[Elizabeth Bear]

There’s an interesting debate over whether cloned meat is vegan.

[Elizabeth Bear]

The question is not so much, “How hackable is the human brain?” as, “How do we hack the human brain ethically and with intention, rather than accidentally and destructively?” Not only do recent advances in neuroscience reveal that we humans retain neuroplasticity throughout our entire lives–you can teach an old plains ape new tricks–but that learning can have a physical effect on the brain. We’re developing the ability to change our personalities and temperaments in a tailored fashion, with drugs, surgery, cognitive-behavioral therapy, electrical stimulation, and probably other tactics I’m currently not remembering off the top of my head.

We’re also learning that we can hack ourselves–that we do hack ourselves!–on a daily basis. Every memory we review is subtly altered each time we recollect it. Every choice we make in how we operate our daily schedule can be habituating. We’re roughly as easy to train as the average dog; the difference between us and the dog is that once we’re aware of this, we can make choices about what we want to habituate and reinforce.

It turns out that activity levels and diet have profound effects on brain chemistry, as well. Some studies show that exercise appears to be roughly as effective as SSRIs in treating anxiety and depression. Heck, primitive brainwashing techniques as used by abusive institutions and individuals the world over–the phenomenon commonly known as “Stockholm Syndrome”–rely on much simpler tactics than modern CBT, and we’re making some real progress in treating certain forms of PTSD.

So while we’re not quite at the level of mental programming and mind control beloved of 1960s spy thrillers, the human brain is about as hackable as it gets.

[Elizabeth Bear]

On this topic: Graphene aerogels. NIFTY!

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/153063-graphene-aerogel-is-seven-times-lighter-than-air-can-balance-on-a-blade-of-grass

[Elizabeth Bear]

James,

The 100-Year Starship Project is an attempt at organizing something sort of Wikipedia-like, with limited DARPA involvement.

https://100yss.org/

I was present at the initial brainstorming session back in 2011, and it’ll be very interesting to see if it pans out at all.

–Bear

[Elizabeth Bear]

And here’s one on the current state of the technology, with a really unappetizing looking photo of a turkey cube mid-print-job.

https://blogs.discovermagazine.com/fieldnotes/2013/05/24/printed-space-food-all-the-calories-but-still-missing-something/#.Uae4_dhv-Io

 

[Elizabeth Bear]

I’ve eaten the occasional cricket lately. They have kind of a musty taste, but they’re not bad. (They come in a protein-bar formulation, and also in individual munchable snack packs.)

But as cheap protein, right now, they’re failing on price point, because they’re still a novelty. And they’re not particularly satisfying.

[Elizabeth Bear]

Darusha,

Yeah. If you can reliably rehabilitate criminals–and not through aversive conditioning, a la A Clockwork Orange, but through actually “fixing” their brains… is it ethical to sentence them to that? More or less ethical than sentencing them to imprisonment or execution?

Is it ethical NOT to do it, especially to violent offenders, given the risk to others?

And then, who decides what a crime is? There are still sodomy laws on the books in some places, and other immorality laws. Oral sex between consenting adults? We can fix that little problem for you….

…creeeepy.

[Elizabeth Bear]

Bryan,

This is a thing I’ve been tackling in my own work, and a subject I find fascinating and complicated. I’ve got some wonking old neural atypicalities of my own (some innate, some acquired), so it’s a topic of some interest to me.

I’ve been playing with some ideas surrounding what I call “rightminding,” and its ethical and social implications. I’m not sure it counts as a Hieroglyph–but it’s one of the biggest societal changes I see coming in the immediate future.

I probably wouldn’t be alive, and I definitely wouldn’t be a functional person, without previous psychiatric interventions. I know people whose lives have quite literally been changed or saved by SSRIs, cognitive therapy, the Chicago block, drugs to control OCD, and so forth– but there are terrible ethical and social issues involved. What works? How do we decide who gets what care? If you have the power to literally change somebody’s mind–or your own!–what do you do with it?

In a world where horrific, involuntary, irreversible mutilations have been and continue to be carried out on psychiatric patients, where do we draw the ethical lines?

On the other hand, if I could flip a cognitive switch and turn off my PTSD? I would be there. I’d not only owe it to myself; I’d owe it to my partner and my family and my friends. When I think of how much more productive and happy and easier for my loved ones to deal with I’d be without those particular defense mechanisms… wow.

As it is, I treat it with a time-consuming regimen of diet and exercise and cognitive therapy. And I’m fortunate, these days, that I can afford to do all of those things. But I would have so much more energy for other things without that chronic illness/injury and the constant maintenance it demands–

The magic bullet almost never survives contact with the real world. But it’s a really attractive magic bullet, and even a partial cure would be a godsend for a lot of people.

(I seem to recall that Bruce has picked at a lot of these issues in his own work, as well.)

[Elizabeth Bear]

Deep brain stimulation is pretty neat! And modern prosthetic technology is amazing. We’re really at a very crude level with all this stuff–I can’t wait to see what the next twenty years brings.

[Elizabeth Bear]

I think getting rid of the cows is the best of all possible options: humane/cruelty-free meat is very attractive to me. (I eat animals probably three days out of five. I try to get my cows and eggs from local farms wherever possible, for various reasons–welfare of the animals, health of the consumer, ecological and economical and political–but our local beef farmer is getting out of the business because of the cost of liability insurance, despite the fact that his product is a heck of a lot safer than factory meat.)

This leads me to wonder what the liability problems in vat meat is. (Personally, there’s less yuck factor for me in vat/printed meat than there is in real dead animals.) I also wonder if stem cell based vat meat isn’t a heck of a lot more feasible than printed meat.

[Elizabeth Bear]

Because my brain inevitably works this way when confronted with a cool idea… what’s the failure mode of 60-story vertical farms*? (The failure mode of orbital potato chips re-entry cooked is probably a pretty good humor piece…)

*”EVEN IN THE FUTURE NOTHING WORKS!”

[Elizabeth Bear]

Mark_

Yes, the research on prosthetics is amazingly cool. There’s a level on which the Cyberpunk future of the 1980s is happening right on schedule_everything from Geordi LaForge’s visor to far-more-functional prosthetic limbs.

[Elizabeth Bear]

BDMerz_

Thanks for the recs!

[Elizabeth Bear]

Cambias_

Yeah, exactly. There’s some current research that’s really interesting on oxytocin and fidelity in human men_a paper just dropped this week on that subject, actually. I’ve been playing with that too, and its possible wider societal effects.

Also fascinating is some current research of PTSD treatments_not just EMDR, but some nerve-anaesthetizing techniques that seem to mitigate symptoms. We’ve figured out a whole bunch about memory recently as well, and how traumatic memories are differently created and stored from regular memories… but the malleability of memory offers some interesting options for treatment.

_Bear

[Elizabeth Bear]

Kathryn_

We used it in Shadow Unit, actually!

_Bear

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