minimum “psychons” of experience too small. Yet the violence to our intuitions is worse: such a proposal makes the minimum psychons of experience ludicrously short-lived. But here’s where it gets interesting. Unless the unitary Schrödinger dynamics breaks down in the CNS, at sufficiently fine-grained timescales the biomolecules, neurons and indeed entire neuronal networks of the mind-brain can’t be considered as discrete, decohered classical objects. If experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then these individual quantum states are experiential. Awake or dreaming, you’re what a quantum computer feels like from the inside.
One often hears that the everyday world always looks classical; we never see superpositions of live-and-dead cats. Yet there’s a covert direct realism about perception at work here. Recall Bertrand Russell’s remark that we are never aware of anything but the inside of our own heads. Perhaps a precondition of our “seeing” anything at all is quantum coherent superpositions of neuronal feature-processors. Neuronal superpositions are what make an organism’s classical world-simulations feasible in the first place. On this story, your phenomenally-bound classical world-simulation is a sequence of neuronal “Schrödinger cat states” that natural selection has harnessed to track fitness-relevant patterns in the local environment.
Crazy stuff. What we need is experiment. Fortunately, when investigating whether or not phenomenal binding really does consist in neuronal superpositions of distributed feature-processors, we know exactly what we’re looking for – even if scarcely anyone expects to find it! By contrast, one problem with Orch-OR is that finding evidence of quantum coherence in microtubules isn’t going to persuade critics that the brain is a quantum computer – although Orch-OR is still a falsifiable scientific conjecture because it proposes modifying the unitary dynamics of QM.
As far as I can tell, the interferometry experiment I discuss using trained-up in vitro neuronal networks is ”clean”, i.e. a positive result would convince sceptics/critics, and a negative result would conclusively falsify the conjecture. But the experiment is still technically extremely demanding because thermally-induced decoherence [i.e. the rapid scrambling of complex phase amplitudes] is extremely fast and hard to control. I reckon there must be an easier way to confirm/falsify the phenomenal binding conjecture that quantum mind critics (and not just the open-minded) can agree in advance would settle the issue. Alas I haven’t been able to think of such a test.
[I’m sane enough to realise the conjecture is probably mistaken. However, if neither quantum nor classical physics can explain phenomenal binding, where do we go next? ]
Do you "see things as they are" like John Searle or run a world-simulation? Perceptual realists miss our most extraordinary computational capacity.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/vision-science
("Seeing things as they are")
Is consciousness necessary for AI? Dirk, it depends. There are lots of problems for which consciousness is incidental or irrelevant. Equally, there are lots of problems, e.g. investigating the nature, varieties and binding of familiar and alien states of consciousness, for which being a subject of experience would seem essential. IMO, a lot of computer scientists and IT researchers rely on an impoverished conception of computation that forbids investigation of these problems. "Sorry, could you possibly reformulate your question in a way that a digital zombie can compute", says your friendly well-programmed futuristic robo-helper – an AI that can effortlessly solve numerous problems that leave naturally evolved organic robots for dust. Alas some cognitive challenges probably fall to humans and our transhuman and posthuman descendants - or possibly to futuristic non-biological quantum computers: I don't know.
https://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/parable.html
* * *
Josh, first, some pedantry. It's tempting as you do to call neuronal superpositions of distributed feature-processors "infinitesimally brief, bound states" because sub-femtosecond, attosecond and even pan-cerebral zeptosecond phenomenal-binding times sound so rapid. But recall that such time-frames can also be viewed as incredibly protracted - well in excess of twenty orders of magnitude more extended than fundamental Planck-scale of chronology.
Second, the idea that we can create simulated sentient beings - and that we might even be such simulated beings ourselves - rests on the assumption that phenomenal binding can occur at different levels of computational abstraction. And I'd want to ask how such strong emergence is possible if physicalism is true. Recall that the conjecture I'd like to see (experimentally) confirmed / falsified is that our bound phenomenal minds disclose one part of the "fire" in the equations - bedrock physical reality. Non-classical interference effects - most famously demonstrated in the double-slit experiment but also in principle demonstrable in organic macromolecules and neuronal superpositions - can't be faked. They are classically impossible to simulate, just as phenomenal binding is impossible classically to simulate. I guess these comments just highlight the need for experiment. Most attention in the quantum mind debate has been focused on the semi-classical Penrose Orch-OR model which proposes to modify the unitary Schrödinger dynamics. By contrast, physically credible decoherence times for neuronal superpositions in the CNS are normally reckoned as a reductio ad absurdum of quantum mind - not a prediction. And alas you can't argue with an incredulous stare.
"Perspectives on Russellian Monism" is not a title well suited to set our pulses racing; but the Introduction is readable online:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0199927359/ref=rdr_ext_tmb
* * *
If the world were classical, it wouldn't look like anything to anyone. The mind-brain is not a digital zombie. We need a new root metaphor of mind. IMO each of us instantiates a quasi-classical world-simulation - what a naturally evolved quantum computer feels like "from the inside". But if next-generation interferometry falsifies this conjecture (cf. https://www.physicalism.com), I honestly don't know which way I'll turn. To Chalmersian dualism or to drink, possibly both.
[on social networks]
How many times have you quit Facebook?
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21637398-how-digital-firms-create-products-get-inside-peoples-heads-getting-hooked
("Getting hooked")
Lots of good discussion groups e.g. Felicifia, have died IMO because Facebook taps into our reward circuitry as social primates more effectively than alternatives. It's not as though a "like" button pressed seven seconds after one’s FB posting has one cooing with delight - any more than taking a quick drag of a cigarette induces a euphoric high. But the cumulative effect is to hijack our reward circuitry. The routine habit of double-posting might seem to involve taking one's Facebook musings too seriously. But otherwise, all sorts of substantive contributions just get lost in a week or two.
Presumably there is customisable software to semi-automate the process?? Obviously not everything needs, or is suitable for, double-posting.
* * *
Truth? If someone goes to a social event and tells a participant he thinks that she's boring, stupid and ugly, we wouldn't commend his honesty but lament the pitfalls of having high AQ. By contrast, if one is writing, say, a referee's report on a bad academic journal paper submission, sometimes the only proper course is to say that the paper is rubbish and cause hurt feelings. The role of Facebook is changing, but it's still pre-eminently a social forum - and needs norms to match.
Guaranteeing Basic Income will be a lot easier than underwriting high self-esteem
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150521213743.htm
How can transhumanist technologies deliver on Maslow's hierarchy of needs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
Naturally, I'm in favour of unlimited material abundance:
(cf. http://dw2blog.com/2015/05/21/anticipating-2040-the-triple-a-triple-h-vision/ "Anticipating 2040: The triple A, triple h+ vision")
But generating an unlimited abundance of status goods - attention, respect, and other zero-sum outcomes that social primates value so dearly - poses more of a challenge than creating molecular nanotech.
(cf. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-fallible-mind/201303/do-things-make-you-happy-or-does-your-disposition
"Do Things Make You Happy, or Does Your Disposition. The admiration of others makes us want the things that we do.")
One limitation of contemporary transhumanism is the relative scarcity of good material on how to tackle our emotional needs. Full-spectrum transhumanism should be as compelling to women as men. Today, the male-female ratio of self-identified transhumanists runs at around 10 to 1.
* * *
Rodents and Facebook users: the mesolimbic dopamine system unites us all:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150106140754.htm
("Computer model explains how animals select actions with rewarding outcomes")
What's changed over the past half-billion years? Perhaps not as much as we might suppose...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27807-dopamine-boost-restores-libido-in-ageing-male-fruit-flies.html
("Dopamine boost restores libido in ageing male fruit flies")
Does the future of well-being lie in blissful serenity or dopaminergic overdrive?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-11-theory-dopamine-role.html
("New theory integrates dopamine's role in learning, motivation")
Designer dopamine neurons: the dawn of hypermotivation?
Can we design superhuman willpower...
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-12-discovery-dopamine-neurons.html
("Discovery puts designer dopamine neurons within reach")
"Normal" age-dependent dopamine cell loss of around 5% each decade of life means we'd all get Parkinson's disease if we lived long enough. Dopamine cell loss may also partly explain the decline in felt intensity of experience with advancing years.
Speedballing or nirvana? Just as we'll be able to choose our own hedonic range and approximate default hedonic set-point, likewise our default level of motivation - a sense of things-to-be-done - will be a biologically adjustable parameter too.
http://www.intelligentlifemagazine.com/content/features/wanting-versus-liking
("The science of craving")
We won't have a complete explanation until we can explain phenomenal binding. And there are lots of complications. For example, around half of people with the "dopamine deficiency disorder", Parkinson's disease, are clinically depressed; indeed depression often precedes the locomotor signs normally diagnostic of the disorder. On a more positive note, the well-defined location of our twin "hedonic hotspots" ought to make effective treatments of depression easier - and as a bonus, allow the engineering of life based on superhuman bliss. When will we decipher the molecular signature of pure pleasure?
See too:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-12-chronic-pain-drug-therapy.html
("Ending chronic pain with new drug therapy")
* * *
Marija. Yes, it's frustrating. "Instinctive" or "preprogrammed" responses are often assumed to be somehow "less conscious" than original thinking and the cognitive processes needed to produce flexible behaviour. But perhaps compare the relative intensity of experience needed to write - and to understand - this novel sentience with the intensity of experience triggered by, say, catching your hand in the door, and the stereotyped behavioural responses such a painful stimulus provokes...
Consciousness and intelligence shouldn't be confused.
Can we use biotech to engineer high self-esteem for all?
http://www.livescience.com/50848-bragging-annoys-people.html
("Braggers Gonna Brag, But It Usually Backfires")
People love and respect themselves - and each other - on MDMA. Alas replicating such a biology (and social dynamic) on a sustainable basis will be quite a challenge.
* * *
My worst time-sinks:
DP on Google +
DP on Facebook
Hedonistic Imperative
The neurological basis of the disorder:
http://www.livescience.com/49585-facebook-addiction-viewed-brain.html
("What Facebook Addiction Looks Like in the Brain")
* * *
Can personal relationships be turned into one of the exact sciences?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11351618/Love-Why-are-we-obsessed-with-the-idea-of-a-formula-for-love.html
("Why we've all fallen head-over-heels for the 36 questions that promise true love")
Relationships today can cause at least as much suffering (and intermittently pleasure) as a heroin habit. I'd like to imagine a future where everyone loves everybody (shades of MDMA). Alas this isn't a plea for universal polyamory right now - or at least not without some serious genetic tweaking - because huge numbers of people aren't biologically designed for it.
Can the science of love spawn an engineering technology of love?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/science-of-love-it-really-is-all-in-the-mind-say-experts-10108781.html
("The science of love: It really is all in the mind, say experts")
Yes, love is subjective. But for reasons we simply don't understand, it's an (objective) fact about the natural world that it contains first-person facts. And biotechnology promises the ability to make these first-facts person generically pleasant - perhaps sublimely so.
Once bitten, twice shy or forever smitten?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3256517/Beauty-really-eye-beholder-perceptions-attractiveness-NOT-hardwired-instead-affected-personal-experience.html
("Why memories of your first love could affect who you MARRY: Early girlfriends and boyfriends influence who we find attractive in later life")
Run up bad debts and have more sex? Can credit rating agencies replace OkCupid?
http://www.ibtimes.com/its-official-credit-scores-can-predict-relationship-success-2125348
("It's Official: Credit Scores Can Predict Relationship Success")
Who sponsors these studies, I wonder.
* * *
Today, taking MDMA ("Ecstasy") induces a sense of "I love the world and the world loves me". When "loved up" on a hug-drug like MDMA, the OCD-like, low-serotonin, jealous-possessive love of traditional pair-bonding is absent: MDMA releases a flood of serotonin and oxytocin as well as dopamine. How much research is going on to design safe and sustainable analogues of MDMA? Zero.
The oxytocin solution...
http://phys.org/news/2015-10-oxytocin-nose-drop-marmoset-partners-closer.html
("Oxytocin nose-drop brings marmoset partners closer")
Can we enhance social intelligence?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/love-hormone-oxytocin-could-be-used-to-treat-mental-health-problems-10178627.html
("'Love hormone' oxytocin could be used to treat mental health problems")
[on free-living nonhuman animals]
The idea that sentient beings shouldn't harm each other, or allow each other to come to harm, was once purely utopian. Later this century and beyond, the policy option will be technically feasible. Sociological credibility is another issue. But a plea of "There is no alternative" is no longer technically or ethically correct.
How did the Darwinian horror story begin?
http://phys.org/news/2015-03-chemists-riddle-life-began-earth.html
("Chemists claim to have solved riddle of how life began on Earth")
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/12/should-we-intervene-in-nature-to-help-animals/
Nicolaus, we wouldn't call preventing human toddlers from starving to death, or being asphyxiated, disembowelled or eaten alive, a "fetish", but rather a moral obligation. Likewise, we shouldn't trivialise the prevention of suffering in nonhuman animals of comparable sentience to human toddlers with a term like “fetish” either. Non-human animal suffering is appalling and preventable. Also, let's distinguish an end to natural selection from an end to selection pressure. Selection pressure against a lot of our nastier alleles is shortly likely to intensify, not slacken, in human and nonhuman animals alike. This is because intelligent agents will increasingly pre-select alleles and allelic combinations in anticipation of their likely psychological and behavioural effects. And just as family planning averted seemingly inescapable Malthusian catastrophe in humans – confounding prophets of inevitable ecological collapse - likewise intelligent use of cross-species immunocontraception to regulate fertility in tomorrow's wildlife parks can prevent overpopulation. In short, how much suffering – if any – we want to sustain in the rest of the living world is up to us.
Nicolaus, insofar as you're urging intensive research before compassionate intervention, I completely agree with you! Sadly, complete certainty about the benefits of intervention – whether on behalf of members of other races or other species – will always be elusive. All we can do is act on the basis of risk-benefit analysis. Let's recall that humans already intervene – massively – in the rest of the living world, whether through uncontrolled habitat destruction, “rewilding”, captive breeding programs for big cats and so forth. So the choice isn't between interference and non-interference, but rather what ethical principle(s) – if any - should guide our interventions. Should we keep the ideology of traditional conservation biology, which gives no moral weight to preventing the suffering of individuals, or instead aim for an ethic of compassionate stewardship?
Insects? IMO we need to be cautious about stating one species suffers more than another species in virtue of the greater biomass of its members. A species is a taxonomic abstraction, not a subject of experience. Also, the upper bounds of insect distress are unclear. Thus a locust head-segment may sometimes keep on feeding while the tail is being devoured by a predator – a scenario unthinkable in vertebrates. Without a central nervous system, there can be no unity of consciousness - no distress above-and-beyond the consciousness of individual nerve ganglia. So in my view, we are entitled ethically to prioritise vertebrates before truly utopian technology allows the well-being of every nerve ganglion to be safeguarded later this century and beyond.
Robert, yes, there is a sliding-scale of urgency and obligation. Perhaps we may differ(?) slightly on whether there is a moral obligation to prevent “mild” suffering. I agree the worst forms of suffering are in a different league. Their abolition should clearly be our main focus. But what then?
* * *
John, fundamentalism is a religious movement favouring the strict and literal interpretation of scripture. To use the term for secular bioethicists is not helpful: to have fundamental principle(s) is not the same as being a fundamentalist. Compassionate stewardship of Nature, let alone the long-term goal of phasing out the biology of (involuntary) experience below "hedonic zero", does not entail creating new kinds of suffering - though if botched it could do so. Hence the need for exhaustive research and deliberation. "Extinction"? Well, one can always stipulatively define a lion - or a human - who no longer harms others as no longer "truly" a lion - or “truly” a human. But such wordplay is uninteresting: the claim becomes true by definition. "Unpredictable"? Whether phasing out smallpox or predation, we cannot know all the long-term consequences. But that is poor reason to perpetuate their existence.
* * *
Not if one identifies with mice:
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2015/06/18/not.so.guilty.pleasure.viewing.cat.videos.boosts.energy.and.positive.emotions
("Not-so-guilty pleasure: Viewing cat videos boosts energy and positive emotions")
* * *
First Switzerland, tomorrow the world...
http://gbs-schweiz.org/activities/?lang=en
I hope.
* * *
The devil does not wear horns:
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/jan/05/our-animal-hell/
("'Our Animal Hell' by Robert Pogue Harrison")
* * *
Eva, if famine breaks out in sub-Saharan Africa, how should we respond to a critic who says, "I think it is terrible arrogance and over-estimation of Western knowledge to think we can or even should intervene in large-scale suffering of members of ethnic groups"? Would allowing Ethiopians to starve represent greater humility on our part?
Instead, we'd agree (I hope) that the developed world would be morally bound to offer both famine relief and support with family planning. Washing our hands of the unfolding tragedy with an appeal to the unforeseeable ecological consequences of intervention would be a cop-out. The same principle is at stake in tomorrow's wildlife parks - though cross-species fertility regulation would most likely involve immunocontraception.
Could anything go wrong? Yes! This is why we need systematic research into what compassionate stewardship of the rest of the living world entails.
* * *
Some might say "compassionate conservation" is a contradiction in terms. In what guise might a benevolent superintelligence want to conserve Homo sapiens - rather than retire us?
http://magnusvinding.blogspot.co.uk/
* * *
Is phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering (1) ethically desirable? (2) technically feasible? (3) sociologically credible?
Jera, let's agree "yes" to (1) and (2) - though even with an unlimited budget, CRISPR genome-editing and a UN mandate a century or more of technically challenging work would lie ahead.
The challenge is (3). There is no global consensus, no unlimited budget, no UN mandate.
So what's the best way forward? No doubt some movements benefit from strong leaders with messianic delusions; it's not going to happen with HI.
What we can do, more modestly, is try to promote awareness and debate on everything from in vitro meat to the desirability of global free access to preimplantation genetic screening and counselling.
When I wrote HI (late 1995) I predicted that several centuries of involuntary suffering still lie ahead - perhaps more.
I'm as excited as anyone by talk of e.g. imminent post-human superintelligence. But the ethical and ideological obstacles - and prevalence of status quo bias - should make us extremely sceptical of anyone who promises salvation in our lifetime.
Kudos to e.g. Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey and anyone else who persuades an audience they are going to live to see the Promised Land (short of cryonics) - and gets the funding to deliver. My chronology is more pessimistic. Let's hope such pessimism is mistaken.
* * *
No one gets bored of bliss. No one finds bliss meaningless. But for physiological reasons of adaptation, plenty of people report no longer enjoying the effects of (initially) euphoriant drugs. Either way (and please forgive me for labouring the point) I'm not arguing for a world of constant bliss - or indeed for coercive well-being. Rather, no sentient being should have to suffer against their will after states below "hedonic zero" become technically optional.
Agreed Sergio: sentient beings shouldn't harm each other. What was once an empty piety will shortly become a technically feasible policy option. The very idea of a "predator" - human or non-human - deserves to be banished to the history books.
Darren, Mercifully, we (probably) won't need a deep understanding of consciousness in order to phase out the biology of suffering. We need merely to understand the necessary and sufficient conditions for its occurrence - or maybe only the necessary and sufficient conditions for phenomenal binding. Without phenomenal binding, the world's minimal "psychons" of consciousness would presumably be ethically trivial. One big challenge is digital sentience. As you know from reading e.g. https://www.physicalism.com, I argue that classical digital computers will never be subjects of experience. But it's wise to be open-minded and acknowledge one could be catastrophically mistaken. After all, some very smart people disagree.
* * *
Should we use biotech and IT to create a happy biosphere?
https://ideas.aeon.co/viewpoints/catia-faria-on-should-we-intervene-in-nature-to-prevent-animal-suffering
("Should we intervene in nature to prevent animal suffering?" by Catia Faria)
It's great that the "meme" is spreading. Alas releasing baby turtles to the ocean safely may not be effective altruism in its most hard-headed guise.
* * *
Martyn, I have no more "acolytes" than mistresses. However, a growing minority of people do recognise that biotech can - in principle - phase out the biology of suffering. Anyhow, I wonder: do we really have a substantive disagreement here? Or is the issue more of a semantic dispute? Compare: on discovering a tribe of cannibalistic head-hunters, one group of ethnographers claims that intervention will destroy the tribe's identity, rob its members of their ethnic traditions, and lead to the extinction of an entire form of life. The other group of ethnographers urges that the cannibals and their victims alike will benefit from dietary reform - and that talk of “extinction”, “cultural genocide” (etc) is needlessly apocalyptic.
Which side is linguistically correct? I'm not sure there is an objective answer. However, both of us agree that the world is ethically better off without cannibalism. Likewise, I hope I can persuade you that the world will be better off without the terrible experiences of asphyxiation, disembowelment and being eaten alive.
* * *
Martyn, this is precisely why I don't think we should be prioritising the dietary habits of penguins. But flash forward to next century and beyond. Aging, disease, low mood and suffering of any kind are biologically optional. The last factory-farm and slaughterhouse has been shut - superseded by mass-produced, flavour-enhanced, in vitro gourmet meat products. Large, long-lived vertebrates graze contentedly in our wildlife parks. What about traditional marine ecosystems, insofar as their fauna has survived the 21st century? Well, maybe our successors will be unregenerate species essentialists who decide, in a spirit of bioconservatism, that there are “acceptable” levels of involuntary suffering. But I wouldn't count on it.
The optimal level of involuntary suffering in the world is zero.
* * *
Günther, my personal view is similar to Adriano's. Life on Earth to date has been a half-billion-year horror story. Instead of "rewilding" and other “conservation” initiatives, I'd allow all sorts of species to go extinct in the wild – in effect, phasing out Mother Nature altogether. But politics, as they say, is the art of the possible. This bleak view of life tends to appal most people. By contrast, the prospect of compassionate stewardship of tomorrow's wildlife parks is (IMO) at least potentially saleable - despite the incredulity the proposal initially elicits from most people.
An analogous point could be made of humans. I might personally agree with David Benatar ("Better Never to Have Been") But ethically speaking, it's a complete waste of time arguing for human extinction through voluntary childlessness (not least because of what might be called the Argument From Selection Pressure). By contrast, the case for using biotech to phase out the biology of involuntary human suffering is at least potentially saleable - despite once again the incredulity that the proposal initially evokes.
Obviously, what is - and what isn't – sociologically credible later this century and beyond is a judgement call.
What do you reckon?
* * *
Günther, recall I was arguing against pursuing any Benatarian proposal for voluntary human extinction. All that remaining childless (or adopting children) does is impose selection pressure against a predisposition to be socially responsible, which is self-defeating. The future belongs to life lovers. (IMO) anyone who cares about reducing - and ultimately phasing out - the biology of involuntary suffering (whether or not they are formally a NU, Buddhist, or whatever) should accept this background assumption as axiomatic.
Should David Benatar commit suicide?
David, presumably David Benatar would argue that he can do more good by continuing to walk the Earth propounding his views than by taking his own life. My main worry with anti-natalists, Benatarians, negative utilitarians (and so forth) isn't with the bleakness of their diagnosis. Rather, it's the risk of distraction from practical solutions. Phasing out the biology of suffering will most likely be achieved by dynamic life-lovers rather than depressive fatalists.
Most people would probably agree with Woody Allen: "Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon." Choosing not to have children, and perhaps adopting instead, might seem the responsible way forward. However, by choosing not to have children, we impose even stronger selection pressure in favour of the predisposition to "go forth and multiply"; and conversely, strong selection pressure against any predisposition to be ethically responsible. For evolutionary reasons, one source of immense misery today is involuntary childlessness. We witness the extraordinary lengths that some childless couples will go to in order to have children. For better or worse, human extinction via voluntary childlessness seems a pipe-dream.
So what is the solution? Any policy proposal to end suffering worldwide must be both technically feasible and sociologically realistic. For the first time in history, mastery of our genetic source code in principle allows one uniquely intelligent species to phase out the biology of suffering, initially in humans, but ultimately throughout the living world. Universal access to preimplantation genetic screening and counselling, followed by true genetic engineering, can potentially impose strong and intensifying selection pressure against genes predisposing to misery and malaise, and in favour of genes predisposing to gradients of bliss.
Perhaps the biggest obstacles to such a genetic revolution are ideological - and simple status quo bias. Yet unlike species suicide, such a policy option isn't inherently sociologically incredible, at least in the longer term. Let's agree: today, coming into existence may always or typically involve harm. Yet in future, there is no technical reason why life can't be inherently wonderful - and perhaps sublime.
* * *
The parasite in question can also induce toxic psychosis
http://www.theonion.com/article/woman-overjoyed-by-giant-uterine-parasite-2266
("Woman Overjoyed By Giant Uterine Parasite")
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/09/save-the-parasites/407701/
("Save The Parasites")
Surely the reductio ad absurdum of traditional conservation biology. For the first time in history, intelligent moral agents have the capacity to design a biosphere where sentient beings don't harm each other. Promoting parasitism is a step in the wrong direction.
* * *
Nicolaus, humans are already doing far more than "tinkering" with Nature. We are intervening on a massive scale. So what ethical principles should guide our interventions? Why shouldn't these principles include the indefinite reduction of suffering in members of other species as well as other races?
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2014/07/17/gene-drives-crispr-could-revolutionize-ecosystem-management/
The ecological consequences of, say, phasing out malaria-transmitting species of Anopheles mosquito could be profound. Malaria has killed around half the humans who ever lived (cf.
http://www.nature.com/news/2002/021003/full/news021001-6.html) Would you oppose such an initiative on the grounds that the Earth is not a laboratory nor a simulation with an "undo" button?
Zachary, no one is proposing to go on with a syringe to vaccinate mosquitoes. Immunocontraception in elephants differs from mass sterilants for malaria-transmitting species of Anopheles mosquito, which in turn differs from the premeditated use of contraception by prospective human parents. But regardless of species, there is always a limiting factor on the growth of population size. And that factor can involve more or less suffering.
* * *
Zachary, the standard zona pellucida (PZP) immunocontraceptive vaccine isn't a virus. Rather, it's a naturally occurring biodegradable protein used successfully to regulate fertility in everything from free-living elephants to feral horses to wild deer. I am unclear why you believe that malaria-transmitting species of Anopheles mosquito have reproductive rights. Mosquitoes don't suffer from not passing on their genes, whereas the protozoan parasite they transmit is a source of immense suffering to millions of human and nonhuman animals alike. In principle, there is no reason why biotech can't deliver the well-being of all sentience later this century and beyond. Whether intelligent agents opt to preserve the biology of involuntary suffering will ultimately be a question of ethical choice.
* * *
Nicolaus, let's recall that every case of sexual reproduction is a genetically unique and untested experiment. None of us can “prove” that any of our actions won't have unforeseen consequences. All we can do is try to weigh risk-reward ratios. Why do you believe that preimplantation genetic screening is more likely to lead to a bad outcome than a genetic crapshoot? It's not as though natural selection has optimised living organisms for subjective well-being. Why deny nonhuman animals all the benefits of the fertility regulation now enjoyed by most humans?
Cost? There's no need for resources to be diverted away from humans to non-humans. Rather, resources currently used in everything from rewilding to captive breeding programs and other “conservation” initiatives could instead be targeted at safeguarding the well-being of individual non-humans. I share many of your dark views about human victims of oppression; but such a concern is no reason to discount the plight of sentient beings from other species.
That said, so long as humans systematically exploit and abuse billions of nonhuman animals on factory-farms, this debate is a bit moot. Before we can realistically start helping sentient beings, we must stop systemically harming them. Shutting and outlawing factory farms and slaughterhouses presumably comes first.
* * *
Stderr, yes, Nature "works". Disease, parasitism, predation and (above all) starvation have traditionally kept the population of human and nonhuman animals in check. But fertility regulation is more civilised - as witnessed by the demographic transition in human populations. The same principles of cross-species fertility regulation can be used in tomorrow's wildlife parks too. Humans already "meddle" with Nature on a colossal scale. What's in question here is the ethical principles - if any - that should guide our interventions. At one extreme, "Pleistocene rewilding". At the other extreme, high-tech Jainism and a pan-species welfare state. Should we try to reduce the burden of suffering in the living world or not? For the first time in history, biotech gives us the opportunity to choose.
* * *
Mittens for koalas?
Yes, good, but a pan-species welfare state will need to be planned.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/09/koala-mittens-needed-to-help-bushfire-victims-with-burnt-paws
Kosta, perhaps compare debeaked, declawed, tail-docked, castrated or otherwise mutilated factory-farmed nonhumans. Imagine if we launched an appeal to help them instead.
Are humans as sentient as sperm whales?
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/10/cultural-lives-of-whales-and-dolphins-hal-whitehead-luke-rendell-review
("The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins")
* * *
Nicolaus, if we are ethically serious about phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering, then some form of preimplantation genetic screening - and ultimately full-blown genetic engineering - is presumably inevitable in human and non-human animals alike. I may have misunderstood you as being opposed in principle to the technologies of PGS. If so, apologies.
Consent? Neither human toddlers nor nonhuman animals of comparable sentience and sapience are capable of signing written consent forms. But complications aside, all sentient beings make it abundantly clear they do not wish to be harmed. Toddlers and zebras do not wish to starve - or be disembowelled, asphyxiated or eaten alive. As technology permits, their interests and wishes deserve to be respected accordingly. Hence stewardship - which can be wise or inept, for sure.
A “food source”? Humans do not need to hurt, harm or kill other sentient beings in order to flourish. Ethically, no doubt it's preferable that toddlers and nonhuman animals of comparable sentience and sapience are kept and killed with less cruelty rather than more. Yet why do our fellow creatures need to be harmed at all? In my view, humans need to make the switch from harming to actively helping other sentient beings. This is not possible if we kill them because we like their taste.
A principle worth extending...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/police-order-all-cows-in-indian-district-to-be-photographed-to-stop-people-eating-them-10155621.html
("Police order all cows in Indian district to be photographed to stop people eating them")
* * *
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/snakebite-treatment-crisis-will-put-tens-of-thousands-of-lives-at-risk-charity-warns-10489909.html
("An estimated 100,000 people die every year from snake bites and 400,000 disabled or disfigured")
A form of Darwinian life well suited for retirement IMO.
"You would rather eradicate snakes than re-engineer them to be harmless?" Alexander, I'd re-engineer them. Humans too. Species essentialists might object that venomous snakes re-engineered so as not to cause harm wouldn't truly belong to the same species. The same might be said of re-engineered humans. But the medical feasibility (if moral folly) of backcrosses in each case would seem to scotch the objection. What do you reckon?
* * *
Does the world need more predators?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2985727/Lynx-roam-woods-Experts-want-wild-cat-reintroduced-1-300-years-help-control-deer-population.html
("Lynx could roam our woods again: Experts want wild cat reintroduced after 1,300 years to help control the deer population")
Yes, the only serious threat to life and limb from our native fauna comes on Friday night after the pubs shut. We just need to extend the civilising process - not throw it into reverse.
Or Better Living Through Genetically Preprogrammed Gradients of Bliss?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/better-living-through-conservation-genetics/
("Better Living Through Conservation Genetics")
Meet the people who want to turn predators into herbivores
("Meet the people who want to turn predators into herbivores")
Genes, alleles and their frequencies change over time. For example, most non-African humans carry around 1 to 3% Neanderthal DNA: the total amount in modern humans is around 20%. Such genetic change isn't inherently good or bad. Rather, what matters ethically is the consequences of such change. Thus I know of no inherent moral advantage to being an obligate carnivore than to being an obligate rapist. Both behaviours involve coercion or its threat. That said, if we do want to advocate some form of genetic species essentialism for members of the cat family, catnip-flavoured in vitro meat is an option.
Spiders and flies? The well-being or ill-being of invertebrates is
presumably a task for our successors – though "gene drives" and the CRISPR revolution
shows how we needn't wait for posthuman utopia or even mature
nanotechnology.
* * *
The cost of in vitro meat is collapsing. Time for an accelerated roll-out:
http://www.sciencealert.com/lab-grown-burger-patty-cost-drops-from-325-000-to-12
("Cost of lab-grown burger patty drops from $325,000 to $11.36")
* * *
And what if nonhuman animals suffer like babies? Let's hope in vitro meat hits the supermarket shelves soon.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-04-babies-pain-adults.html
Regional variants of the Paleo diet aren't much better.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/nigeria/11610908/Nigerian-restaurant-shut-down-for-serving-human-flesh.html
("Nigerian restaurant shut down for ‘serving human flesh'")
* * *
Hoshi, perhaps recall the Bible - and more specifically Isaiah, on how the lion and the wolf will lie down with the lamb. No, the Bible doesn't explicitly describe the CRISPR revolution in biotech and the compassionate use of cross-species immunocontraception to regulate population sizes in our wildlife parks. But the outcome is potentially the same.
Hoshi, the Garden of Eden of Eden was vegetarian before the Fall. Sinful humans have killed animals ever since. When the Bible prophesies the lion and the wolf will lie down with the lamb, Isaiah wasn't insinuating that obligate carnivores would develop a cunning new stalking routine to deceive their victims - or at least, only on an extremely strained interpretation of the sacred text. In short, freedom not to be harmed is very different from freedom to harm others.
* * *
Four policy options:
1) "Pleistocene rewilding" - restoring much of the planet to its state before the human impact.
2) The status quo - essentially an extension of existing conservation biology: more wildlife parks, minimal intervention - conservation with no regard to the subjective well-being of individuals, just the abstract health of species and ecosystems.
3) Compassionate biology, ultimately extending to all free-living sentients: cross-species fertility regulation via immunocontraception, genetic tweaking and/or in vitro meat for obligate carnivores, a pan-species welfare state in tomorrow's Nature reserves, in short, "high-tech Jainism".
4) Phasing out free-living nonhuman sentients altogether ("Why improve nature when destroying it is so much easier?
http://robertwiblin.com/2010/01/21/just-destroy-nature/)
What should be the favoured long-term option of anyone who believes that intelligent ethical agents have a duty to minimise - or phase out altogether - the biology of involuntary suffering?
Options (1) and (2) entail (at least) as much suffering as exists today. So the obvious policy option for anyone who prioritises the reduction of suffering might seem (4) - minus any suggestion of mass killing: mass-sterilisation alone would presumably suffice.
However, one thing that unites (almost) all animal lovers, conservation biologists, policy makers and the general public at large is a desire to preserve free-living "charismatic megafauna" and Nature - or at least extensive wildlife parks.
Is it sociologically realistic to expect a moral revolution in such attitudes?
No (IMO).
This leaves option (3). No, I don't know if compassionate stewardship of tomorrow's Nature reserves is sociologically realistic either. One reason not to discount its sociological plausibility altogether is that most people are inconsistent - which leaves scope for triggering cognitive dissonance. The majority of people oppose "interference" with Nature in the abstract. Yet consider most people's response if on TV (or in the Daily Mail) the camera dwells on some photogenic nonhuman animal in distress. Viewers are indignant - sometimes extremely indignant - if the camera team doesn't intervene to help. The global telecommunications revolution and IT turn the whole planet into an intimate life-and-death spectacle. Just as the Colosseum was eventually closed, so can wildlife snuff movies be ended eventually too.
* * *
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33286942
("Will animals of the future only be safe in captivity?")
“In captivity” sounds dreadful. One imagines forlorn-looking creatures gazing out from behind bars at a zoo. We need to popularise what might otherwise sound a pedantic distinction between wild and free-living. Humans flourish best when neither “wild” nor incarcerated. So do nonhumans. Of course, we’re really talking about a continuum. But a simplistic trichotomy (wild vs free-living vs captive) is better than a simplistic dichotomy (wild versus captive).
[Jeffrey, I wrote e.g.
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pearce20120225
before the CRISPR revolution in biotech exploded
(cf. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/evolution/crispr-gene-drives/)
But IMO its core point still stands. Compassionate biology for free-living but not wild nonhuman animals is technically feasible. Ultimately, its (non-)adoption is a question of (un)ethical choice.
Completing the abolitionist project on Earth will entail penetrating deep into the phylogenetic tree.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27531-flies-share-basic-elements-of-human-fear--but-is-it-emotion.html
("Flies share basic elements of human fear – but is it emotion?")
Any decent scientific theory of consciousness and phenomenal binding should make novel, precise, experimentally falsifiable predictions:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-10/07/how-much-consciousness-octopus-iphone
("How much consciousness does an octopus have?")
[on suicide and assisted euthanasia]
The tip of an iceberg of suffering. Both short-term fixes and a long-term solution are needed:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3141564/Belgian-doctors-healthy-woman-green-light-die-euthanasia-suicidal-thoughts.html
Psychedelics? Taneli, perhaps, but she might well have a nightmarish bad trip. Opioids (as used in hospice care) might be a better solution IMO.
But what we really need long term IMO is routine global preimplantation genetic screening for mood disorders, not just "physical" disorders...
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/07/if-genetic-screening-helps-those-at-risk-why-not-screen-everyone/
("If genetic screening helps those at risk, why not screen everyone?")
Transhumanists normally focus on the plight of the millions of people for whom life is too short. But IMO, we have an equal responsibility to avoid creating people for whom life is too long - and this can't be done without world-wide free access to preimplantation genetic screening and counselling for all prospective parents. Talk of a "depression gene" is as simplistic as talk of a "happiness gene". Yet we do know that mood disorders have a high degree of genetic loading. All responsible policy proposals should be properly costed. Critically for practical politics, preimplantation genetic screening is (extremely) cost-effective. Bipolar disorder, depression and sub-clinical low mood are a huge burden on the global economy. Unlike true genetic engineering, preimplantation genetic screening and diagnosis does not involve the hot-potato issue of editing the human germ-line -
(cf. http://www.nature.com/news/don-t-edit-the-human-germ-line-1.17111) - essential if suffering is ever to be eradicated altogether, but not practical politics today.
Taneli, to anyone who urges extreme caution and exhaustive risk-benefit analysis when using preimplantation genetic screening, I can only say: "Yes!" It's the typical over-hasty inference to "And until we can be sure of the outcome, we should continue to play genetic roulette" that needs critical examination. In the case of alleles and allelic combinations conferring a (conditionally activated) predisposition to low mood, not just heterozygote advantage, but homozygote advantage may have been real in the ancestral environment of adaptation. Low mood is associated with behavioural suppression. If you're a delta-minus social primate on the African savannah, then a biological predisposition to "keep your head down" and ruminate a lot can be fitness-enhancing - despite the ghastly psychological costs to the individual. What's important is to stress how the potential homozygote and homozygote advantage we are talking about here is genetic, i.e. we are not weighing the (dis) advantage to the lifetime subjective well-being or ill-being of the individual.
https://www.biopsychiatry.com/depression/
[on coffee and opioid peptides]
Psychoactive coffee: what's your optimal mix of opioids and psychostimulants?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-01-brazil-coffee-protein-morphine-effect.html
("Brazil finds coffee protein with morphine effect")
and mood-brightening MAO inhibitor:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16139309
("Human monoamine oxidase enzyme inhibition by coffee and beta-carbolines norharman and harman isolated from coffee.")
Weak and reversible MAOIs are normally harmless mood-brighteners, quite common in Nature. Exaggerated fear of the "cheese effect", i.e. hypertensive crises prompted by failure to observe an MAOI diet, means that many doctors are still scared to try prescribing an EMSAM (selegiline) patch even to "treatment-resistant" depressives. According to one study of nurses, coffee drinkers are half as likely to commit suicide - though whether coffee's role as a weak reversible MAOI plays any role is unknown.
* * *
Intake of the ideal pleasure drug will be self-optimising
http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/03/self-regulating-coffee-drinkers
Rodney, critical, I guess, will be agents that have a "therapeutic window", like coffee or nicotine gum. Can we imagine an agent that offers a much higher level of well-being - but for which the brain still titrates optimal dosage (rather than being liable to runaway dose escalation)?
* * *
Unlike unpleasant experience, the wellsprings of pure bliss in the CNS appear to be well-localised. The twin human "hedonic hotspots" in the ventral pallidum and the rostromedial shell of the nucleus accumbens are only around a cubic centimetre each in size. Unfortunately, I don't know if Kent Berridge and his colleagues are investigating the distinctive gene expression profiles of these extraordinary neurons:
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/publications/Berridge%20&%20Kringelbach%202013%20Neuroscience%20of%20affect%20brain%20mechs%20pleasure%20&%20displeasure%20Cur%20Opin%20Neurobiol.pdf
("Neuroscience of affect: brain mechanisms of pleasure and displeasure")
The problem of physiological tolerance and the peripheral side-effects of opioids should all be technically fixable. More challenging for social primate society is how opioid use makes users emotionally self-sufficient. I almost wrote - judgmentally - "selfish". But it's not as though those of us who rely on environmental triggers for endogenous opioid release are motivationally different from junkies. We would all - literally and metaphorically - crawl through the gutter if it were the only way to get our fix. Rather than beating ourselves up about the existence of the pleasure principle, perhaps the best we can do is work with the grain of human nature and ensure that all sentient beings get what they need.
* * *
We demonise opioids, but without them, life would not be worth living.
Depressed people release less pain- and stress-reducing endogenous opioids:
http://psychcentral.com/news/2015/02/28/rejection-seems-to-hurt-depressed-people-longer/81758.html
("Rejection Seems to Hurt Depressed People Longer")
My daily regimen of 10 cups of strong black coffee, two or three sugar-free Red Bulls, 200mg of amineptine and 2 x 5mg selegiline would leave some folk feeling quite lively. But this cocktail just about keeps me sentient.
"The powers of a man's mind are directly proportioned to the quantity of coffee he drinks.” (James Mackintosh)
Not quite true alas or else I'd be on my way to Stockholm.
But selegiline (l-deprenyl) may be safer and more sustainable than amphetamine...
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-06-age-related-cognitive-decline-dopamine.html
("Study finds connection between age-related cognitive decline and dopamine levels")
[on free will]
But what was the time-lag between the virtual clock in the subject's world-simulation and the mind-independent clock it tracked?
http://digg.com/video/is-free-will-just-an-illusion
("Is Free Will Just An Illusion?")
* * *
Only physicists who accept Everett (or buy into some “hidden variables” theory) would claim that quantum mechanics is deterministic. Anyone who still subscribes to the philosophical positivism of Copenhagen, or believes in so-called “dynamical collapse” theories, would argue QM is indeterministic. Fortunately, this isn't just a “philosophical” question. Any departure from the (deterministic) unitary evolution of the Schrödinger equation would have empirical consequences – and we just don't find them, not yet at any rate
(see e.g.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.0270v1.pdf
or the nontechnical papers of
http://faculty.up.edu/schlosshauer/index.php?page=pub
Although I don't think free will can be rescued, if I had to play devil's advocate, I might suggest that the values of the fundamental physical parameters that define our world are the collective outcome of the behaviour of all agents - with a posthuman superbeing playing a greater role than a mouse. Recall that unlike most researchers, I take seriously the possibility that consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical. So it's not the case that, when you decide to lift your hand, a non-experiential process is causing a physical process.
Other thoughts...
Though determinism is often associated with the idea of predictability, they are distinct notions. Quite aside from the field of so-called deterministic chaos, all sorts of predictions one can make of reflective agents are either self-fulfilling or self-falsifying even in a deterministic non-chaotic universe...
* * *
We might usefully distinguish quantum mind theories that do or don't invoke a physically real collapse of the wave function. Penrose and Hameroff Orch-OR are dynamical collapse theorists. Another distinction is between theorists who believe that experience exists at the most fundamental level in Nature (e.g. Hameroff); and theorists who believe consciousness arises only above a certain threshold – in Penrose's case, a quantum gravity threshold.
Another useful distinction between quantum mind theories is precisely what problem quantum mind conjectures are supposed to solve. Penrose, as befits a mathematician, focuses on the alleged ability of smart humans to know the truth of Gödel-unprovable statements. But other quantum mind theorists focus on the other “end” of the phylogenetic tree, namely on the apparent classical impossibility of local and global phenomenal binding.
(cf. http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/journal/article/view/33 - "The Cognitive Binding Problem: From Kant to Quantum Neurodynamics")
Fortunately, all these theories should eventually be empirically falsifiable - though dynamical collapse theories will be easier to falsify experimentally than conjectures that don't modify the unitary dynamics. There is no guarantee that Nature will be kind enough to allow our all conjectures to be empirically tested. But it would be good if all parties to the debate could work on devising novel, experimentally testable predictions that believers AND critics alike can agree would falsify - or vindicate - their pet theory.
* * *
Saving locality carries a high price:
http://www.ijqf.org/wps/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Vaidman-Bell-paper.pdf
("Bell Inequality and Many-Worlds Interpretation")
[on love and jealousy]
Affective psychosis has ancient evolutionary roots:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150107151100.htm
("Research on jealousy: Impact of sexual vs. emotional infidelity")
* * *
The Selfish Ribosome?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150107101405.htm
("Forget the selfish gene: Evolution of life is driven by the selfish ribosome, research suggests")
* * *
Free will? Kristofer, you have no real choice whether to withdraw your hand from the fire. By the same token, a mirror-touch synaesthete has no real choice whether to help you withdraw your hand from the flame, so to speak. Leaving your hand to burn would be like harming herself. We've no good grounds for believing that the perspective-taking capacities of a full-spectrum superintelligence will be inferior to a mirror-touch synaesthete. If so, non-friendliness towards other sentience may be just one aspect of the autism spectrum disorder endemic to Darwinian life.
http://www.livescience.com/1628-study-people-literally-feel-pain.html
[on veganism]
Alas some monsters are real.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3219459/Could-video-game-turn-VEGETARIAN-Players-control-cow-runs-abattoir-slaughters-humans.html
("Could this video game make you VEGETARIAN? Players control a cow that runs an abattoir which slaughters humans...Ludum Dare challenged developers to create a game in 48 hours with the brief: 'You are the monster' In Mr Botkov's That Cow Game, the player is a cow in a human abattoir. Humans are strung up on hooks are can be toyed with and butchered")
Will our grandchildren understand what we did and why?
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/25/industrial-farming-one-worst-crimes-history-ethical-question
("Industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history")
The only debate we should be having should be between vegetarian, quasi-vegan and vegan. Ending the industrialised animal abuse of factory-farming and slaughterhouses is a precondition for a civilised society. Like homeopaths who swear they notice the difference between "natural" Vitamin C and its nasty chemical cousin, some folk will insist they notice the difference between amino acids derived from animal flesh and amino acids derived from plants. In both cases, the distinction is unknown to medical science.
* * *
Would sentience-friendly superintelligence want to preserve humans or retire us?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/dining/animal-welfare-at-risk-in-experiments-for-meat-industry.html
("U.S. Research Lab Lets Livestock Suffer in Quest for Profit")
McDonalds launches "Day of Joy":
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/11491125/McDonalds-launches-day-of-joy-after-worst-sales-in-a-decade.html
Perhaps compare "Arbeit macht frei".
* * *
Misplaced worries about “anthropomorphism” can be ethically catastrophic. There is no scientific evidence that the development of the vertebrate lineage has been marked by greater intensities of feeling, but rather its ever-richer “encephalisation”. Compare how the Cartesians believed that the “distress vocalisations” of the dogs they vivisected were the mechanical responses of insentient automata. Fish can't howl in agony. Yet a convergence of evidence suggests they suffer as they writhe. Perhaps consider blind panic – an exceedingly ancient response. Its uncontrollable intensity isn't the product of sophisticated meta-cognitive processing in the neocortex, but rather the absence or breakdown of any capacity for self-reflection. A nicer example is orgasm, when much of the neocortex effectively shuts down.
http://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2009a/090429GarnerPain.html
("Fish may actually feel pain and react to it much like humans")
* * *
The claim that we are ethically entitled to hurt, harm and kill other sentient beings if we judge they lack the "potential" to become sapient can be used to rationalise the abuse of human and nonhuman animals alike. A (supposedly) irredeemable lack of sapience does not justify killing one's political or religious opponents, nor handicapped children or the very old. Nor does it justify harming sentient beings who lack generative syntax until they are "uplifted" with the relevant allele of the FOXP2 gene. Becoming transman will entail overcoming our baser appetites - a long journey, I fear.
Measuring the capacity of sentient beings to suffer is not an exact science. But the genes, anatomical substrates and neurotransmitter pathways that mediate pain, pleasure and core emotions are almost identical in toddlers and pigs. Of course, pigs are not literally identical to human toddlers: for example, they lack the variant of the FOXP2 gene implicated in the later development of generative syntax. But there is no evidence that such subtle genetic differences shape the capacity to suffer. Indeed, it's possible that nonhuman animals with larger pain centres (cf. the sperm whale) may sometimes suffer more than adult humans. Either way, we're not considering some difficult moral dilemma - e.g. should I save two pigs or one toddler of comparable sentience from a burning building? - but rather the question of whether to stop harming sentient beings for frivolous reasons. Preferring the taste of a hamburger to a veggieburger doesn't qualify as a challenging moral dilemma.
* * *
Bad - but killing and eating one's victims is worse:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11380250/Man-jailed-for-sexual-incident-with-a-Shetland-pony.html
("Man jailed for 'sexual incident' with a Shetland pony")
Martyn, are strict vegans who take Vitamin B12 supplements somehow less human than vegetarians and meat-eaters? And if we are so, does it matter ethically? Either way, the stuff I write isn't really intended to sway folk who don't think we should phase out the biology of involuntary suffering. Rather it's designed to explore different scenarios of what such a radical abolitionist ethic entails.
How does one defend the indefensible?
* * *
Kevin, for evolutionary reasons, humans have a (conditionally activated) predisposition to exploit and kill members of other races and species. But do we want to celebrate such barbarous habits? Or overcome them? Part of the civilising processes is learning how to stop hurting, harming and killing each other. Transhumans and posthumans won't eat or enslave their fellow subjects of experience. We don't need to molest them either.
* * *
"Low testosterone"? A vegan diet can induce the opposite:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2374537/
How do quasi-rational agents defend the indefensible?
"Rationalizing meat consumption: the 4Ns'"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150518121442.htm
("How people defend meat eating")
Pseudo-science that can find no place for sentience in its ontology is a false theory of the world.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-science-can-inform-ethics-and-champion-sentient-beings/
("How Science Can Inform Ethics and Champion Sentient Beings")
Sceptics may recall historian Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens:
"Tens of billions of them [non-human animals] have been subjected over the last two centuries to a regime of industrial exploitation, whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth."
Harari goes further:
"If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history."
"Happy meat?"
Dominic, like the euthanasia program targeting severely handicapped humans last century, I think any analogous program directed at nonhumans of comparable sentience would be unwise. The Hippocratic Oath needs extending to veterinary medicine.
* * *
We have reasoned for hundreds of millions of years...
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-03-rats-neuroscientists-uncovering.html
("Rats, reasoning, and rehabilitation: Neuroscientists uncovering how we reason")
* * *
If you say "sentient", a large minority of your audience will think you mean sapient.
If you say "conscious", a large minority of your audience will think you mean self-conscious.
And if you say (God forbid) "qualia", a large minority of your audience will think you mean something exotically metaphysical.
In short, a minefield...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
http://reducing-suffering.org/altruists-focus-reducing-short-term-far-future-suffering/
Brian, I very much hope you reconsider your position. We both want a civilisation based on helping rather than harming sentient beings. Urging merely that nonhuman animals be treated less cruelly - "humanely" is a misnomer - will simply legitimise their exploitation, not promote a moral revolution. Most vegetarians and vegans aren't too "confrontational": we're not nearly confrontational enough. Shutting and outlawing factory farms and slaughterhouses is fundamental to the project of reducing the burden of suffering in the world. Any future compassionate stewardship of the rest of the living world is sociologically inconceivable in the midst of the animal holocaust on which meat-eating western society is based. Please do think again!
["confrontational" should not mean rude. Courtesy, calmness and rational argument are usually more effective than personal abuse.]
One way to fight industrialised animal abuse now that doesn't legitimate the whole process is to support undercover video-filming of what routinely goes on in factory-farms and slaughterhouses. For one thing the animal exploitation industry can't do is publicise contrasting videos showing how nonhuman animals are butchered "humanely" - because the whole thrust of glossy meat commercials is to obscure the link between what's on supermarket shelves and the cruel story of how it got there.
The industry recognises the threat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag
* * *
A precondition of any sociologically credible project of compassionate stewardship of the rest of the living world is a moral revolution in human behaviour towards nonhuman animals. Systematic interventions to reduce free-living animal suffering are almost impossible to envisage while we are still systematically harming nonhuman animals in factory-farms and slaughterhouses. Supporting undercover filming of what goes on in factory-farms and slaughterhouses makes a - admittedly small - dent in the burden of suffering now, while at the same time helping to promote the longer-term goal.
Factory-farming creates greater densities of suffering sentience than "natural" population densities of free-living nonhuman animals. Also, the lives of free-living nonhumans are only intermittently ghastly: nonhuman animals in the wild are rarely so desperate they resort to self-mutilation - as do chronically desperate factory-farmed animals unless prevented by castration/tail-docking/debeaking etc. But my point was about laying the socio-political preconditions for a pan-species welfare state of compassionate stewardship of terrestrial and marine ecosystems. How can this moral revolution in human behaviour come to pass if we endorse the systematic "humane" [i.e. less cruel] exploitation of other sentient beings?
When mass-produced in vitro meat products finally do hit the supermarket shelves, the transition could come surprisingly fast. It's not as though most consumers today revel in the thought of suffering and killing: Faced with two otherwise identical products, IMO most consumers will pick the ethical option - and feel good about themselves for doing so. More controversially - and this is speculation - the majority who have made the switch will feel morally indignant towards the holdouts; and support shutting down factory-farms and slaughterhouses. Of course predicting - as distinct from advocating - moral revolutions is never easy.
Perhaps one day pictures of "meat" may seem akin to pictures of child abuse - perhaps with in vitro meat as the counterpart of 3D rendering (or insentient juvenile robotlovers) to cater to mankind's residual baser appetites.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3185066/Would-sex-robot-Intimate-relationships-machines-norm-50-years-claims-expert.html
("Intimate relationships with machines will be the norm in 50 years, claims expert")
Do robolovers reinforce stereotypes and demean robots?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34118482
("Intelligent machines: Call for a ban on robots designed as sex toys")
* * *
Grotesquely cruel and inefficient: can our reward circuitry be activated by more civilised tools than Darwinian pair-bonding?
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/a-psychologists-guide-to-online-dating/282225/
("A Psychologist's Guide to Online Dating. Can we predict romantic prospects just from looking at a face?")
* * *
Avian speed-dating and the recipe for love...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150914152616.htm
("Birds reveal the evolutionary importance of love")
[on predation]
Peter Singer on predation. Will sentient beings hurt, harm and kill each other indefinitely? Or will intelligent agents take our responsibilities seriously?
Predation
Biotech promises to make predation optional.
https://www.reprogramming-predators.com/ was written before the CRISPR revolution.
See too:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/evolution/crispr-gene-drives/
("Genetically Engineering Almost Anything")
'The Onion' sometimes puts it better than any philosopher:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/rehabilitated-otter-released-back-into-food-chain,38329/
Thanks Carolyn. What should be our long-term goal? Some sort of "Pleistocene rewilding" - i.e. recreating Nature (in practice, our wildlife parks) as the living world existed before human impact? Or alternatively, a future of global veganism, i.e. a world where sentient beings don't hurt, harm and kill each other - or perish through hunger and neglect? No, I don't trust humans to get it right whatever we do. But the more carefully and morally seriously we weigh the issues the better. I've always found AR Zone a great forum for a thoughtful civilised debate.
Pitfalls? Carolyn, yes, I can only agree. I always used to assume that we'd tackle the thorny issue of free-living animal suffering and predation only after humans finally shut and outlawed factory-farms, slaughterhouses - and the other grosser forms of animal exploitation. However, one reason we need the debate now rather than later is the growth of "rewilding" initiatives. Many people who support e.g. reintroducing wolves, captive big cat breeding programs and other interventions consider themselves animal lovers and even animal advocates. Unless we can work out some kind of consensus on our long-term goal, these well-intentioned efforts risk being self-defeating and even harmful. Re-engineering the Pleistocene could take as much time, effort and resources as a pan-species welfare state.
(I don't doubt wolves can be "gentle and loyal". But to survive in the wild they also eat their larger victims alive.
http://rt.com/uk/243689-attenborough-wolves-scotland-reintroduce/
("Reintroduce ‘gentle & loyal’ wolves to Scotland, urges David Attenborough")
As you know, I argue that human and nonhuman animals flourish best when free living but not wild. Fine words - but what does this entail?
* * *
At Oscar [Horta]'s prompting, a tidied-up version of "A Welfare State for Elephants"
https://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/elephantcare.html
should be appearing in "Relations; Beyond Anthropocentrism"
http://www.ledonline.it/index.php/Relations/
Whether we'll ever truly have high tech Jainism or a pan-species welfare state is of course unknown. But the incredulous response of "That's impossible!" can't be sustained in the technical sense at least.
* * *
A welfare state for tortoises? Eventually, I trust...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/11667543/Tortoise-has-wheel-fitted-to-replace-amputated-leg.html
Rodney, yes. What can be hard - if one recognises the vileness of Darwinian life - is to accept that the future belongs to life lovers. Any politically practical solutions to the cruelties of life will involve its perpetuation. Most of the folk in history who decided that the game wasn't worth the candle were not the people who passed on their genes...
The road to heaven is paved with bad intentions?
Phasing out the biology of suffering may have unlikely sponsors...
http://mic.com/articles/121287/the-department-of-defense-wants-to-use-science-to-make-soldiers-literally-fearless
("The Department of Defense Wants to Use Science to Make Soldiers Literally Fearless")
* * *
http://www.mancept.com/mancept-workshops/mancept-workshops-2015/panels-ii/intervention-or-protest-saving-nonhumans/
("Intervention or Protest: Saving Nonhumans")
one day holding a workshop on, so to speak, "Predation: For or Against?" will seem as crazy as holding a workshop on, say, "Child Abuse: For or Against?"
Alas today predationists (I just made up a word) mostly regard their views as intellectually self-evident.
* * *
The meme is spreading - travestied, of course, as a plea for mass genocide:
http://www.quora.com/Should-humans-wipe-out-all-carnivorous-animals-so-the-succeeding-generations-of-herbivores-can-live-in-peace
("Should humans wipe out all carnivorous animals so the succeeding generations of herbivores can live in peace?")
Sentient beings shouldn't hurt, harm, and kill each other. This isn't an argument for mass genocide against cannibals or carnivores, but for dietary reform. Humans are prone to status quo bias. So let's do a thought-experiment. Imagine we stumble across an advanced civilisation that has abolished predation, disease, famine, and all the horrors of primitive Darwinian life. The descendants of archaic lifeforms flourish unmolested in their wildlife parks - free living but not "wild". Should we urge scrapping their regime of compassionate stewardship of the living world - and a return to asphyxiation, disembowelling and being eaten alive? Or is a happy biosphere best conserved intact?
Back here on Earth, the exponential growth of computer power entails that every cubic metre of the planet will shortly be accessible to surveillance and micro-management. In consequence, which life-forms and states of consciousness exist in tomorrow's wildlife parks will be up to us. Mass-produced in vitro meat, the CRISPR revolution in biotechnology, and fertility regulation via cross-species immunocontraception mean there is no need to re-enact the traditional Darwinian horror story indefinitely. On some fairly modest assumptions, fertility regulation is ethically preferable to Malthusian methods of population control in humans and nonhuman alike.
Critics might claim that a genetically tweaked vegetarian lion isn't "truly" a lion. But this is like saying non-Caucasians who lack the 1% to 3% Neanderthal DNA typical of Caucasians aren't "truly" human. Or vice versa. In short, beware naïve species essentialism.
For now this debate is fanciful. Before humans can start systematically helping sentient beings, we must stop systematically harming them. Thankfully, the in vitro meat revolution promises a world where factory-farms and slaughterhouses have been outlawed. Before seriously contemplating high-tech Jainism, let's shut the death factories. Thankfully, the era of industrialised animal abuse may soon be over:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-04-artificial-meat-low-end.html
("Artificial meat tipped to flood low-end market")
* * *
Should we aim to eradicate malaria? Were we wrong to eradicate smallpox? For sure, ending a source of immense suffering - and check on population sizes - can cause huge ecological disruption if not done intelligently. But this is an argument for cross-species fertility regulation, not Malthusian misery and moral inertia.
"A giant zoo"? Perhaps look around. Most contemporary humans are neither subsistence hunter-gatherers nor physically incarcerated, i.e. we are free-living rather than wild or captive. Good health, adequate shelter and decent nutrition for ourselves and our children are preconditions for an acceptable quality of life. In principle, free-living nonhuman animals too can flourish in tomorrow's nature reserves - well-fed, disease-free, and safe from being physically molested. This scenario isn't the same policy option as creating a "zoo".
"Complexity"? I presume the questioner wasn't envisaging a Five Year Plan, but instead asking about the long-term future of life on Earth over centuries and millennia to come. Power breeds complicity. Should we aim for some sort of "Pleistocene rewilding"? Or a pan-species welfare state? Or something in-between?
What if humans weren't around? Any existential catastrophe that wiped out humans (or our transhuman successors) would presumably wipe out the global ecosystem too, or at least multicellular life. So the question is moot.
"Docile"? Or civilised? Once again, when considering the interests of human and nonhuman animals, the right to freedom from harm shouldn't be conflated with a freedom to harm others. Moreover, vegetarianism does not entail docility - as the lives of numerous free-living herbivores today attest.
* * *
Does the right to asphyxiate, disembowel or eat alive trump the right to be left in peace? This murderous-sounding ethic is hard to justify ethically - regardless of the age, race or species of the victims. To be sure, there is no guarantee that phasing out the horrors of predation will lead to a happy long-term outcome - any more than getting rid of cannibalistic headhunting leads inevitably to peace on Earth. But endorsement of extreme violence should not be the default option.
Dean, let's guard against double standards. Modern humans want healthcare, good nutrition, and the safety of a well-policed society for ourselves and our loved ones - and an environment of parks and gardens, not malarial swamps. Extending the blessings of healthcare, good nutrition, and the safety of a well-policed society to free-living sentient beings from other species - and not so long ago to members of other races - sounds fanciful. Yet why should "we" enjoy a high quality of life while the existence of others is "nasty, brutish, and short". Anthropocentric bias can be as insidious as ethnocentric bias.
Is predation a comparative mercy? Care for the elderly in human society could certainly be improved. But the idea that granny might be better off if eaten alive or disembowelled by predators is as ethically problematic in humans as it is in nonhumans. Ethically speaking, we'd do better systematically to help the vulnerable rather than leave them to their fate.
* * *
Dirk perhaps "Reprogramming Predators" should have a companion piece "Reprogramming Prey". However, just as solving the problem of human predators by inducing their victims to enjoy their fate poses ethical and technical challenges, the same is true of nonhuman animals. In the long run, I hope the very notion of "predator" and "prey" can be engineered out of existence.
https://www.hedweb.com/abolitionist-project/reprogramming-predators.html
* * *
Chaitali, you remark "Offering assistance means that the person can legally give consent to contraception measures. An animal cannot give consent. Hence, your comparison is flawed." Control of both family and overall population sizes is feasible in human and nonhuman animals; but only mature humans are capable of giving informed consent. Perhaps compare vaccinations. Neither small-children nor nonhuman animals can give informed consent to be vaccinated; but vaccinations against several extremely unpleasant diseases are (or should be) performed in the interests of both the vaccinee and the wider community.
Potential ethical dilemmas? Pitfalls? Yes, of course, lots. Yet on some quite modest assumptions, it's not in your interests to contract a nasty debilitating disease, nor to lose half your offspring to hunger, malnutrition or predators - regardless of race or species. Hence the case for compassionate stewardship.
* * *
Life is extremely diverse. But complications aside, no sentient being wants to be harmed. So no anthropocentrism - or anthropomorphism - is involved here: quite the opposite.
Ex-predators? Like ex-cannibals, they can flourish - just not by harming others.
"Diminished vitality"? On the contrary. Hunger, malnutrition, disease, deficiency disorders and parasites sap the vitality of many organisms in a state of Nature. Perhaps compare the psychological as well as physical effects of famine in 20th century sub-Saharan Africa. These adverse effects of deprivation can be transgenerational.
By contrast, good nutrition and ecologically sustainable population sizes thanks to cross-species fertility regulation can hugely enhance vitality.
Yes, pitfalls abound. But let's not assume a civilisation based on compassionate stewardship of the living world would be stupid.
* * *
Sean, we are entitled to be sentientists and phylum chauvinists. Plants, fungi, and the great majority of living organisms on the planet are not subjects of experience. They don't inherently deserve moral consideration.
Nonsense mutations of the SCN9A gene abolish the capacity to experience phenomenal pain. Plants don't have an SCN9A gene - or anything like it. In the absence of any capacity for rapid self-propelled motion, no selection pressure can exist to create an energetically expensive nervous system - or the unitary subject of experience supported by the vertebrate CNS. The nerve ganglia of insects, for example, may undergo micro-pains; but (unless we embrace animism) there is no unitary subject of insect experience. Perhaps compare how the head segment of some locusts can carry on feeding while the tail segment is devoured. Granted, we can't discount the possibility that individual cells - including non-neuronal cellulose cell-wall-encased plant cells - support discrete rudimentary micro-experiences. Yet compared to the horrors of vertebrate suffering, such hypothetical cellular micro-experience is presumably (at worse) ethically trivial.
http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/plants-use-neurotransmitter-signal-stress
("Plants Use Neurotransmitter To Signal Stress")
What really would shock me is if plants (or other sessile organisms) manufactured opiates - or their functional equivalent - for anything resembling pain relief. Of course, members of the poppy family do manufacture opiates; but presumably they do so for the adaptive purpose of "poisoning" anything that might otherwise eat them. My main worry about such stories is they prompt exultant cries of "Look, plants feel pain too!" from meat eaters.
* * *
How many sentient beings want to be asphyxiated, disembowelled or eaten alive? The “complications aside” caveat was there for a reason. But by its very nature, predation involves extreme unprovoked violence.
Ex-predators? A lion who eats in vitro meat or whose metabolism and behavioural phenotype is tweaked to be harmless can flourish no less than a famished lion - who also typically loses several of her cubs.
Human cannibalism? Perhaps consider the genetic evidence of natural selection at work on genetic loci suggesting widespread prion diseases in our evolutionary history. However, this controversial topic would take us far afield.
Timescales? Genetic engineering and ecosystem management are inherently wide-raging and long-term. We're talking about the long-term future of nonhuman life, not just the fate of existing sentience.
The “vitality” of an ecosystem? Mastery of our genetic source code via the revolution in biotech promises unparalleled ecological control. Whether we use such power wisely is another question. If you don't believe that traditional misery-ridden ecosystems are horribly flawed, then you won't see a need for compassionate stewardship.
Variety? The CRISPR revolution in biotech promises far greater genetic, psychological and behavioural diversity that was feasible under a regimen of natural selection.
Infallibility? Responsible policy-making is about risk-reward ratios and cost-benefit analyses, not pretensions to omniscience. If we want a living world of happy and healthy sentience, we now have the tools for the job.
* * *
Malthusians used to believe that the immiseration of humans was inevitable. The exponential growth of human populations would outrun the (at best) linear growth in food supplies. "It must be so". Malthusians did not foresee family planning or the demographic transition.
Free-living nonhuman animals can't control their own fertility like contemporary humans. In consequence, the cruel Darwinian processes of famine and predation still determine species population sizes. "It must be so" say bioconservatives. However, cross-species fertility regulation via immunocontraception now offers an alternative: nonhuman animals in tomorrow's Nature reserves can be free-living rather than wild or zoo-bound.
Resources? Our successors aren't going to run out of the tools of fertility-regulation any more than they'll exhaust computer power, nanobots or gene-editing software. In future, whether sentient beings flourish or undergo misery and malaise will be an (un)ethical decision by intelligent agents.
* * *
Like Dick Cheney's description of the torture of waterboarding as a "dunk in the water", the sense of uncontrollable panic induced by being suffocated should not be trivialized: it is extraordinarily unpleasant.
You speak of "gambling the ecosystem". In the absence of fertility-regulation underwritten by compassionate stewardship, population explosions followed by starvation would resume as now. This is what the "balance of Nature" means - not tranquil equilibrium. Darwinian existence would return.
"Destroy nature"? No - not unless you count family planning and abolishing famine in sub-Saharan Africa as "destroying" the ecosystem.
Who is talking about "destroying" a species? Members of different human ethnic groups may have different alleles/ allelic combinations; but they can still interbreed. The same can be true of free-living nonhumans of different species in tomorrow's wildlife parks.
"Being a predator is what they are. You seek to deny them that. It's a violation of their will". Yes, this is true of some humans who prey on small children. Human predators didn't choose to be that way; there's no metaphysical sense in blaming them for their nature. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't protect small children - thereby "violating the will" of those who would harm them. Nor need it mean in future we aren't duty-bound to protect beings of comparable sentience and sapience.
"Totalitarianism"? The freedom to live one's life without being physically molested is about as basic to liberty as it gets.
Can we bioengineer a living world full of love?
http://phys.org/news/2015-09-parenting-animal-world-infanticide-instinct.html
("Parenting in the animal world: Turning off the infanticide instinct")
* * *
"Don't use the term 'human predators'"
But whether to aim for a world without human and nonhuman predators is precisely what's at issue. You assert that we should protect the interests of the victim if s/he is human, and instead protect the interests of the predator if the victim is nonhuman. It's precisely this inversion of values that advocates of compassionate stewardship are challenging - though in practice, (ex-)predators can benefit from compassionate biology as much as ex-victims. On a practical level, it's hard to imagine humans could systematically help free-living nonhuman animals while we systematically harm their domesticated counterparts in factory-farms and slaughterhouses. But the in vitro meat revolution will most likely bring a moral revolution in its wake. The cruelties of Nature needn't persist indefinitely.
* * *
Jin, agreed, it's potentially hackable. So of course is the IT infrastructure on which the lives of free-living humans now depends. Digital security is a huge challenge. However, I presume the questioner wasn't anticipating an imminent Five Year Plan (or even an imminent Fifty Year Plan) but instead posing a question about the long-term future of life on the planet. From an ethical point of view, should humans promote and preserve a living world where sentient beings are programmed to hurt, harm and kill each other? Or use biotech and IT to create some sort of pan-species welfare state where all sentient beings flourish in peace?
* * *
Wolf, apologies for the lack of clarity about the "sociological credibility". Nature has “designed” many organisms to harm others. So one technical solution to such savagery might be to allow species of obligate predator and parasite to go extinct, allowing the inoffensive to flourish in peace. But one sure-fire way to unite (almost) everyone against you is to propose the “loss” of iconic predators (above a certain size at least. Most people seem relaxed about the extinction of Plasmodium-transmitting species of Anopheles mosquito.)
Of course, judgements of likely socio-political credibility 20 or 50 years from now are speculative - sometimes little better than guesswork. Most people today are still incredulous at any form of compassionate intervention to help free living nonhumans, let alone organised stewardship. Perhaps all we can realistically do for now is set out different policy options and encourage serious ethical debate. By contrast, the case for shutting down factory-farms and slaughterhouses is much simpler in every sense.
* * *
Britain is being haunted by the spectre of killer seagulls, but perhaps we need to discuss the wider picture:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11746530/David-Cameron-wants-a-big-conversation-about-murderous-seagulls-killing-pets-and-attacking-people.html
("David Cameron wants a 'big conversation' about 'murderous' seagulls killing pets and attacking people")
Christian, we tend to respect strong and dominant predators. Conversely, we are prone to feel contempt for the weak. ("Are you a man or a mouse?") But Darwinian ethics, like Darwinian life, deserves to go into the dustbin of history. We can do better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maus
* * *
Jin, but natural selection has done a terrible job. As Richard Dawkins observes, "The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation." Intelligent agents can potentially do better. Not least, mastery of our genetic source code promises a civilised future where intelligent agents pre-select and customise alleles and allelic combinations in anticipation of their likely behavioural and psychological effects on the organism. By contrast, natural selection is "blind". Mutations are effectively random [with respect to the direction of evolution]. Crossing gaps in the fitness landscape is prohibited by natural selection. By contrast, intelligent agency can "leap across" such fitness gaps. So far greater genetic diversity is feasible in a post-CRISPR living world than under the old Darwinian regime.
Prototypes and pilot studies? Sure, they will be essential. But why assume a "sad life for the prototypes"? Lifelong good nutrition, decent healthcare and fertility regulation can allow free-living human and nonhuman animals alike to flourish. Darwinian ecosystems contain obscene amounts of suffering. Post-Darwinian ecosystems can be happy. Either way, it's an ethical choice.
* * *
Direct action now? Sometimes, small actions can make the world a better place. But in the case of free-living animals, I worry that a piecemeal approach may not have any benefit at all. Often the outcome will just be more suffering. Thus rescue some mice or herbivores large and small and the result will be a larger breeding population, followed by more starvation and an increase in predator numbers - and thus more fear, death and suffering.
The only way I know to make a real difference to the burden of suffering will be to campaign for a global ethical-ideological shift away from traditional conservation biology to compassionate biology - with all that such responsible stewardship of the rest of the living world entails. In other words, cross-species fertility regulation, GPS tracking, phasing out carnivory, the lot, though presumably with initial pilot studies in individual wildlife parks. This conception of future Nature reserves will presumably involve many decades (centuries?) of ridicule and hostility as well as moral apathy - though it's great that big names like Peter Singer are gingerly raising issues such as the long-term future of predation.
Is this analysis too pessimistic?
When can ad hoc interventions make a difference?
Whether rescuing mice or wildlife rehabilitation centres, I'd be the last person to discourage hands-on animal activism.
Books and genomes alike should be edited:
http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-people-who-discovered-the-most-powerful-genetic-engineering-tool-we-know-found-it-by-accident-2015-6
("The researchers behind 'the biggest biotech discovery of the century' found it by accident")
Andres' work (http://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/345e6p/this_guy_is_trying_to_figure_out_how_to_quantify/
"If a lion could speak, we could not understand him". Contra Wittgenstein, I think if a lion could speak, we'd understand her or him quite well: we share the same core emotions. Obviously, some aspects of a lion's experience would be foreign to us: for instance, what it's like to fancy another lion. But an analogous lack of appreciation of many other people's sexual turn-ons is common too.
One way of exploring the role of status quo bias is to imagine if some phenomenon didn't exist and ask how hard we'd work to introduce it. Thus if there were no veterinarians, for example, then countless pet owners (and others) would support their introduction. How about obligate predators? In a world where sentient beings flourished unmolested, the idea of deliberately genetically engineering organisms designed to hurt, harm and kill other sentient beings would seem not just fanciful but obscene. In my view, we should take this lesson to heart.
* * *
CRISPR and gene drives could be used to claw our way out of the Darwinian abyss. But what are the odds of our navigating the transition to a happy biosphere?
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/crispr-dna-editing-2/
("The Genesis Engine")
[on mood-enrichers]
Should the development of safe and sustainable mood-enrichers be promoted or discouraged?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11368009/Prisoners-taking-legal-highs-to-be-kept-in-jail-longer.html
("Prisoners taking legal highs to be kept in jail longer")
* * *
Good news, but for now a few month's in the Maldives is cheaper:
http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-created-artificial-sunlight-that-s-real-enough-to-trick-your-brain
("Scientists have created artificial sunlight that’s real enough to trick your brain")
* * *
Cannabis-induced psychosis is not a mere artefact of publication bias. Can medical science design safe, sustainable euphoriants instead?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-31480234
('Skunk-like cannabis' increases risk of psychosis, study suggests")
The austere pages of Nature magazine are getting sexier:
http://www.nature.com/news/marijuana-flips-appetite-switch-in-brain-1.16957
("Marijuana flips appetite switch in brain. Sudden attacks of 'the munchies' are triggered by a change in the hormone released by neurons.")
In common with most nonhuman animals, I don't like the effects of cannabis either; derealisation, depersonalisation, intense introspection. But then I have a pleasure-resistant brain. If the drug made me high, I suspect I'd smoke it all day.
* * *
Your brain and food:
http://www.amazon.com/Your-Brain-Food-Chemicals-Thoughts/dp/0199393273/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
("Food: How Chemicals Control Your Thoughts and Feelings")
Some folk combine junk food or a quasi-Palaeolithic diet with nootropics. However...
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-05-healthful-smart-sustain-brain-power.html
("Healthful eating is smart way to sustain brain power, study finds")
Perhaps the one area where dietary ethics and self-interest don't coincide is fish-eating. However, vegan sources of EFAs lacking the trace dioxin, mercury and PCBs of "natural" fish sources are available from your local health-food store.
* * *
As our minds are currently designed, mesolimbic dopaminergic “wanting” shows no physiological tolerance (cf. wireheading), whereas mu opioidergc “liking” shows a lot of physiological tolerance. This contrast isn't to deny we'd be blissfully happy all day if our twin hedonic hotspots were optimally stimulated. But unlike wireheading, one can't simply keep on taking the same dose of a mu agonist opioid each day and expect to sustain the initial euphoric effect.
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasures-Brain-Series-Affective-Science/dp/0195331028
(Pleasures of the Brain")
[on longevity]
Is aging a treatable disorder?
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/11/-sp-live-forever-extend-life-calico-google-longevity
("Live for ever: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’")
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/04/04/tech-titans-latest-project-defy-death/
("Tech titans’ latest project: Defy death")
A switch best left unflipped:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150723125244.htm
Some of the critical comments would be justified if coercive rejuvenation therapy were proposed. But should anyone be forced to grow old and die when medical science makes aging technically optional? Condemning innocent life-lovers to such a fate would seem cruel and immoral. Further, such a draconian policy could be enforced only by a totalitarian state.
* * *
If humans can live 200 years, we can live indefinitely:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/discovery-bowhead-whale-genes-offer-hope-extending-human-life-1481794
("Discovery of Bowhead whale genes offer hope of extending human life. Genome for the world's longest-living mammal may hold key to 200-year lifespans")
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/genes-that-make-you-clever-also-help-you-live-longer-10417761.html
("Genes that make you clever also help you live longer")
Negative utilitarianism probably knocks at least two decades off one's life-expectancy - though I wouldn't mind being brainwashed out of it by extravagant amounts of pleasure.
* * *
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-01-myc-gene-healthy-lifespan-mice.html
("Reducing Myc gene activity extends healthy lifespan in mice")
Klotho:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-02-protein-linked-longevity-cognition-alzheimer.html
Many fountains, not enough youth. But still interesting:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150408124628.htm
("Fountain of youth uncovered in mammary glands of mice, by breast cancer researchers")
* * *
Prepare for a global surge in bone-crushing handshakes:
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21651169-strength-your-handshake-predicts-length-your-life-getting-grip
("Getting a grip")
* * *
"Hell is other people" (Sartre). But is the alternative worse?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-03-prescription-longer.html
("Prescription for living longer: Spend less time alone")
The sinister story of Darwinian life...
http://phys.org/news/2015-04-science-spite.html
("The Science of spite")
Why do vegetarians tend to live longer than meat-eaters?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/11666721/A-handful-of-nuts-can-save-your-life-says-new-study.html
("A handful of nuts can save your life, says new study")
* * *
Transhumanism is going mainstream:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-09/google-ventures-bill-maris-investing-in-idea-of-living-to-500
("Google Ventures and the Search for Immortality")
* * *
Let's keep violence off the menu:
http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-study-eating-whole-grains-live-longer-20150105-story.html
"Study finds that eating whole grains can help you live longer")
Moral argument or an appeal to self-interest? What's the most effective way to get factory-farms and slaughterhouses shut? See too:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/11325968/Porridge-could-be-key-to-a-long-and-healthy-life-says-Harvard-University.html
* * *
Just as inorganic robots can be repaired indefinitely, there doesn't seem to be any fundamental law of Nature that prohibits organic robots from being maintained indefinitely too, at least before the Heat Death of the universe. But the Ship of Theseus springs to mind...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
* * *
Randall, in science, it doesn't matter whether you're a double Nobel laureate or serve on the checkout counter at Walmart. If you present a compelling argument why organic but not silicon (etc) robots can't be maintained indefinitely, that's great - regardless of your academic credentials.
For what it's worth, I'm sceptical of the notion of enduring personal identity from day-to-day, let alone centuries or millennia. But such scepticism about enduring metaphysical egos is very different from the claim that organic robots are forever destined to senesce and die because their neurons are irreplaceable. We already know this isn't the case from studies of adult neurogenesis.
* * *
("This 26 Year Old Man And His Rare Condition May Be The Key To Immortality")
http://www.koreaboo.com/buzz/this-26-year-old-man-and-his-rare-condition-may-be-the-key-to-immortality/
("This 26 Year Old Man And His Rare Condition May Be The Key To Immortality")
* * *
Do old minds need young blood?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-01-scientists-uncover-tools-rejuvenate-brain.html
("Scientists uncover surprising new tools to rejuvenate the brain")
* * *
Randall, what do you believe are the upper bounds of complexity of an organism that could be engineered to have an indefinite lifespan? For example, if any of the 302 neurons of C. elegans (cf. http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/7985-a-worms-mind-in-a-lego-body.html) wears out, the neurons could be replaced, but I gather you believe such a challenge will always be computationally intractable for Homo sapiens (??).
Randall, most researchers working in the field of anti-aging medicine don't call themselves "transhumanists". But they do seek to extend healthspan as long as possible. No one dies of old age, always of a specific condition. You would support (I trust!) the treatment and prevention of, say, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's and the different cancers. What then? Are you opposed to, say, neural stem cell therapies? What should be the maximum legal lifespan? How should such a cap be enforced?
Should we create "Methuselah humans"?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150115134624.htm
("Prolonging lifespan: Researchers create 'Methuselah fly' by selecting best cells")
If computational platonism is true, presumably we each have an infinite number of digital zombie counterparts. By contrast, finitists (like me), who don't believe that phenomenal binding is classical, will have to settle for digitization for partial restoration and backup purposes.
Randall, you're attacking a straw man. The future feasibility of indefinite lifespans for organic robots does not depend on conserving a precise molecular duplicate of your current mind-brain state. (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem) Recall that throughout life there is a huge turnover of our molecular constituents daily, together with growth and pruning of synaptic connections - and also modest neurogenesis.
Eternal life? On any naturalistic rather theistic view, life must be infinitesimally short, not eternal, because we can't cheat the heat death of the universe. But no law of Nature forbids phasing out involuntary suffering or senescence in our forward light-cone.
* * *
"Cryonics is an experiment. So far the control group isn't doing very well."
(Ralph Merkle)
Neither death nor taxes are inevitable, though taxes may have a long future.
http://hplusmagazine.com/2015/01/08/repairable-human-cryonics-beyond/
Dead? Or in a "deep meditative trance"?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/mongolia/11387391/Mongolian-scientists-study-200-year-old-mummified-monk-who-is-still-alive.html
("Mongolian scientists study 200-year-old mummified monk who is 'still alive’")
* * *
Stefan F., indefinite lifespans are not the same as infinite lifespans. That's why I alluded to the Heat Death of the universe.
Randall, just as we could (if anyone wanted to) keep, say, an Atari 400 functioning indefinitely, presumably post-human superintelligence could do the same for simple-minded organic robots like us. Whether such conservation is ethically desirable is another question. I'm personally opposed to forced terminations.
* * *
Randall, no one was ever harmed by not existing. Accusing someone of behaving selfishly towards non-existing beings is like saying they are harming the tooth-fairy. Also, if as you claim, lifespans of beyond 150 years are forbidden by the second law, then transhumanists would at worst be like designers of perpetual motion machines, i.e. harmless cranks. Either way, does talk of our "selfishness on top of selfishness on top of yet more selfishness" do justice to your natural generosity of spirit?
* * *
Does the track record of futurists beat astrologers?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2015/jan/13/-sp-political-leaders-who-consulted-astrologers-sri-lanka
"To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake” (Schopenhauer)
But not if organic robots upgrade their reward circuitry too.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11413041/How-Silicon-Valley-is-trying-to-cure-ageing.html
("How Silicon Valley is trying to cure ageing")
We recognise progeria as a disorder. The fact its signs and symptoms strike most of us today somewhat later does not make them healthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progeria
Let's hope Syndrome X can provide more clues:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140520-the-girls-who-never-age
* * *
Misao Okawa: 117 years Not Out. When will Jeanne Calment's record 122 years, 164 days be surpassed?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/31725672
("World's oldest person celebrates 117th birthday in Japan")
Supercentenarian Records
Randall, defeating the biology of aging isn't like trying to cheat the no-cloning theorem in quantum mechanics, let alone subverting Gödel's incompleteness theorems. We are not trying to preserve a perfect copy of anyone: the half-life of a typical protein in the brain is around 12 days, and our neuronal weights and connections ceaselessly change. None of this entails a biology of irreparable aging. Not least, high-resolution scanning and backup mind-files should be feasible later this century and beyond - though my idiosyncratic views on the nonclassical nature of phenomenal binding mean I doubt a classical digital computer will ever be a unitary subject of experience.
* * *
Senolytic drugs - the revolution has begun:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150309144823.htm
("New class of drugs dramatically increases healthy lifespan, mouse study suggests")
Dasatinib and quercetin.
See too:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4051295/
("Senescent cells: a novel therapeutic target for aging and age-related disease")
Dylan, much of my early consciousness was stained by angst, introspection and melancholy. The melancholy and hypercholinergic frenzy have gone, together with the old DP. My regimen causes a degree of inner tension (and propensity to play Modern Combat and Hitman Sniper - in HS, killing civilian witnesses is discouraged but not penalised, and if you don't, they blab to guards:
http://www.gamezebo.com/2015/06/09/hitman-sniper-tips-cheats-strategies/
http://brainblogger.com/2015/07/15/the-most-popular-psychiatric-drugs-alter-decisions-to-cause-harm/
Whether this matters in practice is debatable:
http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-their-mothers/
But I ought to be getting ready for Melbourne EA:
https://www.hedweb.com/transhumanism/talks.html
and working on the book.
What next? My JDTIC experiment didn't work out as hoped; kappa opioid antagonists "ought" to improve hedonic tone without the side-effects of mu agonist opioids, but my brain is pleasure-resistant. Anticholinergics brighten my mood; but they are also the archetypal "dumb drugs".
The only time I've experienced a passable imitation of mental health was on:
https://www.mdma.net
But the problem of how safely and sustainably to sustain MDMA-like consciousness (a “triple whammy” of enhanced oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin function?) has defeated me. We need a super-Shulgin.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-David-Pearces-current-supplement-regime
Darren
I hesitated before posting an answer at all. It's not as though my regimen has turned an emotional train-wreck into a psychological superman. I'm still looking for the elusive combo that makes me wake up in the morning ready to take on the world and win...
* * *
A sensible note of caution:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2015/03/11/beyond-resveratrol-the-anti-aging-nad-fad/
* * *
Metformin goes on trial as an anti-aging drug:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22730293.900
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-oldest-person-in-the-world-keeps-dying/
("Why The Oldest Person In The World Keeps Dying")
Real men don't live long?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150604141903.htm
("Why are 95% of people who live to 110 women? You're as old as your stem cells")
* * *
Concepta Emancipación raises an ethically challenging point. Should one cite research that may have involved unethical procedures - whether human or nonhuman? Much of our knowledge of the extremes of human endurance comes from e.g. experiments performed by the Nazi doctors or Unit 731. Like granting the admissibility in court of evidence obtained under duress, the risk of citation is we encourage more abuse. That said, we do need (ethically conducted) biomedical research. It's the only way that humans and mice alike can flourish with indefinite health spans - and of course fertility regulation.
* * *
https://www.quora.com/How-come-no-one-was-ever-born-with-a-mutation-that-prevented-him-from-aging
("How come no one was ever born with a mutation that prevented him from aging?")
Unfortunately, "Syndrome X" (cf. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140520-the-girls-who-never-age
Ageing: The girls who never grow older) strikes very early in life. Yet the CRISPR revolution of genome editing promises a genetically engineered future of eternal youth.
Alas realistic timescales are still unclear:
Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime: Aubrey de Grey, Michael Rae: 9780312367077: Amazon.com: Books
No fundamental law of nature dictates that silicon robots must grow old and perish. Without exception, their components are replaceable, repairable and improvable indefinitely. The same presumably holds for organic robots like us - eventually. But when? Despite e.g. the exponential growth of computer power and the explosive growth of CRISPR genome-editing technologies, I suspect Aubrey de Grey is too optimistic about timescales by several decades - perhaps more.
Syndrome X is fascinating: I’d love to know further details. Alas like you I am (extremely) sceptical we will ever be able to engineer some sort of single genetic switch that turns off aging in early adulthood.
Digital immortality? Some transhumanists imagine that we will be able to scan, digitise and "upload" ourselves to another medium. I'm personally sceptical about the possibility of software-based phenomenal minds. However, my reasons for doubting that classical digital computers can ever solve the phenomenal binding problem are idiosyncratic.
(cf. What did really happen with Schrödinger's cat?)
* * *
In principle, neither aging nor taxes are biologically inevitable...
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6265/1180.full
Happy long-lived worms on mianserin:
http://www.science20.com/news_articles/transcriptional_drift_of_youth_antidepressant_keeps_worms_in_young_adulthood_longer-160966
[on male primate dominance behaviour]
How can transhumanism overcome male primate dominance behaviour?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/11501340/Science-explains-why-hipsters-grow-beards.html
("Science explains why hipsters grow beards. Men might be growing beards to appear more attractive to women and more dominant to other men, a study on monkeys suggests ")
Male primate dominance behaviour is still (IMO) our greatest underlying source of global catastrophic risk - and, less obviously, the evolutionary origin of world-wide scourge of depression. Non-social animals don't get depressed.
http://www.amazon.com/Subordination-Defeat-Evolutionary-Approach-Disorders/dp/080583298X
The abolition of men? The language of enhancement generally plays better with an audience than nihilistic phraseology. But in essence, yes.
[on physicalism]
If physicalism is true, then the world is exhaustively described by the equations of physics and their solutions. No “element of reality” is missing from the equations of (tomorrow's) physics – either relativistic quantum field theory or its currently speculative successor, M-theory. This formal claim is typically conjoined with an ontological assumption, namely that the mysterious “fire” in the equations – the intrinsic nature of the physical – is non-experiential. If this claim is true, then physicalism is a close cousin of classical materialism. If this claim is false, i.e. if experience discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical, then physicalism becomes a scientifically literate variant of monistic idealism. The best known proponent of non-materialistic physicalism today is Galen Strawson. (cf.
"Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?" by Galen Strawson et al. (2006))
Traditional “materialist” physicalists face the seemingly impossible Hard Problem of Consciousness. By contrast, Strawsonian physicalists must confront what David Chalmers calls the problem of microphysical simplicity and the problem of structural mismatch (the phenomenal binding/combination problem)
http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf
All varieties of physicalism are typically associated with – but should be distinguished from – reductionism. According to reductive physicalism, life can be reduced to molecular biology, molecular biology to quantum chemistry, and quantum chemistry to the most fundamental entities recognised by physics. The problem with reductionism is that physicists increasingly recognise that the superposition principle is universal. The decoherence program in post-Everett quantum mechanics explains the illusion of wavefunction collapse. If indeed the unitary dynamics doesn't ever break down, and if physicalism is correct, then wavefunction monism is true, and reductionism is false. All that exists is a single gigantic cosmic superposition exhaustively described by the universal wavefunction. Both materialist and non-materialist physicalists may be wavefunction monists. (cf. Alyssa May and David Albert: "The Wave Function: Essays on the Metaphysics of Quantum
Mechanics" Oxford University Press, 2013
"
http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/ccallender/Ney_Albert_review.pdf)
What's my view? Well, I take David Chalmers' challenge to physicalism seriously. If any element of our rich, bound phenomenal consciousness is unrepresented in the formalism of physics, then physicalism is false. Classical neuroscience suggests that organic minds are nothing but networks of discrete, decohered, membrane-bound, effectively classical neurons. If so, then we'd be nothing but patterns of classical Jamesian “mind-dust”. The existence of local and global phenomenal binding poses a huge challenge to physicalism and the ontological unity of science. Thankfully, experiment rather than armchair philosophising should decide the issue:
https://www.physicalism.com/
* * *
Any theory of quantum mind (beyond Deepak Chopra-style poetry) yield testable, experimentally falsifiable consequences - as well as a more easily confirmed torrent of philosophical speculation from scientists and non-scientists alike. This is true of both Penrose-style "dynamical collapse" conjectures (Orch-OR) and "no collapse" models. However, a quick Google search on "neuronal superpositions" yielded a less-than-stellar 182 results: decoherence is the CNS is intuitively insanely fast:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence
Progress in understanding conscious mind may come via some stunning breakthrough - or instead via definitively falsifying every (non-vacuous) candidate via experiment.
* * *
I am genuinely surprised that Penrose and Hameroff want to hitch their star to Deepak Chopra. Unlike Chopra’s New Agery, the prediction that the superposition principle breaks down for mesoscopic systems above a certain threshold is potentially experimentally falsifiable – albeit (I guess!) false.
David, perhaps replace “vacuous” by “topic-neutral”? Naively, the same deterministic equation can describe the time–evolution of (quantum superpositions of) (1) fields of insentience, (2) fields of sentience or (3) fields of something that is sometimes sentient and sometimes insentient.
(1) is the Dennettian zombie world that we “ought” to be living in if our pre-reflective understanding of the nature of the physical were correct.
(2) is a physicalistic idealist world. David Chalmers, Phil Goff and others claim that we can know this isn’t our world because we aren’t micro-experiential zombies.
(3) is the hybrid world of robust common-sense. Consciousness “switches on “, “emerges”, “arises” (etc) in the womb. Just as life proved derivable from abiotic processes, likewise consciousness will one day be derivable from non-consciousness.
Thanks Andres. Any adequate scientific theory of consciousness should offer novel, precise and empirically falsifiable predictions .The outcome of the proposed experimental test should - by antecedent agreement – satisfy proponents and critics alike. The reason for believing our minds have been quantum computers for the past 540 million-odd years lies – IMO - under our virtual noses. However, it’s a “philosophical” argument. As you've discovered, many folk are serenely untroubled by the phenomenal binding problem. The only way I can think of independently to settle the issue involves something like the in vitro “Schrodinger’s neurons” interferometry experiment outlined. Of
