Mohammed Bushra – Week One Questions
Wednesday, September 16th, 20091) & 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?’