On the other hand, you should consider what evolution can do.
It frustrates me how often this argument against using mind enhancing substances is used and, more importantly, the weight it is given. Not only is evolution optimizing for different critiera (which DuncanS mentions) it is also optimising for an entirely different environment. Further, our expectations that random chemicals will be bad for us is to a massive extent screened off when we go ahead and test them and find that they make things better!
Yet another situation in which evolution should not be expected to give superior results to what we can come up with with science is when we know what we are going to be doing at a specific time. What is best as a general baseline is not going to be the best state when studying for a test. Which is in turn going to be less good when doing unpleasant and potentially traumatic things that you don’t want to remember.
Consuming chemicals that have been tested is certainly an improvement on consuming chemicals that haven’t been.
Consuming chemicals to make your brain work better seems to me to be a rather similar activity to overclocking a computer. Let’s add more voltage. Let’s pour liquid nitrogen into it. Perhaps it will go faster ! Perhaps it will, but will it still be working in 5 years time?
First of all, note just how crude these efforts are compared to the technological research undertaken by the companies that actually make microchips. The same is true of the brain—it can make dopamine and deliver at synapses—exact points of contact throughout the brain. Yet you see people discussing just adding more dopamine everywhere, and thinking that this is in some sense improving on nature in a clever way.
I have to mention a point against myself—which is that I do take general anaesthetics, which, while not an intelligence enhancer, is definitely an intelligence modifier for specific circumstances. However, turning brain function off is arguably simpler than trying to make it better.
It is possible, definitely, to improve human intelligence by combining it with a computer. So it’s not the case that I’m against the idea that it’s impossible to improve on the natural intelligence we all have—it obviously is.
What I’m pointing out is that all of these drug ideas are bound to be something that evolution has at some point tried out, and thrown away. And they are really unsophisticated ideas compared with those the brain has actually adopted.
Even the situation dependent argument isn’t as strong as you might think—for example your brain has a lot of adaptations to cover the “unpleasant and potentially traumatic things” situation, for example—and these adaptations generally disagree with your view that you shouldn’t remember them. It’s probably the case that intelligence tests are a novel environment, however....
What I’m pointing out is that all of these drug ideas are bound to be something that evolution has at some point tried out, and thrown away. And they are really unsophisticated ideas compared with those the brain has actually adopted.
What I’m pointing out is that all of these drug ideas are bound to be something that evolution has at some point tried out, and thrown away. And they are really unsophisticated ideas compared with those the brain has actually adopted.
Well there could be many reasons why evolution has” thrown them out”. Maybe they are harmful in the long term, maybe their use consumes precious energy, or maybe they just aren’t “good enough” for evolution to have kept them. That is, maybe they just don’t give any signifigant evolutionary advantage.
Evolution doesn’t create perfect beings, it creates beings which are good enough to survive.
It frustrates me how often this argument against using mind enhancing substances is used and, more importantly, the weight it is given. Not only is evolution optimizing for different critiera (which DuncanS mentions) it is also optimising for an entirely different environment. Further, our expectations that random chemicals will be bad for us is to a massive extent screened off when we go ahead and test them and find that they make things better!
Yet another situation in which evolution should not be expected to give superior results to what we can come up with with science is when we know what we are going to be doing at a specific time. What is best as a general baseline is not going to be the best state when studying for a test. Which is in turn going to be less good when doing unpleasant and potentially traumatic things that you don’t want to remember.
Consuming chemicals that have been tested is certainly an improvement on consuming chemicals that haven’t been.
Consuming chemicals to make your brain work better seems to me to be a rather similar activity to overclocking a computer. Let’s add more voltage. Let’s pour liquid nitrogen into it. Perhaps it will go faster ! Perhaps it will, but will it still be working in 5 years time?
First of all, note just how crude these efforts are compared to the technological research undertaken by the companies that actually make microchips. The same is true of the brain—it can make dopamine and deliver at synapses—exact points of contact throughout the brain. Yet you see people discussing just adding more dopamine everywhere, and thinking that this is in some sense improving on nature in a clever way.
I have to mention a point against myself—which is that I do take general anaesthetics, which, while not an intelligence enhancer, is definitely an intelligence modifier for specific circumstances. However, turning brain function off is arguably simpler than trying to make it better.
It is possible, definitely, to improve human intelligence by combining it with a computer. So it’s not the case that I’m against the idea that it’s impossible to improve on the natural intelligence we all have—it obviously is.
What I’m pointing out is that all of these drug ideas are bound to be something that evolution has at some point tried out, and thrown away. And they are really unsophisticated ideas compared with those the brain has actually adopted.
Even the situation dependent argument isn’t as strong as you might think—for example your brain has a lot of adaptations to cover the “unpleasant and potentially traumatic things” situation, for example—and these adaptations generally disagree with your view that you shouldn’t remember them. It’s probably the case that intelligence tests are a novel environment, however....
Gwern has a good overview of this argument.
Well there could be many reasons why evolution has” thrown them out”. Maybe they are harmful in the long term, maybe their use consumes precious energy, or maybe they just aren’t “good enough” for evolution to have kept them. That is, maybe they just don’t give any signifigant evolutionary advantage.
Evolution doesn’t create perfect beings, it creates beings which are good enough to survive.