The idea behind Drew Magary’s great new book is simple: aging, as it turns out, is caused by one gene. Shut that gene off and you stop aging; accidents and disease are still a problem, but you’ve cured death by natural causes. Now compound that discovery with the fact that any person who gets the Cure simply stops aging. People don’t become younger, they just don’t get older, frozen at their “Cure age.” What happens next?

In an effort to find out, Magary takes us through the life of John Farrell, a New York lawyer who gets the Cure for aging at the age of 29 in the year 2019. From that point on, things go rather poorly for John and the rest of humanity. As one might expect, curing aging doesn’t cure social ills, over-population, ennui, or a host of other human hangups. Mark Frauenfelder has an excellent synopsis of the book over at boingboing.net, and I share his opinions about the book’s bleak tone and high quality.

Magary’s argument through the text is essentially this: death creates meaning. Not mortality, but guaranteed natural death due to aging. The idea that no matter what you do, how you live your life, the concept that you will be born, mature, grow old, and die creates human meaning. Magary has a point: from the riddle of the Sphinx to Tyler Durden to the final books of Harry Potter, aging and death seem to be at the epicenter of human thought. I don’t deny him that at any moment any one of us could meet a tragic end. Life is precious in part because it is not meant to last.

But here is where I struggle. The Postmortal is not about a post-mortal society, it is about a post-aging society. Lots and lots and lots of people die in Magary’s vision. In fact, he seems to argue that in the absence of death, people will not only seek death but will create circumstances that create death and thereby, create meaning. It is only when Farrell’s life is most in peril that he finds purpose in existence. But Farrell is never immortal, no one is. So my question is: is the process of aging as meaningful as the condition of being mortal?

This question vexed me, because I know a great many people who have aged with grace. They wear wizened white beards or crinkled smiles that highlight eyes behind inch-thick spectacles. Some people are just awesome at being old. They have custom canes and smoke ivory pipes and say saucy things that only they can get away with. To reference Harry Potter again, Voldemort, Mr.Flees-From-Death himself, is contrasted with Albus Dumbledore and Minerva McGonagall, both of whom are walking idealizations of what the aging process should look like.

But that’s just it, isn’t it? They are idealizations.

Reality presents a grimmer picture. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and a laundry list of other late-onset diseases savage the body just enough that modern medicine can step in to keep the heart beating and the organs limping along while the mind deteriorates to the point of nothingness. Aging in the modern era is about slow unstoppable loss – of hearing, of memory, of mobility, of continence, of dignity. What part of that process creates meaning in our lives? Or is it that to get the benefits of death, we must past through the fires of desperate and futile attempts to prevent it?

Magary’s vision is encapsulated by a character who appears at the end of the book. She is a prostitute who wants to die. She had her age frozen at 18 and, as a result, is seen as a perpetual teen mentally. That is, her additional decades on the planet have done nothing to shape her perspective, beyond making her more cynical. And so it is with everyone else on post-Cure Earth. In Magary’s mind, the stop of physical aging is the stop of maturation.

In this sense, I suspect Magary’s indictment is not of those like Aubrey de Grey who seek the end of aging, but of those who resist maturation. Magary’s values are essentially conservative. It isn’t until the main character is about to die that he realizes what matters: namely, his son (out of wedlock), getting married, and protecting an unborn life. Life in the post-aging world is plagued by those who devalue marriage, childbearing, and religion. Yup, even the secular “Church of Man” is shown to be the “right” answer by the end of the novel. While I don’t deny that these are all valuable pursuits (substituting religion for the broader philosophy of the examined life) I do deny that they would be annihilated by agelessness.

Human beings do not settle down because they age anymore than people have quarter-life or midlife or three-quarter life crises because they age. People are content or discontent based on the life they are currently living. I find it fascinating that Dumbledore and Ms. McGonagall are both single as they approach the sunset of life. Both are examples of doing precisely what Magary critiques, pursuing one’s passions while putting commitment and reproduction on hold. As it so happens, one can live a life of value to humanity, one can, in fact, contribute to the greater good, without maturing and aging as he prescribes. Only if Dumbledore and McGonagall didn’t have to age, one could argue they could have become master magicians and raised a family, had they so chosen. Why aging creates more options in Magary’s mind, I’m not quite sure.

Death, I don’t deny, creates meaning. Finitude and limits give us something against which to define our existence. But my meaning is not created by the knowledge that I will die at the ripe old age of 98 but simply by the knowledge that I will die. Maybe I’ll get lucky and live to be 500 only to be obliterated during an alien invasion. Or maybe I have a tumor right now and will be gone before this time next year. I don’t know. But knowing when we will die, be it young or old, has never been what created meaning. And gray hairs and crows feet have never been the cause of wisdom, merely the first signs of the very high cost of living long enough to acquire it.

Personally, I like the idea of having 100 years of wisdom and experience in the youthful body of a 29 year old. But maybe I’m not old enough to know better yet.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Progress is not guaranteed. Be it moral, technological, scientific, or social, there is no reason to assume human civilization marches forever forward in step with time. Understood this way, we can realize that progress is a choice and something we as a species will to happen through the concatenation of our decisions.

Or we can fail to choose, fail to act, and yet, that failure is itself a choice and an action from which consequences follow. There is a reason From Chance to Choice is one of the most essential texts on the bioethics of enhancement – it implies that our continued evolution will hinge upon our decision as to whether or not we want the ability to choose our evolutionary path. We must choose to have a choice.

To be specific, our current generation faces the very real possibility of being asked to decide if human enhancement via technological augmentation and genetic engineering is something we want to pursue. A question already moving beyond the abstract realm of bioethics and making its way into popular culture. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (hereafter DX:HR), prequel to the cyberpunk video game masterpiece Deus Ex, asks the player to take part in answering that question.

DX:HR is that rare video game that offers genuine choice. Some great games, like Mass Effect and Bioshock, allow (or famously disallow) certain choices that, in turn, reflect on the player’s moral compass. DX:HR gives the player the chance to fully explore his or her philosophy and guiding ethic regarding human enhancement and cybernetic augmentation. Choices in DX:HR don’t just ask, are you good or evil, but what do you believe?

Often, what makes a great piece of art is not the message it delivers, but the questions it demands we ask of ourselves. DX:HR, is not a great piece of art, but it aspires to be one. And in some places, it comes damn close by asking us: As humanity moves forward, what do we leave behind?

What follows is not a review but an exegesis of DX:HR and the trials of the main character, Adam Jensen. From behind his switch-blade sunglasses, we see that the future of the human race and of enhancement is not a yes or no question. Instead, we’re forced to face the bleak possibility that there is no right answer and no one to blame.

*Spoilers* from here on out.

The plot of DX:HR can be summarized thusly: Adam Jensen, chief of security for Sarif Industries, a major augmentations manufacturer, is all-but-killed in an attack on one of Sarif’s warehouse. In the attack, Sarif’s chief scientist, Megan Reed, is kidnapped, along with other researchers. Jensen is saved at the cost of his becoming heavily augmented; he is a cybernetic Lazarus. He pursues Dr. Reed’s kidnappers at the behest of the head of Sarif Industries, David Sarif. Jensen quickly uncovers a conspiracy theory with ties to an Illuminati shadow government attempting to use Dr. Reed and her breakthroughs in human augmentation for subliminal social control. As he progresses, Jensen encounters rogue military units, enhancement critics and protestors, and a host of regular people just trying to survive in an augmented world.

Astoundingly, the plot blames no one for this technology’s misuse beyond the Illuminati themselves. The technology gets to remain neutral. Even corporations are given even-handed treatment. More important, when you reach the end of the game, there is no single “end.” There is a selection among endings among which you must choose. In weighing this decision, the-player-as-Jensen is confronted with five avatars who represent the ethics of transhumanism. DX:HR leans heavily on Greek myth, as did the original, so I leverage that here to set these characters in context.

1. Hugh Darrow, inventor of augmentation. Darrow’s right leg is damaged and he must walk with a cane, as his own innovation is rejected by his body, so he cannot be augmented. Darrow views himself like Daedalus watching his creation, augmented humanity, fall like Icarus downward in a flaming spiral after flying to close to the sun. He is the paradox of the innovative status quo. Only the present can create the future, but to let the future flourish, the present must allow itself to become the past.
2. David Sarif, mass producer of augmentations and champion of transhumanism. Sarif recognizes that progress has costs, often calculated in human lives, but argues the utilitarian benefits for future generations far outweigh the harm current generations or certain individuals will suffer. For Sarif, no one person, no set of myopic morals, can stand in the way of where humanity must go. Sarif is Prometheus, a Titan and a thief, stealing augmented fire for humanity.
3. William Taggart, leader of the anti-augmentation movement, Humanity Front. That Taggart shares his last name with an Objectivist hero is curious enough, but his arguments against augmentation come out of a desire for the very thing one might presume transhumanism is trying to achieve: a human future. Taggart is a champion of natural law, a representative of the gods. Humans are limited not out of oppression but protection – to exceed is not evolution, but extinction.
4. Eliza, a self-aware AI construct half-ECHELON, half-spin doctor, that crafts media output into a single subtle message. She tells the public what its opinion is. She is Mercury, Athena, and the Oracle in one – offering information, wisdom, and prophecy. And though her countenance is Apollonian, her option for the world is Dionysian: release the brakes and drop the reigns.
5. Adam Jensen himself. Jensen dreams of himself as Icarus. As the player, one chooses to save those who are merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, or to exercise your newfound power with extreme prejudice. At no point does Jensen betray an opinion about his augmentations that is not in sync with a decision made by the player, including basic dialog response selections.  Jensen forces the player, forces you, to confront your own transhumanist leanings – your own opinions expressed through the choices you make as Jensen will unsettle you.

From these five we develop a rounded picture of enhancement. For Darrow, it is a breakthrough that will leave many deserving people behind. For Sarif, it is a liberating force, a technology that unbridles humanity. For Taggart, it is a gift of dragon’s teeth that glosses over real problems in the name of technophilia. For Jensen, it is for me, but maybe not for thee. For Eliza, it is the technology that brings not the final order of civilization, but must be unleashed into the dark materials of chaos to rebuild the world – perhaps only by destroying the forces controlling it can augmentation and enhancement really liberate humanity.

At the end of the game, Eliza tells Jensen, “This isn’t the end of the world, but you can see it from here.” The player-as-Jensen finds oneself at the proverbial and literal end of the world in a bunker in Antarctica with a choice posed by Eliza: which human future is best? Eliza is in the place to offer this choice because of her ability to control opinion and information. What you decide through Jensen will happen at the touch of a button. Suddenly human progress is not an uncontrollable force hurtling along under the power of its own momentum. Standing at a nexus of history, one can choose to apply pressure to nudge civilization in one of four directions. No direction is backwards, but each its own version of forward. All horrifying.

There are four options:

1. Expose the conspiracy, but cripple progress towards human enhancement;
2. Promote enhancement without reservation, removing the checks of watchdog groups;
3. Hide the conspiracy, but support watchdog groups and slow enhancement progress to a crawl;
4. Annihilate the tools of control and take yourself out of the equation. Choose not to choose.

None of these is the “right answer.” You have already beaten the game when this choice arises. And therein lies the glory of DX:HR. There is no happy ending. The game serves as a warning and a rejoinder: the future is coming, but it is built not by servos and fiber optics, but by the decisions of people. As such, the future will arrive broken and corrupt, beleaguered with the venom and stench of those who seek power at the cost of their fellow humans. Good will persist, yet it will be required, as always, to strive and struggle to be seen and heard. But still humanity moves, ever forward.

Thus, DX:HR can be distilled to this single question: Having ruled out utopia, what is the least worst option for our human future?

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Guessing at which technologies will come to fruition requires the ability to determine how many intermediate technologies can reasonably be attained in a given amount of time. From there, one can extrapolate and make educated suppositions about when one could reasonably expect something like a life-like prosthetic arm would be possible.

Rosellini explained his process with DX:HR:

My job at Microtransponder in large part is writing near-term science fiction.  I do this by combining all the failure modes from science, business, law etc…and then designing a research strategy to mitigate these risks and get new technologies into patients.  With Deus Ex, I was given the task of explaining in a rigorous all of the player abilities in the game.  To do this, I extrapolated where technologies would be moving in the next 20 years (to 2027, the start of the game).  Most implantable neuroprosthetics take 10 years to get to market, so essentially I was forced to make 1 extra jump to foreseeable technologies.

So what are the background technologies that support this research? Are there any scary government projects with weird code names like MK-ULTRA and project ARTICHOKE that may give us some insight into where neuro-implants might be heading? You bet there are. Read on to learn about just how soon we can hope for retinal displays, neuro-integrated prosthetics, and mind-computer interfaces.

Q: Will, please tell me a little about your current experience, expertise, and the research you’ve been doing.

A: I have six advanced degrees spanning business, law, and science. Before I began these academic pursuits, I was a professional baseball pitcher in the Arizona Diamondbacks system.   After retiring from baseball, I became fascinated with shrinking electronic devices to integrate into the nervous system and help patients with damaged nervous systems. To excel in this field of translational neurotechnology, I obtained the relevant business, accounting, and legal background to develop technology and raise capital for preclinical and clinical studies. While pursuing these deal-making skills, I sought the ability to evaluate the technical feasibility of neuroprosthetic systems. In particular, my degrees are an MBA, MS of Accounting, a JD, a Master’s of Computational Biology, a Master’s of Neuroscience, and a Master’s of Regulatory Science. I am in the final phases of a PhD in Neuroscience. My PhD work is focused on evaluating the safety and efficacy of a novel form of neurostimulation, called voltage-controlled capacitive discharge (VCCD), invented by Dr. Larry Cauller.

My company, Microtransponder, Inc. has been researching the therapeutic benefits of pairing Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) with a variety of rehabilitation tasks to treat several neurological disorders such as tinnitus, post stroke motor rehabilitation, phantom limb pain (PLP), and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  We have developed a method to generate long lasting and spatially restricted changes to neural circuits using paired VNS.  As of July 2011, MicroTransponder has implanted 5 patients in a proof of concept Tinnitus clinical trial in Belgium and the results have been encouraging and will be discussed later in this document.  We have received several NIH grants for the animal research based on the robust nature of the scientific data.  Our researcher Dr. Engineer recently published a paper in Nature, regarding the paired VNS therapy and its ability to reverse the tinnitus precept in rats (Engineer et al., 2011).  Our VNS pairing method was reviewed in the April 2011 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine regarding the potential of our paired VNS therapy to treat a variety of neurological disorders.  Our preclinical and clinical studies suggest that  targeted plasticity using paired VNS therapy would be useful in many neurological disorders such as stoke, tinnitus and phantom limb pain in which plasticity is maladaptive.

Q: How did that impact your work on Deus Ex: Human Revolution?

A: I contacted the CEO of Eidos back in 2008 and explained that I was a big fan of the game and wanted to contribute however I could.  My job at Microtransponder in large part is writing near-term science fiction.  I do this by combining all the failure modes from science, business, law etc…and then designing a research strategy to mitigate these risks and get new technologies into patients.  With Deus Ex, I was given the task of explaining in a rigorous all of the player abilities in the game.  To do this, I extrapolated where technologies would be moving in the next 20 years (to 2027, the start of the game).  Most implantable neuroprosthetics take 10 years to get to market, so essentially I was forced to make 1 extra jump to foreseeable technologies.

Q: There are several technologies in the game that rely on direct connections to a person’s nervous system. If you were to make a conservative estimate, how many years away is technology like retinal displays, neuro-integrated prosthetics, and mind-computer interfaces?

A: In the 1870s, Richard Caton, a British physiologist, began a series of experiments intended to measure the electrical output of the brains of living animals. He surgically exposed the brains of rabbits, dogs, and monkeys, and then used wires to connect their brains to an instrument that measured current. “The electrical currents of the gray matter appear to have a relation to its function,” he wrote in 1875, noting that different actions — chewing, blinking, or just looking at food — were each accompanied by electrical activity. This was the first evidence that the brain’s functions could be tapped into directly, without having to be expressed in sounds, gestures, or any of the other usual ways.

Since then we have seen the wide scale adoption of cardiac pacemaker (electricity into the heart), cochlear implants (electricity into the cochlea), spinal cord stimulators (electricity into the spinal cord), deep brain stimulation and a host of other nerves are targets for activation using a battery, wire and electrode.

In a direct fashion to the game, DOD research arm, DARPA has been working on direct peripheral and cortical neural interfaces for mechanical augmentations since 2003 in the DARPA Revolutionizing Prosthetics program.

Q: The writers of Deus Ex: Human Revolution are trying to tell a story, so sticking to science may have been difficult in places. Where do you feel you took the most creative license?

A: I think there was a nice balance between science and science fiction.  We took some license on invisibility cloaks and the anti-gravity implementations.  However, I still spent some researching this and there is some evidence that this field will be viable at some point in our lifetime.

http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118723&org=ENG

Q: There is a good chance that augmentations will be created by large corporations, how do you think that will impact the development of useful medical prosthetics and artificial organs?

A: This is already the case, with over 1M “augmentations” in place.  Our Vice-President Dick Cheney was a cyborg (he had a cardiac neurostimulation device).  More interesting will be the propensity to abuse the technology, which is the case with any advanced technology.  Checkout this article detailing the underground world of neuroenhancing drugs: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/27/090427fa_fact_talbot

The argument for implantable neuroprosthesis having the potential for abuse is not ripe yet.  This is in part due to the state of the technology.  As of now, no implantable is able to return all function back to the diseased nervous system.   The government has the greatest potential to abuse the technology.  It is now widely known that fear memories can be erased with animals.  Some of that work has been done in our lab for the treatment of PTSD in soldiers (we did this in rats).

However, Project MK-ULTRA or MKULTRA is a government project that started in 1948 and studies mind control through chemical interrogation and neurostimulation.  The project was first run by Sidney Gottlieb, Frank Olson and William Sargant. Although MK-ULTRA is most recognized with the LSD testing in the 1950′s and 1960′s, they have been involved with many other experiments in mind control related testing.  MK-ULTRA has tested interrogation through fear of deadly animals and Subproject 54, which through “perfect concussion” tried to erase the memories of U.S. submarine crew.  Some of the most secret projects in U.S. history all took place under MK-ULTRA, such as Projects Paperclip, Chatter, Bluebird and Artichoke.  The usage of electric shock to the brain for the creation of amnesia with hypnosis was discussed by an ARTICHOKE document dated 3 December 1951: “[Deleted] is reported to be an authority on electric shock. He is a psychiatrist of considerable note. [Deleted] explained that electric shock might be of considerable interest to the ‘Artichoke’ type of work. He stated that the standard electric-shock machine (Reiter) could be used. He stated that using this machine with convulsive treatment, he could guarantee amnesia for certain periods of time, and particularly he could guarantee amnesia for any knowledge of use of the convulsive shock. He stated that the lower setting of the machine produced a different type of shock. When this lower current type of shock was applied without convulsion, it had the effect of making a man talk. He said that this type of shock produced in the individual excruciating pain.  He stated that there would be no question that the individual would bequite willing to give information if threatened with the use of this machine. It was [Deleted]‘s opinion that an individual could gradually be reduced through the use of electro-shock treatment to the vegetable level”(P. 44).

Q: What augmentation do you think has the most potential to benefit humanity?

A: I believe our targeted plasticity using vagus nerve stimulation might be the single greatest innovation to benefit patients coming out of the labs in the next 10 years.  The idea that we can harness the brain’s natural plasticity and redirect to reverse disease states is a big idea that can really help patients.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

This is the third of a series of posts about the evolution of consciousness. In the first post, I laid out a basic theory that goes something like this: consciousness began to evolve about 350 million years ago, when we emerged from the water on to land. Why? By enabling vision to work over distances many times greater than in water, this move gave us the ability to perceive multiple futures.  As a result, the ability to consciously plan ahead became important.  In my last post, I detailed why long distance vision reigns supreme when it comes to planning (as opposed to other long distance senses such as hearing or sense of smell).

In this post, I want to make the argument more comprehensive. The crucial environmental condition for evolving neural structures to support planning is that there is an interlude— space to breathe— between perception and action. Without such a gap, only simple, fast, and direct transformations between sensory input and motor output can keep an organism safe from predators. But the long-range sensing abilities discussed in the last two posts are just one category of possibilities for such a gap to open: there are other fancy brain abilities unrelated to sensing that can also open this gap.

Here, I consider two such capabilities: memory and communication. An animal can plan to do something based on memory (“I remember good breakfast was always in this direction”), communication (“hey buddy, around the corner is a good place for lunch”), and, as discussed already, perception (“I see something tasty looking over there”). Let’s go through planning via memory and communication, and compare these to the perceptual route. Combined, the three different mechanisms are the very grist of the mill of consciousness-as-planning.

Remembrance of possible futures. If you have an accurate mental map of a space containing memorized landmarks, then you can devise multiple plans without sensing and execute them by going from landmark to landmark, where those landmarks are spaced no further apart than your sensing range (which could now be very short, and even work through touch). For example, imagine the landmarks are bushes of berries, and they are spaced apart a distance equal to or less than the range of the sensory system you are using to perceive the bushes. You’ve visited these bushes so often, you’ve memorized each bush’s position with respect to the others. (Such maps exist in all animal brains where they’ve been looked for. Their neural basis is under intensive investigation. Fairly elaborate ones have even been found in honey bees.)

Now, before you make your first move, you devise a plan for harvesting efficiently: 1) You know that you will be out until dusk, and you want to be able to see your home before it gets too dark, so you decide to start with the furthest bush and end with the bush closest to home; 2) You typically remove all the berries from a bush before moving on, so it’s important not to waste time in revisiting bushes you’ve already picked. So you devise a trajectory through the bushes that has no overlaps. Both aspects of this strategy can be provided by remembering a bush’s position. In fact, birds and bees use strategies of harvesting from plants that avoid revisits, and need to use memory for this.

Communication of possible futures. Bees have fantastic navigational systems that let them roam hundreds of meters from their hive to find a food source and describe its location to their nestmates back home. They use their relatively coarse visual system to obtain a local cue (optic flow) that lets them detect how far they’ve gone, and they sense direction using their ability to sense the angle of polarized light. They come back, and then communicate distance and direction to nest mates via their dance language. This means the hive mind has an extended sensory range and can collectively explore multiple places to find food. The same is true for humans, with their symbol systems. We can go over the hill, come back and tell our friends that there’s an ice cream stand beyond where we can see.  (Our ability to review this ice cream stand on Yelp, thereby enabling anyone in the world to find it on Google Maps, increases humanity’s possible futures exponentially to the point of creating a new phenomenon of choice anxiety.  But that’s another post entirely…)

Both memory and communication, then, can extend our perceptual capabilities, and thereby give us the room for multiple possible futures. One of the core parts of the idea I’ve been discussing here about how/why consciousness emerged in animals is that the neural basis for planning would have really been pushed once we had long range vision (after we came up on land). Could the ability to plan have come about because of improved memory or communication abilities, rather than long distance sensing?  While possible, this seems unlikely. Here’s why.

A problem for both memory-based and communication-based planning is that they depend on the goal being relatively stable in spatial position. For example, you can plan to go hunting in a place where tend to be are lots of antelopes, but to kill a particular antelope, you can’t hunt purely on the basis of memory—unless it happens to be paralyzed or dead, which is generally not the case.   Similarly, bees would not do so well to come home to their nest and communicate the position of a source of nectar if that source of nectar happened to be a very strange plant—a plansect, if you will—that had wings and was constantly moving around.

The point is clear: for stationary food sources or goals, both memory and communication work well in support of planning. But for unpredictable food sources, like the very nutrient rich body of another moving animal, memory and communication can get you part of the way (“antelope over the next hill!”) but can’t close the deal. Planning different possible paths to the most nutritious sources of energy requires long-distance perception.

Perception of possible futures. I therefore hypothesize that the biggest payoffs to our early land-based ancestors came from advances in long-range perception combined with small buffer of working memory to hold some different possible futures being considered. This combination lets you hunt a moving animal that may be devious and require rapid contemplation of multiple possible approaches to capture.

If this logic is correct, then consciousness may only come about in a world where animals developed a taste for eating other animals. Interestingly, experts in the evolution of the nervous system have suggested that it was only after animals started preying upon one another that diffuse neural nets (similar to those in sponges and jelly fish) condensed into what we now know as the brain over 500 million years ago (e.g., Northcutt and Gans’ “New Head Hypothesis” from the early 1980s). However, by my argument, carnivory alone would not have been sufficient for the birth of full-fledged awareness: you and your prey need to move onto land, where you can see it from a distance and envision several ways of successfully capturing it.  Once weighing these various options becomes useful, evolution can work its powerful ways in slowly accreting the necessary neural structures for thinking about these futures.

Image courtesy of GeoKansas.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

In the film, we see over and over that it is not Caesar’s enhancement that causes problems. In fact, Caesar’s enhancement makes him the most moral and wisest person on the screen. The failure of those around him – from the cruel ape sanctuary caretakers to Caesar’s own father figure, Will Rodman – drive him to do what must be done: rebel.

So what am I saying here? That humans are bad and apes are good? Not at all. My argument is that in many science fiction films, we tend to question the ethics of the science itself and the ethics of pursuing that science. That is, there is a difference between saying “should science try to do X?” and “how can we study X in an ethical manner?” In the case of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, James Franco noted that someone might claim that “This is a Frankenstein story, or that you’re playing God.” But that mindset questions the pursuit of science in general, not how one can pursue a hypothesis ethically. It is how we experiment and what we do with the scientific results that matter. In the case of Caesar, humanity utterly fails to care for the mind that enhancement has created. Dana Stevens at Slate aptly described the film as “an animal-rights manifesto disguised as a prison-break movie.” And as with most prison-break movies, we’re on the side of the prisoners, not the warden, for a reason.

I argue that Caesar’s enhancement and that Caesar himself are ethical, but that the treatment of Caesar by every non-ape in the film (save Charles) is unethical and based on fear, arrogance, willful ignorance, and naiveté. Yes, that means that not only are the obvious villains in the wrong, but so are the other humans in Caesar’s life.

Word of warning: spoilers below.

To address my claim, we must first investigate whether or not enhancement itself harmed Caesar’s ability to be ethical. In the film, Caesar has a happy and inquisitive disposition. He likes exploring, solving puzzles, playing chess, and reading. Fast-forward to the revolution. Caesar directs his troops through the city, but not with the intent to cause mayhem and destruction and with express direction not to slaughter or maim. On multiple occasions, Caesar prevents wanton killing and only against Jacobs, the film’s ethically-bankrupt capitalist, does Caesar authorize death. Caesar’s goal is freedom, not revenge. So we are presented with a person, Caesar, who becomes more moral as his intelligence increases and his enhancement takes hold. He opposes killing and his primary goal for himself and his fellow apes is escape, not conquest. One struggles to make the case that a person who is unjustly imprisoned and abused does not have a right to seek liberation. I think we can make the case that Caesar’s behavior can be deemed ethical and, within the context of his treatment in the film, reasonable.

But how can this be? What sort of treatment would render Caesar’s rebellion justifiable?

Where to start? There are some obvious villains. Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo) is the Big Pharma CEO who pushes for accelerated drug testing and the sacrifice of the chimps all in the name of profits. Jacobs is crafted to be hated. He knows that ALZ-112 might cure Alzheimer’s, but his need for return on investment leads him to kill the program. Only when there is evidence of intelligence increasing properties of the drug does Jacobs come around and reauthorize testing. I must admit, I was shocked by the idea that intelligence enhancing drugs equaled a paycheck in the mind of Jacobs, given the potential resistance to such a technology. But I digress. The point is that Jacobs is ultimately arrogant and uncaring about the animals upon the backs of which he makes his living, but he does little to impact Caesar’s life.

So is it the caretakers at the ape sanctuary? Brian Cox and Tom Felton are cruel and stupid, no doubt. That they have the backing of a faceless uncaring government bureaucracy does little to shock me. Somewhere in the world, there is an ape sanctuary that looks far too much like the one in this film. For every ape in the sanctuary, including Caesar, the caretakers are the second villains in their lives: the first are the original people who were raising each ape. In Caesar’s case, these men are not the instigators of the problem, but the catalyst for Caesar’s final rejection of humanity. The caretakers grind salt into the wound, but they did not make the first cut.

So who did first wound Caesar? I would argue that the main antagonist is not the cruel “caretakers” in the ape sanctuary, nor is it the Big Pharma CEO Steven Jacobs. Instead, I believe that James Franco’s character, Will Rodman, is ultimately responsible for forcing Caesar to rebel. Will Rodman is a mad scientist with a heart of gold. He makes a series of decisions no proper scientist would or should ever make: he brings a chimp that has been experimented on home and he tests his experimental drug on his father. This behavior is not that of a lucid person trying to do right, but of a lunatic lurching wildly towards love through every barrier that ethics and logic might erect. Will Rodman’s decision to test ALZ-112 on his father, Charles (Lithgow), is an almost unbelievable transgression. Yes, Will’s action comes from a place of love and concern for his father, but his recklessness only provides momentary relief from the horrors of Alzheimer’s before the drug fails and Charles experiences a brutal regression on par with that of his obvious namesake, Charlie, in Flowers for Algernon.

For Caesar, Will’s inability to pursue science ethically has the most horrible consequences. Of all the people in the film, Will should have known better than to provide a nurturing and loving environment limited enough to ensure Caesar’s intelligence is insufficiently stimulated, his knowledge of human norms and society stunted, and that any mistake will result in his improper imprisoning with fellow apes. Will also fails to recognize the incredible degree Caesar’s intelligence and, as a result, treats Caesar as an animal, not as a person with an IQ beyond that of most humans. At one point, Freida Pinto’s character, primatologist Caroline Aranha, says “You are trying to control things that are not meant to be controlled.” She is talking about Will’s attempts to cure Alzheimer’s and developing a drug to improve and fix the brain. Caroline is worried about trying to control nature. However, the fact that Will believes Caesar needs a leash, even into adulthood, is a better target for her critique. One does not leash a fellow person, one explains to and reasons with a fellow person. Will should not be trying to control Caesar. Will is arrogant and willfully ignorant, Caroline is naive and fearful, both fail Caesar. Just as with Frankenstein’s monster, the failure is not with the creation but with the creator.

Both Dr. Frankenstein and Franco’s Will Rodman utterly fail to protect or properly nurture their creations. In both cases, a single act of violence is sufficient for the creator to disown and abandon the creation to fend for itself. What was Caesar’s crime? Defending an Alzheimer’s sufferer, Charles, from an angry jerk of a neighbor. But since Caesar is an animal, he has no rights or recourse. Caesar is locked away with hardly a goodbye in the equivalent of a hardcore prison after his first misunderstanding with a culture that is alien and confusing. Trapped in a frightening and brutal environment, abandoned without sufficient explanation by the only father he’d ever known, and with a mind capable of comprehending the injustices against him, Caesar’s rebellion is a logical conclusion. Exposing his fellow apes to the more aggressive Alzheimer’s/brain-repair drug ALZ-113 is the application of enhancement as a tool of liberation. Caesar’s first word, “No!” is the animal equivalent of the Declaration of Independence.

Caesar and his ape rebellion do not rampage or seek revenge. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not simply a story about how apes came to be intelligent. That’s only half of the story. The other half is the failure of humans, the failure of those closest to the apes, to recognize the new brilliant minds that had been created and to care for those new persons. Intelligent persons have a right to freedom and self-determination. Enhancement enables liberty. Simply being the result of an experimental new treatment does not take away one’s personhood or right to justice. If that justice and freedom is not provided, it must be taken. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a film that strives to show the humanity in our closest evolutionary cousins and the resulting tragedy of our inhumanity towards them.

For more on Rise of the Planet of the Apes, check out my interviews with James Franco, Andy Serkis, and director Rupert Wyatt.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Promotional Images via Rise of the Planet of the Apes Trailer

Rise of the Planet of the Apes caught me off guard. I went into the film thinking it would be another anti-enhancement, “All scientists are Frankenstein’s trying to cheat nature” film. I have rarely been so happy to be wrong. Instead, the film treats the viewer to an entertaining exploration of animal rights, what it means to be human, and what’s at stake when it comes to enhancing our minds.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is told from the perspective of Caesar (Andy Serkis), a chimp who is exposed to an anti-Alzheimer’s drug, ALZ-112, in the womb. ALZ-112 causes Caesar’s already healthy brain to develop more rapidly than either a chimp or human counterpart. Due to a series of implausible but not unbelievable events, Caesar is raised by Will Rodman (James Franco), the scientist developing ALZ-112. Rodman is in part driven the desire to cure his father, Charles, (played masterfully by John Lithgow) who suffers from Alzheimer’s. As Caesar develops, his place in Will’s home becomes uncertain and his loyalty to humanity is called into question. After being mistreated, abandoned, and abused, Caesar uses his enhanced intelligence as a tool of self-defense and liberation for himself and his fellow apes.

That cognitive enhancement is a way of seeking liberty is a critical theme that gives Rise of the Apes a nuance and depth I was not anticipating. Though the apes are at times frightening, they are never monstrous or mindless. Though they are at time’s violent, they are never barbaric. Caesar and his comrades are oppressed and imprisoned – enhancement is a means to freedom. There is less Frankenstein and more Flowers for Algernon in the film than the trailer lets on. It’s an action film with a brain.

As Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not out yet, I’m reluctant to do a full analysis of the implications of the film’s plot. That will have to come after August 5th, when the movie releases.

I had a chance to interview Andy Serkis, James Franco, and director Rupert Wyatt. The interviews are posted after the jump, where you can see how James Franco was caught off guard by my questions about cognitive enhancement, Rupert Wyatt explores the way in which the apes mirror humanity, and Andy Serkis describes enhancement as a tool of liberation. It’s good stuff, enjoy.

These interviews are edited, but I will say I am mighty impressed by the thought and honesty all three put into there answers. If Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the beginning of a new series, I for one am excited by the potential for complexity and exploration of humanity and enhancement in the coming films.

Captain America is not a serious scientific film. Nearly every piece of technology is furious hand-waving. Vibranium? Vita-rays? Rocket-powered propellers? The cosmic cube? Awesome, yes, but not real. These, however, are narrative tools, not attempts at hard scientific prediction and therefore not something to be critiqued. What the comic-book-tech of Captain America allows for is an exploration of the ethics of enhancement. Here, more than perhaps any other fictional film I’ve seen, Captain America displays striking balance and nuance – it gets enhancement right.

Based on your knowledge of the film and/or comics, this post may contain *spoilers*, so consider yourself warned. And if you’re looking for review of why it’s a fun movie, A.O. Scott in the NYT captures my sentiments about the film perfectly: pulpy Nazi-punching goodness. Now, on to enhancement!

There are three major factors that make the enhancement of Steve Rogers and his crimson domed antithesis, the Red Skull, unique among comic book lore. The first is that Steve Rogers was deliberately enhanced by someone. There is no accident, no crisis-as-catalyst-and-crucible event, no mystic charm, and no superhuman heritage to explain or justify Rogers’ becoming superhuman. Rogers is superhuman because Dr. Abraham Erskine develops a superhuman serum for that express purpose. Here, the science of enhancement is itself portrayed in a positive light. In what seems like every other superhero origin story, powers are acquired through scientific hubris. Be it the unintended consequences of splitting the atom, tinkering with genetics, or trying to access some heretofore unknown dimension, comic book heroes invariably arise by accident. The super serum, the vita-rays, and the outcome of the experiment on Rogers are all a scientific success. They happen precisely the way every person in the room hopes they will. Dr. Erskine is not a madman but a humble, ethical, and brilliant scientist trying to make better people. As such, he looks for the best in the humans he hopes to enhance. In short, Steve Rogers might be the only major superhero who is the result of scientific experimentation going to plan.

Second, Steve Rogers deliberately chooses to become enhanced. I had expressed my doubts about Rogers’ consent being genuine, but the film makes his determination and clarity of thought evident. Unlike many heroes, who seem to acquire their powers out of recklessness around science (Banner, Parker, Richards, I’m looking at you), Rogers very consciously decides to go through with Dr. Erskine’s procedure. He, in fact, might be one of the only heroes who ever knew he was going to be come a hero before his transformative event. That foreknowledge is critical for demonstrating that enhancement isn’t something that is only desired by egomaniacs. Rogers seeks strength and speed to defend and protect others. His body did not match how he saw his true self. Again, we see an anti-science motif of comic books turned on its head. Normally, those who seek superpowers are unworthy because they believe they deserve to be better than others, thus, the experiments go wrong. This attitude is embodied in the Red Skull, whose evil quite literally boils to the surface when he injects the super serum. However, Rogers’ reasoning is that others deserve to be protected and defended. Altruism, not egoism, is the driving force behind Rogers’ desire to become enhanced.

Third, and most important, is that enhancement in the film is not merely “functional” enhancement. That is, Rogers is not just stronger and faster. In a private moment, Dr. Erskine explains to Rogers that the serum and vita-rays affect “everything that is inside. Good becomes great. Bad becomes worse.” Erskine is not talking about physical traits here. Rogers’ “bad” traits (i.e. his laundry list of medical issues) are not aggravated by the serum, but cured. The good/bad that becomes great/worse are moral qualities and capacities of the person. Captain America is literally super-moral. His already above-average sense of moral clarity and determination to do what is right becomes amplified in the same way that the lust for power and pleasure from slaughter are magnified in the Red Skull.

Moral enhancement, a fairly recent talking point among thinkers in the bioethics community, is handled deftly in Captain America. Enhancements do not change who we are or from where we come, but serve to empower and improve traits which we already possess. For Steve Rogers, those traits are what we wish for most in our heroes: beneficence, altruism, and humility. Note, among his list of valued traits are not unwavering loyalty to national authority (despite his irritating flag fetish) or deference to some commanding power. Instead, Rogers’ own judgment causes him to defy orders at almost every turn. Why? Because Captain America’s sense of ethics is itself enhanced. He is a better human being because of Dr. Erskine’s process.

I haven’t seen a movie that was this pro-science and pro-human goodness in a long time. I may not have seen a movie that was this pro-enhancement ever. Did I mention it also involves Nazi-punching?

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Promotional Image of Captain America via Marvel.com

The future is impossible to predict. But that’s not going to stop people from trying. We can at least pretend to know where it is we want humanity to go. We hope that laws we craft, the technologies we invent, our social habits and our ways of thinking are small forces that, when combined over time, move our species towards a better existence. The question is, How will we know if we are making progress?

As a movement philosophy, transhumanism and its proponents argue for a future of ageless bodies, transcendent experiences, and extraordinary minds. Not everyone supports every aspect of transhumanism, but you’d be amazed at how neatly current political struggles and technological progress point toward a transhuman future. Transhumanism isn’t just about cybernetics and robot bodies. Social and political progress must accompany the technological and biological advances for transhumanism to become a reality.

But how will we able to tell when the pieces finally do fall into place? I’ve been trying to answer that question ever since Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution was asked a while back by his readers: What are the exact conditions for counting “transhumanism” as having been attained? In an attempt to answer, I responded with what I saw as the three key indicators:

1. Medical modifications that permanently alter or replace a function of the human body become prolific.
2. Our social understanding of aging loses the “virtue of necessity” aspect and society begins to treat aging as a disease.
3. Rights discourse would shift from who we include among humans (i.e. should homosexual have marriage rights?) to a system flexible enough to easily bring in sentient non-humans.

As I groped through the intellectual dark for these three points, it became clear that the precise technology and how it worked was unimportant. Instead, we need to figure out how technology may change our lives and our ways of living. Unlike the infamous jetpack, which defined the failed futurama of the 20th century, the 21st needs broader progress markers. Here are seven things to look for in the coming centuries that will let us know if transhumanism is here.

When we think of the future, we think of technology. But too often, we think of really pointless technology – flying cars or self-tying sneakers or ray guns. Those things won’t change the way life happens. Not the way the washing machine or the cell phone changed the way life happens. Those are real inventions. It is in that spirit that I considered indicators of transhumanism. What matters is how a technology changes our definition of a “normal” human. Think of it this way: any one of these indicators has been fulfilled when at least a few of the people you interact with on any given day utilize the technology. With that mindset, I propose the following seven changes as indicators that transhumanism has been attained.

1. Prosthetics are Preferred: The arrival of prosthetics and implants for organs and limbs that are as good as or better than the original. A fairly accurate test for the quality of prosthetics would be voluntary amputations. Those who use prosthetics would compete with or surpass non-amputees in physical performances and athletic competitions. Included in this indicator are cochlear, optic implants, bionic limbs and artificial organs that are within species typical functioning and readily available. A key social indicator will be that terminology around being “disabled”and “handicapped” would become anachronous. If you ever find yourself seriously considering having your birth-given hand lopped off and replaced with a cybernetic one, you can tick off this box on your transhuman checklist.

2. Better Brains: There are three ways we could improve our cognition. In order of likelihood of being used in the near future they are: cognitive enhancing drugs, genetic engineering, or neuro-implants/ prosthetic cyberbrains. When the average person wakes up, brews a pot of coffee and pops an over-the-counter stimulant as or more powerful than modafinil, go ahead and count this condition achieved. Genetic engineering and cyberbrains will be improvements in degree and function, but not in purpose. Any one of these becoming commonplace would indicate that we no longer cling to the bias that going beyond the intelligence dished out by the genetic and environmental lottery is “cheating.”

3. Artificial Assistance: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR) integrated into personal, everyday behaviors. In the same way Google search and Wikipedia changed the way we research and remember, AI and AR could alter the way we think and interact. Daedalus in Deus Ex and Jarvis in Iron Man are great examples of Turing-quality (indistinguishable from human intelligence) AI that interact with the main character as both side kicks and secondary minds. Think of it this way: you walk into a cocktail party. Your cyberbrain’s AI assist analyzes every face in the room and determines those most socially relevant to you. Using AR projected onto your optic implants, the AI highlights each person in your line of sight and, as you approach, provides a dossier of their main interests and personality type. Now apply this level of information access to anything else. Whether it’s grilling a steak or performing a heart transplant, AI assist with AR overlay will radically improve human functioning. When it is expected that most people will have an AI advisor at their side analyzing the situation and providing instructions through their implants, go ahead and count humanity another step closer to being transhuman.

4. Amazing Average Age: The ultimate objective of health care is that people live the longest, healthiest lives possible. Whether that happens due to nanotechnology or genetic engineering or synthetic organs is irrelevant. What matters is that eventually people will age more slowly, be healthier for a larger portion of their lives, and will be living beyond the age of 120. Our social understanding of aging will lose the “virtue of necessity” aspect and society will treat aging as a disease to be mitigated and managed. When the average expected life span exceeds 120, the conditions for transhuman longevity will have arrived.

5. Responsible Reproduction: Having children will be framed almost exclusively in the light of responsibility. Human reproduction is, at the moment, not generally worthy of the term “procreation.” Procreation implies planned creation and conscientious rearing of a new human life. As it stands, anyone with the necessary biological equipment can accidentally spawn a whelp and, save for extreme physical neglect, is free to all but abandon it to develop in an arbitrary and developmentally damaging fashion. Children – human beings as a whole – deserve better. Responsible reproduction will involve, first and foremost, better birth control for men and women. Abortions will be reserved for the rare accidental pregnancy and/or those that threaten the life of the mother. Those who do choose to reproduce will do so via assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) ensuring pregnancy is quite deliberate. Furthermore, genetic modification, health screening, and, eventually synthetic wombs will enable the child with the best possibility of a good life to be born. Parental licensing may be part of the process; a liberalization of adoption and surrogate pregnancy laws certainly will be. When global births stabilize at replacement rates, ARTs are the preferred method of conception, and responsible child rearing is more highly valued than biological parenthood, we will be procreating as transhumans.

6. My Body, My Choice: Legalization and regulation will be based on somatic rights. Substances that are ingested – cogno enhancers, recreational drugs, steroids, nanotech – become both one’s right and responsibility. Actions such as abortion, assisted suicide, voluntary amputation, gender reassignment, surrogate pregnancy, body modification, legal unions among adults of any number, and consenting sexual practices would be protected under law. One’s genetic make-up, neurological composition, prosthetic augmentation, and other cybernetic modifications will be limited only by technology and one’s own discretion. Transhumanism cannot happen without a legal structure that allows individuals to control their own bodies. When bodily freedom is as protected and sanctified as free speech, transhumanism will be free to develop.

7. Persons, not People: Rights discourse will shift to personhood instead of common humanity. I have argued we’re already beginning to see a social shift towards this mentality. Using a scaled system based on traits like sentience, empathy, self-awareness, tool use, problem solving, social behaviors, language use, and abstract reasoning, animals (including humans) will be granted rights based on varying degrees of personhood. Personhood based rights will protect against Gattaca scenarios while ensuring the rights of new forms of intelligence, be they alien, artificial, or animal, are protected. When African grey parrots, gorillas, and dolphins have the same rights as a human toddler, a transhuman friendly rights system will be in place.

Individually, each of these conditions are necessary but not sufficient for transhumanism to have been attained. Only as a whole are they sufficient for transhumanism to have been achieved. I make no claims as to how or when any or all of these conditions will be attained. If forced to guess, I would say all seven conditions will be attained over the course of the next two centuries, with conditions (3) and (4) being the furthest from attainment.

Transhumanism is a long way from being attained. However, with these seven conditions in mind, we can at least determine if we are moving towards or away from a transhuman future.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Image of psychedelic human eye by Kate Whitley via dullhunk on Flickr Creative Commons.

Science fiction has a problem: everyone looks the same. I know there are a few series that have aliens that look unimaginably different from human beings. But those are the exception, not the rule. Most major sci-fi series – Star Wars, Babylon 5, Mass Effect, Star Trek, Farscape, Stargate – have alien species that are hominid.

Consider the above image. Of the twenty visible species, only five are visibly not hominid. That’s right, I count the prawn, xenomorph, predator, Cthulhu and A.L.F. as being hominid. I grant that it’s a bit of a stretch. A more conservative evaluation would be that only two of the twenty are truly hominid. The others, which we’ll call pseudo-hominids, still share the following with humans: bipedal locomotion; bilateral symmetry; a morphology of head, trunk, two arms, and two legs; upright posture; and forward-facing, stereoscopic eyes. I grant they don’t look precisely human, but the similarities are too striking to be swept into the nearest black hole.

Even the most strident supporter of parallel evolution would laugh in the face of anyone who claimed that the most intelligent species on nearly every planet in the universe just happened to evolve the exact same physiology. In series like Star Trek and Mass Effect, where interspecies relationships are possible, this cross-species compatibility is made even more preposterous. We all suspend our scientific disbelief to enjoy the story and the characters. No one believes for a second that the first species we meet in the cosmos is going to look just like us save for some pointy ears and a bowl haircut.

But what if many species in the universe do look like humans? How in Carl Sagan’s cosmos could we explain parallel evolution of that magnitude? Star Trek: The Next Generation, manages to give a scientifically plausible answer to the question of hominid and biologically compatible alien species in an episode entitled “The Chase.” Which lead me to develop the Hominid Panspermia Theory of Science Fiction Aliens.

My guess is that the writers of ST:TNG didn’t intend to plug a genre-spanning plot hole in “The Chase” given that it is, on its own, a pretty goofy episode. But, intentional or not, they gave me enough fuel to come up with a theory that would explain away a lot of sci-fi alien species similarity without resorting to a “that’s just how it is” answer. That said, I’m going to ignore the plot and jump right to the meaty conclusion. At the end of a string of clues, the crew of the Enterprise, along with a begrudging team of Klingons, Cardassians, and Romulans, activate a message from a past species. Star Trek lore is mixed as to what the nature of this species actually is, so I’m going to leverage some creative license and summarize it as I see fit. In short, an ancient hominid species sends a message to all future hominid species. That message is as follows:

Intelligent life evolved in the universe – once. The First Intelligent Species became spacefaring but, unlike the adventures depicted in most science fiction, they found an uninhabited universe. Non-intelligent species were too rudimentary or too far away to be detected. Thus, as both a memorial to themselves and to enliven the universe, the First Intelligent Species seeded the necessary DNA for the eventual evolution of intelligent life in the primordial oceans of every planet that could support life. The First Intelligent Species did not only design the DNA to evolve intelligently, but to parallel their own evolution. An application of the idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” on the scale of life itself. Our corner of the universe thereby became the home of Vulcans, Romulans, Cardassians, Humans, Betazoids, and other hominid species which are all decedents of the First Intelligent Species. Therefore, in the eyes of the universe, the many hominid species are closely related despite their disparate home planets.

The Hominid Panspermia Theory, as I call it, explains a lot. Why are most hominid species variations only cosmetic and cultural? Because their genetics are designed to prevent significant deviation from the First Intelligent Species’ mold. How can species interbreed? They share a distant ancestor the way lions and tigers do. How are there so many species at nearly the same level of technological development? Life was seeded on many planets at approximately the same time. These nagging, infuriating questions that take me out of the story can be set aside because I have a plausible scientific explanation. The Hominid Panspermia Theory also titillates my need to believe we are neither the only nor the first intelligent species in the universe.

The Hominid Panspermia Theory also helps explain how there are so many bizarre life-forms throughout the universe without invoking near-deity races like the Q. One could argue that in the time that it took the seeded planets to evolve spacefaring hominid species, many other forms of life, intelligent and otherwise, evolved as well. The result is a near-universe that is largely populated by hominid alien species and a far-universe populated by inconceivably strange alien species. Furthermore, unintentional forward-contamination from the First Intelligent Species would have allowed unguided panspermia to trigger life in unexpected and unanticipated ways. Thus, many alien first contacts with Humanity were with hominid aliens. As exploration continued outward from the seeded galaxies, stranger and more truly alien species were encountered.

Finally, the Hominid Panspermia Theory still requires abiogenesis at some point and allows for multiple occurrences. That is, human beings could theoretically be the First Intelligent Species. Or among some of the only life in the universe. You don’t have to presume humanity is the product of some previous species to believe the Hominid Panspermia Theory is a scientific possibility, nor does Hominid Panspermia Theory fall prey to the “well who seeded the seeders?” reductio.

I apply the Hominid Panspermia Theory theory to pretty much every sci-fi series I encounter that involves multiple alien species that are hominid. For series in which the species are distinctly hominid but not mammalian, such as Mass Effect, I just modify the theory so that the First Intelligent Species was arbitrarily dumping seed genetic code into every splash of primordial soup they could find with no intent to reproduce themselves and/or that their explorations recklessly forward-contaminated the universe. Life with a very similar genetic base still gets scattered about, but less planning leads to much less parallel evolution.

Thanks to the Hominid Panspermia Theory of Science Fiction Aliens, my neurotic need to explain the similarity among spacefaring species is sated and I can go back to enjoying the photon blasts and spaceship explosions.

Bonus Points: Can anyone name all the aliens in the picture? I only managed fourteen out of twenty.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Image of diverse aliens via alien species wiki. Image of ancient hominid via memory alpha.

Ethics has a bizarre blind spot around parents and children. For no justifiable reason that I can discern, we deem it perfectly tolerable for a parent to decide unilaterally to raise their child genderless or under the Tiger Mother or laissez-faire method of parenting, but horror at the idea of someone “testing” one of these parental styles on a child. Recall, there is no test to become a parent, no minimum qualification or form of licensing. In fact, if you are so irresponsible as to unintentionally have a child you do not want and cannot support, you have more of a right (and obligation) to rear that child than a stranger with the means and desire to give that child a better life.

We erroneously connect the ability to reproduce with the ability to rear in our social norms and in our laws. As adoption, IVF, sperm/egg donation and surrogate mothers along with new family structures challenge the concept that the person who provides the gametes or womb is also the person who will teach the child to ride a bicycle, we need to investigate the impact of perpetuating the idea that there is a link between reproducing and rearing.

I would like to test this reproduce-rearing correlation with a thought experiment. The details of the thought experiment appear below the fold, but the conclusion is as follows: it would be ethically permissible for a scientist to adopt a large group of children and then perform specific, non-harmful, nature-vs-nurture social experiments on those children. My idea comes from an interview by Charles Q. Choi at Too Hard for Science? with Steven Pinker about just such an experiment:

There is one morally repugnant line of thought Pinker strenuously objects to that could resolve this question. “Basically, every nature-nurture debate could be settled for good if we could raise a group of children in a closed environment of our own design, they way we do with animals,” he says. . .

“The biological basis of sex differences could be tested by dressing babies identically, hiding their sex from the people they interact with, and treating them identically, or better still, dividing them into four groups — boys treated as boys, boys treated as girls, girls treated as girls, girls treated as boys,” he notes. . .

“There’s no end to the ethical horrors that could be raised by this exercise,” Pinker says.

“In the sex-difference experiment, could we emasculate the boys at different ages, including in utero, and do sham operations on the girls as a control?” Pinker asks. “In the language experiment, could we ‘sacrifice’ the children at various ages, to use the common euphemism in animal research, and dissect their brains?”

“This is a line of thought that is morally corrosive even in the contemplation, so your thought experiments can go only so far,” he says.

So let’s test the limits of Pinker’s last line. Ethics is rife with and wrought by horrific thought experiments designed to out our biases and assumptions. And I intend to use a thought experiment to expose our bias that reproductive capacity equals rearing capacity. That is, merely because you can have a kid doesn’t mean you should be allowed to decide how to raise it. Using three scenarios, I’ll prove that a team of scientists adopting a large group of children with the dual intent of raising happy and healthy children while also conducting non-surgical or invasive sociological experiments would be ethically permissible.

The immediate objection against social experimentation on children is that the children would be used as mere means, as objects upon which theories can be tested. That claim is false. Unlike Pinker, I believe you can draw a distinction between the “closed environment” and “sacrificial” kind of experimentation in which, for example, a child is killed and dissected to determine the impact of language on brain formation and social experimentation. “Sacrificial” experimentation shows no concern or respect for the child as a human being and would meet the conditions necessary to be described as being used as “mere means” as Kant intends it. But “sacrificial” experimentation is a gross and barbaric example. Pinker also cites examples of surgical genital alteration and in utero experimentation. These are unacceptable forms of experimentation on a child because, again, the child is treated as mere means and would suffer as a result of the experimentation. I argue that if and only if the experiments to not cause physical damage or severe suffering to the child and that the child is raised in a nurturing, safe, and supportive environment, then it would be acceptable to conduct nature-vs-nurture experiments on children.

To defend my case, I ask you to consider the following three scenarios. We start with the least controversial, which I call the 100 Family Scenario:

1. In a community, there are 100 couples of equal income and education level, each with one biological child. Half the families have a boy, half a girl.
2. In this community, a third of families attempt to raise their children with current gender norms (i.e. boys play in pants with trucks, girls in dresses with dolls), a third attempt to reverse their child’s gender norms (i.e. boys in dresses with dolls, girls in pants with trucks), and a third attempt to raise their children to be neutral (boys and girls wear the same outfits and play with similar toys). The children all live in nurturing, safe, and supportive households.
3. There is no coordination among the families, these numbers are statistical happenstance. Furthermore, by coincidence the families are all vigilant about journaling, recording, and filming unbiased observations and data about their children as they grow up.
4. After 20 years, a team of sociologists collects this data and, upon analysis, uses it to publish a paper about the impact of nurturing environment on gender expression and sexual preferences.

We have no outright ethical problems with this scenario. The data collection and child distribution are all happenstance. No one would find a fault in any one of the above steps. It is true that this isn’t a “closed environment” the way Pinker described, but that would also be an incredibly harsh way to raise a child, raising all sorts of concerns about tainting the data. A controlled approximation of similar life-style among many families acts as a superior variable control than a highly unnatural, closed, laboratory environment.

Now let’s combine steps three and four, in the 100 Sociologist Biological Family Scenario:

1. In a community, there are 100 couples of equal income and education level and within each couple in the community there is at least one parent who is a sociologist. Each family has one biological child. Half the families have a boy, half a girl.
2. In this community, a third of families attempt to raise their children with current gender norms (i.e. boys play in pants with trucks, girls in dresses with dolls), a third attempt to reverse their child’s gender norms (i.e. boys in dresses with dolls, girls in pants with trucks), and a third attempt to raise their children to be neutral (boys and girls wear the same outfits and play with similar toys). The children all live in nurturing, safe, and supportive households.
3. There is no coordination among the families, these numbers are statistical happenstance. The sociologist parents are all vigilant about journaling, recording, and filming unbiased observations and data about their children as they grow up.
4. After 20 years, these sociologists coordinate, collect the data and, upon analysis, use it to publish a paper about the impact of nurturing environment on gender expression and sexual preferences.

Again, there seems to be no major ethical breach in how the data was collected or how the children were raised. Having parents who are sociologists is not an ethical violation. Now consider the final scenario, which I call the 100 Sociologist Adopted Family Scenario:

1. A group of sociologists who wish to start families coordinate to conduct a 20 year study in which they will collect data about children they raise and, upon analysis, use it to publish a paper about the impact of nurturing environment on gender expression and sexual preferences.
2. The sociologists form a community, there are 100 couples of equal income and education level and within each couple in the community there is at least one parent who is a sociologist. Each family has one legally adopted child. The community coordinates to ensure that half the families adopt a boy, half a girl.
3. In this community, a third of families attempt to raise their children with current gender norms (i.e. boys play in pants with trucks, girls in dresses with dolls), a third attempt to reverse their child’s gender norms (i.e. boys in dresses with dolls, girls in pants with trucks), and a third attempt to raise their children to be neutral (boys and girls wear the same outfits and play with similar toys). The children all live in nurturing, safe, and supportive households.
4. There is coordination among the families, the divisions among the children are the result of planning and adherence to scientific standards. The sociologist parents are all vigilant about journaling, recording, and filming unbiased observations and data about their children as they grow up.
5. After 20 years, these sociologists coordinate, collect the data and, upon analysis, use it to publish a paper about the impact of nurturing environment on gender expression and sexual preferences.

My argument here is not that the final scenario is ethically permissible or impermissible, but to show there is no difference between the scenarios. The intent to study the children does not impact their quality of life, how they grow up, or whether or not a paper is published about their rearing. Though the children are a means to studying the nature-vs-nature debate, that is not the sole or primary purpose of the sociologist families adopting their respective children. The parents wish to start families and also wish to study gender norms. The parents in the first scenario have as much parental sovereignty as the parents in the last. Thus, there are no relevant ethical differences between the first and the third scenarios. We only perceive a difference because the children are adopted, which is no basis for a relevant ethical difference. Therefore, if it is morally permissible for parents to independently decide how to raise their children in regards to gender, it should be morally permissible for a team of scientists to conduct a rigorous experiment with their own adopted children on the impact of rearing on gender and sexual preferences.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Image of a happy family with a “cloned” child (thank you photoshop) by madnzany under cc license via Flickr Creative Commons

Designers of prosthetics and artificial organs have for a long time tried to replicate the human body. From the earliest peg legs to some of the most modern robotic limbs, the prosthetic we make looks like the body part that needs replacing. Lose a hand? Dean Kamen’s DEKA arm, aka the “Luke arm,” is a robotic prosthesis that will let you grasp an egg or open a beer. The Luke arm is a cutting edge piece of technology based on a backward idea – let’s replace the thing that went missing by replicating it with metal and motors. Whether it’s an artificial leg or a glass eye, prostheses often seek to reproduce not only the function of the body part, but the form and feel as well.

There are good reasons to want to reproduce form and feel along with function. The first reason is that our original bits and pieces work quite well. The human body as a whole is a natural marvel, let alone the immense complexity and dexterity of our hands, eyes, hearts, and legs. No need to reinvent the wheel, just replicate the natural model you’ve been given. The second, less obvious reason, is that we as a society have been and remain deeply uncomfortable with amputees and prosthetics. Many people don’t know what to do when faced with an artificial arm or leg. I wish it were different, but it largely isn’t. So prostheses are designed to look like whatever it is they replicate to hide the fact that the arm or leg or eye isn’t biological.

That methodology is being challenged by a few recent innovations: Össur’s now famous Cheetah blades, Kaylene Kau‘s tentacle arm, and the artificial heart with no heartbeat. These new prostheses and artificial organs are a result of approaching the problem by asking “What does this piece allow us to do?” not “How do we build an artificial one?” The implications for how humans will view themselves in the coming decades are monumental.

There are three major ways in which non-standard prosthetics and artificial organs will change the way we come to understand the human form.

Redefining Normal: The first is a continuation of a current trend already underway: a serious questioning of what a “normal” person should look like. Tattoos, piercings, plastic surgery, sub-dermal implants represent voluntary challenges to the normative standards of human appearance. As more and more soldiers return home from Iraq and Afghanistan amputees and paraplegics, the average person’s exposure to someone who needs and wears a prosthetic is far more likely. Carrie Davis, an amputee advocate and surrogate mother, runs Camp No Limits, a summer camp for children who use prostheses where they discover they are neither alone nor abnormal. Millions of people need some sort of mobility assistance, prosthetic, or artificial organ. They are our friends, family, co-workers, and customers. De-stigmatizing their condition is essential for both improving their daily quality of life and progressing as a civilization.

Nature Doesn’t Know Best: The second is a de-mystification of nature. Evolution is lazy and a cheapskate. Natural selection doesn’t ensure that the best form evolves, merely that the slightly better form is preferred. What does that mean? It mean we delude ourselves that we are the “most highly evolved species” when so many of us wear glasses and are susceptible to sinus infections, lactose intolerance and appendicitis. It also means that just because the human hand is amazing, it isn’t the end-all-be-all of grasping, touching, and manipulating. Elective amputations due to non-amputating injury are the start of the process of recognizing that we might be able to build a better grabber. However, given enough time and technological progress, voluntary amputations by otherwise healthy, uninjured individuals may become commonplace. Showing that a prosthetic can serve all the functions of a hand or foot without having the same form is a huge blow to anyone who doesn’t think the human body could have used a few more revisions on the drawing board. In the future, natural hands and legs might just not be good enough for those who have access to the best in prosthetics technology.

Artificial Aesthetics: The final change will be an aesthetic shift. Prosthetics may be designed the way the best pieces of consumer technology are today. If elective amputations ever become even remotely normal, you might find yourself in a virtual fitting room, swapping among various forearms and terminal attachments. Aimee Mullin’s famous “My 12 pairs of legs” TED speech shows the very beginnings of this trend. Because the form follows the function, there is actually more, not less, freedom for designers. Whatever attaches to your shoulder just needs to be able to open a drawer, pull on pants, type a message, and put in a contact lens. Prosthetics design could help redefine beauty. So long as it does that, the prosthetic can be neon green and see-through for all anyone cares. By focusing on function, the form is liberated.

It’s easy to say that these trends will change the way we see other people and ourselves, in particular those who are amputees. It’s hard to know how a crowd would react to a woman with a tentacle arm or how it would feel to rest your head on someone’s chest and hear not a heartbeat but a constant whir. Disorienting doesn’t even begin to cover it.

To give you an idea of where we’re heading, I’d like to end with an anecdote.

Last week I was on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan. For those of you unfamiliar with St. Mark’s Place, it’s one of the more eclectic gathering places in New York City. You’ll find NYU students, old school residents who’ve been there for decades, baffled tourists looking to buy some cheap sunglasses and an “I Heart New York” t-shirt, East Village punks, SoHo spillover, western otakus, and hipsters galore. One of the bars has a bouncer who wears a conical hat in all seriousness and I’m pretty sure one of the record-holders for most facial piercings frequents the block. If you want to see interesting people, it’s a veritable buffet. Yet, last week, one of the people who caught my attention was a blonde in her 20′s walking with a few friends. Among the crowds festooned with mohawks and jeggings, I might not have even noticed her. Just a cute girl in a t-shirt and jean shorts. All but for the fact that her right leg was, from mid-thigh to sneaker, made of metal. Her knee was a visible hinge. This was not a prosthetic designed to “look normal” and she made no effort to hide it under pants or a long skirt.

I use my language here carefully when I say I was struck by how unbelievable it was that her leg was prosthetic. Visibly, it was obviously artificial. But nothing about the way she carried her self, the way she talked to her friend as they ambled down the street, the way in which crowds ignored her and she didn’t notice them, was strange – which is what made the whole experience so odd. Among New York crowds, I expect people to gawk. But that her right leg was a prosthetic was a non-issue. People were so disinterested that I had to ensure I, myself, was seeing what I thought I saw. No one cared.

That disinterest heartened me because the idea of “nothing to see” is extremely difficult for our brains to process when we are looking at a deviation from the human form. As we are exposed to more and more prosthetics that get the job done rather than act as awkward disguises, the more our brains flex and flow around the idea of what a human looks like. The benefit is two-fold: 1) those who need prosthetics get devices that actually let them do what they need to do and 2) amputees and prosthetics are no longer hidden, but humanized and normalized. And we’re only at the very beginning. I can’t wait to see what inhuman innovations the prostheses of the next few decades will bring.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Images via Össur and Oscar Pistorius.com, PlayMeDesign, and Kaylene Kau’s Coroflot.

Instead of attempting to root out the source of that instinct and investigating whether or not voluntary active euthanasia actually violates morality, many use the blurred line created as reason enough to oppose a chosen death. Ross Douthat of the New York Times argues that Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian’s efforts to provide assistance to those suffering created a moral slippery slope:

And once we allow that such a right exists, the arguments for confining it to the dying seem arbitrary at best. We are all dying, day by day: do the terminally ill really occupy a completely different moral category from the rest? A cancer patient’s suffering isn’t necessarily more unbearable than the more indefinite agony of someone living with multiple sclerosis or quadriplegia or manic depression. And not every unbearable agony is medical: if a man losing a battle with Parkinson’s disease can claim the relief of physician-assisted suicide, then why not a devastated widower, or a parent who has lost her only child?

Note that Douthat doesn’t consider Parkinson’s a medical disease. But more to the point – Douthat’s argument is that we don’t know what degree of suffering makes the choice to die morally palatable. Degree of suffering is the wrong criterion. None but the sufferer can define it and it can never be truly communicated. What is at stake here is not only the free and informed choice of the dying, but our very understanding of what it means to “die of natural causes.”

So how do we determine that the person choosing to die is doing so of sound mind, with all the necessary information and without coercion? Thankfully Sir Terry Pratchett has a suggestion:

That is why I and others have ­suggested some kind of strictly non-­aggressive tribunal that would establish the facts of the case well before the ­assisted death takes place. This might make some people, including me, a little uneasy as it suggests the govern­ment has the power to tell you whether you can live or die. But, that said, the government cannot sidestep the ­responsibility to ensure the protection of the vulnerable and we must respect that. It grieves me that those against assisted death seem to assume, as a matter of course, that those of us who support it have not thought long and hard about this very issue. It is, in fact, at the soul and centre of my argument.

The members of the tribunal would be acting for the good of society as well as that of the applicant – horrible word – to ensure they are of sound and informed mind, firm in their purpose, suffering from a life-threatening and incurable disease and not under the ­influence of a third party. It would need wiser heads than mine, though heaven knows they should be easy enough to find, to determine how such tribunals are constituted. But I would suggest there should be a lawyer, one with ­expertise in dynastic family affairs who has become good at recognizing what somebody really means and indeed, if there is outside pressure. And a ­medical practitioner experienced in dealing with the complexities of serious long-term illnesses.

I would also suggest that all those on the tribunal are over 45, by which time they may have acquired the rare gift of wisdom, because wisdom and compassion should, in this tribunal, stand side-by-side with the law. The tribunal would also have to be a check on those seeking death for reasons that reasonable people may consider trivial or transient distress. I dare say that quite a few people have contemplated death for reasons that much later seemed to them to be quite minor. If we are to live in a world where a ­socially acceptable “early death” can be allowed, it must be allowed as a ­result of careful consideration.

Douthat attempts to build a slippery slope argument out of the variety of human experience. Pratchett embraces that diversity and attempts to build a moral mechanism for dealing with the unpleasantness that comes with dying.

But there is a second problem with death. What if I don’t want to die a natural death? What if I want to live for a long long time, say 10,000 years? Interestingly, the same people who don’t want me to die when I want to don’t want me to live longer than I am “supposed to” either. To use technology to live beyond the statistical average lifespan is to violate some other set of values of humility in the face of death or some such pap. Bioconservative authors like Leon Kass and Frances Fukuyama have repeatedly argued that mortality is part of what gives human lives value. But here comes the twist. If you get sick, we’ll pump you full of chemicals and strap you to whatever machine your health care plan will begrudgingly pay for, but don’t live beyond the average. As Douthat says above, “we’re all dying, day by day.” What are our options here?

Again, the draconian mores of “nature” rear their ugly head.

Natural death as a concept binds us in the shackles of paradox. To make choices around death seem to violate a natural law to which we’ve all unconsciously agreed. None of us know when our time will come, but don’t try die too soon, and don’t try live too long. Death, it seems, is too important a decision for us to make. Like many anti-enhancement arguments, the answer is all too familiar: the most critical choices – those that impact our basic genetic code, what type of children we have, and how we die – ought be left to chance.

Transhumanism is, in large part, an opposition to the mentality that creates the paradox of death. Death of natural causes is not good, it’s just no one’s fault. But in a world where so much death is caused deliberately, maliciously, and pointlessly, a death of natural causes can seem not just a mercy, but a blessing. Thus, we have come to cherish and value that which is but a morally neutral necessity.

When another person chooses our death against our will, that is a moral wrong.

Death by natural causes is morally acceptable because we cannot choose otherwise. But it is not morally good.

Volitionally and autonomously choosing when one dies, now there is a moral good. There is no reason the circumstances of one’s biological make-up and environment that determine one’s expiration date must be abided by. If technology can allow us to stop short in the face of years of suffering or overcome an untimely gentle passing for another 20 years, why not?

A fetishization of natural death should not hold us hostage to the quality and duration of our lives.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on facebook and twitter.

Image of patient by José Goulão via Flickr Creative Commons (Licence)

Deus Ex 3: Human Revolution is a cyberpunk video game coming out later this year. I, for one, am pretty excited. Set in the near future the game is a prequel to the original Deus Ex. For those of you who aren’t video game fanatics, the first Deus Ex is a cyberpunk conspiracy thriller that follows around a transhuman protagonist, JC Denton, as he tries to keep the world from spiraling into Armageddon. Robots, A.I., genetically modified animals, and cyborgs aplenty help and hinder him. Denton himself has several nano-augmentations that give him superhuman abilities (e.g. cloaking, super-strength). Deus Ex 3 explores the rise of general cybernetic augmentation and the corporate espionage that accompanies it. As part of the viral ad campaign you can access the website for Sarif Industries, the leading manufacturer of cybernetic prosthetics. I love the boilerplate:

No one should ever have to give up a normal life because of a random incident, or indeed, lose a dream over a physical limitation. So believes David Sarif, idealist, philanthropist, founder and CEO of Sarif Industries. Pursuing his belief, Mr. Sarif acquired a failing Detroit auto factory in 2007 and repurposed it for the automated manufacture of prosthetics.

The weirdness of the site comes from its nearness to reality. There are links for the stock price and pictures of the interior of the main headquarters. There is even an ethics statement!

A standout piece is the ad for Sarif’s products (cyber hands, eyes, and arms), which seemed like a perfect pastiche of every pharmaceutical ad I’ve seen in the past year: testimonials by attractive people in bright lighting engaging in their favorite cultural or outdoor activities, like rock climbing and football throwing (though mercifully not through a tire wing). Also interesting is the news feed which features headlines I had to research a bit to see they aren’t quite true. The “road to here” also provides a strange alt-history of augmentation and prosthetics that gives you the feeling this all might just be right around the corner. The site’s slickness and dedication to near-reality makes it an eerie predictor of what a future prosthetics company may actually look like.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on facebook and twitter.

Image via Sarif Industries

I’m back after a hiatus of a few weeks to catch up on some stuff in the lab and the waning weeks of spring quarter teaching here at Northwestern. In my last post, I put forward an idea about why consciousness– defined in a narrow way as “contemplation of plans” (after Bridgeman)–evolved, and used this idea to suggest some ways we might improve our consciousness in the future through augmentation technology.

Here’s a quick  review: Back in our watery days as fish (roughly, 350 million years ago) we were in an environment that was not friendly to sensing things far away. This is because of a hard fact about light in water, which is that our ability to see things at a far distance is drastically compromised by attenuation and scattering of light in water. A useful figure of merit is “attenuation length,” which in water is tens of meters for light, while in air it is tens of ten thousand meters. This is in perfectly clear water –add a bit of algae or other kinds of microorganisms and it goes down dramatically. Roughly speaking, vision in water is similar to driving a car in a fog. Since you’re not seeing very far out, the idea I’ve proposed goes, there is less of an advantage to planning over the space you can sense. On land, you can see a lot further out. Now, if a chance set of mutations gives you the ability to contemplate more than one possible future path through the space ahead, then that mutation is more likely to be selected for.

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll wrote a great summary of my post. Between my original post and his, many insightful questions and problems were raised by thoughtful readers.

In the interest of both responding to your comments and encouraging more insightful feedback, I’ll have a couple of further posts on this idea that will explore some of the recurring themes that have cropped up in the comments.

Today, since many commenters raised doubts about my claim that vision on land was key – raising the long distance sensory capabilities of our sense of smell, and hearing, among other points – I thought I’d start with a review of why, among biological senses, only vision (and, to a more limited degree echolocation) is capable of giving access to the detail that could be necessary to having multiple future paths to plan over. Are the other types of sensing that you’ve raised as important as sight?

Having the kind of overview needed for real-time planning of a path to a goal – at least an unpredictable, moving goal like prey – requires being able to access detail over a large amount of space relative to where you are moving in your immediate future.  I’ll show why the only types of biological sensing capable of providing this sort of broad overview to animals are sight and echolocation, and why sight is easily the more powerful of the two.

Two important factors determine one’s ability to sense from a distance: resolution (the minimum size an object or a feature can be before you can no longer distinguish it), and range (how far away an object can be detected). Given our particular terrestrial environment, sight wins out over all other types of sensing on both counts.

First, a little bit on our yardsticks. Range designates the maximum typical distances that something is sensed. Resolution is fairly intuitive these days, since many of us have had the experience of working with some image we’ve grabbed from the internet with a resolution that is too low for our needs. You can measure it in a variety of ways, such as how many pixels can be resolved or displayed in a given unit of length. The new iPhone’s “retina” display has a resolution of 300 pixels per inch, for example, and as the publicity has suggested, this is similar to the resolving power of our eyes when the display is held at typical viewing distances.

For biological senses, resolution is partially set by how densely packed the sensory receptors are. For visual systems, the packing density in the fovea (for animals that have them), at the central part of the retina, is extremely high, and the density rapidly diminishes away from the fovea.

But there is another constraint, besides how closely spaced the sensory receptors are: the wavelength of the energy you are sensing the world with. As a first approximation, you cannot resolve objects below the wavelength of the energy you are sensing with.  This is true whether you are sensing the consequence of probing the environment with that energy, as in the case of bats and their echolocation, or just passively absorbing the energy emitted by some external object, such as an object reflecting sunlight into your visual system. In the case of vision, the wavelengths are small compared to the packing density of our sensory receptors, so we don’t notice this issue. In the case of probing with sound using an artificial sense (for humans), such as ultrasound, or in the case of echolocation for bats and dolphins, the resolution limits imposed by the energy become more constraining. At 80,000 cycles per second (what some bats use, and four times higher than we can hear), resolution is about one quarter of a centimeter. Dolphins emit at somewhat higher frequencies, but because sound goes about four times faster in water than in air, they end up with a resolution of about 1 centimeter.

With that background on range and resolution, we can ask “what senses provide detailed overviews at far distances (say, at least 100 times longer than your body)?”

Let’s go through some of the biological possibilities: hearing; echolocation, also referred to as sonar (which also involves hearing, but at a much higher frequency, and includes the generation of an echolocation beam); touch; taste; smell; flow sensing (in science referred to as the “mechanosensory lateral line”); sensing of weak electric fields, called “electrosense”; active electrical sensing, called “electrolocation” (similar to normal electrosense, but like echolocation, includes not only perception of electric fields, but generation of them as well—so hearing is to echolocation what electrosense is to electrolocation); magnetosense, the ability to sense Earth’s magnetic field; vision (all types, including polarized light, and ultraviolet). For simplicity, I will consider these one at a time, although in many biological situations, multiple senses would be combined.

Passive hearing: sound can travel a long distance before it can no longer be heard. Underwater, it can travel even further. But there is a problem: hearing can tell you something out there is producing sound (like a screeching animal), but it cannot tell you anything about all the things that are not producing sounds, like the quietly resting boulders nearby the screeching animal or the ferns silently bending in the wind across the stream from said animal. This is in great contrast with vision in daylight: everything that reflects light, which is basically everything, can be seen.

As a consequence, when you hear something, you can get a sense of the direction of the object producing sound, and an estimate of distance. So you can get closer to the thing that produces the sound, but using sound alone, it’s challenging to be clever about how you get closer, since you don’t know anything about the stuff in between you and the thing generating sound (again, we are taking these senses one at a time). If you’ve ever played the Hot and Cold game as a kid, this is similar: the sound gives you enough information to tell if you’re getting hot or cold (approaching or moving away), plus some sense of distance and what kind of object is making the sound.

Active hearing (echolocation, or sonar): echolocation has many of the benefits of vision, but without requiring light. Bats and dolphins generate echolocation pulses which travel out and then return after being reflected by nearby objects. By moving the parts of their body that generate the echolocation pulse (mouth or nose), they can “scan” their environment. However, both resolution and range is significantly worse than in the case of vision, at least on land. We already went through resolution limits of echolocation. In terms of the range of echolocation, in water it is quite good – up to one hundred meters for the kinds of objects dolphins hunt for  — far better than vision in water. It’s interesting that a mammal, that may have been used to large visual ranges on land prior to going back to the ocean, came up with a style of sensing that gives you the best long distance sensing in water. Due to more rapid attenuation of high frequencies in air, bats have a shorter range – on the order a few meters for their prey.

The primary reason for the short range of echolocation systems is that their probe signal falls off with the fourth power of distance. This means that in order to double the range of an echolocation system, you need 16 times more power. Obtaining large ranges with echolocation, therefore, runs into energy consumption issues, and limits to the loudness of sounds that can be generated before damage to tissue ensues.

Touch/taste: This one is easy. While for small insects and rodents, touch appendages can reach out for a good fraction of body length, one body length is about the maximum for the length of things like whiskers and antennae before they become unwieldy. Taste sensors are on the body surface or on things like the tongue, so like touch, isn’t great for sensing at a distance.

Smell: Like passive hearing, the sense of smell can have fantastic range (sharks can smell injured prey from 5 km; male moths can find female moths at up to 10 km). But once again, it only tells you about things emitting odors. This allows you to approach them (if you are lucky with respect to environmental conditions), but you can’t use smell for a detailed overview of the space ahead. It’s fun imagining what would be needed in order to have smell work this way. Every object would need to be emitting a distinct odor, and downstream, these odors would have to stay relatively separated. Then, by scanning your nose through the odor array, you might be able to obtain an “olfactograph” of the space ahead!

Flow sensing: Fish and some other aquatic animals possess special sense organs for detecting flows due to the movement of other animals. This can guide predatory strikes. Seals have been demonstrated to be able to follow flows made by fish after some time has elapsed. In general, however, flow sensing is very “near field”, operating on the range of a body length or two at most.

Passive electrosense. Because all animals in water generate a weak bioelectric field, the ability to detect these fields evolved very early in the history of animals. They are found, for example, in the most ancient vertebrate that still exists, the lamprey (so old it doesn’t even have a jaw). Many other aquatic animals have them as well, such as sharks. The detection of external bioelectric fields occurs at very near range, about a body length or two.

Active electrosense (electrolocation). In active electrical sensing (also called electrolocation), an animal detects how its environment is modulating a self-generated weak electric field. In my doctoral work, I showed that it is effective at less than a body length for prey-like objects, and perhaps a few body lengths for larger objects. Like echolocation, the fall off of active electrosense is with the fourth power of distance, so it rapidly becomes prohibitive to sense at a distance.

Magnetic field sensing: Certain animals have been shown to detect the direction of Earth’s magnetic field. This is very useful for navigation. It should be clear, however, that it will not, in any circumstance, provide a detailed overview of the space ahead.

Vision: Given our relatively transparent environment, illuminated for at least a portion of the day with loads of light from the sun (about a thousand watts of light per square meter on a clear day at noon, a typical “radiant flux density” at the surface of Earth), vision reigns king as a system for imaging. It’s true that some land environments are dense enough to make vision nearly as short as it is in water – but in places like tidal flats, savannah, and prairie, being able to see far ahead pays big dividends.

Because of the high velocity of the electromagnetic radiation vision uses, the resolution limit for visible light is much, much smaller than our ability to perceive, because the distance between our sensory organs for light is quite large compared to the wavelength of light (for example 500 billionths of a meter is one of the wavelengths we see with). As a consequence, as the distance between receptors of the eye has decreased, and our optical abilities along with it, we are able to resolve a sixtieth of one degree with our visual systems. That means we can see a rabbit at a bit over half a mile, an astonishing capability compared to how far out our water-based ancestors could sense.

In contrast, as my original post mentioned, because of the “attenuation length” of light in water, the distance at which 63% of the light from an object is absorbed by the water, is on the order of tens of meters in perfectly clear water. So light from the sun has to go down into water, thereby losing 63% of its intensity after tens of meters – and then reflect off an object, and get to your eye, again losing 63% of its intensity in some tens of meters. In costal waters or anywhere the water is a bit cloudy with phytoplankton or algae, attenuation length is ten times less – going down to meters. No matter what you do with your sensors and optics, this is going to result in significantly diminishing returns to see things further away.

On land, the attenuation length for light in air is on the order of 100 km. This is similar to the attenuation length of sound in water, which is why dolphins and whales do so well with echolocation underwater (but still, for dolphins only on the order of 100 meters for prey-sized objects).

That finishes our survey of what senses are good for quickly accessing points in a big amount of space. To sum up: to sense something means you need to detect energy emanating from the object. Some things, like sounds or odors emitted by animals or environmental phenomena, are sparsely distributed (not every point in your surroundings is emitting the energy), and this feature enables us to find the croaking frog or cracking branch.

But, in such situations, because our ability to sense these objects depends to some extent on the surrounding objects NOT emitting any such energy, it is not possible to get a detailed point by point sensation of a large amount of space. In contrast, with vision, echolocation, and active electrosense, energy is delivered to all objects of interest. So, you can sense them, whether or not they emit any kind of energy on their own. As such, only these senses (and similar ones) have the capacity to provide detailed point-by-point overviews. Of these, vision on land is by far the most powerful, in part just because there is an intense amount of energy being delivered by our Sun for at least a portion of the day, and easily delivered by artificial means otherwise; and in part, because the short wavelength means that vision systems can perceive with unparalleled acuity.

In the next post, I’ll explore the connection between having a big amount of space at hand, and planning to an unpredictable, moving goal, like another animal you’re hoping to dine on. I’ll argue that such planning requires you to have a big chunk of space at the beck and call of your sensory system, relative to the space you’re about to move into.

Image by Malcolm A. MacIver

Correction: In the original post I stated “Dolphins emit at somewhat higher frequencies, but because light goes about four times faster in water than in air, they end up with a resolution of about 1 centimeter.” Thanks to @Kees for pointing out my mistake – I meant that sound goes four times faster in water.

Cybernetic brains might make that possible. As computing power and storage continue to plod along their 18-month doubling cycle, there is no reason to believe we won’t at least have cybernetic sub-brains within the coming century. We already offload a tremendous amount of information and communication to our computers and smartphones. Why not make the process more integrated? Of course, what I’m engaging in right now is rampant speculation. But a neuro-computer interface is a possibility. More than that: cyber-brains may be necessary.

The idea of a cyber-brain is pretty simple. Our brains are all-in-one systems that store, process, organize, and collect data. A cybernetic brain would augment one, many, or all parts of that system.  The processing and organization part, not to mention analysis and synthesis, would require something resembling artificial intelligence. People would probably be wary to jack themselves into an A.I. helper brain. So, based on current trends and my rudimentary knowledge of computer progress, my guess is that cybernetic collection, storage, and retrieval of information will be the easiest pieces to integrate into our biological brains: a neural external hard drive. We’ve externalized the storage process for ages – the written word, anyone? But what if we could internalize it again?

That’s what cyber-brains could allow. Ever since we started writing things down, we’ve been trying to make it faster and easier to write, to read what others write, and to remember what we read. A cyber-brain takes the externalization potential of computers (massive amounts of stable and inexpensive data storage with rapid and accurate recall) and removes the lag time. Instead of sitting at your computer or pulling out your phone, opening the file, and taking in the contents, the information is already in your cyber-sub-brain. Anything you store on your cyber-brain, from a song to a novel to the contents of Wikipedia, would be as easily and rapidly accessible as your most vivid memories currently are. Speaking of, your memories would be stored more accurately and permanently than regular ol’ neurons can allow. Almost any piece of information you might need, whether experienced or downloaded, would be at your mental fingertips.

We face a spectacular information glut. It is impossible for any one person to, say, watch every good movie on Netflix, read every informative entry on Wikipedia, and follow every worthy news story. There just isn’t enough time to absorb and process all that content. But what if I didn’t have to actually watch or play or read the item in question to grok its quality and content? Cyber-brains might allow you to, a la Neo and Trinity in The Matrix, to download huge data sets and immediately utilize them. The major advantage is that the time-cost of gathering information becomes nearly zero. Thus, the extra time is freed up for information to be analyzed, synthesized, and, more importantly, utilized.

In the coming years, we may need a form of externalized cybernetic memory to compensate for the overwhelming influx of data. The ability to take digital files and put that content within direct, immediate access of the mind would at least give the average person a fighting chance.The possible benefits are almost unimaginable. Instead of the current information crisis, where the wealth of the world’s knowledge is available at a mouse-click but there is literally not enough time to absorb it all, we would be faced with a world of ultra-informed individuals. What would that world look like?

The optimistic part of me wants to believe all of that data would become knowledge that would lead to happier relationships, more logical decisions (e.g. voting, finances), and a better world would result. The pessimistic part of me fears a world of cynics and nihilists, simultaneously overwhelmed by and indifferent to the wealth of information they possess. The world would continue as it is, just a bit more jaded by what we all know.

The realistic part of me suspects something in between. In a world of cyber-brains, everyone would have nearly the same degree of information. However, information is just information until a mind processes and understands it. Thinking would still take a lot of work, and sometimes letting someone else do the thinking for you is still easier.  ”Education” would be all practice and application. Granted, your basic intelligence would limit your processing power. Even though an infant with a cyber-brain might “know” calculus, she wouldn’t be able to understand calculus. Epistemology aside, the take away point is that a cyber-brain would eliminate the need for lectures, text-books, and rote memorization. Critical thinking and creative utilization would become the main priorities of education. Perhaps social stratification due to pure intelligence would be more noticeable, or maybe it’ll be willpower and determination that draw the lines.

My hope is that people would at least be more skeptical and the most egregious liars (coughGlennBeckcough) would have much less flexibility in spinning the facts their way. The first step towards understanding is raw data. The more people who have data, the more people will have real knowledge. What they do with that knowledge is still their prerogative. So I suspect the more things change, the more they will stay the same.

Sadly, cyber-brains are still a long, long way away. Until then, I guess we just won’t know. And I pray I don’t lose my phone. I keep a lot of the best bits of my brain in there.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on facebook and twitter.

Image of cyber-brain via Wikipedia: Ghost in the Shell

As part of a thread called “The Bias Against Short Men,” Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish published an email by a reader struggling with a difficult question:

The doctor noticed that my son was comfortably sitting at the bottom of the growth chart and that he would most likely end up a measly 5’5” (a little more than my wife and myself). He went on to say that this could qualify as “idiopathic short stature syndrom.” And that we could potentially get our son on HGH (actually, it’s called rGH I think – see here) if we felt that his projected short height could affect his self-confidence and ultimately, his mental health.

Unlike HGH in athletes, HGH used to treat medical conditions has clinically observable benefits. A child given HGH treatments will have an appreciable difference in height as an adult. The reader feels inclined to give his son the treatments, while the reader’s wife is appalled at the idea. When is it alright to use HGH to help your kid grow to a “normal” height? If you do “treat” a child’s shortness, does that mean it’s a disease?

Crack open any text on bioethics and I can almost guarantee that the “is shortness a disability” example will be somewhere among the pages. Shortness (and deafness, which The Dish is also exploring at the moment) sits right in the blurry space among disability, disease, and normal. How short is “too short?” Why is 5’2″ too short for a man, but not a woman? The answer is pretty much: because we think it is. Human height does fall along a bell curve, but it varies around the world and throughout history. Yet, at some point, being short goes from a relative and descriptive term (e.g. I am shorter than Yao Ming) to a normative one implying a disability.

We might think something is a disability for a few possible reasons. The first is that there is a clear physical issue that prevents events self-care. An example of this might be total-body paralysis. That person is literally unable to care for him or herself.

The second is that a person’s physical attributes allow them to care for themselves, but make it difficult to exist in a society set up for people abled in a different way. A good example of this is that those in wheelchairs are perfectly able to do everything a non-wheelchair bound person can do, it’s just that most things are designed with those who walk in mind. Arthur C. Clark’s Childhood’s End has a race of intelligent aliens that are winged. As a result their buildings have doors wherever they are convenient – as it so happens, ground level is rarely convenient. Stairs are unnecessary. Thus, a person who would be normal among human buildings is utterly disabled and helpless among the world of Clark’s winged aliens. Because most people are enabled in one way, those enabled in another become disabled due to the way things are built and designed.

Finally, and most confusing, are social disabilities. These are disabilities that are a result of the advance of civilization. Think of it this way. Today, we’d consider illiteracy a disability. It prevents a person from learning, pursuing most careers, and significantly lowers quality of life. Imagine trying to use the internet without being able to read or write. For our prehistoric ancestors on the savanna, no one could read, yet we’d hardly describe any of them as disabled. Social or civilizational disabilities are the result of cultural demands not necessarily health related.

Shortness (and deafness) move between those last two definitions if they are considered a disability at all. It’s critical to recognize that changes in social conventions and the way we design products and facilities can actually change what is a disability. Also, technologies that enable a person to do something which he or she was previously unable to do can dissolve the category of disability.

Which brings us back to the question of the Dish reader and his son. The son is short because the reader and his wife are short – genetics 101. Neither the father nor the mother consider themselves disabled, and the son is projected to be taller than his parents. Yet being tall can confer a huge social advantage. Heterosexual women tend to prefer taller men and taller people get bigger paychecks. On the other hand, the other side of the bell curve, too tall, is not much fun either. Taller folks are often crammed into cars and plane seats designed for a general population that needs less space. Additionally, excessive growth often has associated medical issues.

On issues such as this, I tend to defer to personal liberty and the discretion of the parents. The reader is clearly not taking the choice lightly. He sees both his wife’s concern and the doctor’s suggestion to use HGH as legitimate. He is considering letting his son get a bit older, so that his son can at least make something of a choice regarding the HGH injections. The relevant question isn’t “is shortness a disability we should treat with HGH” but, “would making a child who will likely be short a bit taller improve that child’s overall quality of life?” The question is complex and unique to each child, but if investigated earnestly and carefully, I see no reason why increasing a healthy child’s height would be wrong.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on facebook and twitter.

Image of frightening vegetable holding ruler to measure height by hoyasmeg via Flickr Creative Commons

Heads up, this article has *spoilers* about the movie Hanna.

Joe Wright’s new film, Hanna, staring Saoirse Ronan is being hailed as the anti-Sucker Punch for its portrayal of a rich, rounded, and compelling female lead. Hanna is a young woman in her late teens (her age is indeterminate) who can beat you up, break your neck, and shoot you down six ways from Sunday. Why is she able to do that? Well, that right there is an interesting question. You see, Hanna was genetically engineered to have “high intelligence, muscle mass, and no pity.” But here’s the rub: she was also raised to be a trained assassin.

So who is to credit (or perhaps, to blame) for Hanna’s ability to crush faces with naught but her hands and an emotionless grimace? Is it her genes or her training?

The film ostensibly portrays Hanna as a naive heroine striving against her draconian and demonic “mother” figure, Marissa Wiegler, with the help of her noble father, Erik Heller. But I submit that is not the case: I believe the “teaching” and “nurture” Heller gives to Hanna makes him as much a monster as Wiegler. Hanna’s battle is to be a good human being against a perfect storm of nature and nurture designed to make her a heartless killer.

Hanna, on initial viewing, symbolizes the contest between genetics and environment. Or, perhaps more familiarly, nature vs nurture. Cate Blanchett is Marissa Wiegler (pronounced by Hanna in proper German as a deliciously evil “Veeglur”), who we gather from the course of the film had more than a little to do with engineering a batch of children to be super soldiers. After deciding the project was a failure/waste/danger, she shut it down and slaughtered the guinea pig children.

Eric Bana plays Hanna’s “father,” Erik Heller, the rogue agent who saved Hanna from Wiegler’s clinical cessation of the program. Heller (as we see from a flashback) it seems was in love with the surrogate mother of Hanna. Heller rightly sees Hanna as a child worth saving, not an experimental product to be disposed of at Wiegler’s leisure. To keep Hanna alive, Heller moved with her to a cabin in an endless wood “just below the arctic circle.” There, amid the caribou and evergreens, he taught her from day one to be the ultimate assassin.

Yet, if Heller sees her as human, not as a mere sum of her genetics, he does a pretty terrible job showing it. Hanna is raised in her father’s demented version of home school with a major in survival skills and violence and minors in 10+ languages and science. They live off the land, training for a confrontation about which Hanna has little knowledge. Then, when he decides the time is right, Heller presents Hanna with the option to throw a switch that will “tell Marissa Wiegler where we are.” Joseph Campbell would be proud at the simultaneous subtlety and neatness of Hanna’s vector for crossing the first threshold of the hero’s journey.

We are lead to believe that Hanna has been trained by her father to protect herself so that she cannot be killed by Wiegler. This theory, however, is not the case. The reason is that, though their life in the wild is hard, Heller and Hanna have a good life. Hanna, thanks to her genetic enhancements, is an adept learner and needs no protection in the wild. She is in excellent health, has spectacular creative and critical thinking ability, shows inventiveness, and has appreciation for the wilderness that surrounds her. The film shows us that Wiegler and the US government in general had no idea where Erik Heller was, nor did they seem to care. If Heller had really wished to save Hanna, he would have simply destroyed the tracking beacon and lived a life of happy hermitage with his prodigious adopted daughter.

But she knows nothing of music, of the arts in general, of human kindness or of the myriad aspects of humanity not comprised by Hobbesian elements. Heller never gives Hanna a choice.

Instead, Heller raises an assassin. Then, after coaxing her to set events in motion, leaves to run his own parallel mission to kill Wiegler. The film is about Heller using Hanna as a pawn in his quest of vengeance. Heller “saves” Hanna from death only to then single handedly complete the experiment Wiegler and her genetics team started. In short, Wiegler bred Hanna to be a monster, and then Heller trained her to be one.

Yet Hanna rebelled against both.

What is astounding is that in spite of Heller’s selfish and cruel rearing, Hanna is a good individual. She never harms an innocent (a Spanish dude trying to get fresh gets a scare, but nothing serious), nor does she present any level of irrational rage, maliciousness, or cruelty. When she fights, it is in an emotional vacuum and always in self-defense. Saoirse Ronan’s portrayal even gives Hanna a moment of sadness and pity for Wiegler at the end. Echoing the scene that opens the film in which she kills a deer, Hanna is sorry that the death was painful and not instant. Wiegler’s death is, like that of the deer, a necessity for Hanna’s existence.

Yet, in my mind, it was the death of Hanna’s father, Heller, that signaled her true liberation. Neither Hanna’s genetic coding nor her father’s relentless conditioning could force Hanna to be any specific kind of person. Her will, her sense of self, and of right and wrong determined who she was. She acted to protect those who helped her and was visibly sorry for those who died or were threatened at her expense.

Thus, the tragedy of Hanna is that those who had the means to shape her life, both biologically and environmentally, chose to treat her like a means to an end, not as the human being she would become. She is a transhumanist hero. I’d love to see a sequel exploring how she continues to discover the world her father did so much to hide from her.

You will spend a third of  your life asleep. If you don’t, your waking hours will be of reduced quality and productivity. For 99% of us, seven hours a night is biological necessity. For a select 1%, what Melinda Beck at the Wall Street Journal dubs the “Sleepless Elite,” less sleep equals more life. So-called short sleepers operate with a kind of low-intensity mania which allows them to go to bed late and wake up early without needing a gallon of coffee to get through the day. And, as it turns out, the ability might be genetic.

“My long-term goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate the sleep pathways without damaging our health,” says human geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California-San Francisco. “Everybody can use more waking hours, even if you just watch movies.”

Dr. Fu was part of a research team that discovered a gene variation, hDEC2, in a pair of short sleepers in 2009. They were studying extreme early birds when they when they noticed that two of their subjects, a mother and daughter, got up naturally about 4 a.m. but also went to bed past midnight.

Genetic analyses spotted one gene variation common to them both. The scientists were able to replicate the gene variation in a strain of mice and found that the mice needed less sleep than usual, too.

Dr. Fu’s research is a reason for excitement because the goal is not just to locate the gene, but to find a way to manipulate sleep pathways safely. For those of us already alive, that means there might be better, safer, more effective stimulants in the future. For those not yet born, genetic engineering may enable future generations to spend less time sawing logs and more time enjoying life. More life! Less sleep! It’s like a longevity enhancement that does nothing to extend your time alive, but instead maximizes your use of that time. But how do short sleepers use their time?

And this, my fine friends, is where the real benefits of whatever genetic magic short sleepers possess comes into focus. Our immediate instinct when we hear we can get a benefit is “what is the cost?” For example, less sleep? I bet I’ll become crazy. Or moody. Or more sleep won’t mean I’m more productive. What ever makes me more energetic will make me too addled to focus.We are programmed by experience to be skeptical of too-good-to-be-true offers. The cynical part of me is reminded of a quote from LCD (R.I.P.) Soundsystem’s jam “Pow Pow:” “But honestly, and be honest with yourself, how much time do you waste? How much time do you blow every day?”

Would we really do any more with our lives if we had more time awake? What are the lives of short sleepers like? University of Utah neurologist Christopher Jones has found common traits among short sleepers in addition to their ability to only catch a few winks:

To date, Dr. Jones says he has identified only about 20 true short sleepers, and he says they share some fascinating characteristics. Not only are their circadian rhythms different from most people, so are their moods (very upbeat) and their metabolism (they’re thinner than average, even though sleep deprivation usually raises the risk of obesity). They also seem to have a high tolerance for physical pain and psychological setbacks.

“They encounter obstacles, they just pick themselves up and try again,” Dr. Jones says.

Short sleep research is still in its early phases, but most of those studied thus far are successful, productive, happy individuals. They quite literally get more out of life. Short sleepers don’t spend a third of their time on this planet asleep. I need to get me some of that.

I’m sad to say I still need a whole pot of java after my requisite seven hours to be a normal human being. Fingers crossed for a pharmaceutical solution sometime soon.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on facebook and twitter.

Image of sleepy businessmen via Wikipedia Commons

Even today, Ball points out, societal and cultural debate is pervaded by the belief that technology is intrinsically perverting and thus carries certain penalty. Views that human cloning will be used for social engineering, eradicating one gender or resurrecting undesirable figures from the past, for example, all reflect age-old fears about the consequences of meddling in the ‘unnatural’. Ball warns that, as there is no global ban on human reproductive cloning, there is a strong chance that it will happen. It is thus likely to become a de facto reality without the well-informed debate it deserves.

Let’s unpack that little nugget, because it contains two very important points.

The first point is that many of our fears about advancing science and biotechnology related to the body trigger fundamental, core cultural fears. Leon Kass calls this the “Yuck” reaction, or, more eloquently, “Wisdom from Repugnance.” Kass’ argument is that we are naturally repelled by abhorrent ideas, like torturing babies and eating people. As regular readers of Science Not Fiction know, eating people isn’t always bad.

Well, as it turns out, Leon Kass’ argument that we should trust our gut when it says, “yuck!” is a pretty terrible way to do ethics. Why? Because what is “yuck” to me might be “yum” to you. And we’re back to not knowing if doing something ethically questionable, like cloning people, is morally permissible. Unnatural at least explains why so many people say “yuck” to modifying humans; it is a lesson we’ve been told over and over for millennia in myths and religion.

The second point is that we should be discussing these ideas like rational adults. Biotechnology is progressing at a rate and in ways that are so rapid as to be unpredictable. I make lots of educated guesses and suppositions, but none of what I write here is a prediction or a guarantee. My interest is in figuring out whether or not something like cloning is ethically permissible if we’re ever able to do it. As Ball notes, there is no current global ban on cloning. There is, as it stands, no global ban on most of the transhumanist issues, from eugenics to cognitive enhancers to A.I. to nano-implants. These possible technologies strain the very foundations of many of our philosophies and cultural institutions. If the lack of a global ban means the technology is likely inevitable, we better figure out how to go about things correctly.

Debate and discussion are essential to making good decisions. Recognizing our old, deep seated prejudices and biases, such as those against technology and making people, is equally essential. Simply because something is unnatural does not mean it is immoral. But that’s where the discussion starts, not where it ends ends.

Image of Book Cover via Bodley Head

The 50th Anniversary of the Pill was last year. Lots and lots of people mentioned how good, bad, unimportant, or essential the Pill has been. Our society changed the way it thought about sex, about reproduction, even about love and relationships. Women being able to take control of their reproductive abilities is one of the greatest advancements in the history of modern human biology. Even if it isn’t universally beloved, the Pill is worth defending and improving. It makes the world a better place. Female hormonal birth control is an exemplary form of human enhancement.

But, astonishingly, non-barrier birth control for men doesn’t yet exist. The current choices are condoms or vasectomies. That’s it. We are in want of a form of birth control that makes men temporarily and reversibly infertile. We don’t have it, we need it, and when it comes out, it’ll be as revolutionary as the Pill itself. It’s on my list of must-have forms of reproductive enhancement, along with artificial wombs.

Which brings us to the question at hand: where the hell is it already? Much like cold-fusion and flying cars, male birth control is always “just around the corner.” The “bright pill” is trying to inhibit the reproductive function of sperm. Ultrasound might be able to interrupt sperm production so that a man is temporarily sterile for six months at a time. Hormones might also be an option. If there are so many options, why don’t we have one that works? The problem seems to be the sheer number of sperm. Females ovulate once a month, meaning one, count ‘em, one egg is released. Men are, uh, different. To quote an expert:

“Men make 1,000 sperm every second,” said John Amory, a male reproductive specialist at the University of Washington, Seattle. “It’s proven to be a lot more difficult to turn that degree of production off compared to one egg a month.”

That is just way too many sperm. But pure biology doesn’t seem to capture the problem. Other problems include male willingness to take the pill, impact on libido, and other social and physiological side-effects.

Which brings up new questions about the male pill: Will men remember to take it? Will men want to take it? Will it emasculate men too much to be worth while?  Or are men just too stupid and awful to ever be able to have that kind of responsibility? Just as all of the articles recounting the impact of the Pill on our society weren’t talking about chemical compositions or dosages, the reason male birth control is important is not the science. It’s the sociology. Male non-barrier birth control has the potential to change society as much as the female birth control pill. And that’s why we need it so badly. The male pill isn’t just about safe sex and birth control, oh no. It’s about the way we think about safe sex and birth control. Once you understand, you’ll want the male birth control pill too.

Women are constantly bombarded with reminders that they can make babies. Furthermore, they are constantly reminded that it can happen accidentally. Consider this: no matter what the situation, men are only required to think about safe sex right before or as it’s happening, but never in the interim. Whether or not she’s sexually active, a woman is constantly being asked if she’s pregnant, might be pregnant, or is planning on getting pregnant. She’s getting check-ups to make sure she doesn’t have a disease, or cancer, or polyps, and is probably on or considering some form of birth control based on the possibility that she might have sex in the future. Because male birth control doesn’t exist, we don’t even think about it.

Sex as we know it has two major biological problems: disease and unintended pregnancy. For men there are approximately four ways of dealing with these issues without the need for a partner’s help: abstinence, condoms, coitus interruptus, and vasectomies. Abstinence prevents everything, including sex itself, so it’s kind of like avoiding food poisoning and gaining weight via fasting: yes it works, but it isn’t exactly practical for most of us. Coitus interruptus is pretty much the worst – precum and partial ejaculation (yes, these are things that happen) can still cause pregnancy, not to mention the incredible test of will power involved. In both cases of abstinence or coitus interruptus, things are left to a man’s will power and self-control. The problem is that in the case of abstinence, if will power breaks down, safe sex of any kind is likely the last consideration. In the case of coitus interruptus, as well as vasectomies, the concern is pregnancy, not disease. Condoms are the best option men have, as they both protect quite well against disease, prevent accidental pregnancy and still allow, you know, sex.

Women have a whole range of birth control options, including hormonal ones, for which there is no male analog: IUDs, sponges, cervical caps, the Pill, and Plan B. All of these options require planning ahead, going to the doctor, thinking about what sort of sex might happen and what to do if the birth control doesn’t work. Further, a woman is often required to think about all of these problems knowing her male partner is blissfully unaware and probably unconcerned with them. Guys just don’t have the same societal pressures or signals. Men don’t think about birth control or pregnancy as much. With a male pill, guys would be forced plan beyond just a condom in the wallet. We would have to chat with our doctor, try different methods (ultrasound or hormones?) and get regular check-ups. Birth control would finally be on our collective male minds.

Which brings us to the following point: one of the major benefits that goes ignored is that a male pill would destigmatize the female use of the pill. Currently, birth control is a single sex issue. The pill is a women’s rights issue, a “special interest group” issue, an identity politics issue, a liberal issue. Male birth control is not, because male issues are not often labeled “special interest group” issues (which is another problem and discussion all together). Women, particularly young women and teenagers, are often not just embarrassed to go on the pill, but are seen as promiscuous or easy for doing so. They are slut-shamed out of making responsible decisions. Many parents actively prohibit their daughters from going on the pill because they (falsely) believe that 1) fear of pregnancy will prevent early sex (it doesn’t) and that 2) the use of the pill will encourage their daughter to sleep around without other protections (it doesn’t).

The enormous problem here is that while girls are forced to contemplate STDs and pregnancy early, boys are largely unconcerned until they have sex for the first time. In many cases, it will be the girl who asks about a condom or says “I’m on the pill, it’s ok” or something else responsible. If the two do have sex without any protection, the girl is forced to deal with the consequences, be it Plan B, abortion, or pregnancy. A male pill would dramatically alter some consciousnesses. Both sexes would be having discussions about preventing pregnancy as well as preventing diseases in sex-ed. The burden of responsibility would be equalized early on.

Another major perceived problem is, of course, is that taking the pill will be emasculating. I emphasize “perceived” because I’ve always found this argument baffling. I don’t know why anyone thinks being responsible is emasculating. You know all those “man up” and “be a man” and “this looks like a job for a man” slogans? Well, they imply repsonsibility. A man takes care of things. Why can’t one of those things be his fertility? I don’t want to have a kid right now, so I nullify my fertility with a pill. That sounds pretty manly to me.

But the male pill isn’t just about me. I want the men around me to start taking responsibility. The male pill is something that men are going to talk about. “Are you on it?” “Feel any different?” Suddenly birth control isn’t something you think about right before or right after sex, but daily, in the locker room and at the office and every day when you take the pill. There will be ads on TV (no more footballs through the tire swing, please), your doctor will ask if you want it, and it’ll come up in entertainment. When an accidental pregnancy happens, suddenly it won’t just be “did you use a condom?” but “why weren’t you on the pill?” It’s easy to forget a condom in the heat of the moment, it’s hard to explain why you weren’t on the pill.

Now for the real kicker: once the male pill is readily available, it will normalize birth control. Even conservative parents will want their sons to have birth control pills, because conservative parents know “boys will be boys.” Male sexuality and virility is a point of pride for the Fox News father. Might as well make sure the boy doesn’t cause too much trouble while he’s sowing his wild oats, right? A guy who carries condoms around is cool, a girl who does is a slut. The double-standard effect might still exist, but if anything a guy does to show he’s having regular sex is a status symbol, then imagine the effect of the pill. A condom in the wallet says “I might get lucky tonight.” The pill says, “I have sex all the damn time.”

No matter how “emasculating” people think it might be, the male pill will be a real alternative to pulling-out and vasectomies and would give monogamous couples much more reliable birth control. Since the male pill would signal a man as virile and sexually active, it would sell like crazy. And for those with a fragile male self image, just consider the increased male responsibility, normalization of birth control and reduced accidental pregnancies as fringe benefits.

Finally, the male pill will put a real dent in abortion rates. Since the male pill will offer a non-barrier method that doesn’t rely on either will power or permanent surgery, it will help separate the “birth control” part of sex from the “disease control” part of sex. Barriers, namely male and female condoms, are awesome because they prevent disease and pregnancy. But if both people are on the pill, get tested and are monogamous, then the condom is irrelevant. If both people are on the pill and aren’t monogamous, the condom becomes protection against disease, but if the condom breaks or is forgotten, then a child of passion is still unlikely. The combined impact of increased male responsibility, birth control normalization, and male pill usage would probably reduce accidental pregnancy by an order of magnitude.

I don’t want my only birth control options to be a condom, vasectomy, or trusting her. Those aren’t enough choices. Furthermore, birth control is something men don’t think about right up until they have sex. In addition to reducing accidental pregnancy, the male pill would increase male responsibility, awareness, and understanding of birth control in general. As a result, our society’s understanding of sex, reproduction, and relationships would change again and for the better. Human enhancement is all about overcoming biology, and the male pill would be one heck of a step forward.

To say this issue is controversial is an understatement. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Comment and blog away!

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on twitter.

Update 5/24/11: The conversation continues in Part II here.

I recently gave a talk at the Directors Guild of America as part of a panel on the “Science of Cyborgs” sponsored by the Science Entertainment Exchange. It was a fun time, and our moderators, Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant from the HowStuffWorks podcast, emceed the evening with just the right measure of humor and cultural insight. In my twelve minutes, I shared a theory of how consciousness evolved. My point was that if we understand the evolutionary basis of consciousness, maybe this will help us envision new ways our consciousness might evolve further in the future. That could be fun in terms of dreaming up new stories. I also believe that part of what inhibits us from taking effective action against long-term problems—like the global environmental crisis — may be found in the evolutionary origins of our ability to be aware.

This idea is so simple that I’m surprised I’ve not yet been able to find it already in circulation.

The idea is this: back in our watery days as fish, we lived in a medium that was inherently unfriendly to seeing things very far away. The technical way this is measured is the “attenuation length’’ of light through the medium. After light travels the attenuation length through a medium, about 63% of the light is blocked. The attenuation length of light in water is on the order of tens of meters. For a beast of a meter or two in length, which moves at a rate of about a body length or two per second, that’s a pretty short horizon of time and space. In just a few seconds, you’ll reach the edge of where you were able to see. If you’re down in the depths at all, or in less clear water, you may reach the edge of your perceptual horizon in about a second.

Think about that: life is coming at you at such a rate that every second unfolds a whole new tableau of potentially deadly threats, or prey you must grab in order to survive. Given such a scenario, we need to have highly reactive nervous systems, just like we revert to when we find ourselves driving in a fog or at night along a dark and winding road. The problem is that there was no respite from this fog. It was an unalterable fact of how light moves through water, relative to our own movement abilities and size.

But then, about 350 million years ago in the Devonian Period, animals like Tiktaalik started making their first tentative forays onto land. From a perceptual point of view, it was a whole new world. You can see things, roughly speaking, 10,000 times better. So, just by the simple act of poking their eyes out of the water, our ancestors went from the mala vista of a fog to a buena vista of a clear day, where they could survey things out for quite a considerable distance.

This puts the first such members of the “buena vista sensing club” into a very interesting position, from an evolutionary perspective. Think of the first animal that gains whatever mutation it might take to disconnect sensory input from motor output (before this point, their rapid linkage was necessary because of the need for reactivity to avoid becoming lunch). At this point, they can potentially survey multiple possible futures and pick the one most likely to lead to success. For example, rather than go straight for the gazelle and risk disclosing your position too soon, you may choose to stalk slowly along a line of bushes (wary that your future dinner is also seeing 10,000 times better than its watery ancestors) until you are much closer. Here’s an illustration of the two scenarios:

On the left, we have the situation when the distance we sense is close to the distance we will move in our reaction time (our reaction time is about 1/3 of a second; from that point to when we will stop is a bit longer– like those diagrams you see of stopping distance when driving at night show). There isn’t a whole lot of space to plan over. On the right, we can fit three very different plans to get to our prey: b1-b3, among others.

So what does this have to do with consciousness?

In 1992, psychologist Bruce Bridgeman wrote that “Consciousness is the operation of the plan-executing mechanism, enabling behavior to be driven by plans rather than immediate environmental contingencies.” No theory of consciousness is likely to account for all of its varied senses, but at least in terms of consciousness-as-operation-of-the-plan-executing-mechanism, due to some very simple “facts of light,” dwelling on land may have been a necessary condition for giving us the ability to survey the contents of our mind. “Buena vista consciousness,” for lack of a better term, might have been the first kind of consciousness that selection pressures could have brought about.

Given this picture of how a certain kind of consciousness came about, what are the knobs we might twiddle, either for the love of story making, or so that our transhumanist future selves might be conscious in a different way?

Let me borrow a moral quandary from philosopher James Rachels. Maybe you’re eating a sandwich right now. There is a child, far away, who is not, and who is about to die for lack of food. Surely, if that child were beside you, you would share your sandwich. But, then, what’s keeping you from sharing that sandwich anyway? The shipping costs? That’s easily avoided – we find someone on the ground who can buy the sandwich locally. If you think through the various possibilities, the only answer you eventually come to is that the starving child is too far removed from your state of awareness to really matter to you. Likewise with any number of a host of environmental devastations that are going on at this moment.

So, what if we massively expanded the blue space in the picture above, our sensorium? I don’t mean watch video of distant places (which surely is part of the way), but use artificial retina technology to directly pipe visual images from a disconnected place directly into your brain? Say, of the rain forest that is currently being destroyed so that an industrial meat producer in Peru can provide fast food chains in our country with low cost beef? This would be disruptive technology on a big scale.

Here’s another thought experiment: Notice that there is only one being in the pictures above. Consciousness does seem to be for one being at a time. What if we reengineer things so that we see what others in our group see, or so that when you do something good, the entire group feels good, rather than just you? This kind of consciousness has been explored in science fiction (The Borg on TV),  and in art (Mathieu Brand’s Ubiq). We even know mechanisms of how something like the hive mind of bees work, such as regulation of the division of labor through various genes and hormones. Could something like this be the antidote to the endemic selfishness of Homo sapiens?

More details on the idea of buena vista consciousness can be found on pages 492-499 of this chapter I wrote in 2009.

UPDATE: A more technical paper describing how to quantify sensory and movement spaces is here.

If there is anything the internet is good for beyond cat photos (see “le sneak” above), it is for arguing. In the spirit of elevating the discourse, I’m going to try and salvage the aftermath of my designer baby post, which itself was a response to Peter Lawler’s post. In the process, I’ll explain to you exactly how social conservatives view the human enhancement debate.

A quick recap: Peter Lawler wrote a post at Big Think about Designer Babies and how they pose a threat to the middle class. I responded with a brilliant rebuttal that displayed my rapier wit and rhetorical dynamism. Now, the chaps at The New Atlantis‘ Futurisms are unhappy with how I portrayed George W. Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics and Peter Lawler in that magnificent post. Peter Lawler also “responded” to me by block-quoting the arguments of blogger Minerva, who writes her own blog. Minerva made some astute comments about the social ramifications of human enhancement and worried I was not considering them; Lawler took her points and used them as a springboard to describe me as “intolerantly judgmental.” What did I say about religion again? Let’s re-read my artful prose:

I have a very, very hard time disagreeing with Haraway that teaching creationism is a form of abuse. Any religious fundamentalism (funny how Lawler neglects Islam, Judaism, and protestants) is a pestilence. Believe in whatever Supreme Being you so desire, just don’t attempt to derive logic or laws that govern the rest of us from the fictive texts you hold so dear.

Man, that’s great. I claim that fundamentalists teaching their children the Earth is 6000 years old is awful and borderline neglect; Lawler argues that makes me intolerant. He is wrong. Let me be clear. I do not believe those who are religious are stupid, abusive, or bad parents. I believe fundamentalists often are those who teach their children Creationism: that evolution is not real, that the Earth is 6000 years old, or that Noah forgot the dinosaurs. Fundamentalists of all religions also attempt to impose their beliefs by law and that should be opposed at all turns. Finally, I grew up Christian, have studied religion more than is probably healthy and remain far more agnostic than atheist. Let’s drop the “he hates religion” canard and address the actual claims against engineering.

On that note,  let me first address Minerva’s concerns about human enhancement, as they are actually cogent and relevant. To begin, Minerva, I agree with you. Enhancement is eugenics. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I support eugenics. Now let me tell you why.

In the bioethics canon, there are few texts as impressive as From Chance to Choice by Alan Buchanan, Dan Brock, Norman Daniels, and Daniel Wilker. The second chapter of the book is “Eugenics and Its Shadow” in which the many ethical violations done by Nazis, Social Darwinists, and other eugenicists of the early 20th century are analyzed and explained. In the conclusion of their chapter they argue:

“[The abuses of Nazis and Social Darwinists], however, do not lend themselves to condemnation of the eugenicists’ every thought and goal, any more than Nazi cost-benefit thinking condemns cost-benefit thinking. … Reprehensible as much of the eugenic program was, there is something unobjectionable and perhaps even morally required in the part of its motivation that sought to endow future generations with genes that might enable their lives to go better. We need not abandon this motivation if we can pursue it justly.”

Honestly, I’d love to spend more time talking about the nuanced ways in which enhancing children might impact social strata. But the debate isn’t there yet. Folks like Lawler are keeping things as rudimentary as possible.

But, briefly, let me try. Social norms guide what we think of as valuable and good. Enhancement seems as though it will drive a kind of arms race as to who will have the most super kid while also creating a Gattaca like split between valids and invalids. The rebuttal here is three-fold. First, there is already tremendous social pressure to raise children a certain way, that’s why I linked to the Achievatron and Tiger mothers in the first post. No one denies hyper-parents are a problem, but they exist already without enhancement. Second, are most of the parents you know hyper-parents? Unlikely. Most of the parents you know want to give their kids a good life and help any way they can. When you think of enhancement, think of your friends who are good parents already and how they might use a new technology to help their kids. Third, concerns of a split society arise around every new technology. My job as an ethicist is to help ensure that such a split doesn’t happen, and to fight to close the current gap in things like health care.

Finally, Minerva makes a great point about physical enhancements being the main goal, not moral enhancement. I submit that for serious proponents of human enhancement, the goals are to improve intelligence, morality, and health. For further reading, I suggest John Harris’ “Moral Enhancement and Freedom,” Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson’s “The Perils of of Cognitive Enhancement and the Urgent Imperative to Enhance the Moral Character of Humanity,” and David Wasserman and S. Matthew Liao’s “Issues on the Pharmacological Induction of Emotions.” All of these fine essays just begin to deal with the possible ethical consequences of enhancement.

Now, on to the critiques of Mr. Keiper at Futurisms. Here they are, in turn.

1. Was the Council “behind halting stem cell research”?

Mr. Keiper’s says, No! And he is technically correct (the best kind of correct). Bush himself announced that he was restricting funding on new stem cell lines. A few members of the Council disagreed. They were canned. The remainder of the PCBE supported Bush’s policy and wrote a report about how great it was. That’s right, those who disagreed with Bush’s policy were either dismissed or ignored, and the PCBE never once dissented in a meaningful way from Bush’s established line.

2. Did the Council focus on “abstinence-only sex education”?

Again, No! It seems I am either mistaken or lying. I admit it, it was sort of both.

I was fairly glib with my insults flying fast and furious against what Minerva so aptly calls the “un-think tank” that is the PCBE. You see, I conflate the views of the members with the views of the Council itself. For example, let’s see what Leon Kass, who chaired the Council, thinks about abortion:

Twenty-five years ago, abortion was still largely illegal and thought to be immoral, the sexual revolution (made possible by the extramarital use of the pill) was still in its infancy, and few had yet heard about the reproductive rights of single women, homosexual men and lesbians. (Never mind shameless memoirs about one’s own incest!) Then one could argue, without embarrassment, that the new technologies of human reproduction — babies without sex — and their confounding of normal kin relations — who’s the mother: the egg donor, the surrogate who carries and delivers, or the one who rears? — would “undermine the justification and support that biological parenthood gives to the monogamous marriage.”

That is a tone right there of a man who would love teens to know about condoms and birth-control for safe pre-marital sex. Right? Oh, but he’s not done:

Thanks to the sexual revolution, we are able to deny in practice, and increasingly in thought, the inherent procreative teleology of sexuality itself. But, if sex has no intrinsic connection to generating babies, babies need have no necessary connection to sex. Thanks to feminism and the gay rights movement, we are increasingly encouraged to treat the natural heterosexual difference and its preeminence as a matter of “cultural construction.” But if male and female are not normatively complementary and generatively significant, babies need not come from male and female complementarity. Thanks to the prominence and the acceptability of divorce and out-of-wedlock births, stable, monogamous marriage as the ideal home for procreation is no longer the agreed-upon cultural norm. For this new dispensation, the clone is the ideal emblem: the ultimate “single-parent child.”

Are you starting to get a picture of how the PCBE thought about biotechnologies? Did I lump their ideas together with general socially conservative politics? Yes! Was that inappropriate or out-of-line with how they think? No, not at all. Kass was the Chair of Bush’s Council, he was the guiding light, the overseer, the big picture guy. So did they talk about abstinence only sex ed? No, they didn’t, you got me. Did they support safe-sex ed? Hell no.

3. Was the council filled with terrible thinkers and philosophers?

Alright, that was mean-spirited. I take it back. Sorry.

That said: Charles Krauthammer, torture cheerleader, was asked questions of human ethics in all seriousness. The mind, it boggles.

4. Was the council a rubber-stamp for Bush and Cheney’s policies?

I refer  you to my answers to question 1. You be the judge.

Finally (whew, this is a long one) we return to Peter Lawler’s rhetorical cacophony (i.e. arguments).

Lawler argues, in various turns, that designer babies will cause: 1) a performance arms-race, 2) an obsession with productivity over personhood 3) a loss of making children “the old fashioned way” 4) discrimination against the disabled 5) outlawing religion and 6) individuals to lose autonomy.

My simplified argument is as follows. Designer babies are not the threat Peter Lawler makes them out to be. Lawler’s arguments are flawed because 1) many enhancements are not zero-sum goods. If you and I are both intelligent, it is still good for me that I am intelligent; 2) no different than now, some parents will drive their children too hard, others will enable them to live good, rounded lives 3) “old fashioned” does not equal good; also, sex separated from reproduction means more pleasure, fewer unwanted babies; 4) those who seek a cure for cancer do not devalue cancer sufferers; 5) I simply don’t know how to address his religion argument, it’s so off base. In short, no, religion won’t be illegal, but you should be ashamed if you don’t teach your child about basic science; 6) the loss of autonomy requires deterministic genetic reductionism, a widely rejected theory. There it is. That’s my argument. As quick, clear, and concise as I can make it.

Bioethics and transhumanism is an amazingly huge topic. I assail Singularity zealots on the one side for dismissing the ethics and thinking that exponential acceleration will solve everything. On the other side, I rail against bioconservatives for claiming that genetic engineering is an affront to human nature. Between the Rapture of the Nerds and the Biotech Apocalypse lies the future world in which we will really be living. That is the world I think about.

The gist of this whole post is simple: genetic engineering is just another way to make children and give them the best shot at life possible. Our job as ethicists is not to panic and say how scary a new technology is, but instead rationally usher it into our midst. The most difficult and thought-provoking part of this process is just beginning with genetic engineering. Let’s not waste time arguing if children are going to suddenly become things their parents treat like show ponies simply because some genes were tweaked to boost valuable traits. Honestly, I’m always amazed at how bleak a picture of humanity bioconservatives are forced to paint when talking about how genetic engineering will change human nature.

I believe eugenics – un-coerced, readily available, and with the child’s best interests in mind – can do amazing things to improve human equality, morality, and progress. And if it turns out the genetic revolution never comes to pass, so be it. In the process of having these discussions, my hope is to discover a few principles that can guide our ethical development as a species regardless of what the future holds.

I sincerely welcome responses in the comments, for the sake of specificity and the ability to rebut directly, particularly from Minerva, Mr. Keiper and Mr. Lawler.

Follow Kyle on his blog and on twitter.

No image is appropriate for internet debates, so I just picked a great cat photo. Image via reddit user Stormhammer who certainly reposted it from elsewhere. If you know the original photog, please let me know in the comments so I can give credit where credit is due.

I am a scientist and academic by day, but by night I’m increasingly called upon to talk about transhumanism and the Singularity. Last year, I was science advisor to Caprica, a show that explored relationships between uploaded digital selves and real selves. Some months ago I participated in a public panel on “Mutants, Androids, and Cyborgs: The science of pop culture films” for Chicago’s NPR affiliate, WBEZ.  This week brings a panel at the Director’s Guild of America in Los Angeles, entitled “The Science of Cyborgs” on interfacing machines to living nervous systems.

The latest panel to be added to my list is a discussion about the first transhumanist opera, Tod Machover’s “Death and the Powers.” The opera is about an inventor and businessman, Simon Powers, who is approaching the end of his life. He decides to create a device (called The System) that he can upload himself into (hmm I wonder who this might be based on?). After Act 2, the entire set, including a host of OperaBots and a musical chandelier (created at the MIT Media Lab), become the physical manifestation of the now incorporeal Simon Powers, who’s singing we still hear but who has disappeared from the stage. Much of the opera is exploring how his relationships with his daughter and mother change post-uploading. His daughter and wife ask whether The System is really him. They wonder if they should follow his pleas to join him, and whether life will still be meaningful without death. The libretto, by the renown Robert Pinsky, renders these questions in beautiful poetry. It will open in Chicago in April.

These experiences have been fascinating. But I can’t help wondering, what’s with all the sudden interest in transhumanism and the singularity?

The media is so saturated with the claim that the Singularity will arrive by 2045 that skeptics are by default on the defensive. Worth noticing amidst the rancor is a recent result by friend and colleague Konrad Kording, who just showed that the number of neurons that we can simultaneously record from is following Moore’s Law. Not long ago, we were limited to recording the activity of a single brain cell at a time; more recently, we can record from several hundred at once. When you examine the trend over 56 different studies, Kording and his student showed that the number is doubling every seven years. Although this is a longer interval than Moore’s Law (two year doublings), what’s really important is that the growth is exponential. Exponential growth lies at the heart of the arguments for the nearness of the Singularity. Given Kording’s result, however, how long do you think it will be before we can record from every neuron in the brain at once? You might be surprised: even with this incredible exponential growth, it will take 220 years. If we suppose that uploading our consciousness will at a minimum entail recording the pattern of activity of the entire brain (why not–it’s no less plausible than every other argument out there), then we can’t even get cracking until 2231.

Of course, the time of the Singularity is not the time when we can upload consciousness, but rather when we create super-intelligent machines (which, according to some, will then devote themselves to figuring out how to beat aging and upload our consciousness, rather than chasing us to the ends of the galaxy). Whether 2045 is reasonable is hotly debated. I expect it’s on the short side by a century or so–but as someone who often thinks in evolutionary time scales, I still view this as an inconsequential amount of time.

But if we weigh the evidence for when the Singularity will occur versus the evidence for world-wide environmental destruction (such as that we’re now exceeding three of ten “planetary boundaries” for sustainable human existence), it’s pretty clear that these threats to our continued existence as a species are looming far faster on the horizon than either the Singularity or uploaded immortality.

So what’s going on? Is environmentalism “tired” and transhumanism “wired”? Is transhumanism just a fleeting new fascination like colonizing space was not long ago, and this soon will also pass? Or is there something more primal going on?

As I pondered these questions recently, it occurred to me that perhaps the transhumanism trend has something to do with secular people–as scientists, engineers, and sci-fi fans tend to be–having an outlet for talking about things that people with religion have more established frameworks for expressing.

Consider this: Scott Atran, among others, has argued that the urge for religion has an evolutionary basis, rooted in our fears of death and predators. Since Darwin, if not before, it’s become increasingly difficult, though, for scientifically-minded people to put stock in religion. Added to this, it’s difficult to have conversations in public about religion, not least because we live in a multi-denominational society where the public expression of creed can be viewed as exclusionary. It’s simply not politically correct in many instances. What if the reason for the rapid spread of Singularity and transhumanism talk is that it’s giving people a secular outlet for thinking through their fears of death and dreams of immortality?

A great deal has been written about relationships between religion and transhumanism. Much of it has drawn parallels between transhumanism and religion. But I don’t think that transhumanism is trying to be a religion: I think that it’s giving secularists (like me) an opportunity to talk publicly about death, the afterlife, and the strange puzzles of personal identity that will someday arise in transforming ourselves into cyborgs, copies of our original selves, or fully digital beings (which I’ve explored here, here, and here). It is letting us safely explore these ideas in a less morose way than the typical meat-to-worms narrative to which secularists are usually limited. In doing so, perhaps it is filling a void that religion used to fill but no longer can for many of us.

Image of cylon by Shawn Sharp, from DVICE’s steampunk cylon contest, via GIZMODO.

Plot from “How advances in neural recording affect data analysis,” by Ian H. Stevenson and Konrad P. Kording, in Nature Neuroscience. Published online 26 January 2011; doi:10.1038/nn.2731.

Some background on Peter Lawler. He writes for Big Think, loves The New Atlantis (their writers at Futurisms are great sparring partners) and was on the President’s Council on Bioethics (PCBE) . For those of you unfamiliar with Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics, they were the brilliant minds behind halting stem cell research, focusing on it-worked-for-Bristol-Palin abstinence-only sex education and being generally terrible philosophers and thinkers. Charles Krauthammer was asked his opinion of ethical issues, I kid you not. In short, the PCBE happily rubber-stamped the backwards and anti-science decrees of Bush and Cheney in an effort to supplicate the deranged Christian base of the Republican party. I tell you all of this lovely information so you have a working context for the luminary Big Think has decided to employ.

Thus, on to the question: will designer babies turn the USA into a culture of compulsory overachievement?

Let us examine Lawler’s argument proper, if such a thing can be said to exist. Most of his post is a cobbled together string of non-sequitor rhetorical questions posing as an argument. But he’s a professor, so I’ll show some respect and presume he makes sense. Lawler’s argument is that if we enhance our children, it’s so they will be competitive and productive, and to make sure enhancement doesn’t increase inequality, we’ll have to make sure they’re all enhanced to the max, regardless of the benefits for the actual child. Though he doesn’t cite the paper, Lawler’s argument seems to be based on Alan Buchanan’s “Enhancement and the Ethics of Development.” Buchanan’s argument is complex, but part of it revolves around the idea that previous forms of human enhancement (agriculture, printing press, microprocessor) had huge benefits for the economy. Thus, it is logical to conclude that the State has incentive to provide, um, incentives for families to enhance in the name of productivity and the economy.

However, Lawler isn’t addressing Buchanan, merely a disfigured straw-man version of Buchanan’s argument. Lawler’s rhetorical goal is to lead the argument to a point of absurdity, where you’ll react, aghast at how awful a world with enhancement will be. The crowning moment is when Lawler says that the society will neither welcome the “gift” of a child with Down syndrome, nor will it tolerate “all those stupid and disease-ridden Mormon and Catholic kids.” Not so, for the following reasons.

1. Buchanan’s argument, as well as those of most proponents of human enhancement, is predicated on the idea that not only will enhancement itself be an option, but the kinds of enhancements and the available traits one can select from will all be optional. Lawler ominously implies there will be a mandate of a “perfect” child, a specter long rejected and rallied against by actual bioethicists. No one will be forced to do anything.

2. Lawler implies that those who support enhancement devalue the lives of those with disabilities. Do those who seek to cure HIV devalue the lives of AIDS sufferers, or are the developers of prostheses disdainful of amputees? I hardly think so. Parents who choose to have a child should love that child as is–period.

3. Again, he doesn’t cite his source, but Lawler’s reference to “Mormons and Catholics” is a nod to Donna Haraway’s epic lines:

Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.

Let’s ignore for the moment that an increase intelligence and education correlates with a drop in religious belief. I’ll be honest: I have a very, very hard time disagreeing with Haraway that teaching creationism is a form of abuse. Any religious fundamentalism (funny how Lawler neglects Islam, Judaism, and protestants) is a pestilence. Believe in whatever Supreme Being you so desire, just don’t attempt to derive logic or laws that govern the rest of us from the fictive texts you hold so dear.

4. Enhancement is still extremely speculative. Ethicists argue about it the same way we argue about philosophical zombies and aliens to understand personhood. Enhancement helps us understand how procreation and parenting creates an ethical obligation to the child. The ability to enhance intelligence, morality, charm, and other complex but universally desirable traits is a long, long ways off.

5. That said, an enhancement arms race might ever take off would result in the least destructive, most beneficial Cold War in human history. Oh no, the world is suddenly a-flush with inventive, moral, empathetic, charming, attractive and beneficent people! Whatever shall we do!

In short, enhancement is not going to be commandeered by the state to make generations of godless child robots hell-bent on productivity. Not by a long shot. For more coherent thoughts on designer babies, I suggest Anders Sandberg’s post “Making Babies.” Mr. Lawler promised more on the topic, I sincerely hope he delivers.

Humans and dolphins are inventing a common language together. This is big news!

In all the hoopla over the world ending due to being asteroid-smashed, man becoming immortal thanks to the singularity in 2045, and Watson the trivia-machine winning Jeopardy! the story of budding interspecies communication got under-reported. Denise Herzing and her team with the Wild Dolphin project has begun developing a language to allow humans and dolphins to communicate. If successful, the ability to communicate with dolphins would fundamentally change animal intelligence research, animal rights arguments, and our ability to talk to aliens.

Herzing and her team faced two huge problems when it came to talking to dolphins. The first problem is that the current state of animal language research creates an asymmetrical relationship between humans and the animals with whom they wish to communicate. The second problem is that (save for parrots) animal vocal cords cannot replicate human speech, and visa versa.

Most, if not nearly all, animal language research involves either studying how animals communicate with one another, or teaching them a human language to see if they can communicate with us. There is a problem with both methods–humans don’t learn much (if any) animal language in the process. Think of it this way: how many commands does the smartest dog you’ve met know? Some border collies, like Chaser, can learn upwards of 1000 words. Now how many words do you know in dog? Or parrot? How about gorilla or whale? Know any corvid? I bet you can at least read cuttlefish patterns, right? No? Of course, I’m being facetious, but with a purpose: up to this point, humans have always attempted to understand animal language by teaching animals how to talk to humans. The glaring flaw in this process of teaching animals to use human language is that it is nary impossible to prove the animal is using language, not merely playing a very complex game of repeater.

There is a second, equally interesting problem. Think about your favorite science fiction series populated by aliens (for me, that’s a toss up between Star Trek and Mass Effect). At some point in that series, an alien has introduced itself as having a very un-alien name, like “Grunt.” The reason? “My real name is unpronounceable by humans.” That is rarely an actual problem, because as it always works out the other alien species (why do we refer to aliens as “races” btw?) can pronounce our human words. One of the only films I can think of that doesn’t have this common sci-fi fallacy is District 9. Humans and prawn seem to be able to understand the other’s language in a rudimentary way, despite neither species being even remotely able to reproduce the other’s sounds. Cetaceans pose the same problem: humans cannot whistle, squeak, chortle, or pop the way a beluga or bottle-nose can. Further, the higher squeals of some dolphins and the low rumbles of some whales are beyond the human auditory spectrum. Dolphins can’t say a word in human languages and we certainly can’t do more than parody the spectrum of cetacean sounds.

Which presents quite a question: How in the heck did Herzing figure out a way to both not teach the dolphins an anthropocentric language and ensure the language was speakable by both species?

Herzing’s team developed a communication system with a sprig of technology and a heaping helping of ingenuity:

Herzing created an open-ended framework for communication, using sounds, symbols and props to interact with the dolphins. The goal was to create a shared, primitive language that would allow dolphins and humans to ask for props, such as balls or scarves.

Divers demonstrated the system by pressing keys on a large submerged keyboard. Other humans would throw them the corresponding prop. In addition to being labeled with a symbol, each key was paired with a whistle that dolphins could mimic. A dolphin could ask for a toy either by pushing the key with her nose, or whistling.

Herzing’s study is the first of its kind. No one has tried to establish two-way communication in the wild.

Amazing! Herzing’s method is effectively the same as that used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The keyboard allows for dolphins to teach humans as much as the humans teach the dolphins. Furthermore, the matched whistle will allow for a more natural integration of communication into the dolphin’s speech. Given the early stages of the project, it seems to have tremendous potential already.

Yet Wired found it necessary to frame Herzing’s breakthrough within the search for extra terrestrial intelligence. As an analogy, I totally understand the reference to aliens. That’s why I used the examples I did above. What is frustrating is that the article seems to see Herzing’s research only as important when in the light of alien communication. No disrespect to NASA (pace the Bad Astronomer), but I’d rather we dumped the funds from our space exploration and focused instead on the oceans of Earth. We’ve got enough aliens and unexplored frontier right here on two-thirds of our pale blue dot.

Thankfully, the flow of information among SETI scientists and marine biologists is two-way. Information theorists like Laurence Doyle (mentioned in the side bar of the Wired article) has used techniques for signal-searching developed with SETI to determine that whales and dolphins use grammar and syntax in their communication. The consequences for genuine communication between a new species is enormous. It would dramatically improve animal intelligence research, as well as make a real case that non-human persons should have limited rights. Success with the dolphins might enable researchers to devise forms of communication with a whole host of other intelligent animals. And, in the far flung future, we might get ourselves a universal translator.

I’m at least hoping for a collar like Dug’s in Up!

Image of impressive dolphins by justthatgoodguyjim via Flickr Creative Commons

People who work in robotics prefer not to highlight a reality of our work: robots are not very reliable. They break, all the time. This applies to all research robots, which typically flake out just as you’re giving an important demo to a funding agency or someone you’re trying to impress. My fish robot is back in the shop, again, after a few of its very rigid and very thin fin rays broke. Industrial robots, such as those you see on car assembly lines, can only do better by operating in extremely predictable, structured environments, doing the same thing over and over again. Home robots? If you buy a Roomba, be prepared to adjust your floor plan so that it doesn’t get stuck.

What’s going on? The world is constantly throwing curveballs at robots that weren’t anticipated by the designers. In a novel approach to this problem, Josh Bongard has recently shown how we can use the principles of evolution to make a robot’s “nervous system”—I’ll call it the robot’s controller—robust against many kinds of change. This study was done using large amounts of computer simulation time (it would have taken 50–100 years on a single computer), running a program that can simulate the effects of real-world physics on robots.

What he showed is that if we force a robot’s controller to work across widely varying robot body shapes, the robot can learn faster, and be more resistant to knocks that might leave your home robot a smoking pile of motors and silicon. It’s a remarkable result, one that offers a compelling illustration of why intelligence, in the broad sense of adaptively coping with the world, is about more than just what’s above your shoulders. How did the study show it?

Each (simulated) robot starts with a very basic body plan (like a snake), a controller (consisting of a neural network that is randomly connected with random strengths), and a sensor for light. Additional sensors report the position of body segments, the orientation of the body, and ground contact sensors for limbs, if the body plan has them. The task is to bring the body over to the light source, 20 meters away.

A bunch of these robots are simulated, and those that do poorly are eliminated, a kind of in-computo natural selection. The eliminated robots are replaced with versions of the ones that succeeded, after random tweaks (“mutations”) to these better controllers have been made. The process repeats until a robot that can get to the light is found. So far, there’s been no change in the shape of the body.

With the first successful robot-controller combination found (one that gets to the light), the body form changes from snake-like to something like a salamander, with short legs sticking out of the body. (All body shape changes are pre-programmed, rather than evolved.) The evolutionary process to find a successful controller-bot combination repeats, with random changes to the better controllers until, once again, a controller-bot combination is found that is able to claw its way to the light.

Then the short legs sticking out to the side slowly get longer, and rather than sticking out to the side, they progressively become more vertical. With each change in body shape, the evolutionary process to find a controller repeats. Eventually, the sim-bot evolves to something that looks like any four-legged animal.

That was all for round one of evolution. For round two, the best controller from round one was copied into the same starting snake-like body type that round one began with. But now, the change in body forms occurs more rapidly, so that by the time 2/3 of the “lifetime” of the robot is completed, it has reached its final dog-like form. For round three, this all happens within 1/3 of the robot’s lifetime. For round four, the body form starts off as dog-like and stays there.

So there are changes occurring at two different time scales: changes over the “lifetime” of the robot, similar to our own shape changes from fetus to adulthood; and changes that occur over generations, through which development during a lifetime occurs more rapidly. The short time scale is called “ontogenetic” and the long scale (between the different rounds) is “phylogenetic.”

The breakthrough of the work is that it found that having these variations in body shape occur over ontogenetic and phylogenetic time scales resulted in finding a controller that got the body over to the light much faster than if no such changes in body shape occurred. For example, when the system began with the final body type, the dog-like shape, it took much longer to evolve a solution than when the body shapes progressed from snake-like to salamander to dog-like. Not only was a controller evolved more rapidly, but the final solution was much more robust to being pushed and nudged.

The complexity of the interactions over 100 CPU years of simulated evolution makes the final evolved result difficult to untangle. Nonetheless, there is good evidence that the cause of accelerated learning in the shape-changing robots is that the controllers developed through changing bodies have gone through a set of “training-wheel” body shapes: a robot starting with a four-legged body plan and a simple controller quickly fails—it can’t control the legs well and simply tips over. Starting with something on the ground that slithers, as was the case in these simulations, is less prone to such failures. So not any old sequence of shape changes works: mimicking the sequence seen in evolution garners some of the advantages that presumably made this sequence actually happen in nature, such as higher mechanical stability of more ancient forms.

Less clear is the source of increased robustness—the ability to recover from being nudged and pushed in random ways. Bongard suggests that the increased robustness of controllers that have evolved with changing body shapes is due to those controllers having had to work under a wider range of sensor-motor relationships than the ones that evolved with no change in body shape. For example, any controller that’s particularly sensitive to a certain relationship between, say, a sensor that reports foot position, and one that reports spine position would fail (and thus be eliminated) as those relationships are systematically changed in shifting from salamander-like to dog-like body form and movement. So that means that if I suddenly pushed down the back of a four-legged dog-like robot, so that its legs would splay out and it would be forced to move more like a salamander, the winners of the evolutionary competition would still be able to work because the controllers had worked in salamander-like bodies as well as in dog-like bodies.

In support of this idea, the early controllers, that were purely based on moving the body axis (“spine”), appear to be still embedded in the more advanced controllers; so if something happens to the body (say, one leg gets knocked), the robot can revert to more basic spine-based motion patterns that don’t require precise limb control. Bongard observed that the controllers evolved through changing body shape exhibited more dependence on spinal movement, using the legs more for balance, than those evolved without changing body shape. (It would be interesting to try his approach with simulated aquatic robots, which can be neutrally buoyant like many aquatic animals are, and thus don’t have the “tipping over” problem that Bongard’s simulated terrestrial robots had).

To be fair to existing robots, even with a controller that worked under every conceivable body shape and environmental condition, they would still break all the time. This is because the materials we make them out of are not self-healing, in contrast to the biomaterials of animals. Animals are also constantly breaking (at least on a micro level), and the body constantly repairs this. Bones subjected to higher loads, like the racket arm of a tennis player, get measurably thicker. Not only is the body self-repairing, recent innovative computer simulations of real neurons that generate basic rhythms like walking and chewing have shown that the neurons keep generating the rhythm despite big variations in the functioning and connections of these neurons. These functions are so important to continued existence—the body’s version of too big to fail—that embedded within them are solutions to just about everything the world can throw at them.

This new work provides the fascinating and useful result that fashioning controllers that work through a sequence of body shapes mimicking those seen in evolution accelerates the learning of new movement tasks and increases robustness to all the hard knocks that life inevitably delivers. It suggests that without the sequence of body shapes that evolution and development bring about, we might have nervous systems that are much too finely tuned to our adult upright bipedal form. Instead of crawling to help after we twist our ankle in the woods, we’d be left with nothing but howling for help.

Rochellys Diaz Heijtza and Sven Pettersson and colleagues raised mice in a germ free environment and compared them to mice raised with normal gut bugs. The researchers found that compared to the germ-free mice, the normal mice had reduced expression of two brain molecules, synaptophysin, and PSD-95, in a region of the brain called the striatum. Correlating with this, the germ-free mice had higher levels of activity, and less anxiety than the mice with the normal complement of gut microbes. Amazingly, they also found that there was a “sensitive period” of exposure — a time before which exposure to the gut bugs mattered, and after which exposure didn’t change the brain any more. This is characteristic of many brain regions such as visual cortex, which needs normal visual input to develop properly and provide normal visual ability. If you provide that normal input after the sensitive period, the brain doesn’t fix itself. The scientists found that exposing the germ-free mice to normal gut microbes up to about 6 weeks of age resulted in normal levels of movement and anxiety; but exposure after that age resulted in no change.

How can this be? The paper has some specific technical suggestions, but if you think broadly about animals versus plants, it isn’t completely surprising. Next time you are eating your salad, consider how it is that you ended up eating your greens, rather than the greens eating you. It’s a story that’s almost two billion years in the making.

About 1.6 billion years ago, animals and plants went on their separate ways. One type of organism has the “stay in place and absorb” energy strategy. These are the plants, which sit and photosynthesize all day. The other organism has the “go around and get it” energy strategy – that’s you. The innovation of being an animal, in comparison to plants, is to have a gut with an ability to move, and a nervous system to detect the next good thing to put into that gut and then control the movement system to get the gut to the food.

The correspondence between a mobile gut and having a nervous system is so deep that some animals that give up mobility later in life also lose their nervous system. Ironically, they digest it. This is the tunicate, an animal that swims around in early life, but once they mature, they find a place to settle down on the ocean floor. Having done that, they digest most of their nervous system (some have compared this to getting tenure).

So, it is not a big surprise that key neurotransmitters like serotonin (most of which is excreted by cells in the gut wall in response to food), dopamine, glutamate, GABA, and norepinephrine are heavily represented in the gut, or that the gut is equipped with its own nervous system that has some one hundred million neurons, and almost the same number of types of neurons as the brain (Heribert Watzke has a stimulating TED talk on this).

I know what you’re thinking. This is just a story of how brains came to be. For the purposes of intelligence, the energy may as well come from a portable fusion reactor for all it matters. So any suggestion that AI needs a gut to reach the next level is misguided. I’ll argue that this viewpoint is overly simplistic.

Years ago the philosopher Patricia Churchland and the computational neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski wrote a book called “The Computational Brain.” In it, they made a striking point regarding a pervasive belief in the AI community regarding the study of the brain. Most of the AI community view the key cognitive powers they are chasing as logically independent of any specific implementation. That is, it’s a formal system they are trying to uncover, and whether that formal system is encoded in silicon, punch cards, a hydraulic machine, biological material, or whatever, does not matter, just as whether the pieces of a chess game are made out of plastic or wood, or pictures on a computer screen, doesn’t matter. Because of this—the multiple realizability of formal systems–some people in AI believe that study the brain is irrelevant.

The brilliant point that Churchland and Sejnowski made was that, although it is true that once you understand the mechanism of the brain, at least certain parts of it may be formally independent of any particular instantiation, the key question for humanity right now is how do we get to this understanding. To get there, they said, we might take our cue from the only existing examples of things that are truly intelligent: animals. We need to study how real examples of intelligence work, crack their mechanism in their full wetware glory, and after that, we can potentially formalize and instantiate in silicon or whatever material we want.

Until recently, most of neuroscience had little inclination to mine questions of how appetitive drives such as hunger, and motivations in general, feed into the rich biomechanical and neuronal story that is being uncovered through the mechanistic study of animals. And yet, as I wrote above, the acquisition of energy through moving the gut around is foundational to “animal-hood” in the first place. Studies like the one showing ties between brain development and the gut testify to the deep interconnections of nervous systems and the guts they evolved to satisfy.

We have every reason to think that a full understanding of gut-brain interactions, and associated reward systems, will lead to a better understanding of how to build an intelligent machine. From this understanding we are also more likely to be able to build machines with the “right” connection between motivations and action, a central issue for people concerned about the consequences of The Singularity for the future of our species.

Image of Olaf Breuning’s “Big Brain Small Stomach” from Arrested Motion

Allow me to elaborate. Vat-grown meat is still a work in progress. But it is a real possibility. One of the scientists trying to make it a reality is Dr. Vladimir Mironov. He envisions giant factories called “carneries” that create meat the same way a brewery brews beer. One of his many goals is to be able to add taste and texture controlling features like fat and vascular systems to make his test-tube steaks as delicious as the real thing:

“It will be functional, natural, designed food,” Mironov said. “How do you want it to taste? You want a little bit of fat, you want pork, you want lamb? We design exactly what you want. We can design texture.”

Vat-grown meat is a godsend for those of us who are omnivores, but recognize the significant flaws with our current agricultural system. Many factory farms keep animals in inhumane conditions and the industry around animal meat is an incredibly wasteful and polluting. The current response to these conditions is to support organic, local and humane farming practices. The problem, of course, is that organic, local, and humane practices are economically inefficient, which makes the cost of ethical food prohibitive for most of us.

Yet I see vat-grown meat as presenting a significant conundrum to many supporters of the ethical/organic food movement: it’s too unnatural.

The crux of the matter is that most ethical foodies and environmentalists operate within a framework of the narrative of “the natural.” What that means is that the less technology and science a process uses to put food on your plate, the more natural, and therefore the more ethical it is. This anti-science attitude explains the irrational fear of genetically modified organisms as food. The problem, as I see it, is that the most artificial, technological and un-natural process – vat-grown meat – might be the only long-term large-scale solution available for the ethical dilemmas surrounding what we eat. And the ethical dilemmas of farming in general are significant:

“Thirty percent of the earth’s land surface area is associated with producing animal protein on farms,” [visiting scholar, Nicholas] Genovese said.

“Animals require between 3 and 8 pounds of nutrient to make 1 pound of meat. It’s fairly inefficient. Animals consume food and produce waste. Cultured meat doesn’t have a digestive system.

Additionally, cultured meat doesn’t have a nervous system, so you can’t hurt it. It doesn’t have an immune system, so you don’t have to inject it with antibiotics or growth hormones. The curious result is that artificially created meat will be more natural and humane than anything you’d find in the store today.  And, of course, there is always the future to think about, as Genovese points out:

“Further out, if we have interplanetary exploration, people will need to produce food in space and you can’t take a cow with you.

“We have to look to these ideas in order to progress. Otherwise, we stay static. I mean, 15 years ago who could have imagined the iPhone?”

For those of you who are vegans, organic foodies, and loco-vores, what are your thoughts on vat-grown meat?

Image of happy cow by wwarby via Flickr Creative Commons

An American body-modification artist of a similar mindset [to Anonym] has created small metal discs of neodymium metal, coated in gold and silicon, which give off mild electric current when in a electromagnetic field. When inserted under the fingertips, this current stimulates the fingers’ nerve endings, allowing the bearer to literally feel the shape and strength of electromagnetic fields around power cords or electronic devices.

Anonym had several of these implanted professionally, choking at the cost, and then learned it was possible to buy the metal herself in bulk, far more cheaply.

So she began experimenting with homebrewed sensors. The metal itself is extremely toxic, so she needed a coating to bioproof it, finding a solution ultimately in a silicon putty-like substance called Sugru. But hot-gun glue works fine too, she says. (“I have lots of things in me coated in hot-gun glue,” she says.)

Anonym describes academic transhumanists (aka moi) as “lame.” My initial thought was “this is not a transhumanist, this is a crazy person!” Whenever I get freaked out by someone’s behavior, I feel old and conservative. To cure this feeling I go see what old, conservative people think. Charles T. Rubin of the Futurisms blog at The New Atlantis was happy to oblige me. Rubin worries that biohackers like Anonym represent some sort of glorification of “self-mutilation” and our society’s inability to see her behavior as the cry for help it really is. Rubin’s hand-wringing post over Anonym’s “self-mutiliation” made me realize what bothered me about Anonym wasn’t her attitude or her aesthetic. Besides the ill-advized techniques (vodka for sterilizer? Rubbing alcohol is cheaper and, uh, actually sterile!), the general ethos of biohackers and grinding is one I’m all about.

Instead, I realized I had no idea why Anonym was making the modifications she was making. RFID chips are sort of useful, but the neodymium discs seem like a lot of work for a minimal payoff. So you can feel electric current. Neat, I guess? Since neither is illegal, the self-surgery comes off as a “look at how hardcore I am” attitude rather than a genuine act of rebellion. Until the mods give a person a useful ability beyond that of a normal individual, folks like Anonym are just body-modifiers who’ve found a new way to get their jollies. Cool, yes, but no more transhuman than a piercing or tattoo.

Original images via anicole and quapan at Flickr Creative Commons