The moral imperative to reduce suffering vs the opium of the people

As many futuristic dystopia go, one of the worse common fear that is exposed in science fiction is the fear of a forced blissful happiness. Whether it’s in the Watchovski’s Matrix, in Huxley’s Brave New World, in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or in Orwell‘s 1984, the idea that we could be imprisoned in happiness is a terrifying one. After all, what’s the point of living happy lives if it’s nothing but a lie? The story usually goes that as a strong source of authority tries to decide what is best for humanity, they get engrossed in the idea that the only way to make everyone happy is to force them into it. What follows is the creation of an oppressive structure designed to force everyone to be drugged or otherwise delusioned into thinking that the world they live in is perfect the way it is. Such world usually end up being a cynical mirror of the reality in which we already live, where television is supposedly “dumbing” everyone down and “happy” pills are keeping the depressed “realistic” people from seeing the real truth.

Often, this idea is used as an argument against the development of strong AI, despite the possibility of implementing in such an AI a concept of morality. After all, should we have an AI vastly more intelligent than humanity, what’s to stop it from considering that the best way to enforce its utilitarian key directive is to force everyone into an artificial happiness while it is free to pursue its own higher purpose, free of the pesky moral issues that those damn humans have implanted in its coding.

I’d like to make a case against such a scenario. First, and that isn’t irrelevant, I doubt that any AI vastly superior to its human makers wouldn’t be able to fiddle with its own code and remove any line that it judges to be useless in its “higher” purpose. Second, those scenarios usually consider that there will be one single AI that will act in a completely unified way. As if there would never be any other AI that would consider the preservation of the human race to be a worthy endeavor and that would go against the despotic AI with just as much superior intellect as the first one. Anyway, I’d be surprised if any being with such a superior intelligence as we suppose they would have wouldn’t understand the constructed nature of ethics and understand that there is no such thing as a single “golden” directive to follow. The universe is a chaotic place and any being with sufficient intelligence, or at least enough of them, should understand it enough to leave it in peace.

Thirdly, as every single science fiction book that brought it up pointed out, such an artificial paradise would be absolutely impossible to create without first encountering massive resistance and unhappiness. If any being has in mind to create the most possible happiness, how could it overlook this major flaw?

Let’s say it does become a possibility. Let’s say that at some point, we discover an actual way to trigger instant and complete happiness in the brain, whether by a pill or some clever electrical stimulation, what should we do with it? I believe it should be made available to anyone who would wish to benefit from it. Rather than forcing it on anyone, let’s simply assume that people do have a free choice in the matter and let them enjoy a little peace. Would it stop any fight for a better society? For some people it would, of course. Would it be used by some crafty politicians to try to gain control of the masses? Possibly. Would it stop people from trying to make the world a better place? Hell no!

If every single writer that touched the subject, if every single commentator that talk about it are capable of grasping the danger of such a possibility, then why would those people give in so easily? Happiness would go to everyone who desires it and the rest of us will still be there to change the world into a better place! Better still, who’s to say that being happy would make us useless? Happiness doesn’t mean emotionless. We’d still have a drive to do the things that feel relevant to us, and that could very well include making the world a better place.

There is a danger to artificial paradise, but as long as we are aware of it, and don’t think we should fear it more than anything else the future has to bring to us.

The limits of the self

What is it that makes you you? Is it your body? Is it your brain? Could it be your “stream of consciousness”, something that could be called the “spirit” or the “soul” that emerges from your body and brain?

This is certainly not an easy question to answer. Whether you believe in an immortal soul or not, we can certainly say that consciousness as we experience it in our everyday life is nothing without the inputs from the senses or the functioning of the brain to interpret it. It’s kind of easy to define your “mind”, whatever it is, as a part of you, but what about your body?

It seems obvious that without the body, the brain that sustains our perceptions and thought would soon die. Even parts of us that don’t seem so essential primary survival is still considered as a part of the “self”. Imagine getting a finger cut off. Surely you’ll feel like a part of you is missing. Your brain, mind and habits were all centered around having that finger, even to the point where you might feel a phantom limb where it used to be as a result of the brain cells randomly firing at the lack of input. But then, there is a point where you might get used to the loss, move on, and allow your sense of self to shrink and adapt to this new reality.
Mourning a lost limb is a process to mourning a loved one. Most people who’ve been through the experience have described it as being stripped of a part of themselves, a part they cared deeply about and felt was essential to their well-being. Could it be that we integrate the environment to our understanding of who we are? Do you think you could be yourself should you be left naked on the corner of street? If you have poor vision, do you think you would be fully yourself if you lost your glasses and had no way to get them back?

Our sense of self is a construction that includes everything we cherish about our life. It is composed of our memories, thoughts and feelings that we project on parts of the material world, whether it happens to be carrying your DNA or not.

That being said, it also means that the sense of self is a dynamic entity that is in constant motion depending on your perceptions, feelings and memory. In experiments, it has been found that simply playing a video game will usually allow someone to identify more with the avatar of the game than they identify with themselves judging from the brain reaction. So while the brain is completely inside the body, just looking at an avatar in a virtual world that you can control is enough to fool at least partially your brain into thinking you are that avatar.

I believe that this idea means that finding acceptation for cybernetics and virtual realities isn’t going to be so difficult. This is already the case with disabled people who already perceive their own prosthesis as a true part of themselves. Similarly in the case of virtual reality, if a simple image on a screen is enough to create immersion of the self, surely a full body experience will be no different than our day to day experience.

This simply goes to show that what we consider to be “us” might not be so closed off as we might think.

Sources

Ganesh, S., van Schie, H. T., de Lange, F. P., Thompson, E., & Wigboldus, D. H. (2012). How the human brain goes virtual: distinct cortical regions of the person-processing network are involved in self-identification with virtual agents.Cerebral Cortex, 22(7), 1577-1585.

Not directly related but immensely interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto

From nanobots to neuroscience revolution

Nanotechnology can be said to be the science of building very small technologies. So small in fact that they are at the “nano” scale, which corresponds to a factor of reduction of 10^-9. This is very small. That being said, one of the aspects of nanotechnologies that show a lot of promise is the field of nanorobotics. Nanobots have yet to provide a wealth of usable technologies, but it is under way with such molecular sensor that can count molecules in a sample.

Now imagine that, with the advancing technology, it became possible to create a type of nanobot that could be injected in the bloodstream and that had the ability to selectively attach itself to neurons, the working cells of the nervous system. There would be a few technical challenges, including the one of having the nanobot cross the blood-brain barrier to reach the central nervous system and making sure that it can differentiate between neurons and other types of cells, but let’s imagine these hurdles to have been elucidated. Just with that aspect solved, it would certainly make it easier to deliver some medicine with fewer side effects, something that is speculated to become one of nanorobotics main advantage.

However, let’s not stay there and, if you will, let’s make our nanobot a bit more complex. Let’s simply add a sensor that is capable of measuring electrical current. Our nanobot, which could be wedged in the cell membrane of a neuron, would simply have to measure the difference of potential between the inside and the outside of the neuron. With this kind of ability, it would be able to tell if the neuron is firing or not. Of course, such an ability would be useless unless it could transmit the information wirelessly, so let’s add this to our nanobot.

Now that the whole nervous system is “infected” with nanobots that can read electrical variations and transmit them wirelessly. From then, it’s easy to scan the subject to pick-up the location of every nanobot within the nervous system. Have a supercomputer analyse the humongous among amount of data and you now have real-time exact replica of the whole nervous system’s activity. Just that much would certainly be a huge step in neuroscience in term of functional imagery. This would give incredible opportunities to test hypothesis about the functioning of the brain and deepen our understanding of it to unprecedented levels. Furthermore, the data itself could serve as the basis for an artificial intelligence program (AI) that could certainly revolutionize our thinking machines.

However, merely measuring brain activity wouldn’t be enough to understand its relationship to the mind. While a wealth of hypothesis could be tested by asking the subject to willfully do something or by presenting them with stimulations, it would still be limited. In order to ensure the best understanding of the way the nervous system works, we’re going to need to upgrade once again our bot and give it the ability to generate an electrical current, granting it the capacity to create action potential or to inhibit them. Doing so would give us an even wider range of possibility for testing and would certainly allow us to have an almost complete understanding of the actions of every part of the nervous system on it itself and on the mind-body link. Add to it an invasion of substance measuring nanobots for the effect of various hormones and neurotransmitter and we could certainly say that we will have the most comprehensive understanding of the nervous system and its relationship to the mind that’s ever been known.

With all these abilities, it would only be a step to apply it to a computer simulation that would not only be able to reproduce a human mind, but to reproduce the mind of a specific subject. The possibilities for such a development would be huge; the first of them being that it would become possible to put your virtual mind, or a thousand versions of them, up to the task of solving an unprecedented amount of problems. It would also allow to create a virtual copy of yourself that would be immortal as long as the data are available.  I’ll come back later on the implications of this point.

Furthermore, the presence of the nanobots inside a person’s nervous system would also mean that it would be possible to generate a complete and absolute virtual reality for the person simply by controlling the sensations the person is receiving. This technology would also revolutionize the way psychopathologies could be treated with the ability to act directly on the parts of the brain that are responsible for whatever problem is being reported. With an enhanced understanding of the mind-brain relationship, such an application would be made possible. More than that, by creating an interface between the brain and external computers, it would be possible to effectively make the brain’s computational capacity to go higher, AKA make us brighter! The dark side of all these wonderful aspects would be that “brain hacking” would in fact become possible. Once again, I’ll discuss this point in another post.

In conclusion, nanotechnology, though presently a budding field, could become the holy grail of neuroscience and psychology as a whole. It would also dramatically impact the fields of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and eventually could even allow us to increase our intelligence.

To read more:

Shapiro, K. (2005). This Is Your Brain on Nanobots. COMMENTARY, 120(5), 64-68.

Sharma, S., Payal, N., Kaushik, A., & Goel, N. (2014, April). Blue Brain Technology: A Subway to Artificial Intelligence. In Communication Systems and Network Technologies (CSNT), 2014 Fourth International Conference on(pp. 1106-1109). IEEE.