Neuroethics and International Biolaw

I’ve noticed everybody has posted answers to the first week session! So, I’m the next one!  I’m going to make comments and try to answer the questions no later than tomorrow.

Before posting my own answers, I think we could now schedule a live session for next sessions. So, I’d like to ask you all to tell me your time zone, so I can schedule a live session using our chat room!

This week, I’m going to write about international law, trying to present the field, especially for those who do not possess a legal background. Some of you are legal scholars or law students and maybe can help me in this task. Maybe my insights will be too based in european (civil law) tradition and I would be glad if our anglo-american friends could express their opinions.

Part II – Legal Concepts

Week 2: Introducing International Law – Concepts and main documents

Objective: Provide a first contact to International Human Rights Law.

Assignments: Write a post entry about international human rights law and its relations to life sciences issues. Visit UNESCO website to learn how Universal Declaration on Bioethics was elaborated.

I’m cathing up… here I come

I haven’t read the literature yet. But I read everything my peers have written sofar. Here is a preliminary answers for the first question of this weeks assignment.

Also, for the gadget friendly,you can see the list of reading on Mendeley here. Everyone can subscribe.

Is it appropriate to start talking about a neurocentric age?

Like Mohammed, I believe this can only be determined in retrospect. Strikingly, Generations of humans before us didn’t even know what the brain was for. Aristotle for example thought the brain’s function was to cool the blood. Considering how little was known about the seat of the mind until fairly recently in history, it doesn’t sound wrong to talk about a “neuroaware” age.

neurocentrism

The reason I might think of this age as neurocentric is probably because I love to think about neuroscience, philosophy of mind and philosophy of neuroscience. I am neurocentric. In other words, interpreting the zeitgeist is always biased by the way the interpreter thinks. Could it be that few really interested people project their neurocentrism on others? Maybe the ones curious about the mind and brain are the ones more vocal about their interest.

I always thought that psychology, how the brain works and all related issues interested every human being. But if that were the case everyone would want to study subjects related to brain and mind. Everyone would read literature about these subjects. This is definitely not the case. People know they have a brain and that alcohol, for instance, changes the way they behave because something in the brain changes. Yet, few people really want to know why they have a mind. Or whether neuroscience could ever be a tool to settle this question. So if the criterion is public awareness, I don’t think we live in a neurocentric age.

If the criterion is epistemic, as Alasdair suggests, we would have to know more than we currently do about the brains functioning. The question I would like to raise is how much knowledge is sufficient? How much do we have to know to talk about a neurocentic age? As mentioned before, we never had as much knowledge about the brain as we do now. What constitutes a “detailed and exploitable understanding of neurology” (Alasdair)? Would we have to solve the hard problem of consciousness?  Because it’s not called the hard problem for nothing Compared to Aristotle we know a lot about our brains, so if this is our criterion I do believe we live in a neurocentric age.

Interestingly, biology in general has received a huge boost in the past decades. Since we came to understand the molecular structure of DNA, thereby uniting several subdisciplines of biology and promoting neo-darwinian theories, much has been published about what life is and how it works. Neuroscience, or lets say neurobiology, is also a subdiscipline of biology. The neuro-movement is therefore part of a more general development in the sciences of life. Biology has developed many great tools to discover physiological processes and the brain is just an organ, albeit a really cool one. So within this meta-discipline, neurobiological advances are advances of biology.

Still, this alone does not explain the interdisciplinary programs springing up in so many research institutes. Neurophilosophy and neuroethics, but even neuromaketing, neurolinguistics, neuroesthetics, neurosociology and neurotheology being examples of this development. There lies explanatory power in neuroscience that many other sciences lack. Scientists of different disciplines have found the brain as the seat of the mind a very compelling idea. By applying neuroscientific methods, using neurophysiological and neuroanatomical terminology and making colorful pictures of the brain with expensive machines, they naturalize their theories. Scientists don’t like words like meaning, love and truth, unless they can show how the pretty picture of a brain looks when the “brain’s owner” thinks about these things. The pretty picture is really about something biological happening in the brain and that, thanks to neurophysiology, is something we can describe in words of physics. No soul, no weird platonic ideas, nothing “unnatural” needed.

We live in a neurocentric age because every science investigating what it means to be human needs a neuro-justification for their research. We don’t believe in love, we believe in hormones, pheromones, mirror neurons and other brain-stuff, in other words things you can touch and/or measure. If understanding the mind means understanding the brain, scientists are all in the translating business.

In conclusion, I do think it is appropriate to start talking about a neurocentric age. But only if the term neurocentrism is used inclusively. Do I mean that everyone is curious about their brains? No. Do I mean that we know loads about our brains? Kinda. Do I mean that in explaining the brain we want to explain everything we want to know about human thought, feelings and behaviour? Definetly, yes. Can we? I don’t think so.

Update: The coolest thing just happened. I researched the mereological fallacy to answer the third question of this week’s assignment when I found a paper called “Love and brain: from mereological fallacy to “folk” neuroimaging”. Isn’t that a coincidence that I used love as an example of what scientists try to naturalize through neuro-talk? Crazy, huh?

My apologies for the delay in posting, but after reading what others had written I decided to incorporate an attempt to comment on what others had written rather than just repeat less eloquently points that others have made.

In reference to the first question I think that it is premature to talk about the neuro-centric age, while the study of neuroscience has made great advances in recent times,  we still have not yet developed a level of understanding that does more than scratch the surface of a detailed understanding of the mind. Although I agree that we are developing a fundamental  recognition of the potential importance of neurological issues I do not think that this alone is enough for us to consider it a “neurocentric” age at this time. For us to really talk of “neurocentrism” would need a much more detailed and exploitable understanding of neurology.

That being said, I agree that there has been a fundamental change in the public perception of neurocentric issues, and that public neuroethics has broadly failed to adequately explore this change. When Kevin talks of the need to educate and inform the public of the “true potential” of neurological issues I found myslef nodding in agreement. For me this is the crucial issue that emerges from the development of neuroscience: While Moreno and others highlighted many potential issues with regard to the ethical uses & exploitation of neurological techniques that do indeed resemble “Kafkaseque nightmares” I think that, at least in countries with strong legal frameworks for the protection of rights, such concerns are not likely to progress into reality.  Perhaps this is an overly optimistic reading of the state of the modern world, but it seems to me that the potential pitfalls  are obvious and malicious enough that at the very least they will be identifed and opposed by a vast majority of those who deal with neuroethics. For me the most disturbing ethical concerns raised by neruoscience are not the bioethical ones (question 2) but those of a public policy and public educational character, the bioethical and philosphical concerns of developing a “truth drug” for example concern me less than the way in which we educate and regulate ourselves about the effectiveness of such a drug. What would be tragic in my view is if neurological developments were to become another DNA evidence or another facebook – a tool we accept purely for its practical advantages without real academic consideration of the public perception of those tools as opposed to the reality of their usage.

Whether “ we are our brains” is a question that others are far more qualified than me to answer; I find the question something of a misnomer in that we have been tying ourselves up in existential knots over the nature of human existence since Aristotle & I doubt we are going to stop any time soon. (Incidentally, one thing I realised when reading others comments and this weeks reading is that my knowledge of philosophy is laughably basic, a philosophy crash course would be a great course for the next session of p2pu – until then I am re-reading russell’s “ a brief history of western philosophy” and hoping to offer more insightful comment in the legal sections of the course). Instead what concerns me more is again the practical implications of our decisions. In our reading the discussion of the legal concepts of duress, provocation and diminished responsibility was concerning, although I do not know how american law addresses these controversial and difficult topics; I felt that the discussion of them within the articles was simplistic and focused more on popular perceptions of the concepts than the legal realities than govern them. Neuroscientists must be as aware of developments in legal understanding of these topics as (some) lawyers are sensitive of scientific developments if we are to produce a coherent and reactive response to our understanding of the human condition.

The final question I feel was already more than adequately answered by others and in the reading that was posted, I would recommend interested readers especially read the article by J Illes and S Bird which gives a good overview of the topic.

I’m soooo sorry. I had to hand in my philosophy paper today and realized a day earlier that I had to rewrite so stuff. Will you still have me if I catch up peers?

Hey, I even brough some muffins to make up for it:

Will you forgive me?

1) & 3)    Is it appropriate to start talking about a neurocentric age? Are we our brains? Are all bioethical issues nothing but neuroethical issues?

In the academic context, whilst a neurocentric focus on ethical issues may indeed be encouraged at our current stage of development and understanding, I would, weary of the typically human “end of history” delusion, be more inclined to call it a neurocentric phase. Whether it will stick or not is another matter. The fact is the same way that neuroscience has come to outweigh many other fields in helping answer questions with ethical implications, such as ‘how do we think?’ and ‘why do we act on certain decisions and not others?’, science may eventually highlight other factors that are equally important in contributing to such answers.

As for attempting to assess trends in popular consciousness, it is my belief that any realistic assessment may only be achieved in retrospect. Such assessments of contemporary and expected future developments lack the foresight to distinguish fad from revolution, regardless of how truly revolutionary the original idea may in fact be. Those of us who rushed to buy first and second generation Minidisc players in the 90s never expected record stores to still sell comparatively large, fingerprint- and scratch-prone, read-only CDs in 2009. The 3DO may well have been a ‘Multimedia Entertainment System’ in the real sense of the phrase, with its capacity to play games, films, music and display digital photos at a time when games consoles were still considered children’s toys, but it took Sony three generations of technology, beginning with audio CDs only, via audio CDs and DVD videos, to finally convince people that using a PlayStation 3 to view web pages whilst listening to mp3s before watching a Blu-ray film wasn’t such a bad idea after all. On another front, we all know people’s aptitude for conjuring up extreme caricatures of concepts and catch phrases otherwise rooted in reality. The Jetsons and countless post-apocalyptic films, as mental creatures of the Space and Atomic Ages respectively, may well in the near future live side by side with the Telepathic Children of Doom of the up and coming Neuro Age. Did Katsuhiro Otomo get a 30 year head start on superbastardising neuroethical concepts in his classic Akira?

As for what we are, I assert that we are not merely our brains. If we managed to successfully remove, say, my brain from my body and attach it instead to, say, a sunflower (considering we’ve already reverse biased the photosynthesis process to in fact deliver oxygen and sugars to my brain as opposed to carbon dioxide and minerals!)… well, for one thing nothing would work. The fact that our brains developed as human brains means they are effectively hotwired to control human arms, legs, hearts and thoughts, etc, and nothing but. But that aside, claiming that a person is nothing more than the sum of their thoughts, mental exercises and brainwaves is to deny, contrary to evidence, that those very mental functions are a product of their genetic material, internal chemical balance, and physical and social circumstance. Significantly, for anyone who has gone through the experience of having to deal with a friend or family member undergoing a bout with delusional mental illness, one of the first experiences one goes through is to exclaim: “they really didn’t sound like themselves… it must be all in their head!”, recognizing the illness as an irregular mental intrusion upon the real person.

Simply based on this premise, the answer to the follow-on question would also be in the negative. However, for the sake of argument, even if I did reach the conclusion that we are indeed our brains, framing it in terms of the assertion that every bioethical issue, from pulling the plug on an iron lung to enforcing targets to tackle global warming, is thus a neuroethical issue would be as relevant and as scientifically (un)interesting as saying that anything as mundane as shining your shoes, or as exciting as getting to know the girl of your dreams, is in fact an issue of cosmology; it all started with the Big Bang, y’see!

2) & 4)   How the emergence of new neurocientific techniques has provoked bioethical issues? How do cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging contribute to neuroethics field?

In this specific context, I would generally say that cognitive neuroscience and modern neuroscientific techniques make more of a contribution to understanding the brain and the wider nervous system, and thus the science of how humans function, whilst the specific technology of brain imagine, despite in turn making contributions to the former, serves the field more fully at the current time in terms of raising mostly hypothetical questions of ethics. The ability of young infants to cognise and react to shapes rapidly increasing in size as perceived approaching objects, and the intrinsic human mental capacity for language or high level abstract maths, as highlighted by Chomsky in Reflections on Language (1975), stand in stark contrast to the Frenchman’s proficiency in French, or the mechanic’s skill using a wrench. Cognitive neuroscience, using modern techniques, recognises the first type as connected to brain structure and the second as a result of environment and conditioning. Recent developments in brain imaging, on the other hand, currently contribute to our Kafkaesque nightmares about Orwellian airport security guards whipping out their handheld mind-reading devices and pointing them at the face of every Mohammed, Abdullah and Osama, in hopes of overhearing thoughts about the next al-Qaeda plot. In this sense, brain imaging is the classic case of neuroscientific technology and techniques provoking neuroethical, and hence more generally bioethical, questions. I.e., in our example, ‘are the security guards being racist?’

Hi everyone!  Great posts. Great answers! Each one of you has raised very interesting points. Ethical theory, definition issues, public awareness, philosophy of mind… As a group, you definitely are foxes and that brings us to the benefits of a peer open education!

I intend to write  an overall post about your comments during this week and try to share my ideas and doubts too.

So far, we’re doing great!

Best,

Ana Rosa Amorim

If we are asking if it is appropriate to begin a dialogue on a neurocentric age, then my answer is yes. If the question is asking if we are living in a neurocentric age, then my answer is that it depends. (Question 1)

To begin a foreword-thinking dialogue regarding the role of neuroscience in our everyday lives is crucial. Neuroscience is going to continue to develop more sophisticated technology with capabilities – or believed potentials – that far exceed what we are familiar with today. The ability to assess the brain’s role in subjective experiences (such as the perception of free-will, choice, sympathy, altruism, bias, prejudice, etc.) is evidently becoming more possible each passing year. It is important to continue the discussion of the implications of such technology on ethical, social, cultural, legal and political values.

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1. I AM A HEDGEHOG
First, let me begin my response by making it explicit that I am hedgehog and not a fox. If you are unfamiliar with the meaning of the hedgehog/fox dichotomy it is this: A hedgehog is focused one thing and sees unity, a fox, on the other hand, is focused on many things and engages in distinctions. Put another way, a hedgehog believes that education should be “an inch wide and a mile deep”. A fox, on the other hand, believes that education should be “a mile wide and an inch deep.” I am a hedgehog and I will strive for focus in all of my posts. That brings me to point #2

2. THRESHOLD QUESTION: WHICH ETHICAL THEORY?

A threshold question is how we are even approaching/defining “ethics” – for there are a number of competing approaches which I will not get into. But the take home point is “ethics” encompasses a variety of theories and approaches to “the right and the good”. For my part, I am an Aristotelian and a virtue ethicist. What that means is that I believe that ethical issues are issues about the traits that persons should have in order to lead a flourishing life (p.s. I have a view about what a flourishing life is). This is not the only ethical framework out there, mind you – and even positive psychologists disagree about the nature of flourishing. But I come at these questions with a very specific viewpoint.

3. READINGS VS. QUESTIONS
The readings and the questions are asking very different things and to answer all adequately would require me to avoid my hedgehog nature. So I am going to focus my comments on the paper about MPH (Ritalin).

4. THE ETHICS OF MPH
Adele Diamond, a neuroscientist who works on ADHD, has suggested that ADHD is the result a child’s failure to learn to self-regulate and develop cognitive control known as EXECUTIVE FUNCTION (EF). EF enables one to “stay on target” to stay focused – hedgehog like – on the task at hand. EF enables one to stay on a goal without getting derailed by temptations/distractions. Many students are unable to do this. Indeed many adults are able to do this. But it is a skill that can be learned with practice and effort. Indeed, the learning and mastery of such a skill has, in my view, tremendous effects on the individual and on flourishing. In fact, I think it is necessary for human flourishing.

Aristotle was aware of he brains natural reward system involved in learning and mastery. And he exhorted people to learn, learn, learn, so as to engage in the highest pleasure known to man and to further stimulate this natural reward system. But I also believe that he claimed that EF must be conquered first. Csikszentmihalyi, who I have mentioned before, refers to the interplay of the brain’s natural reward system and a challenging activity as flow. He also suggests that one can become addicted to the brain’s natural rewards that come from intense focus and concentration. He notes that virtually all human accomplishments are products of the flow state – a natural state of intense focus in which one is completely absorbed in an activity. Such a state presupposes a well developed EF.

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Hello all,

I posted my response to the week 1 questions here .

Cheers,
Ken