Psychoengineering was Re: [extropy-chat] The existential threat of international law

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On 12/23/05, Hughes, James J. <james.hughes at trincoll.edu> wrote:

 I assume you agree that it would be
> progress if we could effectively stop torture and genocide, whether the
> dictators of those countries signed the treaty banning them or not?

### As if building a world-spanning apparatus of enforcement, a police
that can reach you absolutely anywhere, ready to do the bidding of
whichever vicious predator claws his way to the levers of power, as if
this would stop torture, rather than leave no sanctuary for the
victims.

Ah, the naivete of Germans voting for Hitler.

(BTW, J., don't tell me you want world domination just to stop torture
- didn't you rather want to use the World Government to get rid of
rich men by taxing out of existence everybody making 110% of your
income? Professed good intentions aside, a few scores could be settled
too, huh?)

But on a more practical level:

Future trends in the levels of organization prevalent in the society
will be crucially dependent on technological developments. Some of the
developments will aid the supraindividual force, the borg, the
self-reinforcing network of institutions and memes that is the
collective (as a being apart and above its constituent parts, us).
Without doubt, universal surveillance is such a development. Others
will aid us in our fight/flight from the borg - privately owned
spaceships come to mind. Yet others may transform both us and the borg
into something else - psychoengineering is one of them.

Psychoengineering has fascinated me for a long time. It poses a huge
threat to us (second only to the UnFriendly singularity) by allowing
the borg to design its parts to make it much more efficient and
physically destroy us.

Imagine a government that develops a method for imbuing its citizens
with a true respect for law (but not mindless obedience), and a goal
system build around serving external goals, rather than the internally
generated qualia of desire burning in our limbic systems. At first
such model citizens would be cynically exploited by those unmodified
humans in power, but sooner or later, somewhere, by an accident of
psychoengineering programming, a group of model citizens would be
produced with a closed loop of desires, maintained exclusively in
social interaction between the model citizens. This would be the first
true borganism, different from all that came before it. Existing
societies are fueled by individual desires - smashing a modern state
yields a bunch of individuals just as hungry, horny and mean as the
hunter-gatherers. A borganism's constituents, while fully conscious,
would have no desires of their own, and would apply all their
ingenuity, in full honesty, to the glory of the borganism, or whatever
goals are generated by the social interaction. The relevant analogy in
biology is the comparison between bacterial mats and films (analogous
to our societies) and the metazoans that feed on them.  No doubt,
given enough time, there would be mutation, and natural selection at
the level of the borganism, leading to evolution of inconceivable
borgan beings, just like the coalescence of monocellular beings into
multicellular ones started the Cambrian explosion.

My natural optimism would be severely strained by this expectation
(since I do think that psychoengineering will happen within our
non-enhanced lifetimes, even if the singularity comes later than
expected), if not for two thoughts:

First of all, even today, six hundred million years after the first
metazoan started cutting a swath through bacterial mats, bacteria are
still the most prevalent form of life on earth, both in terms of sheer
numbers and even in terms of overall biomass. Maybe the borganism will
not eat us all - maybe we will be able to adapt, to live in the scum
ponds far away from the glistening palaces of power built by the borg.
Maybe we will be even able to live symbiotically with borgans, like
intestinal bacteria live in us. More bacteria than humans have visited
the Moon, by something like ten orders of magnitude (give or take a
few) - and they didn't even have to pay for the ticket. Maybe human
symbionts of borgans will visit and inhabit places we alone could
never reach.

Secondly, autopsychoengineering could let us improve our functioning
in many ways without losing the self-oriented goal systems that define
us as individuals. For example, we could make some parts of our minds
open to scrutiny, thus allowing truly unbreakable trust to be
established. Non-borgan societies built from trusted individuals would
have many of the efficiency gains of borgans without giving up some of
the advantages of individuals - the pluralism, fast experimentation,
mutability that can be very useful for survival in adverse conditions.
Maybe some of us will build small borganisms out of our own flesh, by
making multiple copies of ourselves, as I would like to do. There will
be a lot design space to be explored.

Given the above, I am somewhat optimistic (although not confident -
the matter at hand is too complex for confident predictions) that
there will be place for individuals in the future, and I am certainly
hoping to be there to find out.

Rafal