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Inside the New Science of Neuroengineering
palegray.net writes "Wired brings us a look into the world of neuroengineering, the science of hacking the brain to improve its function. Dr. Ed Boyden is the director of MIT's Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, focusing on innovative methods of physically altering neuroanatomy for various purposes. As useful as discoveries in the field may be, the work certainly raises moral and ethical questions. From the article: '"If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality... that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we are at our core," says Dr. Debra Matthews
of The Berman Institute of Bioethics. "We place ourselves in the mind and therefore the brain. (Mood-altering surgery) feels like fundamentally modifying who a person is."'"
Most still apply Cartesian dualism (mind and brain as separate phenomena) to the brain. This error has propagated from Decartes' own self-admitted fear of The Church. He feared being persecuted as was Galileo unless he offered a sacrosanct seat for the soul. Scientifically he had no such leanings. Nor should we now, with our understanding of dynamics in complex systems. (Not to say we understand the complex system of the brain -- we don't -- but we know better why we don't.) It is probably best to consider mind in terms of process rather than object ("the" mind). More simply, "Brain is a noun, mind is a verb. Mind is what brain does." (Karl Pribram)
The subjects under consideration in TFA are no more engineering than bashing millions of atomic particles together in an accelerator is quantum engineering. Compared to the subtle and highly interdependent Hebbian cellular assemblies where processing occurs, they are massive invasive assaults.
To consider (as per the example) changes in personality only in terms of electrical and surgical interventions exemplifies the engineering slant and belies the lack of understanding of the neuro-. Changes in personality also occur due to chemical (including dietary) influences, as well as environmental factors during (life-long) development, not to mention social and other learning factors. If the ethical questions are regarding "self" and its generation, all must be considered. Thus these should not be considered (and are not) new questions for bioethics. Given the lack of subtlety of the interventions discussed, they should hardly even be grounds for considering a new outlook on the questions.
Changes in personality are probably the worst example to use. Our best understanding of personality is based on statistical correlations of test answers, self-reports and observations by trained and familiar observers, the best of which reach r=0.3 (30% correlation). That means they can explain less than 10% (for r=0.3, r^2=0.09) of the variance in the observations. Leaving 90% of the variance unexplained means you've said almost nothing useful. Since much of basic personality theory statistics are based on subjective consideration of the data ("trained" judgement in how much to rotate axis of plotted data to maximize the results) as well as subjective judgement of test results themselves (ie. inkblot test scoring) we're probably explaining for closer to 0% of the variance. Any results, then, are as illusory as personality itself.
That last statement is ironic -- an anti-truism. Despite the failure of science (especially statistics) to prove the existence of personality and its components, we continue to exhibit them. The failure is probably in our understanding and the language thereof. That being said, what was said regarding personality in TFA probably shouldn't have been either because despite the consensual agreement of its existence, we don't know much at all about what we're talking about.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This concept has been a real-life concern for many years already. Some autistics fear the consequences of "curing" autism. They have a rather angry relationship with groups like Cure Autism Now. These activists feel that the only way to offer such a cure would be to erase the person that now exists in their body. This dilemma was well presented in 2001 in the book "The Speed of Dark" by Elizabeth Moon.
Some would argue that the idea of innate abilities in the dualistic way you've put it is a silly idea to begin with. Learning something new changes your abilities. Innate abilities seem just like an arbitrary starting point. I'm ADDish, so I sometimes take dexamphetamine. I don't feel the help I've had from this has made my achievements hollow at all, as it doesn't give me abilities, but aids my own development of them. Perhaps it's because I follow Buddhist philosophy and subscribe to the theory of no-self which makes many of your points moot from my point of view.
Instead of using direct electrical stimulation to stimulate the brain, he uses virally-transcoded neurons to respond to different wavelengths of light....then pipes a fiber optic cable into a mouse brain. To do what? To make it run in circles.
A quick pubmed search led me to this article, which Boyden was an author on http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=17483470
From the intro:
In other words, the old way damages the cells and could produce artifacts, and the new way additionally allows for better understanding of the circuitry. And that's not all...
From the abstract:
Better resolution as well I guess.
You really can't judge research by blurby articles published in non-scientific journals, (which kind of seems to be what you're doing, maybe not). They don't seem to be doing this with the goal of "making the mouse run in circles," that was just what the journalist got out of it and thought would be interesting to his readers. In fact, they may have explained the full relevance of their work to the writer, who didn't understand any of it and instead wrote about what he did understand: mice with freaking lasers in their heads.
Note that having skimmed the paper and working in a somewhat related field, I'm not entirely clear on what's going on with this researcher. Then again, I didn't try to write an article about it...