진화심리학자 Leda Cosmides의 ABC라디오 대담

Prospects for a transhuman mind?

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Transhumanists are hell-bent on extending their lives beyond the current limits of the flesh, by exploiting cutting-edge genomics, stem-cell research, robotics and nanotechnology. Engineering evolution is their goal. But can they re-engineer our Darwinian mind? Leda Cosmides, renowned pioneer of the controversial field evolutionary psychology, asks, 'Are We Already Transhuman?' Don't miss this Templeton Research Lecture recorded for All in the Mind at Arizona State University.

Transcript

Natasha Mitchell: And hello, Natasha Mitchell joining you for All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, great to have you on board.

Now would you want to live forever? Even just an extra 200 years or so? I'm not so sure myself -- can Mother Earth sustain us all without a regular pruning of the population? Well, the transhumanists think differently. They're the movement hell-bent on extending life beyond the current limits of the flesh. And they plan to exploit every technology to get there: cutting-edge genomics, stem-cell research, robotics, nanotech, you name it. Some have even had their bodies cryonically frozen in the hope that one day technological mecca will arrive, proffering eternal life.

But even if you could achieve this for the body, what about the brain? Can we really re-engineer our Darwinian mind?

Today on the show one of the world's trailblazers in evolutionary psychology, Professor Leda Cosmides from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She's presenting the Templeton Research Lecture which All in the Mind recorded at Arizona State University. And as someone who firmly believes our brains and behaviour are very much the product of evolution, she's asking, are we already transhuman?

Leda Cosmides: Thanks so much, and thank you for inviting me here, I've been having a very, very interesting time. I'm not here as an opponent of transhumanism and I'm not here as an advocate of transhumanism. What I take as my charge is that I'm going to try to consider the goals of transhumanism in light of emerging knowledge about how natural selection designs minds and of the picture of human nature that's starting to emerge from evolutionary psychology and cognitive science more generally.

So this is from the World Transhumanist Association website. They say, 'We support the development of an access to better technologies that enable everyone to enjoy better minds, better bodies and better lives. In other words we want people to be better than well.' Sounds good. The enhancement options being discussed include radical extension of human health span, some people would say eternal life. Eradication of disease, elimination of unnecessary suffering, and augmentation of human intellectual, physical and emotional capacities. That's one of the things I'll be focusing on.

They view human nature as 'a work in progress, a half-baked beginning...' as an evolutionary person the 'half-baked' annoys me, but a half-baked beginning 'that we can learn to remould in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the end point of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become post-human. Beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.'

Transhumanists argue that it's possible and desirable for humanity to enter a post-Darwinian phase of existence in which humans are in control of their own evolution. The brain is considered the common denominator of person-hood and is thus a primary focus of transhumanist ambitions. So the idea is that all kinds of advanced technologies can be used towards these goals; smart drugs, life-extension supplements...(I should disclose I take a lot of life extensions, my husband makes me), nano-medicine, brain-computer interfaces -- so sensory prostheses, enhanced memory through neurally controlled artificial memory; implants that will allow you, through thinking things, to control an artificial memory or external events and so on. Mind uploading is talked about, changing the individual's gene expression through therapies that can change gene expression in your sematic cells to perhaps cure illnesses and do other things.

But also they talk about germline genetic engineering. If you make a change to the germ line, that is to sperm or ova, those genetic changes will be passed on to any offspring that you have and to their offspring in turn. Nick Bostrum is a co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association and discusses general intellectual capacities such as memory, deductive and analogical reasoning and attention. He has a vision of people having enhanced abilities to appreciate music so that you'll have much more blissful experiences listening to music that you would otherwise have.

And then also changes to emotion, the capacity to enjoy life and to respond with appropriate affect to life situations and people. Now when I read this, to me there is an implicit view of human nature in this and it's more of a blank slate view of human nature. The notion that the mind is a very general purpose information processing machine with a very small number of general laws of learning that I'm going to argue is not quite correct.

There's a view of emotions as without any kind of social functions, as without any evolved functions. You get the sense when they talk about emotion that emotions are nothing more than a source of interesting subjective experiences. But you get a sense that by changing somebody's emotional nature you will expand the kinds of experiences that they have but you don't get a sense that they are thinking that you might actually be fundamentally changing the nature of human social relationships. And I'm going to argue that you very well might be.

And also, to me, there's very little appreciation of how natural selection works and how it produces very exquisitely engineered functional mechanisms -- not half-baked ones at all -- that fit together in very precise ways. And then there are interesting questions about what happens if you muck with some of them, yet they are designed to fit together in very precise ways with other ones, and what will happen.

Natasha Mitchell: What will happen indeed, let's just interrupt Professor Cosmides for a moment to hear from a couple of transhumanists themselves, shall we?

Joseph Bloch: You're going to see a bewildering variety of different kinds of human beings. The technology that we have at our disposal right now is very much on the verge of allowing us to have complete morphological freedom, which is the freedom to change our bodies to suit our desires and our moods as well as psychological freedom, which allows us to self-select our own psychology. This is completely based on rational, sober extrapolations of correct technology.

To take but one example, the ability to connect a human mind into a computer. The potential of being able to do that is so earth-shattering, is so changing to the very nature of what it is to be human. Imagine if you had instant access to all the knowledge of the human race. It completely changes what it means to think like a human. When you look at the causes of conflict you're talking about shortages of resources, emotional responses such as fear. In a transhumanist world, in a post-human world we're talking about chosen psychologies where you can choose actively not to feel prejudice, not to feel fear or hostility, not to have your buttons pushed -- but buttons that are right now lurking in your hind-brain, which have been there ever since we picked up jaw bone of an antelope and cracked it over the skull of our fellow Australopithecine -- those psychological reactions go out the window in a post-human world.

Nick Bostrom: If you think of a space of possible modes of beings: different ways of being, feeling, experiencing, developing, growing -- different sets of capacities. But there are some modes of beings that we can't currently have. We cannot, for example, know what it would be like to live for 200 years, what levels of personal maturity you could develop if you actually were able to live with full vigour for that long and accumulate experience over such a long time. We don't know what types of thoughts that we could think, but that don't think into our three-pound cheesy, lumpy things that we use to think with; psychological, mental states that might be a whole sea and a whole continent of these that we are currently barred from travelling into just because of our physiological limitations.

So I think this means that we have a reason to develop the means to explore this larger space of possible modes of beings. Carefully, obviously, and in steps one at a time, staying clear of dangers as much as we can, but ultimately we should have just stayed there in our little corner, we should venture out into the larger space of possibilities.

Natasha Mitchell: Philosopher Nick Bostrom, who heads up the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and is a co-founder of the World Transhumanism Association...transhumanism at Oxford, who would have thought?

Before him Joseph Bloch, recently on the association's board of directors, speaking on American radio WBAI. And so back to Leda Cosmides who believes the transhumanists underestimate the sophistication of our Darwinian mind, as a complex beast crafted through evolutionary time and through an ongoing tango between biology and the wider environment. As you'll hear, messing with the head's program won't be as easy or ethical as it might sound.

Leda Cosmides: The picture that's emerging from evolutionary psychology is a mind full of richly structured mechanisms that each are there because they had a function in our ancestral environment. In the past there's been a tendency for psychologists to focus on the information out in the environment and think that that's efficient as an explanation for behaviour. But just do the thought experiment of humans versus dung flies. Humans and dung flies are both capable of perceiving big, steaming piles of dung. So the information in the environment is exactly the same in both cases. But we go ugh, we stay away from the dung. Dung flies does exactly the opposite. Female dung flies register the dung is there and go, oh, nice place to raise my children; lay their eggs in the dung, the larvae eat the dung, so for the larvae it's food yum yum, very different than what we do -- hopefully. And for male dung flies you know it's a pick-up joint, this is a good place to find females. This hopefully is not something any of the men in the room would do if you were looking for a date, it would be a very bad strategy.

But the point I'm making is that there are programs in the head of the dung fly, there are programs in our heads but they are very, very different programs. So you can't just say the information in the environment made me do it. To explain behaviour you have to know both the information registered and the structure of the program that registered that information, and that generates behaviour in response to it.

Another point -- the programs that comprise the human brain were sculpted over evolutionary time by the ancestral environments and selection pressures experienced by the hunter/gatherers from whom we are descended. Now evolutionary psychologists emphasise hunter/gatherer life because the evolutionary process is really, really slow. It takes thousands of years to build a program of any complexity. Think of the complexity of the human eye, with all its parts that have to fit together just right. So the industrial revolution, even the agricultural revolution, are just eye-blinks in evolutionary time, they are too short to have selected for new cognitive programs that are complexly specialised for dealing with the problems that have arisen in the modern world.

Modern environments differ importantly from ancestral ones and that's particularly true when it comes to social behaviour. We no longer live in small face to face societies in semi nomadic bands of a few families, a few extended families, maybe 50 to 200 people, you know very small, many of whom were close relatives. Yet our cognitive programs were designed for that small social world where you were repeatedly interacting with people that you know very well and some are related and so forth.

So our social world is a world with many, many strangers; many, many anonymous interactions, that's a really different social world from the one that designed our programs that govern our social behaviour. So now I want to ask, against this background are we already transhuman in a certain sense?

Natasha Mitchell: On ABC Radio National's All in the Mind, I'm Natasha Mitchell with one of the world's great pioneers in mind research, evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides coming to you globally also on Radio Australia and as podcast.

Transhumanists are optimistic that they'll be able to radically extend the life of the mind and the body with the help of technology. Evolutionary psychologists argue our brains evolved and were optimised in a very particular environment, that of the ancient African savanna. But many tens of millennia on that environment has been transformed or mutated enormously. So are we really the humans we once were? Could we in fact already be transhuman? Post-human even?

Leda Cosmides: I think there's been a long history of environmental mutations. There's already commonly available sensory prostheses to enhance perception, life extension technologies, memory enhancing ones, mind uploading. What am I talking about? What about sensory prostheses for enhanced perception? My guess is that about half the people in the room have them -- glasses. Now, let me ask you a question, am I post-human with my glasses on, or am I past-human with my glasses off? Now why am I asking the question this way? Well hunter/gatherers are in general not near-sighted. Our visual systems have mechanisms that during development calibrate the length of the eye to the average focal distance and for hunter/gatherers the average focal distance is about ten to fifteen feet and the calibration works very well under those conditions. People do not end up near-sighted.

Now then what happens with an environmental mutation? You take a hunter/gatherer like all of us and you put us in a modern environment where we're focusing up close all the time either reading or watching TV up close, what's going to happen is that some of us have genes that make us susceptible to near-sightedness, we're experiencing an average focal distance that's much shorter than the typical hunter/gatherer is experiencing. So glasses are a sensory prosthesis. But the question is, are the glasses making me human or post-human? When I put the prosthesis on I become more like the normal hunter/gatherer. How about life extension? Hunter/gatherers hunt and they gather -- they've got a problem which is that meat runs away from them. Now an environmental mutation -- we have new agriculture, new food production methods and markets and because of those food production methods and market there's been a huge decrease in the industrialised world in death from famine.

This is life extension. But what happens when you put this environmental mutation together with a hunter/gatherer mind that really, really likes fat and sugar and it likes to minimise search and handling time? What you get is McDonald's right? You know you really don't want to try to make a fortune by starting a fibre restaurant. The All-Bran restaurant. That's not going to be the way to making a lot of money, right? But it's also the situation, we now have what are called the diseases of civilisation. We have cavities in our teeth that comes from having too much sugar in our diet, there's a lot of heart disease, there's a lot of obesity and diabetes. These are things that you don't find in hunter/gatherer populations, they just don't have any of those problems. So again a transhuman sort of situation already.

Enhanced memory and mind uploading -- I've been reading these different transhumanist doctrines and so forth and arguments...and a conceptualised memory merely as a storage of propositions, beliefs, data, of knowledge, as if all memory is a big storage bank. Well from that point of view we've been transhuman or post-human for a long time, we've got a lot of memory enhancement devices. You know the invention of paper where you could write things down and not just rely on your remembering it. The printing press, the world wide web which does storage and retrieval. I mean these are our external memory; I don't have to remember everything.

From this point of view we live in a vastly different world than that of the hunter/gatherers. We have mind uploading; we read what others have thought. We can upload Socrates by reading Socrates. If you're conceptualising memory only in terms of the storage of propositions or beliefs and knowledge, there's already memory uploading. It's just a little bit more time consuming because you actually have to read it and think about it.

But the question I want to pose is there more to memory than just storing propositions? For example it's turning out that there's not just one memory but it's starting to look like there are many memory systems in the human brain. So for example a lot of neuropsychological results where you study people with various kinds of brain damage seem to be showing that we have a lot of content specialised databases. So for example you can knock out somebody's ability to recognise animals while not disturbing their ability to pull up knowledge about tools or plants. You can also knock out a person's ability to recognise various kinds of edible plants without impairing their ability to recognise a name, other sorts of categories.

Brain damage can knock out your entire ability to retrieve the episodes of your life. You can no longer remember a single episode that ever happened to you -- yet you can still know what your own personality is like. So if somebody asks you to do a list of personality traits like generous, friendly, stubborn, etc ... shy -- and asks you to rate yourself on those personality traits ... you can give it to somebody who has amnesia, they'll rate themselves ... what they do is very highly correlated with what other people who know them well say about them. So it looks like we have a specialised memory system for storing our own personality traits. You can remember your own personality but not remember your child's personality, depending on the brain damage.

But there's a trick that our memory uses, we need to have search engines that deliver the right information to the right decision rule at the right time. So for example it turns out that if I were to ask you are you generous, as you pull up a trait abstract of yourself yeah, usually generous, at the same time your mind pulls up contrary episodes; cases where you were stingy. It looks like the system is designed to give you fast access to an answer by pulling up a generalisation, but to bound the scope of that answer by telling you how far does this generalisation apply, by calling up episodes that would contradict it.

If you really want to make an interesting difference to memory you are going to have to create search engines, and you are going to have to understand something about what decision rules are in the head, and you are going to have to ask what kind of decision rules are we going to create memory systems for. Now natural selection does this, has already done this for us for all kinds of decisions, because it actually runs the experiment. There's actual human beings with actual human lives, there are actual consequences to their decisions, and selection acts on those actual consequences in the real world and has designed very intricate memory systems in response to real problems in the world. What are the transhumanists, what are they proposing the decision rules in our heads are and the memory systems that should serve them should be? That's a very difficult question to answer.

Natasha Mitchell: Evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides coming to you on ABC Radio National's All in the Mind, contemplating the transhuman mind.

Leda Cosmides: Now what about emotional enhancement? For an evolutionary psychologist emotions are not just about subjective experience, emotions have functions, they regulate social relationships in various ways. So the question is what would happen if you changed social and moral instincts regulating social behaviour? What if you did it through individual genetic engineering, so you changed gene expression in my particular brain so that I had different kinds of emotional reactions to situations? What if you changed my germ line so that my child and all of my child's children had different social instincts, different emotional reactions to situations? I help you, you help me -- it's a basis of trade, we are designed to help people who help us and to avoid cheaters and there's a lot of evidence now that we have mechanisms that are very exquisitely designed for cheater detection. And not just for cheater detection but for making very specialised kinds of inferences about social exchange.

So if I say to you, what I'd really say to you like I might say to my child, if you borrow the car then you have to fill the tank with gas. We automatically understand that that implies that if you fulfil the requirement then you're entitled to the benefit. So we have a very interesting reasoning structure for reasoning about cooperation. And also it's very clear now from experimental economics that the decision to cooperate -- that these rules evolved in a very small social world, I mean we know that they did. But what you find the economists are always amazed because you can put somebody in a one shot prisoner's dilemma and you can tell them you are never going to see this person again, and you're never going to actually meet this person face to face, and rational choice theory says you should not cooperate in that case - but people do.

If you assume that we have decision rules that were designed for a small social world that repeated social interactions it makes perfect sense that our default setting is to cooperate. So let's say you've got germline genetic engineering, which post-human morph would you choose for your child? And what would the consequences be, what would the evolutionary consequences be? So you could be a parent who says well, you might say well I want my child to maximise his or her pay-offs in the future, that'll be good, they'll be happier, more prosperous etc. So maybe I don't want them to do this kind of contingent cooperation, I want them to defect a lot. What if you decided to do that, did germline genetic engineering? Well that in the modern world which has a very, very different structure than the ancestral world where there really are a lot of one-shot interactions with anonymous strangers, natural selection might really favour that. If that spreads, then you don't get contingent cooperation anymore. But contingent cooperation is the basis of the cognitive foundation of trade -- you're not going to have trade anymore, you're going to end up with a species that does not engage in trade, since engaging in trade is one of the things that makes technology and research and development possible, you're going to end up without technology too.

Building a program of great complexity can take a lot of time but if you're just 'lesioning' something, which is what you would be doing to make somebody always defect, all you have to do in a sense is lesion the conditional cooperation mechanism. You don't have to build a whole new complex thing. Or maybe you'd be a different kind of parent, and maybe you'd be very utopian and say I want to live in a utopian society where everybody cooperates unconditionally. Well the thing that's funny is that in the modern world if you create people who are unconditional cooperators, those are the designs that are most easily exploited by the defectors. And so you're setting up perfect conditions for 'always defect' to prosper. So again you end up with the same results as before. My point being that messing with these social instincts -- these social instincts have functions, and when you mess with them, in principle you could end up with consequences that are vastly different than anything you ever intended to do.

We are one of the few species, we and chimpanzees, that actually will cooperate with three or more individuals who are not kin to achieve common goals and share the resulting benefits. Quite rare -- we do it, it looks like there's a lot of research in social psychology that's coming together, it looks like we have what you can think of as a coalitional psychology, a set of species-typical programs -- they're the basis of teamwork which you don't find in a lot of species, you don't find a lot of teamwork in a lot of species.

There's a lot of features that this coalitional psychology seems to have, but one of them seems to be moral sentiments for sharing within group members and another one has to do with your reactions to free riders. People who don't contribute to the public good but who take the benefits anyway. In social exchange with just another person, if somebody cheats, you could just avoid them and interact with somebody else. But a free rider in a group that you're cooperating with, you can't avoid that free rider unless you avoid the whole group and all the benefits that come with group living. And it looks like the way that evolution has solved this problem is that we have evolved what an economist would view as irrational punitive sentiments towards free riders, and it's triggered by how much you contribute. The more you contribute to the public good the more pissed you are at people who free-ride on those contributions, who don't contribute as much as you do. There will be people who will, at their own expense, punish free riders. And what's interesting is when that happens cooperation ratchets up to very high levels until almost everybody is contributing toward the public good. When there's no opportunity to punish, people start out hopeful that cooperation will start out, but then it winds down, it unravels. There's been more and more research about the moral sentiment that we have about free riders.

All right. Now, think about, again, the environmental mutations that have happened. These are programs designed for a small world of a few well known other people. But there have been attempts, various attempts in human history, to redesign society -- Marxism was one of them -- where you try collective action on a very large scale, much larger than for the typical hunter/gatherer. So you might try a collective farm with 10,000 people on it in China. Knowing this about punitive sentiments and how they contribute to cooperation, what you'd expect is either you have no punishment -- in which case cooperation ratchets down and then not very much food is produced -- or you have a punitive system. But coercion is a predictable side effect of organising the behaviour as a collective action; an unanticipated side effect.

I think many people had very utopian views of what would happen if you collectivised agriculture. But I don't know if you know that statistically, in the Soviet Union, on the collectivised farms they allowed a little bit, three per cent of the land, to be privately cultivated, and that three per cent of the land produced 50 to 75 per cent of all of the produce in the Soviet Union -- which is really astonishing. In fact if there had not been those private lands there would have been mass starvation, because the system was not fitting, the environmental mutation was not fitting well with the design of our moral instincts and our mechanisms for cooperation.

So ask the same question -- what about with genetic engineering? Is it utopian to remove punitive sentiments towards free riders? What if you decided to engineer that into your children? Game theory tells us that that sets up selection for free riders and then you get the eventual loss of coalitional cooperation, and with the loss of coalitional cooperation you have the loss of the very basis of the kind of teamwork that makes a lot of human society possible. So what about human nature in transhumanism?

If human nature is a collection of complex, functionally specialised mechanisms that are exquisitely designed to work well with one another and to function in certain ways given certain environments, especially the structure of ancestral environments, these have functions, and many of them regulate social behaviour. The consequences of various environmental mutations that have happened over human history have often been the opposite of those intended by the people who did them. And so we've got to ask the questions: what are the consequences of genetic engineering that changes these mechanisms -- that won't change just your experience of the world so you'll have the interesting experiences to see, well, how does a chimp feel as it murders some of its neighbours or whatever -- it doesn't change just your experience, it can be expected to change the nature of human social interactions and it could in principle change the direction of natural selection itself. Selecting, indeed, for post-humans, but in an unintended and possibly very troubling way.

Thank you.

Natasha Mitchell: Professor Leda Cosmides. She co-directs the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara with her husband and longtime collaborator John Tooby. Both hugely influential in applying Darwin's thinking to the mind and to kick-starting the controversial field of evolutionary psychology.

That Templeton Research Lecture was recorded at Arizona State University.
Thanks to Pauline Newman for doing that for us, and don't forget you can download the show as a podcast from our website abc.net.au/rn/allinthe mind and we pop up a transcript there later in the week. You can of course email us to your heart's content from there as well.

A big thanks to producer Anita Barraud and sound engineer Alec Mclosky. I'm Natasha Mitchell and next week panic from collective Cold War hysteria to medicated disorder. Until then don't -- panic, that is.

Guests

Leda Cosmides
Professor of Psychology
Co-director and Founder
Center for Evolutionary Psychology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Templeton Research co-Fellow for 2006-07 (with John Tooby)
Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict
Arizona State University

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/cosmides/index.php

Further Information

Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California Santa Barbara

Templeton Research Lectures: Facing the Challenge of Transhumanism - Religion Science and Technology
Hosted by Arizona State University

(The full lecture) Are We Already Transhuman?: Evolutionary Psychology and Human Nature
Leda Cosmides' full lecture, of which you sampled an excerpt in this week's show, can be downloaded on Arizona State University's website.

Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer
Compiled by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby

Transhumanism: the next stage in human evolution?
Lecture given by Nick Bostrom The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce in the UK, March 22, 2006. A brief excerpt of this lecture was used in the broadcast of this program, with thanks. PDF and audio of the speech available at the above link.

Nick Bostrom's website
Director, Oxford Future of Humanity, Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University

Cofounder of the World Transhumanism

Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University

World Transhumanist Association

ATranshumanist view of humanity (radio interview)
A brief excerpt of this interview broadcast on an American radio show (WBAI) was used in this program, with thanks.

Publications

Title: What is Evolutionary Psychology?: Explaining the New Science of the Mind
Author: Leda Cosmides
Publisher: Yale University Press, 2000

Title: The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture
Author: Jerome H. Barkow (Editor), Leda Cosmides (Editor), John Tooby (Editor)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1992

Title: Cognitive?Enhancement:?Methods,?Ethics,?Regulatory?Challenges?/em>
Author: Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg
Publisher: 2006
URL: http://www.nickbostrom.com/cognitive.pdf
Chapter in a book titled Science and Engineering Ethics, (forthcoming as of 2007).

Presenter

Natasha Mitchell

Producer

Natasha Mitchell/Anita Barraud