The Ethics of Imagination: The Space Between Your

Ears

Wrye Sententia, Ph.D.Director, CCLE

Terasem 2006 Neuro-nanotechnology and the

Preservation of Human Consciousness

Ethics without Imagination is Dogma;

Imagination without Ethics is Dangerous.

“It is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored.”

J.G. Ballard (1962)

Empathy vs. Sympathy

Empathy: “The power of projecting one's personality into the object of contemplation" Oxford English Dictionary

“The capacity to understand what another person is experiencing from within the other’s frame of reference” (Gary Bravo 2001)

Sympathy / Sameness

Empathy / Difference

What is Ethics?compassion

fairness honesty respect

responsibility

Institute for Global Ethicshttp://www.globalethics.org/about/faq.htm#whatethics

Virgil Ulam

Ulam’s experiment

Phase1: Basic Health Benefits

Ulam’s experiment

Phase 2: Enhancement

(1985)

“If you're trying to project the long-term future, and what you get sounds like science fiction, you might be wrong. But if it doesn't sound like science fiction, it's definitely wrong.”

Chris Peterson

“For real science to proceed, nanotechnologists ought to distance themselves from the giggle factor”— Steven M. Block (Lecture “What is Nanotechnology,” presented at NIH conference “Nanoscience & Nanotechnology: Shaping Biomedical Research (June 25, 2000)

THE REALITY FACTOR

Phase 3: Conversion

Ulam’s experiment

Phase 3: Conversion

Ulam’s experiment

Joachim Schummer(April 2006)

Neuro-nanofiction: Horror or Harmony?

“Greg Bear’s Blood Music takes the horror of exponentially self-replicating, intelligent nanomachines to its ultimate extreme—the termination of the natural world”—Dan DinelloTechnophobia: Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology (2005)

Lynn Hunt. "The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights," in Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt, and Marilyn Young, eds., Human Rights and Revolutions (Lanham, Md., 2000) 3–17.

Human Rights Narratives in the 18th Century

21st Century Narratives:Inner Space Technologies

Science Fiction; Meditation; Art; Neuropharmaceuticals;

Full-Immersion VR/GamesFuture Brain/Machine Symbiosis

Neuro-nano Interfaces

Accelerating Rights & Ethics

in the 21st Century

Imagination=Neuroethics Cognitive Liberty Cognitive Security

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces theentire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Albert Einstein

QuickTime™ and aSorenson Video decompressorare needed to see this picture.

Nanomandala (UCLA)

wrye@cognitiveliberty.org * www.cognitiveliberty.org

“To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.”

Auguries of Innocence, William Blake