He invokes standard rhetoric to decry transhumanists’ desire to increase their intelligence, but not their compassion. I think this raises an interesting question: are there any drugs that are at least somewhat likely to increase compassion and who is experimenting with them?
I’m not a biochemist by any means, but I was looking into this a few months back. I was able to find some people experimenting with intranasal oxytocin, who reported increases in subjective trust and empathy; the biological half-life of that delivery route seems very short, though, on the order of minutes.
Then there’s the well-known empathogen family, of course.
I vaguely recall some results that indicated greater likelihood of experiencing an emotional reaction in response to seeing someone else modeling that emotion (e.g., reporting being sad when someone else in the same room was crying) after taking some drug or another… seratonin, maybe?… but it was many years ago and I may well be misremembering.
Which isn’t quite the same thing as compassion, of course, but it wouldn’t surprise me to discover they were correlated.
People at the longecity forum seem to be taking serotonin precursors, including 5-HTP and tryptophan. I’m not sure exactly what benefits they expect to receive, but improved mood is at least one of them.
He invokes standard rhetoric to decry transhumanists’ desire to increase their intelligence, but not their compassion. I think this raises an interesting question: are there any drugs that are at least somewhat likely to increase compassion and who is experimenting with them?
I’m not a biochemist by any means, but I was looking into this a few months back. I was able to find some people experimenting with intranasal oxytocin, who reported increases in subjective trust and empathy; the biological half-life of that delivery route seems very short, though, on the order of minutes.
Then there’s the well-known empathogen family, of course.
I vaguely recall some results that indicated greater likelihood of experiencing an emotional reaction in response to seeing someone else modeling that emotion (e.g., reporting being sad when someone else in the same room was crying) after taking some drug or another… seratonin, maybe?… but it was many years ago and I may well be misremembering.
Which isn’t quite the same thing as compassion, of course, but it wouldn’t surprise me to discover they were correlated.
People at the longecity forum seem to be taking serotonin precursors, including 5-HTP and tryptophan. I’m not sure exactly what benefits they expect to receive, but improved mood is at least one of them.