We will one day be able to modulate human behavior in every respect that one could possibly wish. Although the most complicated machine in the known universe may take centuries more to decipher, it is reasonable to believe that we will one day understand the role of every single circuit, if not of all of their neuronal constituents, in the human brain and nervous system. The resolution of our investigations will approach that of singular neurons out of tens of billions, if not singular proteins out of an incomprehensible number per human. However, a resolution of the individual neuron, both to record and to stimulate, is likely all the capability we will need to control our brains — and therefore our thoughts, actions, movements, sensations, impulses, and consciousness.
We ought not be concerned with the characteristics of the technology that will allow us access to our programming; human ingenuity has accomplished remarkable feats on smaller scales, but in incredibly short durations of time. Perhaps there will soon be some analog to the CRISPR-Cas9 breakthrough, which introduced a tool to edit genomes with previously unimaginable ease. But, just as for gene editing, such ease of neural modulation is a terrifying thought. Are we as a society ready for a tool to manipulate the underlying mechanisms of our subconsciousness and consciousness? In medicine, the answer is (cautiously) affirmative: how could we refuse an opportunity to cure mental disorders, neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases, along with the chronic diseases which they promote? In the medical realm, we treat the brain as an organ, whose dysfunction we ought to remedy just as we do with any other organ of the body when we can.
What about neural intervention beyond solely medically? Enter the race of cyborgs, where what used to be personal devices now are permanent neural implants, equipping us with telepathic communication, thought-based access to the cloud, and an integration of consciousness with calculation which accelerates the pace of our thought processes. Although such technology seems enthralling from a safe distance in time, I see no need for neural devices which can make us think faster or communicate quicker. The rate at which humanity thinks is not the culprit of its crises. Rather, the culprit is how we think, or, in other words, how we are inclined by our neural programming to perceive and act on reality. By reality, I mean others, ourselves, our collective ideas, and the structures of our societies. By crises, I mean the inequities inherent to our society which punish the innocent and reward the evil.
It is clear that parts of our neural programming —vestiges of our relatively recent hunter-gatherer lifestyle — clash with the technologies and diversities of today's societies. This, I believe, is what accounts for all our social crises. With neuromodulation, we can correct this programming to resolve the dissonance between our anachronistic behaviors and our modern environments.
Of course, we should not stop attempting to solve today's crises with grassroots movements and legislation, for our modern crises will likely be solved by these efforts long before we develop sufficient neuromodulation capability, which may take centuries or millennia more. But these crises did not arise randomly, and they did not arise only once. Human nature has led us to the present state of society and its ills in a predictable manner, just as Thucydides observed. Unmodified, human nature will again lead us to analogous crises in the future.
For instance, suppose that movements and legislation successfully solve the present opioid epidemic by dramatically limiting and regulating access and prescriptions of narcotics. Who is to say that another addiction epidemic won't take its place? The opioid epidemic arose and persists because of the human’s biological propensity for opiate addiction, the American healthcare oligarch’s insatiable greed and despicable inhumanity, and the American legislator’s hunger for power. Other epidemics lie in wait behind that of the opioid, instigated by another industry eager to sell their product at all costs to the consumer. The opioid epidemic will pass, but the nature of the criminals and their victims will remain the same.
For instance, suppose that through education and civil rights legislation, we could eliminate systemic racism in the United States and topple the caste system which abuses and cements racial minorities in poverty. Suppose that we could remodel our childhood educational system to such an extent that all children of the United States are freed from the indoctrinations by their communities into the ideology of Black hatred. I believe this would be a short-lived victory. For, if such an irrational will to oppress our fellow human beings has before transcended the will to improve society, and if such an arbitrary belief as racism could have rooted itself so deeply into the centuries-old soil of American society, why shouldn’t an analogous belief quickly manifest against a victim equally as arbitrary as our fellow Americans with more melanin? We may uproot today’s American racial caste system one day, but why shouldn't another equally arbitrary one arise on the basis of height rather than skin color, for instance? We humans have a propensity to form hierarchy. This propensity manifests in the United States as a caste system based on race, but toppling this system would only treat the symptoms of, and not ultimately cure, our nature. As pure as we hope that human nature is, our nature is in fact the culprit of our past, present, and future evils.
I place hope in neural engineering because I believe it is the solution to curing human nature.
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