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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.
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
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.
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.
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
"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?
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.
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.
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?
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
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.
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.