The Transhuman Taste

Reviews of Extropian interest

He wasn’t joking.

by Simon! D. Levy

Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman (as told to Ralph Leighton). New York: Bantam Books, 350 pages.

What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman (as told to Ralph Leighton). New York: Bantam Books., 255 pages.

Richard P. Feynman was born in 1918 and died in 1988. Between those years, he helped build the first atomic bomb, won a Nobel prize in physics, and solved the mystery of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Strangely enough, he was also an accomplished safecracker and samba musician. Tales of these achievements, and many others, are told in a refreshingly direct, engaging style in Feynman’s two autobiographies.

You will probably find these books in the science section of your local bookstore, but there is absolutely nothing technical about either one. Feynman explains his profession in the same way he explains everything else: in simple language. What really drew me into these books was the feeling that that is the right way to talk about things, because Feynman is so successful at it. Consider, for example his description of a character in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as “a simple country doctor who had some idea of how to fix club feet, but all he did was screw people up.” Feynman uses the same shoot-from-the-hip prose to describe everything, and it works.

Surely You’re Joking… and What Do You Care… are also great reading for libertarians, because of the wonderful irreverence that Feynman showed for any authority or bureaucracy that crossed his path. Faced with frightening security holes at the Manhattan project — the top-secret information was stored in “wooden filing cabinets that had little, ordinary, common padlocks on them” — Feynman didn’t complain or fill out a form. Instead, he picked the locks to show how easy it would be for anyone to get the information. Asked to speak at a local city college, he agreed on the condition that he would only be asked to sign his name on government paperwork a maximum of thirteen times. (He pulled the number thirteen out of a hat.) He had already signed twelve times and was then asked to sign once more, to receive his honorarium check. He refused, because signing the form and check would make a total of fourteen signatures. The government was so embarrassed that they let him have the money.

Feynman’s distaste for bureaucracy gets more serious justification in his analysis of the Challenger explosion:

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The shuttle… flies in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure on the order of a percent.

Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA’s perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believe it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between managers and their working engineers.

This is scary stuff. I take this passage to mean that the Challenger astronauts died because of lying, or lack of communication, or both, on the part of the National Air and Space Administration. In his typical fashion, Feynman doesn’t mince words in stating his conclusions.

I was especially taken by Feynman’s views on social responsibility. In an age where we are told that we are to blame for every possible ill, from the plight of the homeless to the destruction of the rain forests, it is a delight to hear Feynman say that - ’… you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility…’

What impressed me the most about these two books, though, was the simple sense of optimism in Feynman’s writing. It is clear that he believed in his own power to solve difficult problems, and in the ability of science to comprehend the world. If you don’t feel better about the future after reading these books, you are beyond help. In short, I recommend both Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think? without reservation.

And the chickens shall lead them.

Reviewed by Simon! D. Levy.

Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 350 pages.

Well, it’s finally here: the book that is going to put the word transhuman into the dictionary.

Great Mambo Chicken covers just about every late-twentieth-century event that could be of interest to readers of Extropy, along with several that probably aren’t. (Evel Knievel’s antics fall into the latter category.) In fact, there’s so much going on here that it’s hard for me to decide where I should start.

The book itself begins with a discussion of the Dora Kent affair, which is already legendary to many readers of this magazine. For those who haven’t heard the story, I suggest you read Regis’ account of it, which is nothing if not amusing. As a caveat, though, I should tell you that that Regis left Max’s name out of the suspension team list. I suspect that this sort of slip is not unique in Mambo Chicken, because the aim seems primarily to entertain, and not to inform. With that in mind, let’s see what else Regis has to offer.

There’s the story of Bob Truax, a real-life American rocket scientist who also happens to be an immortalist. According to Regis,

Truax wanted to do for rockets what Jobs and Wozniak did for computers: he wanted to make them into everyday items, machines that people could own, operate, and run by themselves, personally.

Truax once placed an ad in the paper, asking for $100,000 in investment capital. In return, he would make you -the world’s first private astronaut.’ He hasn’t succeeded (no one could come up with the cash), but the idea of free-market space exploration strikes me as a great one.

There’s also the story of the Hensons, Keith and Carolyn, who lived in the Arizona desert and built a system of tunnels under their house, apparently for the purpose of entertaining their friends. The tunneling was fairly tame, though, compared to the Henson’s main activity, which was blowing things up with dynamite. Like almost everyone else in this book, they are, to put it mildly, interested in space exploration. You haven’t seen optimism until you’ve read Regis’ account of Keith Henson’s intergalactic party plans.

Mostly, though, this book is concerned with ideas: the cryonicists’ idea that each of us can live forever by freezing-and-waiting; Hans Moravec’s

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idea that we can achieve the same goals more easily by downloading our consciousness into robots; Chris Langton’s idea that the computational critters in artificial life programs will be just like real organisms. All these ideas eventually coalesce into a very, very big idea: that ‘postbiological man’ will, as Barrow and Tipler put it in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, be in ‘control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose existence is logically possible.’

Ultimate intelligence and control sounds appealing from an Extropian point of view, but Great Mambo Chicken left me with the impression that many of the ideas that Regis relates hadn’t been very well thought out. There is, for instance, Moravec’s notion of ‘backup copies’: Since you are a transhuman and want to experience everything, it would be best to download a copy of your mental software onto a machine, in case your adventurous body is destroyed by one of its experiences. Of course, this idea is based on the belief that minds are programs and that bodies are simply the hardware that stores and runs the programs.

To put it plainly, I think that this is pure nonsense. First, the only similarity between computers and brains is analogical. If you work very, very hard, you can get a computer to do a poor imitation of some tiny corner of human behavior. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t believe that things will be this bad forever. But I do think that the ‘downloading’ idea is based on the same mind/body (software/hardware) dualism that has screwed up Western thought for so many millennia. It’s clear to me that what we are — and who we are — is tied inextricably with how we’re put together. I don’t believe that carbon-based mush is necessarily the only way to make an intelligent organism, but I won’t agree that it’s irrelevant whether you put my mind in a brain or a VAX.

Nevertheless, Great Mambo Chicken is quite entertaining, and admirable in its cheerful attitude toward the future. Most of the ideas it describes — space exploration, cryonics, artificial life — are exciting and worth pursuing, and Regis does a nice job of making them seem so. I often got the feeling

that he was trying to be Tom Wolfe writing The Right Stuff about scientists instead of astronauts — there are loads of italics and exclamation points — but I enjoyed the book anyway. If you’re wondering about the title, I’m going to set a precedent for Great Mambo Chicken reviews by not explaining what it means. Regis does that better than I ever could.

Despite the wacky name and Regis’ uncritical attitude toward his material, this book should be useful in getting your non-transhumanist friends introduced to some of the ideas that you probably care about, so it makes a great present. It’s certainly something that should be on the bookshelf of every Extropian worthy of the name.

Just Say Know.

Smart Drugs and Nutrients: How to Improve Your Memory and Increase Your Intelligence Using the Latest Discoveries in Neuroscience, by Ward Dean, M.D. and John Morgenthaler.

From B&J Publications, PO Box 483, Santa Cruz, CA 95061-0483. $9.95 + $2 ($3 overseas) postage (+$0.62 tax for addresses in California).

Reviewed by Max More.

This book, appearing shortly after Ross Pelton’s Mind Food and Smart Pills, indicates a growing interest in the possibilities for improving cognitive capacities by means of drugs and nutrients. As the neurosciences have increased our understanding of the chemical basis of thinking, scientists have come up with better and better means of enhancing cognition.

In the short time between the appearance of Pelton’s book and this new one by Dean and Morgenthaler, quite a few new substances have entered the limelight. As neurochemistry reveals even more about the still largely mysterious workings of the brain we can expect ever more effective cognition enhancing substances. Apart from improving memory formation and recall, concentration and attention, alertness, ideation (production of ideas), and slowing the rate of brain aging (sometimes reversing it), we can expect more drugs capable of allowing us to fine-tune our

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emotional self-control.

Smart Drugs and Nutrients (SDN) is a valuable aid for Extropians. It provides information on a wide variety of vitamins, herbs, and drugs known to have cognition enhancing effects. The authors helpfully supply information about the studies done, the neurochemical pathways involved (to the extent these are known), and sources for the substances. This information is tremendously valuable in helping us to act on the Extropian principle of Self-Transformation, which affirms personal responsibility in the pursuit of personal improvement. The authors adopt a helpful, non-authoritarian approach in presenting information and allowing us to use our own judgement in deciding on which substances to use at what dosages.

Especially worthy of attention in regard to dosage is that cognition-enhancing substances frequently have a U-shaped response curve, so that more is not necessarily better. Many of the substances are synergistic; if you taking a combination then you may need only a fraction of the amount required if you were to take them separately. This is true of the nootropic drugs if not the vitamins. “Nootropic” is a term coined by Giurgea in 1972 “to describe substances that improve learning, memory consolidation, and memory retrieval without other central nervous system effects and with low toxicity, even at extremely high doses.”

The pyrrolidone derivatives piracetam, pramiracetam, aniracetam and oxiracetam exhibit this response curve. I found that I was able to save money by adding more nootropics to my daily intake. By adding hydergine to piracetam, DMAE and choline, I was able to greatly reduce the dosages of each. For example, you can cut your piracetam down to a fifth of the previous intake if you are also taking DMAE or centrophenoxine and hydergine.

The pyrrolidone derivatives, such as piracetam, have a number of appealing effects. They protect against brain damage under hypoxic conditions, and enhance memory and some kinds of learning in both normal persons and those with cognitive deficits. Piracetam may also improve creativity since it facilitates the flow of information

between the brain’s hemispheres.

Hydergine has many beneficial effects and is probably worth taking before your brain starts to seriously age, since it will help to slow down age-related deterioration. This drug, among other effects, increases blood supply and oxygen to the brain, enhances neural metabolism, protects the brain against free radical damage resulting from hypoxia and hyperoxia, accelerates elimination of brain-clogging lipofuscin, increases intelligence, memory, learning and recall, and normalizes systolic blood pressure. In America it is usually prescribed at 3mg/day, but in Europe 9mg is typical. New users should start at lower doses to avoid headache, gastric disturbance or nausea.

In addition to piracetam and hydergine, a good brain program might include regular use of DMAE (apparently similar to centrophenoxine but cheaper) and choline for memory. Occasional use of vasopressin nasal spray could be added for times when recall or optimal learning of new information is vital, though vasopressin should not be used continually.

A note for users of marijuana, LSD or stimulants such as amphetamine: Marijuana inhibits release of vasopressin - this is what causes short-term memory problems; vasopressin may help alleviate this effect. LSD, and especially the stimulants, cause large amounts of vasopressin to be released - this is one reason for the vivid nature of the effects of these drugs; a few squirts of vasopressin will help restore levels toward normal and relieve the negative after-effects. Reportedly, people in a depression after continually over-using strong stimulants show an impressive improvement in manner within a minute of vasopressin administration.

The authors cite a few studies on the effects of caffeine, noting that though it has been promoted for its cognition enhancing effects, there is evidence that it has some negative effects on cognition. They also cite a study showing, contrary to popular practice, caffeine taken with alcohol will make you more drunk than the alcohol alone (the same is true of aspirin). However, on the basis of the work cited by Dean and Morgenthaler, the message about caffeine seems more mixed than

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