We live in a universe that conforms to what one might call reductionistic analysis: the behavior of the macroscale objects that we see around us (objects like people) can be explained by regarding those objects as conglomerates of simple building blocks called elementary particles which obey the same physical laws whether they are part of a machine gun or part of a dopamine receptor in your brain.
There are some highly counterintuitive predictions that this fact about our world makes: the physical laws that govern interactions between these elementary particles must give rise to parts of our lives that we don't usually associate with "physics" - such as feeling tired and defeated on a saturday morning, being in pain, or falling - and staying - in love. Furthermore, if those parts of our lives - parts that we care about deeply - are really just special cases of physics, then there is nothing stopping us from making them do more of what we want, and less of what we don't want. If our deepest feelings are ultiumately the result of the interactions of elementary particles, and we find that some other people around us sometimes seem to fare better in those most intimate aspects of life, then we have an opportunity: self-modification to make oneself more the person one wants to be.
The particular stimulus that jolted me into writing a blog post is this article (H/T David Pearce, Kaj Sotala) , which shows that there is a lot of natural variation in one of the most important aspects of our lives - being in love with our partner:
Suzanne Bernstein said she and her husband, Sidney, eat side-by-side when they go out, always walk hand-in-hand, and begin and end each day with "I love you." The couple from Weehawken, N.J., have been married 18 years and Suzanne said the relationship is as passionate as when they first met.
Now research exists to support her claim.
Stony Brook University researchers looked at the brains of Bernstein and 16 other people who had been married an average of 20 years and claimed to be still intensely in love. They found that their MRIs showed activity in the same regions of the brain as those who had just fallen in love. "It's always been assumed that passionate love inevitably declines over time," said Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University and one of four authors of the study, presented in November at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
"But in survey after survey we always have these people who have been together a long time and say they are intensely in love. It was always chalked up to self-deception or trying to make a good impression," he said. In fact, she said, the study found an advantage to the longer-term relationships she studied: The brains of those people showed less anxiety and obsessiveness.
Aron had conducted an earlier MRI study published in 2005 among 17 people who had recently fallen in love. He found that regions of the brain associated generally with reward and motivation -- the same regions that light up when cocaine is taken -- activated when the subjects were shown pictures of their beloved. These regions, Aron said, are not the same as those associated with sexual arousal.
If there's that much natural variation, one wonders what could be done with deliberate interventions? This is the real allure of the humanity+ endeavour: forget space elevators and jupiter brains. Think about the fact that falling in love is a physical feat involving both you and your partner's ability to secrete certain hormones, and that neither of you are the best in the world at it, just as neither of you are the best in the world at other physical feats like running the 100m sprint in world-record breaking time.
In the limit of extremely high technology and extreme wisdom to steer that technology to good ends, we end up with the so-called surprisingly good solutions - states of existence that are so good that when we experience them, we will be shocked that it can get this good, and outraged that we didn't get there sooner.
For the moment, the article offers the following advice for people who are interested in improving the quality of their relationship with the best technology we have today - self-help:
Keeping the Fires Burning - research has found that passionate, long-lasting relationships generally have several things in common:
- The couple is not facing terrible "external stressors," such as war or the loss of a child.
- One partner is not highly depressed or anxious.
- Both know how to communicate with each other.
- The couple does new, challenging things together.
- When one partner is successful, the other celebrates the success.
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19 comments:
Instead of marriage vows, future grooms might opt to undergo gene therapy with the "monogamy gene":
http://www.healthnews.com/medical-updates/scientists-discover-monogamy-gene-1706.html
To sustain lifelong sexual ardour indefinitely, both partners could take subcutaneously delivered PT-141 / bremelanotide:
http://www.pt141.com/aphrodisiac.html
Such talk doesn't sound very romantic. But posthuman love can be far richer than anything accessible today - when heartache and frustration is the norm.
Let's not forget the problems caused by jealousy and insecurity, and their effects on society.
@David: "Such talk doesn't sound very romantic."
- there is an important insight that Eliezer Yudkowsky shared with me: having experience X is very different from having the experience of understanding experience X. Similarly, having an improved version of an experience is very different from experiencing the process of reworking the mechanism behind the experience to improve it.
Water is wet, but the equations of fluid dynamics are not.
Similarly, talking about subcutaneously delivered PT-141 / bremelanotide is not romantic, but actually having subcutaneously delivered PT-141 / bremelanotide and then spending time with your loved one would be a romantic experience.
Many people conflate the so called "object level" of what some piece of transhuman technology would actually be like with the "meta level" of talking about how it works.
- and the result is that they unconsciously use the feelings and emotions attached to the meta-level process of thinking about the intervention (boring, science, complicated, unromantic, mechanical) to fill in the blank space for what a successful implementation of the intervention would feel like.
I think that h+ is unpopular for this reason, amongst others.
Yes, I'm sure Eliezer is right on that score. Tellingly, perhaps, Elizeer is (uncharacteristically) ambivalent about the possibility of lifelong superhappiness:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/wv/prolegomena_to_a_theory_of_fun/
at least if I've understood him correctly.
An advocate of posthuman happiness could point out that anyone who had tasted the sublime (rather than just talked about it) wouldn't want anything else. But a critic of such a future might dismiss it with the proverbial junky's warning: "Don't try heroin, it's too good".
Actually, I suspect a lot of people (including super-rationalists like Eliezer?) feel ambivalent about even safe, sustainable, superintelligent bliss in any form we can describe today. Hearing news you'd won the lottery would be more exciting.
"Elizeer is (uncharacteristically) ambivalent about the possibility of lifelong superhappiness"
I think that his position is that you require something more than just sensual pleasure, something more complex.
Love is, in fact, more complex than sensual pleasure. There is "more going on", somehow. I am finding this hard to put into words, though.
Orgasmic bliss is one option. But so is the radical enrichment of normal hedonic tone that forms the backdrop to everyday life. Even a quadriplegic intellectual who today wishes he were a disembodied soul could be superhappy. The critical test for many intellectuals, I suspect, will be whether superhappiness is really feasible without subtly impairing intellectual performance or critical insight.
@David:
"But so is the radical enrichment of normal hedonic tone that forms the backdrop to everyday life."
I think that there is even more than that.
Think about the Coherent Extrapolated Volition concept. The idea is that there are probably implicit preferences that you have that you do not currently know that you have, but that a sufficiently intelligent AI could suggest these possibilities to you.
Related is the idea of "fake" oversimple utopias:
But to an exhausted, poverty-stricken medieval peasant, the Christian Heaven sounds like good news in the moment of being first informed: You can lay down the plow and rest! Forever! Never to work again!
It'd get boring after... what, a week? A day? An hour?
Regrettably, I think that the situation of contemporary western citizens is analogous to that of the medieval peasant. We are stuck within a world where our hedonic setpoints often give us a chronic negative reward signal, so when (those of us enlightened enough to do so) think about creating utopia, we fixate on the very first, most important problem we have: being unhappy. But once we had fixed that problem, we would want more; we would want to participate in better social activities with more interesting people who were kinder to us and each other, we would want to continue to learn, to savour special moments with people, etc, etc, etc. And once we had done all of that for a while, well, we would have learned new ideas about what to want. To quote Nick Bostrom:
The whole exceeds the sum of its parts. What I have is not merely more of what is available to you now. It isn’t just the particular things, the paintings and toothpaste-tube designs, the record covers and books, the epochs, lives, leaves, rivers, and random encounters, the satellite images and the collider data – it is also the complex relationships between these particulars that make up my mind. There are ideas that can be formed only on top of such a wide experience base. There are depths that can be fathomed only with such ideas.
Imminent control over our reward circuitry promises a fundamental discontinuity in the history of life in the universe. In future not just suffering, but also boredom and a sense that life lacks meaning can (optionally) be made biologically impossible.
Yes, as you describe, conceptions of the ideal life are time- and culture-bound. _Any_ purely "environmentalist" utopia can come to seem boring or otherwise unsatisfactory _if_ you're still stuck with our current biological make-up.
Yet IMO that's the beauty of what's in store. If we want, tomorrow's biotech allows every moment of our lives to be as exhilarating as we choose - though prudence dictates the use of information-signalling "dips" in interest to preserve the functional analogues of boredom and hence intellectual discernment.
As you, Eliezer and Nick rightly note, sophisticated posthumans may entertain desires far richer than feasible today. But this richness isn't an obstacle to superhappiness. For mastery of our reward circuitry should also allow us independently to modulate [mu-opioidergic] "liking" and [dopaminergic] "wanting" i.e.our levels of happiness and desire. Contra Buddhist orthodoxy, deep happiness and immense desire are in principle both sustainable indefinitely - though only recently have neuroscientists started to tease their molecular mechanisms apart:
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/psych/research&labs/berridge/publications/Berridge%20'Liking'%20&%20'wanting'%20food%20rewards%20Physiol%20&%20Behav%202009.pdf
@David: "circuitry should also allow us independently to modulate [mu-opioidergic] "liking" and [dopaminergic] "wanting""
- I am hesitant that this would actually be a good idea for me personally, and I would advise others to be careful. I think perhaps some limited re-setting of the the dopaminergic "wanting" setpoint would be good, but I would not want to decouple the two. The only reason I can cite is that I wouldn't be sufficiently human-like if my wanting and my liking were non-correlated.
But one could probably benefit from some kind of tinkering here.
"In future not just suffering, but also boredom and a sense that life lacks meaning can (optionally) be made biologically impossible."
You're solving the wrong problem. If people have new and interesting things to do, they shouldn't be bored; if their lives are exciting, they shouldn't have a sense of meaninglessness. If the underlying problems are solved and the angst still persists, maybe there's something else going on. If anything that could be solved has been solved and the existential angst is persisting, maybe as just a brute neurological fact, that's the point at which I'd reach for the modification software.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/xr/in_praise_of_boredom/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/sc/existential_angst_factory/
>We live in a universe that conforms to what one might call reductionistic analysis
I still have strong doubts on that score. In fact I put the chances of a failure of reductionism as being as high as 50%, where I define reductionism as being the claim that;
'Any useful ontological object hierarchy could in principle be reduced to a single level i.e higher level ontological objects could in princple be entirely explained in terms of lower level ones'
Remember, QM as it stands contradicts classical mechanics, and no one has yet succeeded in explaining the Born probabilities (a bridging law is needed)
This means that even if you have a high confidence in reductionism, you must admit that the case for reductionism has not been proven beyond 'reasonable doubt'.
--
Interestingly, I think a failure of reductionism would mean that for every new irreducible level of reality, there would be a new form of indeterminism associated with that level. (so there could be new non-QM forms of indeterminism).
Note: I have a non-reductionist theory consisting of a 27-level reality!
Let's keep an open mind and realize that the final verdict of the 'big issues' is not yet in.
>Water is wet, but the equations of fluid dynamics are not.
The human brain is not capable of *directly experiencing* mathematical equations... we are all suffering from mathematical *blind-sight* (we have mathematical knowledge, but not mathematical experiences).
However, with suitable modification, there is no reason why we could not *directly experience* math. Indeed, a mind with reliable 'mathematical intuitions' could just use conscious experience to 'see' mathematical truths directly.
I strongly suspect that *mathematical consciousness* could be like looking at an *ontology scape* (i.e. I think mathematics would seem to a math-conscious mind to be like an ontology). But these are esoteric issues.
Many new amazing conscious experiences await post-humans.
@Geddes: "I have a non-reductionist theory consisting of a 27-level reality!"
Marc, you need to get out more...
@EY/David Pearce:
It seems that I would not want to turn off boredom if the world around me is actually boring, I would not want to experience pleasure unless the world around me is actually pleasing, and I do not want to be pleasured by experiences that I do not actually like, unless the world is such that there is no other way of experiencing pleasure, excitement, satisfaction.
David is correct that you could re-program yourself to be in blissful even orgasmic pleasure all the time, irrespective of what you are doing, for example using the toilet or washing the dishes. But I think that EY is correct that it would be better to change the world around you such that you spend most of your time doing exciting, blissfully (and *hey* orgasmically) pleasurable things much more of the time than we do today, and retain a relationship between subjective experience and actual activity that is the same in kind as we have today - so if you have an argument with someone, you still feel bad afterwards, rather than just feeling a less intense form of orgasmic bliss.
But although I think that it is best to retain a relationship that is qualitatively very much what we have today, it doesn't have to be quantitatively similar. The lows can be less low, and the highs oh-so-much higher.
EY, who is right? The enraptured mystic who can "see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower"?
Or you and me who think grains of sand are scarcely worth noticing and wild flowers are quite pretty?
Some people are temperamentally disposed to find almost everything interesting - albeit even more fascinating on occasion than others. Other people are normally bored. Individuals seem to have a variable homeostatic range of interest/boredom with an approximate "set-point" around which they typically fluctuate. [Who was it who said that a true artist could never be bored even in a lifetime prison cell because he had a rich imagination to draw on?] Analogous to the hedonic treadmill, the set-point of some people's boredom threshold seems to be (partially) fixed higher than others; it has a high degree of genetic loading. In principle, this set-point can be recalibrated. As you know, I (tentatively) predict that our descendants will find everyday life orders of magnitude more saturated with significance than the "peak experiences" of contemporary humans. Alas such states simply aren't genetically possible with existing human biology. Thus I doubt if the average inhabitant of entertainment-rich Western society finds his or her life any more (or less) interesting than a typical Kalahari bushman. As neuroscanning technology improves, such claims are testable.
Roko, I'd agree we should systematically redesign our external environment - and indeed our whole ecosystem - rather than retreat into private personal paradises as soon as we've mastered our reward circuitry. But this is because radical environmental manipulation is the only way impartially to ensure lifelong sublimity for all.
Could you possibly clarity one point above? Do you think that, if you have a disagreement with someone, you ought in some sense to feel bad afterwards (as distinct from undergo diminished well-being)? Or is this just an expression of personal preference? Would you want others to feel bad (as distinct from undergo diminished well-being) after having a disagreement with you?
@David: Give me a few days to comment back, I have a thesis deadline attacking me right now...
I find the longer you leave work, the quicker it gets done!
Seriously Roko, no rush. But I'll be interested in your response. Transhumanists are pretty much unanimous in advocating the unlimited amplification of lifespan and intelligence. Alas no such consensus exists about the use of future technologies of radical mood-enrichment - or even the abolition of involuntary suffering.
It would probably be better if we had more pleasure from learning new things (knowledge, experience, art, etc.), to reach a level at least as high as that of gambling (which has a very high dopamine release level, hard to beat except with drugs).
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