SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
From The Atlantic:
It is a good question, but I was a little surprised to see it as the title of a research paper in a medical journal: “How Happy Is Too Happy?”
Yet there it was in a publication from 2012. The article was grappling with the issue of how we should deal with the possibility of manipulating people’s moods and feelings of happiness through brain stimulation. If you have direct access to the reward system and can turn the feeling of euphoria up or down, who decides what the level should be? The doctors or the person whose brain is on the line?
The authors were asking this question because of a patient who wanted to decide the matter for himself: a 33-year-old German man who had been suffering for many years from severe OCD and generalized anxiety syndrome. A few years earlier, his doctors had implanted electrodes in a central part of his brain’s reward system—namely, the nucleus accumbens. Electrically stimulating the patient’s brain had worked rather well on his symptoms, but now it was time to change the stimulator battery.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @02:36AM (3 children)
Niven covered this in one of the ringworld books. Junkies plugging themselves onto A/C current and stimulating the pleasure center of their brains until they either became vegetables, or simply could no longer feel pleasure anymore, as in Louie's case.
(Score: 3, Informative) by archfeld on Saturday April 28 2018, @02:40AM
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Wireheading [lesswrong.com]
Wireheads
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 3, Interesting) by isj on Saturday April 28 2018, @02:38PM (1 child)
Greg Egan also covered a similar issue in one of his short stories (unfortunately I cannot remember the title):
A man gets a severe brain injury, the doctors repair most of it and install electronics for the rest. The plan is that after a while the electronics can be adjusted so the properly mimic the original parts. Turns out that the destroyed part was the part that controlled likes and dislikes. Tests are run, but all preferences are gone. The man is given control so he can decide. He choses to not go to extremes and puts all settings to neutral except for liking classical music and craving fruit because that seems like sensible choices. Things go fine and nobody suspects that he is different. He meets a woman that would make a good wife so he adjust the settings so he now loves her. Ta-da!
So is there any personality left of him? Is love a choice? Is he even human anymore?
Some people dislike Greg Egan's stories but I think that there are some true gems in his collections.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 28 2018, @03:45PM
Reasons to be cheerful.