I envision a future e-commerce based utopia/dystopia (read: dystopia) where everyone is quantified by dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, epinephrine, melatonin, and all the rest (there are plenty more) levels, which are read in real time and translated for current "need", and the Uber-like market of potential 'platonic prostitutes' (or non-platonic, but I christened them as such) to cater to the needs of the given neurotransmitter deficiency come forth and receive a given entirely efficient payment based on a global market-based valuation of neurotransmitter-derived transactions....

masque, how does this sort of thing align with your entirely utopian visions for the future?

everyone else, feel free to opine

What would have value other than feel-good chemicals?

I'm not a neuroscientist--far from it, but if I enlisted one (or a team), then, with their insight/guidance, you could quantify say the risk/reward of doing that line of coke versus getting some sleep tonight. That's probably the/an aspect of the idea I didn't make explicit in the OP. So, the science of quantifying short-term reward/long-term reward and all associated risks, and establishing efficient supply markets to service all interests....

I guess I didn't address this directly. Nothing. Everything (relevant to humans) is reducible to (or expressible in terms of) neurochemistry

mrcnkwcz can you explain a little bit more what you imagine happening? You have a system that monitors all your levels and in principle can project how you feel and how happy, driven if you can sleep easily or be satisfied by simple pleasures, depressed etc?

Or you mean a system that monitors also your overall health and assigns death probability to it ? Is that even possible to project? Why not fix any situation that looks alarming instead of buying the satisfaction in terms of external interaction with others that fits that particular state of mind/body?

Some people have deficiencies or health risk issues and obviously by then it can be corrected chemically very efficiently/cheaply...

I do not understand what the e-commerce part is about. Isnt it easier to just locally help everyone get what they need to feel ok in exchange for basic work or free if its seen as basic need by then? What am i not understanding here? Can you describe a bit more the situation?

A dystopia serves some dark force/interest. What is going on here? Is the dystopia the lack of privacy of your body's state?

I initially thought your worthiness as a person that day would be evaluated that way based on readings and imagine lack of privacy and manipulation of your life to fit a dystopian theme putting you to work based on chance to do it right and survive it? Just offer more context. I cant exactly follow. (missing jargon on what death odds is?)

In a Utopian sense i imagine your own home being your friend helping you all day programmed by you and specialists how, not sending the data to anyone without authorization and suggesting based on the readings to you activities and what to work on, games, entertainment, provides or suggests health care that fits the state you are or builds on it, connecting you to external activities, jobs, other people? The very manner the home interacts with you is matching these levels to offer a very satisfying interaction (or irritating if you are training etc lol).

For example, if the chemicals are in short supply then weapons begin to have value.

(Not sure how important a point that is, but nothing is not the correct answer.)

For the past ~five years, I've wanted to write a "1984"-style (or "Brave New World"-style, or "Fahrenheit 451"-style, etc) novel which would outline a potential world which pursued scientism to its logical end. Now, mind you, I am scientist, myself. But the idea is that I see it ultimately reducing to market-based logic (for better or worse) where any suffering person can purchase his fix, in the form of pill, human, combination, via the Internet to alleviate what ails him...only now, in say year 2025, we have an exact chemical idea of "what ails him".

This is extremely speculative (for now), but I am at this point nearly 100% certain that some form of this will occur in the future. An online multifaceted massive marketplace for psychological health, monitored by some third party doctor, with rates constantly adjusted for global fairness....

This market would merely be integrated with all currently existing markets...I just see this as a refining of the market system. The effects would certainly reverberate throughout all other markets and effects would ultimately be unpredictable, as with any true innovation

masque, by any chance, given that you're at Stanford, do you happen to know or know anyone who knows Jaron Lanier?

the calculus begins here:

http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2012/07/do...cheeseburgers/

I can imagine a neurotransmitter monitor but not individuals providing any catering service in that regard if I understand the question correctly. Why not instead a virtual reality system that is the service or some sort of neurotransmitter regulator/manipulator in real time.

It's interesting how many subjective experiences there are that are not yet known. People have had only a glimpse of a relatively small amount of new ones I would say from the invention/discovery/synthesis of psychoactive drugs from alcohol right though to Alexander Shulgin's creations and thereafter, which can and tend to be quite harmful/neurotoxic etc.
There's obvious evolutionary and practical reasons our brains don't inhibit the re-uptake of feel good chemicals and thus, mother nature is pretty mean in that regard, but it doesn't always have to be that way I guess.

I am sure people at the Gates Computer Science/Engineering building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_...ding,_Stanford know him as he has worked in Silicon valley and that is not far from Physics (couple minutes walking) but i havent been in their department recently or interacted with such people before other than lecture events. Sorry. Interesting person though.

That right there is what I'm talking about. Think that device plus stock market for neurotransmitters + EBay (or etrade or what have you) style buying and selling system.

I've heard Ben Goertzel talk about exactly this in the past. He envisioned cranial jacks and bittorent for downloading subjective experiences. You may know, he's an interesting guy, like a utopian Lanier.,

Thanks, never heard of him. Wiki'ed, youtubed, bookmarked, etc.

To be continued....

There may be a fundamental problem, in the sense that bad experiences and their associated emotions, including their severity, have a strong influence on the experience of good emotions and feelings.

For example, if you're under some sort of happy chemical most of the time, good emotions and feelings can never be as good, as if you went through a severe slump, followed by a spike. Similarly, if you're under some sort of happy chemicals that incrementally continue to increase your experience of 'good'.

This is in addition to the brain's natural response of developing tolerance, which although would not be a massive technical problem to overcome, you will never escape the fact that the bad defines the good, and vice versa.

To this end, one could never reliably know what chemicals, and in what doses will bring about the most happiness for them. One would ultimately just end up being a victim of the fluctuations of free-market availability and demand. Arguably, nothing would be different.

It is precisely the unpredictable in subjective experience, that we all have an innate yearning for, both in the present, and retrospectively. Controlling one's experience down to the level of chemical interactions is a scientific dystopia that no-body desires or would act toward making a reality. Indeed, the control-freaks in my life, are most often the least happiest.

There are certain kinds of pleasures that are tied to pain. The pleasure from getting a program to work comes from the pain of coding it, for example.
The pleasure of reuniting with a loved comes from missing them.

But I think it's really limiting your imagination to think pain and pleasure are two sides of the same coin. An everlasting orgasm would not be interesting
because there is no variety. Instead though, we could alternate between different levels of pleasure, in some sort of highly complex virtual reality system.

Walking up a hill, to expect to see something interesting on the other side, is changing patterns in some interesting way, without the need to ever have to slip and twist my ankle.
It's only some kind of perversion 'that the bad defines the good, and vice versa' and we just need new tools than evolution has given us to realise it.

Actually, when you enter a K-hole, and undergo ego-loss you may conclude you could imagine an eternity of an altogether different and interesting reality. It's only if it becomes nightmarish, there is a problem. The possibilities are endless.

My one contribution to this thread is a reference to a long ago thread about Heroin Kings. If the gods inspire you, you can search and find it, though it is meant for only those that can interpret and understand it correctly. Which, aside from me and possibly Btm, and some other SMP regulars, is very few. Read at your own risk. Dissemination of the ideas contain within are subject to governmental surveillance, hackneyed horror by free speech haters and sanctimonious liberals and lurking French intellectuals and their sycophantic followers.


Disclaimer: I have had only two glasses of Pinot Grigio. If I had consumed 5 glass of said wine; the above would have been much better on the sarcasm scale. I offer no apologies, you don't deserve any.

Or....just live life as it is...and make it interesting/high-variance, by placing yourself in challenging and unpredictable situations?
Concepts and experiences are defined by contrasts. What 'perversion'?

Yes, you should have the option of remaining a legacy human in the kind of transhumanist society the OP imagines if you like.

We used to be apes running around the Savanna and were then thrust into civilization. Daily life can be kind of awkward and uncomfortable. We've happened upon mental disorders we've only recently began to give names and describe. There was a big thread about an existential vacuum lately. You can imagine that a lot of us will choose something better if the option arises and that we haven't reached the pinnacle.

Carl Sagan — 'The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.'

Nightmares are in stark contrast to wonderful dreams. For the most part, the dream-state of consciousness seems to be some neutral to good, and nonsensical
experience that is nice enough to not want to wake up from.

But I agree. I gave the example of walking up a hill and been given a nice surprise on the other side. It may be that altering between different states of pleasure is enough for things to not get boring, without needing any bad or pain.

I think there's a fundamental problem to this idea, and that's that brain state can be reducible to various neurotransmitter level. As someone in the field of biochemical sciences, it's often more important how these neurochemicals interact with each other on a systems level rather than the pure amounts or levels that are present.

Though you are presenting a concept relatable to the future, this problem already arises in the pharmacology and related sciences where merely altering so and so transmitters abundance can have a variety of effects based on the individual.

thanks for this post. Although I have transhumanist designs and impulses (as mackeleven sensed), I think this encapsulated why I've never been able to believe in any vision. The design specifics are just so far away. Think of what we need to design a building properly. Now compare the complexity of a (relatively) boring concrete and brick structure to a massively complex human structure. Not even comparable except by way of loose analogy. I think and have always thought that the complexity of the 'physical infrastructure' of the human being (or, indeed, the ****ing frog) was underrated--does anyone alive know the frog at a cellular level? Of course not. We know the cell of the 'typical' frog at the cellular level. Everything else is extrapolation.

Kurzweil would have to be taking 100,000 pills per day for me to believe that 'salvation' was imminent.

PS: SSRIs test terribly--no better than placebo. What you say is compatible with that evidence. Your thoughts on the multibillion-dollar Prozac scam?

PPS: 'systems level' as regarding brain function needs to be popularized, understood, etc. Even if that means undermining the preexisting mythology regarding human identity. David Hume long ago understood the self to be bundled and therefore illusory (as a singular entity). Science has supported his views. Hume needs to be elevated and legions of others need demotion as we move forward.

PPPS--how relevant is blood-brain barrier in regards to understanding neurotransmitter levels? I recall once reading that bloodstream levels of serotonin (as measured) were not indicative of brain levels of it, due to said barrier. Thoughts?

Can't get to your other comments at the moment but yes, BBB is very important in pharmacology. It's designed to keep most foreign material out and is what makes treating brain disease often so difficult. Some compounds that could or would have substantial benefit within the brain are destroyed before they reach the BBB or are simply unable to pass through. To "loosen up" those junctions would allow for an abundance of harmful foreign substances in and cause even more disarray.

Without looking, I'm fairly certain serotonin (5-HT) cannot cross BBB because of it's polarity or other structural characteristics. Normally non-polar molecules or compounds more readily cross this divide. The best way to alter brain, and more specifically synaptic, neurotransmitter dynamics is to alter their synthesis or degradation. This is done for example with first gen SSRIs by blocking the transporter responsible for recycling 5-HT back into the neuron. But the first SSRIs such as prozac have affinity for EVERY transporter they find, and in many locations within the brain. This method just isn't specific enough on a case-by-case basis, though for some people I do believe is truly truly effective in some regard outside the placebo effect. Severe depression becomes a different story, and it has become more clear that serotonin does so many other things within the nervous system outside of regulate mood. Hell, serotonin might be a small fraction of what really contributes toward mood changes.

We only know so much about the nature of depression, and in scarcely limited terms. Though there does appear to be consistency across brain regions in depressed individuals, it is yet to be seen if those patterns are what drives or is the root cause of the depressed emotional state.

Like you say, viewing the brain as a system is so important to having a chance at understanding even the small parts that make it up. We can say some brain region looks like this when we do that, but at no point are brain regions truly in isolation. They impact each other to varying degrees at all times. As brain science progresses, that will be vitally important to making leaps in understanding, treatment, and preservation of the mind.

The thread reads to me like OP lacks any strong sense of belonging, so he fills that 'vacuum' with escapism and scientific fictions that will never come to pass. People who frequently romanticize the past, have the same issue. No real judgement either way: whatever floats your boat, so long as you're aware of what that is, and how its biasing the focus of your intellectual energy.
Nope.

I need the pain.

The alternative, as you've proposed, is a life hardly lived: something that's unfortunately gaining popularity, thanks to big pharma. Rough seas aren't for everyone either, but I believe in their promotion.

Predictions of the future should be taken with a bucket of salt, we know.
Those that aren't based on data and those that are involving complex systems.
Advances in technology on a weekly or bi-weekly basis have become more interesting than the science-fiction of the past, however, for me personally.

Some people need to be tied up and whipped by their sexual partners. I wouldn't argue with them about it.

I haven't proposed an alternative (I am thinking about current advances in neuroscience and extrapolating and imagining).
I'm mostly recognizing the constraints under which we operate and take meaning from, as well as how good we are at adapting.

Living in a world of scarcity, has caused us to take meaning from competing with one another for resources. Nascar fans have found meaning in accelerating round a circle repeatedly.
Living a life that must end, has caused us to take meaning from that.

We still have all the inbuilt fears of our ancestors; anxious hunters, and tend to have emotions of pain and suffering all the time. It's hardly any wonder we've chosen to take meaning from that, is it?

I don't think we define our lives by the suffering we've had anyway, as you put it, and that would involve romanticizing of the past as you put it.
I'm sure we don't enjoy suffering as it happens, I'm sure we can agree, unless, again, you're some kind of masochist.