This sounds kind of in line with the theory that drugs are kind of a zero-sum game. You got a lot of speed earlier on and achieved a ton, but then paid for it later on. Kind of like a, "no such thing as a free lunch" economic theory, but for drugs! Not to knock you or your methods, just an observation.
> a no such thing as a free lunch theory, but for drugs
There's some reason to believe this is literally true - and true in the same sense as the economic rule! In this context, it's been nicknamed the Algernon argument. Gwern (of course) has the canonical writeup.[1]
The short version is: "if some chemical change could make us smarter, why wouldn't it already been in place?" Or, framed differently, "why would the brain evolve to benefit from a chemical it doesn't normally have?" This argument doesn't say cognitive performance enhancement is impossible, only that there has to be some tradeoff for it or we would have evolved it already. If we're going to get rewarding "brain boosts", we need to find tradeoffs that are more appealing than they were historically.
One simple possibility is this one: we can find chemical supplements that let us rearrange when we're performing well, without net gain. Caffeine is an obvious example: it doesn't actually diminish the value of sleep, but postpones the feeling and helps us manipulate our schedules. Amphetamines might be a more extreme case of the same, 'borrowing' energy more generally and paying for it later.
The other dodges are less relevant here, but a fascinating read if you check the article.
This is a fallacy. There are many things we can accomplish through medicine, or technology more generally, that evolution never could. There are reasons other than it being a net disadvantage that evolution may not have produced something; for example, a particular chemical may not have an easy and cost-effective way to be created in the body (particularly when food was much harder to come by), but be easy enough for us now to synthesise.
Your argument doesn't make sense to me. If the chemical is harder to synthesize, then the receptors could be more sensitive, or bind longer. Why would our bodies evolve to use a messenger molecule that was so prohibitively expensive to make that we couldn't make enough of it?
These drugs are just changing the balances of existing pathways in our brains. They aren't creating new pathways. Either they are causing a substance that your body naturally limits to exist in higher quantities or lower quantities, keeping a messenger molecule from being removed as fast as it would be normally, or removed faster than normal.
So I agree with the parent, it is likely we can choose the tradeoffs, maybe needing to avoid predators and scavenge for food is not our priority anymore and we can turn off some of that so we can think more deeply. But chemically I doubt we can improve ourselves without any drawbacks.
But yes, technology in general, physical things, can have a more pure benefit, and we are already reaping the rewards of those benefits. A new macbook pro is likely to make me more productive while not interfering with my sleep :)
A net benefit is when we can synthesize drugs to allow us to adapt to externalities, which produce fewer side effects than benefits. Vaccines are a net positive in the presence of Polio. It could be argued that stimulants are a net positive in the presence of having to stare at a glowing rectangle and think in abstractions all day.
The Algernon argument is concerned with our inability to make simple, tradeoff free improvements to performance. It says that if you find an improvement, you should be able to explain why it isn't a free lunch. None of those examples make it a fallacy - there's a reason I ended with "The other dodges are less relevant here, but a fascinating read if you check the article."
Gwern outlines three general ways to work around the Algernon rule:
1. We can live under different conditions than evolution prepared us for
2. We can optimize for different goals than evolution rewarded
3. We can make major/multifactor changes unavailable to an local-maximization algorithm.
Condition two is easiest: caffeine is a sensible response to electric lighting, while staying awake long after dark was largely unhelpful in our evolutionary past.
Condition one is sometimes rewarding: piracetam shows efficacy with choline supplements, because we can massively overload a relatively scarce chemical. Other kludges may exist, like boosting immune response by simulating a summer day/night cycle to signal "safe conditions, energy is cheap now".
Condition three is incredibly hard wrt to the brain. It's obvious for the body - eye surgery can improve on 20/20 vision - but I don't know of any drastic better-than-well interventions for the mind.
> why would the brain evolve to benefit from a chemical it doesn't normally have?
You could apply the same logic to Aspirin or any medicine - if reducing swelling was beneficial, why doesn't our body do it for us?
That seems like a misunderstanding of evolution. It's not a master plan driving toward perfection. Our biology is a bag of traits, some of which were useful and some of which just haven't been selected out yet.
I think it applies to aspirin too. You thin your blood, reduce some swelling. You feel better. But maybe you don't heal as quickly. Instead of being immobile and allowing resources to gather at the wound we get back to our work. But our work is leisurely these days and we probably don't need to heal quickly.
Perhaps if you are a runner and you take these seemingly benign medicines to reduce pain and swelling, you end up causing more permanent damage by continuing to run when you should not (I have experienced this).
I think a lot of medicines work by turning off or on processes that are important but inconvenient at the time. Painkillers are probably the best example. We shouldn't take them when we are healthy, it would be dangerous. Other medicines, such as antibiotics, work by killing pathogens directly and don't affect our bodies like the drugs in this discussion.
It's I suppose possible to hit a simple optimization evolution hasn't found yet, but that's rarer than people seem to think. The major examples we have are either things which evolution lacks the tools for (e.g. mechanical prosthetics) or major biological leaps (e.g. your antibiotic example).
The things that look quick and easy like "eat some willow bark extract" have tradeoffs, even when they aren't obvious. Taking 'painkillers' to the extreme - morphine - makes it especially obvious. It's generally a terrible idea unless you've recognized that there's a problem and gotten someone else to take care of keeping you healthy while you're out of commission.
Could it be that one reason we use chemicals to "enhance" our brains is because we are living in ways we aren't intended to live? Human beings aren't made to sit in front of a screen for 16 hours a day. We probably shouldn't be as isolated as we can get, we shouldn't be living the way we live (in crowded cities, say, disconnected from family or community, doing one thing--coding, for example--for 10 hours at a time, etc.)Does that makes sense to anyone?
I instinctively like these arguments but I think we should be careful about indulging them. A big part of the human animals biological advantage is just how damn versatile it is. The range of diets, climates, and lifestyles which we tolerate is vast, compared to other animals. Different permutations may produce different outcomes in terms of happiness, health/longevity, and so on, but I doubt that you could find some particular permutation that is "the right one."
There is one version of this idea that I like though, which is that I doubt that we're built for 8+ hours a day of intense abstract reasoning, which seems to be what the modern information economy demands of those aspiring to a middle class or better existence. The vast bulk of humanity did not earn their daily bread this way for most of human history, so I don't think our brains are adapted for "abstract reasoning above all else."
Nor for non-movement and staring at a glowing rectangle all day while doing the intense abstract reasoning. We have all sorts of natural mechanisms in our bodies to produce reward chemicals that are not used at all in our lifestyles.
I don't think this type of thinking is very productive - it's a romanticization of an ancestral past. The ancestral environment is useful for context for why things are the way they are, but it tells us nothing about the future. We can point back to the habits and lifestyles of the past and imagine cargo-culting their behavior will grant us the outcomes we prefer, but there's no understanding in it. Various communities even implement this, with varying success - see the Amish or Mormons.
As an aside, drug use was extremely common among indigenous peoples all across the world. I don't even think this naturalism fallacy supports these particular claims.
I think it depends on exactly how the question is framed, yes.
It's very useful to recognize when we aren't 'made' for something, because it implies we can get benefits from either avoiding it or supplementing our performance at the task. When we are "made for" a task, like walking for long periods or throwing objects with good aim, it's tough to improve on human baseline. (At least, not without serious side effects. There's a reason drugs to boost strength and physical endurance tend to be risky.)
But that distinction has to be kept separate from a values judgement. As I mentioned in another comment, "reading a good book" is something I'm not evolved to do. That might mean I should be prepared for challenges with the task (e.g. back pain if I sit for too long), but it's unrelated to whether I want to keep doing it.
The 'ancestral environment' stuff is likely to be easy or optimized-for, but that's not the same as being a better way to live.
There shouldn't be any easy way to improve on what evolution tried to do, because evolution would have done it. But there can certainly be ways to optimize for things evolution didn't try to do, like preparing us to do symbolic logic for 40 hours a week or stay up well past dark. And there can be ways to optimize for goals evolution didn't/couldn't reward, like "never having kids and staying healthy until age 90".
I do think there's risk in blurring the moral point with the practical one, though. I'm not particularly evolved for reading books, but it's something I enjoy and I want 'hacks' to do it better - whether that's reading glasses or a cup of coffee. I don't like commuting while tired or being stationary for hours on end, and if I had free choice I'd stop doing those things instead of hacking myself to be better at them.
But in "enhancement" terms, they both count as "doing a thing I wasn't made to do" regardless of whether I want to keep doing them.
Our brains exist as an adaption to allow us to survive long enough to procreate. We did not evolve a brain to work harder, smarter or faster. The fitness function for evolution is not intelligence, it is survival and procreation.
It does not follow that evolution would maximize intelligence or performance.
Human intelligence exists as a by-product of many cumulative adaptions for survival.
One of the obvious ones is consuming excessive amounts of nutrients scarce in the ancestral environment. Like, you evolved in a place where you can't just buy Choline supplements, so "you're smarter but run out of Choline" isn't a thing that comes about.
Yeah, certainly true. I wish I had summarized more of Gwern's take, because he goes into piracetam + choline as a specific example. His take is that it doesn't violate the rule, but provides a case of a changing environment - burning choline for minor cognitive improvements is a vastly better deal than it was in a choline-scarce environment.
> "why would the brain evolve to benefit from a chemical it doesn't normally have?"
That's the thing, that's not how it works
The brain didn't evolve to be affected by substances unknown to it, it's plants that evolved substances that have CNS effects. (Though the body did evolve to depend on a lot of external substances - be that calorie and protein sources or vitamins)
Nicotine is literally a pesticide (and yes, people do use it as such in some occasions). Not sure how other substances evolved though (I think caffeine made the coffee seeds travel further)
I look at it as a loan. You're borrowing a little of tomorrow's (good mood, productivity, energy, etc. etc. depending on which drug it is) to use today, but you'll eventually have to pay it back with interest.
The analogy I like to use is "buying on credit" - you can choose the time and place of your enhanced productivity, but you pay for it later, with interest. You're not actually creating any new productivity, just shifting it around.
Caffeine certainly is a good, tame example. It's chemical effect is basically to block your brain from fatigue signals, perhaps analogous to anesthetic that blocks pain signals. It doesn't actually prevent fatigue, just as anesthetic doesn't actually prevent injury or damage. You are still burning through energy and accumulating sleep debt like anyone else.
I think it is more a sprint vs a marathon. Many people don't ease into drug usage nor do they try and follow any way to actually tell if they are getting any gains from it. We see this in all aspects of life specially in sports where athletes might actually hurt their performance because they start doing something like some oddball workout that is suppose to improve you or by working out more to try and get gains. Without data, numbers, and a third party watching you then you have no sure fire way to tell if you gaining anything from drugs. People abuse them hard starting out thinking they are a silver bullet, then burn out fast.
