RE: Ethics

[N3Emily Yates]

Chris, I see that your second writer has a particularly English – Cromwell-complex- beware he does not hunt you through the media as he threatens.  I think these criticisms are rudimentary but I also object to your casting of ‘authoritarian regime’ as a crude, impossible underside: “an authoritarian regime using iPlants to create large factories with workers addicted to manual labour”

This innovation, like any other, will serve the interests of capital and the ways it would do so are already here and present.  

 

1. The question of authenticity is unimportant on the grounds of phenomenological belief in experience.  However, the condition of the phenomenon is already corrupted for commercial use.  (Think branding and “need creation” and how the iplant can serve this).  Science is sold to the highest bidder so I first point out the area of SALES for consideration.
2. The iplant aims to boost the reward achieved through learning/exercise.  Now as far as I am aware these things already call forth a natural reward. To add on an artificial reward devalues the things found to be naturally good and rewarding for human experience and seems grotesque to me.  If this comment is too aesthetic for your liking (where is the aesthetic in the realm of ethics – everywhere I think) then I would remind you of the value of negative experience.  To experience the unnatural, the uncomfortable, the alienated is to gain a true and directive experience of human society as lived.  Hoping to eradicate the negative and enhance the positive is the ultimate in assimilation.
3. It is inherently assimilationist – I extend this criticism to SSRIs.  When one seeks to make life/work tolerable through changing their own make up they remove all incentive to do so through social and political action/re-organisation. 
4. The particular ethic of the iplant has to do with value.  The iplant seeks to aid production and create a blindly positive experience of production.  It will further production and quantity and also devotion to these things through a myriad of employment.  It is therefore fascistic in its logic; its devotion to maximising output and ignoring conditions; estranging one further from their already estranged experience of modern life.
5. There are revolutionary possibilities in science as Edward Miller pointed out.  This reminds me of Aubrey de Grey and notions of life extension which as we have discussed has actual revolutionary potential in reopening the possibility of taking back property and with it technology.  The iplant however, cannot be conceived of as a revolutionary tool – but very easily a doctrinal one:
6. How would the iplant serve the cause of doctrine?  It seems to me that organised religion, ideology, organisation and government of every kind would love to introduce such an irreversible pledge.  Can I remind you how rife the suggestion of a ‘citizenship pledge’ in the UK at the moment.  (Imagine if we could combine citizenship pledge and ID card in one simple chip.  Efficiency and streamlining are the trend.  If the need for compulsory biometric id has already been sold then how easy to sell an even more secure version?!)
7. The desire for an iplant comes from a place that is already impoverished of experience.  It is a wish to experience things in the absence of the ability to enjoy learning and activity.  If one were to learn in this way their learning experience would not be progressive and lead its own path.  Instead it would be repetitive and aimed at accumulation not variety.  The iplant would inhibit creative learning and spontaneous connections which in my opinion are the main value in life.  The structure of using such a tool relies on FIRST COMMITMENT, and with this commitment an abnegation of the ongoing ability to distinguish. 

 

Anyway, these are just some ideas that previously bothered me about the iplant.  I would like to expand, to reorder and to condense.  I am taking it as read that such a device will always be used in the interests of power in its various incarnations.  But even just starting with a middle class learning aid market i think it could be corruptive of the intellect.  Had not previously thought this until time of writing, but i think the structure of the learning experience with an iplant (idea of first commitment and accumulation) needs to be addressed by you.  What else in the brain does the iplant unbalance?  What other connections are jeopardised or overshadowed?

 

Emxx

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Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:23:03 +0000
From: christopher....@googlemail.com
To: adrian.j...@gmail.com; j.davidg...@googlemail.com; emily_y...@hotmail.com; ipl...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Ethics

Hey,
The critics are getting more aggressive. Please let me know if you think there's anything I should change before I make this reply public:

http://www.iplant.eu/b3_2.html

Very much appreciated
Chris

---

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[Tommi]

On 29 maalis, 23:38, N3Emily Yates <emily_yates1...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

>To experience the unnatural, the uncomfortable, the alienated is to gain a true and directive experience of human society as lived.  Hoping to eradicate the negative and enhance the positive is the ultimate in assimilation.

I don't think Chris has tried to envision an implant that would do
what you say above. Enhancement is not eradication of the negative.
Even if we could transform our affective spectrum to gradients of
bliss, negative would still exist. Happy people act usually more
altruistic than unhappy people. And it might be even possible to
selectively enhance mirror neurons, which would certainly mean
enhanced empathy.

From HedWeb:

4.22 "Genetically pre-programmed euphoria would undermine the basis of
all human relationships. All this fancy verbal window-dressing about
combining perpetual ecstasy with love, empathy, beauty etc is only
superficial. Say, for example, some terrible physical misfortune
overtakes a friend; after all, accidents can happen in even the best-
run utopias. One will still be ecstatically happy: love for one's
friend may indeed feel intense; but it is completely shallow if one
can't grieve for a tragedy that befalls her."

By hypothesis, one's friend will be incapable of suffering; however
badly mangled his or her body. Indeed (s)he will still be happy,
albeit, we shall assume here, less intensely than before. Perhaps some
of her favourite pleasure-cells are damaged. Let us also assume, in
this scenario, that the molecular substrates of volition have long
since been identified and toned up. One has chosen to blend the
biochemical substrates of pleasure with those of dopaminergic
"incentive" motivation rather than blissed-out satiety. If this is the
case, then one will strive with all one's prodigiously augmented will-
power to find means to restore one's friend to a state of maximal well-
being. One will try far harder in dopaminergic overdrive than would be
psychophysiologically possible if one were stuck in one's current
comparatively weak-willed and ineffectual state. Thus a life of
unremitting happiness doesn't entail that friendship is shallow or
inauthentic; on the contrary, one will have the motivational resources
to express depth of personal commitment all the more.

> It is inherently assimilationist – I extend this criticism to SSRIs. When one seeks to make life/work tolerable through changing their own make up they remove all incentive to do so through social and political action/re-organisation.

_All_ incentive? This seems like a version of the wireheading
argument. Happiness doesn't necessarily take away empathy, as
previously stated. Consider this as well:

4.23 "One big risk posed by the global species-project of The
Hedonistic Imperative is that (post-)humanity will get "stuck" in a
better, but perhaps still severely sub-optimal, state. Evolutionary
progress, if one may be allowed to use such a term, would thereby come
to an end. This is too high a price to be paid, or to run the risk of
paying."

This worry shouldn't be lightly dismissed. But perhaps three points
are worth making here.

First, natural selection has promoted such an abundance of
dreadful states that even a severely sub-optimal (by whose criteria? -
presumably not the sublimely fulfilled super-beings themselves) result
would ethically be far preferable to today's status quo; and indeed
preferable to any of our often hellish world's environmentally-tweaked
successors.

Second, the danger of getting irreversibly stuck is still
present even if genetic engineering and psychopharmacology are
renounced in favour of time-honoured "peripheralist" approaches to
making the world a better place.

> The particular ethic of the iplant has to do with value.  The iplant seeks to aid production and create a blindly positive experience of production.  It will further production and quantity and also devotion to these things through a myriad of employment.  It is therefore fascistic in its logic; its devotion to maximising output and ignoring conditions; estranging one further from their already estranged experience of modern life.

This argument reminds me of this:

4.17 "I'd rather stay in touch with Reality than live in an escapist
fantasy world."

Some people enjoy the lucky conviction they have more intimate
relations with Reality than the rest of us. A robust sense of intimacy
is of course all the easier if one holds an agreeably commonsensical
direct realist view of perception. Unfortunately, common sense is ill-
named and at variance with the neuropsychological and quantum
mechanical facts. Yet even a virtual worlder, for whom an awake mind/
brain can aspire only to real-time data-driven simulations, may be
sensitive to the charge of wanting to live in a fool's paradise,
blissed out of his head come-what-may. Better, surely, to live like a
sad but wise Socrates than as a happy pig.

Happy pigs should not be despised, but Socratic intellectual
heavyweights can be happy too. In a magically transfigured environment
in which all one's fellow creatures were fabulously well, it is not
clear at all why occupying an affectively neutral or pensive state
should promote greater realism and representational fidelity. Perhaps
the only way to grasp the actual nature of the unexplored celestial
chemistry that beckons is to try becoming blissfully happy as well;
and this is surely as good a reason as any for seeking maximal
comprehension.

>learning and activity.  If one were to learn in this way their learning experience would not be progressive and lead its own path.  Instead it would be repetitive and aimed at accumulation not variety.  The iplant would inhibit creative learning and spontaneous connections which in my opinion are the main value in life.

Certainly this could be true of the first versions of iPlant. But what
if we could go beyond that, to also increase creative learning?
Perhaps by modifying the hedonistic set-point.

>What else in the brain does the iplant unbalance?  What other connections are jeopardised or overshadowed?

These are very real concerns that have to be dealt with.

[Christopher]

Emily! Many apologies for my lack of response, but truth be told I
haven't had anything good to add. Hence my confused 'open letter' to
you which essentially said "Well how would you do it?!" Since then
I've been hiding behind the this-technology-will-come-no-matter-what,-
we'd-better figure-out-how-to-make-the-most-of-it argument, but I'm
hoping the iPlant seminar tomorrow will give me some ideas for how
approach the problems you raise. I see the iPlant as liberating rather
than enslaving, as revolutionary rather than repressive, as
empowerment rather than assimilation, especially for those lacking in
self-discipline. But as you point out, the potential for abuse by
government and capital is enormous and must be carefully attended to.

The issue of the iPlant creating chemical imbalances in the brain is
something I've worked on a bit more and there IS a risk that the
dopamine system will atrophy unless it's activated in the 'normal'
way, by the cortex. It makes intuitive sense that bypassing the cortex
and relying too much on an iPlant for motivation might lead to a rapid
decline in one's ability to self-motivate, at least with early
versions of the implant. This is not necessarily a bad thing since it
might prevent large-scale incorporation of the implant into industry/
society and limit it's use to times when you would normally be
procrastinating or wasting time and not exercise self-discipline. The
iPlant would be nothing more than a switch that lets you stop staring
at the TV and instead go for an enjoyable run in the woods (and now
what could be wrong with that?;)