It can sometimes be difficult to detect change and progress as it is occurring -- when following and studying a given subject or scientific endeavor, it is not always immediately apparent which data points and events are significant amidst the noise and buzz of journalism, discussion, and argument. But it seems quite certain that things are indeed happening in the realm of longevity science and related research.
For starters, the SENS challenge has been addressed, the MPrize has received generous support this year, and the Longevity Dividend represents, perhaps, one of the first vestiges of mainstream attention to the criticality of addressing the health needs of members of the present and future elderly population (who, of course, have as much a right to stay alive and well anyone else).
I've also linked to several new blogs and information pages that have come into my sphere of awareness over the past few months:
- Ouroboros - Research in the Biology of Aging (lots of good, hard science)
- Partial Immortalization (Biologist, philosopher, and PhD student Attila Csordás reports on longevity research news and interviews various scientists and philosophers on their thoughts and impressions of the current state and projected outcomes of longevity science)
- The Methuselah Foundation Blog (This blog has been reporting on Methuselah Foundation activities since July and gives a nice overview of the kinds of things the Mprize could be applied to.)
- Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (A fascinating source of tech-progressive musings and biotech philosophy. One of my favorite aspects of this group is that there's plenty of heterogeneity of thought, which fits in nicely with my own conviction that since no individual mind can see the overall picture, input from different kinds of minds is necessary when it comes to addressing tough issues.)
However, awareness and support, though indispensible factors, are only part of the equation. Nobody is going to be able to enjoy the benefits of even moderate life extension until the science is there to make it technically feasible. Which is why I am pleased to see the beginnings of actual, laboratory-based investigations.
Lyso-SENS activities have already begin at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute, heading up an effort to identify enzymes which might help address common "storage diseases" in which accumulated material -- plaques, protein crosslinks, cholesterol, etc., -- contributes to conditions such as Alzheimer's, macular degeneration, diabetes, and cardiovascular illness.
Mito-SENS activities will be conducted at Cambridge University, in an effort to help reduce the effects of mitochondrial DNA vulnerability implicated as a possible contributor to ill health in advanced age -- the goal of the project is to "relocate" the expression of mitochondrial DNA genes to the nucleus, where they will be better protected from the damaging byproducts of cellular metabolism.
The great thing about scientific research (particularly in an era where information and peer-reviewed papers can be transmitted between interested folks on opposite sides of the world in the blink of an eye) is how different studies and even different fields can act in a symbiotic manner -- one person could be working on a particular challenge, and then happen to hear about something his or her colleague is doing that s/he might never have suspected could be relevant.
So, it is quite possible for a person to support, say, SENS research without putting all one's proverbial eggs into one basket; advances anywhere in biotech have the potential to advance SENS science, and vice versa. Speaking of which, I had the fortunate experience recently of being able to assist in proofreading an upcoming book on SENS, intented to bring the ideas of engineered negligible senescence to a wider audience. I am not sure yet when the book is coming out, but I am tremendously excited about it -- even in an unfinished state, what I read was quite fascinating. So, that is definitely something to look out for.
But the question remains -- where do we go from here? Lyso-SENS and Mito-SENS alone are not likely to be "enough", and besides, their efforts are only utilizing a fraction of available biotech-related scientific infrastructure. One thing I would like to see would be more opportunities for regular folks -- people with bachelor's degrees (as opposed to just PhDs and PhD candidates) to contribute more directly to longevity research.
I know from reading various blogs and fora that there is actually a rather impressive "layman's knowledge" base out there -- people who are not necessarily working in university laboratories, but who are reading plenty of peer-reviewed literature and engaging in rigorous self-study on highly technical topics. If all goes well, hopefully these people will be able to find opportunities to contribute productively according to the particular skills and knowledge areas offered by this diverse community.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Saturday, November 25, 2006
The Hardest Stuff of All?
Phil Bowermaster over at The Speculist revisits the death-gives-life-meaning argument in response to having seen the film, Stranger Than Fiction. I haven't personally seen the film, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about the issues and philosophical questions Phil raises in his November 24, 2006 post, The Hard Stuff.
Phil notes:
However, he goes on to say:
I don't think death, specifically age-related death, is really the issue here at all. Rather, Mr. Bowermaster is simply acknowledging the fact that risk and difficulty add depth and richness to life. Whenever a particular risk is mitigated or eliminated, the structures (literary, artistic, ideological) that grew up around that risk over the years can lose their poignant luster -- in short, another piece of meaning-bolstering certainty falls away, sometimes taking something beautiful along with it.
Or at least, that's how I interpret that particular argument.
Personally, I don't think we (as in present-day sentient beings) are really in a position to worry about what happens when there isn't "enough" risk. Aging is only one risk variable -- even if longevity medicine improves to the point where most of us can make plans for our 500th birthday party with reasonable confidence that we'll be there to celebrate it, there are plenty of things left to worry about.
Simply put, I think that anyone who is worried about healthy life extension taking meaning away from existence (Leon Kass, I'm looking at you) is missing the bigger picture: the fact that there will always be accidents, the fact that we have no idea what kinds of cosmic catastrophes could be facing the earth (remember, we're a ball of rock spinning through a universe we are barely beginning to understand), and the fact that this universe could end up in heat death (or some other unimaginable end) regardless of what kinds of life extension and risk-mitigation technology are developed.
Phil seems to agree me on this:
Yes, mitigating any particular risk forces the sapient population into a space where, once again, we must question what exactly makes life really matter -- just as new and emerging transformative technologies can prompt a sort of existential panic in those with a little-examined self-concept. Anyone who wants to remain sane and healthy while navigating accelerating change would do well to build up a sense of meaning that does not depend on any particular construct remaining in place forever. Someone who is concerned that eliminating this or that risk is going to excise the meaning from their life should realize that finding and constructing meaning is itself an awe-inspiring and self-fueling challenge.
I would almost wager that in some ways, humans as a whole are reeling from the growing realization that meaning and significance are so subjective and malleable. Rather than being foisted upon us by gods and kings, or even by the myriad forces of untamed nature, meaning is something that exists because of minds. Because of persons. There is indeed no such thing as meaning in the absense of sentience. Certainly, there is phenomena in the absence of sentience, but not qualitative worth. And coming to terms with this may lead to a kind of nihilism at first -- I remember making a deliberate decision to "peer into the void", so to speak, when I was about twenty years old (nearly eight years ago at the time of this writing).
I read in a book that it was impossible for a person to imagine their own nonexistence, so I tried to imagine it -- and was thrust into a strange space made of amorphous threads of "source code", constituent polygons, and sweeping landscapes of time so vast that I cannot possibly quantify them with words. This was purely a meditative thought experiment; no drugs were involved (though I was in college at the time, so sleep deprivation could have been a factor in allowing this kind of thinking to take place).
I remember sitting in my physics classroom, waiting for a lecture to begin, and drawing a comic strip of a stick figure sitting at a window, outside which lay the totality of existence. The stick figure was permitted one brief illuminated glance when the shade on the window lifted briefly, but that was all. That brief illuminated glance was "life", and it was bordered on both sides by an unfathomable dark mystery. A friend of mine recently described this picture of existence as something akin to, "a short bright moment bookended by oblivion". And certainly, there is a kind of poignancy to that picture. Analogies to fireflies, fireworks, and mayflies come to mind, and therein lies the stuff of poetry.
Is it this -- this poetry of glimpses and glances amidst walls of indeterminacy and nothingness -- that come as part and parcel of "The Hard Stuff"? Perhaps. But it is my contention that in order to survive the future -- emotionally and intellectually -- sentience must move into a realm of post-nihilism, into a space where scientific materialism is not viewed as an enemy of beauty, but as the very thing that makes beauty possible.
That, perhaps, is the "hardest stuff of all": the kinds of thinking that sentience must engage in in order to keep perpetuating an existence that is, truly, wonderful. There is something on the other side of the void, teen angst notwithstanding. I will end with part of something I wrote on a mailing list a few months back:
I’m not convinced that over-arching “supergoals” are all that important in the grand scheme of things; once we’ve dealt with basic survival issues, everything on top of that is rather subjective. Perhaps this sense that everyone and everything needs a supergoal on the order of survival is merely an artifact stemming from the very powerful motivation FOR survival that we’ve needed all these years.
Why not a series of personal mini-goals? Paint a picture, write a novel, climb a tree, beat Zelda again, prove a theorem, build a supercollider, make cookies, play with kittens, tour China, create your own model of China, invent a new kind of noodle, plug your brain into a machine that lets you watch your dreams, dream, videotape penguins, search for extraterrestrials, grow your own extraterrestrials, run infinite simulations, see how high you can count, knit a blanket, knit spacetime, start your own television show, make holograms, build an entire city out of Duct tape, breed immortal dragonflies, watch stars form and wax and wane over millennia, push on galaxies…you get the idea.
Sure, there might be some sort of “ultimate meaning”. However, I don’t claim to know that there is such a meaning — and I generally operate under the assumption that there isn’t, since the individual human viewpoint is so incredibly subjective, and I don’t stake my existence or enjoyment of life on the potential of that sort of meaning.
Certainly, I’ll keep learning and exploring and delving into scientific mysteries, but this process is just as rewarding if there’s nothing but knowledge at the “end” (if such an end even exists) or if there’s some sort of unforeseeable complex prize that would keep anyone, even a superintelligence, happily occupied basically forever. The process, and what is experienced during the process, is just as important as any sort of goal, “super” or otherwise. And knowledge is no “booby prize”; lacking all that knowledge we stand to gain still, who knows what we might think of to do with it once we have it?
Evolution has granted us the capacity to enjoy things. Being able to enjoy life, regardless of whether you’re being chased by a ravenous tiger or not, is an adaptation in the sense that it motivates people to continue existing. Which, of course, allows for the perpetuation of both genes and memes — if our ancestors had all been suicidally bored between mammoth hunts, we wouldn’t be here right now....
And as far as I can tell, there is no predetermined limit to the depth one might find in art, music, or mathematics. And I’ve never found knowing how or why something works to make it any less beautiful or amazing — to suggest that understanding something means you’ve “used it up” is, frankly, incoherent to me. All I can say is: speak for yourself!
Meaning isn’t some kind of externally-sourced quantity, but a product of symbiosis. I, for one, plan to meet the universe at least halfway in that regard.
Phil notes:
Whether we're talking about our jobs or our relationships or our lives in their totality, commitments that can't simply be turned off and situations where there really is risk involved, where something truly is at stake, are bound to be more meaningful and more real to us than experiences lacking those qualities. So I guess I'm with the buzzkills on that point – life extension may very well take some of the immediacy and poignancy out of human life. And, yes, we really will have lost something there.
However, he goes on to say:
I just can't make the same leap the buzzkills do. Let's look at another example of the same kind of thing. When air travel substantially replaced rail travel (at least in this country) and ocean liners, travel became less romantic and glamorous. We really did lose something, there, too. Of course, what we gained in the transaction made it a good deal, and I certainly wouldn't make the boneheaded argument that air travel should be eliminated to bring the glamour and romance back.
I don't think death, specifically age-related death, is really the issue here at all. Rather, Mr. Bowermaster is simply acknowledging the fact that risk and difficulty add depth and richness to life. Whenever a particular risk is mitigated or eliminated, the structures (literary, artistic, ideological) that grew up around that risk over the years can lose their poignant luster -- in short, another piece of meaning-bolstering certainty falls away, sometimes taking something beautiful along with it.
Or at least, that's how I interpret that particular argument.
Personally, I don't think we (as in present-day sentient beings) are really in a position to worry about what happens when there isn't "enough" risk. Aging is only one risk variable -- even if longevity medicine improves to the point where most of us can make plans for our 500th birthday party with reasonable confidence that we'll be there to celebrate it, there are plenty of things left to worry about.
Simply put, I think that anyone who is worried about healthy life extension taking meaning away from existence (Leon Kass, I'm looking at you) is missing the bigger picture: the fact that there will always be accidents, the fact that we have no idea what kinds of cosmic catastrophes could be facing the earth (remember, we're a ball of rock spinning through a universe we are barely beginning to understand), and the fact that this universe could end up in heat death (or some other unimaginable end) regardless of what kinds of life extension and risk-mitigation technology are developed.
Phil seems to agree me on this:
it's safe to say that people faced with such [future] choices will still take their lives very seriously, and will find that there's plenty of hard stuff yet to go around. After all, we still consider our lives difficult and challenging, even though our hunter-gatherer ancestors might think we live in some kind of paradise. So on the question of meaning, there's good news.
Yes, mitigating any particular risk forces the sapient population into a space where, once again, we must question what exactly makes life really matter -- just as new and emerging transformative technologies can prompt a sort of existential panic in those with a little-examined self-concept. Anyone who wants to remain sane and healthy while navigating accelerating change would do well to build up a sense of meaning that does not depend on any particular construct remaining in place forever. Someone who is concerned that eliminating this or that risk is going to excise the meaning from their life should realize that finding and constructing meaning is itself an awe-inspiring and self-fueling challenge.
I would almost wager that in some ways, humans as a whole are reeling from the growing realization that meaning and significance are so subjective and malleable. Rather than being foisted upon us by gods and kings, or even by the myriad forces of untamed nature, meaning is something that exists because of minds. Because of persons. There is indeed no such thing as meaning in the absense of sentience. Certainly, there is phenomena in the absence of sentience, but not qualitative worth. And coming to terms with this may lead to a kind of nihilism at first -- I remember making a deliberate decision to "peer into the void", so to speak, when I was about twenty years old (nearly eight years ago at the time of this writing).
I read in a book that it was impossible for a person to imagine their own nonexistence, so I tried to imagine it -- and was thrust into a strange space made of amorphous threads of "source code", constituent polygons, and sweeping landscapes of time so vast that I cannot possibly quantify them with words. This was purely a meditative thought experiment; no drugs were involved (though I was in college at the time, so sleep deprivation could have been a factor in allowing this kind of thinking to take place).
I remember sitting in my physics classroom, waiting for a lecture to begin, and drawing a comic strip of a stick figure sitting at a window, outside which lay the totality of existence. The stick figure was permitted one brief illuminated glance when the shade on the window lifted briefly, but that was all. That brief illuminated glance was "life", and it was bordered on both sides by an unfathomable dark mystery. A friend of mine recently described this picture of existence as something akin to, "a short bright moment bookended by oblivion". And certainly, there is a kind of poignancy to that picture. Analogies to fireflies, fireworks, and mayflies come to mind, and therein lies the stuff of poetry.
Is it this -- this poetry of glimpses and glances amidst walls of indeterminacy and nothingness -- that come as part and parcel of "The Hard Stuff"? Perhaps. But it is my contention that in order to survive the future -- emotionally and intellectually -- sentience must move into a realm of post-nihilism, into a space where scientific materialism is not viewed as an enemy of beauty, but as the very thing that makes beauty possible.
That, perhaps, is the "hardest stuff of all": the kinds of thinking that sentience must engage in in order to keep perpetuating an existence that is, truly, wonderful. There is something on the other side of the void, teen angst notwithstanding. I will end with part of something I wrote on a mailing list a few months back:
I’m not convinced that over-arching “supergoals” are all that important in the grand scheme of things; once we’ve dealt with basic survival issues, everything on top of that is rather subjective. Perhaps this sense that everyone and everything needs a supergoal on the order of survival is merely an artifact stemming from the very powerful motivation FOR survival that we’ve needed all these years.
Why not a series of personal mini-goals? Paint a picture, write a novel, climb a tree, beat Zelda again, prove a theorem, build a supercollider, make cookies, play with kittens, tour China, create your own model of China, invent a new kind of noodle, plug your brain into a machine that lets you watch your dreams, dream, videotape penguins, search for extraterrestrials, grow your own extraterrestrials, run infinite simulations, see how high you can count, knit a blanket, knit spacetime, start your own television show, make holograms, build an entire city out of Duct tape, breed immortal dragonflies, watch stars form and wax and wane over millennia, push on galaxies…you get the idea.
Sure, there might be some sort of “ultimate meaning”. However, I don’t claim to know that there is such a meaning — and I generally operate under the assumption that there isn’t, since the individual human viewpoint is so incredibly subjective, and I don’t stake my existence or enjoyment of life on the potential of that sort of meaning.
Certainly, I’ll keep learning and exploring and delving into scientific mysteries, but this process is just as rewarding if there’s nothing but knowledge at the “end” (if such an end even exists) or if there’s some sort of unforeseeable complex prize that would keep anyone, even a superintelligence, happily occupied basically forever. The process, and what is experienced during the process, is just as important as any sort of goal, “super” or otherwise. And knowledge is no “booby prize”; lacking all that knowledge we stand to gain still, who knows what we might think of to do with it once we have it?
Evolution has granted us the capacity to enjoy things. Being able to enjoy life, regardless of whether you’re being chased by a ravenous tiger or not, is an adaptation in the sense that it motivates people to continue existing. Which, of course, allows for the perpetuation of both genes and memes — if our ancestors had all been suicidally bored between mammoth hunts, we wouldn’t be here right now....
And as far as I can tell, there is no predetermined limit to the depth one might find in art, music, or mathematics. And I’ve never found knowing how or why something works to make it any less beautiful or amazing — to suggest that understanding something means you’ve “used it up” is, frankly, incoherent to me. All I can say is: speak for yourself!
Meaning isn’t some kind of externally-sourced quantity, but a product of symbiosis. I, for one, plan to meet the universe at least halfway in that regard.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Choosing Who To Be: Robust Self-Concept In An Age of Transformative Technology
One issue that frequently arises these days is that of the significance of configurations (gender phenotype, neurological tendencies, etc.), particularly when technologies already exist that permit people to change aspects of themselves that once sat firmly in the category of "immutable".
Through the machinery of modern surgery and medicine, and because of the fluidity of definitions and social/cultural roles continually being negotiated by people everywhere, men can become women, women can become men, shy people can become extroverts, and scatterbrains can become focused engines of productivity. Emerging transformative technologies are likely to dilute the concept of an ultimate, identity-bolstering constraint even further. And the net result of this is going to be that more people than ever before are going to be faced with the question: "What makes me me?", coupled with the inevitable followup question, "Who do I want to be?"
I don't know how many people consciously ask themselves such questions -- my observations over the years seem to indicate that few people enjoy talking about such things, at least in the context of casual discussion. Nevertheless, I remember noting as a child how commonly I was asked by adults, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" While I now realize this question is probably a kind of cultural script that evolved out of a need for adults to have something to say to the young children they encountered, I also think that this particular cultural script probably developed in part due to the degree to which adults define themselves according to their chosen work.
But most people still consider themselves to be "the same person" even if they change careers (though there are exceptions to this, particularly, perhaps, when the "new" vocation is of a religious nature). It seems that in some respects, certain formerly-immutable aspects of being are moving into a realm similar to that of a person's "career space" or "hobby space" -- that of things which are chosen by someone but that do not wholly comprise that someone.
Regardless of whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, personal identity determination is a dynamic, multivariable process for each of us. And each of us applies different levels of significance to things within, about, and attached to us that might be considered to make us "who we are". For some people, something as seemingly superficial as hair color might be a primary determinant of identity, whereas for others, identity is an illusory thing -- an emergent property of a string of autobiographical memories woven through spacetime. My own concept of identity is part emergent property, part cognitive processing style, and part perceptual interface with the environment outside my brain (which is a dynamic system as far as I'm concerned, and not a static set of parameters).
Together, these components combine to form my version of something that cultural critic Erik Davis has referred to as, "the chooser". It doesn't really matter so much what the chooser is made of -- only that it is the thing which decides what is going to be part of me and what is not, according to whatever meta-goals and impressions my consciousness has managed to come up with.
I find the "chooser" concept to be a very robust one -- one that is, perhaps, an antidote to the future-shocked existential angst that is probably hitting many for the first time (perhaps as they're faced with the decision of taking, or not taking, a pill that might change their work habits or personality to an unpredictable degree). Regardless of how many factors you think define you, or what those factors are, "you" can still be said to be the thing that chooses -- even if that choice is that of deciding you don't want anything but your memories to determine who you are, or even if you decide to dispense with the concept of "you" altogether.
I don't personally subscribe to the concept that the ultimate fate of consciousness is that of entereing into an irreducible hive-mind; being able to "unplug" at least on occasion is something that I find very useful. In the words of James Russell Lowell:
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
The concept of individual identity is likely to be an important one for a long time coming, possibly for as long as we have conscious beings. Though there is strength in interconnectivity, something is lost when parts of the whole cannot periodically separate and take in some of the raw data from the universe surrounding them. As profoundly real as culturally-defined reality might seem, it is dangerous to lose onesself in it to the point where you forget you're a tiny fragment of flesh and intent scurrying to and fro on a globe spinning through a space apparently much more optimized for the proliferation of black holes than for sentient humanoids.
It is the contention of this author that a strong model of individual identity is an essential aspect of existential risk mitigation -- for individuals as well as for the population at large. Longevity medicine is a wonderful example of affirmation of the value of individuals -- that single brains and minds have worth whenever the chooser native to that brain and mind remains enamored with living, exploring, and perceiving (and wishes to be able to do these things for as long as possible). Therefore, I see it as beneficial to encourage a continued discourse between individuals and the structures and cultures we form. I've noticed some very interesting bits of existential questioning creeping into mainstream media these days (particularly in articles about biotech and new medications), and I am often struck by the fact that anyone considers this sort of questioning to be new.
By the time a new technology reaches mass market, it's generally too late to start figuring out how to answer people who might, for the first time, finally start getting interested in matters of identity and consciousness. Part of conscious evolution (and part of the evolution of consciousness) consists of enabling people to develop a dynamic, healthy, and utterly non-nihilistic concept of who and what they are.
Through the machinery of modern surgery and medicine, and because of the fluidity of definitions and social/cultural roles continually being negotiated by people everywhere, men can become women, women can become men, shy people can become extroverts, and scatterbrains can become focused engines of productivity. Emerging transformative technologies are likely to dilute the concept of an ultimate, identity-bolstering constraint even further. And the net result of this is going to be that more people than ever before are going to be faced with the question: "What makes me me?", coupled with the inevitable followup question, "Who do I want to be?"
I don't know how many people consciously ask themselves such questions -- my observations over the years seem to indicate that few people enjoy talking about such things, at least in the context of casual discussion. Nevertheless, I remember noting as a child how commonly I was asked by adults, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" While I now realize this question is probably a kind of cultural script that evolved out of a need for adults to have something to say to the young children they encountered, I also think that this particular cultural script probably developed in part due to the degree to which adults define themselves according to their chosen work.
But most people still consider themselves to be "the same person" even if they change careers (though there are exceptions to this, particularly, perhaps, when the "new" vocation is of a religious nature). It seems that in some respects, certain formerly-immutable aspects of being are moving into a realm similar to that of a person's "career space" or "hobby space" -- that of things which are chosen by someone but that do not wholly comprise that someone.
Regardless of whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, personal identity determination is a dynamic, multivariable process for each of us. And each of us applies different levels of significance to things within, about, and attached to us that might be considered to make us "who we are". For some people, something as seemingly superficial as hair color might be a primary determinant of identity, whereas for others, identity is an illusory thing -- an emergent property of a string of autobiographical memories woven through spacetime. My own concept of identity is part emergent property, part cognitive processing style, and part perceptual interface with the environment outside my brain (which is a dynamic system as far as I'm concerned, and not a static set of parameters).
Together, these components combine to form my version of something that cultural critic Erik Davis has referred to as, "the chooser". It doesn't really matter so much what the chooser is made of -- only that it is the thing which decides what is going to be part of me and what is not, according to whatever meta-goals and impressions my consciousness has managed to come up with.
I find the "chooser" concept to be a very robust one -- one that is, perhaps, an antidote to the future-shocked existential angst that is probably hitting many for the first time (perhaps as they're faced with the decision of taking, or not taking, a pill that might change their work habits or personality to an unpredictable degree). Regardless of how many factors you think define you, or what those factors are, "you" can still be said to be the thing that chooses -- even if that choice is that of deciding you don't want anything but your memories to determine who you are, or even if you decide to dispense with the concept of "you" altogether.
I don't personally subscribe to the concept that the ultimate fate of consciousness is that of entereing into an irreducible hive-mind; being able to "unplug" at least on occasion is something that I find very useful. In the words of James Russell Lowell:
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
The concept of individual identity is likely to be an important one for a long time coming, possibly for as long as we have conscious beings. Though there is strength in interconnectivity, something is lost when parts of the whole cannot periodically separate and take in some of the raw data from the universe surrounding them. As profoundly real as culturally-defined reality might seem, it is dangerous to lose onesself in it to the point where you forget you're a tiny fragment of flesh and intent scurrying to and fro on a globe spinning through a space apparently much more optimized for the proliferation of black holes than for sentient humanoids.
It is the contention of this author that a strong model of individual identity is an essential aspect of existential risk mitigation -- for individuals as well as for the population at large. Longevity medicine is a wonderful example of affirmation of the value of individuals -- that single brains and minds have worth whenever the chooser native to that brain and mind remains enamored with living, exploring, and perceiving (and wishes to be able to do these things for as long as possible). Therefore, I see it as beneficial to encourage a continued discourse between individuals and the structures and cultures we form. I've noticed some very interesting bits of existential questioning creeping into mainstream media these days (particularly in articles about biotech and new medications), and I am often struck by the fact that anyone considers this sort of questioning to be new.
By the time a new technology reaches mass market, it's generally too late to start figuring out how to answer people who might, for the first time, finally start getting interested in matters of identity and consciousness. Part of conscious evolution (and part of the evolution of consciousness) consists of enabling people to develop a dynamic, healthy, and utterly non-nihilistic concept of who and what they are.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Questions for Life Extension Supporters
The Partial Immortalization blog recently put out a call for answers to 5 simple questions to life extension supporters, 1 plus for bloggers. I've answered these questions below.
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment?
I've been interested in life extension since childhood, as a result of discovering science and science-fiction at a young age (and being a generally happy person overall -- I've frankly never understood how anyone could not want to live as long as possible, considering how much there is to see, think, and do while alive!) However, for years I considered it to be the province of science fiction, except for the possibility of cryonics and some impossibly-advanced future civilization able to wake people up and repair them using nanobots. But then about eight years ago, I learned of Roy Walford's work with caloric restriction, and that sparked a realization in my mind that this represented concrete evidence that the aging process was just another biological mechanism, and possibly a controllable one.
Ever since then, I've been attempting to figure out what I can do to help contribute to the development of life extension medicine, though that's really only part of what I see as an overall personal project: that of being a lifelong perpetuator of optimism and joy and wonder and curiosity. I just recently became a volunteer with the Methuselah Foundation and an intern with the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and I am in the process of trying to figure out how to best contribute to LE and the informed, ethical use of technology through connecting and strategizing with others.
2. Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension?
Maximum, since I think people should be able to live as long as they would like to.
3. What is your favourite argument supporting human life extension?
If we accept the premise that saving people's lives is a good thing, I don't see why this premise should only apply to people below a certain age. An elderly person has as much right to exist as a younger person, and should not be forced to simply accept their own decline and demise on the basis of someone else's philosophical convictions. Simply put, people who want to live and enjoy good continuing health should be enabled to do so, regardless of age. It shouldn't be up to anyone but the individual to decide when they've lived "enough"; nobody has the right to tell someone else when they're supposed to die.
In addition, from the disability-rights perspective, people with severe disabilities and the elderly often face similar pressures from society and even families to just get out of the way and let themselves die (or seek euthanasia) so as not to be "burdensome"; a sort of noble sacrifice archetype has developed in response to these pressures. Life extension medicine is something I see as a much-needed backlash against this archetype (which can be very damaging, and which can compel people who might otherwise want to fight for their right to receive proper care and treatment to just give up, ostensibly for the sake of their families).
4. What is the most probable technological draft of human life extension, which technology or discipline has the biggest chance to reach it earliest? (regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, gene therapy, caloric restriction, bionics, hormones, antioxidants, …)
Well, invoking the escape velocity model, it seems logical that the people who take care of themselves best using presently-available tools (e.g., caloric restriction) have the best chance of living to benefit from more drastic life-extension medicine. So I'd say that in the near-term, caloric restriction (and possibly CR-mimetic drugs) have the greatest chance of offering some people the chance to live longer than they otherwise would have. Nevertheless, CR and mimetics are only likely to grant a person a few extra years of healthy life; after that, a combination of interventions will be required to sustain the person and repair the ongoing damage that would otherwise kill them.
Considering the complexity of the human body and its systems, I do not think anyone alive today is going to be able to benefit from therapies that depend on a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of everything about human biology -- that sort of knowledge isn't something you can set out to obtain and utilize within a short timespan.
If anyone in this generation of adults manages to make it past 120 or so in reasonable health, it will likely be due at least in part to "short-cut" therapies -- perhaps similar to those suggested by the SENS platform. That is, I think that an engineering approach to aging damage is really the only way to achieve effective treatment in enough time to save the lives of those alive today -- longevity science needs to be a targeted project, and there's a different mindset required in order to create therapies which actually repair age-related damage as opposed to just "understanding the aging process".
Regenerative medicine is perhaps the most promising item in the list above, since it represents a repair approach rather than a prevention approach. Repairs can be conducted without necessarily knowing every nuance of all the underlying bodily systems, which is important since we're not likely to understand everything about such processes as metabolism for quite a while still. And it's the repairs that are going to keep people alive.
5. When?
Impossible to say. It depends on funding and motivation and availability of persons and lab space, and also on the ability of all involved to remain focused on the goal of saving lives.
6. What can blogs do for LE?
- They can provide a means by which to disseminate news and advances in longevity science to a wider audience. A lot of people simply don't know what "those scientists" are doing, and how far along the research is in various areas, and how it could actually potentially affect them.
- They can serve as a forum for those interested in LE to strategize, connect, and discuss; this can be crucial for forming effective project teams throughout the world, since not all the highly motivated life-extensionists and scientists in the world are in close physical proximity to one another.
- They can allow individuals to develop their own strategies and philosophies related to LE over time, with some degree of informal peer review.
- They can inject healthy philosophical memes into scientific discussion space -- my own blog is entitled "Existence is Wonderful" for a reason. I want people to pause and consider for a moment how utterly amazing it is that sentient life exists at all, let alone their particular lives. There's just so much potential for joy in existence, and yet many people take it for granted, and perhaps someone might come across an LE blog and suddenly start being able to admit to themselves that the idea of getting old and expiring due to ill health really is horrible.
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment?
I've been interested in life extension since childhood, as a result of discovering science and science-fiction at a young age (and being a generally happy person overall -- I've frankly never understood how anyone could not want to live as long as possible, considering how much there is to see, think, and do while alive!) However, for years I considered it to be the province of science fiction, except for the possibility of cryonics and some impossibly-advanced future civilization able to wake people up and repair them using nanobots. But then about eight years ago, I learned of Roy Walford's work with caloric restriction, and that sparked a realization in my mind that this represented concrete evidence that the aging process was just another biological mechanism, and possibly a controllable one.
Ever since then, I've been attempting to figure out what I can do to help contribute to the development of life extension medicine, though that's really only part of what I see as an overall personal project: that of being a lifelong perpetuator of optimism and joy and wonder and curiosity. I just recently became a volunteer with the Methuselah Foundation and an intern with the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and I am in the process of trying to figure out how to best contribute to LE and the informed, ethical use of technology through connecting and strategizing with others.
2. Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension?
Maximum, since I think people should be able to live as long as they would like to.
3. What is your favourite argument supporting human life extension?
If we accept the premise that saving people's lives is a good thing, I don't see why this premise should only apply to people below a certain age. An elderly person has as much right to exist as a younger person, and should not be forced to simply accept their own decline and demise on the basis of someone else's philosophical convictions. Simply put, people who want to live and enjoy good continuing health should be enabled to do so, regardless of age. It shouldn't be up to anyone but the individual to decide when they've lived "enough"; nobody has the right to tell someone else when they're supposed to die.
In addition, from the disability-rights perspective, people with severe disabilities and the elderly often face similar pressures from society and even families to just get out of the way and let themselves die (or seek euthanasia) so as not to be "burdensome"; a sort of noble sacrifice archetype has developed in response to these pressures. Life extension medicine is something I see as a much-needed backlash against this archetype (which can be very damaging, and which can compel people who might otherwise want to fight for their right to receive proper care and treatment to just give up, ostensibly for the sake of their families).
4. What is the most probable technological draft of human life extension, which technology or discipline has the biggest chance to reach it earliest? (regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, gene therapy, caloric restriction, bionics, hormones, antioxidants, …)
Well, invoking the escape velocity model, it seems logical that the people who take care of themselves best using presently-available tools (e.g., caloric restriction) have the best chance of living to benefit from more drastic life-extension medicine. So I'd say that in the near-term, caloric restriction (and possibly CR-mimetic drugs) have the greatest chance of offering some people the chance to live longer than they otherwise would have. Nevertheless, CR and mimetics are only likely to grant a person a few extra years of healthy life; after that, a combination of interventions will be required to sustain the person and repair the ongoing damage that would otherwise kill them.
Considering the complexity of the human body and its systems, I do not think anyone alive today is going to be able to benefit from therapies that depend on a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of everything about human biology -- that sort of knowledge isn't something you can set out to obtain and utilize within a short timespan.
If anyone in this generation of adults manages to make it past 120 or so in reasonable health, it will likely be due at least in part to "short-cut" therapies -- perhaps similar to those suggested by the SENS platform. That is, I think that an engineering approach to aging damage is really the only way to achieve effective treatment in enough time to save the lives of those alive today -- longevity science needs to be a targeted project, and there's a different mindset required in order to create therapies which actually repair age-related damage as opposed to just "understanding the aging process".
Regenerative medicine is perhaps the most promising item in the list above, since it represents a repair approach rather than a prevention approach. Repairs can be conducted without necessarily knowing every nuance of all the underlying bodily systems, which is important since we're not likely to understand everything about such processes as metabolism for quite a while still. And it's the repairs that are going to keep people alive.
5. When?
Impossible to say. It depends on funding and motivation and availability of persons and lab space, and also on the ability of all involved to remain focused on the goal of saving lives.
6. What can blogs do for LE?
- They can provide a means by which to disseminate news and advances in longevity science to a wider audience. A lot of people simply don't know what "those scientists" are doing, and how far along the research is in various areas, and how it could actually potentially affect them.
- They can serve as a forum for those interested in LE to strategize, connect, and discuss; this can be crucial for forming effective project teams throughout the world, since not all the highly motivated life-extensionists and scientists in the world are in close physical proximity to one another.
- They can allow individuals to develop their own strategies and philosophies related to LE over time, with some degree of informal peer review.
- They can inject healthy philosophical memes into scientific discussion space -- my own blog is entitled "Existence is Wonderful" for a reason. I want people to pause and consider for a moment how utterly amazing it is that sentient life exists at all, let alone their particular lives. There's just so much potential for joy in existence, and yet many people take it for granted, and perhaps someone might come across an LE blog and suddenly start being able to admit to themselves that the idea of getting old and expiring due to ill health really is horrible.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Progressive Dialogue and Procreative Freedom
There is a principle known as procreative beneficence, which states that parents are somehow obliged to select, of all potential children, those most likely to lead the best lives based on available and relevant information.
This philosophy has been argued for in some transhumanist dialogues, however, I see it as somewhat short-sighted and in tremendous need of better explanation and refinement.
Defenders of procreative beneficence often point out that parents already take such measures as prenatal vitamin supplementation to alter the course of various aspects of development, often toward what is considered "normal" or "nondisabled". This is a valid observation -- but not one that really addresses critiques of the application of procreative beneficence, as you would be hard-pressed to find any disability advocate arguing that expectant mothers shouldn't take vitamins or practice good nutrition. It may be a subtle distinction to say that there should not be an obligation to enforce a prescribed set of "normal" abilities and characteristics on a potential child -- but I argue that it is an important distinction.
Peter Singer-style ethics are sometimes invoked in transhumanist discourse, and while I certainly support Singer's notions with respect to the personhood of nonhuman animals, I think he's somewhat off-base when it comes to procreative obligations. In his attempts to fit all situations neatly into a self-consistent ideology, he makes the error of calling irrelevant or throwaway much that many people might actually consider tremendously significant.
Opportunities, Not Coercion
Procreative beneficence -- when applied in a strict sense -- cannot help but lead to a coercive-eugenics state or society, in which one trait after another is pathologized on the basis that anyone who cannot function optimally in the existing society is better off not existing at all (a mindset which plunges firmly into the territory of naturalistic fallacy, since it assumes that the way society is now is is somehow superlative).
And it is important to note that with diagnostic criteria widening and new "disorders" showing up on the scene at a frenetic pace, it definitely seems plausible that some of the very people in favor of strict, narrowly-defined procreative beneficence today might tomorrow be in one of the very groups of people up for elimination.
Part of the solution to this issue can likely be found in progressive policies that favor widespread access to consensual modification technologies and services -- this would, of course, eliminate the need to define certain variations as pathologies for the sake of allowing people with these variations access to helpful services and technologies.
If a progressive technology-access policy were implemented, the compulsion to group people along the lines of "healthy" and "defective" for the purpose of deciding who should get the (apparent) lion's share of the resources would likely evaporate. Access to consensual modification technologies and treatments would allow people who want to change their morphology or cognitive abilities in any way to do so, without fear that their doing so would define, for all time, that type of change as either therapeutic or cosmetic.
I don't think anyone should have to prove they have "subnormal" memory abilities in order to gain access to a memory-enhancing treatment, but the way society is set up at the moment, people who desire to change their ability set for any reason are at the mercy of whatever the major, large policy-making bodies have defined as pathological or nonpathological.
One only need walk into any local drugstore (or open their e-mail spam folder) to see that "enhancements" are a hot commodity. From Viagra (and its numerous herbal knockoffs) to dubiously-effective focus-enhancers to Retin-A creme to caffeine pills, shelves are stocked to brimming with things that fall far outside the "therapy" category. I don't see this as a bad thing at all (aside from when the various advertised "enhancement" products turn out to be ill-tested, ineffective, or just plain quackery); I see it as evidence that people want the freedom to define their own ability sets and configurations, based on whatever meta-goals they might have for themselves.
I also see similar phenomena in the prenatal nutrition and early childhood care and education market. Women are quite concerned about the future health of the children they carry, and most these days try very hard to make sure they eat nutritious meals and supplement appropriately while pregnant. I've also seen baby formulas and foods appearing over the past few years that include such things as DHA and omega-3 fatty acids, which are thought to help promote brain development.
I also see such things as "Baby Einstein" videos and educational computer software designed for toddlers barely able to control a mouse. I heard an amusing anecdote recently about an acquaintance's preschool-aged daughter -- she is apparently already quite adept at navigating her own computer games, and one day turned to her parents to solemnly announce, "Just wait. It's loading" (when the screen froze briefly between activities). The next generation of middle-class youngsters is growing up "enhanced", or at least changed, right before our eyes, and even in advance of the existence of more serious genetic and somatic modification technologies.
And while again there are certainly plenty of "pushy parents" seeking to live out their own unrealized dreams through their offspring inappropriately, this group by no means includes all parents, and (as noted by Ron Bailey in Liberation Biology), "a ban on cloning [as an example of one of the more controversial biotech breakthroughs likely to arrive in coming decades] won't abolish pushy parents."
So, if it's okay for parents to make choices for their offspring before these offspring even fall under the umbrella of "persons" (such as in the case of prenatal nutrition), how can a concept like biodiversity in humans survive? After all, (say advocates of procreative beneficence) shouldn't parents by default (or according to social pressures) simply select, if possible, the potential offspring with the lowest risk of experiencing hardship? If not, what are the possible justifications for not doing so?
Avoiding Oversimplification
For an illustrative example, consider the case of a couple incapable of producing any embryo which does not show evidence of some kind of genetic "abnormality" (which honestly probably encompasses all couples, since there's really no such thing as a "standard human" in the first place, except within the pages of anatomy texts).
If none of these abnormalities are fatal -- consider, perhaps, a couple who produces three embryos, one with a propensity toward blindness, one to deafness, one to autism -- what is the proper course of action? Certainly, it should not be to deny these parents the right to have a child at all; that would fall under the category of the kind of Nazi-esque eugenics policies that any society worth living in must maintain a more-than-comfortable distance from.
The very idea that some kinds of people should not exist because they represent a "drain on society" is utterly reprehensible. This attitude also flies in the face of progressive ideals that would encourage the provision of needed survival and enrichment resources to everyone. Remember that artists, musicians, and poets have been put in the category of "useless" at various times throughout history in the minds of certain groups.
So it seems that in cases of nonfatal conditions, procreative beneficence degrades into pointlessness at best and anti-choice claptrap at worst. If parents are allowed to abort a developing fetus, for any reason (a right I fully support as a pro-choice woman), I also think that parents should be allowed to have whatever child they want, even if this means taking no steps to assure that the child is maximally normal.
The idea of coercing women to abort (or not select) potentially deaf, blind, or autistic children is completely at odds with reproductive freedom.
Just as nobody should be forced to have a child, nobody should be forced not to have a particular child. As noted above, regardless of the fact that pre-implantation embryos are not technically persons, this doesn't mean that these embryos are interchangeable.
A given embryo isn't just defined by "disability" or lack thereof, but by a robust and complex set of initial conditions. You could have a child that is deaf, extroverted, and talented at drawing and painting, or a child that has no apparent disabilities but who ends up becoming a bully or a drug addict (again, based on genes, but so far I haven't heard of anyone looking for "bully genes").
The simplest solution here seems to be to not force or oblige parents to undergo pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Parents with potentially deadly conditions in their families will likely seek out this technology themselves, no coercion required, when they decide to start a family.
Potential Persons, Rights, and Choice
The suggestion that bringing a child with a particular condition into existence is somehow the same as inflicting that condition on an existing child easily fails any sort of rational analysis. After all, choosing to have a female child rather than a male child is not the same thing as taking a five-year-old boy and forcing him to undergo sex-reassignment surgery.
And moving for a moment into the "dissolving species boundary" realm of personhood discourse, if we put bonobos into the category of "persons" (which I certainly do), it makes absolutely no sense to suggest that since bonobos lack some of the cognitive and speech abilities humans possess (ignoring for a moment that bonobos certainly possess some superior abilities to those displayed by the average human), we ought to just sterilize all the bonobos in the world on the basis that the places of the babies the bonobos would have had will somehow be "taken" by human children.
That would frankly be genocide, and while anti-miscegenation laws are every bit as morally wrong as racism is, it should never be assumed that a group of people sharing a certain trait (whether it be something like skin color, "bonoboism", or dolphinhood) must be eliminated systematically, ostensibly for the good of "all persons" -- that way, as they say, leads to the Dark Side.
Sometimes, even the most benevolent intentions can end up drastically restricting freedoms that ought to instead be protected. But there's a difference between a society that evolves to be a certain way based on consensual modification and the exercise of free choice, and a society that is fairly molded to be a certain way based on coercive tactics, ignorance, and status-quo bias.
Attempts to merge principles of procreative beneficence with pro-choice philosophy and personhood theory have so far created a muddled, tangled web of politics and confusion.
If an embryo is not a person, then it cannot be said to have rights -- it has no "right" to be configured a particular way and certainly no "right" to be implanted and brought to term in the first place. And even if a fetus is defined as a person after a certain point during gestation, if it is still permissible to kill that fetus for whatever reason (which I think it should be, on the basis that women should have the final say regarding what goes on in their bodies), then it should certainly be permissible as well to bring that fetus to term and try to give it the best care possible once it is born, regardless of difference or disability.
While most people alive today would not jump at the chance to acquire a disability if given the opportunity, most people who already have disabilities don't sit around bemoaning the fact that they were ever born to begin with.
And while I certainly think societies are obligated to help assist people in living effectively and obtaining appropriate care, treatment, and modification (if desired), I do not think that societies have any sort of obligation to prevent the existence of people who might be considered "disabled". Note that "obligation" is the key word here. Certainly, parents might wish to take folic acid so their baby won't have spina bifida, but if the condition occurs anyway, these parents should not be coerced to abort that child on the basis that they really ought to just try again for a nondisabled baby.
Trusting Parents, Eschewing Ignorance
A parent who feels perfectly up to the task of raising, say, an autistic child (or who might even prefer such a child, on the basis of being autistic themselves) should not be guilt-tripped or made to feel as if they're "hurting" their child by allowing him/her to be born, or that they are somehow draining resources in society that would be better spent on neurotypical children.
To assume that just because someone is autistic that they're somehow by default not going to be able to contribute "meaningfully" to existence (or be happy, or intelligent, etc.) is to presuppose a lot of things on the basis of ignorance that often leads to outright bigotry.
Just because the media is sloppy and prone to stereotyping in its descriptions and portrayals of a particular kind of person, that doesn't give anyone an excuse to just accept, unquestioningly, what they are spoon-fed by this media machine.
Of course I am not saying it's all a fine idea for prospective parents to drink radioactive waste and play tackle football while pregnant. But this sort of behavior is really too rare to be of much, if any, relevance to discussions of procreative beneficence and related concepts. Furthermore, consensual modification technologies (including germline therapies and alterations) may well change the face, shape, and form of humanity over the years to come -- and I find myself quite intrigued, rather than horrified, by this prospect.
However, I think that as this occurs, it must occur in the absence of subscription to naturalistic fallacies, in defiance of intellectual laziness, and without bigotry or prejudice. A worthwhile society must necessarily embrace difference, while acknowledging that a strength in one area can mean a constraint in another.
In Citizen Cyborg, Dr. James Hughes notes that:
Hughes makes some points in the same book that I do not agree with (an understatement -- Hughes has a tremendously irritating tendency to ignorantly decry disability-rights advocates as "disability extremists", and to completely ignore power differentials when it's convenient to do so, which in my opinion dramatically weakens any valid-seeming points he might be making elsewhere).
But I wholeheartedly agree that a range of increasingly diverse choices is upon us. Prospective parents need accurate information, not scaremongering, and not hype. And everyone needs to avoid making superficial assumptions about the quality of life of someone they themselves can't imagine being. Sometimes, apparent "sub-optimal" functioning of a person in a society is a warning sign that the society itself is built upon an unstable and transient foundation, and that said society is in desperate need of an upgrade to make it more flexible and inclusive.
This philosophy has been argued for in some transhumanist dialogues, however, I see it as somewhat short-sighted and in tremendous need of better explanation and refinement.
Defenders of procreative beneficence often point out that parents already take such measures as prenatal vitamin supplementation to alter the course of various aspects of development, often toward what is considered "normal" or "nondisabled". This is a valid observation -- but not one that really addresses critiques of the application of procreative beneficence, as you would be hard-pressed to find any disability advocate arguing that expectant mothers shouldn't take vitamins or practice good nutrition. It may be a subtle distinction to say that there should not be an obligation to enforce a prescribed set of "normal" abilities and characteristics on a potential child -- but I argue that it is an important distinction.
Peter Singer-style ethics are sometimes invoked in transhumanist discourse, and while I certainly support Singer's notions with respect to the personhood of nonhuman animals, I think he's somewhat off-base when it comes to procreative obligations. In his attempts to fit all situations neatly into a self-consistent ideology, he makes the error of calling irrelevant or throwaway much that many people might actually consider tremendously significant.
Opportunities, Not Coercion
Procreative beneficence -- when applied in a strict sense -- cannot help but lead to a coercive-eugenics state or society, in which one trait after another is pathologized on the basis that anyone who cannot function optimally in the existing society is better off not existing at all (a mindset which plunges firmly into the territory of naturalistic fallacy, since it assumes that the way society is now is is somehow superlative).
And it is important to note that with diagnostic criteria widening and new "disorders" showing up on the scene at a frenetic pace, it definitely seems plausible that some of the very people in favor of strict, narrowly-defined procreative beneficence today might tomorrow be in one of the very groups of people up for elimination.
Part of the solution to this issue can likely be found in progressive policies that favor widespread access to consensual modification technologies and services -- this would, of course, eliminate the need to define certain variations as pathologies for the sake of allowing people with these variations access to helpful services and technologies.
If a progressive technology-access policy were implemented, the compulsion to group people along the lines of "healthy" and "defective" for the purpose of deciding who should get the (apparent) lion's share of the resources would likely evaporate. Access to consensual modification technologies and treatments would allow people who want to change their morphology or cognitive abilities in any way to do so, without fear that their doing so would define, for all time, that type of change as either therapeutic or cosmetic.
I don't think anyone should have to prove they have "subnormal" memory abilities in order to gain access to a memory-enhancing treatment, but the way society is set up at the moment, people who desire to change their ability set for any reason are at the mercy of whatever the major, large policy-making bodies have defined as pathological or nonpathological.
One only need walk into any local drugstore (or open their e-mail spam folder) to see that "enhancements" are a hot commodity. From Viagra (and its numerous herbal knockoffs) to dubiously-effective focus-enhancers to Retin-A creme to caffeine pills, shelves are stocked to brimming with things that fall far outside the "therapy" category. I don't see this as a bad thing at all (aside from when the various advertised "enhancement" products turn out to be ill-tested, ineffective, or just plain quackery); I see it as evidence that people want the freedom to define their own ability sets and configurations, based on whatever meta-goals they might have for themselves.
I also see similar phenomena in the prenatal nutrition and early childhood care and education market. Women are quite concerned about the future health of the children they carry, and most these days try very hard to make sure they eat nutritious meals and supplement appropriately while pregnant. I've also seen baby formulas and foods appearing over the past few years that include such things as DHA and omega-3 fatty acids, which are thought to help promote brain development.
I also see such things as "Baby Einstein" videos and educational computer software designed for toddlers barely able to control a mouse. I heard an amusing anecdote recently about an acquaintance's preschool-aged daughter -- she is apparently already quite adept at navigating her own computer games, and one day turned to her parents to solemnly announce, "Just wait. It's loading" (when the screen froze briefly between activities). The next generation of middle-class youngsters is growing up "enhanced", or at least changed, right before our eyes, and even in advance of the existence of more serious genetic and somatic modification technologies.
And while again there are certainly plenty of "pushy parents" seeking to live out their own unrealized dreams through their offspring inappropriately, this group by no means includes all parents, and (as noted by Ron Bailey in Liberation Biology), "a ban on cloning [as an example of one of the more controversial biotech breakthroughs likely to arrive in coming decades] won't abolish pushy parents."
So, if it's okay for parents to make choices for their offspring before these offspring even fall under the umbrella of "persons" (such as in the case of prenatal nutrition), how can a concept like biodiversity in humans survive? After all, (say advocates of procreative beneficence) shouldn't parents by default (or according to social pressures) simply select, if possible, the potential offspring with the lowest risk of experiencing hardship? If not, what are the possible justifications for not doing so?
Avoiding Oversimplification
For an illustrative example, consider the case of a couple incapable of producing any embryo which does not show evidence of some kind of genetic "abnormality" (which honestly probably encompasses all couples, since there's really no such thing as a "standard human" in the first place, except within the pages of anatomy texts).
If none of these abnormalities are fatal -- consider, perhaps, a couple who produces three embryos, one with a propensity toward blindness, one to deafness, one to autism -- what is the proper course of action? Certainly, it should not be to deny these parents the right to have a child at all; that would fall under the category of the kind of Nazi-esque eugenics policies that any society worth living in must maintain a more-than-comfortable distance from.
The very idea that some kinds of people should not exist because they represent a "drain on society" is utterly reprehensible. This attitude also flies in the face of progressive ideals that would encourage the provision of needed survival and enrichment resources to everyone. Remember that artists, musicians, and poets have been put in the category of "useless" at various times throughout history in the minds of certain groups.
So it seems that in cases of nonfatal conditions, procreative beneficence degrades into pointlessness at best and anti-choice claptrap at worst. If parents are allowed to abort a developing fetus, for any reason (a right I fully support as a pro-choice woman), I also think that parents should be allowed to have whatever child they want, even if this means taking no steps to assure that the child is maximally normal.
The idea of coercing women to abort (or not select) potentially deaf, blind, or autistic children is completely at odds with reproductive freedom.
Just as nobody should be forced to have a child, nobody should be forced not to have a particular child. As noted above, regardless of the fact that pre-implantation embryos are not technically persons, this doesn't mean that these embryos are interchangeable.
A given embryo isn't just defined by "disability" or lack thereof, but by a robust and complex set of initial conditions. You could have a child that is deaf, extroverted, and talented at drawing and painting, or a child that has no apparent disabilities but who ends up becoming a bully or a drug addict (again, based on genes, but so far I haven't heard of anyone looking for "bully genes").
The simplest solution here seems to be to not force or oblige parents to undergo pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Parents with potentially deadly conditions in their families will likely seek out this technology themselves, no coercion required, when they decide to start a family.
Potential Persons, Rights, and Choice
The suggestion that bringing a child with a particular condition into existence is somehow the same as inflicting that condition on an existing child easily fails any sort of rational analysis. After all, choosing to have a female child rather than a male child is not the same thing as taking a five-year-old boy and forcing him to undergo sex-reassignment surgery.
And moving for a moment into the "dissolving species boundary" realm of personhood discourse, if we put bonobos into the category of "persons" (which I certainly do), it makes absolutely no sense to suggest that since bonobos lack some of the cognitive and speech abilities humans possess (ignoring for a moment that bonobos certainly possess some superior abilities to those displayed by the average human), we ought to just sterilize all the bonobos in the world on the basis that the places of the babies the bonobos would have had will somehow be "taken" by human children.
That would frankly be genocide, and while anti-miscegenation laws are every bit as morally wrong as racism is, it should never be assumed that a group of people sharing a certain trait (whether it be something like skin color, "bonoboism", or dolphinhood) must be eliminated systematically, ostensibly for the good of "all persons" -- that way, as they say, leads to the Dark Side.
Sometimes, even the most benevolent intentions can end up drastically restricting freedoms that ought to instead be protected. But there's a difference between a society that evolves to be a certain way based on consensual modification and the exercise of free choice, and a society that is fairly molded to be a certain way based on coercive tactics, ignorance, and status-quo bias.
Attempts to merge principles of procreative beneficence with pro-choice philosophy and personhood theory have so far created a muddled, tangled web of politics and confusion.
If an embryo is not a person, then it cannot be said to have rights -- it has no "right" to be configured a particular way and certainly no "right" to be implanted and brought to term in the first place. And even if a fetus is defined as a person after a certain point during gestation, if it is still permissible to kill that fetus for whatever reason (which I think it should be, on the basis that women should have the final say regarding what goes on in their bodies), then it should certainly be permissible as well to bring that fetus to term and try to give it the best care possible once it is born, regardless of difference or disability.
While most people alive today would not jump at the chance to acquire a disability if given the opportunity, most people who already have disabilities don't sit around bemoaning the fact that they were ever born to begin with.
And while I certainly think societies are obligated to help assist people in living effectively and obtaining appropriate care, treatment, and modification (if desired), I do not think that societies have any sort of obligation to prevent the existence of people who might be considered "disabled". Note that "obligation" is the key word here. Certainly, parents might wish to take folic acid so their baby won't have spina bifida, but if the condition occurs anyway, these parents should not be coerced to abort that child on the basis that they really ought to just try again for a nondisabled baby.
Trusting Parents, Eschewing Ignorance
A parent who feels perfectly up to the task of raising, say, an autistic child (or who might even prefer such a child, on the basis of being autistic themselves) should not be guilt-tripped or made to feel as if they're "hurting" their child by allowing him/her to be born, or that they are somehow draining resources in society that would be better spent on neurotypical children.
To assume that just because someone is autistic that they're somehow by default not going to be able to contribute "meaningfully" to existence (or be happy, or intelligent, etc.) is to presuppose a lot of things on the basis of ignorance that often leads to outright bigotry.
Just because the media is sloppy and prone to stereotyping in its descriptions and portrayals of a particular kind of person, that doesn't give anyone an excuse to just accept, unquestioningly, what they are spoon-fed by this media machine.
Of course I am not saying it's all a fine idea for prospective parents to drink radioactive waste and play tackle football while pregnant. But this sort of behavior is really too rare to be of much, if any, relevance to discussions of procreative beneficence and related concepts. Furthermore, consensual modification technologies (including germline therapies and alterations) may well change the face, shape, and form of humanity over the years to come -- and I find myself quite intrigued, rather than horrified, by this prospect.
However, I think that as this occurs, it must occur in the absence of subscription to naturalistic fallacies, in defiance of intellectual laziness, and without bigotry or prejudice. A worthwhile society must necessarily embrace difference, while acknowledging that a strength in one area can mean a constraint in another.
In Citizen Cyborg, Dr. James Hughes notes that:
If people choose to modify themselves to live underwater, with gills and flippers, and then choose to have children to share their underwater society, would this be child abuse or enhancement? It takes away some abilities but adds others. Trusting parents to navigate the increasingly diverse choices will be hard, but nonetheless essential in a free society.
Hughes makes some points in the same book that I do not agree with (an understatement -- Hughes has a tremendously irritating tendency to ignorantly decry disability-rights advocates as "disability extremists", and to completely ignore power differentials when it's convenient to do so, which in my opinion dramatically weakens any valid-seeming points he might be making elsewhere).
But I wholeheartedly agree that a range of increasingly diverse choices is upon us. Prospective parents need accurate information, not scaremongering, and not hype. And everyone needs to avoid making superficial assumptions about the quality of life of someone they themselves can't imagine being. Sometimes, apparent "sub-optimal" functioning of a person in a society is a warning sign that the society itself is built upon an unstable and transient foundation, and that said society is in desperate need of an upgrade to make it more flexible and inclusive.
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