Virtue Engineering: Part Two
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. Continued from Virtue Engineering: Part One.
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
Another condition that U.S. psychology is anxious to treat is social anxiety disorder, or SAD. This is called shyness by other people. Systematic shyness now is considered a treatable condition in the United States. There are many different kinds of therapies that are used for it. For many of these kinds of conditions, I don’t want to suggest that drugs are the only way to change these things. Cognitive behavioral therapy, where you teach people to think differently is a very effective way to treat many of these kinds of things. But also SSRI’s (prozac and so forth), beta blockers (which suppress the flight or fight reflex) , other kinds of drugs that calm people down and allow them to interact have been shown to make people less shy. You have this phobia in upwards of 6% of the population on that end of the bell curve.
I just saw this study today. Not to slight the electronic and interactive technologies and their potential benefits, we hear a lot of complaints about the ways the internet and mediated electronic communication will make us more alienated from one another and reduce social solidarity. Just today a study came out where researchers suggest that people who play games like Second Life or World of Warcraft have established social ties through these games that are as important to them, though not quite as deep as face-to-face communication, but are broad. On Myspace you can have a thousand friends. You can’t actually spend time with those thousand friends, but at least you have a thousand friends.
It increases your social awareness in other ways. I think this is a very important experiment: Camp Darfur, which is a role-playing environment in Second Life where you adopt the role of a Darfuree. You have to fight the Janjaweed and try to save your family from being slaughtered, and learn a lot about the Sudan in the process. So I think there are many ways that these electronic forms of communication will increase our empathy, as they already do. In the sense that the more we know about how other people think in other parts of the world, the less cosmopolitan we become, and the more complex our models about empathy for other people’s ways of thought become.
When we live in a parochial world we find it incomprehensible how someone could be a Muslim, or how someone could be a Communist, or whatever. At least when we have more communication with them, we may begin to understand the way they think. We may not like it, and that may lead to some of its own conflicts. We may like them even less when we understand how they think, but at least we begin to have a more complex model of the world.
A study came out last year that suggested that giving people caffeine allowed them to change their mind more often. There was some debate about what the causes of this were, and so there was another paper that was released a couple months ago where they again gave people in a controlled setting drinks. In one set of drinks there were doses of caffeine, and in the other there weren’t. Then they exposed them to arguments about things they were opposed to, and they measured afterwards which group were more likely to change their mind in relationship to the arguments that they had heard. The group that got the caffeine changed their mind more. The suggestion is that caffeine stimulated their brains, so they were able to pay attention to the arguments better than the other group was. Of course the media spun this as “Caffeine makes you more suggestible.” It does suggest that this characteristic of open-mindedness may be malleable by some of these attentional mechanisms.
This was a great connection for me, because I have been reading about the Enlightenment recently, it turns out that coffee houses were closly associated with the rise of the Enlightenment. Before the Enlightenment, the principle way that men socialized with one another was in ale houses. As the Enlightenment began to rise, people began to go instead, especially in the morning and all through the day, to drink coffee, to read the newspaper, and to debate politics, to create what economists call “the first internet.” It was a place where all kinds of newspapers and broadsheets were collected. In fact, some of the editors, just like bloggers, had their addresses at a coffee house. You could send mail to them at the coffee house.
You weren’t drunk the whole time, so you were able to pay attention to arguments. Now we know you were more open-minded as well. Beer, by one anonymous broadsheet writer, was called “the foggy ale that besieged our brains, while coffee was the brave and wholesome liquor that heals the stomach, makes the genius quicker, relieves the memory, revives the sad, and cheers the spirits without making mad.” They were also called “penny universities” because of all the free newspapers. They were also classless. Working men and men from the middle class could go and have a conversation together.
Conscientiousness and emotional control, the ability for us to overcome our neuroticism, our degree of getting upset with the things that happen in our lives. It is also the degree to which we can carry through with our commitments. An example of a disorder that is related to that is, again, something that American psychiatry wants to now treat: intermittent explosive disorder. There have been only one or two epidemiological studies to determine who might fit into a category of explosive disorder. That is, having periods of rage which are overpowering and which cause you to do things you didn’t intend to do.
There is some suggestion that certain kinds of brain lesions may lead to it. A lot of research has been done in prisons. The cause and effect there is a little unclear. For people who fit this diagnosis one NIH study found an average of 43 attacked people across their lifetime, averaging $1400 in property damage. $1400 does not sound like a lot to me, but the 43 attacks is quite dramatic. I think I haven’t gotten into a fistfight since I was ten years-old. Treatments for this are anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, beta blockers, alpha-agonsists, mood stabilizers.
Stepping away from personality for a second, and our kind of basic inclinations to be a moral being with other people, there is another model in psychology specifically related to ethics and moral reasoning. This is the model that Lawrence Kohlberg developed in the 1970’s. Kohlberg was influenced by Piaget, who was a child psychologist.
Piaget did all kinds of experiments with children. He said, “When does a child know that an object really exists?” So, if you take a ball and show it to a child and then put it under the table, do their eyes follow under the table, waiting for the ball to come back up? Or do they immediately lose interest in the ball as soon as it disappears from their vision because they don’t think it exists anymore? That’s called “object permanence.” So he had a series of stages that children go through. You have to have object permanence before you have other kinds of mental processing capabilities.
There were a series of stages, and you could not have stage three if you did not have stage two in the Piagetian model. Kohlberg wondered if the same thing were true for morality: whether having certain forms of moral logic was a staged process. He did international research and a lot of research in the States and found that there were six stages of moral reasoning, which started with punishment avoidance: whatever someone who is control of me says is right is what’s right. That is your basic childhood stage. Whoever is powerful, whatever they say is right. Then, if someone can give something to me, that’s right. Then there is the social contract model, that we have to have rules of right and wrong, otherwise everything will go to hell.
The final one, universal ethical principle orientation, he only found in a very small subset of adults. The degree to achieve these higher levels of reasoning was somewhat correlated with higher education. It was a little bit different by country. But very few adults got to the sixth stage, which was basically a Gandhian or Martin Luther King stage, that there was a universal ethic and I have to be subject to that before social ethics. So if sometime it is required that I do something that society says is wrong in order to achieve this higher ethic, I will take the consequences for that. He considered that the highest level of ethic and very few people were at that level of ethic.
It sounds like a pretty ethnocentric model. He tried to validate it internationally and found that there was some support for it. It has come under criticism from feminists and others who consider it far too legalistic and rationalistic. But if you think about the fact that we may eventually have machines interfacing with our brains, and we already have machines surrounding us in various ways, the notion that we might hold ourselves accountable to a higher ethic that we don’t consistently… people, when they answered the questionnaires to determine what stage of ethic they were at, some would respond to one situation at stage two and another situation at stage four. They weren’t consistent. You could rank them generally at a certain stage, but they were not terribly consistent.
Some kinds of questions completely distort ethical thinking. If you ask somebody about human enhancement, incest, cannibalism, or eugenics in Germany, there were things which overwhelmed their moral reasoning and don’t allow them to be consistent in the way that they are thinking about situations.
This leads me to the idea of a morality PDA. I carry around a PDA that I’m supposed to enter all the food I eat into, and which tells me when I get to the top number of calories that I’m supposed to have for the day. Of course, I never enter anything into it. What I would like is for it to be able to sit in my glasses or on my tongue and measure automatically the amount of food that I want, and then signal to my stomach “now it’s time to stop eating.” That would be the kind of automatic feedback loop that I would like. Otherwise, it’s just far too cumbersome.
In the United States we have the “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets, which kids where. It’s supposed to be a constant reminder that I’m supposed to think about in this situation, “What would Jesus do?” Well, he would leave his family and go live with a bunch of men out in the wilderness and eventually get killed for being a political dissident. Okay, great, that’s what I’m going to do. Also, you have the electronic bible, which people can carry around in their pocket, and if they have a moral question they can immediately type up “What does Ezekial say about premarital sex?”
We have the potential in the future to have these automatic, in our environment and potentially in our brain, kinds of morality checkers. An example of one that is already in existence is that on some software programs there is a list of words that you really don’t want to use in software that is considered flaming. It will warn you, “Do you really want to send this message with these words in it?” That’s a pretty useful thing to have. I don’t have it turned on on mine because I’m way above that, but I think it might be a useful thing for some.
Another dimension of morality is the degree to which we are morally autonomous. This of course is an enormous concern. Surveillance of our behavior is related to this as well. The degree to which we are independent and are able to control our own behavior, I think in the end this is going to become much more difficult to define, but at least where we are at right now we have this notion of whether I am in control or whether I am being influenced. We might want to think about the development in the future of morality spam filters.
An example for me of this is Steve Mann, the guy in Toronto who wears glasses that have a camera in them. He never sees what is actually in front of him. The camera goes into a computer and then it goes into a display that he sees in his glasses. He has it programmed so that when it recognizes an ad, he has some sort of algorithm for a billboard or advertisement, it replaces that billboard with his email or a beautiful picture that he wants to see instead of that ad. He is trying to filter out the influences in his environment that might annoy him.
I think we can think about this in a similar way. There is lots of evidence to suggest that the degree of threat that people perceive in their environment, the degree of violence that they perceive in society, increases their tolerance for authoritarian leadership. This was pointed out in the last election when the Bush administration was very carefully moderating the threat levels assessment, how threatening terrorism was, and arresting groups of Christian fundamentalist teenagers who they had entrapped into being terrorists in the United States, saying that this was another Al-Qaeda plot. The same thing was suggested in Russia when buildings were blowing up and people thought that it was an attempt to booster support for Putin. It has happened in many regimes, this notion that there is an attempt to portray society as out of control so people will turn to authoritarian leadership.
If we had more control over our own sense about those things and are able to parse out those kinds of influences on our thinking, we might not be so subject to influence by others. My conclusion with this is that, I think with transhuman neurotechnologies we have the capability to build a society in which we are happier, more intelligent, more self-aware, potentially more independent of other influences to the degree that that’s desirable, more socially minded, and have better moral and political decision making. I do reference some of that in Citizen Cyborg.
But I think there are also some serious risks here, as you might have already imagined. There is the risk of, for instance, brain fingerprinting. Neuroimaging technologies are now being used, with a lot of financing from American Homeland Security, to say if we show you a bunch of pictures including George Bush and Osama bin Laden, and your pleasure center goes on when we show you Osama bin Laden and your disgust center goes on when you see George Bush, doesn’t that suggest something about the kind of person you are and whether we should let you into the United States? These kinds of terrorist brain fingerprints are being sought. If we found that someone had a systematically bad set of mental responses, we might then say we should put you on the prozac or give you the morality PDA that will systematically retrain you.
You remember of course A Clockwork Orange, the classic scene where he has his eyes wired open and he’s being shown images. This is a potential rehabilitative technology that I think we have to be very conscious might be out there. There is the possibility that people in a purely liberal framework might take drugs that would bliss them out, might make them insensate to the kinds of oppression that they live under and not be the kind of dynamic engaged citizens that we want them to be. If you read The Hedonistic Imperative by David Pearce, one of the founders of the WTA, he parses out this question very interestingly. There is no evidence that people in the top ten percentile of happiness setpoint are systematically more passive or less engaged with their world.
There is a whole debate as to whether SSRI’s cause people to commit suicide. They do kind of cause people to commit suicide, because when you are really depressed, you are too depressed even to kill yourself. When you take an SSRI you get a little bit less depressed, and then you think, “Now I can finally kill myself.” Across that whole spectrum, the degree of neuroticism and depression that you experience is the degree to which you are not able to engage with the world and change the world. When you look at the history of revolutions, rising expectations and optimism can be as much a cause of political change as people being really bummed out.
I imagine that if you go into a battlefield and you find it difficult to shoot innocent people or people that you haven’t met before, you might be given a drug to help you overcome that kind of innate compassion for your fellow human being. If you go into the workplace and you need to be extra competitive, you might take something that suppresses your innate humanity so that you can become a more competitive person. These kinds of pressures might encourage society to use these technologies in ways that we don’t like.
Another example might be the degree to which we might encourage people to conform to society instead of change society. Imagine if you are transgendered and you go to the doctor and say, “I’m a woman living in a man’s body.” Right now a doctor can say, “Over time we could transform your body to become a woman’s body and eventually you could live as a woman.” But in the future you might be able to go to the doctor and he could say, “We can either give you this pill that can make you feel that you are a man in a man’s body, or we can transform your body.” I don’t know if it’s morally preferable to do one or the other. I think it should be up to each individual to choose. But it would mean there would be less pressure on society to accept those kinds of differences. People might find that the path of least resistance is the path that they want to take.
Not to bash China too much, but just as a final comment I will say that I am very concerned about the use of these technologies in authoritarian countries that don’t have the same kinds of liberal democratic traditions and values that the Enlightenment has attempted to spread throughout the world and in which people seem much more oriented towards conformity than towards individual rights and expression.
In conclusion, we could have a better world or we could have a worse world, as many of the talks have said. The difference will be made by whether we transhumanists and others who are our allies fight for the importance of cognitive liberty. That’s what will make the difference. It’s not the technologies that will make the difference, because as I pointed out there are many technologies already being used, which have the potentials for the negatives and the potentials for the positives. It’s not the technologies that will make the difference, the difference will be made by whether we create the kinds of societies that will protect people’s rights to use these technologies in self-chosen ways and to give them the messages about the kinds of people we think people should become.
We do not want a purely liberal society in this regard. A purely liberal society might end up in dead ends that we wouldn’t want to have. We want to tell people “liberal, but there are boundaries.” Thank you very much.