I am just wondering what are everyone's thoughts on the subject of perception. I have been pondering about whether life can be meaningful and pleasant if one's perceptions are that it is such, even if the reality of the matter is quite the opposite by conventional standards.

Imagine that someone - in this case it will be a male - had been perceiving that they were living a dull life, in a dull town, with very dull friends. He was therefore constantly bored and dissatisfied with life, and probably not very productive. (which, for the record, is basically the opposite of my perceived reality)

Now imagine that he was programmed, either through behavioral conditioning, or some form of restructuring of his brain. Because of this procedure, the person no longer sees life as dull, and now becomes fascinated by his surroundings, and amazed by his fellow human beings, no matter how seemingly mediocre they were before.

Would this be positive or negative?

After all, isn't dullness subjective? Even the people who seem entirely uninteresting or downright repulsive can be fascinating if looked at with the right lens. From a scientific point of view, all humans are amazingly complex creatures. From an artist's view just about anyone can be beautiful, even if it is just in some small quirky way. I would actually say that stupidity could also be a lens, such as described in Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. (summary and spoilers for the novel are available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon )

Is it more important to live in a great place, or perceive it as great? Is it more important to have good friends, or just perceive them as such? Etc, Etc.  Isn't perception all there is? Cogito Ergo Sum. I would go so far to say that a virtual reality that is constructed in enough detail would be just as "real" as the universe in which we live. We perceive the world through our five senses, all of which could be emulated by artificial means.

Now this thought experiment could have been set up in other ways which could emotionally complicate the issue. For instance, if the subject was afflicted with chronic depression, or impoverished, or in a relationship with a cruel person.

I also see how a procedure such as the one I described could be used for malicious ends by powerful elites to create content slaves and so forth, but even if that happened, to whom is harm being caused? I am not defending that this should be done, but I am honestly asking who is being harmed in such a scenario.

Thoughts?

In keeping with eastern thought, happiness and contentment should come from all points of life, you simply have to put yourself in the right mindset.  I personally would see a procedure for it as, kind of, cheating.  Don't have a problem with others doing it, but I've always been one to achieve my goals the old fashioned way.  Self imposed behavioral conditioning.

Edit:  You're wikipedia link is broken.

You mindset isn't exclusively eastern, Nietzsche had a similar perspective. By the way, I fixed the link. Thank you for notifying me.

You've elucidated what I think is a critical issue in the "enhancement" debate: that of the dichotomy (or lack thereof, depending on your frame of reference) between changing a person such that they appreciate their environment more, or changing an environment so as to allow a person to experience happiness, productivity, and well-being.

First of all, one issue that I think is sometimes ignored in enhancement discussions is the fact that applying a "quick fix" (which often leans toward the "change the person, not the environment" side of things) does not always represent the best choice.  Not because there is any sort of virtue in needless suffering, but because there is a danger here of masking a problem rather than solving it.  For instance, if someone goes to a therapist complaining of depression and is immediately given antidepressants, I would call out that therapist as incompetent.  Whenever someone's circumstances are, shall we say, less than ideal, I think it is important to look at the root causes of the negative aspects of those circumstances.

For instance, someone's self-perceived depression could very well be due to being in an abusive relationship.  The correct course of action here would be for the person to remove themselves from the abusive relationship -- it would not be to take a pill that made them happy to just lie there while their partner beat them.  I realize this is an extreme example, but sometimes this sort of reductio ad absurdum is useful in pointing out flaws in common arguments.  While I'm probably technophilic enough to annoy some of the more political transhumanists, I do think that sometimes there is a bit of a tendency to oversimplify complex problems with assertions that there is absolutely no reason for someone not to take advantage of anything that might be considered an "enhancement". 

This is partly because something that seems to improve conditions in the short term might not necessarily do so in the long run.  In the case of our hypothetical depressive abuse victim, if this person were to indeed take a pill that made them not mind the abuse, this would certainly make them feel better in the short run but could end up getting them killed.  And to take this scenario a step further (into even more absurd territory): would it be ethical to give someone a drug that would make them want to die?  I'm reminded of the cow from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" who sauntered up to the table in a restaurant and amiably recommended the juiciest parts of its own anatomy for the diners' consumption.  The diners were made very uncomfortable by this, and I suspect that this is because the diners themselves probably dreaded the idea of anyone manipulating their minds similarly.

I think that part of the key here lies in acknowledging that conscious beings do have the ability to exert control over their own perspective to a certain extent.  A person can, for instance, have a notion to expand their own sphere of (for instance) foods they like -- and it is possible to do this, and want to do it, without knowing exactly what it will be like to eat the new foods beforehand.  Imagination can be developed so as to serve as something of a personal VR function in which new potential scenarios can be played out.  However, the degree to which a person can imagine states of mind and experiences outside their present sphere of such things is always going to be limited, and this is where the question of ethics comes in as it pertains to other people's minds.

This sort of meta-awareness of "what could be" is something that I think is often neglected in enhancement / modification discussions...I think that a person's own ability to determine what is "best" for them is often underestimated.  Of course, there are cases in which it seems clear that interventions ought to occur; a heroin addict might enthusiastically assert that s/he is best when s/he has an ample supply of narcotics, but there is plenty of historical evidence to support the notion that drug addicts usually feel better and more satisfied with their lives once they've kicked the habit, gotten a job, re-established healthy relationships, etc.

The "happy slave" question is an interesting one, because I honestly don't think anyone is being directly "harmed" in the traditional sense in such a scenario.  If the slaves are engineered to not mind being slaves, and those enslaving the happy individuals bred to serve them, then it definitely seems that everyone is benefitting from the arrangement.  However, I would suggest that the very existence of slavery in any civilized society sets a bad precedent; if you give someone tacit permission to enslave those who don't mind the arrangement, those same people could start feeling entitled to own slaves, and might start trying to justify the keeping of slaves who do not actually approve of the arrangement.  And as in the past, people would come up with arguments to make this seem like a fine idea: such as postulating intellectual inferiority of the enslaved persons, when in fact the enslaved persons are just as smart as anyone else fundamentally, but have been so culturally oppressed and possibly threatened that their resolve to resist has been broken. 

My point is that while there may not be any direct harm due to the existence of "happy slaves", there is definitely a certain degree of indirect sociological harm that could come about.  This might seem a frivolous example, but consider for a moment the House-Elves in the Harry Potter series of novels.  These creatures have been bred and socialized to accept their role as unpaid servants, and most of them are fine with this.  However, their existence as an enslaved underclass allows the denizens of the wizarding world to feel justified in various forms of discrimination against nonhuman creatures; that is, it becomes assumed that if one species or type can be used and thought of as "less than" everyone else, then this mindset can be applied to other creatures, simply because they differ (usually appearance-wise, and sometimes culturally) from the dominant human group.

The peculiarities of developmental gene expression as well as the difficulty of constraining every individual's life experiences so as to render them maximally useful for a simplistic purpose seems to make the "happy slave" idea highly unrealistic.  The randomness of existence and environment-personhood interactions allow for flukes to occur; in the Harry Potter analogy, there is one house-elf who (despite any supposed genetic and social determinism) decides he would prefer to be free, and in doing so manages to persuade some of his fellows to follow him.  As well as being a socially unhealthy precedent, the notion that any group can be assuredly enslaved by non-coercive means for any length of time seems tremendously unlikely; eventually, the slave-owners will get complacent, or the environment will change, or some aspect of the regimen required to maintain such a structure will slip.

The perception of happiness is pretty subjective. You see people living it up next door and you envy them. With them next door, you think your life is miserable, even though, objectively it hasn't changed much. It's already possible to tweak peoples perceptions to get them to do all kinds of crazy things. A disturbing number of young Japanese men were converted into kamikaze pilots. During the Iran/Iraq War, the Iranian government created waves of boy soldiers who'd "assault" mine fields and entrenched Iraqi positions by "martyring themselves." There was also the Children's Crusade. WWI, banzi charges, etc. etc.

So no, I have no trouble imagining tweaking someone's brain so they, perversely, take the greatest joy in leaping onto spikes to impale themselves to death.

So the question emerges, if they take joy in suicide, slavery or masochism, is anyone being harmed? If the prisoners aren't aware they are in a prison, if they think it's paradise, is it really a prison?

I think it is because some outside agency has to shape these individuals to think in such ways. The situation seems forced or contrived to me. Would such a situation ever arise from emergent evolution? Or is it always artificial? If it's aways artificial, I'd argue it's always forced and therefore unethical--that somehow limiting a sapient being's autonomy in that way is very likely to be unethical whether or not they themselves perceive any suffering.

I should probably say that I'm pretty biased on this concept. The idea of building joyous slaves is revolting to me. (I wonder if we can assume that Asimovian robots are built this way. Or that episode of Futurama where they convinced Bender to accept an upgrade when he was superceded by new models.)

Of course you could probably avoid a lot of this controversy by not making these creatures sapient or sentient in the first place. Just limit their intelligence to be extremely narrow. Nobody minds when the Roomba selflessly sucks up all our nasty garbage. The Roomba has no mind to grant rights and dignity too. 

Mr. Farlops: Your Roomba example brings up something I imagine will become much more prominent in coming decades: I think that humans are going to rely increasingly on machines for certain narrow, mechanical, specialized tasks.  Couple this with the fact that for the most part, we have socially evolved beyond things like enslavement of sentient beings in the so-called civilized world, and you get a situation wherein the risk of a "Brave New World" scenario is extremely low.

However, it is also important to remember that humans are notoriously bad at determining the sentience / sapience of beings who are not shaped like them, or who do not communicate the way they do.  It is now known, for instance, that Great Apes, elephants, and dolphins are fairly sophisticated socially and intellectually -- however, for years these creatures were treated otherwise.  Whenever a creature / person is in a position of less power than a dominant group, his or her personhood is often overtly denied by superficial observers -- and the way these creatures are treated is sometimes justified by statements about their supposed lack of intelligence or awareness.

This also occurs between groups of humans (ref. the "Stanford Prison Experiment").  For whatever reason, despite the positive aspects of our social evolution, some humans still have a sort of latent authoritarian xenophobia that can be activated when these humans are put in (or find themselves in) a position of power.  So while I think the risk of deliberately trying to create (through bioengineering or programming) races of joyful slaves is fairly low, I also think that we humans need to be on guard against a tendency to dismiss on the basis of lack of understanding.

Nydra,

Yes, in these modern times, in the post-industrial world, there is no need to enslave anyone, at least not in the classical sense.

However there is still disagreeable work that needs to be done though so, in the United States, we still find illegal immigrant farm workers or, in the industrial sector, we ship boring factory work overseas to cheap, poorly organized labor in repressive countries. But these workers get paid so it's not exactly slavery--the distinction is very narrow in some cases though. Or in the services area we ship the tech support and programming scutwork overseas.

Regardless, we can or will build machines to do this dangerous, boring, backbreaking labor for us.

As an aside, one wonders if cheap labor over seas is actually slowing the automation of certain industries simply because it's cheaper to hire millions of busy hands of Asia, South America or Africa than it is to build better vision systems and AI in robots. Is cheap labor in one area slowing technical advances in anther?

But this takes me off the point. My feeling is that happiness is a little of both. It's what takes place inside the mind of the individual and it's what takes place in the environment that person is in.

To use your example, I agree, a psychiatrist who simply prescribes a pill instead of really helping the patient to solve their problems is incompetent. Even pathological depression is not merely a question of faulty hardware in the brain. It's also family, friends, environments and circumstance. You have to heal the whole system to heal the patient. 

Someone could be very rich and still be miserable. Someone could be poor and still be generally happy. However, the rich guy has many more options to heal themselves than the poor guy does.

The other thing that is rather perverse (Or perhaps glorious) about us is that when various needs or wants are met, we just find something else to complain about. This is what keeps us busy. It's what keeps us creative. It's what keeps us restlessly going over the horizon in search of new things. It drives our art. I hope we never lose this restlessness. If we were all perfectly satisfied, nothing would ever change.  (I wonder if this will head off Abolitionist's burblings?)

Erich Fromm argued that often what psychologists treat is a natural reaction to an insane society. Surely popping pills doesn't fix the social problems that cause mental illness or depression. Brave New World is the famous example of a society that medicates itself chemically, via Soma, to anesthetize itself from an unhealthy social arrangement.

As future medications and therapies are created, we will have the capacity to change our subjective experience at will. We could condition ourselves to be highly motivated workaholics, if we wanted.

There is a project called iPlant that is actually looking to build a device that could let people reprogram themselves. If such technologies simply feed the current hypercapitalist trends, then we could very well become a society of "happy" workaholics. Is this desirable? If not, how could this be averted?

I can't say this would necessarily be a bad thing so long as it's purely optional rather than something put upon people to get them to work for less. I'm sure I'd be much more financially successful if I could find something productive that I enjoyed as much as my father enjoys painting or some people enjoy gardening and cooking.

Some say that believing in a religious doctrine will make you happier - assuming that believing in the doctrine itself is what makes one happier (oppossed to sociological rewards) - it's obviously not a good long-term solution.

The attempt to be happy with what we have is what makes bioluddites bioluddites - and these beliefs have negative long-term consequences.

How to be as happy as possible while still able to recognize that there are ways to improve and to be working towards improvement is the ideal imo.

If lifelong individual happiness is the measure of success then using belief or simply changing perception doesn't work very well compared to the possibilities of using biotechnology to extend lifespan and redesign human nature.

(i know you're all of like mind - this is mostly posted for onlookers)