Cyborg Buddha Blog
James 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.”
DOWNLOAD/LISTEN/VIEWSep 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.
Jun 23, 2007
I feel for you
by Moheb CostandiSynaesthesia is a condition in which there is increased connectivity between the areas of the brain that process information received from each sense organ. This leads to a mingling of the senses: for example, sounds may elicit perceptions of colour in a synaesthete who has increased connectivity between the brain’s visual and auditory pathways.
Jun 12, 2007
Cyborg Buddha News in Review
Happiness, Health and Inner Calm
- University of London researchers correlated the happiness of 10,000 Britons to their income and other life factors. Then they quantified how much income-per-year would give someone an equivalent amount of happiness or grief as the life factors. Excellent health was worth the equivalent of a $600,000-a-year pay rise; marriage = $100,000 pay raise, although living together was worth a $162,000 pay raise, and being widowed bummed Britons out as much as a $400,000 pay cut.
- University of Vermont psychologists studied 154 young adults and found a correlation between their capacity for “mindfulness” and their lack of anxiety and neuroticism. Apparently anxious and neurotic people find it hard to be mindful and mindfulness helps lower anxiety. “Mindfulness skills are our ability to be in the present moment, avoid harsh judgment of ourselves and others, and act with deliberation. When a person lacks mindfulness skills, it can lead to impulsive unwanted behaviors, avoidance, and a general feeling of dissatisfaction.”
- Find Inner Calm Good for Your Longevity A Harvard team followed 516 cardiac disease patients for three years. Although initial anxiety level was not correlated with heart attack risk, those who had lower anxiety over time had a lower rate of heart attacks, and those with higher anxiety over time had higher rates.
- Yoga good for the depressed brain A team in Boston, writing in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, has found that yoga elevates brain gamma-aminobutyric (GABA) levels, the brain’s primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. Low GABA levels are associated with depression and anxiety.
- Review article on Meditation and the Brain
“Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness”
Antoine Lutz, John D. Dunne, Richard J. Davidson
In press in Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness edited by Zelazo P., Moscovitch M. and Thompson E
Abstract: The overall goal of this essay is to explore the initial findings of neuroscientific research on meditation; in doing so, the essay also suggests potential avenues of further inquiry The essay consists of three sections that, while integral to the essay as a whole, may also be read independently. The first section, “Defining Meditation,” notes the need for a more precise understanding of meditation as a scientific explanandum. Arguing for the importance of distinguishing the particularities of various traditions, the section presents the theory of meditation from the paradigmatic perspective of Buddhism, and it discusses the difficulties encountered when working with such theories. The section includes an overview of three practices that have been the subject of research, and it ends with a strategy for developing a questionnaire to more precisely define a practice under examination. The second section, “the Intersection of Neuroscience and Meditation,” explores some scientific motivations for the neuroscientific examination of meditation in terms of its potential impact on the brain and body of long-term practitioners. After an overview of the mechanisms of mind-body interaction, this section addresses the use of first-person expertise, especially in relation to the potential for research on the neural counterpart of subjective experience. In general terms, the section thus points to the possible contributions of research on meditation to the neuroscience of consciousness. The final section, “Neuroelectric and Neuroimaging Correlates of Meditation,” reviews the most relevant neuroelectric and neuroimaging findings of research conducted to date, including some preliminary correlates of the previously discussed Buddhist practices.
Psychiatric Clothing, Headgear
A team at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), are using a bio-telemetry lifevest to monitor patients for characteristic movement and physiological signs of mental illness. Fascinating that this application was the one envisaged by Clynes and Kline in their original “cyborg” paper for NASA - a way to detect when astronauts were losing it in space, with telemetry from their suit/body, so ground control could give them a shot of Haldol.
Technology Review also reports on the use of a five electrode EEG device for use by patients taking anti-depressants to measure if they are having the expected effect after a week of use, which is earlier than many patients feel better. The story also discusses Neurostar, a wand that sends magnetic pulses to the cortex. After five treatments a week for four to six weeks it relieved depression for about 40% of those who it has been tested on.
Morality and Political Preference are Partly Hard-Wired
The Washington Post published a very nice review of neurological studies of moral decision-making and empathy (Damasio, Hauser, et al.) which suggest that we have inherited some basic moral intuitions and emotions. For instance it discusses fMRI scanning of people thinking about donating money to charity; when they thought about making altruistic donations their pleasure centers lit up, suggesting that we have some hard-wiring for altruism.
Psychologist John Jost, having studied more than 22,000 subjects from 12 countries, finds that personality traits, partly hard-wired at birth, predict political ideology. People who prefer order, structure and closure tend to be more conservative, while creative people open to new experiences tend to be more politically liberal. Situational factors can also influence political preference, such as social chaos and violence which drive people toward structure and conservatism. Jost, like other researchers, attributes about half of the variance in political preference to genetic predisposition.
Also check out this excellent paper from Jon Haidt and Jesse Graham:
“When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize,” Social Justice Research (in press).
Abstract: Researchers in moral psychology and social justice have agreed that morality is about matters of harm, rights, and justice. With this definition of morality, conservative opposition to social justice programs has appeared to be immoral, and has been explained as a product of various non-moral processes, such as system justification or social dominance orientation. In this article we argue that, from an anthropological perspective, the moral domain is usually much broader, encompassing many more aspects of social life and valuing institutions as much or more than individuals. We present theoretical and empirical reasons for believing that there are in fact five psychological systems that provide the foundations for the world’s many moralities. The five foundations are psychological preparations for detecting and reacting emotionally to issues related to harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Political liberals have moral intuitions primarily based upon the first two foundations, and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of political conservatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations.
In other words, conservatives are driven by monkey-brain wiring to think that racism, nepotism, yuck factors and obedience to authority are all moral, while liberals have freed themselves from that hard-wiring to focus on justice and caring for other people. Not to put down monkeys by comparing them to conservatives…
The Really Nasty and the Really Nice Get More Sex A study at Rutgers correlated self-reported relationships with number of sexual partners.
People who are socially dominant and either very friendly or very antagonistic tend to be more sexually promiscuous, according to a new study.Friendly, warm people may enjoy sharing their warmth with others by sleeping with them, whereas antagonistic people may sleep around to avoid having a monogamous relationship. And having a dominant personality makes it easier to approach potential partners.
This suggests to me that testosterone (dominant, antagonistic) and oxytocin (friendly) levels are driving these relationships.
Speaking in Tongues
UPenn’s Andrew Newberg, scanning the brains of people speaking in tongues, has found that their language centers get quieter. Newberg admitted to ABC’s “Nightline” on March 20 that his study does not answer whether speaking in tongues is a real phenomenon.
Irrational Religious Exemptions from Drug Laws in the U.S., Reproductive Ethics in Jamaica
Jacob Sullum, writing in Reason has an excellent article on the current state of US drug regulations which allow native Americans to take peyote as a religious sacrament, but refuses to recognize the exemption claims of groups, like Rastafarians, that insist that marijuana or other drugs are their sacraments.
Speaking of Jamaica, Jamaican Muslims are OK with Designer Babies, but not the Christians and Jews
Head of Islamic education in Jamaica, Sheikh Tijani Musa argues that people have the right to utilise the technology, certainly in the Muslim community.
“In Islam, the principle is that the female and male have to be married before they do what they want to do, and it has to be through the husband’s sperm, not from anything else. If the technology wants to help them, Islam will not say anything to that,” Musa said.
“Islam allows us to use our brain or knowledge, as long as it does not contradict the principle of Islam (which is that) the male and female are to firstly be under the married act. It has to be after the marriage, and the egg from the wife,” he added.
According to Musa, God is the only one who creates the child, even where technology is used as a tool.
“If technology gives you knowledge, we need to know any benefit that comes from that. So the principle that we have is the marriage principle so that all the technology to check this or transfer that must be between the husband and wife, not any other,” he told the Sunday Observer. “God is the only one who can make the child - rich or poor, long life, short life, good or bad. As long as they don’t put any other sperm or anything to come to the mother, Islam will not have a problem with that.”
In other words Allah is OK with using the brain to improve life so long as you do it within marriage, and use your own spouse’s gametes.
Hopefully the rest of the Ummah will buy that argument, limited as it is.
May 21, 2007
Cyborg Buddha news of the week
Psychologist Carol Dweck argues that long-term changes in personality are possible.
Meditation can improve your potential for paying attention. Intensive training in Buddhist Vipassana meditation improved performance on an attention test. Published article here. A meta-analysis in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry suggests however that meditation does not improve depression and anxiety, suggesting it should be an adjunct to SSRIs and not as a replacement.
Douglas Hofstadter muses on the emptiness of the self and his new book I Am a Strange Loop.
Sometimes old aphorisms are true: treating oneself with kindess is key to maintaining psychological resilience and self-esteem. A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology broke self-compassion into three components: (a) self-kindness (being kind and understanding toward oneself rather than self-critical); (b) common humanity (viewing one’s negative experiences as a normal part of the human condition); and (c) mindful acceptance (having mindful equanimity rather than over-identifying with painful thoughts and feelings). People with self-compassion had less negative emotional reactions to real, remembered and imagined bad events, and had hiher self-esteem, although the latter correlation is dangeroulsy close to tautology.
In “Superhuman: The Uncharted Territory of Transhumanism” Eric Pavlat muses on why Catholics need to open dialogue with transhumanists, and intervene more in bioethical debates, in Crisis Magazine.
May 19, 2007
Wisdom through Neural Macrosensing
by Natasha Vita-More“I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years,” claims Vernor Vinge (1993: 1), mathematician, computer scientist and Hugo award-winning novelist. But what is the point of having more neural transmitters firing off connections if those connections do not promote wisdom?
May 17, 2007
Cyborgs and Altruism
by V.R. ManojCyborgs are often imagined as devoid of emotion and empathy. We need a new understanding of the cyborg, one with the capacity for altruism and love.
May 6, 2007
Roundup of technoprogressive morality news of the week
The Boston Globe reviews the work of Damasio et al. on the role of emotions in facilitating cognition.
Stephen Hall examines the relationship of wisdom and aging in the New York Times Magazine (reg reqd). Older people are happier, more resilient and even-keeled, and may be wiser depending on your definition of wisdom. I wonder what dire dystopian scenario Fukuyama and Kass would spin about a society full of calm, happy and wise centenarians.
A survey by the University of Wisconsin at Madison shows that most Americans trust scientists and the scientific process, except when religious or ecological buttons get pushed.
The London Times reviews three recent books">London Times reviews three recent books on primate morality and the evolutionary origins of human morality, from Franz de Waal, Richard Joyce, and lee Alan Dugatkin.
In The Scientist Glenn McGee applauds efforts to develop a code of ethics for robot-human relationships: “Either the effort to create a code of ethics to shape the evolution of robotics will be embraced, or we may reap the consequences. It only remains to be seen who will wake up first.”
In Slate‘s Brain science forum Alison Gopnik questions whether the hypothesis that mirror neurons are the basis of empathy and morality is really solid. “The intuition that we are deeply and specially connected to other people is certainly right. And there is absolutely no doubt that this is due to our brains, because everything about our experience is due to our brains...But it’s little more than a lovely metaphor to say that our mirror neurons bring us together.”
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