Or make your own, and beta test the results on you and your friends. Next download recipes for smart drugs from a vibrant community of bio-hackers. Replace the input material with packets of pre-cursor chemicals (phenethylamine’s a good building block) that you buy semi-legally online. It’s just mainstream fiction with the sell-by date scraped off.) To show what life is like a few years into the designer-drug revolution, I made up a few technologies that are pretty much doable now, chief among them the ChemJet. (If you want to write about the present in a way that won’t feel quaint in ten minutes, write near-future SF. The story takes place in the very near future. And that’s the big idea behind Afterparty. Is he a fat man you’d have to push onto the track yourself, a villain who “deserves it,” or an unsuspecting guy sleeping in his hammock? Because we evolved as social apes, some actions just feel more wrong, even if the moral calculus is the same. The answers people give can vary simply by the story you tell about the singleton who would die. You can pull a lever to divert the trolley onto another track, where a single person is standing. A runaway trolley is coming down the track toward five people. Consider the well-known thought experiment, the Trolley Problem. And Dan Ariely, the guy who wrote Predictably Irrational, can supply plenty of examples of how our “rational” decision-making can be shaped by things as simple as changing the design of a form at the DMV.īut evolution has also shaped our brains to affect the way we make moral decisions. Folks like Daniel Dennett argue that free will is just a feeling of control. It starts with the illusion that there’s a “you” behind your eyes, and independent “self” that has something called free will. Your brain is also lying about the big stuff, the most fundamental aspects of being human. Not just about the small stuff, like when it makes you fall for an optical illusion, messes with your sense of time, or creates a gorilla-size gap in your perception when it’s busy concentrating on something else. Your brain: Is it your friend? Or is it something else entirely - something maybe a little less chummy with you than you thought? Ask Daryl Gregory, because he’s given it some thought (with his brain!!!!) for his newest novel, Afterparty.
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