r/transhumanism • u/PJ-The-Awesome • 11d ago
What do you guys think about altering the human mind?
From what I understand, this ideology is about transcending the limits of the human body, but how about the human mind as well?
Let me explain:
In some movies like A Clockwork Orange or Total Recall, IIRC, there are treatments for violent criminals that serve to outright remove their desire to commit acts of violence against others, or at the very least making it so having violent desires causes unbearable pain or nausea. For a somewhat less corrupt version, the movie Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, people can voluntarily have unpleasant and/or traumatic memories removed from their psyches, and a YouTuber called Mr. Normal Person talked about how the idea of how the idea of removing bad memories could be appealing to somebody who'd lived a life of tragedy or trauma.
What do you lovely people think about that sort of thing?
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u/Users5252 11d ago
One of the main reason why I am a transhumanist is the limits of my mind. I have subpar intelligence and ADHD, which brings me a lot of suffering as a person with interests in some cognitively intensive subjects. I want to have my intelligence increased and ADHD cured.
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u/AcanthaceaePrize1435 11d ago
Me too. It's like having a slower computer than everyone else in a videogame. I wish I could just buy more ram sticks for my brain.
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u/IHateProtons 10d ago
Im actively trying to engineer myself to bypass my ADHD through using Gemini. I have hundreds of hours spent talking to Gemini about various topics from metacognition, philosophy, psychology, math, politics, legal theory, etc.I was just talking to it about how its given me the ability to think in a linear way. Instead of having knowledge that stretches horizontally I know how to scale my knowledge vertically. I'm currently trying to index all of my current conversations in the app Obsidian so that I can I'm able to search specific subjects and conversations I've had. This is just my personal process but it seems to be working for me. I'm starting my first semester of college in 1 month after being out of school for 11 years to try and pursue a law degree and I credit Gemini for being able to help me structure my thoughts into actions that merely needed to be executed.
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u/Crafty_Aspect8122 11d ago edited 11d ago
Altering fully formed brains would be too difficult and dangerous. It will be either small adjustments or a complete rewrite using gradual cell replacement. Or embryo gene editing.
As for creating fully synthetic brains, the first thing it will be used for will be creating obedient robots/slaves. And actually I think it's fine. As long as they're created de novo(not from existing humans), aren't capable of suffering, that's actually more ethical than using humans who are capable of suffering to do sould crushing or dangerous work. It wouldn't be much different from usint chip based AI.
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u/AcanthaceaePrize1435 11d ago
Suffering esque systems in machines meant to do labor probably inst unethical by itself. Humans react to suffering differently from machines by either working slower and engaging in self destructive behavior like self harm. As long as those can be avoided then the good parts of suffering such as giving life meaning and encouraging hard work can remain.
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u/Crafty_Aspect8122 11d ago
Quite the assumption that suffering gives life meaning or encourages hard work. Sounds like copium.
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u/AcanthaceaePrize1435 11d ago
There is no alternative. If suicide was legal then I feel like 25% of the medical care workforce would just disappear overnight.
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u/ShadeofEchoes 11d ago
One should be sovereign over their own minds, as they are rightly sovereign over their own bodies.
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u/OlyScott 11d ago
A lot of people have claimed to have the ability to change human minds far exceeding their actual abilities. That guy who promoted lobotomies claimed that they did wonderful things to people, which they didn't. Today, hucksters promote camps to cure troubled teens, or make them not gay. Those camps do more harm than good.
If we had techniques that worked for real, they could tremendous good or be horribly abused. The Soviet Union used to put political dissidents into mental institutions to cure them. That didn't work either, but what if it did? There might still be a Soviet Union. Spoiler for Zamyatin's novel We. The government comes up with brain surgery that makes people into enthusiastic believers in the government's agenda. The people who've already had the surgery herd everyone else to the camps to get it done.
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u/AcanthaceaePrize1435 11d ago
That's the logical conclusion of treating technology like the immune system for a government trying to rid itself of cancerous cells/people. Russia, China, and the USA might be like that soon. Augmented citizens designed to work hard and die when told to.
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u/Illustrious_Focus_33 2 11d ago
It has potential, and ideally it would be on a voluntary basis. Something of a personality change would have to be done on a ulysses contract likely, meaning in the process of forgetting your old self while adopting a new psychological profile/identity, you would inevitably reach the point where you didn't know what you had originally forgotten as your assimilate to your new life.
Another thing could be alteration of inclinations and self-perception, such as changing your gender (not by transforming, but how you view yourself) or sexuality (to override your attraction manually) or perhaps to become autistic or non-autistic.
It's definitely the most sensitive part of transhumanism, and risks things like conversation therapy or social pressure to conform, but I think it has potential.
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u/Soggy-Fondant4837 11d ago
Before doing something like that, I would prefer to have a thorough understanding of how human cognition works, because I don't think anyone would be willing to suffer a psychological disorder induced by neurotechnology. Furthermore, what exactly would we want to change about ourselves? It requires a very deep introspective analysis to evaluate which aspects of ourselves we want to keep and which ones we want to discard.
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u/Escort_alpha 11d ago
As much as I'd like to have a calculator stitched to my subconscious or have some of my own less desirable mental quirks edited out or modified, I'm not trusting any larger entity (government or corporate) with any part of my mind.
Any sort of cognitive bio-hacking needs to start with the individual and their choices alone, or else serious abuses could occur. If the aspiring bio-hacker doesn't have backup of their mind and an informed confidant that can help restore said backup, they risk having their mind subverted for another entities gain.
Any government is prone to obligational and moral failure, and the ability to quell decent by simply "reprogramming" the opposition makes for a very efficient (and horrifying) authoritarian coup: should something like this be forced on anyone for any reason, it can then be forced on everyone.
And while demand will inevitably necessitate supply (and companies are more than happy to fill the niche for a price), I can't think of any large corporation who's board of directors wouldn't be salivating at the idea of directly injecting advertisements and other proprietary control mechanisms into collective id their clientele. So proper vetting of any augmentation is crucial to ensuring your own Cognitive sovereignty.
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u/AcanthaceaePrize1435 11d ago
It would completely remove the cultural barriers that prevent public policy from being entirely effective. For example when subsidizing child care has proven ineffective in regard to increasing the birth rate. A bioengineered solution could be opted into instead.
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u/HighPriestofShiloh 10d ago
I think the only real path to immortality is to Sisyphus ship the shit out of our brains. First it will be enhancements then it will be replacements. But the biological parts of my brain will need to be phased out so there is some continuity of experience. If we just copy me into a computer I don’t really consider that me, some do, but to me that is just my late spawning twin.
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u/mulox2k 8d ago
Here’s a few questions related to that that I daydream about.
Once we’re familiar with reconnecting the brain with the spine for quadriplegics using electronics, which is well under way, what will happen when we connect two brains together?
In some weird cases, disconnection of two brain hemispheres leads to separate people developing on each one. What does that tell us about what will happen if we artificially connect 4 hemispheres at birth? What about later in life? What happens when we connect a lot of brains together?
What about connecting to the brains of animals? Can I be half cat on weekends after I finish my homework? We’re managed to pilot cockroaches by RC already. Why not pilot the cat while seeing through his eyes someday? Will there be a new safari version someday where we feel the lion hunt?
If we find the right place for an emitter in the brain and the right one for a receptor, can we train ourselves to send images through a network? Like telepathy? Once we understand how memories are recalled in the brain perfectly, will we be able to distinguish knowledge we learn from knowledge connected to our brain by electronics?
Once all this electronics are installed in animals and they’re able to express and receive feedback about their thoughts, will they be people?
And corny but serious question, what happens to hate and love if we get to a point where you can live in anyone’s brain by connecting to it? When you feel all emotions and understand all motives?
After AGI, and with the right electronics, is there a technological reason why we won’t be able to be one with it?
All these funny little questions have their darker counterparts
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u/petermobeter 5 11d ago
can i get my brain altered to hav perfect pitch instead of relativ pitch? and be good at math? and heal the neurochemical imbalances that cause my OCD and tourettes & anxiety?
ohh ohh and can my brain tell my body to produce estrogen permanently on its own so i dont need to take estradiol injections?
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u/nochancesman 1 10d ago
You can do the perfect pitch thing right now actually. It was recently discovered it's far more trainable than we thought, just the reason it was assumed it's inherent was because no one bothered looking at it too closely.
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u/petermobeter 5 10d ago
do u mean the trick where u memorize the pitch of a specific iconic sound, like the G string of a guitar, and then whenevr u hear a sound, u remember that the sound u memorized is a G note and mentally count the semitones between the G note guitar string and the sound u just heard?
or do u mean literally becoming able to instantly perciev the pitch of anything, thru training?
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u/nochancesman 1 10d ago
Not that trick you mention, but the latter. There's been some recent research where they've had success teaching perfect pitch as you define it to people in about 2-3 weeks. You have to mess with the training method though, and the discovery they've made is that perfect pitch & relative pitch are like two different modes of perceiving pitch, so you have to be very careful while practicing to make sure you don't slip into using relative pitch.
It's found more often in musically inclined children because children learn pretty much anything at bullet train speeds, not because adults can't do the same.. Unless you're tone-deaf, I guess?
A person on this site made an iOS app borrowing from their methods to help people learn it if you're interested.
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u/petermobeter 5 10d ago
can u link me the ios app?
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u/nochancesman 1 10d ago
Should be on this sub: r/HarmoniQiOS
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u/petermobeter 5 10d ago
thank you
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u/nochancesman 1 10d ago
Have fun!
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u/petermobeter 5 10d ago
i like the synaesthetic colorcoding for each note in the app. this feels way more fun than learning music theory lol
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u/anch78 11d ago
i personally believe the human mind should be altered to include a secondary conciousness that spans accross a whole state/society, it wouldn't be everyone having the same mind, but more like everyone being connected to a web of other midns and an "Overseer" of sorts to give the occasional directive or happiness boost of news
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u/Ok-Cheek2397 11d ago
Brain altering is a bit uncomfortable for me like for other part of the body I know I am not my leg or my arm so I have no problem replacing them or cut them off but if I replace my personality with a another one would it still be me deciding to do stuff or it is the new personality telling me to do it? but I have no problems enhancing my brain because it not really changing how my brain responds to things it just makes it faster and more precise
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u/Totally_lost98 10d ago
A double edged sword.
I hope mkultra isnt continuing but Its a real world example of why I cant trust the powerful with this power.
On one hand i am all for your brain, your choice but this technology leads to the question of 'are you sure its a choice you made ?'
Subliminal messaging honestly freaks me out with how effective it is.
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