Zebrafish

Thirty-sixth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 27: Zebrafish

page 369: watching the development. Here is an example of time-lapse of the first 24 hours.

page 369: investigate anything... Zebrafish have recently been made to grow 'pre-hands' instead of fins. Here's an outline of why the zebrafish is many researchers' favourite animal. (Added 24 Jan: as mentioned in an earlier note, zebrafish are being trapped in a virtual world provide a window into complex brain connections.)

page 370: since this book was written Craig Venter and his colleagues have announced the development of the first software simulation of the lifecycle of an entire organism:

The simulation, which runs on a cluster of 128 computers, models the complete life span of the cell at the molecular level, charting the interactions of 28 categories of molecules — including DNA, RNA, proteins and small molecules known as metabolites, which are generated by cell processes.

page 370: reprogramming the code of life. As one article puts it:

DNA is passé. Synthetic biologists have invented an array of new molecules called XNAs that boast all the talents of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA), as well as some special powers. XNAs could allow scientists to safely create life-forms in the laboratory that do not depend on DNA to survive and evolve.

page 371: some harbingers of change are considered artistic or creative.  See, for example, The unnatural art of synthetic biology, A museum of creatures re-engineered by humans, Bio-artists who tinker with tools of science. Here is a picture of Joris Laarman's Halflife Lamp, which is illuminated by hamster cells modified with firefly DNA.

 page 371: a sensational earlier life partly captured in the classic headline Now she has her pit bull cloned. But once she manacled a Mormon for sex.

page 373: reverse engineer dinosaurs which does, of course look like rather a mad thing to do, as does recreating Neanderthals.

page 373: scenarios for the future of humanity. Gary Marcus is a long way from addressing them all, but is pretty wise this far:

Edison certainly didn’t envision electric guitars, and even after the basic structure of the Internet had been in place for decades, few people foresaw Facebook or Twitter. It would be mistake for any of us to claim that we know exactly what a world full of robots, 3-D printers, biotech, and nanotechnology will bring. But, at the very least, we can take a long, hard look at our own cognitive limitations (in part through increased training in metacognition and rational decision-making), and significantly increase the currently modest amount of money we invest in research in how to keep our future generations safe from the risks of future technologies.

Moral enhancement

Julian Savalescu and Ingmar Persson write:

Modern technology provides us with many means to cause our downfall, and our natural moral psychology does not provide us with the means to prevent it. The moral enhancement of humankind is necessary for there to be a way out of this predicament. If we are to avoid catastrophe by misguided employment of our power, we need to be morally motivated to a higher degree (as well as adequately informed about relevant facts). A stronger focus on moral education could go some way to achieving this, but as already remarked, this method has had only modest success during the last couple of millennia. Our growing knowledge of biology, especially genetics and neurobiology, could deliver additional moral enhancement, such as drugs or genetic modifications, or devices to augment moral education.

It's good to see this argument spelled out.  But even if (and I think it may be a big if) "our growing knowledge of biology, especially genetics and neurobiology" can deliver "additional moral enhancement" can they really do so faster than foreseeable breakthroughs in energy technology can (just perhaps) solve the energy/carbon challenge?
So, for example, Benjamin Strauss of Climate Central argues that "Our best hope is some kind of disruptive technology that takes off on its own, the way the Internet and the fax took off."

Note: two recent useful pieces relating relating to the psychology of climate change are Beth's We are all climate change idiots, which notes Robert Gifford analysis of habits of mind he calls the "dragons of inaction", and Atul Gawande's Something wicked this way comes, which is actually about health insurance in the US but notes Albert O. Hirschman's anatomy of reactionary argument in three basic forms: perversity, futility, and jeopardy.

(Image: melting ice on Greenland coast)

Flow is a force that gives us meaning

As if they were needed, reminders -- one and two -- that human enhancements are most likely to be seen first and predominantly in the military-industrial killing complex rather than in some libertarian fantasy world.

P.S. 19 Feb: The Brain, weaponized

Poiesis

If what is or is not an ethical truth is contingent on the types of biological organisms that we are, then changing the types of biological organisms that we are will change the nature of what is or is not ethical.

So writes Greg Nirshberg in a reflection titled Genetic Modification and Human Ontology. This is probably useful as far as it goes.

One of the matters scarcely explored, however, is that significant modifications to the human genome and associated systems, will, if undertaken at all, be undertaken in the context of changes in even larger the systems in which they are embedded. [1] To (mis?)use the language suggested by Andrew Pickering, there will be a 'dance of agency' between (on the one hand) scientists and society and (on the other) the world as revealed through performance. Agency -- and therefore ethics -- will be an emergent property of interaction between the two.

But even if we are necessarily ignorant of many of ethical (and spiritual) questions that will confront us or our descendants can we not still develop working hypotheses (or ideas to explore in performance rather than cognition)?  So, for example, we may consider this from James Lovelock, (echoing Lewis Thomas here):

The remaining life span of the biosphere is unlikely to be much more than 500 million years, so that if humans died out the chances of our replacement by another intelligent communicating species is improbable. If this is true then we have a goal a purpose. As part of the Earth system our job is to help keep our planet habitable and perhaps become a step in the evolution of an intelligent planet.

One small but essential way of pursuing such a goal would be the tending of forests and other ecosystems through interaction and learning over time: techniques of ecological restoration/recreation/new-creation that are 'alive to emergence.'

Footnote:

[1] See also level 3 systems complexity as described by Brad Allenby and Dan Sarowitz in The Techno-human Condition, plus their short posts here.

(Image from Solaris - Lem/Tarkovsky)

P.S. 9 Feb: 'You...have to consider the possibility that cognitive enhancements may go hand in hand with moral enhancements.'

The Wilmington Yew

You may think there will be less Change than I am suggesting, and you may be right, but it is hard for me to see why. It is possible that the sorts of understanding and the skills in creation needed to fundamentally reshape the human being are simply not available to our intellects, or to the ways we act upon knowledge. But look at the progress of the past hundred years - the progress that weighs isotopes by stratospheric chemistry in the Archaean, and reads the genomes of chloroplasts, that lets us build pictures of the atomic machines that pull apart water molecules and weigh the chlorophyll content of whole oceans by staring down from space - and ask yourself if understanding and reshaping the mechanisms of the mind is really likely to be entirely beyond us.

...in the churchyard overlooked by the Long Man sits a yew that may be two thousand years old. Men who fought at the Battle of Lewes could have cut their bows from it; now it is celebrated in the Norman church beside it by a wonderful new stained-glass window based on micrographs of yew wood, the sunshine streaming through its representations of stomata like wounds of the living Christ. This yew and its ancient brethren scattered across the landscape could, I increasingly suspect, outlive the human race, or at least see the first flowering of its successors.

-- from Eating the Sun by Oliver Morton (2007)


Photo: Taxus baccata at Wakehurst Place by Marco Schmidt.

The long view

Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.

-- Paul Saffo, quoted in The Coming Superbrain.

Lazarus

This interview with Ray Kurzweil (whose Age of Spirital Machines I reviewed in '99) is fascinating. So much seems credible. [1] Then I get to the last paragraph and wonder, is he insane or joking in some way? Or am I missing something?


Another story imagines eternal life beginning not in 2045 or so, but at 'the Omega point' far in the future of the universe. As Marcus Chown introduces the idea:

You've had a long life but, finally, your time has come. If you were a wit like Oscar Wilde, you would say something amusing like: 'Either these curtains go or I do'. But you are suffused by such an awful tiredness that you can barely think, let alone speak...You draw one last breath...

...and it is summer and you are young again. Your favourite dog -- the one that loved you so much as a child and thought you would never see again -- has knocked you to the ground and is licking your face furiously. Through tears of joy, you see your father and mother -- long dead -- standing over you. They are young -- just as they were when you were ten years old -- and they are laughing and stretching out their hands to you.

Footnote

[1] (Added 13 May): See, e.g., Will designer brains divide humanity?

As we to Floresiensis

On the wilder shores, perhaps, Michael Anissimov wonders whether the only way to escape a scenario in which billions of people are killed by toxins deliberately engineered and delivered by micro-robotic scorpions, parasitic wasps, fairyflies and the like [1] is to create a "benevolent singleton", an "Intelligence Amplified fundamentally considerate and kind human whose intelligence is actually improved above Homo sapiens to the tune that H. sapiens is above H. heidelbergensis."

Para eso habeis nacido

To be contrary, and with only a bit of tongue in cheek, couldn't there be more room for beings a little less intelligent, perhaps a little like H. floresiensis, which in a slower world might persist for millions of years?

Footnote

[1] On insects as weapons, insect cyborgs and roboflies see Jeffrey Lockwood.

Musica universalis

It may or may not be altogether true. It does make for a good story:

Konstantin Saradzhev [had] almost superhuman aural acuity: between two adjacent whole tones, he perceived not just one half tone but a half tone flanked on either side by a hundred and twenty-one flats and a hundred and twenty-one sharps.

When Saradzhev was seven years old, the sound a particularly powerful church bell caused him to lose consciousness, and he was captivated for life. Although a skilled pianist, he always referred to the piano as “that well-tempered nitwit”: a piano can produce only twelve tones per octave, whereas Saradzhev perceived one thousand seven hundred and one. This sensitivity perhaps explains Saradzhev’s intense delight in Russian bells, which are unparalleled in their microtonal complexity. Each bell sounds a unique cloud of untempered frequencies, producing intervals unplayable on any twelve-tone keyboard. By such acoustic fingerprints Saradzhev could distinguish all four thousand of Moscow’s church bells. He described his hearing as “true pitch” (by contrast with perfect pitch). The capacity for true pitch, he said, lay dormant in all humans, and would someday be awakened. But in the meantime he was, like a superhero, cruelly isolated by his own powers.

-- from The Bells by Elif Batuman.


See also: World premiere of brain orchestra:

We can wonder what the mind and brain would be capable of if it would be directly interfaced to the world, bypassing the body.

P.S. 29 April: Tonal languages are the key to perfect pitch

Birdsong of the Eremezoic

It seems feasible that over the coming century human nature will be scientifically remodelled. If so, it will be done haphazardly, as an upshot of struggles in the murky realm where big business, organised crime, and the hidden parts of government vie for control. If the human species is re-engineered it will not be as a result of humanity assuming a godlike control of its destiny. It will be another twist in man's fate.

Thus John Gray (2002) in pessimism of the grand style, which sweeps along so boldly that you may sometimes question if it sweeps away too much. [1]

For Gray, the prospect of conscious human evolution evoked by E O Wilson is a mirage.

Further extensions for Freud's prosthetic (brutal infant) god(s) are likely. Whatever is coming down the track may not be godlike in the sense Gray means, but it may be as arbitrary and unpredictable, as kind and as cruel as the gods in Ovid's Metamorphosis.


Footnote

[1] So, for example, Man may well be "a highly inventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive"; but it may be more than that. Man, and especially women, may also be "naturally" cooperative and compassionate. Pity, like a naked new-born babe, striding the blast...shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, that tears shall drown the wind.

All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, despair, law, chance hath slain

This is rather odd but worth a look.

Eyeborg

Rob Spence, a 36-year-old Canadian filmmaker, is not content with having one blind eye. He wants a wireless video camera inside his prosthetic, giving him the ability to make movies wherever he is, all the time, just by looking around. "If you lose your eye and have a hole in your head, then why not stick a camera in there?" he asks.

-- Wired

Image: scallop

An end to suffering...

...but probably not as the Buddha meant it. David Pearce of BLTC does a Hedonistic Imperative spiel for H+ magazine which appears to hold that, contra Aristotle, happiness is a mental state and not an activity:

In maybe three or four decades or so, we’ll be choosing such traits as the average hedonic set point of our children. Over time, I think allelic combinations…that leave their bearers predisposed to unpleasant states of consciousness – unpleasant states that were genetically adaptive in our ancestral environment – will be weeded out of the gene pool. For a very different kind of selection pressure is at work when evolution is no longer ‘blind’ and ‘random’, i.e. when rational agents design the genetic makeup of their future offspring in anticipation of its likely effects. In that sense, we’re heading for a post-Darwinian transition – ultimately I believe to some form of paradise-engineering.

Ataraxia or Eudaimonia may not be illusory or wrong as goals, but how intelligent, compassionate and wise would the designers of this imagined world be? What about unpleasant states of consciousness that do not arise because of genetically adaptive responses shaped by ancestral environments? And how plausible is this?:

If we want to, we can use depot contraception, redesign the global ecosystem, and rewrite the vertebrate genome to get rid of suffering in the rest of the natural world too. For non-human animals don't need liberating; they need looking after... Just as we don't feed terrified live rodents to snakes in zoos - we recognize that's barbaric - will we really continue to permit cruelties in our terrestrial wildlife parks because they are "natural"?

So we contemplate a future in which (say) tigers and eagles are dosed with Meat 2.0 and no longer hunt? It's almost enough to send one back to the anecdote retold by Adam Phillips in Darwin's Worms. Asked "don't you think there's too much suffering in the world?", the composer John Cage answered, "No, I think there's just the right amount".


(photo from when eagles go bad...)

P.S. 22 Oct: I just learned via Andrew Sullivan that Brian Appleyard homes in on the same passage from David Pearce as I do and has even less time for the argument.

Humans, chimeras, humility

Many bioconservatives are addicted to a notion of humanness that is very specific to Judeo-Christianity. [But] when you look at India and Thailand, Japan, Korea and China, and you ask should parents be able to use biotechnology to make their children more virtuous or more intelligent?, the vast majority in those countries say yes. But in Europe and North America people are very pessimistic. And that’s largely because of the Judeo-Christian hangover that there's a certain humanness was created by God at the beginning of time, and by playing around with this you’re playing God. There are natural boundaries beyond which it’s hubris to go. And those are western problems, for the most part. In eastern cultures you don’t have that problem. You have chimeric gods in Hinduism which are half-human, half-animal. In Buddhism you have the implicitly notion that humans can become more than the gods, achieve greater states of mind and physical abilities than the gods.

--James Hughes in conversation [1] on existential threats at Buddhist Geeks.

Yes, but hubris (ὕβρις) predates Judeo-Christianity. The word comes from a culture that had no problem imagining chimeric beings and gods that could take animal forms but still thought Man could over reach with terrible consequences. [2]

Who are most humble? Those who most skillfully prepare for the deepest and most catastrophic errors in their own beliefs and plans.

-- from the Twelve Virtues of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Notes

1. this is a rough transcript, not verbatim.

2. In Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams argues that the basic ethical ideas possessed by the ancient Greeks were "in better condition" than modern ones

It could be worse

'tis but a scratch.

I'm going to a conference on global catastrophic risks which runs from 17 to 20 July in Oxford. This may seem is an odd way to pass time, but the case for looking seriously at a range of catastrophic scenarios, up to and including human extinction, has been well made a few times. In this lecture, for example, Martin Rees does a pretty good job of outlining some cosmic challenges for humanity.

By way of background, a new book edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic is helpful (its introduction is available via the conference reading list). Also useful (although not directly connected to the conference) are posts by James Cascio on An Eschatological Taxonomy and The Big Picture: Collapse, Transcendence or Muddling Through.

I am less convinced of the transhumanism agenda [1], apparent in Bostrom and Cirkovic's inclusion of ageing in the category of catastrophic risks. I hope to keep an open mind (and better understand a range of arguments including those advanced by Russell Blackford of the IEET), but my initial skepticism is informed by the following points (which are unlikely to be original and have probably been better stated, and answered, elsewhere):

* acceptance of human fragility is a starting point for compassion and 'humanity' as we know it. Renewal, including the complete innocence of the new born, is part of the glory. The great chain of love over generations is part of us.[2]

* what's good for the individual may not not necessarily be what's good for the species. The very old but indefinitely strong, fit and active would accumulate all the power, rather as Swift's Struldbrugs: "[these] immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public." [3]

* even if they pan out, the efforts of Aubrey de Grey et al may be aimed at the wrong target. The idea of a singularity should be treated with critical distance [4], but if you accept that, as Rees says, there is more time ahead in the cosmos for complexity and intelligence to develop than there is time behind then he's probably right that future life will be as different from humans as we are from bacteria.

Of course, continuing to be able to have these debates depends in part on whether humanity gets through the existential risks [5] of the next few decades or so intact. For this we have our current abilities as humans and the institutions and networks we are capable of developing over those decades. But at heart our success or failure will probably depend, as Rees says, on whether we show at least as much moral courage as the likes of Joseph Rotblat and those who shared his view, perhaps sentimental, of humanity:

We appeal, as human beings to human beings. Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open for a new paradise; if you cannot there lies before you the risk of universal death.[6]

Footnotes

1. In John Gray's view (Black Mass, p. 56), there is a straight line from Leon Trotsky's revolutionary violence to transhumanism. I'm not convinced this is right either -- particularly not in reference to those who think about transhumanism/singluarlity in a sophisticated way.

2. I realise this starts to sound almost 'religious', but it's an interesting exercise to try to articulate what one thinks are his cherished beliefs. Of course I am in favour of as long, healthy and rich a life as possible for as many as possible. But remember the warning against megalomania whispered to Roman generals at a triumph: 'Remember you are mortal'.

3. Quite independently of this discussion, someone put it to me that the existence of people like Sheldon Adelson (profiled here) was the best argument against indefinite life extension. [On similar grounds, this person said, 'personhood' in law for corporations was extremely dangerous. It's familiar argument, but interesting that it should come from someone who works at the most senior levels of American business.] One counterargument, I suppose, would be that in the right circumstances those who lived a very long time would become wise and/or know that they would live to see the long term consequences of their actions.

4. A good very short intro to thinking about the idea is provided, again, by James Cascio in Singularities enough and time.

5. Including climate change. See, for example, James Lovelock here.

6. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto.

Busy being born

In the future there will be no more human beings. This is not something we should worry about.

-- writes John Harris (in Who’s afraid of a synthetic human?). And having got your attention he frames an argument for human enhancement with a plausible simile: it's like candlelight as opposed to darkness -- artificial, of course, but an unquestionable benefit (...so long as it regulated and fairly distributed: Harris is after all a European [1] not an American).

For Harris, professor of bioethics at Manchester University, "the end of humanity is not in itself a concern; making sure that those who replace us are better than we are is a huge and timely concern."

I agree with Stephen Pinker's attack on 'theocon bioethics', provocatively titled The Stupidity of Dignity, and I think Olivia Judson writes thoughtfully and informatively about how, for her, wonder replaced unease when she learned more about cybrids. But I think we need to think carefully about two terms Harris deploys: "better" and "humanity."

In the brief scope of his article, Harris describes "creatures better than ourselves" as ones that are "longer-lived, more resistant to disease and injury, healthier and better adapted to a changing environment". This is OK as far as it goes but I think it is not enough for at least two reasons.

One, we are not just talking about pet dogs or heirloom vegetables (to use a comparison made in a post on the blog Practical Ethics). Synthetic biology looks likely to have greater potential than anything so far to turn all beings into an undifferentiated "standing reserve" (Heidegger) for any use to which humans -- or post humans -- choose to put them.

Two, we need an enhanced sense of what it is to be human and a broader and deeper sense of non-human being at least as much as if not more than we need enhanced humans. I have in mind wisdom and compassion -- 'humanity' in the richest sense of that word -- and a better sense of moral and physical limits, given our capacity to inflict pain on others and to damage ecosystems.

In a recent piece titled Faustian Economics, Wendell Berry writes:

Our cultural tradition is in large part the record of our continuing effort to understand ourselves as beings specifically human: to say that, as humans, we must do certain things and we must not do certain things. We must have limits of we will cease to exist as humans; perhaps we will cease to exist [altogether]. At times, for example, some of us humans have thought that human beings, properly so called, did not make war against civilian populations, or hold prisoners without fair trial, or use torture for any reason.

[Footnote 1: 'European', perhaps, in the sense of states, institutions and values of the kind that the historian Tony Judt hopes for: "the alternative in the 21st century is not the globalised post state world as versus the old fashioned world of the nation state; it's the protective, welfare state -- democratic and open -- as against the demagogic closed state of fear." (Nightwaves, BBC Radio 3, May 2008)].

Just wondering

The entire history of humankind to date is a mere instant compared with the eons that still lie before us. All the triumphs and tribulations of the millions of people who have walked the Earth since the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia would be like mere birth pangs in the delivery of a kind of life that hasn't yet begun. For surely it would be the height of naïveté to think that with the transformative technologies already in sight--genetics, nano technology, and so on--and with thousands of millennia still ahead of us in which to perfect and apply these technologies and others of which we haven't yet conceived, human nature and the human condition will remain unchanged. Instead, if we survive and prosper, we will presumably develop some kind of posthuman existence.

-- a scenario from Nick Bostrom, the co-organiser of a conference on catastrophic global risks, who (unlike Funes the not so memorious) hopes the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing. The late W G Sebald looked in other directions:

The denial of time, so the tract on Orbius Tertius tells us, is one of the key tenets of the philosophical schools of Tloen. According to this principle, the future exists only in the shape of our present apprehensions and hopes, and the past is merely a memory. In a different view, the world and everything now living in it was created only moments ago, together with its complete but illusory pre-history. A third school of thought variously describes our earth as a cul-de-sac in the great city of God, a dark cave crowded with incomprehensible images, or a hazy aura surrounding a better sun. The advocates of a fourth philosophy maintain that time has run its course and that this life is no more than the fading recollection of an event beyond recall. We simply do not know how many of its possible mutations the world may already have gone through, or how much time, always assuming that it exists, remains. All that is certain is that night lasts far longer than day, if one compares an individual life, life as a whole, or time itself with the system which, in each case, is above it. The night of time, wrote Thomas Browne in his treatise of 1658, The Garden of Cyrus [footnote 1], far surpasseth the day and who knows when was the Aequinox?

This may all be just so much speculation. What looks more sure is that:

working memory enables us to link the past and present, and allows us to conceive of a future. No other species has developed this capacity so completely as humans, and early on it may well have allowed us to steal a march on our most recent ancestors.

-- from How culture made your modern mind.

[Footnote 1: actually it is in Urn Burial]