The revolution today that is more imminent than neural engineering is genetic engineering, the other part of the quest to cure humanity of its ills. When we have developed technologies enabling high-precision genetic and neural modulation, I believe we will have possessed the tools to control all diseases, medical and social. Only when we have conquered these two realms of biotechnology can we hope to approach the vision of universal contentedness which all who wish to better the world have in mind.
But how do we approach such a society without losing what we love about society today? Our imperfections, our differences, and our disabilities as much as our abilities (in some cases) do enrich our lives. Genetically, biodiversity is a necessary byproduct of evolution, as it is what provided the random advantages which enabled the animal kingdom to arise from our single-celled forefathers. Neurally, human mental diversity is what made us supreme over our hominid cousins in highly competitive primordial environments.
Notice that animals other than the human are not mentally diverse. Your cat may be more feisty or quirky than your neighbor's, but out of the billions of cats on Earth, current evidence suggests that there are hundreds of millions who have had only the same thoughts (if they may be called "thoughts") as your cat's. In some cases, mental homogeneity can actually be beneficial for a species’ chances of survival. Consider a school of fish, where mental diversity may harm these chances. On the other hand, you are neurally distinct from eight billion others. (Although, this may be becoming less true today, with the pressure we feel to conform at all hours of the day.)
It is our genetic programming which gives rise to our physical – and, to some extent, neurological – diversity. However, it is our mental diversity (specifically that independent of genetic programming), whose origin we know very little about (cf. the nature vs. nurture argument), which distinguishes one human being from another. With genome engineering, we risk losing our physical diversity. With neural engineering, we risk losing our mental diversity.
There have been antagonists to the mental diversity of the human race throughout history. One might argue that the invention of writing or even language struck the first blow to our mental diversity, as they allowed for the persuasion of a weak man by a strong man that his idea was right, after which the weaker man's possible ideas on the matter would be lost. But this argument is clearly naïve in some ways: while language and writing allow convincing ideas to proliferate, this proliferation yields idea offspring by inspiring those most creative to further interpret or develop an initial idea which they would not otherwise have had.
In other ways, language and writing have indeed squashed mental diversity. How many different religions do you think there were before the invention of writing fifty centuries ago? Writing such as the Bible which man proclaims immortal and immutable stifles mental diversity. The technological revolutions following the invention of writing (printing, radio, telephone, television, email, text, social media) all had a similarly double-edged effect.
An objection some may contrive against genome and neural engineering is that these technologies are unnatural. "Playing god," they say, is unethical because man should not wield so much power over nature, or "god's creation". But as taught by the mythology of religion, these opponents to progress have abstracted mankind far above its true form: a product of evolution like any other lifeform on Earth. Mankind is nature. For this reason, technologies developed by "mankind" to mutate or control nature are in fact developed by nature. We (i.e., nature) are no more than a hyper-organized collection of molecules bartering and exchanging with other collections of molecules, regardless of whether this takes place in a laboratory (also a collection of molecules) or the womb. Thus, the argument that we should avoid biotechnological progress because it is "unnatural" is almost as weak as it is pointlessly semantic.
Further, it is strange to me how averse to genome editing and neural modulation are the extremist religious, or similarly crazed. For, with genome editing, society could approach complete homogeneity, where all could be modified to appear as their god’s favored race. With neural modulation, every individual could be programmed with a devotion to their belief. Is this not the mission of such extremists – to either extinguish those who are different, or convert them into a follower of their god? Then they should perceive genome engineering and neural engineering as brute force solutions to this mission, guaranteeing their supremacy. Perhaps they realize that if there were homogeneity, then there would be no “supremacy” because there would be no “inferiority.” Here, we can thus identify among leaders of a religion not a desire to execute the commands of their make-believe god, but a hunger for power and supremacy achieved with the instrument of religion.
How do we retain the aspects of our mental diversity which enrich our lives and eradicate those which plague us? Before that, what are those aspects which help or harm our wellbeing as a society, and are they different than those which help or harm one's wellbeing as an individual? Like the conversation around genetic engineering to address our physical diversity, neurotechnology requires us to likewise our mental diversity. The questions between the two complementary fields are uncannily similar. And we must answer them before those who will profit off of these technologies answer them for us.
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