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."'"

Comments

What about mind altering drugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm bipolar and take lithium to alter the range of moods I experience - does that mean I'm no longer me?

I don't see this as an ethical issue so long as the results are within the limits of what we consider "normal" for human kind. Once we start discussing augmentations to give people x-ray vision, streaming video memory and frickin' lasers attached to their heads then we have an ethical issue.

Re:What about mind altering drugs?

[Kandenshi]

Indeed, such commentary typically makes me rage or sigh with exasperation.

We already have medical interventions that can drastically change what a person acts like, thinks and feels.
We've had brain surgeries ranging from incredibly crude to fairly sophisticated, these affect the brains and hence the minds of patients.

As you said, we have psychoactive drugs that can change the activity(or even structure) of the brain, leading to changes in all sorts of stuff.
Hell, sitting down on a couch and talking about your life can have noticeable and significant changes in neurochemistry and we believe the structure of the brain(eg: changes in hippocampal neurogenesis).

If this is an ethical issue(and broadly speaking I think it is) then the development of this new technology isn't why we should be talking about it. It's the fact that we've been able to do this for millenia and have gotten steadily better and better at it. We should already have good answers to such topics because we've been doing it for ages.

i'll play counterpoint to the inevitable

[circletimessquare]

slashdot chorus of "let us hack away at our bodies, and use all the mind altering substances we want, the enemy here is just narrow-minded busy bodies"

there is a subtle philosophical issue at play here, and the issue is self-perception. for example: you win a chess match, or ace an exam, or win the nobel prize, while under the influence of a concentration enhancing drug, or with some sort of technological mind alteration

the question is: did YOU achieve something, or did your modification achieve something?

what happens is we develop a poverty of self-perception. you begin to think: without various crutches, i cannot achieve what i achieved. such that you have no confidence, and you have no real self-regard. you begin to think of yourself as just a piece of meat channeling some sort of technology or drug. that you yourself are not the key to your own performance

meanwhile, to achieve something without any hackery or artificial boost is to replenish self-regard and confidence

in other words, the issue is not what other people think of you, or what shrill narrow minds think of you. the issue is the damage you do to what you think of yourself with these deep modifications

emphasis: deep modifications. no, sorry, we are most certainly talking about modifications to your performance nothing at all like a good meal or a good night's sleep. some will say radical modifications are no different philosophically from simple sustenance in terms of contributing to performance. but hydrating before an exam is absolutely nothing like taking a cognition enhancer in terms of contributing something to your performance, really

if you really have to ask why, it has to do with what goes on in the mind, with the self, with your core competency, not simple rote material contribution on the periphery of what it takes to pass an exam. for example: you can't complete an exam without a pencil, and you also can't complete an exam without your mind. to think of them as equivalent contributions to your self-regard and your performance is not a valid or logically coherent argument

if you yourself don't even think any of your accomplishments are due to your own innate abilities, then you eventually have no drive in life, you become empty and self-loathing. quality of life and happiness is not defined by pure accomplishment. quality of life is derived from self-regard. it is possible to win at everything, and hate yourself, and be an unhappy person. it is also possible to try hard, do mediocre, but still have high self-consideration

when you achieve something, and you don't even believe it is because of your own abilities, you have developed a hollow, rotten chasm in your ability to enjoy your own life

in this way, a lot of you really need to pause and reconsider cognition enhancers, technological tweaks on mental abilities, and the like. no: it is not no big deal. it is a deeply serious deal, and it has absolutel ynothing to do with judgmental busy bodies, but simply because of subtle philosophical alterations on the idea of "self" that can lead to terrible consequences for your own happiness

Re:i'll play counterpoint to the inevitable

[oldspewey]

there is a subtle philosophical issue at play here

There is another, even less subtle philosophical issue at play here: This sort of neural enhancement will certainly not be free. In fact it will probably be fairly expensive. Assuming the bugs and kinks get worked out at some point in the future and we have the means to double somebody's IQ, who gets access to that treatment?

If it is only available to "those who can afford it" then you are essentially saying that the poor (or the less-than-rich) should be content to live out their lives as second-class citizens - unable to compete intellectually with their wealthy peers they will be forever confined in a sort of intellectual apartheid.

This apartheid will only deepen generation after generation, with the wealthy having access to more and better wet hacks, while the unwealthy fall further behind.

Re:i'll play counterpoint to the inevitable

[oldspewey]

Having a well educated population is an economic advantage, but so are things like access to lifesaving drugs and medical treatments, or even access to something as basic as clean water.

In the case of medicines and health care, the profit motive of the life sci companies means the poor do not get these treatments. Even when the outcome severely debilitates that community's ability to compete economically.

In the case of water, privatization of municipal water supplies in the developing world has shown time and again that those who can't pay will have something as fundamental as access to water cut off. Even when the outcome severely debilitates that community's ability to compete economically.

Why would neural enhancement be any different?

Re:Boring question

[Iyonesco]

I'm sick of reading how any and all work related to human enhancement raises moral and ethical questions. Moralists are the reason medical science is stuck in the stone age since the stop all human experimentation and if you can't experiment you can't progress. This work could vastly enhance peoples' lives in ways such as curing mental conditions like depression to increasing intelligence and dexterity. However, progress will no doubt be stopped while morons who know nothing about the subject debate the moral and ethical issues. There's no way that "rewiring the brain" will be permitted in a Luddite society like ours where we still need to debate what human rights should be given to a clump of cells.

you can stand in the way of progress

[circletimessquare]

because you are a clueless moron

you can also ask a completely logically valid question about the implications of a given technology

for you to confuse the two motivations makes you just as big as a fool as the busy body morons you detest

really

Re:Whay about psychiatruic drugs?

[DrLang21]

I'm seriously sick and tired of this antiquated view of anti-depressants. They don't alter personality. They alter chemistry. The fact that you have or don't have depression or the fact that you have greater or lesser control of outbursts, etc has nothing to do with a person's personality. If it did, your personality would be different on a day to day basis based on whether or not you're having a good day or a bad day.

Re:Boring question

[Thiez]

You're being extremely vague there. Eating a carrot is harming another life. Unless you reformulate your post to something more concrete, 'because I felt like eating something orange' is a logical justification I can live with.

Re:Boring question

[nobodylocalhost]

Moralists do serve a purpose. What happens then if the said therapy also contains a switch that turns the formerly depressed individuals into fearless mind controlled soldiers? Plenty people in this world would love to have that switch in their hands. In another word, would you like to join the collective?

We do it with drugs, sleep, and food already

[davidwr]

Your attitude and mood are already affected by sleep, food, medicine, and other environmental factors.

Taken over a long time, this defines your personality.

There's a reason grumpy old men become grumpy old men, for most of them it's not because they were born that way.

Direct brain manipulation is just one of many ways to alter a personality.

Re:Whay about psychiatruic drugs?

[DrLang21]

I think there are several general misconceptions about psychotropic drugs that make describing them as changing personality a very poor choice of words, whether you believe it to be technically accurate or not. First and foremost is that almost every person I talk to about psychotropic drugs completely misunderstands how they work. They believe that anti-depressants make you happy, resulting in such misinformed beliefs in things like "fake happiness". And not just with anti-depressants. These beliefs follow for every psychotropic drug that has ever come up in conversation with me including such straightforward things like amphetamines. Many people have expressed concern to me that psychotropic drugs change your personality, and thereby change who you are as a person. And that's just rubbish. As someone else mentioned in here, our current understanding of personality can only account for about 10% of the variation, which basically means that we don't know anything about personality, and can't at all be defined by some form of look-up table.

Sorry, I came into this a little heated. I have just had way too many friends ostracized and admonished for using drugs to treat conditions like depression, chronic anxiety, and ADD. In addition, I have lost friends who refused to consider treatment for problems based on the idea that drugs would change who they are, rather than on a preference for more traditional treatment (which they still refused).