Tag Archives: transhumanism

And as long as I’m posting videos today…

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….here’s a great one from over on anansi133‘s blog.

“Disabled” and “not disabled” are not binary states, and increasingly, we’re learning to make the distinctions irrelevant. I think we’re approaching the time when replacements to parts of our body, instead of being clunky and inferior in every way to the original, are actually improvements; this is already happening in some specific niches, such as in track and field, where the International Olympic Committee is reluctant to allow legless athletes to compete with normal athletes because of the perception that sprinting prosthetics are superior to natural legs, and give the nominally “disabled” athlete an unfair advantage.

Personally, I’d like to see an athletic event similar to the original Can-Am racing event, designed to push technology right up against its limits; the rules might be something like “any augmentation or prosthetic is permissible as long as it does not contain its own power source and is powered completely by the body of the athlete who wears it.” I bet we’d see some really interesting stuff (four-second hundred-yard dash, anyone?). But I digress.

Anyway, I think the intersection of disability and transhumanism is kind of fascinating, and I find it interesting that it may end up being nominally “disabled” people who lead the way.

Biochemistry and sex…and hey, multiple orgasms!

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A few days ago, someone on my flist posted something that had a casual mention of a drug that is used to cause lactation. I don’t remember who it was, or what the post was actually about, see, but I ended up getting sucked down the Intertubes for hours because if ot, and it was some hours before I re-surfaced in the middle of a lake many miles away.

Lactation in human beings is largely mediated by a hormone called, naturally enough, “prolactin.” But that’s not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is about sex.

This is prolactin. It’s a hormone produced by human beings in the breast during breast feeding (it causes the production of milk) and in the brain during orgasm. As is typical with many hormones, it serves double duty and has a number of different roles; evolutionary biology never starts with a clean slate, so we get hormones in one part of the body repurposed to do something completely different in another part of the body (and we also get fucked-up design night mares like the knee…but I digress).

Its role in the brain is interesting. it’s what keeps you from wanting to fuck all the time.

When (most) people have an orgasm, there’s a drop in sexual arousal immediately afterward. There’s usually a refractory period, during which you can’t get off again, and there’s a generalized, overall decrease in libido. The length of time it lasts varies all over the map; for some folks it’s a few minutes, for other folks it’s the rest of the day, or at least until the rerun of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is over. Prolactin is the cause.

When it’s released in the brain during and after orgasm, the role of prolactin is to stomp all over your arousal like it was a narc at a biker rally. A while ago, a bunch of scientists far better at getting funded than I am worked out a way to get paid for watching people masturbate; they found some heroic volunters, hooked them up to blood sampling equipment, then monitored the levels of various hormones in their blood while the volunteers masturbated to orgasm. The experiment was repeated with volunteers who could experience multiple orgasms.

What they found, aside from the fact that getting paid to watch women masturbate is really hot, is that the production of prolactin is directly correlated to the post-orgasmic crash; the prolactin remains in the body for hours (or longer); while the level of prolactin is high, arousal is difficult or impossible; and people who have multiple orgasms don’t have this spike in prolactin in their blood after they get off.

All this, I already knew.

Being the transhumanist that I am, which is often just a way of saying being the pragmatist that I am, I’ve long thought that the easiest path to becoming multiply orgasmic would probably be to develop a drug that blocks the action of prolactin. Snap, job done. Take a pill, get off again and again and again and again. And then some more after that.

What I didn’t realize was that such drugs already exist.

So here I am, reading LJ, and I find a passing reference to a drug that induces lactation. Since I hadn’t heard of it before, I do what I always do with novel words or ideas–I consulted the Oracle at Google.

The Oracle at Google is wise and all-knowing, but she can also be a temperamental and difficult oracle, for she often sows her information with the seeds of more things you didn’t know, which in turn lead to more things you didnt know, and still more things you didn’t know, inducing you to submerge yourself in the waters of human knowledge and not come up for air until you’re reading about the history of Hadrian’s Wall when all you’d asked for was perhaps the best ways to trim a cat’s claws.

Anyway, lactation can be induced in women by means of drugs that enhance the action of prolactin, or that stimulate prolactin production. Lactation can also be prevented, naturally enough, by drugs which block the effects of prolactin, of which there are two, cabergoline and bromocriptine.

Now, there are a lot of other reasons why you might want to block prolactin, which have nothing to do with lactation. Excess prolactin is responsible for a number of other conditions; certain forms of pituitary disease cause excess levels of prolactin, which can lead to cancers, arthritis and other autoimmune diseases, and a whole host of other stuff you don’t want. So there’s a medical need for drugs that block prolactin.

As it turns out, there’s a relationship between prolactin and a completely different compound, the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine also serves multiple functions. It’s the neurotransmitter that signals nerves in your voluntary motor centers of your brain; when you think about moving your arm, your motor centers produce dopamine, which turns into the nerve impulses that make your arm actually move.

It’s also a key component of the so-called “reward center” of the brain that mediates feelings of pleasure; when you delight in anything from a beautiful painting to the knowledge that you’re getting paid to watch people masturbate, dopamine is the reason. And dopamine mediates much of the sexual system of the brain, including the functions that cause physical arousal.

Dopamine and prolactin are mutually antagonistic. Dopamine tends to inhibit the function and production of prolactin, and excess prolactin tends to inhibit the function of dopamine. For that reasons, things that are antagonistic to prolactin tend to enhance the function or quantity of dopamine in the brain, and vice-versa.

Okay, so here’s where things get really cool.

There is a devastating disease called Parkinson’s disease which results in gradual, irreversible destruction of the dopamine-producing cells in the motor area of the brain, which leads to gradual, creeping paralysis. Because it’s caused by the loss of dopamine-producing cells, anything which acts to stimulate the production of dopamine in the brain will tend to reverse the paralysis, so dopamine-enhancing drugs are often used to treat Parkinson’s.

Now, as I’ve already mentioned, drugs that block prolactin tend to enhance dopamine, and vice versa. The drug bromocriptine is a prolactin antagonist and a dopamine agonist; for that reason, it’s often used to treat both Parkinson’s disease and certain pituitary disorders that cause excess prolactin production. The down side is that it has a number of fairly nasty side effects in some people, including such unpleasantness as psychosis.

Cabergoline is another drug that works the same way as bromocriptine; like bromocriptine, cabergoline is used to treat Parkinson’s disease and pituitary disease. It, too, blocks prolactin and enhances dopamine, and it has fewer nasty side effects.

One interesting side effect reported in both men and women being treated for things like Parkinson’s is multiple orgasms.

Which is a hell of a side effect, if you ask me.

In fact, cabergoline (and, to a lesser extent, bromocriptine) are sometimes prescribed off-label to counteract the sexual side effects of antidepressants (which modify the action of dopamine), and as treatments for sexual dysfunction.

So it turns out, as is often the case, that not only was I right in thinking that a prolactin-blocking drug might allow folks to have multiple orgasms, but that, as usual, other folks had already beaten me to the punch.

The moral lesson here is to be careful what you write about in your LiveJournal. The simple mention of an unfamiliar word can suck someone down into the bowels of the Internet for hours on end, and not only that, can spread viral-like through LiveJournal psts to other folks, who may get sucked down for hours on end plumbing the depths of biochemistry or stellar nucleosynthesis, as this post in shiva-kun‘s journal so aptly shows. In the interests of getting things done in the office, I hereby ask that all the folks on my friends list refrain from posting anything interesting, and instead confine themselves to discussions of reruns of “Friends” for the next three days, kay?

Some thoughts on death

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So a couple of days ago, joreth, David, and I went to see the movie “Hancock.”

This isn’t actually a post about the movie; it’s a post about transhumanism, human dignity, and the inevitability of death. Hang on for a bit; I’ll get to that, I promise.

The movie is surprisingly good. I expected a kind of “Airplane!”-esque send-up of superhero movies, but that’s not what it is at all. It’s a thoughtful, and in some places surprisingly sweet, story. And it does something I’ve never seen a superhero movie do before; it makes characters with superhuman abilities (flying, immunity to bullets, super strength, all the usual ones) human.

One interesting twist is that the main character, Hancock, never ages.

And that’s pretty cool. In fact, I’d take a write-off on all the other superhero powers for that one. Which is good, because it’s the only superhero power that doesn’t violate those pesky laws of physics, and the only superhero power we’re actually getting close to in the real world.

To me, the value in this seems like a no-brainer. And yet, the majority–by large margin–of folks I talk to don’t want it. And I find hat kind of interesting.

When i talk about living forever, most of the people I talk to, at least outside the transhumanist community, react with varying degrees of shock and horror. “But why would you want to do that?” is the most common response, by a mile.

Now, it seems to me the answer to this question is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. Before I go into that, though, I think it’s probably a good idea to clear up what “live forever” means. That phrase can sound a bit scary, and seems to carry connotations of a kind of involuntary immortality to many folks.

When I talk about “immortality,” perhaps it would be better to say that I think death should be optional. I’m not talking about forcing people to live who don’t want to; I’m talking about changing the inevitability of death. Death should be an option to folks who want it, but it should not be compulsory.

I think that I may stop talking about “immortality” and instead start talking about “making death optional.” It might address some of the mental images that “immortality” conjures up with respect to a burdensome and unwanted life.

It’s also important to make clear that I’m talking about healthy life, as well. Any reasonable approach to solving the problem of death begins with solving the problem of aging. Life extension as an ever-increasing period of enfeeblement is a non-starter. For the purposes of radical longevity, what I’m talking about is a cessation of aging such that human beings have an indefinite lifespan with no upper limit, and that we will spend that time in healthy, strong bodies.

This kind of immortality, a life where people simply don’t age, is not the same thing as superhero, immune-to-bullets-and-everything immortality. If we solve aging, which is a biological process that operates like all other biological processes and is therefore subject to change, that’s what we will have.

As it stands now, we stop self-repairing and start falling apart in our mid 20s, and it’s all downhill from there. Conquering aging means keeping the physical strength and health of a 20something indefinitely. Which, honestly, doesn’t seem like a bad deal to me.

A person immune to the ravages of old age would still not be immune to death; accident, violence, and other misadventure is perfectly capable of ending even a 25-year-old’s life. It simply means that person no longer has a cap on the maximum time he can live, if he so chooses.

And that’s really what it’s all about. Choice.

Right now, we have no choice. The maximum possible human lifespan is somewhere around 120 years, if we make it that far, and that’s it.

This has been the reality of human existence for a very long time, and we’ve built entire philosophies around that reality. “Death gives life meaning,” we’re told. (What a load of rubbish! If I burn down your house, is that destruction the only thing that gives your house value?) “Death provides dignity,” we’re told. (Nonsense; decrepitude and death are among the least dignified parts of our existence. It is our choices, our freedom to make ourselves what we choose, that informs our dignity and our value. Anything which reduces our freedom to choose for ourselves what we want to be, including the inevitability of death, reduces human dignity.)

If you go into the doctor’s office, and he tells you that you have a bacterial infection, which will slowly grow progressively worse until it kills you painfully, then offers you an antibiotic pill that will completely eradicate the infection, I bet you’ll take it. Even if you don’t fancy the thought of living forever.

There’s an important point in that. Even folks who don’t much want to live forever still probably don’t want to die today. Or tomorrow. Someday, perhaps, if that “someday” is held in the abstract; some future time when things no longer seem interesting. But not today.

And that’s the point. A solution for aging puts the power to choose in your hands. Old age forces your hand; you don’t get the choice to see your grandkids graduate from school, or to celebrate your fiftieth anniversary…the choice is made for you. And I don’t see how that benefits anyone.

Now, some people have asked me why I would even want an extended lifespan in the first place. “Wouldn’t you get bored?” I’ve been asked. “Wouldn’t you eventually become too depressed at seeing everyone close to you die?”

The second question is easy. Presumably, if medical tech existed that could stop me from aging, it could stop the people around me from aging too.

The first question is a bit more baffling. Bored? With all the things going on in the world, all the time, who would ever be bored?

I think there’s an idea lurking in the subtext of that objection; namely, the sense that the future is just like the present, only longer.

Which is silly. One only needs to look at how much American society has changed in the last century to see that isn’t true. Within the lifetime of folks still alive today, we’ve gone from a largely agrarian society to a post-industrial society, with detours through powered flight, manned space exploration, and widespread electrification. A person born in 1900, in a one-room house with a dirt floor, has seen the advent of industrialization, the popularization of the automobile, manned moon landings, the taming of Niagra Falls, and the iPhone.

Who has time to be bored?

And that aint nothin’. Technology today, as interesting as it is, isn’t qualitatively different from the technology of the Victorians. We still make stuff by starting with a bloody great lump of stuff and whacking bits off, pounding, molding, stamping, cutting, and otherwise hacking away at the stuff until all that’s left is the bits we want.

Which is a wasteful, inefficient way to go about doing it. Smacks of stone knives and bearskins, really.

But what we’re closing in on is the ability to make stuff from the ground up, one atom at a time. And when that happens…jackpot.

Windows made of diamond (because carbon is cheap and easy to work with). Skyscrapers grown from a single metal crystal. Efficiency which allows the entire world, including those parts of it currently mired on poverty, to live at the same standard of living as us decadent Westerners, without imposing additional burdens on the earth’s resources or energy supply. Molecular assembly changes the name of the game completely.

Who has time to be bored?

And with that comes changes to all the assumptions we make about the Way Things Work. Many of the objections to improved longevity rest on assumptions that aren’t necessarily going to be valid in thefuture; you can’t anticipate the future by projecting current truths on it.

“But what about overpopulation?” I’m asked. Well, what about it? There’s a close connection between population growth and technological sophistication; post-agrarian societies have lower population growth than agrarian societies, because children are no longer needed to work the farms and care for enfeebled elders.

“But don’t we have to die to make room for the next generation?” I’m asked. No, we don’t, and thank you very much for implying that my life, and your life, and the lives of all the people who are here today are worth less than the theoretical lives of people who don’t even exist yet.

“But won’t longer life put more strain on the earth’s resources?” I’m asked. This assumes a continuation of the exponential population growth, when even now in the United States we actually have negative population growth, with immigration being what keeps the sum total population increasing. As lifespan increases, birth rate decreases; and, as I said before, nanotech manufacturing offers high standard of living with dramatically smaller environmental costs.

And if you find all that implausible, imagine what a person born in 1900 would say about owning a device that fits in your pocket, lets you talk to anyone in the world, and uses a network of satellites placed in earth orbit by rockets to help you find the easiest way to drive from your house to your friend’s house on the other side of the country.

Why do I want to live forever? Because things now are better than they were in 1900, and things in 1900 were better than they were in 1462. Because the future is an interesting place, and I want to see it. Because death should be optional, not mandatory. Because the encroachment of old age and death is the ultimate insult to human dignity. Because we are the part of the universe capable of understanding itself, and that means that every single one of us has incalculable value. Because every death is a tragedy, and we have lost sight of that. And in the end, because I see us not for what we are now, but for what we have the potential to become, and we have potential that is beautiful beyond all imagination.

Teaching a Dog Calculus

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This is actually a post about transhumanism and Outside Context Problems, and an epiphany I had last time I was in Chicago.

But first…

God damn did I wake up with a bad case of the hornies this morning. Jesus Christ in Heaven, I want to fuck. I want to feel soft skin against mine. I want to trace the curve of the neck with teeth and tongue. I want to hear the little intake of breath when I discover a sensitive spot. I want to rest my hand on the curve of the hip, I want to explore the roundness of breast with my fingertips. I want to run fingernails lightly up the back of the neck and see goosebumps form. Holy fuck it’s distracting.

Also, when I crawled out of bed and walked stumbled into the bathroom this morning, I was all like “Ow! Ow! Ouch! Ow! What the hell?” Some time last night, it seems, the cat had scoured the house for every smallish, vaguely cylindrical object he could find, and hidden them all underneath the rug in the bathroom. Pens, a plastic travel tube of Advil, a small bullet vibrator, an AA battery…it was like walking on marbles. WTF?

None of that is what I’m actually here to say.

I’ve been thinking a great deal these days about Outside Context Problems. Put briefly, an Outside Context Problem is what happens when a group, society, or civilization encounters something so far outside its own context and understanding that it is not able even to understand the basic parameters of what it has encountered, much less deal with it successfully. Most civilizations encounter such a problem only once.

For example, you’re a Mayan king. Life is pretty good for you; you’ve built a civilization at the pinnacle of technological achievement, you’ve dominated and largely pacified any competition you might have, you’ve created many wondrous things, and life is pretty comfortable.

Then, all at once, out of the blue, some folks clad in strange, impervious silver armor show up at your doorstep. They carry long sticks that belch fire and kill from great distances; some of them appear to have four legs; they claim to come from a place that you have never in your entire life even conceived might exist…

Civilizations that encounter Outside Context Problems end. Even if some members of the civilization survive, the civilization itself is irrevocably changed beyond recognition. Nothing like the original Native American societies exists today in any form that the pre-Columbians would recognize.

Typically, we think of Outside Context Problems in terms of situations that arise when one society has contact with another society that’s radically different and technologically far more advanced. But I don’t think it necessarily has to be that way.

In a sense, we are, right now, hard at work building our own Outside Context Problem, and it’s going to be internal, not external.

Right now, as I type this, one of the hottest fields of biomedical research is brain mapping and modeling. I’ve mentioned several times in the past the research being done by a Swiss group to model a mammalian brain inside a supercomputer; such a model is essentially a neuron-by-neuron, connection-by-connection emulation of a brain in a computer. Such an emulation will, presumably, act exactly like its biological counterpart; it is the connections and patterns of information, not the physical wetware, that makes a brain act like it does.

This group claims to be ten years from being able to model a human brain inside a computer. Ten years, and we may see the advent of true AI.

Let me backtrack a little. The field of AI has, so far, been disappointing. For decades, we have struggled to program computers to be smart. The problem is, we don’t really quite know what we mean by “smart.” Intelligence is not an easily defined thing; and it’s not like you can sit down and break up generalized, adaptive intelligence into a sequence of steps.

Oh, sure, we’ve produced expert systems that can design computer chips, simulate bridges, and play chess far better than a human can. In fact, we don’t even have grandmaster-level human/machine chess tournaments any more, because the machines always win. Always. Deep Blue, the supercomputer that beat human grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a much-publicized tournament, is by modern standards a cripple; ordinary desktop PCs today are more powerful.

But these are simple, iterative tasks. A chess-playing computer isn’t smart. It can’t do anything besides play chess, and it approaches chess as a simple iterative mathematical problem. That’s about where AI has been for the last four decades.

New approaches, though, are not about programming computers to act smart. They are about taking systems which are smart–brains–and rebuilding them inside a computer. If this approach works, we will create our own Outside Context Problem.

Human brains are pretty pathetic, from a hardware standpoint. Our neurons are painfully, agonizingly slow. They are slow to respond, they are slow to fire, they are slow to reset after they have fired, and they are slow to form new connections. All these things limit our cognitive capabilities; they impose constraints on how adaptable our intelligence is, and how smart we can become.

Computers are fast. They encode new information rapidly and efficiently. Raw computing power available from a given square inch of silicon real estate doubles roughly every eighteen months. Modeling a brain in a computer removes many of the constraints; such a modeled brain can operate more quickly and more efficiently, and as more computer power becomes available, the complexity of the model–the number of neurons modeled, the richness of the interconnections between them–increases too.

We humans like to make believe that we are somehow the apex of creation–and not just of creation, but of all possible creation. It pleases us to imagine that we are created in the image of some divine heavenly architect–that the universe and everything in it was made by some sapient being, that that sapient being is recognizable to us, and that that sapient being is like us. We like to tell ourselves that thre is no limit to human imagination, that human intellect can understand and achieve anything, and so on.

Now, all of this is really embarrassingly self-serving. It’s also easy enough to deflate. The human imagination is indeed limited, though by definition limitations in the things you can conceive of tend to be hard to see, because you…can not conceive of things you can not conceive of. (As one person once challenged me, without apparent irony: “Name something the human imagination can’t conceive of!”)

But its relatively easy to find some of the boundaries of human imagination. For example:

• Imagine one apple. Just an apple, floating alone on a plain white background. Easy to do, right?
Imagine three apples, perhaps arranged in a triangle, floating in stark white nothingness. Simple, yes? Four apples. Picture four apples in your head. Got it?

Now, picture 17,431 apples in your head, each unique. Visualize all of them together, and make your mental image contain each of those apples separately and distinctly. Got it? I didn’t think so.

• Imagine a cube in your head. Think of all the faces of the cube and how they fit together, Rotate the imaginary cube in your head. Got it going? Good.

Now imagine a seventeen-dimensional cube in your head. Picture what it would look like rotating through seventeen-dimensional space. Got it?

The first example indicates one particular kind of boundary on our imaginations: our limited resolving power when it comes to holding discrete images in our imagination. The second shows another boundary; our imaginations are circumscribed by the limitations of our experiences, as perceived and interpreted through finite (and, it must be said, quite limited) senses. Quantum mechanics and astrophysics often pose riddles whose math suggests behaviors we have a great deal of difficulty imagining, because our imaginations were formed through the experiences of a very limited slice of the universe: medium-sized, medium-density mass-bearing objects moving quite slowly with respect to one another. Go outside those constraints, and we may be able to understand the math, but the reality of the way these systems works is, at best, right at the threshold of the limitations of our imaginations.

Everyone who has ever owned a dog knows that dogs are capable of a surprisingly sophisticated sort of reasoning. Dogs understand that they are separate entities; they interact with other entities, such as other dogs and humans, in complex ways; they can differentiate between other living entities and non-living entities, for the most part (tough I’ve seen dogs who are confused by television images); they have emotional responses that mirror, on a simple scale, human emotional responses; they are capable of planning, problem-solving, and analytical reasoning.

They can not, however, learn calculus.

No matter how smart your dog is, there are things it can not understand and will never understand because of the biological constraints on its brain. You will never teach a dog calculus; in fact, a dog is not capable of understanding what calculus is.

Yes, I know you think your dog is very smart. No, your dog can’t learn calculus. Yes, you can too, if you set your mind to it; the point here is that there are realms of knowledge unavailable to the entire species, because all dogs, no matter how smart they may be in comparison to other dogs, lack the necessary cognitive tools to get there.

The intelligence of every organism is circumscribed in part by that organism’s physical biology. And just as they are entire reals and categories of knowledge unavailable to a dog, so too are there realms of knowledge unavailable to us. What are they? I don’t know; I can’t see them. That’s exactly the point.

To get back to the idea of artificial intelligence: A generalized AI would in many ways not be subject to the same limitations we are. One nice thing about modeled brains that isn’t true of human brains is that we can easily tinker with them. The human brain is limited in the total number of neurons within it by the size and shape of the human pelvis; we can’t fit larger brains through the birth canal. We have, in essence, encountered a fundamental evolutionary barrier.

Similarly, we can’t easily make neurons faster; their speed is limited by the complex biochemical cascade of events which makes them fire (contrary to popular belief, neurons don’t communicate via electrical signals; they change state electrochemically, by the movement of charged ions across a membrane, and the speed with which a signal travels is dependent on the speed with which ions can propagate across the membrane and then be pumped back again). They are limited in how quickly they can learn new things by the speed with which neurons can grow new interconnections, which is pretty painful, really.

But a model of a brain? What if we double the number of neurons? Increase the speed at which they send signals? Increase the efficiency with which new connections form? These are all obvious and logical paths to explore.

And the thing about generalized AI is that it’s so goddamn useful. We want it, and we’re working very hard toward it, because there are just so many things that our current, primitive computers are poor at, that generalized Ai would be good at.

And one of those things, as it happens, is likely to be improving itself.

The first generalized AI will be a watershed. Even if it isn’t very smart, it can easily be put to the task of making AIs that are smarter. And smarter still. Hell, just advances in the underlying processor power of the computer beneath it–whatever that computer may look like–will probably make it smarter. Able to think faster, hold more information, remember more…and able to have whatever senses we give it, including senses our own physiology doesn’t have.

The first generalized AI might not be smarter than us, but subsequent ones will, oh yes. You can bank on that. And that soon presents an Outside Context Problem.

Because how do we relate to a sapience that’s smarter than we are?

In transhumanist circles, this is called a singularity–a change so profound that the people before the singularity can not imagine what life after the singularity is like.

There have been many singularities throughout human history. The development of agriculture, the Iron Age, the development of industrialization–all of these created changes so profound that a person living in a time before these things could not imagine what life after these things is like. However, the advent of smart and rapidly-improving AI is different, because it presents a singularity and an Outside Context Problem all rolled up into one.

In past singularities, the fundamental nature of human beings and human intelligence have not changed. A Bronze Age human is not necessarily dumber than an Iron Age human. Less knowledgeable, perhaps, but not dumber. The Bronze Age human could not anticipate Iron Age technology, but if they meet, they will still recognize each other.

But a smarter-than-us AI is different, in the ways we are different from a dog. We would not–we cannot–understand the perception or experience of something smarter than we are, ay more than a dog can understand what it means to be human. And that presents an interesting challenge indeed.

Civilizations tend not to survive contact with Outside Context Problems.

Which brings me, at last, to an epiphany that I had while I was walking with dayo in Chicago.

Transhumanism is the notion that human beings can become, with the application of intelligence and will, more than we are right now. I’ve talked about it a great deal in the past, and talked about some of the reasons I am a transhumanist.

But here’s a new one, and I think it’s important.

Strong AI is coming. It’s really only a matter of time. We are learning that our own intelligence is the result of physical processes within our brain, not the result of magical supernatural forces or spirits. We are working on applying the results of this knowledge to the problem of creating things that are not-us but that are smart like us.

Now, there are several ways we can approach this. One is by creating models of ourselves in computers; another is by using advances in nanotechnology and biomedical science to make ourselves smarter, and improve the capabilities of our wet and slow but still serviceable brains.

Or, we can create something not based on us at all; perhaps by using adaptive neural networks to model increasingly complex systems in a sort of artificial evolutionary system, trying things at random and choosing the smartest of those things until eventually we create something as smart as us, but self-improving and altogether different.

Regardless, we have a choice. We can make ourselves into this new whatever-it-is, or we can make something entirely independent from us.

However we make it, it will likely become our successor. Civilizations tend not to survive contact with Outside Context Problems.

If we are to be replaced–and I think, quite honestly, that that is only a matter of time as well–I would rather that we are replaced by us, by Humanity 2.0, than see us replaced by something that is entirely not-us. And I think transhumanism, refined down to its most simple essence, is the replacing of us by us, rather than by something that is not-us.

Hey, folks, let’s play!

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icedrake posted a question in this conversation thread which I thought might deserve wider discussion. On the subject of intentional, functional body modifications, his challenge was to put together a list of desired augmentations. The augmentations should be something reasonably attainable within the next decade; assume that money is no concern. For bonus points, say why you want it.

My own list:

Subdermal BlueTooth controller/display combination

Availability: Now (sort of)

This is a subdermal black and white programmable tattoo, with built-in BlueTooth connectivity. It’s powered by your body’s own metabolism (using a nifty little fuel cell that runs on blood). It can be programmed by any BlueTooth device, so the display can be changed at will, and in theory at least can even show streaming 3G media. (I’d love to watch The Matrix on this thing!)

No new technology here; we can make it with off-the-shelf parts, though there’s no plan at the present for commercialization.

Why I want it: The idea of a direct, implanted interface with other devices is just too cool for words. On a geek cool scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being “not cool” and 10 being “übergeek,” this clocks in at about a 27.4. I am a big fan of tattoos and a big fan of wireless communication; combining the two is just…well, a geekgasm of cool. And it’s functional!

Implanted rare-earth magnets that offer the ability to feel electromagnetic fields

Availability: 1-3 years, or now (with potential problems)

A tiny (about the size of a grain of rice) rare-earth magnet is coated with silicone and surgically implanted in the fingertip beneath the skin. It reacts to electromagnetic fields, and its close proximity to the sensory nerves in the fingertips allows the wearer to feel such fields. You can run your finger over a power cord and tell if it’s plugged in or not, feel the hard drive in your computer spin up, trace the path of power cables through the wall, and even feel the electromagnetic field emitted by the grocery store anti-shoplifting sensors.

People have done this now, but the art of coating the magnets with silicone is still in its infancy. many people who have these magnets implanted end up rejecting them. Even a microscopic breach of the silicone jacket around the magnet causes the body to destroy the magnet, which often leads to infection. A lot of folks in the body-mod community are working on this problem. It’s a simple enough engineering challenge; with the right funding and research, it could be licked in a week. Body-mod enthusiasts don’t exactly have access to funding or to cutting-edge engineering or biomedical know-how, so I said 1-3 years on this one.

Why I want it: We live, every single day, immersed in an environment we are completely unaware of. We’re bathed constantly in electromagnetic fields of all kinds, and yet we’re totally blind to them. Adding a new sense opens up a new world; it’s like being born deaf and suddenly being given the ability to hear.

This ability is useful for a number of practical reasons; but forget those. It’s being given sight when you’re blind, touch when you’re numb. Anything that promises a whole new sense gets my vote!

Respirocytes: artificial mechanical red blood cells

Availability: 7-10 years (maybe)

The most speculative of the near-tech things on this list, respirocytes are nanoscale machines which could be injected into a person, and which perform the basic functions of red blood cells–transporting oxygen to the tissues and carbon dioxide away from the tissues of the body. They do this job, at least in theory, thousands of times more efficiently.

A person injected with a therapeutic dose of respirocytes would, if the technology works, be able to do things like hold his breath for half an hour, run at top speed without breathing for ten minutes, and even survive with his heart stopped for half an hour or more.

Actually making these things will require some pretty fancy work in nanoscale fabrication. The idea is pretty simple; it’s the execution that’s the tough part. The basic technologies are sound, but we’re not very good at making moving parts on the required scale yet.

Why I want it: It’s hard to know where to begin.

First of all, these offer a tremendous insurance policy against heart attack, injury, or environmental dangers that affect breathing. With medical technology as it is now, a person who drowns or suffers a heart attack and does not receive medical attention within minutes is likely to die or suffer irreversible brain damage; these expand the window of time tremendously. They also protect against things like dying in a fire (most people killed in building fires die of smoke inhalation, not burns), counteract the effects of weakened cardiopulmonary organs, and just generally make a person a whole lot more resilient.

On top of that, I suspect that we’d likely find that one of the limiting factors on brain functioning, the efficiency with which the brain can be supplied with oxygen, might be removed. I have a sneaking feeling that a person shot full of respirocytes would probably feel, and think, a lot better.

Okay, that’s enough for now. A lot of the things I want are likely more than ten years past the horizon, more’s the pity. How ’bout you folks? Your turn now!

Your daily dose of teh ky00t

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This is Liam.

Liam is cursed with that same irresistible urge that gave us hairless naked apes the iPod, the steam engine, and nearly complete domination over all the earth: curiosity. If I place a box anywhere in my apartment, even if it’s simply a bottled water box that is set to go out with the trash, Liam will not rest until he has been over, under, around, and through it. He’s compelled, you see. He loves novelty, and he wants to know what it’s all about.

He’ll usually sleep in any box I put on or near the floor, at least for a few days. When it ceases to be novel and interesting, he grows tired of it and returns to sleeping at the foot of the bed with me. Like us naked apes, he’s curious and also fickle in his attentions.

Curiosity is a pretty sophisticated trait for an animal whose brain is smaller than my fist and not very wrinkly. In terms of raw processing power, a dozen Liams put together would compare pretty poorly to an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, a much more computtionally powerful, yet singularly uncurious, piece of equipment.

Liam is actually pretty sophisticated in many of his behaviors. A couple weeks ago, he made a face at me.

It happened while I was eating frozen TV dinner apples. Microwave baked apples are tasty and delicious, and I make a point to eat them regularly. Five minutes in the microwave and you can have a small black plastic tray of bliss.

So there I was, sitting by my desk playing World of Warcraft and eating microwave baked apples, and Liam hopped up onto the desk and, brazen as you please, reached into my black plastic tray of bliss with his paw, hooked out a small piece of apple, brought it up to his nose, sniffed it suspiciously, licked it, and made a face at me. He shook the apple off his paw in disgust and wrinkled his nose at me.

Then he watched me eating the apples for several minutes, stole another bit of apple, sniffed at it even more suspiciously, and made another face at me.

There are many ways one might respond to this. One might say “Aww! How cute!” (And really, it was.) One might say “Hey! That’s my food! Don’t put your paw in that!” (And really, I did, though I knew even as I said it that it was pointless-an exercise more for my benefit than for the cats. We naked walking monkeys are kind of insecure in our position that way.) One might push the cat off the desk sternly. (And really, I didn’t have the heart to, because i dote on the cat so. A pushover, I am.)

Or, if one’s inclination runs that way, one might sit back and ponder the surprising degree of cognitive prowess the cat possesses.

I mean, seriously, think about it.

The cat recognized that I was eating something. We take that for granted, but there’s a lot of intellectual horsepower being brought to bear on a task of that sort. First, it means that he was able to map a projection of himself onto a projection on me well enough to be able to determine what kind of activity I was engaged in, and to recognize that it’s an activity he also engages in, despite great physical dissimilarities between us. That, at its foundation, means he was able to recognize the difference between himself and the rest of the world, and to recognize that some things in the world are more like him than other things in the world, to recognize those things when he sees them, and to recognize patterns of behavior common to he and I even as he recognized that I am distinct from him. Human babies take rather a long time to sort all this out.

Then, he was able to make an inference–namely, that what I was eating might be something e would like to eat as well. He made this inference in the absence of other cues, such as smell; he is, after all, a carnivore, and he is uninterested in a tray of baked apples just sitting by itself. (I know; I tried. What can I say? I was curious, too. He probably thinks they small like rotting plant matter.)

When he made this inference, he was able to formulate and then implement a plan of action, which shows at least a very limited ability to plan, even if only in a simple way.

When he obtained a piece of apple and decided it was just as revolting as it smells, he was then faced with a conundrum; this stuff was revolting, but clearly I was eating it (and with great gusto and no small amount of satisfaction, I might add). So he was willing to re-evaluate his original decision, and put it to the test again–something, the cynic in me begs to point out, that appears beyond the cognitive grasp of many people I know.

A couple of weeks ago, in a repeat of the I am not Sir Edmund fucking Hillary debacle that left me stranded on the balcony with a rope in my hand, Shelly went onto the porch to do some tidying up and the door locked behind her, trapping her until I came home for lunch.

Liam, in another example of cognitive dexterity (the only kind he has, I fear, as he is a stunningly clumsy cat), recognized that she was trapped, and became highly distressed and agitated. That shows empathy–the ability to map himself onto her and to respond as if he was the one in the distressing situation. He also knew that the door’s latch was to blame, and pawed and batted at it in a charming but unsuccessful bid to release her. Lack of opposing thumbs, and all that.

A Blue Gene/L system has, at very rough estimation, approximately the same processing power as a human brain. The Blue Gene/P supercomputer, currently in development, will well and truly trounce human beings in terms of processing ability. However, the architecture is very, very different. Modern computers are just really big, really complex Von Neumann machines, bound by the fact that the processing and memory are distinct entities which interact with one another in a series of discrete state changes.

A brain cell can roughly be mapped onto a transistor in the sense that it has only two discrete states, “firing” and “not firing,” but the architectural similarities pretty much end there.

Still, they are both finite state machines with memory, handwaving and nattering of Roger Penrose aside. And it is an axiom of state machines and formal language theory, which I will leave as an exercise to te reader to explore further, that any universal Turing machine, which is a finite state machine with memory, can, given sufficient memory, emulate any other universal Turing machine.

Which means that, given sufficient cleverness on our parts, it should be possible to take these wonderful brains of ours and emulate them in these crude computers of ours, without loss of fidelity.

Handwaving and nattering of Roger Penrose aside. (“Look! Consciousness is a quantum phenomenon! I don’t know anything about quantum physics, neurophysiology, consciousness, or cognitive science, but consciousness is a quantum phenomenon! I have no proof of this, so watch as I wave my hands!” But I digress.)

And, of course, when you emulate one kind of machine (yes, I said it, brains are machines, deal with it) on another kind of machine, if the host machine is sufficiently faster than the emulated machine, the emulation of the emulated machine is faster than the real thing.

Chew on that for a while.

I love Liam. He’s very sweet, and he is a constant little reminder in my life of figment_j. I continue to be impressed by the range of cognitive flexibility we take for granted, even in relatively unsophisticated animals, and I can hardly wait until we start building machines which can exhibit the same kind of cognitive skills.

We’re not there yet, but we will be soon. When IBM makes a supercomputer that has Liam’s level of cognitive prowess, the Singularity will well and truly be nigh.

Some thoughts on nanotech’s dark side

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Iran is currently working on obtaining fissionable uranium which can be used for nuclear weapons. This is presenting something of a thorny issue for our current Simian-in-Chief, whose approval rating is dipping perilously close to single digits over his mismanagement of the botched and ultimately pointless war in Iraq. We currently lack the political capital and the military and financial resources to mount any kind of overt action in Iran, wishful thinking of the pro-war Far Right aside. None of this is news to anyone who’s not been living under a bridge for the past four years or so.

There’s some good news and some bad news in this situation, none of which has anything to do with American politics or the situation in Iraq. The good news is the part that says “Iran is currently working on obtaining fissionable uranium which can be used for nuclear weapons.” This is good news because, more than fifty years after Word War II, it still requires a major committed effort on the part of an entire nation to obtain fissionable uranium which can be used for nuclear weapons. The bad news is generic programmable nanotech assemblers. The good news is that these don’t exist yet. The bad news is that they will.

The process of enriching uranium is delicate, costly, complex, and fiddly. The Reader’s Digest Condensed Version is this: Uranium occurs in nature in two isotopes, U-235 and U-238. The difference is the number of neutrons in the atomic nucleus of the uranium atoms. U-238 has three more neutrons in the nucleus than U-235 does.

The vast majority of the uranium in nature is U-238. U-235 is quite scarce, making up just over one-half of one percent of the uranium you can dig up out of the ground. For various complicated reasons that have to do with Science and are beyond the scope of this post, U-238 doesn’t go boom. In order to be useful to people who want to make things go boom, uranium needs to be “enriched,” meaning that the percentage of U-235–the kind that does go boom–needs to be increased.

This process is really, really, really hard to do. Essentially, you take your uranium and combine it with fluorine to form a gas called uranium hexafluoride. You then put this gas into a special centrifuge and you spin it really, really fast for a really, really long time. A tiny percentage of the U-235, which is just oh such a little bit lighter (by the weight of three neutrons) than U-238, ends up at the top. Then you take some of the gas out of the bottom, where it’s more U-238, and put the remaining gas into a second centrifuge, which you spin really, really fast for a really, really long time. You keep doing this over and over and over again for months, and you’re left with a little bit of enriched uranium hexafluoride, which you take the fluorine atoms off of to end up with uranium.

The centrifuges are complicated and difficult to make, even if you’re an entire country. The process is so delicate that if one of your workers sneezes while it’s happening, the whole shebang gets all mixed up again and you have to start over. Even with billions of dollars on hand and the resources and will of an entire nation behind you, making nuclear bombs is tough to do.

There is this notion that once a nation acquires nuclear weapons and realizes how destructive these things are, that nation tends to become very, very reluctant to use them. In the history of the world, only two have been used in war. There are historians who will argue that the existence of nuclear weapons has likely averted a third world war; these weapons are so bad that nobody really wants to use them, so nations that have them tend to think twice about getting into shooting matches with other nations that have them.

Of course, this assumes people are reasonable. This is often, but not always, the case. Witness 1 for the prosecution: Kim Jong Il, the poster boy for “deranged psychopaths,” who just so happens to be the leader of North Korea, a nation which just so happens to have nukes.

I tend to think the notion that nuclear weapons have a calming effect on countries is a historical artifact, because they’re so hard to make that only highly industrialized, rationalist nations get them first. There is a correlation between countries with stable, rational governments,and countries which are wealthy and industrialized.

Don’t look at me like that. Compared to Kim Jong Il, Josef Stalin is a model of reason and rationality. And George W.’s administration didn’t invent the Bomb. Had all our nation’s leaders been like W, we would never have become a First World nation to begin with, and we may still not be a First World nation by the time he leaves office. Half a trillion dollars drained out of the nation’s economy to finance a war against a paltry and largely unmilitarized Third World country…but I digress.

The point is, making nuclear bombs is tough and expensive, even for entire nations. Your next door Al Qaeda cell isn’t going to get one any time soon, wishful thinking of the pro-war Far Right aside.

But hold on. Things are getting better.

Nanotechnology is a cutting-edge new technology that offers the promise of doing for manufacturing, medicine, and materials engineering what electronics did for computation. Right now, human technology is barbaric and primitive almost beyond reason. We like to think that we’re high-tech, but we’re not. The process by which we make things has hardly changed since flint knives and bearskins. We take a piece of something, we whack off all the bits that don’t look like what we want, until we get what we do want. Today the whacking is done by computer-controlled, automated CNC milling equipment instead of with a big rock, but essentially it’s the same. Our processes for making stuff are better, but our basic techniques have scarcely changed.

The Holy Grail of manufacturing nanotech is the universal programmable assembler, a hypothetical device that makes stuff the way the cells in your body made you–at an atomic scale, one molecule at a time. The theory is simple: you take a bunch of little programmable machines, each of which is the size of a couple dozen molecules or so, and you program them with what you want to make. Then you give them some carbon, iron, or whatever, and they make that thing for you from the ground up, one molecule at a time. It’s the ultimate dream manufacturing technique; if you can conceive it, you can make it. (Of course you don’t want to make stuff literally one molecule at a time; when I say a “bunch” of assemblers, I mean like “a few billion.”)

It’s less farfetched than it sounds. Read Engines of Creation. Go ahead; I’ll wait.

You back? Cool stuff, right? Radical longevity, effortless and cheap manufacturing that doesn’t pollute or deplete natural resources, personalized cancer cures that cost less than a low-end Dell desktop. The advent of nanotechnology will arguably change human civilization more than the advent of agriculture did.

If we live that long, that is. You see, nanotech offers the promise of building stuff on a molecular level. Nanotech assemblers manipulate matter on the level of individual molecules. Forget that complicated, tedious mucking about with expensive and finicky centrifuges and uranium hexafluoride; dissolve your uranium in hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydroxide, stir in some nano devices that sort out the U-235 bits from the U-238 bits, and wait. Enriching uranium is removed from the realm of entire nations and brought down to the level where anyone who’s having a bad hair day can do it.

If he can get the uranium to begin with, of course. It’s not like you can buy it at the corner grocery. But we’re a clever species; someone will figure out how to solve that problem. 🙂

I’ve decided on my first two body mods.

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No, I don’t mean tattoos or piercings or anything like that; I already have those. I mean real body mods. Functional body mods.

icedrake pointed me to this link, which in turn points to a larger article here, about researchers who are creating new senses by piggybacking onto existing senses.

It’s neat stuff. For example, researchers have taken a camera, connected its output to a device that you wear on your tongue (which has a very large number of sensory nerves crowded very close together), which “draws” a “picture” of what the camera sees onto your tongue using subtle electrical currents. Now hold on to your hat, Dorothy, ’cause this is the part where Kansas goes bye-bye…not only does this allow people to navigate blindfolded, but afterward, their memories of the experience aren’t memories of feelings on their tongue, but visual memories. This suggests, though it has not yet been confirmed by fMRI scans, that the visual cortex of the brain quickly and seamlessly takes over processing the information being presented to the tongue. And that suggests that our brain’s ability to interpret data from new senses actually outstrips our sensory system, meaning that adding new senses to human beings should be a pretty straightforward matter.

I already know the first two I want.

First, I want tiny neodymium magnets surgically implanted in my fingertips so that I can feel magnetic fields. (This is no surprise; I’ve talked about this before.)

Next, I want a series of tiny holes drilled all the way around the edge of my hip bone. Why, you ask? Why, for the piezo transducers, of course! I want a row of tiny piezo transducers implanted all along the edge of my pelvic girdle, all the way around, connected to a device (which I figure can be tucked in beneath one of my kidneys) which can detect which way is magnetic north and vibrate the transducer that faces north. Tat way, I will always have an immediate, unerring, and flawless sense of direction.

Dammit, this stuff should be easy. In fact, I’m even willing to forego having the flying car I was promised in kindergarten if I can get this instead.

Why I Am an Optimist

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On the drive down to Florida Poly Retreat a few weeks back, I had an epiphany.

You see, I’ve always harbored a not-so-secret desire to crush the earth beneath my iron boot, but in the past twoscore years, I’ve made very little progress toward realizing that goal. And it occurred to me why that is. I’m actually very optimistic about the state of humanity, and unbridled optimism about the human condition doesn’t lend itself to the kind of monomaniacial dedication required of a true James Bond-class villain.

There is a reason I am an optimist. That reason emerges directly from the fact that I do not believe in god.

This might seem, at first glance, to be something of a contradiction. Many people cling to a belief in some kind of divine, personally involved caretaker high up in the sky precisely because it’s the only way they can find optimism and not despair. There’s even a Web site set up by a Fundamentalist Christian organization that is organized around the idea “if you don’t matter to God, you don’t matter to anyone.” The site is advertised by banner ads like this one, showing some gangster wannabe who, without God, presumably has no reason not to blow your punk ass away:

I find this attitude, that without god there is no morality and no meaning or purpose in life, very, very interesting…more for what it says about the people who subscribe to it than for anything else. The Web site that this banner advertises is strongly anti-evolution and pro-creation, and I think that’s extremely telling.

There are, I think, two driving forces behind much of religious thought: fear and despair. The despair comes from the idea that human lives and human achievement are without meaning or purpose in a universe without god, a universe where we are the natural result of natural processes on an insignificant and not terribly remarkable part of an insignificant and not terribly remarkable galaxy lost in a universe that is quite literally inconceivably huge. When you look at an image taken from the Hubble Deep Field camera of a teeny, tiny patch of sky, and you see that everywhere in the universe, as far as you can look, you see not hundreds or even thousands but billions of galaxies, and every one of these galaxies is made up of billions of stars, and we occupy such a tiny sliver of this universe that our entire galaxy could vanish or be destroyed in some kind of cataclysm and the universe would scarcely even notice, some people get all freaked out.

But it’s true.

Every object you see in this picture with the exception of the bright object in the lower left of center (which is a star in our own galaxy) is an entire galaxy. The scale of the universe beggars comprehension, and we feel insignificant.

So the creationists, who never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge, invent a new universe to satisfy their need to feel special. They imagine a tiny universe, a limited universe, a universe only a few thousand years old, a small place containing a world (which is seventy-five percent water) deliberately created just for man (who has no gills). They post videos on YouTube arguing that the hand of god is clearly visible in the banana, which with its convenient wrapper and hand-pleasing shape was deliberately designed by a benificient creator to fit easily in our hand and be eaten–though they ignore contradictory evidence, like, say, the coconut. Or, they argue, since the evolutionary idea on the origin of life claims life can begin when non-living matter is exposed to radiation, then how come life doesn’t spontaneously begin from other non-living matter, like peanut butter?

It’s easy to mock creationists; they’re just so cute when they pretend to be scientists! But their folly isn’t born of stupidity; it’s a product of the very human need to feel special and significant.

When you add the Void to the mix, the problem becomes even greater. Human beings have the cognitive tools to generalize from their experiences and make predictions about future events, and that gives us the capacity to realize that one day we are going to die. Facing the Void is, for many people, the very embodiment of stark raving terror. We are going to die. There will come a day when we will be gone, and there is nothing we can do about it.

So we as a species respond the only way we can: by denying it. We pull the shade down over the Void, and then decorate that shade with an entire bestiary of gods and demons and angels and supernatural forces of all descriptions imaginable who will protect us from the certainty of death. When you look at all the various gods and deities people have worshipped throughout history, all the supernatural beings we’ve ever believed in–the sun gods worshipped by almost all hunter-gatherer tribes; the god Tezcatlipoca of the Aztecs; the various gods of the Egyptian pantheon; the feuding, spiteful divine teenagers of the Greeks; the vengeful, erratic, emotionally volatile god of the ancient Israelites–one thing becomes very, very clear: these gods are all us. All these divinities are distorted, funhouse mirror caricatures of humanity. We pull the shade down over the Void, then project onto it ourselves. All our fears, desires, petty insecurities, all our need for conformity and control, all these things are reflected in the gods and demons and pixies and faeries we invent. All these dim, distorted projections, created to convince ourselves that the Void is not real.

And it works. The first time I was confronted by the Void, at about thirteen years old, the thought of going to heaven was the only comfort I could find. When I lost that, I lost my only defense against the Void, and that’s not easy to do. These crazy funhouse projections serve a purpose.

But there is a price to pay for this comfort, one that I suspect many people aren’t even consciously aware of.

Part of that price is truth. If one cares passionately about the truth, one can not help but notice that every time a religious entity has disagreed with empirical science about some matter of empirical fact about the physical world, the religion has been wrong. Every single time, with not one single exception. The creationists seek meaning and purpose by believing themselves to be the favored of a supernatural entity that created the whole of the universe just for us, yet this belief requires them to imagine a universe much smaller and much younger than it actually is. Their need for meaning, their desperate desire to feel special, causes them to adopt the notion that the whole of creation is only six thousand years old (5,997 years, according to Orthodox Judiasm; Fundamentalist Christians put the figure at about ten years older), in spite of massive, overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

And this notion leads naturally to other notions as well, including the idea that humanity, the favored of the divine architect of the universe, can do no wrong. Environmental responsibility? Social responsibility? Outmoded beliefs of godless liberals; we were given divine sanction to do as we please, and that’s exactly what we should do.

God made the universe for us. We are the most important things in all of creation. The world was put here specifically for the purpose of housing us. If we believe this, we will never die; God won’t allow it.

If you don’t matter to God, you don’t matter to anyone.

When people let go of the idea of god, they’re left with a sense of despair. If there is no god–if we are simply the result of natural, mindless forces operating in a universe that is incomprehensibly huge and incomprehensibly ancient, a place that is steered by no divine force and a place where an airless rock is just as good as a planet teeming with life, then what meaning can any of us have? What meaning can any of our struggles and triumphs have? What point is there?

And that attitude, tragically, misses the point entirely.

For you see, if we were made a brief time ago in God’s image and put here for the sole and express purpose of worshipping and exalting God, then what we are now is what we will always be. There is an upward limit on the things we are capable of. We are born disgraced, pale shadows of the original models who fell from that grace, and our job is to struggle through this brief life of misery and tears hoping we somehow manage to do and say the right things so that god will rescue us. We have no purpose other than that which is given to us by god–and looking around, I gotta say it’s not much of a purpose.

But if we are evolved monkeys…

Ah, now things are different. If we are evolved monkeys, if we are the result of natural processes that conspired across a vast sea of time to give rise to sapient, self-directing entities capable of understanding themselves and the physical world, then all bets are off. Now, there is no limit to what we can become. Now, anything within the physical laws of the universe is potentially within our grasp. Now, we have the power we once reserved to our gods; now, we can, through the application of our will, make of ourselves anything we choose to be.

And now we have meaning and purpose far beyond that of crawling around chanting to some insecure creator-god about how great and magnificent he is, and would he please please not strike us dead? Now, we are the part of the universe capable of understanding itself. We are of the universe; we are a part of it, not above it; but we are unique in all the universe we know in that we can understand it. We are aware. We are the universe’s way of understanding itself.

And that is a far more magnificent purpose than telling a child-god over and over again that yes, he’s great, really, he’s great, he’s good, he’s wonderful, no really, he’s great, and we love him, really we do.

There is a saying: “with God, all things are possible.” The saying is false. With God, all things are possible save for rising above our station and becoming anything more than what we are right now.

Without god, however, all things not disallowed by the fundamental laws of physics really are possible. Without god, we make our own meaning and purpose; and that power lets us use the gifts granted to us to transform ourselves and the world around us in any way we want.

This power fills some people with fear. Without god, they say, how will we know what is moral? Without god, they say, what punishment can there be for people who do things that are wrong? To this I say: Your morals, given to you by your belief in god, allow for the most appalling atrocities, historically and today. Your morals teach that some human beings, simply as a result of the way they are born, are inherently unequal to others. The notion that there is one and only one right way to live is the cause of more human suffering, more grief, and more evil than any other single idea in all of human history. This is your morals? Your morals, like your gods, are a distorted mirror of your own prejudices and your own evil. You will not find heaven by backing away from hell; the fear of retribution is not the path to enlightenment.

We don’t always make good choices, it’s true. But we’re still a young race. And I am very optimistic about what we can accomplish.

Why I am not a Buddhist

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I asked myself, was I content
With the world that I once cherished?
Did it bring me to this darkened place
To contemplate my perfect future?
I will not stand nor utter words against
This tide of hate
Losing sight of what and who I was again

I’m so sorry if these seething words I say
Impress on you that I’ve become
The anathema of my soul

As I was waiting for the battery in my car to be replaced, I bought a Twix bar from the repair shop vending machine.

Now, I love Twix bars. I mean, I really love Twix bars. There is something…unwholesome about the way I love Twix bars. The chocolate layer, the caramel, the crisp cookie crunch…it’s enough to bring a grown man to tears.

I was disappointed by the Twix bar that I bought. At some point in its life, somewhere ‘twixt the factory and my hands, it had been exposed to very high heat. The caramel layer had melted and oozed out the bottom of the bars in a gooey puddle, leaving behind a thin and feeble layer of half-melted and congealed chocolate over a partly denuded cookie center. It was a hollow mockery of a Twix bar, a Twix bar that had shuffled off this mortal coil before it even had time to live.

But I didn’t come here to talk about candy bars. I came here to talk about Buddhism.

I can’t say that you’re losing me
I always tried to keep myself tied to this world
Though I know where this is leading
Please, no tears, no sympathy
I can’t say that you’re losing me
But I must be that which I am
Though I know where this could take me
No tears, no sympathy

In some small way, my desire for a Twix bar brought me unhappiness. The Twix bar I bought did not meet my expectations, and as a result, it did not bring me joy.

Buddhist philosophy correctly predicts my unhappiness. Buddhism teaches, and quite rightly, that the experience of life is the experience of suffering. This suffering, it says, comes inevitably from desire; when one desires that which one does not have, or when one has that which one does not desire, the result is suffering.

It’s hard to find fault in that idea. I could, as a minor quibble, argue that the source of suffering is not desire of and by itself, but rather the difference between one’s expectations and reality; I expected my experience with the Twix bar to be something other than it was, and I was disappointed. Had I had no expectations at all, the Twix bar may actually, when judged on the merits of what it was rather than what I expected it to be, have been quite good.

But that’s really a trivial complaint. The fact is, desire and expectation do lead to suffering, because we can not always expect to have what we desire, nor have the world match our expectations.

Gracefully, respectfully
Facing conflict deep inside myself
But here confined, losing control
Of what I could not change

Gracefully, respectfully
I ask you, please don’t worry, not for me
Don’t turn your back, don’t turn away

When viewed through this lens, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhist thought seem quite reasonable. Nobody likes to suffer; suffering and sorrow and grief are painful burdens, that grind down the human soul and sometimes make the experience of being human unbearable.

Buddhism teaches that freedom from suffering comes through disengagement. If desire results in suffering, then the way out of suffering is to desire nothing. By practicing this, a person can seek to free himself from the endless cycle of suffering resulting from birth, death, and rebirth, and become enlightened. Once the attachment to the world, with its attendant desire, is released, the enlightened Buddhist frees himself from suffering.

And if this is enlightenment, I want nothing to do with it.

It’s hard to say that the Buddhists have it wrong. One need only look around to see that the world looks as if it has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls. A litany of the evils of mankind is at once horrifying and clichéd; we have lived shoulder to shoulder with evil for so long that even talking about it seems banal. Engaging the world invariably brings pain and misery; we are so steeped in it that it cannot be any other way.

And yet… and yet…

And yet the flip side of that very coin is the fact that broken desire and unmet expectation is the necessary driving inspiration behind the impulse to do good.

Desire and expectation lead to sorrow and suffering, but in that sorrow and suffering is the incentive that prods us to seek to make more than what exists now, to become more than what we are today. The drive to better ourselves and the world we live in has at its core that very dissatisfaction the Buddhist philosophy sees as the source of all suffering.

Sometimes, it seems to me that Buddhist thought, when viewed from a certain angle, is the philosophy of nihilism. The world is a wretched, miserable place, it says, and engaging it will only bring you sorrow; best, then to transcend it, to disengage from it, to step away from that which you desire, lest your desire cause you pain.

That strikes me as a tacit, perhaps unconscious acceptance that the world as it is now is irredeemable. The world is beyond hope; the only reasonable answer is to forfeit the game, be quit of the whole affair. The Noble Eightfold Path is a road away from the world, teeming with refugees seeking to separate themselves from it.

To that, I say, no.

The world looks as though it has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls, it is true. The world rarely lives up even to the most modest of expectations, and the rift between one’s expectations and the unpleasant and often evil reality is a source of suffering. But that is not all there is. In that suffering, we can find the power to oppose evil, and to bend reality to our will. We are not impotent. Indeed, with every passing year, our knowledge increases, and with it increases our power to remake the world into something better.

Evil exists. Suffering exists. The world is shaped often by twisted and corrupt people, people of low ways and mean spirits. But it is shaped also by those who desire to do good–and the desire to do good may bring pain, but it also brings hope, and joy. It is only by engaging the world that we can leave our mark upon it, and by leaving our mark upon it we can know joy that is beyond all measure.

The Buddhist says, the world is not okay. Turn away; leave the world behind you; disengage from it. I say, the world is not okay, and that is why we must engage it, for only by engaging it can we ever hope to make it okay.