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Apr. 27th, 2012 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretAnother 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.
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.