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Two dozen leading experts in the brain recently converged for a daylong meeting at Stanford University. The meeting focused on a review of the current state of research and scientific knowledge related to software products and approaches that aim to defend against age-related cognitive decline. This meeting follows a similar meeting held five years ago which resulted in the 2008 Expert Consensus on Brain Health.

The availability of a range of new psychotropic agents raises the possibility that these will be used for enhancement purposes (smart pills, happy pills, and pep pills). The enhancement debate soon raises questions in philosophy of medicine and psychiatry (eg, what is a disorder?), and this debate in turn raises fundament questions in philosophy of language, science, and ethics. In this paper, a naturalistic conceptual framework is proposed for addressing these issues. This framework begins by contrasting classical and critical concepts of categories, and then puts forward an integrative position that is based on cognitive-affective research. This position can in turn be used to consider the debate between pharmacological Calvinism (which may adopt a moral metaphor of disorder) and psychotropic utopianism (which may emphasize a medical metaphor of disorder). I argue that psychiatric treatment of serious psychiatric disorders is justified, and that psychotropics are an acceptable kind of intervention. The use of psychotropics for sub-threshold phenomena requires a judicious weighing of the relevant facts (which are often sparse) and values.

Nick Bostrom interviewed at AGI 12 by Adam A. Ford

Get involved with the Denigma Project, a “Collaborative Resource for Gerontology” and revolutionize aging research.

Ben and Natasha discuss cyborgs, the future of the human body, H+ TV , and Natasha’s new book.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine are testing the first “brain pacemaker”, a device which provides for deep brain stimulation, for Alzheimer’s patients.

1. Chemical brain preservation is a technology that may soon be validated to inexpensively preserve the key features of our memories and identity at our biological death.
2. If either chemical or cryogenic brain preservation can be validated to reliably store retrievable and useful individual mental information, these medical procedures should be made available in all societies as an option at biological death.
3. If computational neuroscience, microscopy, scanning, and robotics technologies continue to improve at their historical rates, preserved memories and identity may be affordably reanimated by being “uploaded” into computer simulations, beginning well before the end of this century.
4. In all societies where a significant minority (let’s say 100,000 people) have done brain preservation at biological death, significant positive social change will result in those societies today, regardless of how much information is eventually recovered from preserved brains.

In what amounts to a fairly shocking reminder of how quickly our technologies are advancing and how deeply our lives are being woven with networked computation, security researchers have recently reported successes in remotely compromising and controlling two different medical implant devices. 

The very traits that make someone creative, passionate, and likely to achieve a high degree of success in their domain, are the same traits that define psychological disorders such as Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, and ADHD. So what is the difference between creativity and psychopathology? Where do we draw the line between functional excess of extreme traits and the point at which they define a psychological disorder?

Could advanced technology somehow allow us to modify our brains to avoid the existence of pain — without killing us or rendering us unconscious or idiotic or something else undesirable? My best guess is that the answer is YES. To explain why I think this, I’ll first need to delve a little into the nature of a strange brain disorder called “pain asymbolia”….

Ben Goertzel converses with Hugo de Garis on his transhumanist argument for the reality of a Creator.