The opposite of an antagonist is just something that attaches to the relevant receptors… so your suggestion seems to practically cash out as a very carefully managed use of things similar to heroine, morphine, or methadone? It might work, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be the first one to try it. It sounds like acquiring a habit in roughly the way a trained monkey does, performing the desired new behaviors for a jolt of positive reinforcement. Then make the reinforcement intermittent until you leave the trainee to their own devices. In this case, however, you’d be using opioids instead of fruit juice.
(One terminological quibble is that neurotransmitter “antagonists” block the action of “agonists”. It would make a sort of sense for “protagonist” to mean what “agonist” does within that technical area, but the relevant technical community’s jargon just doesn’t work that way.)
For a refinement, neurotransmitters floating free in one’s cerebro-spinal fluid take their “meaning” from the distribution of the cells that emit and detect a given kind of neurotransmitter and influence them via changing the ambient properties of the brain within the “channel” of that neurotransmitter… so perhaps a more careful implementation of the same idea would be to map the relevant parts of an individual’s brain very very carefully and come up with a wireheading system that wasn’t aimed at hedonism, but at habit or belief formation, by stimulating exactly the right parts of the brain at precisely the right moments to cause the appropriate kinds of general updates across the entire brain.
Perhaps it could even be done without “cutting open” anyone using neural magnetic stimulation but the engineering there looks pretty tricky to me. I’m not sure how precisely you could modulate the EM fields to focus on only the parts of the brain that one would be interested in. Again, I think I’d let others go first and see how it turns out.
A little piece of me fears the whole idea, because it sounds a little bit to me like dark side epistemology, only dressed in the clothes of science, medicine, and engineering, and promising a free ride to good character. It feels like a place where TANSTAAFL should apply somehow.
The opposite of an antagonist is just something that attaches to the relevant receptors… so your suggestion seems to practically cash out as a very carefully managed use of things similar to heroine, morphine, or methadone? It might work, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be the first one to try it. It sounds like acquiring a habit in roughly the way a trained monkey does, performing the desired new behaviors for a jolt of positive reinforcement. Then make the reinforcement intermittent until you leave the trainee to their own devices. In this case, however, you’d be using opioids instead of fruit juice.
(One terminological quibble is that neurotransmitter “antagonists” block the action of “agonists”. It would make a sort of sense for “protagonist” to mean what “agonist” does within that technical area, but the relevant technical community’s jargon just doesn’t work that way.)
For a refinement, neurotransmitters floating free in one’s cerebro-spinal fluid take their “meaning” from the distribution of the cells that emit and detect a given kind of neurotransmitter and influence them via changing the ambient properties of the brain within the “channel” of that neurotransmitter… so perhaps a more careful implementation of the same idea would be to map the relevant parts of an individual’s brain very very carefully and come up with a wireheading system that wasn’t aimed at hedonism, but at habit or belief formation, by stimulating exactly the right parts of the brain at precisely the right moments to cause the appropriate kinds of general updates across the entire brain.
Perhaps it could even be done without “cutting open” anyone using neural magnetic stimulation but the engineering there looks pretty tricky to me. I’m not sure how precisely you could modulate the EM fields to focus on only the parts of the brain that one would be interested in. Again, I think I’d let others go first and see how it turns out.
A little piece of me fears the whole idea, because it sounds a little bit to me like dark side epistemology, only dressed in the clothes of science, medicine, and engineering, and promising a free ride to good character. It feels like a place where TANSTAAFL should apply somehow.