LUC agreement with UN University for Peace

LUC The Hague is delighted and proud to announce the completion of an agreement with UPEACE and the Alliance for Peace.  Recognizing the synergies between the missions of the institutions, this agreement will enable each party to develop new collaborative teaching and research capacities in the area of Peace & Conflict Studies.

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On 26 June 2012, the dean of LUC The Hague, the rector of the UN-mandated University for Peace (UPEACE), and the chairman of the UPEACE Alliance signed a Memorandum of Understanding that allows for the joint development of educational programmes.  In the first instance, the agreement enables LUC to offer a new track in Peace & Conflict Studies in its innovative BA programme, in cooperation with the new UPEACE Centre in The Hague, based in the Peace Palace.

Chris Goto-Jones (LUC), John Maresca (UPEACE), Marius Enthoven (Alliance)

Signing the MoU in LUC's boardroom

In the future, the main UPEACE campus in Costa Rica and LUC The Hague will also work towards the development of collaborative programmes at the graduate level.  The two institutions signed a separate agreement with that intent, and we should look forward to seeing developments in this area soon.

Chris Goto-Jones (LUC) and John Maresca (UPEACE) complete the agreement

DAI Triumph!

Building on the success of last year’s poster conference, emerging out of the core course, Designing Academic Inquiry, this year’s students did a fantastic job of raising the bar even higher.Whilst last year’s conference focussed on issues of direct relevance to the city of The Hague itself (+Public transportation +Healthcare +Recycling and waste management +Sporting and leisure facilities +Museums and cultural provisions +Parks and open public spaces), this year’s took a broader, global perspective on questions of environmental sustainability.




Building on the success of last year’s poster conference, emerging out of the core course, Designing Academic Inquiry, this year’s students did a fantastic job of raising the bar even higher.Whilst last year’s conference focussed on issues of direct relevance to the city of The Hague itself (+Public transportation +Healthcare +Recycling and waste management +Sporting and leisure facilities +Museums and cultural provisions +Parks and open public spaces), this year’s took a broader, global perspective on questions of environmental sustainability.




A very effective device on this poster was the use of a mirror in the screen of a laptop, to suggest that the audience was always and already a participant in the issue.




Other groups tackled more familiar materials, such as cotton, copper, water, rubber and wood, albeit with equally provocative and powerful messages.




In the end, as last year, our poster conference was honoured by the presence of the alderman for education of the city of The Hague, Ingrid van Engelshoven, who answered questions about the various ways in which the city is committed to environmental sustainability, and she asked LUC to prepare some policy recommendations for the city based on the work done for this conference.





Many congratulations to all the students and staff involved in making this second Designing Academic Inquiry poster conference such a success.  As last year, it was extremely impressive to see what students can achieve even after such a short period at LUC.



With admiration,
Chris (the dean)

Nicholas Agar responds to students' blogposts

I have to say that I really  enjoyed reading these posts.  When you  write a book like Humanity’s End you  hope that smart people will read it and engage with its themes.  That’s obviously happened here.  Congratulations to Chris on running what  seems to have been a very successful course and thanks for inviting me to  respond to some of your points.

Nicholas Agar

Barend de Rooij

Barend, you challenge some of my  criticisms of Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord.  Bostrom and Ord think that some (but not all) arguments against human enhancement display a bias toward the status quo.  Novel enhancements are opposed just because they’re novel.  You think that I retain an irrational bias toward the status quo.  In a way, I’m pleading guilty.  But I’m going to say that it’s a rational preference rather than an irrational bias.

Bostrom and Ord leave open the possibility of rational preference for the status quo in their paper.  In their discussion of the famous experiment in which people chose to retain whichever of the chocolate bar or mug that they had first received they allow that people might have formed an emotional bond with the original item.  Emotional bonds are a big part of being human.  You don’t automatically dump your romantic partner because you receive an offer from someone who is objectively better (by common consensus s/he is more attractive, more intelligent, wittier, has more Facebook friends …).   

I think we have this kind of connection with aspects of ourselves that radical enhancement would do away with.  This attachment isn’t fully described in Humanity’s End.  But, (shameless self-promotion coming …) look for more on it in my next book….

Caspar Plomp

Caspar, I agree with almost everything you say.  De Grey has a somewhat simplistic view of how SENS will work.  According to him, therapies that turn old people into young people will sharply reduce medical costs.  Rejuvenated people will stay out of hospital beds.  Instead they’ll generate wealth to pay for SENS.  I really like your suggestion that SENS will involve substantial ongoing maintenance costs.  SENS patients will be like diabetics requiring (very expensive) daily injections.  I think that there’s a general problem of too much optimism from would-be radical enhancers.  They focus too much on ideal outcomes (compare the possibility that SENS rejuvenates and therefore dramatically reduces health costs with the outcome sought by planners of the Iraq war – the overthrow of Saddam Hussein followed by the prompt establishment of a stable democracy).  There’s not enough thought about sub-optimal outcomes (SENS works imperfectly and remains very expensive and socially divisive; the Iraqi people aren’t terrifically happy about being invaded and occupied.)

Laura Pierik

Laura, like you, I’m not keen on the boredom argument.  But I do think that there’s something in the fear line.  It’s really a prediction about how people who’ve done all they can to reduce to zero the risk of death from internal causes will feel about external threats.  I wonder how many of them will think as you do – that it’s the risk of dying that makes life fun.  Anyone who thinks this way probably isn’t making plans to celebrate her 1,000^th birthday!  I find the risk of death from (careful) car driving acceptable, but won’t negligibly senescent people view driving pretty much as we now view medieval jousting – an activity that we used to view as safe enough but now seems hideously reckless?  Wouldn’t a kind of Darwinian selection tend to eliminate risk-takers from the population of the negligibly senescing leaving only the cautious types?  This isn’t to say that you’d be mad to opt for negligible senescence.  But it would be a life very different from the kinds of lives that we currently enjoy.  It’s something for societies to factor in when they consider spending the huge sums of money that SENS requires.

I like your discussion of social inequality.  This is something that de Grey tends to dismiss.  New therapies need to be tested before they’re ready for de Grey’s millionaire benefactors.  Who will test them?  Here’s something I wrote for Slate on the problem of finding willing human guinea pigs for SENS.  

  In 2011 researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Florida discovered that eliminating senescent cells delays aging. Both mice in the picture above are of the same age, the one on the right had its senescent cells removed (image Jan M. van Deursen)

Georgina Kuipers

Georgina, nice account of the process that Kurzweil thinks will take us to super-intelligence.  I think he might want to defend the falsifiability of the law of accelerating returns.  His books contain (tediously) many examples of technologies whose improvement has tracked an exponential path.

I meant my discussion of the possibility of a holism about the mind to be one possibility that would throw out Kurzweil’s timetable – according to him human super-intelligence is imminent.  I was thinking of some ways in which it could take (much) longer than Kurzweil suspects.  I take it that holists can’t just assert that atomists leave stuff out.  Holism might gain credibility at some point in the future when we have a good account of all of the human mind’s parts – its neurons and neuronal maps – and we find that there’s a whole list of mental phenomena about which we remain clueless.  I like the example of George Lucas’s atomistic account of the force.  That’s certainly another way in which the task of describing the human brain well enough to make a synthetic mind might be a harder task that Kurzweil anticipates.

Lars Been 

Hi, Lars.  I’m an academic philosopher so it’s not surprising that I have lots of philosophical beliefs.  But there are relatively few (none?) of them I’d bet my life on.  For example, I’m a strong believer in moral consequentialism but I wouldn’t challenge a philosophical super-intelligence (something like Douglas Adams’ Deep Thought computer) to immediately terminate me if it turned out that consequentialism wasn’t the correct moral theory.

Uploading asks us to stake our lives on the truth of a philosophical proposition – that every aspect of our minds that we value can be realized by a machine.  You might be quite confident about the possibility of computers capable of intentionality and consciousness but still be justifiably cautious about transferring your mind into a computer.  A skeptic about thinking machines would be as unconvinced by the computer learning that you discuss as s/he would be by the message “I have conscious beliefs about the world” displayed on a computer monitor.

You’re right that this won’t bother some people who will just go ahead and upload.  But then there will always be people who do prudentially irrational (i.e. silly) things.  Please don’t do it, Lars!

Post written by Nicholas Agar

Author of Humanity's End (The MIT Press, 2010)

For more information about Nicholas Agar and his writings: www.nicholasagar.com

Opposing Radical Enhancement & the Status Quo Bias

Lifespans of over a thousand years, enhanced levels of perception, never failing memories and IQs that would make Einstein look like a primate—the apparent benefits of radical enhancement are great, and they are many. With the dawn of new enhancement technologies that enable us to augment an increasingly greater number of bodily functions, several scholars have expressed their hope and belief that we will relatively soon be able to artificially improve our intellectual, physical and psychological capacities such that they far exceed the capacities we naturally possess.  Aubrey de Grey, as we have seen, has argued that aging will soon be considered a disease that can be cured. Ray Kurzweil, an expert in artificial intelligence, has predicted that technology will improve at so fast a rate that it is only a brief matter of time before we leave our biological bodies behind entirely and upload ourselves into infinitely intelligent machines. Yet not everyone is as keen as De Grey and Kurzweil to embrace radical enhancement technologies—Nicholas Agar, writer of Humanity’s End, hy we should reject radical  enhancement argues that as soon as we opt to radically enhance ourselves our relation to the world transforms in such a way that we might cease to be human since our experiences and the value we place on them will have transformed beyond recognition (1). Whatever the radically enhanced humans experience and value, he argues, it is not what we experience and value, and therefore not worth pursuing for us regular humans.  Doesn’t Agar, however, by this reasoning betray an irrational disposition towards maintaining the status quo?

Amalgam Comics' Super Soldier (1996). Injected with a 'super soldier' formula an exposed to solar radiation, he holds powers and abilities far beyond those of mortals.

The philosopher Nick Bostrom makes just this case by asserting that most opponents of radical enhancement suffer from a so-called “status quo bias.” In his view, bioconservatives and other sceptics of radical enhancement are only against it because they are irrationally disposed to favour the status quo. As such, they make the error of favouring one alternative over another simply because it preserves things as they are now. Blindly wanting to maintain what we have now in the face of seemingly better alternatives, Bostrom implies, many sceptics of radical enhancement are being irrational in the arguments they make. Hoping to expose this crippling fallacy, he and his colleague Toby Ord designed what they call the reversal test:

“Reversal Test: When a proposal to change a certain parameter is thought to have bad overall consequences, consider a change to the same parameter in the opposite direction. If this is also thought to have bad overall consequences, then the onus is on those who reach these conclusions to explain why our position cannot be improved through changes to this parameter. If they are unable to do so, then we have reason to suspect that they suffer from status quo bias.” (2)

In other words, they make the case that those opponents of radical enhancement who are also against intentionally diminishing our psychological and physical capacities are suspect of suffering from a status quo bias if they cannot prove that these capacities are currently at precisely the right level. As such, they not only attack the arguments of nearly every opponent of radical enhancement, but they also burden these opponents with the task of proving that radical enhancement cannot improve the status quo.

Since there are few opponents of radical enhancement who would consider diminishing our psychological and physical capacities a good thing, they should according to the reversal test prove why these capacities are now at an optimal level. We might, however question whether or not Bostrom provides the persons who take his test with a fair choice. He sketches a picture of radical enhancement as directly opposed to what we might call ‘radical diminishment’ and frames this opposition in such a way that radical diminishment corresponds with something that is morally bad, something that no one in his right mind would choose. According to Bostrom, since no one would want to intentionally diminish his mental or physical capacities, everyone should opt for the other alternative, which, presumably, is located on the other end of the moral spectrum and should be labelled “good”. If, given the choice between these two alternatives, someone refuses to choose either one of them, he or she implicitly chooses for maintaining the status quo and should prove why radical enhancement cannot improve it.

It seems to me, however, that given the choice between two alternatives one of which is demonstrably bad, no one would choose for this obviously bad option—but this is not tantamount to saying that the other option is at all desirable. Even though radical enhancement and radical diminishment stand in direct opposition to each other and radical diminishment is demonstrably bad, this does not mean that radical enhancement is automatically good. Additionally, someone who is against radical enhancement and also against radical diminishment does not implicitly claim that our psychological and physical capacities are precisely at the right level now. Someone may perfectly well be against radical enhancement without saying that we are optimal as we are, for example by claiming that it is not up to us to enhance ourselves, or, like Agar, by claiming that by trying to enhance our current position it may cease to be our position (since we may cease to be human). Neither of these examples amounts to saying that our current cognitive and physical capacities are optimal, yet I am quite sure that neither Agar nor someone who claims that it is not up to us to enhance ourselves would want to artificially diminish these capacities. Certainly, they do not have the burden of proving why radical enhancement cannot improve our current position—the burden to prove why we might benefit from radical enhancement remains with its proponents. This is not to say, however, that opponents like Agar should not respond intelligently to arguments in favour of radical enhancement.

Bostrom’s reversal test, then, is a clever rhetorical device targeted specifically at opponents of radical enhancement by presenting them with an unfair choice between two opposing alternatives one of which is demonstrably bad. Since no one would choose for the demonstrably bad option, Bostrom implies, the other alternative is better and the obvious way to go. If, however, someone is also against this better option, he or she implicitly opts for maintaining the status quo and as such should prove why the other alternative is not better. In reality there are more options. Someone is not either for radical enhancement, for maintaining the status quo or for radical diminishment. Someone may be discontent with his or her mental capacities, against radical enhancement and against radical diminishment without being irrational. The reversal test does not allow for this, and as such does not hold— despite its clever design.

Sources:
1. Nicholas Agar, Humanity’s End, why we should reject radical enhancement (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010).
2. Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord, “The Reversal Test: Eliminating Status Quo Bias in Applied Ethics,” Ethics 116 (2006): pp. 664-65. Cited in Agar, Humanity’s end: p. 136.

Written by Barend de Rooij

2nd year student LUC

The LUC Dean's Masterclass is run each semester for the students who made the honour roll in the previous semester. 

Negligible Senescence and its Implications

• “Is SENS following Gandhi?
• First they ignore you (2000-2002).
• Then they laugh at you (2002-2004).
• Then they oppose you (2005-present).
• Then they say they were always with you.”

Aubrey de Grey

Such was the confidence that Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge gerontologist, concisely displayed on a Powerpoint slide during a 2006 TED talk, in which he mapped out his Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, a project he developed and of which he is Chief Science Officer. The project, that at first sight appears fantastic in several ways, treats ageing as a disease that can, should and will be overcome, the mere prerequisite being that society invests enough. What is more, de Grey asserted elsewhere that due to Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV), “The first 1000-year-old is probably less than 20 years younger than the first 150-year-old.”(1) In other words, those alive today will come to witness a point in time where engineering (a term he prefers over medical research) will be so advanced that every liveable time unit that is the outcome of this engineering will be greater than the time consumed for doing away with the causes of ageing. Because of this increase in time lived, ageing will cease to be, leaving only fatal accidents, murder and suicide as barriers to certainly indefinite life spans. In what follows, I examine SENS as the therapies for negligible senescence it hopes it will offer, and on the basis of this I ask what consequences the characteristics of such therapies might have for the society subjected to SENS as the organisation in control of these therapies.

Try to imagine how we might arrive in a world, or even just one, privileged, community for that matter, where the fruits of years of medical engineering would be able to stop anyone from ageing. How, technically, would we accomplish LEV and go on from there to fully stop ageing? Despite all de Grey's bold confidence, things may turn out to be slightly more difficult than demanding a few round numbers for funding – $100M a year, de Grey asserts us, would result in a 50% chance of therapies being available in 2030 (2). De Grey intends to spend this funding on combating the 'seven deadly things' that cause ageing, one of which he labels as mutations to our DNA or to the structure of proteins that regulate gene expression that cause cancer. Although he himself acknowledges that the SENS response to cancer is extremely speculative, this does not reduce the flaws in de Grey's strategies to combat cancer as a cause of ageing by preventing a single tumour from becoming fatal; Nicholas Agar, in his chapter on SENS in his book Humanity's End, points out that clusters of tumours – an inevitability, since a negligibly senescent person's chances of growing them increase exponentially to 1 – can also be fatal (3). The other six of the seven hurdles SENS wants to take seem equally ambitious: these are the loss of cells that perform important tasks, the accumulation of the wrong kinds of cells in some parts of our bodies, mutations to mitochondrial DNA, the accumulation of various kinds of waste (these are two of the deadly things), and, lastly, extracellular crosslinks as a special kind of extracellular waste. De Grey wants to revolutionise healthcare by transforming research into these respective areas, which now purports to offer sick people only a few more, allegedly miserable, years to live, into engineering that will stop these causes from altogether influencing one's vitality. That is, SENS is confident there are no more than seven causes of ageing – it argues on its website that since scientists have added nothing to this list for 20 years, it must be complete (4). But the website's display of the chronological coming into existence of this list refutes SENS's own argument: between the first cause discovered (extracellular junk, 1907) and the second (cell loss and cell atrophy 1955) there were 48 years – why could there not be remaining one, ten, or a million other causes of ageing undiscovered? Now, in Agar's words, “Can [de Grey] do it?” (5). Reflecting on some serious criticism on SENS from several journals, Agar draws a comparison with similar sentiments of disbelief amidst John F. Kennedy's commitment to send humans to the moon. Given the groundbreaking results required, however, it may be more apt to say that SENS will have to go to the moon seven times.

 robot nurse Riba, designed to aid the Japan's increasing elderly population

This hints at another aspect that merits more consideration than SENS grants it: the finances. De Grey may or may not be right in asserting that developing SENS will be much less costly than healthcare for the current elderly, but what is the value of this comparison (6)? For one, there will certainly be people who do not wish or cannot afford to be part of SENS's project; they will still require regular healthcare. But what is more, the costs of undergoing such treatment and keeping or making it available are set to be fuelled by a significant proportion of the world population that will, as the likelihood of getting certain diseases increases to 1 after one has lived a few hundred years, require perhaps daily medical care, of a nature much more complex than current healthcare. While mass production will make individual treatments more affordable – an argument provided by SENS's website – the scale at which negligibly senescent persons will need them appears neglected; it may too easy to claim, as SENS's website does, that a society with SENS “is likely to be far cheaper” than current healthcare expenses (7). And if indeed the reverse is true, and healthcare costs will be far greater than they are now, where will funding come from – especially when, after having tackled the seven deadly things, SENS has not achieved negligible senescence because there remain other, unknown causes of ageing? This is a speculative but important question; since SENS claims to be committed to improving people's quality of life, it would have to ensure that redirecting cash flows would not adversely affect this quality.

Without doubt it can be said that SENS's therapies, if at some point they will have come into existence, would have their share of potential patients; indeed, with the availability of such therapies the cost of dying becomes so much greater that people might become much more anxious to do everything in order to remain as physically healthy as possible (note that such anxiety potentially may infringe on one's mental health, which is not taken into account by SENS). Medical check-ups and treatment against a thousand ailments might become part of the negligibly senescent person's daily routine. What emerges here is the beginning of a description of a healthcare industry that will physically and mentally dominate the lives of those who have decided they want to live up to their 1,000s. Important questions arise: who, as the bearers of power in such a healthcare system, decide over the lives of these people? Who funds the engineering and what is so inferior to this project that money can be withdrawn from it to feed the ever-more-needy healthcare industry? Will powerful figures in the future healthcare industry (or industries, for that matter) become the effective political heads of communities of negligibly senescent people? De Grey, disappointingly, replaces current biogerontologists by “visionary philanthropists” and assumes that's that (8). One cannot help but wonder what could happen if SENS, as the organisation that might come to control the minds and bodies of all those negligibly senescent, would fall into the wrong hands. It appears, however, that de Grey himself is not remotely concerned with, for example, a democratic system that would replace the malevolent by the genuinely philanthropic – and that he himself knows best which 'visionary philanthropists' will best promote SENS. Thus, objectionably, we would simply have to trust SENS, our lives being in their hands.

Through this exercise of imagination, we have established that SENS, if it were to develop as promised by de Grey, will have profound physical and mental influence over those who undergo its therapies, and will possibly require a sizeable proportion of the economy's cash flows directed towards it. All that appears left for those who want to become negligibly senescent, then, is to trust SENS that it will not abuse its power to, for example, set exorbitant prices on those treatments required to keep alive those for whom the cost of dying is even higher (for after a certain age SENS will make all the difference between a 1,000 year old going to bed with the knowledge that the next day he will still be able to do the toughest physical work and a 1,000 year old who will perish quickly when his body does not receive its necessary treatments). If SENS is going to be fully developed and treatments made available, let us hope that indeed people will say SENS is following Gandhi.

sources:

1   Nicholas Agar, Humanity's End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 102.

2   Aubrey de Grey, “TED 2006 Conference Presentation: Aubrey de Grey,” video posted 2006, <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3847943059984264388> (accessed 11 December, 2011).

3   Agar, Humanity's End, 95.

4   SENS Foundation, “Research Themes,” <http://sens.org/sens-research/research-themes> (accessed 12 December 2011).

5   Agar, Humanity's End, 102.

6   De Grey, “TED 2006 Conference Presentation: Aubrey de Grey.”

7   SENS Foundation, “FAQ,” <http://sens.org/sens-research/faq> (accessed 11 December 2011).

8   De Grey, “TED 2006 Conference Presentation: Aubrey de Grey.”

Written by Caspar Plomp

2nd year student LUC

The LUC Dean's Masterclass is run each semester for the students who made the honour roll in the previous semester.