new risks and new potentials for action. The new potentials for action
include the ability to alter, in a fine-grained manner, both the
functional properties of our brains and the phenomenal properties they
realize—that is, the content of our experience. Besides the rubber
hands, the phantom limbs, and the out-of-body experiences, other examples
of manipulation of the contents of consciousness include the induction
of an artificial scotoma (blind spot) in the visual field and the
creation of an acute transient depression by stimulating certain subthalamic
nuclei. Not only sensory and emotional experiences are open to
technical manipulation; so also are such high-level properties of the Ego
as the experiences of will or agency (recall Stéphane Kremer’s experiment,
described in chapter 4).
We have known for centuries that deep spiritual experiences can be
caused by psychoactive substances, including mescaline, psilocybin, and
LSD. Electromagnetic stimulation is another route. Neuroscientist
Michael Persinger, at Laurentian University in Ontario, received worldwide
media attention in the late 1990s by using electromagnetic fields
to stimulate the brains of his subjects in successful attempts to create
supposed religious experiences—that is, the subjective impression that an invisible person was present. The lesson is clear: Whatever else religious
experiences may be, they obviously possess a sufficient neural
correlate—a correlate that can be stimulated experimentally. It is becoming
increasingly clear that there are no principled limits to this
process. This is not going away—it can only become more efficient. For
instance, if we can determine which kinds of epileptic patients typically
experience religious ecstasy before seizures and where the foci of these
seizures are located in the brain, then we can stimulate the same brain
areas, invasively or noninvasively, in healthy people.
The temporal-lobe theory of religious experience and personality
shifts may be flawed, but the principle is clear. When we find the minimally
sufficient neurodynamical core of an interesting conscious state,
we can try to reproduce it experimentally. Since many such experiences
include the phenomenology of certainty and automatically lead to the
conviction that one is not hallucinating, these experiments—depending
on the content of the hallucination itself—may have upsetting, even
dangerous, consequences. Self-deception may feel like insight. Nevertheless,
once such technologies become available, people will want to
experience them. Many will draw their own conclusions about artificially
induced religious experiences, without caring much about what
neuroscientists or philosophers have to say. One can envision a future in
which people will no longer play video games or experiment with virtual
reality just for entertainment; instead they will explore the universe of
altered states of consciousness in a quest for meaning, using the latest
neurotechnological tools. Perhaps they will have their temporal lobes
tickled on street corners, or abandon their churches and synagogues
and mosques in favor of new Centers for Transpersonal Hedonic Engineering
and Metaphysical Tunnel Design.
In principle, we can design our own Ego Tunnels by tinkering with
the hardware responsible for the relevant information-processing. In order
to activate a specific form of phenomenal content, we need to discover
which neural subsystem in the brain carries that representational
content under normal conditions. Whether the desired phenomenal
content is religious awe, an ineffable sense of sacredness, the taste of
cinnamon, or a special kind of sexual arousal does not really matter. So, what is your favorite region of phenospace? What conscious experience
would you like to order up?
Let us select just one example. Currently the neurotechnological field
most likely to turn into a commercialized consciousness technology is
that of psychoactive substances. In general, many benefits can be expected:
We will be able to treat psychiatric and neurological diseases with
new combinations of neuroimaging, psychosurgery, deep-brain stimulation,
and psychopharmacology. Between 1 and 5 percent of the population
in most countries suffers from serious mental illness. Now there is
realistic hope that new generations of antidepressants and antipsychotic
drugs will alleviate the suffering caused by these ancient scourges.
But we will go further than that. One of the new keywords in the important
new academic discipline of neuroethics is “cognitive enhancement.”
Soon we’ll be able to enhance cognition and mood in healthy
subjects. Indeed, “cosmetic psychopharmacology” has already arrived on
the scene. If we can control senile dementia and memory loss, if we can
develop attention-boosters and eliminate shyness or ordinary everyday
sadness, why shouldn’t we? And why should we leave it to our doctors to
decide how to use those drugs to design our lives? Just as today we can
opt for breast enlargement, plastic surgery, or other types of body modification,
we will soon be able to alter our neurochemistry in a controlled,
finely tuned manner. Who is to decide which of those alterations will enrich
our lives and which alterations we may come to regret?
If we can make normal people smarter, should we also make smart
people even smarter? A recent informal online poll of its readers conducted
by the journal Nature attempted to determine the use of cognitive
enhancers among scientists. Fourteen hundred people from sixty
countries responded, with one in five saying he or she had used such
drugs for nonmedical reasons to stimulate focus, concentration, or
memory. Among users, methylphenidate (Ritalin) was most popular,
with 62 percent using it, whereas 44 percent used modafinil, and 15
percent used beta blockers such as propanolol. One-third purchased
these drugs over the Internet. The poll not only showed large-scale use
among academics but also revealed that four-fifths of respondents
thought healthy adults should be allowed to use such substances if they so desired. Almost 70 percent stated they would risk mild side effects to take such drugs themselves. One respondent said, “As a professional, it
is my duty to use my resources to the greatest benefit of humanity. If ‘enhancers’
can contribute to this humane service, it is my duty to do so.” It
seems safe to assume that pharmacological neurotechnology for enhancement
will become better, and that just averting our gaze, as we
have done with the classical hallucinogens in the past, will not help head
off ethical issues. The only difference is that many more people are interested
in cognitive enhancement than in spiritual experience. As cognitive
neuroscientist Martha Farah and colleagues put it: “The question
is therefore not whether we need policies to govern neurocognitive enhancement,
but rather what kind of policies we need.”
Given the new generations of cognitive enhancers, should we inaugurate
pre-exam urine tests in our secondary schools and universities? If
reliable mood-optimizers become available, will grumpiness or premenstrual
syndrome in the workplace be seen as unkemptness or dishevelment,
in much the same way as strong body odor is today? What would
we do if “moral enhancement” became a pharmacological possibility
through drugs that make people behave in a more prosocial, altruistic
manner? Would we feel obliged to optimize everybody’s ethical behavior?
Some will argue that a system like the human brain, which has
been optimized over millions of years, cannot be further optimized
without losing a degree of its stability. Others will counter that we might
want to start an optimization process that leads in a new direction, different
from what evolution has gradually wired into our conscious selfmodels.
Why should we be neurophenomenological Luddites?
Phenotechnology has both an ethical and a political dimension. Ultimately
we will have to decide which states of consciousness should be illegal
in a free society. Should it be legal, for instance, to let children
experience their parents in a drunken state? Would you mind if senior
citizens, or your colleagues at work, were wired and flying high on the
next generation of cognitive enhancers? What about adjusting libido in
the elderly? Is it acceptable if soldiers, perhaps on ethically dubious missions,
fight and kill under the influence of psychostimulants and anti -
depressants to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder? What if a new company offered religious experiences through electrical brain stimulation
to everyone? In the case of psychoactive substances, we urgently
need an intelligent and differentiated drug policy—one that can meet
the challenges presented by twenty-first-century neuropharmacology.
Today we have a legal market and an illegal market; thus, there are legal
states of consciousness and illegal states of consciousness. If we do manage
to introduce an intelligent drug policy, the goal should be to minimize
damage to individual consumers and to society while maximizing
potential gains. Ideally, we would gradually decrease the importance of
the legal/illegal distinction so that the desired consumer behavior is
controlled through a cultural consensus and by citizens themselves—
bottom-up, so to speak, and not top-down by the state.
Still, the better we understand our neurochemical mechanisms, the
more illegal drugs on the black market there will be, both in type and
quantity. If you are skeptical about that, I recommend reading PiHKAL:
A Chemical Love Story, by the chemist Alexander Shulgin and his wife
Ann, and TiHKAL: The Continuation, by Alexander Shulgin. (PiHKAL
is short for “Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved,” and TiHKAL
for “Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved.”) In their first book, the
Shulgins describe 179 hallucinogenic phenethylamines (a group that includes
mescaline and the “party drug” Ecstasy), most of which Alexander
Shulgin, a drug designer and former employee of Dow Chemical,
invented himself. Aside from collected personal accounts of psychedelic
experiences, the book includes detailed instructions for the drugs’ chemical
synthesis and information about different dosages. In the second volume,
Shulgin introduces fifty-five tryptamines—again, most of them
unknown on the illegal drug market prior to the book’s 1997 publication.
Recipes for many of these new illegal substances, as well as first-person
reports about the phenomenology associated with different dosages, are
available on the Internet—easily accessed by the spiritually inclined psychology
student in Argentina, the alternative psychotherapist in California,
or the unemployed chemist in the Ukraine. Or, of course, by
organized crime. My prediction is that by 2050 the “good old days,” when
we had to deal with only a dozen or so molecules dominating the illegal
market, will seem like a picnic. We should not fool ourselves: Prohibition has always failed in the past, and experience shows that there is a black
market to satisfy every outlawed human desire. For every market, there
will be an industry to serve it. We may witness a burgeoning of illegal
psychoactive compounds, while doctors in emergency rooms are confronted
with kids on substances whose names they’ve never even heard
of before.
Globalization, the Internet, and modern neuropharmacology together
pose new challenges to drug policy. For example, the legal drug
industry knows very well that with the advent of Internet pharmacies,
national law-enforcement agencies can no longer control the market for
the widespread off-label use of psychostimulants such as Ritalin or
Modafinil. Someday we may be unable to meet these challenges with denial,
disinformation, public-relations campaigns, legislation, or draconian
penal codes. We already pay a high price for the status quo in terms
of abuse of prescription drugs and alcohol. Now the problem is that new
challenges are arising, but we have not done our homework yet.
To give a simple example: Anyone interested has already had plenty
of time and opportunity to experiment with the classic hallucinogens,
such as psilocybin, LSD, or mescaline. We now know that these substances
are not addictive or toxic and that some of them have therapeutic
potential and can even induce profound spiritual experiences.
Consider, for example, this excerpt from Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of
Perception (1954), in which he describes the mescaline experience:
“Is it agreeable?” somebody asked. (During this part of the experiment,
all conversations were recorded on a dictating machine,
and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of
what was said.)
“Neither agreeable nor disagreeable,” I answered. “It just is.”
Istigkeit—wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use?
“Is-ness.” The Being of Platonic philosophy—except that Plato
seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of
separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the
mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow,
have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance
with which they were charged; could never have perceived that
what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing
more, and nothing less, than what they were—a transience
that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the
same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in
which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was
to be seen the divine source of all existence.
Here we have a first example of a state of consciousness that is illegal
today. Almost no one can attain the state in Huxley’s profile without
breaking the law. A classic study in this field is Walter Pahnke’s Good
Friday experiment, involving theology students and conducted at Harvard
University in 1962. Recently, this experiment has generated two
interesting follow-up studies, this time conducted by Roland Griffiths at
the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins
School of Medicine in Baltimore. Here, the psychoactive compound
used was not mescaline but psilocybin, another naturally occurring substance
used as a sacrament and in structured religious ceremonies in
some cultures, possibly for millennia. If you had to assess the value of
the following state of consciousness (taken from the original experiment
at Harvard), how would you rate it?
I was experiencing directly the metaphysical theory known as
emanationism in which, beginning with the clear, unbroken infinite
light of God, the light then breaks into forms and then
lessens in intensity as it passes through descending degrees of
reality. . . . The emanation theory and especially the elaborately
worked out layers of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology and psychology
had heretofore been concepts and inferences. Now they
were objects of the most direct and immediate perception. I
could see exactly how these theories would have come into being
if their progenitors had had this experience. But beyond accounting
for their origin, my experience testified for their
absolute truth. Other participants described their associated feelings as those of
awe, reverence, and sacredness. A careful replication of Pahnke’s classical
study, published in 2006, used rigorous double-blind clinical pharmacology
methods to evaluate both the acute (seven hours) and long-term
(two months) mood-altering and psychological effects of psilocybin relative
to an active comparison compound (methylphenidate). The study
was conducted with thirty-six well-educated, hallucinogen-naive volunteers.
All thirty-six indicated at least intermittent participation in religious
or spiritual activities such as services, prayer, meditation, church
choir, or educational or discussion groups, which limits the generality of
this study. Based on a priori scientific criteria, twenty-two of the thirtysix
volunteers had a complete mystical experience. A dozen of those volunteers
rated the psilocybin experience as being the single most
spiritually significant experience of his or her life, and an additional 38
percent rated it to be among the top five most spiritually significant experiences.
More than two-thirds of the volunteers rated the experience
with psilocybin to be either the single most meaningful experience of
his or her life or among the top five most meaningful experiences.
Recall Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine. Should these experiences
count as an empty form of hedonism, or do they belong to the
“epistemic” form of happiness grounded in insight? Indeed, do they possess
any value for society as a whole? They certainly have long-lasting
effects: Even at the fourteen-month follow-up, 58 percent of volunteers
rated the experience of the psilocybin session as among the five most
personally meaningful experiences of their lives, and 67 percent rated it
among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives,
with 11 and 17 percent respectively indicating that it was the single most
meaningful experience and the single most spiritually significant experience.
Furthermore, 64 percent of the volunteers indicated that the psilocybin
experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction
either moderately or very much, and 61 percent reported that the experience
was associated with positive behavior change.
This study exemplifies what I mean by saying that “we have not done
our homework yet.” In the past, we have not arrived at a convincing assessment
of the intrinsic value of such (and many other) artificially induced states of consciousness, of the risks and benefits they carry not
only for the individual citizen but for society as a whole. We have simply
looked the other way. Not integrating such drugs into our culture by
making them illegal causes great damage too: Spiritual practitioners or
serious students of theology and psychiatry have no access to them;
youngsters come into contact with criminals; people experiment with
unclear dosages and in unprotected environments; persons with specific
vulnerabilities may engage in dangerous behavior or seriously traumatize
themselves by episodes of panic and enormous anxiety or even develop
prolonged psychotic reactions. There is no way of “doing
nothing”; whatever we do has consequences. This is true for the problems
of the past as well as for the new challenges we face in the future.
Consider the risk of psychotic reactions: In the United Kingdom, a
survey of experiences with LSD in clinical work covered some 4,300
subjects and a total of some 49,500 LSD sessions. There was an attendant
suicide rate of 0.7 per thousand patients, an accident rate of 2.3 per
thousand patients, and in nine out of a thousand patients, psychosis
lasted for more than forty-eight hours (from which two-thirds recovered
fully). Another study examining the prevalence of psychiatric reactions
through questionnaires sent to researchers conducting
controlled studies with LSD found that 0.08 percent of five thousand
study volunteers experienced psychiatric symptoms that lasted more
than two days. Recently, researchers have made progress in controlling
such adverse reactions through careful screening and preparation.
Nevertheless, we should remain conservative and assume that even under
controlled conditions we should expect about nine prolonged psychotic
reactions per thousand subjects.
Now assume that we took a group of a thousand carefully selected
citizens and allowed them legally to enter the region of phenomenal
state-space opened by psilocybin, as in the two recent psilocybin studies
by Roland Griffiths and his co-workers. Because LSD and psilocybin are
very similar in this regard, an empirically plausible assumption is that
nine would have a serious, prolonged psychotic reaction, three of these
persisting for longer than two days, perhaps with lifelong negative aftereffects.
Three hundred and thirty citizens would rate their experience as the single most spiritually significant experience of their life; 670 would
say either it was the single most meaningful experience of their lives or
among the top five most meaningful experiences. Can we weigh the
nine individuals against the 670?
Assume further that individual citizens decide they are ready to take
this risk and demand a legal and maximally safe access to this region in
their phenomenal-state space. On ethical grounds, should the state interfere,
perhaps arguing that people have no right to put their mental
health at stake in this way and potentially become a burden to society?
We would have to ban alcohol immediately. What if legal experts argued
that, just as with the death penalty, a single false decision, a single persisting
psychotic reaction, was already one too many, that it was intrinsically
unethical to take risks of this type? What if social workers and
psychiatrists replied that the decision to make such experiences illegal
increased the overall number of serious psychiatric complications in the
population and made them statistically invisible? What if church officials
pointed out (exactly according to the background assumptions of
reductive materialism) that these experiences are just “Nes-Zen,” not the
real thing—appearance only, without epistemic value? Should citizens
in a free society have a right to find the answer to this question themselves?
Would it matter if the expected risk/benefit ratio was much
worse, say, 80:20? What if citizens without any spiritual interests felt
discriminated against and argued for their right to engage in pure
“empty” hedonism, to enjoy Meister Eckhart’s “Istigkeit” for fun only?
What if ultraconservative religious believers, together with aging hippies
firmly holding on to their belief in “psychedelic sacraments,” felt
deeply insulted, protesting about the blasphemy and profanation implied
in any recreational, purely hedonistic use of such substances?
These are concrete examples of ethical questions for which we have not
found a tenable, normative consensus in the past. We have not yet developed
an intelligent way of dealing with these substances—a strategy
of minimizing the risks while letting people enjoy their potential benefits.
All we have done is to declare the relevant portions of phenomenalstate
space off-limits, making academic research on these substances and rational risk-assessment practically impossible in most countries.
Lives are ruined because we have not done our homework.
The price for denial may rise. Many new psychoactive substances of
the hallucinogen-type—such as 2C-B (4-bromo-2.5-dimethoxyphenethylamine,
street names “Venus” or “Nexus”) or 2C-T-7 (2.5-
dimethoxy-4-(n)-propylthiophenethylamine, “Blue Mystic” or “T7”)—
have been developed and are out on the illegal market without any clinical
testing; their numbers will continue to increase.
These are just the old (and easy) problems—the homework we never
did. Today the structure of the demand is changing, the technology is
becoming more precise, and the markets are getting bigger. In our ultrafast,
ever more competitive and ruthless modern societies, very few
people are seeking deeper spiritual experience. They want alertness,
concentration, emotional stability, and charisma—everything that leads
to professional success and eases stress associated with life in the fast
lane. There are few Aldous Huxleys left, but there is a new demographic
factor: In the rich societies, people are growing older than ever before—
and they want not just quantity but quality of life. Big Pharma knows all
of this. Everybody has heard about modafinil, and perhaps also that it is
already in use in the Iraq War, but there are at least forty new molecules
in the pipeline. Yes, there is a lot of hype, and alarmism certainly is not
the right attitude. But the technology is not going away, and it is becoming
better.
Large pharmaceutical companies, circumventing the border between
legal and illegal substances, are quietly developing numerous new compounds;
they know that cognitive enhancers will reap them hefty future
profits from “nonmedical use.” For instance, Cephalon, maker of
modafinil, has said that roughly 90 percent of prescriptions are for offlabel
use. The recent spread of Internet pharmacies has given them
new means of worldwide distribution and new tools for mass testing potential
long-term effects.
Modern neuroethics will have to create a new approach to drug policy.
The key question is, Which brain states should be legal? Which regions
of phenomenal-state space (if any) should be declared off-limits? It’s important to remember that for thousands of years people of all cultures
have used psychoactive substances to induce special states of consciousness:
not merely religious ecstasy, relaxed cheerfulness, or
heightened awareness but also simple, stupid intoxication. The new factor
is that the tools are getting better. Therefore, we must decide which
of these altered states can be integrated into our culture and which are
to be avoided at all cost.
In free societies, the goal should always be to maximize the autonomy
of the citizenry. That being said, we should adopt a sober perspective
on the problem. We should minimize the price we pay in terms of
deaths, addiction, and the damage that might be done to our economy
by, say, a marked loss of productivity. However, the question is not only
how to protect ourselves; we should also determine the hidden benefits
that psychoactive substances can provide for our culture. Should spiritual
experiences like those induced by some of the classic hallucinogens
be banned in principle? Is it acceptable to deny more serious students of
theology or psychiatry access to such altered states of consciousness? Is
it acceptable that anyone who seeks valid spiritual or religious experience—
or simply wants to see for himself or herself—has to break laws
and take the risks associated with uncertain dosages, chemical impurities,
and dangerous settings? Many aspects of our current drug policy
are arbitrary and ethically untenable. Is it ethical, for instance, to permit
advertising for dangerous addictive substances such as alcohol and nicotine?
Should governments, through the taxes on such substances, profit
from the self-destructive behavior of their citizens? We will need precise
laws covering every single molecule and its corresponding neurophenomenological
profile. Neuroethics must not only consider the physiological
effects of a substance on the brain but also must weigh the
psychological and social risks against the intrinsic value of the experiences
resulting from one or another altered brain state—a difficult task.
The job will be easier if we can establish a basic moral consensus supported
by a large part of the general public—the citizens for whom these
rules will be made. Government agencies should not lie to their target
audiences; rather they should attempt to regain their credibility, in particular
with the younger generation. Black markets are much more difficult to regulate than legal markets, and political decisions generally have
a much weaker effect on consumer behavior than does the cultural context.
Laws alone will not help. For the challenges posed by new psychoactive
substances, we will need a new cultural context.
There are other ways in which problems of neuroethics will affect
our everyday lives. Many of the brilliant experiments conducted by my
friends in the neurosciences—say, on neural synchrony and binocular
rivalry, on the dreaming animal brain, or on mirror neurons and mindreading—
are experiments I would never conduct myself. Yet as a
philosopher, I interpret these data and write about them. I am like a
philosopher-parasite, profiting from a research practice I find dubious
on moral grounds. The kittens and the macaques we continually sacrifice
in experimental consciousness research are not interested in a theory
of consciousness; the results of these experiments are of interest
only to our species. However, we pursue this interest by making members
of other species suffer, forcing highly unpleasant states of consciousness
on them and even denying their right to exist. How coherent
is this from an ethical perspective? As a theoretician, do I have the right
to interpret data gathered by making animals suffer? Am I morally
obliged to boycott these types of experiments?
Just as in the ethical issue of machine consciousness, this example illustrates
a guiding principle on which almost everyone will agree: We
should not increase the overall amount of conscious suffering in the universe
unless we have compelling reasons to do so. There is no other moral
issue in which the gap between insight and human behavior is so extreme,
in which what we already know diverges so strongly from how we
act. The way we have treated animals for centuries is clearly untenable.
Given all our new knowledge about the neural basis of conscious experience,
the burden of proof now shifts to the side of meat-eaters—and
perhaps even to intellectual carnivores like me, philosopher-parasites
and other people indirectly profiting from an ethically dubious research
practice.
Or imagine, for instance, that we could develop a methodologically
sound and successful method of “brain fingerprinting.” Let’s assume we
can home in on the neural correlate of the conscious experience that goes along with deliberately lying (in fact, first candidates are already
being discussed). We could then build efficient, high-tech lie detectors
that do not rely on superficial physiological effects, such as skin conductance
or changes in peripheral blood flow. This would be an extremely
useful instrument in fighting terrorism and crime, but it would also fundamentally
change our social reality. Something that had previously been
the paradigm of privacy—the contents of your mind—would suddenly
have become a public affair. Certain simple forms of political resistance—
misleading the authorities during an interrogation, say—would disappear.
On the other hand, society would benefit from the increased
transparency in many ways. Innocent prisoners could be saved from the
death penalty. Imagine that during presidential campaign debates, a red
light would begin flashing in front of a candidate whenever the neural
correlate for lying became active in his or her brain.
But nearly infallible lie detection would do more than this: It would
change our self-models. If, as citizens, we knew that in principle secrets
no longer existed—that we could no longer conceal information from
the state—then a mainstay of everyday life (at least, everyday life in the
Western world), the enjoyment of intellectual autonomy, would disappear.
Mere awareness of the existence of such forensic neurotechnologies
would be enough to bring about the change. Would we want to live
in such a society? Would the benefits outweigh the harm? How (if at all)
could we prevent these new technologies from being misused? Just as
with cognitive enhancement, new opportunities will create new problems
(think of job interviews, divorce proceedings, immigration control,
or health-insurance companies), and the commercial potential is high. A
core problem for neuroethics in the near future will be protecting the
individual’s right to privacy. Is our mental inner world, the contents of
our Ego Tunnel, untouchable, an area to which the state should have no
access? Shall we define a “mental sphere of privacy,” or should anything
that can be revealed by modern neuroscience be at the disposal of political
decisions? Will we soon need a new version of the United Kingdom’s
Data Protection Act for the human brain? Again, the technologies are
coming, they are gradually getting better, and looking the other way will
not help.
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