Big Pharma is connected with Defense, which is where all money goes. No new health care system will be devised that lowers the amount of money that can be channeled into Big Pharma, because of the weapons (both offensive and defensive) it will have to produce regarding the human mind and stem cells in the very near future.
The U.S. economy depends on continual warfare now, which means money goes to any kind of weapon production–in this case, drugs or stem cell-related products, that could be more devastating than nuclear weapons. That is why we will not have single-payor or “government-payor” care anytime soon. This is a hot area because of recent discoveries in neuroscience. Check out Thomas Metzinger’s “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self,” (Basic Books, 2009):
When certain processing stages are elevated to the level of conscious experience and bound into the self-model active in your brain, they become available for ALL your mental capacities. Now you experience them as your OWN thoughts or urges to act-as properties that BELONG to you. They appear spontaneous because they are the first link in the chain to cross the border from unconscious to conscious brain processes; you have the IMPRESSION that they appeared in your mind “out of the blue,” so to speak. The unconscious precursor is invisible, but the link exists. The fact that the conscious experience is just a SLIVER of the process in the brain, and since THIS fact does NOT appear to us, we have the robust experience of being able to spontaneously initiate causal chains. This is the appearance of an agent. The brain is blind to its own inner workings.
The science of the mind is now beginning to reintroduce those hidden facts into our ego tunnels. There will be a CONFLICT between the biological reality tunnel in our heads and the neuroscientific image of humankind, and many people sense that this image might present a danger to our mental health. Metzinger goes on to write, “I think the irritation and deep sense of resentment surrounding debates on the freedom of the will have little to do with the actual options on the table. These reactions have to do with the perfectly sensible INTUITION that certain types of answers will not only be emotionally disturbing, but ultimately impossible to integrate into our conscious self-models.
The idea of free will does not exist in our minds alone-it is also a social institution. It is a window connecting us with social practice around us. The assumption that something like free agency exists is a concept fundamental to our legal system and the rules governing societies-rules built on accountability and guilt. These rules are mirrored deep in the structure of our self-model and this incessant mirroring, created complex social networks. If one day, we must tell an entirely different story about what human will is, this will affect our societies in an unprecedented way. For example, it would be meaningless to punish people (as opposed to rehabilitating them). RETRIBUTION would then appear to be a STONE-AGE concept, something we inherited from animals.
When neuroscience discovers the sufficient neural correlates for willing, desiring, and executing an action, we will be able to cause, amplify and modulate the conscious experience of will. It will become clear that the ACTUAL causes of our actions often have very little to do with what the conscious self tells us.
We now have an information jungle that is increasing each day. It already is reconfiguring our brain. Perhaps our body perception will change as we learn to control multiple avatars in multiple virtual realities, embedding our conscious self into entirely new kinds of sensorimotor loops. A growing number of social interactions may be avatar-to-avatar and we already know that social interactions in cyberspace increase the sense of presence more strongly than higher-resolution graphics ever could. We may finally come to understand what a lot of our conscious social life has been all along–an interaction between images, a highly mediated process in which mental MODELS of persons begin to causally influence one another.
We already use the the Internet as part of our self-model. We use it for external memory storage, as a cognitive prosthesis and for emotional autoregulation. We are learning to multitask, our attention span is shorter and our social relations have a disembodied character.
A related problem is management of our attention. The ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings to those of others was a naturally evolved feature of the human brain. Attention is a finite commodity. Our brains can generate only a limited amount of attention each day.
“The advertisement and entertainment industries are attacking our foundations of experience and trying to rob us of our scarce attention. New insights into the human mind by cognitive and brain science created a new field called neuromarketing-and it has become one of the ugly new buzzwords. If I am right that consciousness is the space of attentional agency and if it is also true that the experience of controlling and sustaining your focus of attention is one of the deeper layers of phenomenal (experience) selfhood, then we are witnessing not only an organized attack on the space of consciousness per se, but a form of depersonalization,” Metzinger wrote.
New media may create a new form of waking consciousness that resembles weakly subjective states-a mixture of dreaming, dementia, intoxication and infantilization.
Lives can be ruined because we have not done our homework. The price of denial may rise. Many new psychoactive substances of the hallucinogen-type-such as 2C-B (“Venus” or “Nexus”) or 2C-T-7 (Blue Mystic” or “T7″) are on the illegal market without any clinical testing; their numbers will continue to increase.
And that’s just the old problems stemming from the homework we never did. In our ultrafast, ever more competitive and RUTHLESS modern societies, very few people are seeking a deeper spiritual experience. They want alertness, concentration, emotional stability, and charisma-things that lead to success. In the rich societies of the world, people are growing older than ever before-and they want not just quantity but QUALITY of life.
BIG PHARMA knows this. Everybody has heard of modafinil, and perhaps that is already has been with us in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars; but there are at least 40 new molecules in the pipeline. The technology is not going away.
Big Pharma, circumventing the border between legal and illegal substances, is quietly developing new compounds; they know that cognitive enhancers will reap hefty future profits from “nonmedical use.” For instance, Cephalon, maker of modafinil has said that 90 percent of prescriptions currently are for off-label used. The spread of Internet pharmacies has given them new ways for distribution and new tools for mass testing potential long-term effects.
Modern neuro-ethics will have to create a new approach to drug policy: The key question is: Which brain states should be legal?