Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits

5. Should We Enhance Our Cognitive Powers to Better Understand the Universe and Our Place in It?

5 Should We Enhance Our Cognitive Powers to Better Understand the Universe and Our Place in It? This chapter addresses the value we place on improving our capacity to do science by enhancing our cognitive powers. The search for new scientific explanations is certainly not the only motivation for enhancing our cognitive powers—one might pursue cognitive enhancement for its effects on the writing of poetry or the playing of chess, for example. But it has a special significance. Scientific advances enable the invention of new technologies that improve our lives. In addition, they satisfy a deep and enduring curiosity about the universe and our place in it. This curiosity is held by some to be the defining virtue of our species. In chapter 2, I used MacIntyre’s distinction between internal and external goods to address the consequences of enhancement. This distinction serves as a useful starting point for investigating the effects of radical cognitive enhancement on science. Science produces many external goods. It reveals the causes of diseases enabling successful treatment of them. It enables the construction of jetliners that quickly and safely ferry us between continents. These satisfy MacIntyre’s criteria for external goods. If there were ways of getting these goods that did not require science—perhaps by praying to a god who would just banish diseases from existence and delegate angels to facilitate air travel—then their value would be undiminished. The internal goods of science correspond with our sense of curiosity about the universe and our place in it. The scientific advances that enabled successful treatment of diseases and the construction of jetliners brought new understanding of the universe, understanding that divine miracles do not in general bring. This internal good of science is not restricted to practicing scientists. The publishing genre of popular science satisfies the curiosity of nonscientists , granting them access to this particular internal good. Prayers that bring the valuable external goods of cures for disease and angel-powered 82 Chapter 5 flight would not satisfy this sense of curiosity about the universe and our place in it. They promise none of science’s internal goods. In this chapter, I argue that the external and internal goods of science respond differently to cognitive enhancement. The propensity of cognitive enhancement to generate external goods conforms to the objective ideal. The greater the degree of objective enhancement, the more significant will be the external goods. By quickening the pace of scientific discovery, radical cognitive enhancement will accelerate the discovery of technologies that improve our lives. The more we cognitively enhance, the sooner we will receive beneficial technologies. Our cognitive faculties become more instrumentally valuable with greater degrees of enhancement. The propensity of cognitive enhancement to generate science’s internal goods conforms to the anthropocentric ideal. Beyond a certain point, greater degrees of objective enhancement tend to bring less valuable internal goods. They satisfy our sense of curiosity less effectively. Another way to put this is to say that our cognitive faculties tend to lose intrinsic value with greater degrees of enhancement. The explanations of radically cognitively enhanced scientists (henceforth “radically enhanced science”) differ from the explanations of unenhanced human scientists (henceforth “human science”) by connecting less directly with the internal goods of human science. They respond less directly to the human sense of curiosity about the universe and our place in it. This difference arises in respect of the idealizations that constitute these sciences. Idealization is an indispensable feature of science—human scientists idealize, and so will radically cognitively enhanced scientists. But their idealizations will differ. These differences arise as a direct consequence of the respective cognitive limitations of unenhanced and radically enhanced scientists. One reason scientists idealize is to simplify reality so that they can formulate theories about it. Scientists with different cognitive powers will have different requirements for simplicity and should therefore favor explanations formulated in terms of different idealizations. Unenhanced human science is adapted to unenhanced human cognitive capacities. It lacks idealizations that exceed human cognitive limitations. This differs from a radically enhanced science featuring idealizations adapted to radically enhanced scientists’ more capacious minds. Unenhanced scientists are right to find greater intrinsic value in explanations that make use of idealizations adapted to their cognitive limitations Should We Enhance Our Cognitive Powers? 83 than they do in explanations presented in terms of idealizations adapted to radically enhanced intellects. These explanations connect with a particular scientific narrative (or a particular...