(no subject)
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-29 02:48 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-29 03:09 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-29 04:04 pm (UTC)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"?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-04-30 02:04 pm (UTC)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.