Cyborg Buddha BlogJeriaska of the Accelerating Future People Database has transcribed another talk by an IEET person, the 2006 Transvision (Helsinki) talk by IEET Executive Director James Hughes “Virtue Engineering: Applications of Neurotechnology to Improve Moral Behavior.” See the video here.
Nov 13, 2007
Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?
TED ConferencesIn this memorable TED talk, Dan Gilbert demonstrates just how poor we humans are at predicting (or understanding) what will make us happy. Gilbert is a psychology professor at Harvard, and author of “Stumbling on Happiness”. (Recorded February 2004 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 22:02)
DOWNLOAD/LISTEN/VIEWNov 10, 2007
Science and the meditation boom
All in the MindMindfulness based meditation is being touted as beneficial for any number of afflictions - from anxiety to asthma; social phobia to psoriasis. But what is it, and how can science scrutinize subjective states of mind? Three scientists at high powered institutions discuss how they’ve turned a personal passion into a professional investigation.
Transcript
Transcripts go up mid week after Saturday’s broadcast
Guests
Venerable Ajahn Brahm
Abbot of Bodhinyana Monastery, in Serpentine, Western Australia
Spiritual Director
The Buddhist Society of Western Australia
http://www.bswa.org/
Dr James Carmody
Assistant Professor of Medicine
University of Massachusetts Medical School
http://www.umassmed.edu/behavmed/faculty/carmody.cfm
Dr Philippe Goldin
Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience (CAAN)
Department of Psychology
Stanford University, USA
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~caan/
Dr Amishi P. Jha
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
Dept of Psychology
University of Pennsylvania
http://www.amishi.com/lab/people/amishi.php
Further Information
Nov 9, 2007
Neuroscience and The Enlightenment Machine
Buddhist GeeksIn this episode Buddhist Geeks spoke with neuroscientist and Buddhist meditator Daniel Rizzuto. Rizzuto is the project manager for the Caltech Neural Prosthetics Group. Vince and Rizzuto discussed a number of topics including the link between contemplative and scientific methodologies, some of the potential technologies that could emerge for the neuroscientific research, including Daniel’s favorite, an empathic training device. Daniel also shared some of the meditation research he was aware of, including Dr. Sara Lazar’s research out of harvard where she found that meditation actually affected the structural basis of the brain (check out the study here) as well as some of the recent meditation research that was conducted using EEG devices.
We then discussed the possibility of constructing a neural map that describes a practitioners evolution, and the potential that such a map could be used to help create a device—a so called “enlightenment machine"—that could actually accelerate that process. The question soon emerged, how might this machine impact one’s ethical understanding? Can someone actually go through the process without a revolution in their ethical understanding? The Buddhist tradition often describes the inseparability of insight and ethical understanding or the unity of Emptiness and Compassion. Daniel proposed that a sub-field of neuroscience, neuroethics is an attempt at understanding the neural correlates of one’s ethical choices, such that this information could be built into a device even if it weren’t a by-product of the process of spiritual maturation.
This dialogue is a distillation of a longer conversation that originally aired on The Techsattva. To find out more, visit www.techsattva.com , and to find out more about Daniel visit his personal blog, Evolutionary Mind.
(MP3)
Oct 28, 2007
Memory, Gender and the Self
Changesurfer RadioPagan Kennedy is the author of Confessions of a Memory Eater, about a hypothetical drug that allows you to live in high-fidelity memories of your own past, and The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution, about the life of the first female-to-male transsexual. (MP3)
Oct 22, 2007
Situationist Challenge to Cyborg Buddhism?
by J. HughesIf there is no such thing as “moral character,” is there any point in trying to make ourselves more ethical by tweaking our personalities?
Sep 27, 2007
Virtue Engineering
Transvision 2006James Hughes argues that neurotechnology will encourage people to be more responsible and help them suppress the desires they consider immoral, at the TransVision06 conference in Helsink in August 2006. The presentation slides can be found here .
“In the near future we will have many technologies that will allow us to modify and assist our emotions and reasoning. One of the purposes we will put these technologies to is to assist our adherence to self-chosen moral codes and citizenship obligations. For instance we will be able to suppress unwelcome desires, enhance compassion and empathy, and expand our understanding our social world and the consequences of actions. So, contrary to the bioconservative accusation that neurological self-determination and human enhancement will encourage more selfishness in society, it will probably permit people to be even more moral and responsible than they currently are.”
Sep 27, 2007
Hughes interviewed on Singularity and AI
Singularity Summit 2007The SIAI folks interviewed the speakers at their recent Summit. Here’s the interview they conducted with me:
Aug 8, 2007
The struggle for a smarter world
by J. HughesAbstract: The coming knowledge society will see an acceleration in the trend towards increasing human intelligence begun hundreds of thousands of years ago. Many converging technologies will facilitate this acceleration of intelligence, including psychopharmacology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and communications technology. The accelerating increase in intelligence will not just be in individual brains, but also in the social, political and economic systems that link those brains together. From growing individual and social intelligence we will create increasingly accurate models of the way the social and natural world works, and how best to achieve human ends. But the struggle for a smarter world will require a political struggle for greater liberty and equality to enable everyone to participate fully in social decision-making and to benefit from human enhancement. [Futures 39(8) Oct 2007: 942-954]
Jun 26, 2007
Cognitive Enhancement Roundup
- Brian Doherty reviews the insanity defense in Reason The insanity defense is related to the the debate over whether the mentally ill should be allowed to vote (NYT sub reqd) as another area which (a) illuminates the cognitive boundaries of citizenship, and (b) is amenable to voluntary/coercive modification. There have been cases, for instance, where defendents have refused psychiatric medication to keep themselves from being tried as a culpable sane person.
Morse and Hoffman (observe) “even if pure [neurological] mechanism is true…human beings will find it almost impossible not to treat themselves as rational, intentional agents unless there are major changes in the way our brains work. Indeed…there are powerful evolutionary explanations for the causal efficacy of our mental states [that make us think we have free will], states that are the predicates for responsibility. Overcoming what may in fact be neuro-architectural facts of evolution may be only a little less likely than ‘overcoming’ our opposable thumbs.”…
Harvard’s Pinker figures that we can simultaneously believe in a fully caused human being and an ethical system that holds people responsible for their actions by imagining ethics as a “game” that it is useful for us to play for social purposes. In How the Mind Works, he writes that “the ethics game treats people as equivalent, sentient, rational, free-willed agents, and its rules are the calculus that assigns moral value to behavior through the behavior’s inherent nature or its consequences. Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable.” The results of that game, he concludes, “can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events.”
- Nicotine, the Wonder Drug Wired reviews evidence that nicotine is good for immune function, circulation, mood, and brain health, for instance in reducing depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, Tourette Syndrome, ADHD, anger and anxiety. As a consequence firms are developing targeted nicotine analogues as therapeutic drugs, which hopefully will not have some of the addictive potentials. For self-experimentation one can buy a box of nicotine gum for about 16 cents per gram of nicotine.
- Long-term Ritalin increases dopamine, reduces potential for addiction to amphetamines At least in rats, as measured with brain-imaging and behavioral research and reported in Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior. After eight months of methylphenidate brain scans revealed elevated levels of dopamine receptors in treated rats compared with controls, with the higher-dose treatment group showing the highest level of dopamine receptors. In the control group, dopamine receptor levels declined with age. Since low dopamine receptors is associated with likelihood of drug abuse this is apparently why the treated rats were significantly less likely to press a lever to self-administer cocaine, and received fewer self-initiated infusions of the drug following eight months of treatment than the lower-dose group or the control rats. This is consistent with follow-up studies on kids treated with methylphenidate, who are less likely than un-treated ADHD peers to develop drug abuse problems.
- George Dvorsky points us to research demonstrating that humans cognitively “uplift” chimpanzees just by interacting with them. A team at Ohio State University report in Animal Cognition that chimps with long-term stable, social interaction with humans understand tools better than those without interaction.
- Anxiety degrades memory capacity Or maybe it encourages people to forget. At any rate, people who are easily distressed and have more negative emotions were 40 percent more likely to develop mild cognitive impairment than more easygoing people, according to a study in Neurology.
- Simon Baron-Cohen summarizes research on the The Biology of the Imagination in Entelechy Journal.
Since the disability that comprises classic autism is biological in origin, then children with autism are offering us a big clue about the biological basis of the imagination. Of course, when the meta-representational hardware develops normally, biology has done its job. From then on, the content of our imagination, whether we imagine an angry god or a school of wizardry, a mermaid or a devil, owes more to our specific culture than to biology. But the capacity to imagine depends on genes that build brains with a very specific kind of mechanism – one that we take for granted whenever we form relationships or fantasize.
- Modafinil relieves chemo-fog Many cancer survivors report permanent cognitive deficits, such as difficulty concentrating, resulting from the neurotoxic effects of chemotherapy drugs. But sixty-eight women who had completed treatment for breast cancer who took modafinil for eight weeks reported major improvements in energy, memory, concentration and learning.
- Turning off gene makes mice smarter Building on the 1999 “Doogie” mice research, in which mice were made better maze-runners by manipulating their NR2B gene, researchers have now made smarter mice by suppressing their Cdk5 gene, which controls the expression of NR2B gene. The role of these pathways for memory may lead to therapies for Alzheimers, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and depression.
- Lost? Ask a straight woman, or a gay man in a pinch University of Warwick researchers and the BBC used data from almost 200,000 people to demonstrate that men were better at spatial visualization and women are better at verbal dexterity tests and remembering the locations of objects. But they also discovered that sexual orientation was also a correlate of these skills, such that straights of a gender tended to perform on their gender’s preferred skills better than bisexuals and gays of that gender, and gays and bisexuals of the other gender performed better on the skill than the straights of the other gender. For instance in spatial visualization, the skill levels were:
1. Heterosexual men
2. Bisexual men
3. Homosexual men
4. Homosexual women
5. Bisexual women
6. Heterosexual women - Bigger Is Smarter: Overall, Not Relative, Brain Size Predicts Intelligence A study in Brain, Behavior, and Evolution finds that size of the brain, in particular the neocortex, not size of the brain relative to the body, is the best predictor of cognitive skills across species. I was always a skeptical of Mark Walker’s suggestion that we tweak our genes to make our brains bigger. But maybe we all will be egg-heads in the future.
- Digital Dementia In Kurt Vonegut’s dark parody of affirmative action “Harrison Bergeron” everyone with IQs above the norm have buzzers in their ears that interrupt their stream of thought, effectively reducing their intelligence. Ironically a growing body of research suggests that wired workers have installed their own IQ-reducers by surrounding themselves with digital interruptions and digital surrogates for gray meat memory. In a recent survey on 2,030 office workers conducted by the firms Incruit and Embrain 63% (1,281 respondents) said they suffer from forgetfulness, and one in five of those workers cited their growing dependence on mobile phones, PCs, and other digital devices as the cause.
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