Great Minds Don't Think Alike: Debates on Consciousness, Reality, Intelligence, Faith, Time, AI, Immortality, and the Human by Marcelo Gleiser

Author:Marcelo Gleiser
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: PHI015000, Science, Philosophy, SCI075000, Science/Philosophy & Social Aspects, Philosophy/Mind & Body
ISBN: 9780231204118
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2022-02-08T08:00:00+00:00

6

Cyborgs, Futurists, &

Transhumanism

A Dialogue Between a Neuroscientist and an Author

MGLEISER: This big question is about transhumanism and the blending of flesh and machine. How far down this road are we? How far can we go? And, perhaps most importantly, how far should we go with this? Clearly, these are questions that call for a scientific and a humanistic outlook; they may represent interesting, even amazing scientific challenges, but they also directly impact our human identity and, why not say it now, possibly the future of our species as a whole. Is the marriage of carbon and silicon our evolutionary fate? The new technology also has practical impact on the job market, as AI and robotization will push many out of their current jobs while creating the need for new kinds of experts and of technical training. The topic has the potential for endless speculation.

Ed Boyden, one of the leading neuroscientists working at the cutting edge of this topic, is the head of the Synthetic Neurobiology Group and an associate professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at the MIT Media Lab and at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Ed is really trying to make headway in some of the most difficult questions concerning the notion of how the brain engenders consciousness, what that means, and whether we can reproduce this process (if that’s what it is) artificially or not.

Mark O’Connell is a journalist and humanist who has addressed these questions in a book that explores and meditates on transhumanism and what it means to us as individuals and as a species, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death. In 2018, the book won the UK’s very prestigious Wellcome Book Prize.

E BOYDEN: I direct a group at MIT that works on brain technology—ways to map what’s happening in the brain and to try to repair what goes wrong. Over the last century, in neurology and psychiatry studies of patients who were injured in war or who had lesions from disease, we’ve learned a lot about how different regions of the human brain are important for decision making, for memory recall, and for emotion. For example, patients who have an injury to one part of their brain lack fear, whereas those with changes in another part of the brain are no longer able to form memories.

In the twenty-first century, we’re now finding that there are many new technologies that are having huge impact on our ability to understand and repair brain functions. So I thought today I would give you a bit of a lightning tour of just some of the areas where we are seeing very rapid change, and then talk about the consequences on topics like cyborgs and transhumanism. Can we simulate what happens in the brain? Can we enlighten ourselves by understanding more about the human condition? Can we augment the brain?

The human brain is incredibly complicated. There are around a hundred billion brain cells called neurons and they’re connected, each of them, to maybe a thousand others.

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