Happiness in a Complex Universe
Posted by Jeriaska on January 13th, 2008
Anne Corwin is an engineer and technoprogressive activist based in California. She is an intern with the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and a volunteer for the Methuselah Foundation. She is also the author of the blog Existence is Wonderful and produces the associated podcast, Existence is Wonderful audio. In this talk with Accelerating Future’s founder Michael Anissimov, she spoke on how futurist topics like neurodiversity, life extension and self-modification are relevant to discussion today.
Video and audio are also available.
ANNE: The two main issues I tend to cover most frequently in my writing are radical life extension and neurodiversity. Those two may not necessarily sound very much like they’re related, and truthfully I didn’t really think they were at first. What happened was I started doing the life extension stuff, I got into conversations with more general transhumanist-type people, and I found that there were a lot of opinions going around and a lot of assumptions being made about people who were atypically brained. I saw some things that kind of horrified me, like “Autistics aren’t really people” or “Maybe they couldn’t pass a Turing test,” things like that. I was just thinking, “Heck, talk to me, or type at me or something, and I’ll pass it for you.”
Then I found out there was a connection, actually, and the connection is civil rights. Because when you think about it, both the right to basically own your own neurology and own your own brain and be able to determine what is and is not done to it, is an extremely important right. That’s what I see as the primal motivating factor in neurodiversity. People need to be almost given some leeway and trusted to make their own decisions about how their brain is wired, and not be coerced into “cures” or something that they don’t want. I think if somebody is a certain way, and they don’t like it, they should be allowed to change it. But if they’re fine with it, and they find that there are things about it that they like, or things about it that are kind of neutral but they’re attached to that they know they don’t want to lose, then they should be allowed to keep it.
When it comes to life extension, how that ties in is that, just as I don’t think people should be coerced into altering their brains in ways they don’t like, I don’t think people should be coerced into dying, basically. I think that it’s a morphological freedom issue, it’s an issue that nobody, not a society, not a culture, and not a kind of a political leader should be allowed to tell you, “You have to die now” or “You have to die by this age.”
Happiness in a Complex Universe
MICHAEL: Say a great variety of enhancement techniques become available. And say there are what some people might call, like, “higher” branches. Like for example, improving your intellect, improving your ability to interact with others, things like that. And then there are “lower” things, like wanting to get big muscles so you can beat people up. We know that humans have a spectrum of different motivations, some of which are loftier than others. How do you think that we can steer things in such a way that the “transhumanist revolution” or the “incremental transhumanist century” ends up in a better end state, rather than a more like superficial one?
ANNE: As all these new technologies start coming about and people become more able to change various aspects of themselves, maybe change their intellect, or their levels of empathy, or things like that, as was suggested, what if people just want really big muscles so they can beat people up? I would say that’s something we’ll have to deal with.
I don’t think that there is really going to be much of a way to stop people from getting the enhancement, or to do that. But, we already do that. People already take steroids and things like that for ostensibly things like dominance battles, so we already have that problem in society.
Society itself has some issues. It’s almost like it’s got this dysfunctional childhood it needs to work through. And part of that is realizing which motivations are based in sort of unhealthy, primate energies that got taken along for the ride that we really don’t need anymore. I don’t think just because something is natural or because it evolved, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good.
There are some things that evolved that are wonderful, and that we want to keep obviously, I mean, like we’ve got things like consciousness and intellect and the ability to create beauty. Those are all wonderful things, and we didn’t make those things.
We can make them different and, according to some people’s perspectives, better in some ways. But there are other things that we just need to get rid of – things that make people very fearful and overly focused on competition, wanting to be able to beat up anybody who comes their way and things like that. Or the motivations that cause people to band together and bully people that are different. I think that those all need to just go.
I’m not sure exactly how, though. I think that’s the root of the question: “How does that happen?” There is I think is a convergent social evolution that needs to occur alongside with technological and biological evolution. As this technology increases, there are going to be temptations along the way, I think for a lot of people to use them in ways that are based in these unhealthy primate-type, “I’m better than you” dominance-hierarchy things. Or, you know, “I’m terrified, so I’m going to make myself as big and mean as possible,” There might even be things like people might say, “I don’t want to feel guilt. I want to get ahead in my corporation, so I’m going to, uh, give myself, just a touch of sociopathy.” You don’t want things like that.
MICHAEL: I like that. “A touch of sociopathy”.
ANNE: I think a lot of CEOs have it anyway.
MICHAEL: I think that’s why some of them are successful.
Anne, what makes you think that indefinite life extension is possible?
ANNE: I don’t see it as violating any known laws of physics, but I think that’s getting a little bit ahead. I think for now, we have to start with what we have. And what we have are these biological bodies. I don’t know how long we can make them last in good health, but I think it’s definitely worth a try. There is definitely a precedent for it in that it’s already been shown that there are ways to affect lifespan and there are ways to live differently that can positively impact the length of your life, the quality of your life, and your overall health. But obviously we need something more if we want to take it further.
I mean, technology isn’t static. As these people are getting older, science is going to be creating more and better means to clean up that accumulated damage, also, I would imagine, to compensate for errors or weaknesses in the previous generation of treatments. So what you get eventually is somebody who is in better shape in their 500th year than when they were 50, because we’re that much better at fixing things that go wrong in the body and things that cause damage over time.
MICHAEL: Another unscripted question: A popular technology among transhumanists that sets them apart from non-transhumanists is that of cryonics. Why do you personally think that someone can die — die — and then be brought back to life? How is that possible?
ANNE: Speaking of cryonics now, this is a popular topic of discussion in transhumanist circles. It’s probably one of the most popular. It was probably one of the earliest, too. I think it was one of the things they started talking about, probably in the 70′s, and probably even before that. It’s been kind of an idea. In terms of what I think of it, I do think that it’s a viable thing. I think it has great potential.
I don’t see anything scientifically infeasible about the idea of slowing down cellular and neural activity to the point of almost basic stoppage. I don’t think we can get them to absolute zero, but there already have been animals put into the suspended animation that have been brought back after a few hours. They’ve already found that there’s certain medical techniques that you can do to cool a person, and you have a longer window of time in which to operate on them.
If there’s a way to do this in sort of a portable fashion, I can imagine something like the military being very interested in that. Because then if somebody was wounded severely on a battlefield, you could increase your time in which you could get them to safety. You could just suspend them or something like that.
I think that is going to be needed, first to get more data on cryonics. Because when it’s a case of, “Okay, we need to suspend this person, or they will die,” that’s going to force the experiment to happen. Then, you know, we’ll be able to find out what the viability of that person is once they’re thawed out.
MICHAEL: You’ve talked about neurodiversity in the context of different human variations. What specific types of neurodiversity do you think may be introduced through advanced genetic manipulation or cybernetic implants?
ANNE: I have indeed talked about neurodiversity. As the ability for people to modify themselves becomes more prevalent and easier, we’re going to have an increase in diversity, not a decrease in it. One of the reasons I think it’s important to acknowledge presently existing forms of diversity and help try to make a more flexible society to help accommodate different kinds of people, is because if you don’t, you end up losing out on a lot of potential sources for imagination, for creativity, and for intelligence and things like that.
In terms of the specific types of neurodiversity that may come about through these new technologies, I think that a good place to start would be to look at subcultures and see which subcultures exist already now. People get really into what their thing is, whether it’s art or music or even furry fandom. They want to become this thing.
For example, say if you really want to be a good musician. And say there was an implant you could get, or a gene splice or pharmaceutical that would improve your musical ability, or perhaps increase your ability to learn a new instrument or sing. If you took that modification, and then it worked in some way, not only would it work in a that way, but the thing is when you think about these things, it’s not just like your set of abilities is this grid in which you just get to pop out pieces like Legos and say, “Okay, I’m going to put a blue one here instead of a green one, and the whole structure will be the same.”
Changing one thing changes the whole structure, in a sense, because you get a different kind of emergent set or of parameters coming out of that. So what you may do is you may increase your musical ability in some way, but you’ll find that it affects the way you listen to things, it will affect the way you maybe hear people, or which sounds you hear, or which sounds you don’t hear. That can be kind of an all-encompassing thing in your life, and you’ll start thinking differently without really even realizing it.
I think that society has no choice but to become more flexible in that context. Otherwise, I don’t think people will stand for it.
I read a study recently that talked about a gene that I think they could insert or change in mice to make them see a wider spectrum of colors or be able to distinguish between a greater number of colors. Now, okay, maybe you’re an artist. Maybe you want to do that so you can improve your art, or your ability like that, but that will also change the way you see when you’re walking around all the time. What if changing that gene also has other effects, too? Then it ends up changing the way you think, your preferences, what you want to do, what you notice, what you don’t notice. I definitely see a huge potential there.
MICHAEL: There’s too many qualifications that would be necessary — like many people are afraid of furries.
You’re fairly new to the transhumanist group, if you even want to call it a group. What was your initial impression of people who call themselves transhumanists?
ANNE: When I first encountered transhumanism, or the group of people who call themselves transhumanists, my first thought was almost literally, “Wow, I’ve found my people!” There were certain things I’ve always basically been interested in, at least back into childhood. Things like life extension. Originally it was time travel, and then I figured it would be better just to not be dead. Then you could get to the future that way. Anyway, things biotech, robotics, and artificial intelligence. And I was like, “Wow, here’s this great word I can use — transhumanism — it’s like a search engine tool almost. If I look up this, I can find people who are interested in these things that I’m also interested in. And that’s great.” So that was my first impression.
MICHAEL: What do you think about the potential growth rates of transhumanism as a movement or people that call themselves transhumanists? How do you see them possibly affecting things on a larger scale than they were previously?
ANNE: I think what’s more likely to happen is that things will sort of drift into the mainstream almost without people knowing it. I don’t think it’s likely that we’re going to have a majority of the population ever, who says, “Hey, I’m a transhumanist.” The kinds of people I think will be drawn to this area of subject matter are people who see goodness in the world and who see potential, who see things like science and technology as a means to better the world instead of being afraid of it.
