Virtue Engineering: Part One
Posted by Jeriaska on November 20th, 2007
In his 2006 Transvision presentation, James Hughes offers his views on the present and future of neurotechnologies, a subject that will feature in his upcoming book tentatively titled Cyborg Buddha. He argues that the near future technologies will allow us to modify and assist our emotions and reasoning. One of their purposes will be to assist our adherence to self-chosen moral codes and citizenship obligations.
The following transcript of James Hughes’ Transvision 2006 presentation “Virtue Engineering: Applications of Neurotechnology to Improve Moral Behavior” has not been approved by the author. Video is also available.
Virtue Engineering: Applications of Neurotechnology
In the last chapter of Citizen Cyborg I have some reflections on the nature of compassion and empathy in the context of trying to talk about what characteristics of persons we want to preserve in a transhuman future as people have increasing control over their brains. I’m writing a second book now called Cyborg Buddha, which is about this topic. So it’s very much on my mind.
This cartoon by the way, this is a military general. It says, “These are for keeping any sexist or homophobic remarks to myself,” which has been a problem in the U.S. military on occasion. The motivation for this talk is partly that one of the bioconservative complaints about transhumanism is that as people have increasing control over their own brains, that it lessens the responsibility that we have for our own lives. People will feel that they are the subject of engineering, they no longer are in control of themselves, and will be able to blame their brain structure, their brain chemistry for their behavior.
I think it’s entirely the opposite. I think what is actually happening is that enhancement technologies, neural technologies in particular, give us increasing conscious control over our own behavior. They increase our moral responsibility and will increase the demans that society makes of us to control our own behavior - to keep sexist and homophobic comments to ourselves, for instance.
Francis Fukuyama says, “Who is to tell us that being human and having dignity means sticking with a set of emotional responses,” he asks this rhetorically, “that are the accidental byproduct of our evolutionary history? Why don’t we accept our destiny as creatures who modify themselves?” That’s, of course, the transhumanist question. Francis Fukuyama says that that’s a bad idea. The reason that he gives is children who take ritalin will no longer feel like they really accomplish things themselves, or that women who take prozac will no longer feel like they’re in control of their lives, because they are taking a drug.
But we’ve been trying to control ourselves with willpower for thousands and thousands of years. “Crazy? Yeah, I’m crazy. That’s the point. The only way I have to control my brain is with this hammer, and I’m going to take the fight to the enemy.” That’s our usual approach to problems that are only under the control of our willpower. “I only have this crude tool of will, but I will do my best to lose weight” or “I will do my best to control violent outbursts.” But we have better tools than that. We don’t have to use a hammer, or maybe a marshmallow in the case of most people’s willpower.
What I’m suggesting is that neurotechnology will increase our obligation to use some neurotechnologies in certain cases, and also not to use neurotechnologies. Of course, the not to use neurotechnologies part has already been a part of moral responsibility for quite a long time, because we have, for instance, the consequences alcohol and other drugs have on our behavior. This is one of the neurotechnologies we’ve had available to us. When we think about the different causes of auto accidents, not drinking and driving is a moral and legal responsibility not to impair your behavior with a neurotechnology.
But now we have these additional questions, because we know that many auto accidents are caused by cell phone distraction. We have laws that say you can’t use a technology which distracts you while you are driving. We also now know that many auto accidents are caused by fatigue, because, especially in the United States, many people are chronically sleep deprived and they fall asleep at the wheel. Now, we have this drug that we’ve heard in almost every presentation, Modafinil, that has almost no side effects, which increases your awareness and your ability to concentrate. Why don’t we then have the responsibility if we’re fatigued to take Modafinil? We have a responsibility not to impair ourselves by using a technology like a cell phone. Why don’t we have a responsibility to use a technology?
J.B.S. Haldane, who was one of the progenitors of the transhumanist vision, said “We may be able to control our passions by some more direct method than fasting and flagellation to deal with perverted instincts by physiology rather than prison.” He didn’t work much on the neurotechnology question, he was mostly a geneticist. But, at least he pointed us in that direction. First I want to talk about the difference between vice and virtue. In the classical vices and virtues model of Catholicism, each vice had a corresponding virtue. Separating what is a vice and what is a virtue, just like separating what is a therapy and what is an enhancement, is kind of complicated or meaningless. Let’s start with things that we think of as vices.
Clearly, in terms of all of your moral behavior, all of your responsibility to other people, your need to be compassionate, to meet your obligations in society, taking drugs and being dependent on a substance can impair those. One of the concerns I have with transhumanism and how we are portrayed is that if we adopt a purely liberal notion that says that we don’t mind if people wirehead - putting a wire into their head and turning on their pleasure center to constantly be jacking themselves with pleasure - or we don’t mind if people are heroin addicts, or as Jeremy Bentham implied, a utilitarian ethic would support the notion of people having constant pleasure and not accomplishing other things with their lives.
I think we need to adopt a more sophisticated statement on this and say, we believe that there is a kind of range of personalities that we can encourage one another to have, within which there is a great deal of diversity. One end might be something like drug addiction or alcohol dependency, where we think that this is a use of technology in a way that actually perverts the human capability, and that we want to encourage technologies that will lead us away from those. We have fortunately some technologies in the pipeline, which without putting people in prison for their vices, allow people more control over those kinds of addictions and dependencies. Things like cocaine vaccines, which block the receptors in the brain that make use of cocaine and that make people resistant to cocaine dependency, or buprinorphine for overcoming opiate addiction, or Neltrexone for alcohol, which causes people to be nauseous when they drink. Similarly, they are being developed for nicotine.
Sex addiction. It’s a controversial idea, whether people can actually be sex addicted or not, but it is in the United States, where many things are being treated as diseases, which weren’t previously treated as diseases. Sex addiction is being treated as a disease and people are being treated, for instance, with prozac and other SSRI’s. It’s become helpful for some people. Of course, that suggests it really isn’t sex addiction, that it might be depression that is leading people to that behavior.
There is related evidence about what leads people to have different patterns of sexual behavior altogether. There’s this fascinating study with voles, which are these insectile rodents in the United States. There’s one kind of vole that has monogamous behavior, and there’s another kind of vole where the male has many sexual partners but never pair bonds. And they tweaked one gene in the voles that were having many partners and that gene increased the amount of vasopressin in their brain and also some of the dopamine, and the voles became monogamous. What it suggested was that this one gene allowed them to, when they had sex with a particular female vole, to associate the pleasure that they were getting with that particular female. Then they no longer sought other sexual experiences. They continued to go back to that female and developed a pair bond with that female.
Human behavior is probably a hundred times more complex than this, but it suggests that there may be biochemical modalities for controlling our sexual expression as well, becoming more monogamous or less monogamous. I’m not a prude - If people decided that they wanted to live in polyamorous, non-monogamous communities, then perhaps they would suppress their vasopressin so that they weren’t as monogamous.
In the New Testament it says that Jesus says to people, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.” Now, I know I’m not a Christian scholar, but it seems to me like Jesus is advocating castration for men, which is a pretty profound insight that testosterone is a modulator of sexual behavior and many kinds of aggressive male behavior. I often say that testosterone is one of the most potent neurotoxins in the world. The degree of violence and crime in a society can be directly tied to the number of males 15-25 in a society.
We may not want to systematically suppress testosterone because it has other benefits. It encourages, for instance, sexual desire, which we find pleasurable. But for people who have too much testosterone or problems with their testosterone regulation, this is another avenue. Another disease that is beginning to be discussed being put into the DSM-IV, the diagnostic manual for psychiatry is the notion of obsessive racism. There are anecdotal accounts of people who walk around constantly obsessed with the fear of Jews, blacks, immigrants.
There is very interesting related research to this that comes out of twin studies in England that suggests that your attitudes toward immigrants is actually partly genetically inherited. This is one of the many characteristics that genetically similar twins share more than other people do. There might be some brain structure, some set of neurochemistry that creates a positive or negative xenophobia in people. In extreme cases, this might become part of people’s psychopathology, where they become obsessively racist or hostile to immigrants.
This relates to what is the dominant emerging model, at least in American psychology about the structure of personality. This is mainly coming out of statistical analysis of personality surveys, so you ask people hundreds of thousands of questions. You find these certain kinds of traits tend to hang together statistically. There is much debate as to whether there is three of them or five of them, but these five appear to be pretty stable and cross-cultural. When you go to different countries, different societies may have more or less of one of thes, but the same traits hang together in each of these societies.
These are things like neuroticism: the degree to which you are obsessed with your personal problems. Extroversion: the amount of energy that you have and how much you communicate and interact with other people. Agreeableness: the degree to which you are trusting of other people and compassionate. Conscientiousness: the degree to which people want to meet their obligations, the degree to which they want to be precise about particular jobs, or whether they are spontaneous and lose the details, as I often tend to do. Openness to experiences: there is some suggestions that the love of learning is chemically related to other kinds of pleasure centers in the brain. When people have an a-ha! experience, they actually get the same kind of neurochemical rewards that people get from nicotin, alcohol and other kinds of drugs.
This is the notion that there is a systematic trait set at birth. All of these traits, you have a certain setpoint at birth, and you can become a little bit more of this or a little bit less, but it is pretty much neurochemically or genetically determined at birth. A related field of endeavor that has come out of what is called the positive psychology movement in the United States is that this guy, Martin Seligman, was the president of the American Psychological Association. When he became president in the 1990’s he said we have been focusing almost exclusively on psychopathology, on illness, and how to treat neuroticism. What about the positive side of psychology? How do we become happier? How do we become better people? What does it mean to become a better person?
He established a commission to investigate different areas of this. What was the happiness research saying about the relationship to health? What kinds of values do people have cross-culturally that they consider to be virtues? They summarized about twenty different virtues that they found across many different cultures. Within those they had six major sets of virtues that they found in almost every culture. They have begun to empirically look at the psychological literature through this lens and say, with this particular analysis of what the structure of human character is, and what we consider to be an ideal character for someone, what does the literature say about the relationship to happiness and health?
They find, for instance, there are many kinds of research that suggest that people who are higher on humanity, which is your compassion or agreeableness, are happier people. Again, happiness has a setpoint. The degree to which you are happy appears to be strongly genetically determined. About 50% of the degree to which you say you are happy is genetically determined at birth. Things can influence this - if you win the lottery, you’re happier for awhile, but then you come back down to your happiness setpoint. There are shocking findings coming out of studies of people with terminal illness in the United States. If you get a terminal illness, you are sad for awhile and then you come back up to your happiness setpoint. If you are already sad, you don’t move very much. If you were happy to begin with, you become happy again.
Happiness seems to be a relatively inflexible, and again, genetically determined at birth, as are some of these character traits because they are partly determined by your personality. The question for transhumanists then is that nothing is really variable in the long-term. This model that they have at the top (S+C+V=H) summarizes the positive psychology movement. The degree of happiness that you have is determined by your happiness setpoint, the conditions of your life (whether you are in a concentration camp or living in idyllic Finland), and what you do with your life (things like whether you are married, whether you drink, and things like that). S is a strong component of that model. V is a relatively weak component. Income does not have much influence on happiness after $20,000 a year. You have very little additional happiness per additional income. Getting married has more, being a member of a religious community has a little bit more, and so forth. They see S as a set condition that cannot be changed, and of course, we don’t.
This is a summary of some of the relationships that one can draw between these set personality characteristics, some of these virtues, and then, over here are some suggestions about what are the potential enhancers of these virtues and personality enhancers. Again, the personality model has been related to happiness. The more agreeable you are, the happier you tend to be. Spontaneity has some advantages and conscientiousness has some advantages, so there is an ideal place in the middle. The less neurotic you are, the happier you are. The more extroverted, the happier you are.
Let’s talk about a couple of these. This is my niece. She is one of the happiest people I know. I’m not suggesting that she takes ecstasy herself. Ecstasy has been suggested to be a drug by the people who take it to break down the barrier between self and other, to increase the feeling systematically of love for other people. There is some suggestion that it changes the structure of the brain permanently in that direction. Now there are some initial clinical studies being done in the States for the use of ecstasy to determine whether it is useful for psychiatric conditions of one kind or another. Again, there is research that suggests that fear of other people has a genetic or neurochemical component.
We may have drugs like ecstasy. Oxitocin is another drug that may be useful for increasing agreeableness or humanity in people. Oxitocin is a neuroactive hormone that is released during breastfeeding and during orgasm. It is also a key component of people bonding with one another. The degree of oxitocin that you have helps you trust other people. There is some very interesting research out of Switzerland, where they put people in role-playing game situations where they could either trust one another or they could compete against one another. They found that dosing people with oxytocin without their knowledge led to more cooperative behavior in the games than not. The reports of this last year suggested that diplomats would have to have oxytocin monitors so that they weren’t being gassed with oxytocin when they went in to negotiate.
There are some very interesting potential implications of this. This study, Neuroactive Hormones and Interpersonal Trust: International Evidence, they went to 32 countries, tested the amount of oxytocin in the blood of people from different countries, and then looked at a hundred different variables to see which ones were correlated with the amount of oxytocin in their blood. There were this set of phytochemicals that were relatively strong correlates of the amount of oxytocin in people’s blood. You can see the countries in the upper range here of trust: Demark, Norway, Sweden, Canada. These are countries with relatively social democratic orientations. The countries at the bottom: Columbia, Philippine, Turkey, Peru, Brazil. This is just the correlation with diet, which seems to be triggering the release of oxytocin.
In turn, they looked at studies of asking people whether they trusted other people and it was correlated with the amount of oxytocin in their blood. They looked at studies of the relationship between the amount of oxytocin in their blood to the level of happiness and here again you see in the upper quadran: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands. Down here at the bottom: Brazil, Turkey, Portugal. The implication that they make in this study, it’s in a journal of biology and economics, is that trust is a key component of all kinds of social cooperation, both economic and political cooperation. There are serious economic and political consequences of a society being oxytocin-deficient, because you are not able to engage in the same kind of economic activity. You are not able to engage in the same kind of political cooperation as people who have more oxytocin in their blood.
Continued in Part Two of Virtue Engineering