Materialism was a pre-socratic view that for something to be real it has to be matter – physical stuff made of atoms (which at the time were considered hard like billiard balls – fundametal parts of reality). The reason these days the term physicalism is used is because it can describe things that aren’t matter – like forces, or aren’t observable matter – like dark matter, or energy or fields, or spacetime etc.. Physicalism is the idea that all that exist can be described in the language of some ‘ideal’ physics – we may never know what this ideal physics is, though people think that it is something close to our current physics (as we can make very accurate predictions with our current physics).
If magic, telepathy or angels were real, there would be a physics that could describe them – they’d have patterns and properties that would be describable and explainable. A physicist would likely think that even the mind operates according to physical rules. Being a physicalist according to John means you think everything is governed by rules, physical rules – and that there is an ideal language that can be used to describe all this.
Note John is also a deontologist. Perhaps there should exist an ideal language that can fully describe ethics – does this mean that ideally there is no need for utilitarianism? I’ll leave that question for another post.
Here are some blog posts about physicalism by John Wilkins:
Is physicalism an impoverished metaphysics?
Every so often, we read about some philosopher or other form of public intellectual who makes the claim that a physicalist ontology – a world view in which only things that can be described in terms of physics are said to exist – is impoverished. That is, there are things whereof science cannot know, &c. A recent example is that made by Thomas Nagel [nicely eviscerated here by the physicist Sean Carroll], whose fame in philosophy rests with an influential 1974 paper that there is something like being a bat that no amount of physics, physiology or other objective science could account for.
Recent, Nagel has argued that the evolutionary view called (historically misleadingly) neo-Darwinism, is “almost certainly” false. One of the reasons is that “materialism” (which Nagel should know is an antiquated world view replaced by physicalism defined above; there are many non-material things in physics, not least fields of various kinds) does not permit a full account of consciousness; the subjective facts of being a particular individual organism. Another is that the chance that life would emerge from a lifeless universe is staggeringly unlikely. How this is calculated is somewhat mysterious, given that at best we only have (dare I say it?) subjective estimates anyway, but there it is.
But Nagel is not alone. Various nonreligious (apparently) thinkers have made similar assertions, although some, like Frank Jackson, who proposed the Knowledge Argument, have since backed down. What is it that physicalism must account for that these disputants and objectors say it cannot?
It almost entirely consists of consciousness, intentions, intelligence or some similar mental property which is entirely inexplicable by “reductionist” physicalism. [Reductionism is a term of abuse that means – so far as I can tell – solely that the person who makes such an accusation does not like the thing or persons being accused.] And that raises our question: is physicalism lacking something?
In my last post I argued that physicalism cannot be rejected simply because people assert there are nonphysical objects which are beyond specification. Some are, however, specifiable, and one commentator has identified the obvious ones: abstract objects like the rules of chess or numbers. I have dealt with these before in my “Pizza reductionism” post, which I invite you to go read.
Done? OK, then; let us proceed.
It is often asserted that there are obviously things that are not physical, such as ideas, numbers, concepts, etc., quite apart from qualia, I once sat with a distinguished philosopher, who I respect greatly and so shall not name, when he asserted that we can construct natural classifications because we can deal first with the natural numbers. I asked him “In what sense are numbers natural objects?”, meaning, why should we think numbers are entities in the natural world. He admitted that the question had not occurred to him (I doubt that – he is rather smart), but that it was simply an axiom of his philosophy. I do not think such abstract objects are natural.
This applies to anything that is “informational”, including all semantic entities like meanings, symbols, lexical objects, and so on. They only “exist” as functional modalities in our thoughts and language. I have also argued this before: information does not “exist”; it is a function of how we process signals. Mathematics is not a domain, it is a language, and the reason it works is because the bits that seriously do not work are not explored far[*] – not all of it has to work in a physical or natural sense, but much of it has to, or else it becomes a simple game that we would not play so much.
So the question of the incoherence of physicalism is based on the assumption (which runs contrary to physicalism, and is thus question begging) that abstract objects are natural things. I don’t believe they are, and I certainly do not think that a thought, or concept, for example, which can be had by many minds and is therefore supposed to be located in none of them (and thus transcendental), really is nonphysical. That is another case of nouning language. The thought “that is red” exists, for a physicalist, in all the heads that meet the functional social criteria for ascriptions of red. It exists nowhere else – it just is all those cognitive and social behaviours in biological heads…
In philosophy, physicalism is the ontological thesis that “everything is physical”, that there is “nothing over and above” the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a “one substance” view of the nature of reality as opposed to a “two-substance” (dualism) or “many-substance” (pluralism) view. Both the definition of physical and the meaning of physicalism have been debated. Physicalism is closely related to materialism. Physicalism grew out of materialism with the success of the physical sciences in explaining observed phenomena. The terms are often used interchangeably, although they are sometimes distinguished, for example on the basis of physics describing more than just matter (including energy and physical law). Common arguments against physicalism include both the philosophical zombie argument and the multiple observers argument, that the existence of a physical being may imply zero or more distinct conscious entities. “When I lost my belief in religion I had to decide what I needed to accept as a bare minimum. I decided that I needed to believe in the physical world. I never found the slightest reason to accept the existence of anything else. To this day I am a physicalist only because I never found the need to be anything else. The principle of parsimony suggests that one should not believe in more than one needs to. Even if it does make you feel comfortable.”
In this interview with Christof Koch, he shares some deeply felt ideas about the urgency of reducing suffering (with some caveats), his experience with mindfulness – explaining what it was like to visit the Dali Lama for a week, as well as a heart felt experience of his family dog ‘Nosey’ dying in his arms, and how that moved him to become a vegetarian. He also discusses the bias of human exceptionalism, the horrors of factory farming of non-human animals, as well as a consequentialist view on animal testing. Christof Koch is an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural bases of consciousness.
An online panel focusing on reducing suffering & paradise engineering through the lens of science.
Panelists: Andrés Gómez Emilsson, David Pearce, Brian Tomasik and Mike Johnson
Note, consider skipping to to 10:19 to bypass some audio problems in the beginning!!
Topics
Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Qualia computing (how to use consciousness for information processing, and why that has ethical implications)
How do we know consciousness is causally efficacious? Because we are conscious and evolution can only recruit systems/properties when they do something (and they do it better than the available alternatives).
What is consciousness’ purpose on animals? (Information processing).
What is consciousness’ comparative advantage? (Phenomenal binding).
Why does this matter for suffering reduction? Suffering has functional properties that play a role in the inclusive fitness of organisms. If we figure out exactly what role they play (by reverse-engineering the computational properties of consciousness), we can substitute them by equally (or better) functioning non-conscious or positive hedonic-tone analogues.
What is the focus of Qualia Computing? (it focuses on basic fundamental questions and simple experimental paradigms to get at them (e.g. computational properties of visual qualia via psychedelic psychophysics)).
Brian Tomasik:
Space colonization “Colonization of space seems likely to increase suffering by creating (literally) astronomically more minds than exist on Earth, so we should push for policies that would make a colonization wave more humane, such as not propagating wild-animal suffering to other planets or in virtual worlds.”
AGI safety “It looks likely that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be developed in the coming decades or centuries, and its initial conditions and control structures may make an enormous impact to the dynamics, values, and character of life in the cosmos.”,
Animals and insects “Because most wild animals die, often painfully, shortly after birth, it’s plausible that suffering dominates happiness in nature. This is especially plausible if we extend moral considerations to smaller creatures like the ~1019 insects on Earth, whose collective neural mass outweighs that of humanity by several orders of magnitude.”
Mike Johnson:
If we successfully “reverse-engineer” the patterns for pain and pleasure, what does ‘responsible disclosure’ look like? Potential benefits and potential for abuse both seem significant.
If we agree that valence is a pattern in a dataset, what’s a good approach to defining the dataset, and what’s a good heuristic for finding the pattern?
What order of magnitude is the theoretical potential of mood enhancement? E.g., 2x vs 10x vs 10^10x
What are your expectations of the distribution of suffering in the world? What proportion happens in nature vs within the boundaries of civilization? What are counter-intuitive sources of suffering? Do we know about ~90% of suffering on the earth, or ~.001%?
Why is it such an exciting time round about now to be doing valence research? Are we at a sweet spot in history with this regard? What is hindering valence research? (examples of muddled thinking, cultural barriers etc?)
How do we use the available science to improve the QALY? GiveDirectly has used change in cortisol levels to measure effectiveness, and the EU (what’s EU stand for?) evidently does something similar involving cattle. It seems like a lot of the pieces for a more biologically-grounded QALY- and maybe a SQALY (Species and Quality-Adjusted Life-Year)- are available, someone just needs to put them together. I suspect this one of the lowest-hanging highest-leverage research fruits.
David Pearce: The ultimate scope of our moral responsibilities. Assume for a moment that our main or overriding goal should be to minimise and ideally abolish involuntary suffering. I typically assume that (a) only biological minds suffer and (b) we are probably alone within our cosmological horizon. If so, then our responsibility is “only” to phase out the biology of involuntary suffering here on Earth and make sure it doesn’t spread or propagate outside our solar system. But Brian, for instance, has quite a different metaphysics of mind, most famously that digital characters in video games can suffer (now only a little – but in future perhaps a lot). The ramifications here for abolitionist bioethics are far-reaching.
Other: – Valence research, Qualia computing (how to use consciousness for information processing, and why that has ethical implications), animal suffering, insect suffering, developing an ethical Nozick’s Experience Machine, long term paradise engineering, complexity and valence – Effective Altruism/Cause prioritization and suffering reduction – People’s practical recommendations for the best projects that suffering reducers can work on (including where to donate, what research topics to prioritize, what messages to spread). – So cause prioritization applied directly to the abolition of suffering? – what are the best projects people can work on to reduce suffering? and what to work on first? (including where to donate, what research topics to prioritize, what messages to spread) – If we successfully “reverse-engineer” the patterns for pain and pleasure, what does ‘responsible disclosure’ look like? Potential benefits and potential for abuse both seem significant – If we agree that valence is a pattern in a dataset, what’s a good approach to defining the dataset, and what’s a good heuristic for finding the pattern? – What order of magnitude is the theoretical potential of mood enhancement? E.g., 2x vs 10x vs 10^10x
Aging is a technical problem with a technical solution – finding the solution requires clear thinking and focused effort. Once solving aging becomes demonstrably feasible, it is likely attitudes will shift regarding its desirability. There is huge potential, for individuals and for society, in reducing suffering through the use of rejuvenation therapy to achieve new heights of physical well-being. I also discuss the looming economic implications of large percentages of illness among aging populations – and put forward that focusing on solving fundamental problems of aging will reduce the incidents of debilitating diseases of aging – which will in turn reduce the economic burden of illness. This mini-documentary discusses the implications of actually solving aging, as well as some misconceptions about aging.
The above video is the latest version with a few updates & kinks ironed out.
‘The End of Aging’ was Adam Ford’s submission for the Longevity Film Competition – all the contestants did a great job. Big thanks to the organisers of competition, it inspires people to produce videos to help spread awareness and understanding about the importance of ending aging.
It’s important to see that health in old age is desirable at population levels – rejuvenation medicine – repairing the bodies ability to cope with stressors (or practical reversal of the aging process), will end up being cheaper than traditional medicine based on general indefinite postponement of ill-health on population levels (especially in the long run when rejuvenation therapy becomes efficient).
Between 2015 and 2050, the proportion of the world’s population over 60 years will nearly double from 12% to 22%.
By 2020, the number of people aged 60 years and older will outnumber children younger than 5 years.
In 2050, 80% of older people will be living in low- and middle-income countries.
The pace of population ageing is much faster than in the past.
All countries face major challenges to ensure that their health and social systems are ready to make the most of this demographic shift.
Happy Longevity Day 2018! 😀
[1] * The Longevity Film Competition is an initiative by the Healthy Life Extension Society, the SENS Research Foundation, and the International Longevity Alliance. The promoters of the competition invited filmmakers everywhere to produce short films advocating for healthy life extension, with a focus on dispelling four usual misconceptions and concerns around the concept of life extension: the false dichotomy between aging and age-related diseases, the Tithonus error, the appeal to nature fallacy, and the fear of inequality of access to rejuvenation biotechnologies.
Michio Kaku on Nanotechnology – Michio is the author of many best sellers, recently the Future of the Mind!
The Holy Grail of Nanotechnology
Merging with machines is on the horizon and Nanotechnology will be key to achieving this. The ‘Holy Grail of Nanotechnology’ is the replicator: A microscopic robot that rearranges molecules into desired structures. At the moment, molecular assemblers exist in nature in us, as cells and ribosomes.
Sticky Fingers problem
How might nanorobots/replicators look and behave? Because of the ‘Sticky /Fat Fingers problem’ in the short term we won’t have nanobots with agile clippers or blow torches (like what we might see in a scifi movie).
The 4th Wave of High Technology
Humanity has seen an acceleration in history of technological progress from the steam engine and industrial revolution to the electrical age, the space program and high technology – what is the 4th wave that will dominate the rest of the 21st century? Nanotechnology (molecular physics), Biotechnology, and Artificial Intelligence (reducing the curcuitry of the brain down to neurons) – “these three molecular technologies will propel us into the future”!
Michio Kaku – Bio
Michio Kaku (born January 24, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York, a futurist, and a communicator and popularizer of science. He has written several books about physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and writes extensive online blogs and articles. He has written three New York Times Best Sellers: Physics of the Impossible (2008), Physics of the Future (2011), and The Future of the Mind (2014).
Kaku is the author of various popular science books: – Beyond Einstein: The Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe (with Jennifer Thompson) (1987) – Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension (1994) – Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century[12] (1998) – Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time (2004) – Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos (2004) – Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel (2008) – Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (2011) – The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind (2014)
Why is aging research important? Biological aging causes suffering, however in recent times there as been surprising progress in stem cell research and in regenerative medicine that will likely disrupt the way we think about aging, and in the longer term, substantially mitigate some of the suffering involved in growing old.
Aubrey de Grey is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation – an organisation focused on going beyond ageing and leading the journey towards the future of regenerative medicine!
What will it take to get there?
You might wonder why pursue regenerative medicine ? Historically, doctors have been racing against time to find cures for specific illnesses, making temporary victories by tackling diseases one by one – solve one disease and another urgency beacons – once your body becomes frail, if you survive one major illness, you may not be so lucky with the next one – the older you get the less capable your body becomes to staving off new illnesses – you can imagine a long line of other ailments fading beyond view into the distance, and eventually one of them will do you in. If we are to achieve radical healthy longevity , we need to strike at the fundamental technical problems of why we get frail and more disease prone as we get older. Every technical problem has a technical solution – regenerative medicine is a class of solutions that seek to keep turning the ‘biological clock’ back rather than achieve short-term palliatives.
The damage repair methodology has gained in popularity over the last two decades, though it’s still not popular enough to attract huge amounts of funding – what might tip the scales of advocacy in damage-repair’s favor? A clear existence proof such as achieving…
Robust Mouse Rejuvenation
In this interview, Aubrey de Grey reveals the most amount of optimism I have heard him express about the near term achievement of Robust Mouse Rejuvenation. Previously it’s been 10 years away subject to adequate funding (which was not realised) – now Aubrey predicts it might happen within only 5-6 years (subject to funding of course). So, what is Robust Mouse Rejuvenation – and why should we care?
For those who have seen Aubrey speak on this, he used to say RMR within 10 years (subject to funding)
Specifically, the goal of RBR is this: Make normal, healthy two-year old mice (expected to live one more year) live three further years.
What’s the ideal type of mouse to test on and why? The ideal mouse to trail on is one that doesn’t naturally have a certain kind of congenital disease (that might on average only live 1.5 or 2 years) – because increasing their lifespan might only be a sign that you have solved their particular congenital disease. The ideal type of mouse is one which lives to 3 years on average, which could die of various things.
How many extra years is significant? Consistently increasing mouse lifespan for an extra two years on top of their normal three year lifespans – essentially tripling their remaining lifespan.
When, or at what stage of the mice’s life to begin the treatment? Don’t start treating the mice until they are already 2 years old – at a time where they would normally be 2 thirds of the way though their life (at or past middle age) and they would have one more year to live.
Why not start treating the mice earlier? The goal is to produce sufficiently dramatic results in a laboratory to convince the main-stream gerontology community, such that they would willingly publicly endorse the idea that it is not impossible, but indeed it is only a matter of time before rejuvenation therapy will work in humans – that is to get out there on talk shows and in front of cameras and say all this.
Arguably, the mainstream gerontology community are generally a bit conservative – they have vested interests in being successful in publishing papers, they get grants they have worries around peer review, they want tenure, and have a reputation to uphold. Gerontologists hold the keys to public trust – they are considered to be the authorities on aging. When gerontologists are convinced and let the world know about it, a lot of other people in the scientific community and in the general community will also then become convinced. Once that happens, here’s what’s likely to happen next – longevity through rejuvenation medicine will become a big issue, there will be domino effects – there will be a war on aging, experts will appear on Oprah Winfrey, politicians will have to include the war on aging in their political manifesto if they want to get elected.
Yoda - the oldest mouse ever to have lived?
Yoda, a cute dwarf mouse, was named as the oldest mouse in 2004 at age 4 who lived with the much larger Princess Leia, in ‘a pathogen-free rest home for geriatric mice’ belonging to Dr. Richard Miller, professor of pathology in the Geriatrics Center of the Medical School. “Yoda is only the second mouse I know to have made it to his fourth birthday without the rigors of a severe calorie-restricted diet,” Miller says. “He’s the oldest mouse we’ve seen in 14 years of research on aged mice at U-M. The previous record-holder in our colony died nine days short of his 4th birthday; 100-year-old people are much more common than 4-year-old mice.” (ref)
What about Auto-Immune Diseases?
Auto-immune diseases (considered incurable to some) – get worse with aging for the same reason we loose general ability to fight off infections and attack cancer. Essentially the immune system looses it’s precision – it has two arms: the innate system and the adaptive – the adaptive side works by having polyclonality – a very wide diversity of cells with different rearrangements of parts of the genome that confer specificity of the immune cell to a particular target (which it may or may not encounter at some time in the future) – this polyclonality diminishes over life such that the cells which are targeted towards a given problem with the immune system are on average less precisely adapted towards it – so the immune system takes longer to do it’s job or doesn’t do it effectively – so with autoimmune system it looses it’s ability to distinguish between things that are foreign and things that are part of the body. So this could be powerfully addressed by the same measures taken to rejuvenate the immune system generally – regenerating the thyamis and illuminating senescent cells that are accumulating in the blood.
Big Bottlenecks
See Aubrey discuss this at timepoint: 38:50 Bottlenecks: which bottlenecks does Aubrey believes need most attention from the community of people who already believe aging is a problem that needs to be solved?
The first thing: Funding. The shortage of funding is still the biggest bottleneck.
The second thing: The need for policy makers to get on board with the ideas and understand what is coming – so it’s not only developing the therapies as quickly as possible, it’s also important that once they are developed, the therapies get disseminated as quick as possible to avoid complete chaos.
It’s very urgent to have proper discussions about this. Anticipating the anticipation – getting ready for the public anticipating these therapies instead of thinking that it’s all science fiction and is never going to happen.
Effective Advocacy
See Aubrey discuss this at timepoint: 42:47 Advocacy, it’s a big ask to get people from extreme opposition to supporting regenerative medicine. Nudging people a bit sideways is a lot earlier – that is getting them from complete offense to less offense, or getting people who are un-decided to be in favor of it.
Here are 2 of the main aspects of advocacy:
feasibility / importance – emphasize progress, embracement by the scientific community (see paper hallmarks of aging – single most highly cited paper on the biology of aging this decade) – defining the legitimacy of the damage repair approach – it’s not just a crazy hair brained idea …
desirability – concerns about (bad arguments : on overpopulation – oh don’t worry we will immigrate into space – the people who are concerned about this problem aren’t the ones who would like to go to space) – focus on more of the things that can generalize to desirable outcomes – so regenerative medicine will have side effects, like a longer lifespan, but also people will be more healthy at any given age compared to what they would be in they hadn’t had regenerative therapy – no body wants Alzheimer’s, or heart disease – if the outcome of regenerative medicine is that then it’s easier to sell.
We need a sense of proportion on possible future problems – will they generally be more serious than they are today? Talking about uploading, substrate independence, etc one is actively alienating the public – it’s better to create a foundation of credibility in the conversation before you decide to persuade anyone of anything. If we are going to get from here to the long term future we need advocacy now – the short term matters as well.
More on Advocacy here:
And here
Other Stuff
This interview covers a fair bit of ground, so here are some other points covered:
– Updates & progress at SENS
– Highlights of promising progress in regenerative medicine in general
– Recent funding successes, what can be achieved with this?
– Discussion on getting the message across
– desirability & feasibility of rejuvenation therapy
– What could be the future of regenerative medicine?
– Given progress so far, what can people alive today look forward to?
– Multi-factorial diseases – Fixing amyloid plaque buildup alone won’t cure Alzheimer’s – getting rid of amyloid plaque alone only produced mild cognitive benefits in Alzheimer’s patients. There is still the unaddressed issue of tangles… If you only get rid of one component in a multi-component problem then you don’t get to see much improvement of pathology – in just he same way one shouldn’t expect to see much of an overall increase in health & longevity if you only fix 5 of 7 things that need fixing (i.e. 5 of the 7 strands of SENS)
– moth-balling anti-telomerase approach to fighting cancer in favor of cancer immunotherapy (for the time being) as it’s side effects need to be compensated against… – Cancer immunotherapy – stimulating the bodies natural ability to attack cancer with it’s immune system -2 approaches – car-T (Chimeric Antigen Receptors and T cells), and checkpoint inhibiting drugs.. then there is training the immune system to identify neoantegens (stuff that all cancers produce)
Biography
Chief Science Officer, SENS Research Foundation, Mountain View, CA – http://sens.org
Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) biomedical research charity that performs and funds laboratory research dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also VP of New Technology Discovery at AgeX Therapeutics, a biotechnology startup developing new therapies in the field of biomedical gerontology. In addition, he is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He received his BA in computer science and Ph.D. in biology from the University of Cambridge. His research interests encompass the characterisation of all the types of self-inflicted cellular and molecular damage that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations. He is a highly sought-after speaker who gives 40-50 invited talks per year at scientific conferences, universities, companies in areas ranging from pharma to life insurance, and to the public.
Oisín Biotechnologies ground-breaking research and technology is demonstrating that the solution to mitigating the effects of age-related diseases is to address the damage created by the aging process itself. We have recently successfully launched our first subsidiary, Oisin Oncology, focusing in combating multiple cancers.
Interview with Stephen Hilbert
We cover the exciting scientific progress at Oisín, targeting senescent cells (dubbed ‘zombie cells’) to help them to die properly, rejuvenation therapy vs traditional approaches to combating disease, Oisín’s potential for aiding astronauts survive high levels of radiation in space, funding for the research and therapy/drug development and specifically Stephen’s background in corporate development in helping raise capital for Oisín and it’s research.
Are we close to achieving Robust Mouse Rejuvenation?
According to Aubrey de Grey we are about 5-6 years away fromrobust mouse rejuvenation (RBR) subject to the kind of funding SENS has received this year and the previous year (2017-2018). There has been progress in developing certain therapies .
Specifically, the goal of RBR is this:
Make normal, healthy two-year old mice (expected to live one more year) live three further years.
The type of mice: The ideal mouse to trail on is one that doesn’t naturally have a certain kind of congenital disease (that might on average only live 1.5 or 2 years) – because increasing their lifespan might only be a sign that you have solved their particular congenital disease.
Number of extra years: Consistently increasing mouse lifespan for an extra two years on top of their normal three year lifespans – essentially tripling their remaining lifespan.
When to begin the treatment: Don’t start treating the mice until they are already 2 years old – at a time where they would normally be 2 thirds of the way though their life (at or past middle age) and they would have one more year to live.
Why not start treating the mice earlier? The goal is to produce sufficiently dramatic results in a laboratory to convince the main-stream gerontology community such that they would willingly publicly endorse the idea that it is not impossible, but indeed it is only a matter of time before rejuvenation therapy will work in humans – that is to get out there on talk shows and in front of cameras and say all this.
The mainstream gerontology community are generally a bit conservative – they have vested interests in being successful in publishing papers, they get grants they have worries around peer review, they want tenure, and have a reputation to uphold. Gerontologists hold the keys to public trust – they are considered to be the authorities on aging.
Preliminary results from study showing normalized mouse survival at 140 weeks
Stephen heads up corporate development for Oisín Biotechnologies. He has served as a business advisor to Oisín since its inception and has served on several biotechnology company advisory boards, specializing in business strategy and capital formation. Prior to Oisín, his career spanned over 15 years in the banking industry where he served as trusted advisor to accredited investors around the globe. Most recently he headed up a specialty alternative investment for a company in San Diego, focusing in tax and insurance strategies for family offices and investment advisors. Stephen is the founder of several ventures in the areas of real estate small manufacturing of novelty gifts and strategic consulting. He serves on the Overlake Hospital’s Pulse Board, assists with Children’s Hospital Guild and is the incoming Chairman at the Columbia Tower Club, a member’s club in Seattle. LinkedIn Profile
Head of Corporate Strategy/Development Pre-Clinical Oisin Biotechnologies and OncoSenX
FightAging - Oisin Biotechnologies Produces Impressive Mouse Life Span Data from an Ongoing Study of Senescent Cell Clearance
FightAging reported: Oisin Biotechnologies is the company working on what is, to my eyes, the best of the best when it comes to the current crop of senolytic technologies, approaches capable of selectively destroying senescent cells in old tissues. Adding senescent cells to young mice has been shown to produce pathologies of aging, and removal of senescent cells can reverse those pathologies, and also extend life span. It is a very robust and reliable approach, with these observations repeated by numerous different groups using numerous different methodologies of senescent cell destruction. Most of the current senolytic development programs focus on small molecules, peptides, and the like. These are expensive to adjust, and will be tissue specific in ways that are probably challenging and expensive to alter, where such alteration is possible at all. In comparison, Oisin Biotechnologies builds their treatments atop a programmable suicide gene therapy; they can kill cells based on the presence of any arbitrary protein expressed within those cells. Right now the company is focused on p53 and p16, as these are noteworthy markers of cancerous and senescent cells. As further investigation of cellular senescence improves the understanding of senescent biochemistry, Oisin staff could quickly adapt their approach to target any other potential signal of senescence – or of any other type of cell that is best destroyed rather than left alone. Adaptability is a very valuable characteristic. The Oisin Biotechnologies staff are currently more than six months in to a long-term mouse life span study, using cohorts in which the gene therapy is deployed against either p16, p53, or both p16 and p53, plus a control group injected with phosphate buffered saline (PBS). The study commenced more than six months ago with mice that were at the time two years (104 weeks) old. When running a life span study, there is a lot to be said for starting with mice that are already old; it saves a lot of time and effort. The mice were randomly put into one of the four treatment groups, and then dosed once a month. As it turns out, the mice in which both p16 and p53 expressing cells are destroyed are doing very well indeed so far, in comparison to their peers. This is quite impressive data, even given the fact that the trial is nowhere near done yet.
I think our first ethical priority is to stop doing harm, and right now in our factory farms billions of non-human animals are being treated in ways that if our victims were human, we would get the perpetrators locked up for life. And the sentience (and what it’s worth the sapience) of a pig compares with the pre-linguistic toddler. A chicken perhaps may be no more intellectually advanced or sentient than a human infant. But before considering the suffering of free living animals we need to consider, I think, the suffering we’re causing our fellow creatures.
Essentially it’s a lifestyle choice – do we want to continue to exploit and abuse other sentient beings because we like the taste of their flesh, or do we want to embrace the cruelty free vegan lifestyle. Some people would focus on treating other sentient beings less inhumanely. I’d say that we really need an ethical revolution in which our focus is: how can we help other sentient beings rather than harm them?
It’s very straightforward indeed to be a vegetarian. Vegetarians tend to statistically live longer, they record high IQ scores, they tend to be slimmer – it’s very easy to be a vegetarian. A strict vegan lifestyle requires considerably more effort. But over the medium to long run I think our focus should be going vegan.
In the short run I think we should be closing factory farms and slaughterhouses. And given that factory farming and slaughterhouses are the greatest source of severe chronic readily avoidable suffering in the world today, any talk of intervening compassionate stewardship of the rest of the living world is fanciful.
Will ethical argument alone persuade us to stop exploiting & killing other non-human beings because we like the taste of their flesh? Possibly not. I think realistically one wants a twin track strategy that combines animal advocacy with the development of in-vitro meat. But I would strenuously urge anyone watching this program to consider giving up meat and animal products if you are ethically serious.
The final strand of the Abolitionist Project on earth however is free-living animals in nature. And it might seem ecologically illiterate to argue that it is going to be feasible to take care of elephants, zebras, and free living animals. Because after all – let’s say there is starvation, it’s in winter, if you start feeding a lot of starving herbivores – all this does is lead the next spring to a population explosion followed by ecological collapse & more suffering than before.
However what is potentially feasible, if we’re ethically serious, is to micromanage the entire living world – now this sounds extremely far fetched and utopian, but I’ll sketch how it is feasible. Later this century and beyond, every cubic meter of the planet is going to be computationally accessible to surveillance, micro-management and control. And if we want to, we can use fertility regulation & immuno-contraception to regulate population numbers – cross-species fertility control. Starting off presumably with higher vertebrates – elephants for instance – already now – in the Kruger National Park for example – in preference to the cruel practice of culling, population numbers are controlled by immuno-contraception.
So starting off with higher vertebrates but eventually in our wildlife parks, then across the phylogenetic tree, it will be possible to micromanage the living world.
And just as right now if you were to stumble across a small child who is drowning in a pond – you would be guilty of complicity in that child’s drowning if you didn’t pull the child out – exactly the same intimacy over the rest of the living world is going to be feasible later this century and beyond.
Now what about obligate carnivores – predators? Surely it’s inevitable that they’re going to continue to prey on herbivores, so that means one might intuitively suppose that the abolitionist project could never be completed. But even there, if we’re ethically serious there are workarounds – in-vitro meat – for instance big cats if they are offered in vitro meat, catnip flavored in-vitro meat – they’re not going to be tempted to chase after herbivores.
Alternatively, a little bit of genetic tweaking, and you no longer have an obligate carnivore.
I’m supposing here that we do want to preserve recognizable approximations of today’s so-called charismatic megafauna – many people are extremely unhappy at the idea that lions or tigers or snakes or crocodiles should go extinct. I’m not personally persuaded that the world would be a worse place without crocodiles or snakes, but if we do want to preserve them it’s possible genetically to treat them or provide in vitro meat so that they don’t actually do any harm to sentient beings.
Some species essentialists would respond that a lion that is no longer chasing, asphyxiating, disemboweling zebras is no longer truly a lion. But one might make the same argument that a homo sapiens who is no longer beating his rivals over their heads, or waging war or practicing infanticide, slavery and all the other ghastly practices of our evolutionary past, or for that matter wearing clothes, that which are that someone who adopts a more civilized life style are no longer truly human – which I can only say good.
And likewise, if there is a living world in which lions are pacifistic, if a lion so to speak is lying down with the lamb I would say that is much more civilized.
Compassionate Biology
See this exerpt from The Antispeciesist Revolution: If and when humans stop systematically harming other sentient beings, will our ethical duties to members of other species have been discharged? Not if the same ethical considerations as apply to members of other human races or age-groups apply also to members of other species of equivalent sentience. Thus if famine breaks out in sub-Saharan Africa and young human children are starving, then we recognise we have a duty to send aid; or better still, to take proactive to measures to ensure famines do not arise in the first instance, i.e. to provide not just food aid but family planning. So why not assist, say, starving free-living elephants? Until recently, no comparable interventions were feasible for members of other species. The technical challenges were insurmountable. Not least, the absence of cross-species fertility control technologies would have often made bad problems worse. Yet thanks to the exponential growth of computer power, every cubic metre of the planet will shortly be computationally accessible to micro-management, surveillance and control. Harnessed to biotechnology, nanotechnology and robotics, such tools confer unprecedented power over Nature. With unbridled power comes complicity. Ethically speaking, how many of the traditional cruelties of the living world do we wish to perpetuate? Orthodox conservation biologists argue we should not “interfere”: humans can’t “police” Nature. Antispeciesists disagree. Advocates of compassionate biology argue that humans and nonhumans alike should not be parasitised, starved, disembowelled, asphyxiated, or eaten alive.
As always, bioconservatives insist such miseries are “natural”; status quo bias runs deep. “”Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity””, observed George Bernard Shaw. Snuff movies in the guise of Nature documentaries are quite popular on Youtube, a counterpoint to the Disneyfied wildlife shows aired on mainstream TV. Moreover even sympathetic critics of compassionate biology might respond that helping free-living members of other species is prohibitively expensive. An adequate welfare safety-net scarcely exists for humans in many parts of the world. So how can we contemplate its extension to nonhumans – even just to large-brained, long-lived vertebrates in our Nature reserves? Provision of comprehensive healthcare for all free-living elephants, for example, might cost between two or three billion dollars annually. Compassionate stewardship of the living world would be technically daunting too, entailing ecosystem management, cross-species fertility control via immunocontraception, veterinary care, emergency famine-relief, GPS tracking and monitoring, and ultimately phasing out or genetically “reprogramming” carnivorous predators. The notional bill could approach the world’s 1.7 trillion-dollar annual arms budget. But irrespective of cost or timescale, if we are to be consistently non-speciesist, then decisions about resource allocation should be based not on species membership, but directly or indirectly on sentience. An elephant, for example, is at least as sentient as a human toddler – and may well be as sentient if not sapient as adult humans. If it is ethically obligatory to help sick or starving children, then it’s ethically obligatory to help sick or starving elephants – not just via crisis interventions but via long-term healthcare support.
A traditional conservation biologist might respond that elephants helped by humans are no longer truly wild. Yet on such a criterion, clothes-wearing humans or beneficiaries of food aid and family planning aren’t “wild” humans either. Why should this matter? “Free-living” and “wild” are conceptually distinct. To assume that the civilising process should be confined to our own species is mere speciesist prejudice. Humans, transhumans and posthumans must choose what forms of sentience we want to preserve and create on Earth and beyond. Humans already massively intervene in Nature, whether through habitat destruction, captive breeding programs for big cats, “rewilding”, etc. So the question is not whether humans should “interfere”, but rather what ethical principles should govern our interventions.
Speciesism. When is it ethically acceptable to harm another sentient being? On some fairly modest(1) assumptions, to harm or kill someone simply on the grounds they belong to a different gender, sexual orientation or ethnic group is unjustified. Such distinctions are real but ethically irrelevant. On the other hand, species membership is normally reckoned an ethically relevant criterion. Fundamental to our conceptual scheme is the pre-Darwinian distinction between “humans” and “animals”. In law, nonhuman animals share with inanimate objects the status of property. As property, nonhuman animals can be bought, sold, killed or otherwise harmed as humans see fit. In consequence, humans treat nonhuman animals in ways that would earn a life-time prison sentence without parole if our victims were human. From an evolutionary perspective, this contrast in status isn’t surprising. In our ancestral environment of adaptedness, the human capacity to hunt, kill and exploit sentient beings of other species was fitness-enhancing(2). Our moral intuitions have been shaped accordingly. Yet can we ethically justify such behaviour today?
Naively, one reason for disregarding the interests of nonhumans is the dimmer-switch model of consciousness. Humans matter more than nonhuman animals because (most) humans are more intelligent. Intuitively, more intelligent beings are more conscious than less intelligent beings; consciousness is the touchstone of moral status.
The problem with the dimmer-switch model is that it’s empirically unsupported, among vertebrates with central nervous systems at least. Microelectrode studies of the brains of awake human subjects suggest that the most intense forms of experience, for example agony, terror and orgasmic bliss, are mediated by the limbic system, not the prefrontal cortex. Our core emotions are evolutionarily ancient and strongly conserved. Humans share the anatomical and molecular substrates of our core emotions with the nonhuman animals whom we factory-farm and kill. By contrast, distinctively human cognitive capacities such as generative syntax, or the ability to do higher mathematics, are either phenomenologically subtle or impenetrable to introspection. To be sure, genetic and epigenetic differences exist between, say, a pig and a human being that explain our adult behavioural differences, e.g. the allele of the FOXP2(1) gene implicated in the human capacity for recursive syntax. Such mutations have little to do with raw sentience(1).
Antispeciesism. So what is the alternative to traditional anthropocentric ethics? Antispeciesism is not the claim that “All Animals Are Equal”, or that all species are of equal value, or that a human or a pig is equivalent to a mosquito. Rather the antispeciesist claims that, other things being equal, conscious beings of equivalent sentience deserve equal care and respect. A pig, for example, is of comparable sentience to a prelinguistic human toddler. As it happens, a pig is of comparable (or superior) intelligence to a toddler as well(5). However, such cognitive prowess is ethically incidental. If ethical status is a function of sentience, then to factory-farm and slaughter a pig is as ethically abhorrent as to factory-farm and slaughter a human baby. To exploit one and nurture the other expresses an irrational but genetically adaptive prejudice.
On the face of it, this antispeciesist claim isn’t just wrong-headed; it’s absurd. Philosopher Jonathan Haidt speaks of “moral dumfounding”(6), where we just know something is wrong but can’t articulate precisely why. Haidt offers the example of consensual incest between an adult brother and sister who use birth control. For evolutionary reasons, we “just know” such an incestuous relationship is immoral. In the case of any comparisons of pigs with human infants and toddlers, we “just know” at some deep level that any alleged equivalence in status is unfounded. After all, if there were no ethically relevant distinction between a pig and a toddler, or between a battery-farmed chicken and a human infant, then the daily behaviour of ordinary meat-eating humans would be sociopathic – which is crazy. In fact, unless the psychiatrists’ bible, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is modified explicitly to exclude behaviour towards nonhumans, most of us do risk satisfying its diagnostic criteria for the disorder. Even so, humans often conceive of ourselves as animal lovers. Despite the horrors of factory-farming, most consumers of meat and animal products are clearly not sociopaths in the normal usage of the term; most factory-farm managers are not wantonly cruel; and the majority of slaughterhouse workers are not sadists who delight in suffering. Serial killers of nonhuman animals are just ordinary men doing a distasteful job – “obeying orders” – on pain of losing their livelihoods.
Should we expect anything different? Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt spoke famously of the “banality of evil”(7). If twenty-first century humans are collectively doing something posthuman superintelligence will reckon monstrous, akin to the [human] Holocaust or Atlantic slave trade, then it’s easy to assume our moral intuitions would disclose this to us. Our intuitions don’t disclose anything of the kind; so we sleep easy. But both natural selection and the historical record offer powerful reasons for doubting the trustworthiness of our naive moral intuitions. So the possibility that human civilisation might be founded upon some monstrous evil should be taken seriously – even if the possibility seems transparently absurd at the time.
One possible speciesist response is to raise the question of “potential”. Even if a pig is as sentient as a human toddler, there is a fundamental distinction between human toddlers and pigs. Only a toddler has the potential to mature into a rational adult human being.
The problem with this response is that it contradicts our treatment of humans who lack “potential”. Thus we recognise that a toddler with a progressive disorder who will never live to celebrate his third birthday deserves at least as much love, care and respect as his normally developing peers – not to be packed off to a factory-farm on the grounds it’s a shame to let good food go to waste. We recognise a similar duty of care for mentally handicapped adult humans and cognitively frail old people. For sure, historical exceptions exist to this perceived duty of care for vulnerable humans, e.g. the Nazi “euthanasia” program, with its eugenicist conception of “life unworthy of life”. But by common consent, we value young children and cognitively challenged adults for who they are, not simply for who they may – or may not – one day become. On occasion, there may controversially be instrumental reasons for allocating more care and resources to a potential genius or exceptionally gifted child than to a normal human. Yet disproportionate intraspecies resource allocation may be justified, not because high IQ humans are more sentient, but because of the anticipated benefits to society as a whole.
Practical Implications. 1. Invitrotarianism. The greatest source of severe, chronic and readily avoidable suffering in the world today is man-made: factory farming. Humans currently slaughter over fifty billion sentient beings each year. One implication of an antispeciesist ethic is that factory farms should be shut and their surviving victims rehabilitated.
In common with most ethical revolutions in history, the prospect of humanity switching to a cruelty-free diet initially strikes most practically-minded folk as utopian dreaming. “Realists” certainly have plenty of hard evidence to bolster their case. As English essayist William Hazlitt observed, “The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.” Without the aid of twenty-first century technology, the mass slaughter and abuse of our fellow animals might continue indefinitely. Yet tissue science technology promises to allow consumers to become moral agents without the slightest hint of personal inconvenience. Lab-grown in vitro meat produced in cell culture rather than a live animal has long been a staple of science fiction. But global veganism – or its ethical invitrotarian equivalent – is no longer a futuristic fantasy. Rapid advances in tissue engineering mean that in vitro meat will shortly be developed and commercialised. Today’s experimental cultured mincemeat can be supplanted by mass-manufactured gourmet steaks for the consumer market. Perhaps critically for its rapid public acceptance, in vitro meat does not need to be genetically modified – thereby spiking the guns of techno-luddites who might otherwise worry about “FrankenBurgers”. Indeed, cultured meat products will be more “natural” in some ways than their antibiotic-laced counterparts derived from factory-farmed animals.
Momentum for commercialisation is growing. Non-profit research organisations like New Harvest(8), working to develop alternatives to conventionally-produced meat, have been joined by hard-headed businessmen. Visionary entrepreneur and Stanford academic Peter Thiel has just funnelled $350,000 into Modern Meadow, a start-up that aims to combine 3D printing with in vitro meat cultivation. Within the next decade or so, gourmet steaks could be printed out from biological materials. In principle, the technology should be scalable.
Tragically, billions of nonhuman animals will grievously suffer and die this century at human hands before the dietary transition is complete. Humans are not obligate carnivores; eating meat and animal products is a lifestyle choice. “But I like the taste!” is not a morally compelling argument. Vegans and animal advocates ask whether we are ethically entitled to wait on a technological fix? The antispeciesist answer is clear: no.
2. Compassionate Biology. If and when humans stop systematically harming other sentient beings, will our ethical duties to members of other species have been discharged? Not if the same ethical considerations as apply to members of other human races or age-groups apply also to members of other species of equivalent sentience. Thus if famine breaks out in sub-Saharan Africa and young human children are starving, then we recognise we have a duty to send aid; or better still, to take proactive measures to ensure famines do not arise in the first instance, i.e. to provide not just food aid but family planning. So why not assist, say, starving free-living elephants? Until recently, no comparable interventions were feasible for members of other species. The technical challenges were insurmountable. Not least, the absence of cross-species fertility control technologies would have often made bad problems worse. Yet thanks to the exponential growth of computer power, every cubic metre of the planet will shortly be computationally accessible to micro-management, surveillance and control. Harnessed to biotechnology, nanotechnology and robotics, such tools confer unprecedented power over Nature. With unbridled power comes complicity. Ethically speaking, how many of the traditional cruelties of the living world do we wish to perpetuate? Orthodox conservation biologists argue we should not “interfere”: humans can’t “police” Nature. Antispeciesists disagree. Advocates of compassionate biology argue that humans and nonhumans alike should not be parasitised, starved, disembowelled, asphyxiated, or eaten alive.
As always, bioconservatives insist such miseries are “natural”; status quo bias runs deep. “Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity”, observed George Bernard Shaw. Snuff movies in the guise of Nature documentaries are quite popular on Youtube, a counterpoint to the Disneyfied wildlife shows aired on mainstream TV. Moreover even sympathetic critics of compassionate biology might respond that helping free-living members of other species is prohibitively expensive. An adequate welfare safety-net scarcely exists for humans in many parts of the world. So how can we contemplate its extension to nonhumans – even just to large-brained, long-lived vertebrates in our Nature reserves? Provision of comprehensive healthcare for all free-living elephants(10), for example, might cost between two or three billion dollars annually. Compassionate stewardship of the living world would be technically daunting too, entailing ecosystem management, cross-species fertility control via immunocontraception, veterinary care, emergency famine-relief, GPS tracking and monitoring, and ultimately phasing out or genetically “reprogramming”(11) carnivorous predators. The notional bill could approach the world’s 1.7 trillion-dollar annual arms budget. But irrespective of cost or timescale, if we are to be consistently non-speciesist, then decisions about resource allocation should be based not on species membership, but directly or indirectly on sentience. An elephant, for example, is at least as sentient as a human toddler. If it is ethically obligatory to help sick or starving children, then it’s ethically obligatory to help sick or starving elephants – not just via crisis interventions but via long-term healthcare support.
A traditional conservation biologist might respond that elephants helped by humans are no longer truly wild. Yet on such a criterion, clothes-wearing humans or beneficiaries of food aid and family planning aren’t “wild” humans either. Why should this matter? “Free-living” and “wild” are conceptually distinct. To assume that the civilising process should be confined to our own species is mere speciesist prejudice. Humans, transhumans and posthumans must choose what forms of sentience we want to preserve and create on Earth and beyond. Humans already massively intervene in Nature, whether though habitat destruction, captive breeding programs for big cats, “rewilding”, etc. So the question is not whether humans should “interfere”, but rather what ethical principles should govern our interventions(12).
Speciesism and Superintelligence. Why should transhumanists care about the suffering of nonhuman animals? This is not a “feel-good” issue. One reason we should care cuts to the heart of the future of life in the universe. Transhumanists differ over whether our posthuman successors will most likely be nonbiological artificial superintelligence; or cyborgs who effectively merge with our hyperintelligent machines; or our own recursively self-improving biological descendents who modify their own genetic source code and bootstrap their way to full-spectrum superintelligence(13). Regardless of the dominant lifeform of the posthuman era, biological humans have a vested interest in the behaviour of intellectually advanced beings towards cognitively humble creatures – if we survive at all. Compared to posthuman superintelligence, archaic humans may be no smarter than pigs or chickens – or perhaps worms. This does not augur well for Homo sapiens. Western-educated humans tend to view Jains as faintly ridiculous for practising ahimsa, or harmlessness, sweeping the ground in front of them to avoid inadvertently treading on insects. How quixotic! Yet the fate of sentient but cognitively humble lifeforms in relation to vastly superior intelligence is precisely the issue at stake as we confront the prospect of posthuman superintelligence. How can we ensure a Jain-like concern for comparatively simple-minded creatures such as ourselves? Why should superintelligences care any more than humans about the well-being of their intellectual inferiors? Might distinctively human-friendly superintelligence turn out to be as intellectually-incoherent as, say, Aryan-friendly superintelligence? If human primitives are to prove worthy of conservation, how can we implement technologies of impartial friendliness towards other sentients? And if posthumans do care, how do we know that a truly benevolent superintelligence wouldn’t turn Darwinian life into utilitronium with a communal hug?
Viewed in such a light, biological humanity’s prospects in a future world of superintelligence might seem dire. However, this worry expresses a one-dimensional conception of general intelligence. No doubt the nature of mature superintelligence is humanly unknowable. But presumably full-spectrum(14) superintelligence entails, at the very least, a capacity to investigate, understand and manipulate both the formal and the subjective properties of mind. Modern science aspires to an idealised “view from nowhere”(15), an impartial, God-like understanding of the natural universe, stripped of any bias in perspective and expressed in the language of mathematical physics. By the same token, a God-like superintelligence must also be endowed with the capacity impartially to grasp all possible first-person perspectives – not a partial and primitive Machiavellian cunning of the kind adaptive on the African savannah, but an unimaginably radical expansion of our own fitfully growing circle of empathy.
What such superhuman perspective-taking ability might entail is unclear. We are familiar with people who display abnormally advanced forms of “mind-blind”(16), autistic intelligence in higher mathematics and theoretical physics. Less well known are hyper-empathisers who display unusually sophisticated social intelligence. Perhaps the most advanced naturally occurring hyper-empathisers exhibit mirror-touch synaesthesia(17). A mirror-touch synaesthete cannot be unfriendly towards you because she feels your pain and pleasure as if it were her own. In principle, such unusual perspective-taking capacity could be generalised and extended with reciprocal neuroscanning technology and telemetry into a kind of naturalised telepathy, both between and within species. Interpersonal and cross-species mind-reading could in theory break down hitherto invincible barriers of ignorance between different skull-bound subjects of experience, thereby eroding the anthropocentric, ethnocentric and egocentric bias that has plagued life on Earth to date. Today, the intelligence-testing community tends to treat facility at empathetic understanding as if it were a mere personality variable, or at best some sort of second-rate cognition for people who can’t do IQ tests. But “mind-reading” can be a highly sophisticated, cognitively demanding ability. Compare, say, the sixth-order intentionality manifested by Shakespeare. Thus we shouldn’t conceive superintelligence as akin to God imagined by someone with autistic spectrum disorder. Rather full-spectrum superintelligence entails a God’s-eye capacity to understand the rich multi-faceted first-person perspectives of diverse lifeforms whose mind-spaces humans would find incomprehensibly alien.
An obvious objection arises. Just because ultra-intelligent posthumans may be capable of displaying empathetic superintelligence, how do we know such intelligence will be exercised? The short answer is that we don’t: by analogy, today’s mirror-touch synaesthetes might one day neurosurgically opt to become mind-blind. But then equally we don’t know whether posthumans will renounce their advanced logico-mathematical prowess in favour of the functional equivalent of wireheading. If they do so, then they won’t be superintelligent. The existence of diverse first-person perspectives is a fundamental feature of the natural world, as fundamental as the second law of thermodynamics or the Higgs boson. To be ignorant of fundamental features of the world is to be an idiot savant: a super-Watson(18) perhaps, but not a superintelligence(19).
High-Tech Jainism? Jules Renard once remarked, “I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t.” God’s conspicuous absence from the natural world needn’t deter us from asking what an omniscient, omnipotent, all-merciful deity would want humans to do with our imminent God-like powers. For we’re on the brink of a momentous evolutionary transition in the history of life on Earth. Physicist Freeman Dyson predicts we’ll soon “be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses”(20). The ethical risks and opportunities for apprentice deities are huge.
On the one hand, Karl Popper warns, “Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell”(21). Twentieth-century history bears out such pessimism. Yet for billions of sentient beings from less powerful species, existing life on Earth is hell. They end their miserable lives on our dinner plates: “for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka”, writes Jewish Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer(22).
In a more utopian vein, some utterly sublime scenarios are technically feasible later this century and beyond. It’s not clear whether experience below Sidgwick’s(23) “hedonic zero” has any long-term future. Thanks to molecular neuroscience, mastery of the brain’s reward circuitry could make everyday life wonderful beyond the bounds of normal human experience. There is no technical reason why the pitiless Darwinian struggle of the past half billion years can’t be replaced by an earthly paradise for all creatures great and small. Genetic engineering could allow “the lion to lie down with the lamb.” Enhancement technologies could transform killer apes into saintly smart angels. Biotechnology could abolish suffering throughout the living world. Artificial intelligence could secure the well-being of all sentience in our forward light-cone. Our quasi-immortal descendants may be animated by gradients of intelligent bliss orders of magnitude richer than anything physiologically feasible today.
Such fantastical-sounding scenarios may never come to pass. Yet if so, this won’t be because the technical challenges prove too daunting, but because intelligent agents choose to forgo the molecular keys to paradise for something else. Critically, the substrates of bliss don’t need to be species-specific or rationed. Transhumanists believe the well-being of all sentience(24) is the bedrock of any civilisation worthy of the name.
Also see this related interview with David Pearce on ‘Antispecism & Compassionate Stewardship’:
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NOTES
1. How modest? A venerable tradition in philosophical meta-ethics is anti-realism. The meta-ethical anti-realist proposes that claims such as it’s wrong to rape women, kill Jews, torture babies (etc) lack truth value – or are simply false. (cf. JL Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Viking Press, 1977.) Here I shall assume that, for reasons we simply don’t understand, the pain-pleasure axis discloses the world’s inbuilt metric of (dis)value. Meta-ethical anti-realists may instead wish to interpret this critique of speciesism merely as casting doubt on its internal coherence rather than a substantive claim that a non-speciesist ethic is objectively true.
2. Extreme violence towards members of other tribes and races can be fitness-enhancing too. See, e.g. Richard Wrangham & Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
3. Fisher SE, Scharff C (2009). “FOXP2 as a molecular window into speech and language”. Trends Genet. 25 (4): 166–77. doi:10.1016/j.tig.2009.03.002. PMID 19304338.
4. Interpersonal and interspecies comparisons of sentience are of course fraught with problems. Comparative studies of how hard a human or nonhuman animal will work to avoid or obtain a particular stimulus give one crude behavioural indication. Yet we can go right down to the genetic and molecular level, e.g. interspecies comparisons of SCN9A genotype. (cf. http://www.pnas.org/? content/early/2010/02/23/?0913181107.full.pdf) We know that in humans the SCN9A gene modulates pain-sensitivity. Some alleles of SCN9A give rise to hypoalgesia, others alleles to hyperalgesia. Nonsense mutations yield congenital insensitivity to pain. So we could systematically compare the SCN9A gene and its homologues in nonhuman animals. Neocortical chauvinists will still be sceptical of non-mammalian sentience, pointing to the extensive role of cortical processing in higher vertebrates. But recall how neuroscanning techniques reveal that during orgasm, for example, much of the neocortex effectively shuts down. Intensity of experience is scarcely diminished.
5. Held S, Mendl M, Devereux C, and Byrne RW. 2001. “Studies in social cognition: from primates to pigs”. Animal Welfare 10:S209-17.
6. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Pantheon Books, 2012.
7. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Viking Press, 1963.
12. The scholarly literature on the problem of wild animal suffering is still sparse. But perhaps see Arne Naess, “Should We Try To Relieve Clear Cases of Suffering in Nature?”, published in The Selected Works of Arne Naess, Springer, 2005; Oscar Horta, “The Ethics of the Ecology of Fear against the Nonspeciesist Paradigm: A Shift in the Aims of Intervention in Nature”, Between the Species, Issue X, August 2010. http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/bts/vol13/iss10/10/ ; Brian Tomasik, “The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering”, http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/suffering-nature.html ; and the first print-published plea for phasing out carnivorism in Nature, Jeff McMahan’s “The Meat Eaters”, The New York Times. September 19, 2010. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/the-meat-eaters/
13. Singularity Hypotheses, A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment, Eden, A.H.; Moor, J.H.; Søraker, J.H.; Steinhart, E. (Eds.) Spinger 2013. http://singularityhypothesis.blogspot.co.uk/p/table-of-contents.html
14. David Pearce, The Biointelligence Explosion. (preprint), 2012. https://www.biointelligence-explosion.com.
15. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere , OUP, 1989.
16. Simon Baron-Cohen (2009). “Autism: the empathizing–systemizing (E-S) theory” (PDF). Ann N Y Acad Sci 1156: 68–80. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04467.x. PMID 19338503.
17. Banissy, M. J. & Ward, J. (2007). Mirror-touch synesthesia is linked with empathy. Nature Neurosci. doi: 10.1038/nn1926.
18. Stephen Baker. Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2011.
19. Orthogonality or convergence? For an alternative to the convergence thesis, see Nick Bostrom, “The Superintelligent Will: Motivation and Instrumental Rationality in Advanced Artificial Agents”, 2012, http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf; and Eliezer Yudkowsky, Carl Shulman, Anna Salamon, Rolf Nelson, Steven Kaas, Steve Rayhawk, Zack Davis, and Tom McCabe. “Reducing Long-Term Catastrophic Risks from Artificial Intelligence”, 2010. http://singularity.org/files/ReducingRisks.pdf
20. Freeman Dyson, “When Science & Poetry Were Friends”, New York Review of Books, August 13, 2009.
21. As quoted in Jon Winokur, In Passing: Condolences and Complaints on Death, Dying, and Related Disappointments, Sasquatch Books, 2005.
22. Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Letter Writer, 1964.
23. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics. London, 1874, 7th ed. 1907.
24. The Transhumanist Declaration (1998, 2009). http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-declaration/
The topic of Moral Enhancement is controversial (and often misrepresented); it is considered by many to be repugnant – provocative questions arise like “who’s morals?”, “who are the ones to be morally enhanced?”, “will it be compulsory?”, “won’t taking a morality pill decrease the value of the intended morality if it skips the difficult process we normally go through to become better people?”, “Shouldn’t people be concerned that use of enhancements which alter character traits might consumer’s authenticity?”
Humans have a built in capacity of learning moral systems from their parents and other people. We are not born with any particular moral [code] – but with the ability to learn it just like we learn languages. The problem is of course this built in facility might have worked quite well back in the Stone Age when we were evolving in small tribal communities – but doesn’t work that well when surrounded with a high-tech civilization, millions of other people and technology that could be potentially very dangerous. So we might need to update our moral systems and that is the interesting question of moral enhancement: can we make ourselves more fit for a current work?Anders Sandberg - Are we morally equipped for the future?
Humans have an evolved capacity to learn moral systems – we became more adept at learning moral systems that aided our survival in the ancestral environment – but are our moral instincts fit for the future?
Let’s build some context. For millennia humans have lived in complex social structures constraining and encouraging certain types of behaviour. More recently for similar reasons people go through years of education at the end of which (for the most part) are more able to morally function in the modern world – though this world is very different from that of our ancestors, and when considering the possibilities for vastly radical change at breakneck speed in the future, it’s hard to know how humans will keep up both intellectually and ethically. This is important to consider as the degree to which we shape the future for the good depends both on how well and how ethically we solve the problems needed to achieve change that on balance (all things equal) benefits humanity (and arguably all morally relevant life-forms).
Can we engineer ourselves to be more ethically fit for the future?
Peter Singer discussed how our circles of care and compassion have expanded over the years – through reason we have been able to expand our natural propensity to act morally and the circumstances in which we act morally.
We may need to expand our circle of ethical consideration to include artificial life – considering certain types of software as moral patients.
So, if we think we could use a boost in our propensity for ethical progress,
How do we actually achieve ideal Moral Enhancement?
That’s a big topic (see a list of papers on the subject of ME here) – the answers may depend on what our goals and preferences. One idea (among many others) is to regulate the level of Oxytocin (the cuddle hormone) – though this may come with the drawback of increasing distrust in the out-group. Since morality depends on us being able to make accurate predictions and solve complex ethical problems, ‘Intelligence Enhancement‘ could be an effective aspect of moral enhancement.
Morality is dependent on us being able to predict what’s going to happen when we do something. So various forms of intelligence enhancement might be very useful also for becoming more moral. Our ability to control our reactions that allow our higher-order values to control our lower order values is also important, that might actually require us to literally rewire or have biochips that help us do it.Anders Sandberg - Are we morally equipped for the future?
How we decide whether to use Moral Enhancement Therapy will be interesting – it may be needed to help solve global coordination problems; to increase the likelihood that we will, as a civilization, cooperate and cope with many known and as yet to be realised complex ethical quandaries as we move through times of unprecedented social and technological change.
So humans have a kind of built-in capacity of learning moral systems from their parents and other people we’re not born with any particular moral [code] but the ability to learn it just like we can learn languages. The problem is of course this built-in facility might have worked quite well back in the Stone Age when we were evolving in small tribal communities – but doesn’t work that well when surrounded with a high-tech civilization, millions of other people and technology that could be potentially very dangerous. So we might need to update our moral systems. And that is the interesting question of moral enhancement:
can we make ourselves more fit for a current work?
And what kind of fitness should we be talking about?
For example we might want to improve on altruism – that we should be coming to strangers. But in a big society, in a big town – of course there are going to be some stranger’s that you shouldn’t trust. So it’s not just blind trust you want to enhance – you actually want to enhance ability to make careful judgements; to figure out what’s going to happen on whom you can trust. So maybe you want to have some other aspect, maybe the care – the circle of care – is what you want to expand.
Peter Singer pointed out that there are circles of care and compassion have been slowly expanding from our own tribe and their own gender, to other genders, to other people and eventually maybe to other species. But this is still biologically based a lot of it is going on here in the brain and might be modified. Maybe we should artificially extend these circles of care to make sure that we actually do care about those entities we ought to be caring about. This might be a problem of course, because some of these agents might be extremely different for what we used to.
For example machine intelligence might produce more machines or software that is a ‘moral patient’ – we actually ought to be caring about the suffering of software. That might be very tricky because our pattern receptors up in the brain are not very tuned for that – we tend to think that if it’s got a face and the speaks then it’s human and then we can care about it. But who thinks about Google? Maybe we could get super-intelligences that we actually ought to care a lot about, but we can’t recognize them at all because they’re so utterly different from ourselves.
So there are some easy ways of modifying how we think and react – for example by taking a drug. So the hormone oxytocin is sometimes called ‘the cuddle hormone’ – it’s released when breastfeeding and when having bodily contact with your loved one, and it generally seems to be making us more altruistic; more willing to trust strangers. You can kind of sniff it and run an economic game and you can immediately see a change in response. It might also make you a bit more ego-centric. It does enlarge feelings of comfort and family friendliness – except that it’s only within what you consider to be your family. So we might want to tweak that.
Similarly we might think about adding links to our brains that allow us to think in better ways. After all, morality is dependent on us being able to predict what’s going to happen when we do something. So various forms of intelligence enhancement might be very useful also for becoming more moral. Our ability to control our reactions that allow our higher-order values to control our lower order values is also important, that might actually require us to literally rewire or have biochips that help us do it.
But most important is that we need the information we need to retrain the subtle networks in a brain in order to think better. And that’s going to require something akin to therapy – it might not necessarily be about lying on a sofa and telling your psychologist about your mother. It might very well be a bit of training, a bit of cognitive enhancement, maybe a bit of brain scanning – to figure out what actually ails you. It’s probably going to look very very different from anything Freud or anybody else envisioned for the future.
But I think in the future we’re actually going to try to modify ourselves so we’re going to be extra certain, maybe even extra moral, so we can function in a complex big world.
Related Papers
Neuroenhancement of Love and Marriage: The Chemicals Between Us
Anders contributed to this paper ‘Neuroenhancement of Love and Marriage: The Chemicals Between Us‘. This paper reviews the evolutionary history and biology of love and marriage. It examines the current and imminent possibilities of biological manipulation of lust, attraction and attachment, so called neuroenhancement of love. We examine the arguments for and against these biological interventions to influence love. We argue that biological interventions offer an important adjunct to psychosocial interventions, especially given the biological limitations inherent in human love.
Human Engineering and Climate Change
Anders also contributed to the paper “Human Engineering and Climate Change” which argues that cognitive, moral and biological enhancement could increase human ecological sustainability.
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Note John is also a deontologist. Perhaps there should exist an ideal language that can fully describe ethics – does this mean that ideally there is no need for utilitarianism? I’ll leave that question for another post.
In this 
Christof Koch is the President and Chief Scientific Officer of the 
Merging with machines is on the horizon and Nanotechnology will be key to achieving this. The ‘Holy Grail of Nanotechnology’ is the replicator: A microscopic robot that rearranges molecules into desired structures. At the moment, molecular assemblers exist in nature in us, as cells and ribosomes.
Why not start treating the mice earlier? The goal is to produce sufficiently dramatic results in a laboratory to convince the main-stream gerontology community, such that they would willingly publicly endorse the idea that it is not impossible, but indeed it is only a matter of time before rejuvenation therapy will work in humans – that is to get out there on talk shows and in front of cameras and say all this.
Yoda, a cute dwarf mouse, was named as the oldest mouse in 2004 at age 4 who lived with the much larger Princess Leia, in ‘a pathogen-free rest home for geriatric mice’ belonging to Dr. Richard Miller, professor of pathology in the Geriatrics Center of the Medical School. “Yoda is only the second mouse I know to have made it to his fourth birthday without the rigors of a severe calorie-restricted diet,” Miller says. “He’s the oldest mouse we’ve seen in 14 years of research on aged mice at U-M. The previous record-holder in our colony died nine days short of his 4th birthday; 100-year-old people are much more common than 4-year-old mice.” (
Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) biomedical research charity that performs and funds laboratory research dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also VP of New Technology Discovery at AgeX Therapeutics, a biotechnology startup developing new therapies in the field of biomedical gerontology. In addition, he is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He received his BA in computer science and Ph.D. in biology from the University of Cambridge. His research interests encompass the characterisation of all the types of self-inflicted cellular and molecular damage that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations. He is a highly sought-after speaker who gives 40-50 invited talks per year at scientific conferences, universities, companies in areas ranging from pharma to life insurance, and to the public.
