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the center for ethics in science and technology, based out of ucsd, has declared this week “neuroethics week.” each day, a high-profile speaker and expert panel discuss a subfield relevant to neuroscience and ethics. monday, hank greely, a law prof at stanford, gave a keynote lecture “A Revolution in Neuroscience: Challenges for Society.” below are some notes from the lecture… read at your own risk! (disclaimer: these don’t necessarily reflect the views of bosci).

if these are issues you’re interested in, come to a coffee hour i’m co-hosting this saturday afternoon; feel free to email me for details.

1. ethical issues in neuroscience research
• as many as 40% of participants in research fMRI scans (typically undergrads) have some abnormality. what should the researcher do?
• identification of anonymous research subjects (a problem similar to those in genetics)
• dual use problems. similar to biological warfare today, or nuclear physics of fifty years ago. e.g. monkey stimulation of thalamus can keep people awake. this could be used by our military, or others.
2. the neuroscience of ethics
• the trolley problem: flipping a switch to kill five instead of 20 people, throwing someone in the way to kill just one person instead of 20 people (researchers like josh greene).
• by extension, neuroeconomics and advertising
3. ethical, legal, social implications of neuro applications
• prediction. discrimination for insurance. examples:
• similar to the genetics diagnosis problem (e.g. huntington’s disease); amyloid plaques (indirectly visible by PET or MRI) to compute likelihood of dementia onset (long-term studies are underway).
• schizophrenia
• psychopaths, greater likelihood in crime (1-2% in general population, 30-70% of incarcerated population)
• mind-reading.
• currently, we can read whether someone is looking at a face or a house (fusiform face area).
• we can detect the feeling of pain by fMRI (useful for law and insurance purposes), and could examine the pain associated with lethal injection.
• lie detection. so far, 12 peer-reviewed papers. two companies are doing it: no-lie mri, based in san diego. the relevant research found 80% accuracy. much of this is funded by the intelligence community (darpa, cia, homeland security).
• competence, consciousness, and responsibility
• when a crime is committed, to what extent is he culpable. put differently, is there free will?
• is an elderly person in a capable state to sign a will?
• vegetative states. in one of 13 cases, a patient showed all the same brain activity patterns that a normal person would. what should be done in this case?
• treatment
• try to distinguish the good from the bad. we have a track record of mistakes (the inventor of the frontal lobotomy received a nobel prize long before the technique was discredited.
• a cocaine effects-blocker. should it be mandatory?
• enhancement
• making people “better than healthy”. improved memories.
• brain-computer interfaces (as for quadriplegics, or the cochlear implant, which has been around for 25 years. see michael chorost)
• beta blockers to prevent deep emotions following traumatic stress. it’s already being used in the military and for rape victims.

this neuroethics week is essential to educate the public not on the answers, or even the questions (which depend on the technology development), but on the class of questions we do and will face.

(and an important point during the discussion)
how good must a test be to use it (false positives and and negatives)? should this be administered by FDA?

ucsd’s guardian just ran an article on religion profs who strive and struggle to maintain objectivity in teaching. in response i wrote the following letter to the editor (link added when published, Oct 12).

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Dear Editor,

I enjoyed Ms. Buchanan’s carefully written Teacher Don’t Preach in Monday’s Guardian; I’d like to encourage more articles on the topic by pointing out two areas to explore. First, the author assumed that objectivity is possible in academics. In reality, this proposition has been actively debated among philosophers for a while. Rutgers philosopher Roy Clouser, in his lively book The Myth of Religious Neutrality (U Notre Dame Press, 2001), finds ‘religious beliefs’ in mathematics and the natural sciences after rigorously defining that phrase. UCSD Prof. Rahimi’s comment on the diversity of his religious beliefs affirms Clouser’s definition: “my religious beliefs range from a humanistic conception of moral conduct to ritually watching ‘Real Time’[…] I never separate my beliefs from my lectures.” Second, and in keeping with this broad understanding of religious conviction, Ms. Buchanan did not explore the extent to which religious beliefs permeate the science and philosophy lecture halls. To put it bluntly, if Daniel Dennett and UCSD Prof. Patricia Churchland don’t have strong religious convictions that influence their lectures and their work, no one does.

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hopefully, churchland won’t blacklist me. (picture credit, kedar reddy/guardian)

a good friend of mine, an intellectual disciple of durkheim and a fellow electrophysiologist, recently posed to me the following question: if the bible really is the word of God, why isn’t it written like wittgenstein? in other words, why isn’t the bible a series of explicit propositions, conditionals, and conclusions?

i think there are lots of decent answers to this question: stylistically, not everybody likes Wittgenstein, and historically, the narrative tradition hadn’t developed the mid-1900s minimalist, strunk&white, expositional style during the eras when the bible was written. but three other reasons are much more important.

1. there is power in the biblical narrative because it communicates truth historically, not propositionally. our problem is not ignorance (if you’ve read any of the bible, you probably know the law); it is hardness of heart. (nod to james lee)

2. christianity is education-independent; so are stories. to appreciate wittgenstein requires some degree of intelligence, or at the very least, rich parents to send you to a decent college. but historical narrative transcends intellectual and educational boundaries. stories are universal.

3. propositional logic, when applied to a moral framework, can still be twisted (nod to darren hsiung). for evidence, though it doesn’t quite fit the bill, consider the american constitution, which despite its original minimalist clarity, is probably among the most argued documents of all time.

ramachandran, director of ucsd’s center for brain and cognition, tells seed magazine about his view of consciousness. not much new here, but i really liked the graphic (credit: dave casey).

he says that we need to be approaching the qualia problem from both the reductionistic (how do neurons create awareness of sensations?) and hippie-istic (how does self arise from qualia, maaan?). to him, you can’t get one without the other.

i guess we’ll see… but will we, really?

while stanford researcher bill newsome has been talking about this for a while, he recently made public his desire to have electrodes implanted in his own brain. he wants to know the conscious experience of having (read: ‘what it’s like to have’) one’s visual decision-making affected by electrical stimulation to area MT, which is involved in motion discrimination.

this is a noble or a selfish act, depending on whom you talk to. but that issue aside, i disagree with his fundamental assertion:
“If we understand the system completely (from input to output) at a cellular level, but still do not know exactly what causes conscious mental phenomena, we will have failed.”

sure, it sounds good, but there’s an underlying assumption in his claim, namely, that the source of conscious mental phenomena is knowable by scientific means. let’s unpack that.

1. “knowable” - whatever the causes of conscious mental phenomena, we can know them. determining what is knowable has a long history (try wikipedia’s article on epistemology). many scientists and idealists believe that mental phenomena are identical to physical phenomena (we all know this as the “mind-body problem”). but there are good arguments against this, in my opinion. and, even if you don’t buy my opinion, it’s undeniably an unsolved issue: i’ll give a shiny nickel to the first person who can demonstrate that we humans can, in principle, know all things about mental phenomena.

2. “by scientific means” - whatever the causes of mental phenomena, they can be addressed and answered by the tools of science. this amounts to scientism. simply because science has helped us to answer some questions about how the brain works, we cannot simply assume that it’ll help us answer all of them. oh yeah, and all the remaining questions about the mind. don’t get me wrong, i’m in neuroscience because i think it can help us answer tons of questions… just maybe not all of them.
note that it’s unclear whether bill actually believes this. his interest in doing this experiment suggests that he think that the subjective experience of MT stimulation contains some data that are unmeasurable with traditional scientific tools. or he might just want someone to pay him to shock his own brain.

in the end, what will we learn from bill’s experiment? well, to some extent, the experiment has already been done by penfield in the early 20th century and by many current neurosurgeons. today, recording electrodes are implanted in epileptics’ brains to determine the initiation zones of focal seizures. but these can be modified to stimulate brains. additionally, neurosurgeons push on random brain parts while awake patients describe their subjective experiences. last, noninvasive, temporary brain lesions are possible with a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation… so you can shock the right side of your brain and talk about the experience of losing all muscle control on your left side, as you try to pick yourself up off of the floor. two nickels to the sap who wants to do that experiment.

so what’ll we learn? well, bill might learn something. but will it count as science? and if doesn’t, will it bring us any closer to a fully physicalist understanding of the conscious brain.

in the meantime, it looks like he’s still waiting for the right surgeon: “If the risk of serious postsurgical complications was one in one hundred, I wouldn’t do it. If it was one in one thousand, I would seriously consider doing it. To my chagrin, most surgeons estimate the risk to be somewhere in between my benchmarks.”