Cognitive Enhancement Strategies Wednesday, Mar 12 2008
brain and singularity 6:37 pm
Currently existing:
- writing systems
- digital communication
- caffeine, maybe sugar
- nootropics, maybe (need more data)
- education, hands-on learning
- other intellectual stimulation
- enriched environments
- good nutrition
Cutting-edge:
Future:
- increasing neuron density and connectivity
- gene therapy, which has been successful in mice
- brain-computer interfaces, brain implants
- cognition enhancing drugs
- developing strong AI
See Ben Goertzel on why the Internet may not be making us smarter.
March 12th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Caffeine does, indeed, sound like a miracle drug, judging by current research. If it’s so easy to boost brain function with so few drawbacks, is there an evolutionary explanation of why evolution didn’t “figure this trick out” by itself?
Not sure what you mean by “enriched environments” or “high IQ cooperation”.
March 13th, 2008 at 12:50 am
“High IQ cooperation”, like the Prometheus Society?
A google search of the phrase turns up nothing but this blog post.
March 13th, 2008 at 7:10 am
I meant cooperating with people who have a high IQ, like some professors or whatever. It seems as if there are emergent beneficial effects when a lot of smart people get together.
Evolution doesn’t figure out every trick because it is remarkably dumb.
An enriched environment is the difference between growing up playing with colorful, challenging toys and a supportive family versus growing up alone in a plain room.
March 13th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Can’t forget Nootropics.
March 13th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Cognition-enhancing drugs are nootropics, but I’ve added nootropics as a separate item anyway. Yet, I’m skeptical they work that well. The main advocates of nootropics seem to be from the supplement-overfocused crowd, and I have yet to see studies that prove they enhance intelligence noticeably.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:56 am
No, it’s not. It simply doesn’t share the same goals as we transhumanists do. In terms of its goals and ‘baud rate’, evolution is actually sophisticated to the point where we have begun mimicking its principles in order to augment human engineering & design practices. (Genetic algorithms, anyone?)
I truly feel that calling evolution “dumb” because it didn’t augment intelligence further is rather like saying that a star football player is a poor athlete because he sucks at golf, or swimming. It’s not something I expect of someone with a strong capacity for discernment and an active habit of avoiding cognitive biases.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Sorry for the double-post; but at least they are actually separate items!
That said, moving on:
I think adrafinil/modafinil needs a place in there somewhere alongside caffeine. Seeing as adrafinil is no more heavily restricted in the US than is caffeine, this seems especially significant.
March 13th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Bostrom’s paper seems like the best overview of specific technologies currently available. Anyone know of anything better?
March 13th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Hey, don’t leave out Anders!
I know of some overviews which are better, but unfortunately they are proprietary.
March 13th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
(I should add, Michael’s list covers several points that Bostrom’s paper does not. I tend to prefer the more broad approach. Also, I think it would be interesting to unpack the concept of brain implants. Seems like there’s a lot of stuff rolled into a single term?)
March 13th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Right, Anders too.
March 13th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
“Not sure what you mean by “enriched environments” or “high IQ cooperation”.”
This refers to favorable environments for high IQ people to actually get work done. How many high-IQ federal prisoners build new gadgets or publish research papers?
“No, it’s not.”
So why didn’t it foresee condoms and birth control, and instill us with strong instincts against them?
“I truly feel that calling evolution “dumb” because it didn’t augment intelligence further is rather like saying that a star football player is a poor athlete because he sucks at golf, or swimming.”
Even using evolution’s own standard- mass replication- it still fails miserably. How many species have large populations, or cover more than a tiny fraction of the globe?
March 13th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
“See Ben Goertzel on why the Internet may not be making us smarter.”
>> That isn’t really what he wrote.
And how can the internet NOT make ‘us’ smarter anyway?
Sure, 500 million spoiled, stupid, Paris Hilton-loving whores might be wasting time by writing pointless shit on Facebook, but how does that make me or anyone else who is interested in science and transhumanism, less intelligent?
March 13th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
I would also add to the list, transcranial magnetic stimulation, deep brain stimulation and neurofeedback. All of them have shown potential in enhancing human cognition.
March 13th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Oh, and transcranial direct current is also something thats fairly new. Basically its just passing a 1-2 milliamp current through your brain (nothing like ECT which causes a seizure and is 1 amp). You just need a 9 volt battery and some electrodes. The anode electrode can excite neuron firing underneath it while the cathode electrode suppreses firing. So you can basically affect any area in close proximity to your skull. It has been used to improve working memory, enhance language performance and improve long-term memory:
http://www.rotten.com/library/medicine/tDCS/
March 13th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Brainwaves/Binaural Beats maybe are another one to think about.
March 14th, 2008 at 1:08 am
Tom, I hate to break it to you but you’ve rather missed what evolution’s goal is. The sole goal of evolution is the optimization of a species to its environment. Nothing more, nothing less. Mass replication is actually harmful to that goal in many cases. Evolution does not operate on an individual basis. Nor does it possess the structures to handle social developments. Your question about condoms is effectively like asking why the football player doesn’t know how to pirouette. It’s absurd on its face.
I once again remind you that I did place a caveat in my statement about baud rates.
I entreat you to investigate this further for yourself, and attempt to do so from intellectual perspectives that you disagree with to begin with, as though they were genuine beliefs in your part. (Call it the intellectual equivalent of proof by falsification.)
March 14th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
“The sole goal of evolution is the optimization of a species to its environment.”
Humans are *extremely* badly adapted to their present-day environment. I’m sure you can find thousands of other examples.
“Mass replication is actually harmful to that goal in many cases.”
This is a group-selection fallacy. See http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/group-selection.html.
“Your question about condoms is effectively like asking why the football player doesn’t know how to pirouette.”
If you placed a gene for strong aversion to birth control into the human population, it would spread very rapidly; it would be an evolutionary success, in other words. This is extremely obvious to any human observer, so why hasn’t evolution done it?
March 14th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
You have here made two errors.
1) Mass replication beyond environmental constraints yields extermination of populations due to environmental collapse. This is why the Russian lynx’s breeding success is so strongly linked to the population of the snowshoe hare, regardless of whether the diet of individuals consists primarily of snowshoe hares. Mass replication is not, therefore, the immediate goal of evolution — or else it would have optimized all species for rampant replication. Another proof positive of this is the rarity of ubiquitously lethal parasites and diseases. The optimized parasite is note a massively replicating entity — it only reproduces //just enough// to maintain its longevity; this is optimization to its environment.
2) The more complex the brain the more difficult it is to encode specific behavior. There is no gene for birth control aversion; it is a physical impossibility. Any genetic phenotypical modification required to cause such a selective aversion would inevitably have other consequences — possibly quite atrocious ones.
Now, if you want to discuss memes, well, that’s another story. As we all know quite well. There are many memes in existence that are highly BC-averse. Most of them are failing.
These two elements together should be sufficient evidence for any audience regardless of level or sophistication to comprehend that Tom’s ideas about evolution are painfully inaccurate.
March 14th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
@Iconrad
I don’t believe that an anti-Birth Control imperative would be terribly difficult to encode, or rather a pro-reproduction drive on top of a sexual drive. Many women already seem to have maternal desires that seem quite possibly genetically based. I’m not convinced it would be difficult to intensify that drive through selection.
Also, you realize you’re arguing about how to correctly anthropomorphize a natural phenomenon?
——————
My intelligence enhancing strategy: subsidize intelligent couples to reproduce.
March 15th, 2008 at 1:12 am
AJordan, I’m afraid you entirely missed the point. My ‘argument’ was selectively parsed to the idea of a single gene. That being said, the “female maternal imperative” idea is essentially immune to the separation between the social, genetic, and environmental imperatives, all of which have an impact on the psyche.
Either way, however, simply modifying one gene can have horribly powerful invocations of the Rule of Unintended Consequences. A good example of this would be the albino fruit flies generated in the laboratory some time ago: after all; the researchers had isolated one gene which was supposed to turn the flies white. As a result, the majority of the males this gene was “flipped” in were homosexual, and furthermore all, regardless of gender, exhibited odd “chaining” behaviors. Given how much of human behavior is learned over the course of time and further how much is controlled by neurochemical responses, I’m afraid the idea that it would be “simple enough” to genetically introduce a characteristic that only introduced massive breeding on a genetic level in humans is simply a pipe-dream at this point. You can no more accomplish it than you can accomplish genetically inherited memory: nobody can even currently conceive of where such a genetic alteration ought to be made or what structure it should take. It simply can’t be done; and by the time human (or post-human) science reaches that point, it is exceedingly likely that other mechanisms would have accomplished it far more cheaply and readily.
Excuse me? That is patently absurd; all algorithms have goals. To ascribe human motivations or charateristics to things that do not have them is anthropomorphization. That has not been done here; rather, I have addressed the process of evolution as an optimization algorithm and have indicated that — as all algorithms qualify as “artificial intelligence” in their own way, that evolution can be ascribed a level of intelligence. This is not anthropomorphism. In fact, the idea that it is //could// be seen as anthropocentric.
Eugenics by animal husbandry. Proven ineffective by the Eugenics programs and also the principle of reversion to the mean.
March 15th, 2008 at 7:38 am
“1) Mass replication beyond environmental constraints yields extermination of populations due to environmental collapse.”
This is a group selection argument. Such arguments have been dismissed by evolutionary biology since the 1960s. The data shows that species actually do evolve themselves into extinction (see http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/evolving-to-ext.html).
“or else it would have optimized all species for rampant replication.”
Er, it kind of does. In all animals, the drive to replicate is *very* powerful. Many animals commit suicide by replicating, showing that the urge to replicate is stronger than the urge to survive (which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective).
“Another proof positive of this is the rarity of ubiquitously lethal parasites and diseases.”
Cholera. Smallpox. Typhus. Yellow fever. Malaria. Spanish flu. Tuberculosis. AIDS. Need I go on?
“There is no gene for birth control aversion; it is a physical impossibility.”
A large number of behavioral characteristics have been shown to have large genetic components, including IQ (see the next post).
March 15th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
@Icon, evolution is not an algorithm, it’s simply a pattern that we as observers have picked up on. Now, evolutionary strategies used in computer science, those are algorithms.
Arguing semantics make me want to stab myself with a ballpoint pen.
March 15th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
@Icon, evolution is not an algorithm, it’s simply a pattern that we as observers have picked up on. Now, evolutionary strategies used in computer science, those are algorithms.
Arguing semantics make me want to stab myself with a ballpoint pen.
That said, while I don’t actually support subsidizing anyone to reproduce I think it can be potentially more fruitful than you realize. See the history of Ashkenazi Jews and their practice of essentially subsidizing top students to reproduce.
March 17th, 2008 at 12:18 am
Tom, you really need to pay closer attention to your own citations.
Source.It really doesn’t do your position-statements much justice when you cite materials that contradict your positions. To whit: multi-level selection is a valid and widely acknowledged portion of the evolutionary process. To each of your statements about the diseases in question, I offer only this: Why is it that none of them are either ancient diseases (and thus not fully addressed by evolution) or else invariably have a radically lesser-than-100% fatality rate? As a side note: to even bring up a disease that has only been around in humans for less than a century when discussing evolution shows that your thinking is far less than without bias. You might as well be making pro-creationist arguments; they use the same magical/selective thinking. (Ignoring millennia of cultivation in the banana when using the plant to counter evolutionary theory, for example.)
Jordan: As the body of thought surrounding evolutionary algorithms strongly disagrees with you, I will leave it with that. Just because a process exists in nature and not in a silicon substrate doesn’t magically make that process a non-algorithm.
March 17th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Ack — link didn’t take in my previous comment. Source = http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/group-selection.html#comment-89079680
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:47 am
hey.i am trying to find ways,methods and to enhance mind and body.i dont believe in nootropics.the side effects of most medication are far worse than the beneficial effects.anything you think works or even things you not sure of.any helpful information emailed to me would really be appreciated