Correcting Cognitive Bias with Nanocognition, Machine Ethics Interfaces, and an Ethics of Reality

Along with the potential future possibility of changing our perceptual apparatus through nanocognition (nanorobot-aided cognition), comes an increased awareness of the many ways in which we are currently biased due to evolution and sociality.

There is the level of basic biology where nature’s evolutionary requirements filter, order, and hierarchialize the overwhelming amount of input data before it is routed to our cognitive circuits. Likewise, culture and society put a lens on our perception from an individual and group dynamics perspective in the form of attunement to power relations, social conditioning, status-garnering, mate selection, and gender-performing.

With the creation of machine ethics interfaces, we could have the ability to adjust for these built-in biases. It could be possible to choose different kinds of perceptual realities, and this then implies that there should be a philosophical consideration of an Ethics of Reality. An ethics of reality can address questions like: even if we can obtain access to some sort of objective external reality, is it more ethical to see raw reality the way we do now with evolutionary biases or is it more ethical to see a bias-corrected version? One imaginable result is the construction of a transhumanist viewpoint that it is unethical to experience raw reality because it is inhumane, unproductive, or perceptually harmful.

YouTube Video: Machine Ethics Interfaces

Nanocognition Series:

Ethics of Perception and Nanocognition (Nanorobot-aided Cognition)

Killer Apps of Cognitive Nanorobotics

 

What are Cognitive Nanorobots?

Cognitive nanorobots are an extension of the more familiar idea of medical nanorobots.

Medical nanorobots are a range of medical solutions using nanoscale electronics. Medical nanorobots span the continuum from nanoparticles in current pharmaceutical use that disgorge cargo in cellular destinations per simple onboard logic instructions to optically-stimulated channelrhodopsin proteins for real-time live biological intervention to the more elaborate conceptualization of many species of future medical nanorobots such as respirocytes, clottocytes, vasculoids, and microbivores that could perform a variety of biophysical clean-up, maintenance, and augmentation functions in the body.

In the most basic sense, cognitive nanorobots are the analog to medical nanorobots, nanorobots deployed in the specific context of facilitating, aiding, and improving the processes of cognition like perception and memory, a sort of NanoNeuroProsthetics.

Cognition is just another biological function, a process that can possibly be identified, managed, and ameliorated. Robert Freitas in the Nanomedicine text books has already begun to explore the issue of nanorobot biocompatibility with neural cells, and outlined the different levels of concern and response for them: mechanical, physiological, immunological, cytological, and biochemical.

In summary, one initial way to consider and classify cognitive nanorobots is as a special case of medical nanorobots.

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