(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Another Immodest Proposals discussion the other night. The topic was mind-enhancing drugs, for various definitions of mind enhancing. The primary real drugs discussed were adderall, alcohol, caffeine, marijuana, and percocet, for no reason other than those were the drugs that the people present had the most experience with. We also discussed a variety of hypothetical drugs, which seems to be an Immodest Proposals specialty. People are really good at imagining drugs that do interesting things to our bodies and minds. We discussed the drug from Limitless a lot. We discussed the drug from Flowers for Algernon. We discussed the Eternal Sunshine drug.

The discussion was broken into three parts, that were roughly: personal experience, social implications, and ethical implications.

In the first part of the discussion, we talked about what taking these drugs did for us. Artists and writers spoke about using marijuana or alcohol to help break down barriers in their minds, to access new ideas their conscious minds weren't able to bring up. A musician and writer talked about how adderall focused him and concentrated the diffuseness with which he otherwise experienced the world. I brought in an engineer's perspective when I commented that I seem to do arithmetic better while drunk, an experience other science/math types in the audience confirmed. I theorized this was because the arithmetic relationships were so deeply drilled in that alcohol freed us from thinking and made us more instinctive.

People spoke about the way some of these drugs brought a sort of 'childlike' approach to the world, and we argued a little bit, none too rigorously, about what childlike meant and why it was something artists sought. There was also some equally unrigorous talk about 'primitive approaches' that I would have preferred to skip altogether.

And then the conversation started moving into social issues provoked by these sorts of mental enhancements. Like what kind of pressure it puts on non-users when drug users reap intellectual or creative benefit? And even more simply, what kind of society do we live in where we're constantly seeking to change ourselves through biochemical experimentation? Some wondered if there were something uniquely American about the better living through biochemistry approach, which I doubt, though I think our scientific ethos has made us in some ways better at it. There was a detour into abuse of alcohol in the middle ages that didn't really lead anywhere. There was a proposal that the original addiction was to grain, which pulled us out of hunter-gathering by giving us an endorphin fix that made us want to continue to farm. There was some discussion of straight-edge culture and the various religious ascetic movements that believe the opposite is true, that drugs distract us from our full mental capacity. (In writing all of this down, I stare in wonder at how varied and creative the conversation can get at ImP. This was when the conversation started to drift away from just being about the panelists and started to take advantage of the varied crowd we had)

The third segment covered 'ethics', which really was focused primarily around comparing the ethics of mind enhancing drugs to the ethics of physical performance enhancing drugs. There is considerable agreement that doping in sports is unethical, though as you know I take a more permissive view on this than most people. Is doping in science class the same way? What about in professional academia? What about in an artistic competition?

One of the more intriguing questions I came up with was "Suppose we could create a cocktail that would enhance a chess grandmaster so that she could beat Deep Blue in chess. Would that count as a human beating Deep Blue?" I don't have an answer.

But people did have some interesting answers to some of the other questions. Some divided the ethical situation based on the permanence of the result. For example, if you create a great work of art that wins a competition while on drugs, that result has permanent beauty regardless of any taint placed on it by the drug use, so that it produces something worthwhile in a long term sense to society. So too a Nobel Prize-winning scientific breakthrough achieved while abusing drugs. In contrast, an athletic achievement lacks that permanence, generally speaking. The victory itself is the goal, so if that is tainted by an unfair advantage, the signpost of achievement is forever tainted.

Another interesting segmentation was based on a satisfaction heuristic. If you win at a game by taking an unfair advantage, you're generally not going to feel satisfied with yourself. If you achieve a scientific breakthrough, the achievement brings satisfaction. I'm a little skeptical of this on both ends. Many of the top professional athletes, in my observation, have a competitive disorder that makes winning be the only thing that matters to them. Roger Clemens achieved satisfaction by winning, whatever the cost. At the same time, there are plenty of people, athletes and scientists and artists, who don't feel satisfaction no matter how much they achieve without any illicit help.

I also tried to reshape the conversation by pointing to things that sit on both sides of one of these heuristics. The DARPA Grand Challenge is a competition whose only point is to win, because the resulting vehicle is nothing more than a toy. If you cheat, that taints your victory, because the only direct reward for winning is the prize and the bragging rights. On the other hand, the reason for the challenge is to hopefully provoke discovery of new technologies, and if that comes nobody is going to care that the breakthrough was achieved using mind-enhancing drugs.

Lastly, we considered the implications of national competition. If China is giving its scientists powerful mind-enhancing drugs and we are at war/in competition with China and lives are at stake, what is the ethical obligation of American scientists? I don't think we came to a firm answer on this, other than that it obviously depended on circumstances, but possibly would require an American response.

All in all, a really fascinating, deep conversation that took all the beautiful wrong turns I expect of an ImP discussion. Next month, the topic if Kosher Pigs and other bioengineering of food. I'm responsible for suggesting this topic, obviously, but I was joking, damnit.

Comments

[sanguinity]

:: I commented that I seem to do arithmetic better while drunk, an experience other science/math types in the audience confirmed. ::

Whoah, really?

I'm of the breed who has shaky arithmetic (super-common among pure math types), although that has gotten better from having spent the past five years doing arithmetic with an audience watching. I always presumed that my arithmetic would be one of the first things to flee when I'm drinking. Just like every other ability that is halfway interesting.

But I can't say that I actually know what would happen. Which mostly just says to me that I avoid arithmetic to the point that it hasn't come up. I'll run probability calculations for you on your pull-tabs while I'm drunk, sure -- in fact, I don't care that you don't want to know, you said "What are the odds!" within my hearing and I'm gonna tell you in just one sec -- but arithmetic? Can't say I've ever done arithmetic while I was drunk.

*tries to resist the urge to experiment tonight*


:: I'm responsible for suggesting this topic, obviously, but I was joking, damnit. ::

Hahahahahahaha. They sound like just your kind of people, they really do.

In fact, I had always assumed these were relatively private discussions with friends of yours, but they're not? This is some formal panel with audience, open to the public thing, is it?

[seekingferret]

It started as relatively private discussions with friends. freeradical42 started it as a bunch of wine bottles and a bunch of friends sitting around a table in his apartment. But as it grew, it moved to a bar in Brooklyn and is open to the public. It has a panel format, but because of its roots we really try to keep it feeling as much as possible like a private discussion among friends. So... it's an informal panel with audience, open to the public thing.


And yeah, Gmail has something called Mail Goggles you can turn on, where if it's late it'll prompt you to solve a few simple arithmetic problems before sending an email, to prove you're rational enough to not be sending off angry email to an ex-girlfriend or something. It seemed like a good idea, but I found when I tried it for the first time that I was faster and more accurate while drunk than I usually am. And when I told other math/science people about this, several told me they'd had similar experiences.

I'm shit at calculus when drunk, though. What I really want is for Mail Goggles to ask me to do a simple integral calculation before letting me send my email.

[sanguinity]

Ah. My misapprehension makes more sense. ;-)


:: I'm shit at calculus when drunk, though. What I really want is for Mail Goggles to ask me to do a simple integral calculation before letting me send my email. ::

You'd think someone has already written that.

And if such a thing existed, maybe I'd finally learn to do calculus the way normal people do calculus.

[seekingferret]

I think I stopped putting up the links with each post, but here's the group's site: http://www.meetup.com/Immodest-Proposals-NYC/

[thaurfea]

Every English/writing teacher who's spoken to me on the subject has insisted that alcohol and drugs do not improve their writing. Every friend, peer, and person who is not being paid to influence young minds who has spoken to me on the subject, as well as my own experience, says that they do help.

I've personally only written while drunk. My girlfriend says that nicotine helps her. I've heard that marijuana helps, up to a point; after that point, the writing tends to devolve into "omg i'm so high right now" rather than anything of substance. I don't have many accounts of other drugs, although the frequency with which Adderall is used in colleges seems to suggest it's useful for academia.

[zandperl]

There is considerable agreement that doping in sports is unethical, though as you know I take a more permissive view on this than most people. Is doping in science class the same way? What about in professional academia? What about in an artistic competition?

I've decided I'd like enhanced and natural categories in sports, so that those who choose to use performance enhancing drugs are separated from those who don't.

When it comes to science and academia, and mental drugs, I don't think that there is as clear a relationship that "X drug always causes an improvement". For example, one drink of alcohol gets me in the same mood as if I had been hanging out with good friends for a few hours previously. Two drinks is (from my perspective) no different. Three has me on the edge of puking. I don't see how any of this would affect my ability to do science or other things in academia. I am adverse to using medically unnecessary drugs on myself, so the anxiety involved in anything else would more than counter balance any benefit.

IMO many of these drugs damage your body/mind if used inappropriately, so I feel that using them for an advantage you are also facing drawbacks which to some extent counterbalance the advantages. When it comes to professional sports, these athletes are already damaging their bodies from the excessive exercise and their minds from the social constructs around professional athletes, so adding drugs does not as significantly adversely affect them as it does people in other categories. Perhaps this is why I personally disapprove of steroids more than say Adderal. I still believe it's their choice however and that there's no way to prevent it, hence my wanting separate categories.

[seekingferret]

Yes, the fact that there isn't as clear a correlation between drug and performance improvement in cognitively affecting drugs is something that someone brought up, and it's a fair point. We discussed specific cases of people who have adverse reactions to drugs that generally work predictably for most people, we discussed the incredible range of idiosyncratic responses that people normally have to drugs, even differences in response to the same drug in the same person based on their biochemistry at that moment. The problem is that if we stick too rigidly to these facts, we can't ask the bigger social questions that we wanted to explore, and we can't confront the fact that science is getting better and better at predicting these idiosyncratic responses. In ImP's futurism-focused spirit, therefore, this is something that we sidestep in a few different ways to get to the issues that we actually find interesting to argue.

One way is to propose hypothetical future drugs without side effects and with clear correlative effects, to get to questions like "If this drug clearly made you smarter and didn't hurt you, how would that affect people around you who weren't on the drug? Would it be rational to compel everyone in society to use the drug? If such a drug existed, would depriving someone of the drug be a moral injustice and source of inequality?"

Another technique we use is to propose hypothetical future drugs where the side effects are even more severe and more predictable, to get to questions like "If this drug clearly made you smarter for fifteen years and then you died, would it be worth it if you made a major scientific breakthrough in those fifteen years? What would a society look like where people in their intellectual primes were enhanced, but at the cost of their life, and then there was a class of normals who had longer life but without the intellectual brilliance?"


I think your point about 'medically necessary' is also an interesting one, which we touched on a little, but perhaps not enough. Someone mentioned that they suffered from a chronic illness which requires regular medication or they would die. He said "Is that a mental-enhancement drug? In one sense, sure, since without it my brain would not work as well." The line of what is medically necessary is blurry and complicated in many of these cases. Is a person with a low IQ suffering from a genetic disease that should be medically remedied? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

[zandperl]

"If such a drug existed, would depriving someone of the drug be a moral injustice and source of inequality?"

Oh definitely! This was the very first thing that occurred to me when you mentioned "If this drug clearly made you smarter and didn't hurt you". Obviously those with money and access would use the drug, creating even larger social gaps than currently exist, as those who can take it will be able to achieve more education. This might mean that the Ivory Tower did become more of a social force than it currently is. Even more interestingly though, the drug might also increase social mobility - if there were drug grant/loan programs, then someone could be easily lifted out of the lower social class with access to the drug. And of course denial of the drug would of course be a great punishment for upper class people who break laws and such. And would of course cause even more injustice if prisoners were denied the drug...

Yeah, fascinating possibilities.

[zandperl]

Regarding "medically necessary", how I define that has varied throughout my life. Obviously anything that sustains life is medically necessary, but I also accept (for myself) things that will improve quality of life (such as allergy medication or painkillers), maintain a "normal"/typical life experience (again allergy medication falls into this, as does my asthma medication), or increase the lifespan (I think this's where I put vitamins, though they could fall into the others).

I'm really torn on the birth control pill though - am I taking it for merely for convenience, and if so am I being a hypocrite? If I'm taking it for menstrual regulation (knowing when I'll get it, reducing the length, reducing the flow rate), does this mean that I assume that men are the norm and I am attempting to "maintain a normal life experience", and am I therefore internalizing sexism? I plan to keep taking it regardless of my level of sexual activity - is "taking it for my convenience" the same as "improving quality of life"?

[seekingferret]

At a futurist-oriented group like ImP, there's always going to be an undercurrent of transhumanist thought. There are plenty of people who think that taking it for convenience is only the mildest form of improving quality of life. A position was expressed that using this sort of mind-enhancing drugs was one step along the path of human evolution.

I find this troubling because I noted that such evolutionary progress would only be Lamarckian. A collapse in the drug supply would revert us to where we were before the drug. Thus any evolutionary leap with that kind of underpinning ought to be established with clear backup plans in place.

That notwithstanding, I do think making our lives easier and more convenient is a valid use for drugs, provided the side effects aren't worse than the problem.