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This page is for discussion of the political, social, and ethical issues surrounding neuro stuff.
Hey folks-
Here’s two really great articles from the recent Economist about
the future of neuroscience and of the imminent commericialization/
transfer to industry of certain neuro developments in the near future.
Both articles are excellent (although perhaps not as technical as the
neurodudes audience) and I recommend both of them highly.
This first one is a quick read and focuses primarily on the
short shrift that neuro-ethics has gotten compared to the ethics of
genetic engineering and cloning. The next one is longer and a better
article in my opinion… it has a lot of examples of what the future of
commerical neuroscience might look like..
''>People already worry about genetics. They should worry about brain science too''
i agree with this as i’m sure y’all know.. we should worry about the sci-fi-ish dangers of neuroscience.
>This relative lack of regulation and oversight has produced a curious result. When it comes to the brain, society now regards the distinction between treatment and enhancement as essentially meaningless. Taking a drug such as Prozac when you are
i don’t think this is really a problem of insufficient thinking about ethics. it is not unethical to allow people to regard drugs like prozac as proper or improper to use in whatever context. that is more of a philosophical, how-do-we-want-society-to-be kind of a choice, not a morality issue.
although i guess “neuro-ethics” people would be the ones to think about it, still i see this sort of question as unrelated to the more pressing dangers of neuro-research (the worst effects are when the target of new neuro technology would not be voluntary; compulsion to use could be imposed by government, criminals, or as a requirement to get a job (like was talked about with Provigil)).
put another way, i would love for all sorts of weird brain modifications and drugs to be available for those willing, as long as no one was ever pressured to use them (i’m not sure this result is possible though…)
>as any other sort of drug. Where drugs to change personality traits were once seen as medicinal fripperies, or enhancements, they are now seen as entitlements.
in addition, since i started studying the brain more, i’ve become much more receptive to the use of these drugs than the general public, including, i suspect, the author of this article. as long as the personality deficit is caused or maintained by an underlying physical problem with the brain, i think it makes sense to treat it with physical intervention (yes, it may become hard soon to separate “hardware” personality problems from “software” problems, but i think this is still a good heuristic). what i have learned by studying neuroscience is that even non-psychotic ailments like depression are often (probably) caused or maintained by physical problems. i think the general public thinks what i used to think, that is, that these “personality”-type problems are not hardware problems, and that only really severely crazy people have something physically wrong with their brain.
Pervasive neurotechnology? Cogniceuticals? Sounds fun…
PS. Hasn’t anyone done the Stroop task in a scanner (fMRI) before? This
seems like an experiment that would’ve been done ages ago… – AnonymousFriend
here’s the single best sentence in this article:
>Tradition has it that they must sit around with their fingers crossed, hoping that a patient will walk through the door sporting a tumour or other injury in a part of the brain whose function is not yet understood.
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>Genetics may yet threaten privacy, kill autonomy, make society homogeneous and gut the concept of human nature. But neuroscience could do all of these things first
yeah. although, as neville pointed out, as long as there are some natural humans running about most bad scenarios are temporary (up to a few hundred years?).
>healthy broth of chemicals. The little girl in the circle, vows her doctor, has a cortex that will one day win her a Nobel prize in physics-if she keeps up the correct regime of “cogniceuticals”, of course.
talk about pressure..
>from that displayed by “normal” individuals. The amygdalas of the depressed hum away for as long as 25 seconds after hearing a depressing word. Those of individuals who have never been depressed
i’m sorry, but the amygdala seems like such an evil, useless suborgan. everytime i hear about it, it is being used for some stupid unpleasant emotion that makes walls between people and does more harm than good in modern society. i would love to see a way to just turn the amygdala off.
>the moment, given their expense, but not unimaginable). An individual who wished to conceal evidence of depression from possible employers would have a much harder time doing so in the face of fMRI, than in the face of a little light form-filling.
yeah, this is something to worry about.
>actually the head, and not merely the brain. In other words, a magnetic scan of a brain also contains enough information about the front of the skull to recreate a recognisable depiction of the scanned subject.
wow, i didn’t know that. this makes me glad that i haven’t got my brain scanned. not that a single study could give away that much about my personality, but you never know what silly ideas society will latch onto in the future. in the future i think i will insist on some agreement that the face region is scrambled if my info is put into any database as a prerequisite for being in any of these.
>of those who fear the advance of neurotechnology is that it will one day be capable of “enhancing” human beings. Some worry that this may blunt the differences between individuals, turning society into one homogeneous mass. Others see the opposite risk-a Gattacesque division between the privileged and the unenhanced.
hmm, interesting question – which one?
>a small lesion on demand. Although nobody is quite sure how it works, there is evidence to suggest that certain kinds of TMS improve performance in memory and reasoning tasks.
that’s interesting. TMS is such a blunt instrument; i guess the only way it could help is by getting the brain to redirect more resources (like attention) to the task. i guess one would assume that it would inhibit inhibition of these tasks.
>The death of free will?
i’m not worried about this one. i think most people’s morality is based on more than their intellect. i don’t think a change in this abstract philosophical issue will suddenly make people abandon their morals.
>moral development. Erik Parens of the Hastings Centre, a think-tank in Garrison, New York, is concerned that it could, for example, “reduce the number of ways acceptable to be a person”.
…
>that he needs to change to be acceptable. If forgetfulness, xenophobia and a whole host of the other eccentricities that make up a person’s character become optional traits rather than inevitable ones, people will be more inclined to discriminate against the bearers of those traits.
this is true and is a danger
>Discoveries in neuroscience may also have profound legal implications. Most courts, for example, accept a claim of insanity as
….
>In Texas, for example, all that a prosecutor needs to demonstrate is that a suspect knew “the difference between right and wrong” at the time of the crime. Even individuals who are clearly insane can be found guilty if they meet this test.
come on people, you don’t need cutting edge neuroscience to know that Texas’s criminal law doesn’t favor the wrongdoer
>the soul.” There is a deal of searching to do yet before human nature gives up its secrets.
this is no protection. we can create powerful ways to modify our minds without knowing exactly how or why they work. powerful neurotechnology will come soon, even though a complete understanding of the brain is probably not near.
i read a review of “Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology
Revolution” by Francis Fukuyama in the Economist (below), and there was one
point that really stood out for me.
If we modify or improve, genetically or through prosthetics, the minds of
humans, one of the biggest dangers is not so much that we empower some “bad
apples” but that we would unexpectedly modify the social or emotional
parameters of the being in such a way that a society of such beings cannot
achieve stability like human civilization can. One could imagine, for example,
creating super-intelligent post-humans with tweaked parameters such that each
being implicitly trusts others less than std. humans do. We might end up with a
collapsed society with all these superintelligent folks living on their own in
the wilderness because they don’t trust anyone. One should note that although
it is obvious that a decrease in trust is bad for society, these effects could
be more “emergent” and harder to predict. For example, what if the new beings
are very verbally smart. Maybe it is implicit is the way we are built that a
society with more verbal smarts leads to more verbal sparring and !
competitive conversations (probably not, just an example though). We wouldn’t
notice anything with a few of these guys around, but once there were a lot of
them, they would tend to waste most of their time talking to each other and
never get anything done. One again, a possible societal collapse.
the point is that even smarter/better individuals could be unable to sustain a
society if their emotions/instincts were screwed up in certain ways. and we
would not be able to predict which things are dangerous to screw with.
Really good mathematical sociology or game theory might be able to predict these
things in advance, but we aren’t that good yet. In addition, on the biological
end, i bet we wouldn’t notice if some modification seredipidously slightly
modified some social parameter also.health insurance blog
These are real dangers, of course, but we don’t need genetic engineering for that. Human brains wire under genetic and environmental stimuli and thus, since culture changes, human brains change (see the famous study comparing the brains of illiterates with people capable of reading). And because global culture is changing at least in certain areas in common directions, a vast number of human brains get wired in a partly similar way - but in certain areas/functions they’re radically different than they were during the vast majority of human evolution. In short, there is no way around that problem - with or without genetic engineering. --DavidAndel
that’s a good point; one would expect that the evolved constraints on wiring would have been evolutionarily “untested” in environments like the present; hence even living in such a different environ could disturb the “social parameters”. – BayleShanks This question was researched in the dissertation.Men Leather Jackets