h+ Magazine

Science is not magic, no matter what the movies might tell us. It operates under very real, and very palpable constraints. One of these is money. You can’t just recite equations like they’re incantations, and pull change out of the ether. It takes time, and time costs money.

Who are those that support the true spirit of discovery, who dare to champion it wherever it is found?

God is dead, said the man with the world’s most exciting moustache. And many, seeing the dogma of ancient traditions as an anachronistic throwback to a time before the rise of reason, would seek to ensure that this process is completed as soon as possible.

The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (the Bioethics Commission) will meet April 30 in Washington, D.C. to discuss the ethical implications of incidental findings.

What is missing from that linear view is the power and influence of an invisible, yet monumentally powerful force. Possibility. And to get a clearer view of the road behind – and the road ahead – this force is one you ignore at your peril.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman – a rope over an abyss”

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

Though our contemporary world still enjoys the favours of Enlightenment, people from every kind of scientific and philosophical discipline seem to have been defeated in the task of excavating our human origins. And it took a long way down. The Antique World, the Medieval World and all the following eras found themselves among the quest of trying to answer this most vital question: what does it mean to be human?

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