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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."'"
It is an interesting take on an old technique. 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.
It's a proof of technology, but nothing more. Engineering the brain would imply we understand how it works, which, more or less, we still don't. Not really at a cellular level, not really at a systems level, not even really at a gross level either. We know an order of magnitude more than we did even a decade ago, but we are no closer to altering behavior than we were when the lobotomy was invented...the first 'neuroengineering'.
I think it is much more likely that we will first have engineered modules, either synthetic neuronal or otherwise, that will process independently and then 'plug into' our pre-existing sensory input pathways, rather than direct brain modification.
Do you drink coffee? Use a computer/calculator? As technology increases there will be new ways to enhance the human body and mind. It's foolish to restrict it to adults who want it. Busy-bodies can mind their own bodies. Just not mine.
"If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality... that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we are at our core,"
Really?
If we drug up someone so as to flatten their emotional responses, don't we change their Neuroticism level (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits)? Is that not changing their personality?
We probably don't want to do that for its own sake, but suppose it happens as a side-effect.
How's this different?
Without mind altering medication I'd be unable to function half as well as I do now. I know that my achievements are my own but that without my drugs (my modifications) I'd have been unable to make those achievements yet I have no issues with self confidence, self worth or anything like that.
If my drugs allowed me to achieve things that would otherwise be impossible for any (not just me) person to achieve then I might start to have issues but I'm not even certain about that. I'm sure there are world record holding athletes on performance enhancing drugs that have none of these issues.
Step 1 - introduce Stranger A to your friend Alice, when Alice is having a bad day.
Step 2 - introduce Stranger B to your friend Alice, when Alice is having a good day.
Step 3 - ask Strangers A and B to describe Alice's personality. Ding ding ding! They describe different personalities.
But wait, you say, one person's description based on purposely limited evidence is not a complete picture of Alice's personality, the old 3-blind-men-feeling-an-elephant-and-describing-it problem. Indeed this is true. A complete picture of someone's personality would account for the variation in their behaviors, as well as the distribution of those various modes, and anti-depressants could clearly alter that distribution.
If anti-depressants perceptibly alter one's distribution of behavior, I see no reason to say they don't alter one's personality. Of course, it's conceivable someone could feel better internally but not act any different, but that doesn't seem to be what you're saying. You seem to be saying that different behavior != different personality, and I'm asking, well why not?
One could point out that situations affect behavior without affecting personality. If your dog died, you lost your wallet, broke a bone, and your girl-friend broke up with you in the span of a couple weeks, you'd probably be feeling pretty shitty in a way that would affect your behavior. However, this kind of feeling-shitty, unlike with depression, is directly caused by shitty-stimuli and leads to feeling-shitty-behavior. If it were the environmental stimuli of taking anti-depressants that directly lead to more-optimistic-personality-behavior, then I would counter that taking the placebo would provide the exact same environmental stimuli, and hence should lead to the same behavioral changes. However, it doesn't, so I don't think it's unfair to label an anti-depressant as possibly personality-altering.
I would certainly agree this is largely semantics, and that the shitty feelings, whatever the cause, are complex chemical responses.
However, is personality also not a chemical thing? Isn't an addictive personality due to an unusual dopamine response (can't remember whether it's signal or receptor, and over or under active, but that's immaterial here)? Are there not chemical bases behind aggressive, nurturing, apathetic personalities?
My point was not that these aren't chemical things, but rather, everything is chemistry, so I'm just trying to apply labels to certain parts of chemistry so that they line as consistently as possible with normal language use.
While the general population may not articulate it as such, I'd say in general usage personality is something of a look-up table for how a given individual will respond to situations whereas "self" is the qualia of self-awareness and experience. For example, your personality describes whether you'll stay calm and collected or freak out when thrust into a new situation, whether you'll take charge or sit back when a power vacuum arises, or whether you'll sit in the corner or strike out and meet people at a party (many more possible examples, not all based on dominance). Self is that gooey, even more ill-defined subject that philosophers are always going on about (which I happen to think boils down to information processing structures in those vast chemical reactions, but that is another discussion).
Every human (who lives long enough) will go through puberty. Not every human will be able to afford 'enhancements.' So, should we build a society with 2 classes of humankind?... don't you think we ought to talk about it a little?
Given that we already have disparities among many lines, healthcare being one of them, I think we have sufficently covered it here just now.
These are not superman enhancements, it's still at the question asking phase. We're not using this to make people or even rats smarter. And I have to think even if we do manage that, how would that be different than what we have now? You can't tell me that a refugee in a 3rd world country is on equal footing in almost any respect to your average CEO here. If he has a machine rigged into his head to cure his depression instantly, that won't change things significantly. Heck, if we make him smarter, he might see the problems with such inequity and may change things for the better. Unlikely, but the bottom line is that this is far from real right now and wouldn't seem to be a unique problem anyway.