SF Writers Propose Altering Brains to Accept Orders

[Draco Dracul]

If you were going to alter people's brains, witch you shouldn't, your goal should be to increase empathy.

No, no, no! Making people feel the pain of others will just motivate them to remove all of the natural consequences of stupid choices, since they generally create suffering in the idiots who make them.

If you were going to muck about in human brains, which you shouldn't, your goal should be to increase the ability to override emotion with rational thought, not make people more susceptible to feelings!

Frank Herbert wrote about the distinct between sentiment and sentimentality. Sentiment is swerving to avoid hitting someone's beloved pet with your car. Sentimentality is swerving to avoid hitting someone's beloved pet with your car and mowing down bystanders in the process.

Overriding emotion with rational thought is at best useless and at worst detrimental to the scenario you are describing because emotion is what's useful for split second decisions.

[Beastro]

Additionally framing compassion as opposed to rationality is something used to justify acts that are both cruel and irrational like means testing for welfare or the endless propaganda about Nazis super science (which didn't exist).

I'm not framing it as such, I'm saying it can be paralyzing and actively harmful to people.

You doubt me? I'm sorry but I have family that are cripple by it. They feel too much and it's in their temperament: It's in mine. I "suffer" from it as well, but to a lesser degree and they've outright praised me for not being broken hearted like they are about witnessing suffering because it allows me to be functional in ways they cannot. With this said, I love being highly empathic when I can apply it to a counseling environment with proper boundaries and know what someone is thinking before they can but is fucking sucks when they feel their world is ending and I feel it's ending as well because I'm being sucked into their emotional black hole along with them.

Also empathy and agreeableness are not the same thing.

One is highly correlated with the other.

You also forgot there is the crucial difference between empathy and sympathy. Empathy is very good, but has limits and dangers while sympathy is something everyone can work on. In clinical mental health practice you are cautioned about applying empathy for your own welfare and encouraged to apply sympathy where you can to maintain healthy boundaries with clients:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR6QDTW-ceQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWbj-2DRLps (especially at: https://youtu.be/sWbj-2DRLps?t=182)

My framing of compassion as oppose to rationality is only framed that way based upon your assumption that rationality = always good, moral, decent, etc. It's not and deontological behaviour is a mark of a healthy mind. Choosing to save one person in a trolley thought experiment rather than the five or freezing up and doing nothing are choices that come from a mind that doesn't anyone harmed and hates the thought of having to make such a choice, something a psychopathic or sociopathic mind is unburdened by: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ful ... 2/bsl.2547

One explanation for these heterogeneous relationships is that psychopathic individuals may be able to distinguish between “right” and “wrong,” but are insufficiently motivated to act in accordance with such a moral understanding (Cima et al., 2010; Luke et al., 2021; Marshall et al., 2017), perhaps in part, due to differences in cognitive-affective processes. In support of this, psychopathy has been linked to utilitarian choices of action but not to corresponding utilitarian moral judgments (Pletti et al., 2017; Tassy et al., 2013). Consistent with the suggestion that psychopathy is associated with lack of motivation to act along moral principles, recent evidence suggested that psychopathic individuals experience moral conflicts as emotionally less unpleasant than individuals low in psychopathy (Blair, 2007; Pletti et al., 2017; Seara-Cardoso et al., 2012).

In this context, research on the cognitive and affective correlates of psychopathy can potentially shed light on the moral “sensibility” of psychopathic individuals. For example, when attending to emotion information, psychopathic individuals are able to respond to it as indicated by fear-potentiated startle in the presence of threat-related stimuli (Baskin-Sommers et al., 2012; Newman et al., 2010). Psychopathic individuals do not appear, however, to incorporate emotional information into further decision-making processes. For example, research has shown psychopathic individuals display intact momentary regret but deficient avoidance of regret in counterfactual decisions (Baskin-Sommers et al., 2016).

The studies drawing a distinction between moral judgments and choices of actions provide evidence that psychopathic individuals might recognize moral matters but that they do not act in accordance with such intellectual recognition. However, such studies raise questions concerning the deliberation of moral decision-making and the behavior of psychopathic individuals. On that note, additional research may help further our understanding of the cognitive-affective processes involved in psychopathy and their link to moral reasoning. In tasks that explicitly demand taking the perspective of others, for instance, individuals with elevated psychopathic traits perform similarly to those without elevated traits, indicating adequate theory of mind capacities (Blair et al., 1996; Jones et al., 2010; Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2010). In contrast, on tasks that do not explicitly demand taking the perspective of others, psychopathic individuals do considerably worse than individuals without elevated traits (Blair, 1995; Drayton et al., 2018).

One way to make sense of these findings is to make a distinction between spontaneous versus deliberative processing of cognitive and emotional information. Evidence for this processing distinction in psychopathic individuals has been found for several empathy correlates, such as moral evaluations (Yoder et al., 2015), emotional empathy (Meffert et al., 2013), and theory of mind (Drayton et al., 2018). When it comes to deliberative reasoning, psychopathic individuals succeed in empathizing with others as indicated by altered brain activation (Meffert et al., 2013; Yoder et al., 2015). In spontaneous reasoning, however, psychopathic individuals have considerable difficulties. Specifically, while an automatic, unintentional representation of others' thoughts and feelings is natural to most people (Apperly, 2010), psychopathic individuals seem to lack this ability, despite the capability to do so deliberately (Drayton et al., 2018). These findings have been interpreted in terms of selective attention abnormalities in information processing of psychopathic individuals. The general idea is that these individuals process goal-relevant information with a myopic focus and are insensitive to goal-irrelevant stimuli (Baskin-Sommers et al., 2011). With regard to moral decisions, this distinction suggests that psychopathic individuals may not generally avoid emotion-driven decisions, but that they fail non-deliberately to integrate emotional aspects of complex moral situations into decision-making processes.

If you were going to alter people's brains, witch you shouldn't, your goal should be to increase empathy.

No, no, no! Making people feel the pain of others will just motivate them to remove all of the natural consequences of stupid choices, since they generally create suffering in the idiots who make them.

If you were going to muck about in human brains, which you shouldn't, your goal should be to increase the ability to override emotion with rational thought, not make people more susceptible to feelings!

Frank Herbert wrote about the distinct between sentiment and sentimentality. Sentiment is swerving to avoid hitting someone's beloved pet with your car. Sentimentality is swerving to avoid hitting someone's beloved pet with your car and mowing down bystanders in the process.

Overriding emotion with rational thought is at best useless and at worst detrimental to the scenario you are describing because emotion is what's useful for split second decisions.

Precisely there is simply not enough time to do that, even if it took mere seconds. That is why the majority of our behaviour is habitual and based on heuristics.

A major issue here is inculcating the best of both that can be done within a persons set temperament: so guess what? That comes down to decently raising children even if their temperament still does most of the work. Good parenting doesn't do much to a kid but poor parenting will fuck around with you terribly.

So what? They're literally rats. I'd stomp them to death if I saw them. Well, maybe not if I'm shoeless.

If you think it has to do with rats then you completely miss the point.

It's the volition to tinker that way to see what will come.

Oh, and btw, people how are more utilitarian are psychopaths and they tend to be destructive to themselves and others because they are able to make very good utilitarian choices but cannot make utilitarian moral judgements.

This is why science maintains an increasing odious reputation and I lament it. This is the same old same old like Eugenics with his prejudices on display.

Science is bare fact with no fundamental morality (in theory, anyway, and that's talking about the knowledge gained rather than the means of gaining it). If people misue it and try to get morals or ethics from it then that's their mistake.

Science is a tool. You do not base your morals and values around what a hammer does because then everyone becomes nails.

This is the danger of Watt's worldview as he seeks to make everything safe, stable and predictable. Such things always go so well when you enforce them so broadly as he'd like.

Keep in mind I'm speaking as a conservative person here: I like those things, but I recognize you need a dose of chaos to keep things changing to stave off disaster. That is what is in human nature and our penchant to be our own worst enemies, we just have zero trust that nature.

[TGLS]

So what? They're literally rats. I'd stomp them to death if I saw them. Well, maybe not if I'm shoeless.

If you think it has to do with rats then you completely miss the point.

It's the volition to tinker that way to see what will come.

Look, if you don't realize your argument is a slippery slope, you're not as rational as you claim to be.

Now, it certainly is possible that one day this basic research could be used to do horrible things. Or it could be used like how the researcher who ran the experiment thinks it could be used, to develop means to treat people with traumatic brain injuries (link on the experiment). I don't know if it's still as true then as it is now, but we don't know very little about how the brain operates. We don't understand why neurons are so plastic. Experimentation is the way to understanding, and it's a heck of a lot more moral to experiment on animals than it is on people.

[Frustration]

one day this basic research could be used to do horrible things

Could? Given human history - never mind speculation about what we, the public, doesn't yet know about what's been done but classified - I'd say the chance of this hypothetical technology being used to do something horrible is 100%. Or so close to 100% as to make no difference.

[TGLS]

one day this basic research could be used to do horrible things

Could? Given human history - never mind speculation about what we, the public, doesn't yet know about what's been done but classified - I'd say the chance of this hypothetical technology being used to do something horrible is 100%. Or so close to 100% as to make no difference.

Let's not research computers; they could be used to categorize and round people up.
Let's not research mass-energy equivalence; it could be used to create high energy explosives.
Let's not research rockets; they could be used to deliver bombs.
Let's not research disease; it could be used to create a horrible plague.
Let's not research laws of motion; it could be used to create giant guns.

--

If you take such a nihilistic view of human nature that any hypothetical technology being used to do horrible things is 100%, then it doesn't matter what is developed or researched. Horrible things will happen regardless of whether they happen in primitive or advanced ways, so side effects can be ignored.

[Frustration]

The problem isn't the technology. The problem is the people.

[Beastro]

The problem isn't the technology. The problem is the people.

The sentiment I can understand, but it isn't that.

People aren't a problem because a problem implies they can be "fixed" to be made "right". This is the mentality Watts and others have.

People are people. They will mess shit up and if you try to fix them you'll only wind up with people committing even greater horrors, as we saw last century.

[clearspira]

The problem isn't the technology. The problem is the people.

The sentiment I can understand, but it isn't that.

People aren't a problem because a problem implies they can be "fixed" to be made "right". This is the mentality Watts and others have.

People are people. They will mess shit up and if you try to fix them you'll only wind up with people committing even greater horrors, as we saw last century.

At the end of the day, I just do not trust my government to tell me what they think ''right'' is.

[Frustration]

It's not the malicious people that worry me, it's those who are convinced they're doing right. They effectively have no conscience, because their conscience approves of their actions, and there's therefore nothing to appeal to.