The minds of enhanced people

[Rynn]

As someone who has suffered pretty badly with mental health problems I've gone through occasional spurts of reading through psychology and epidemiology papers on the topic. At the moment it seems that the jury is still out on whether or not there is a relationship between IQ and incidence of mental health disorders. Even amongst the papers that report a correlation some show positive and some negative.

It seems like a typically difficult problem to study (or even define) based on the huge amount of variables and difficulty in gathering data. There may be some reporting bias going on in that people are more likely to share stories of "brilliant" people suffering from mental health problems because it fits the cultural narrative. There's also the issue of definitions; IQ isn't the be-all and end-all of intelligence and "mental health" is a class of diseases that can manifest for very different reasons and with very different symptoms. Some studies suggest a link between schizophrenia and creativity, for example, possibly due to an overactive pattern recognition response. Others have found that certain depressive moods lead people to more intelligent work and not-vice-versa.

And of course there's the nature vs nurture problem. There's a tonne of social, cultural and economic factors that can come into play here. Like kids who do better in school being told more frequently by adults "you're really bright, you're going to do great in life" which they then deeply internalised and suffer a constant unconscious anxiety when faced with failure. Speaking of kids whilst it's true their brains aren't fully developed there is a lot of study into the development of altruism and empathy in child psychology. Again the jury is still out but there's some fascinating work showing that young kids innately revert to basic game theory tactics like iterative tit-for-tat, e.g. "He stole our toy yesterday, he can't play with us today" Teenagers are a bit different due to biological and cultural factors again.

Putting that together and focusing on the cultural; we talk a lot about the physical technology of OA but not always the social science. I can't even begin to imagine how good an understanding there could be in the setting for the nature/nurture - psychology relationship. Beyond invasive measures of brain rewrites and stuff like that angelnets could be programmed to ensure that children develop in a way that gives them the best chance of being stable, content, well-adjusted adults. That could lead to all sorts of odd situations, like the angelnet occasionally allowing things to happen that it wouldn't for esoteric reasons of psychological manipulation. Nudging the kids all along.

[Jordanes]

I wrote a short story about early superiors, way back when I first joined the OAUP. The Augmentation Activists were an early group of enhanced humans, who were still struggling with significant problems with augmentation technology as well as their status as proscribed organisation. Eventually the AA became extinct, although their history provided valuable lessons for later, more successful superior clades.

I really enjoyed that story, and always wanted to read more -- what happened to them, how they were defeated/integrated into society (whichever), and what happened to Neptune following that.

[Drashner1]

I wrote a short story about early superiors, way back when I first joined the OAUP. The Augmentation Activists were an early group of enhanced humans, who were still struggling with significant problems with augmentation technology as well as their status as proscribed organisation. Eventually the AA became extinct, although their history provided valuable lessons for later, more successful superior clades.

I really enjoyed that story, and always wanted to read more -- what happened to them, how they were defeated/integrated into society (whichever), and what happened to Neptune following that.

Bumping this since it fell through the cracks on the first post moderation queue.

Sorry for the delay in getting this visible. Your subsequent posts should all just display on the forum immediately.

Todd

[stevebowers]

Thanks!
I've got a deep suspicion about the concept of 'Homo Superior'; at least some of the earliest attempts to create an enhanced race or species of humans are likely to create a privileged, poorly augmented elite who have contempt for unaugmented baselines. The conflicts between such augmented elites and more inclusive superior factions are likely to be just as intense as the conflicts between hu-friendly AI factions and ahumans.

Indeed there is likely to be some overlap between these conflicts - the ahumans might give support to the elitist superiors, and vice versa on occasion. They might also come into conflict with each other fairly frequently, since even elitist superiors might despise or fear the ahumans, and the ahumans would only see the elitists as inadequate tools. Ultimately the Augmentation Activists on Neptune would probably be defeated by a coalition between hu-friendly AIs and baseline-friendly superior factions, although maybe the ahumans were involved as well.