Cyborg Buddha is the tentative name of my (now oversue)book, and of the IEET project we are pursuing of discussing the use of neurotechnologies to enhance moral behavior, spiritual experiences and personal growth.
Without the explanation above I would’ve thought that “Cyborg Buddha” had some association with a classic from the 70’s called “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” that ultimately tried to par meditation with mechanical repair. Of course such a lofty title as “Cyborg Buddha” could apply to any number of subjects from robotic sentimentalism brought from anthropomorphising robots to artificial intelligence acquiring spiritual understanding… nice to know that it’s neither of these, though “enhancing moral behavior, spiritual experiences and personal growth using neuro-technologies” sounds a little Orwellian to me, even though this has been done with various drugs and other manipulations for millenia…
Looks like limited resources needed to feed and maintain / improve lifestyle of growing numbers of inhabitants, what would be the role of ever changing moral standard in resource allocation ? And similarly, for access to newest ING advances ...
Dan
I wouldn’t want to press the ecological ramifications of neurotechnology too much, cause that does sound like we want to program the populace to recycle or something. But I do think that the more control we each have over our subjective sense of well-being the more we will be liberated from the “hedonic treadmill” of consumption and disappointment. That will probably mean more people living lives of voluntary simplicity.
“Voluntary simplicity” sounds fine , not sure how realistic however… sooner or later neutrality won’t be possible, on one side you have nanotechnology, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, coming singularity, then on the other (dark) side you have people starving and fighting for the basics, so you’ll need do something or engage yourself somehow, how can you ignore it ? Or can you ...
Simplicity is coming whether we like it or not and a permanent state of energy decline is here right now. Much of the touted technologies will become redundant without the energy that drives the technology; it must be remembered that all technology is energy-derived and the laws of thermodynamics are set in stone. The current staggering increases in food costs worldwide stem entirely from energy declines brought about through the “red herring” of bio-fuel expansion and declining stocks of petroleum based fertilisers. Similarly, economic models are collapsing at an ever increasing rate as the myth of unlimited expansion that underpins all economics hits the brick wall of limited resources. This is evidenced in not only the peaking in production of energy stocks - including oil, gas and coal - but in nearly all the metals groups as well; mobile phone makers are being hit by the shortage of hafnium and are giving rebates to those who hand in old phones, for instance. We are headed toward a society that lives off its recycled waste as a matter of survival rather than as a matter of ecological sustainability.
William
I didn’t know that various drugs can be used to enhance moral behavior, please hit me with some examples ...
“A permanent state of energy decline is here right now” - must confess I have a problem with “permanent” , in general .
“Laws are set in stone” - really ?
But ... “models are collapsing at an ever increasing rate”
Do you maybe have something constructive to suggest ?
Firstly, “enhancing moral behavior” is really a dangerous term as it implies that the enhancer has a superior standard of moral ethic and/or assumes that the morals of one society or historical period is more correct than another. A bsc in anthropology contains a module that explores the role of drug use in religion, ritual, and social settings, and as old as religion is and as old as the mass-control of peoples through religion is, thusly is the age of drug-controlled moral behavior, which most certainly would go back as far as neolithic times. As for “an example”, there are many, but, as an example you may be aware of - the likelihood that you are American from your syntax - the Mescaleros should stand as a good one with their use of peyote-mescaline for hallucinogenic Catholic rapture. The cannabis smoking Rastafari are another. Of course other religions use less obvious ways to enable a religious “high”; Krsna use a chant while dancing and get a nitrogen “rush” while churches use dim lighting and coloured and tinted windows with hypnotic choral singing to instill an otherworldly state, some devout monks will not speak or eat and sit in a dark cave until they eventually hallucinate and “have an epiphany”.
I also have a problem with “permanent”, I wish it weren’t so. But the fact remains that past civilisations have vanished “permanently”. I doubt I need to go into the details of the Easter Islanders and the resource depletion that destroyed them, but, you may not be aware of recent findings that show that the Mayans also were wiped out because of the collapse of the agrarian society that supported it - their base corn stock died off, likely because of a blight and the use of a single strain of corn.
We have built a worldwide economic and social system that requires cheap and abundant energy while assuming that this would always be the case. The limitations to energy growth are now becoming very apparent with shortages across the spectrum cropping up daily. As much as I would like to believe that a new, cheap and plentiful energy source will be found it is highly unlikely that it would, or could, be in place before the serious consequences of depletion are felt everywhere.
The reference to the Laws of Thermodynamics was in relation to the third law which states that all energy is transferred and that energy cannot be created. This law is immutable and therefore “set in stone”. The coal, oil and gas we rely on so much is actually the stored solar energy of a limited amount of fossils that were deposited - mostly in ancient seabeds - 70 million years ago. We are using ancient sunlight whenever we switch on a light or power-up the lawnmower, nuclear power notwithstanding (uranium just doesn’t jump out of the ground, it must be mined, refined and transported using oil-powered machinery).
Economics relies on ever-increasing returns on investment, and, the belief that expansion is unlimited, it also assumes that “the market will take care of everything” including supply. If there’s a supply shortage then the value of the asset will increase and that increase will dampen demand until equilibrium returns; if supply is too constrained then producers will increase supply to compensate and again equilibrium is returned. Tragically the most base ingredient for all industry is cheap and plentiful energy and when its supply declines dramatically all manner of human endeavour is affected.
As for “something constructive to suggest” I’m afraid that I do but it’s not a pleasant medicine and is unlikely to be accepted by those who have the political power to do so. The economics of decline are best addressed in a book by Richard Heinberg (a Californian professor I met in Sydney more than a year ago) called Powerdown. However the suggestions in the book would need to be accepted by a united world for it to work and we all know how likely that is.
So you agree that drugs can be related to spiritual and religious experiences, but not for “enhancing moral behavior” ... as my folks permanently tried to convince me.
As for the (Orwellian or not) dangers of the moral enhancement I’ll leave it for the Administrator here , he is more qualified than myself to comment on that.
Yes , past known civilizations vanished, but however none was spread on a planetary level like today, whatever the implications are.
Yes even new technologies will need energy, but they may serve us better using existing sources and maybe help discovering new ones.
Thanks for mentioning the “Powerdown”, I amazoned it, also the Party is over, will get them in a couple of days, started me thinking about building a lifeboat ( of course after I manage to get rid of the magic elixir waiting
There is much difficulty in defining what is moral and what is immoral, the viewpoint being as much an individual belief as an institutional or societal one. Personally, I think that anyone who considers themselves an arbiter of moral stewardship to be more than just full of themselves, irregardless of the moderator’s standpoint. I spent my youth in the “immoral” 60’s and 70’s yet I cringe at some of the licentious behavior of modern youth, but, I wouldn’t apply my own prejudices to their behavior - who am I to judge another’s morality?
A study of historical moral trends shows a pendulum that swings from licentiousness to prudery when considering various society’s sexual mores. In contrast, however, most people would agree that war and violence are more immoral than “aberrational” sexual inclinations or even illicit drug use, yet war is considered honorable for those who wage it, unless they are the enemy who are always dishonorable.
Global reliance on cheaply transported goods, especially food, is the linchpin in civilization’s machinery. The best description I can borrow from Matt Savinar’s lifeaftertheoilcrash.net is the 1500 mile Waldorf salad, the fifteen hundred miles refers to the average distance that all the ingredients must travel to reach a table in New York. When considering the amount of wheat that travels from Australia to India, that is critical for the survival of hundreds of millions of people, you can see what might happen were the oil-powered freighting curtailed. In America, where every suburb relies on eighteen-wheelers to deliver all essential commodities, and where rail freighting is next to non-existent, there are some very serious consequences to fuel scarcity.
There are a number of authors and interested people who are close to the truth out there and Richard Heinberg is just one. “Twilight In The Desert” by Matt Simmons is another very good primer (he’s a very successful investment banker with broad qualifications in the oil industry and the book is about the crashing of the Saudi oilfields - it is very detailed). James Howard Kuntsler’s “The Long Emergency” is another.
There are a number of organisations devoted to peak-energy including ODAC (Oil Depletion Action Centre) various national A.S.P.O. groups across the world and many online sites including theoildrum and lifeaftertheroilcrash.net, which is the best introduction to the topic. I’d suggest you check out the last one at least before you read Heinberg so you’ve got a good grip on the subject matter. Good luck with your reading, I hope you don’t suffer too much from the usual depression associated with coming to grips with all of this… don’t worry you’re not alone if you do… there’s even a site that deals with that out there…
I do hope that the overdue Cyborg Buddha is published soon and the author will be able to convince me that “moral enhancement” is not what previous posters to this thread have feared, e.g. an imposition of a particular moral code on those not holding it. I suspect that the word “moral” is too big and too vaguely defined to be of use when we talk about neuro-technologies. We are still in our infancy when it comes to understanding much about the brain-mind connection, though we certainly do understand that there is one. I am much more realistically interested in the apparent irrationality of our emotional lives and the disconnect between our conscious mind and our unconscious mental processing than I am able to be in topic of our “morality”.
It is almost by definition, that our emotions are irrational. We see emotionally driven behaviours that are distinctly anti- or dys- social with disruptive effects on ourselves, our loved ones and our communities, certainly “irrational”. At the societal level, we see rationalized behaviours, war over suspected WMDs and other bogeymen for example, as well as resource depletion’s, environmental degradation’s, that are also fueled by emotions of fear and greed and lust, sloth, which are if not completely unconscious are at least, denied by the perpetrators. See DeMauz, Psychohistory, The Emotional Health of Nations, for a very informed examination of this premise. The disrespect of otherness, may or may not be rational in any particular circumstance, but when coming from an individual, unconscious emotional agendas may usually be discovered in the perpetrator by even a not so skilled analyst. I personally believe that our emotions were rationally based, and had survival value, both for the individual and for our progenitor species, but in evolving our our large brains with its massive computing/cognitive power we have lost sufficient connections to cognitive processing centers to come to full awareness and so they, emotions, remain, at least in part, invisible to our conscious ability to evaluate action before acting. I strongly suspect that as we understand more of how the brain processes our emotions, cognitions and perceptions, we possibly will be able to manipulate our neuroanatomy to allow for greater consciousness of here-to-fore unconscious factors in motivating behavior. I also believe that current psychological technologies employed in attempting to achieve this, are inefficient and incomplete. The use of psychedelic/sacred substances is so incompletely understood, and so co-opted by both religious and secular authorities to be useless in this endeavor on any large scale. Will we develop neuro-technologies that can re-construct our brains to allow for greater conscious control of our emotions/passions? I suspect so, but I think that a lot more water is going to have to flow over the dam of our ignorance, and whether or not our inefficiencies in the utilization of resources and in the conduct of our human affairs will impede our further development remains to be seen. Robert R. Newport M.D.
Dr. Robert, it is interesting that you should mention Lloyd deMause and the Emotional Life Of Nations in relation to this subject line. I’ve been a member of the Psychohistory group since 1999 after finding it while researching one of my main interests, which is E.P (evolutionary psychology). Both the brothers deMause and Lawton are intellectual giants and I find their writings very interesting, though I find “The History of Childhood, A Bibliography of Psychohistory” as interesting as any other publications and very relevant when discussing societal motivation.
That our collective minds are governed by evolutionary instinct is to me beyond question, that we share more with lesser lifeforms, without anthropomorphising, is an absolute. I’ve been working on a dissertation for many years entitled Tribal Prime : Primal Tribe in which the basic premise is the instinctive nature of species to group in tribal structures, with all the attendant ramifications, including territorial and resource monopolisation, that fits quite nicely with humanity’s often dysfunctional and irrational behaviour. We are born with an innate need to belong to a tribal group, whether it be an immediate local community, religion, nation or sporting club; from this need springs all prejudices including racism and nationalism and cultural bias. Like language I suspect that this is hardwired into our neural pathways. The so-called seven deadly sins are actually survival traits that, under most circumstances, enhance an individual’s chances; greed is good if the last mouthful of food enables the individual the better chance of surviving to procreate and pass on his or her genes - which is the prime natural motivation behind all behaviour.
Controlling our own emotions can also be a helpful survival trait if it enables greater consideration of the consequences of our actions; whether to leap into a possibly dangerous confrontation or consider a timely retreat is certainly relevant to the fight or flight instinct governing all living creatures, but, to do so using artificial methods may be irrational in itself.
I am happy to hear that someone besides myself has read De Mauz. As to your last comment that “attempting to do so [achieve greater control over our emotions] by artificial means may be irrational in itself”, is a truism given the current state of our knowledge, though not an uncommon nor unacceptable practice in modern psychiatry, psychopharmacology being as crude a practice as trepanning with stone knives and EST and psychosurgery being worse. I am however not advocating that we attempt to control emotions, rather that we might benefit from having a greater awareness of them, and perhaps being better able to choose which of many behavioural options would be best in achieving both our personal goals as well as societal goals. Obviously we need to know much more neuroanatomy and neuropsychology as well as advancing a great deal in neuro-nanotechnology, before this becomes thinkable.
As you have a major interest in evolutionary psychology, perhaps you might agree that we are overdue for evolving a greater notion of tribalism. It does seem that with the increase in our numbers and the increases in complexities of our world, that the numerically and or geographically limited tribe has become anachronistic and dangerous to the survival of our civilization, if not species. The rather recent discovery of the mirror neurons, might point to here-to-fore latent and potentially developable capacities for doing this. Dr. Robert
I don’t think the project of moral enhancement necessarily implies imposition of a particular moral code. The basic idea is that our ability to make ourselves more mindful, more patient, more empathetic, more diligent and so on will generally be taken advantage of. Most people want to be better, more virtuous, than they are currently capable of being. Our control over our brain and behavior will allow us to bind ourselves to our higher aspirations, whichever aspirations we might choose. Cyborg Buddha (the book) is based on the schema of virtues developed by the positive psychologists which are pretty comprehensive. I doubt there are virtues not encompassed by them.
However, the question of coercion doesn’t go away, since these technologies will then also be part of formal and informal social codes and laws. If most people are running a moral operating system, knowing that you are running such a system, and which system it is, may be part of public accountability, just as drug testing, criminal record checks, and other behavior-based proxies for moral conduct are used today. And criminal rehabilitation (think Clockwork Orange) would finally become a real possibility, along with the Orwellian potentials for abuse.
Dr. Robert, I must admit to a little joy as well from discovering another aware of psychohistory, as the “field” is relatively new and the origination a little unusual, and obscure. I’m not sure a greater understanding of biological systems will be achievable within the short time-frame allowed our diminishing civilisation - as I mentioned in an earlier posting, I have serious doubts our current standards will be able to be maintained for much longer. Whether anyone is ever going to be able to see beyond their naturally inherited tribalism will become moot if our current fragmented ethics are eroded by virtue of a descent into barbarism - a highly likely scenario when food and fuel become restrictively scarce. Unfortunately, globalism and the specialisation of skills may have conspired to set us on a path toward serious societal dysfunction - being able to maintain any semblance of a modern technological society may be impossible beyond the wars over declining resources headed towards us.
The one thing I am certain of is that the world’s population is about to decline very quickly, most likely through a combination of war and famine, the best I can hope for is that the wars are conventional and the famines far from my own doorstep.
Dr. Hughes, I understand the meritorious value of such an endeavour but again hearken to the threat of world instability and the coming crisis that is upon our doorstep. That which is a virtue today may not be tomorrow, criminality may be the best survival trait in times of complete societal collapse, for instance, and one’s own understanding of honourable behaviour may even now be clouded by such dubious values as patriotism and religious affiliation. Nonetheless, I expect I’d be interested in buying a copy once you publish - all viewpoints should be considered when evaluating any intellectual pursuit.
