Slashdot Mirror
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."'"
> "If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality... that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we are at our core,"
Wouldn't altering someone's personality by altering their brain imply that 'we are our brain' (which is of course influenced by chemicals produced in other parts of the body, so in a way one could also say 'we are our bodies'), thus answering this boring question?
...is somebody changed enough to make them a different person?
If somebody elects to have a procedure done to permanently alter the way their brain works, are they still the same person?
I wonder how effective this would be - even after this mood alteration is done, won't the patient still have memories from their past on how they used to act. It's interesting what kind of stress that would put on somebody's psyche to have an abrupt change in how they act, how they think and how a patient would react to the stress.
I wonder if this could be used to correct mental disorders like schizophrenia where medication has been ineffective.
I wonder if this will ever get to the test phase...
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
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.
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.
Whilst AI has produced some fantastic techniques for solving countless problems through the years pretty much everyone in the field accepts that on current computer architecture it's scope is limited. For us to make any advance towards strong AI we'd need much greater computing power and some see biological computing, others see quantum computing as key here.
Perhaps you might just call it a branch of biological computing, but I've thought for a while now and said here a few times that I think realistically what we'll see is that instead of trying to re-create the brain we'll simply start working out how to control the brain and effectively end up programming it. It seems possible that in a few decades we'll be able to grow or harness brain matter for processing at will and this new science of neuroengineering coupled with advanced in biology are I'm sure steps towards that. We will also almost certainly see experts in artificial intelligence from computer science backgrounds involved as well of course and the end result will be convergence between neuroscience, computer science and biology when they realise they all effectively are seeking the same goal in this particular scenario - understanding and perhaps creation of true and customized intelligence.
It's something that sounds like it's from the realm of sci-fi for the most part certainly, but the fact we already are at the stage where we can interface electronics with nervous systems and I don't think it's an unrealistic future.
Of course we'd have a new round of arguments about ethics- if it's intelligent should we be controlling it? countering that, if it's entirely man made then is it really any different to controlling a computer? This is a particularly interesting question should we find out that the brain really isn't much more than an extremely complex computer in the first place, an argument for which there is already a ton of evidence. At that point if there are ethical considerations to be taken into account where do you draw the line in computer complexity before treating it differently? Presumably much of Asimov's ideas can be applied here but is there a difference between organic and electronic ultra intelligent systems?
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
i already addressed your point
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
"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?
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.
All my abilities are either genetic luck of the draw or results of my environment, fatalistic, but rational.
I cannot think as well as some, or socialize as well as others, so this treatment could be argued as therapeutic. All of a sudden many people said "oh its therapeutic, that's OK then". They have some idea of a threshold of what abilities are "natural" and as long as we are bringing people up to that threshold we are fine, but going past it would of course be hubris. I should stop feeding trolls, or else poison the food.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
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.
No, this is environmental stimuli resulting in specific complex chemical changes occurring in the brain including but not limited to serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrin concentrations. The only difference in chronic depression is that these chemical levels are set to feel shitty by default. The only way that an anti-depressant is personality altering would be if you consider normal environmental stimuli to also be personality altering. If you believe this to be the case, then I think you have a very narrow view of what personality is in comparison to the majority of society (no citation). Maybe that narrow view is for the better; I would certainly argue in favor of it. But the majority of society seems to view personality as being very closely associated with defining their concept of "self", no matter how misguided that association is.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
...since without them I couldn't achieve this post.
Radical modifications are certainly different from a good meal or a good night's sleep. That's why school our children, instead of simply feeding them and putting them to bed -- we need to make the radical changes in their mental and emotional structures that allow them to read, to write, to interact successfully with others, and to engage effectively with our society and culture.
If surgical or pharmaceutical enhancements allow us to better control our thought processes, to better perceive and respond to our environment, or to better achieve whatever we individually perceive as "success", please stay the hell out of our way as we take advantage of them.
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?
It seems to me, that's one of the reasons moralists are raising issues. Maybe we should get ready to bow and scrape to the supermen. Maybe that will be good. But certainly don't you think we ought to talk about it a little?
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).
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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).
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Scientology has a Flash ad for their "video channel" on this page about neuroengineering, when they are intensely opposed/mistrustful of psychiatry (another brain-altering profession). Ha.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
> "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.
Screw that!
Just give me a chip I can plug-n-play a yappy personality so I can get with hot chicks like this.
How many dudes have you given the "can't we just be friends line" to, Debra? I got news for you, some people have no problem scrapping parts of their personality. Unload that shit like a deformed leg for a beautiful one grown in a lab, thanksforplayingbie.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This is awesome. I guess it would void the warranty to overclock your brain, but imagine the FPS you could get. Might need some water cooling. Anyways, nice!!
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.
That's the trouble with describing psychoactive drugs. I've found that the answer to anyone who claims 'SSRI make you fake-happy' is that 'No, SSRI take away the fake-sad'. When you get depressed because you can't do anything, and you can't do anything because you are too depressed, that's not a 'real-sad' by their definition. Some people can't grok that loop that depressed people get caught in. Before I started taking them, I thought the same thing. I had reasons to be depressed; not dog died and girlfriend left like ShadesOfBlue said above; and figured that I didn't want to be happy about that situation and that being pissed off and depressed was a valid state of mind. When you can't get out of it, though, having something to temporarily alter the personality to let you escape that can be a good thing.
Having been on them, I would even call the current batches of anti-depressants personality-altering drugs. For me, they got rid of the fear of crowds, but took along most other self preservation instinct as well. I was a completely different person for the time I was on them, as attested to by the few people I knew before, and during, who still talk to me.
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).
That's a good reason to be more than a little heated and hostile. If anyone ever mentions 'fake happiness' to you, feel free to hit them with the fake-sad, or ask them how they think caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, or even chocolate works on the brain.
Mmm, chocolate, now there is a 'fake happy' drug.
I realise arguing against the faceless mods of /. (a duty we've all shouldered from time to time) makes me look like an idiot, but really WTF? Someone posts opposing all barriers to medical research and gets +5, I point out restrictions were put in place due to Nazi atrocities and get called a troll (maybe it's because I used a naughty word?).
Yea I know this is stupid, but I've had a few so what the hey.
Nick
is simple humanism
i support your desire to destroy religious and nationalistic bases for morality
but unless you replace the substandard form of moralities you outline above with another morality of your own choosing, you are a nihilist, and are therefore worse in effect on your world than any of the examples you cite above
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it