David Pearce – Nootropics & Mood Brightening Interventions – Cognitive Enhancement

What can we do, other than diet, exercices and sleep dicipline to achieve more desirable states of consciousness? Some drugs can be dirty options to some more than others. Evolution designed us to be discontent to motivate us to enable us to be able more effective at spreading our genes.
The most common drugs are not exactly benign, alcohol and cannabis – there are other options.

Further discussion on Nootropics – sometimes are psychostimulants – improving signal to noise ratio. It is good to ask questions about the kind of intelligence you want to enhance.

Drugs that help empathic behavior – David calls this ‘mind reading’ in the interview – not referring to ESP. The spontaneous tendency that most of us have to mentalize – people with autism spectral disorder do not seem to be able to mentalize, or have a strong ability to empathize. The development of empathy helped drive the evolution of human intelligence – increasing raw calculating power at the cost of empathy may be dangerous – full spectrum intelligence enhancement is not something that we can reliably achieve with drugs.

Some people with asperges can be very good at what they do – systematizers and rule followers – they know that other people have minds though they may not spontaneously mentalize . IQ test may be a test of autistic style intelligence disregarding emphatic intelligence.

6th order intentionality is incredibly congnitively demanding – we as humans have achieved cooperative problem solving ability – some animals can achieve 3rd order intentionality. Boosting orders of intentionality may help us to be more emphatically intelligent.

David Pearce will speak at a conference in Melbourne, Australia on Nov 30 – Dec 1 2013
Science, Technology & the Future – By Design : http://scifuture.org

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