Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation: Fundamental enhancement for humanity?
The idea of a simple, cheap and widely available device that could boost brain function sounds too good to be true.
Yet promising results in the lab with emerging ‘brain stimulation’ techniques, though still very preliminary, have prompted Oxford neuroscientists to team up with leading ethicists at the University to consider the issues the new technology could raise.
Recent research in Oxford and elsewhere has shown that one type of brain stimulation in particular, called transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS, can be used to improve language and maths abilities, memory, problem solving, attention, even movement.
Critically, this is not just helping to restore function in those with impaired abilities. TDCS can be used to enhance healthy people’s mental capacities. Indeed, most of the research so far has been carried out in healthy adults.
More details from Oxford Press Release
My Comment:
This research cuts to core of humanity: the capacity to learn. The capacity to learn varies across people, across ages and with illness. Enhancing the capacity to learn of children and adults, with impairments and without. The ability to learn is a basic human good. This kind of technology enables people to get more out of the work they put into learning something.
This is a first step down the path of maximizing human potential. It is a very exciting development. We need to control the release of the genie. Although this looks like a simple external device, it acts by affecting the brain. That could have very good effects, but unpredictable side effects. We should aim to do better than we have with the development of pharmaceuticals. We should learn from our mistakes over the last forty years.
Of course, as with any powerful technology, not only is there the possibility of great benefit, there is potential for misuse and abuse. This has been used in other experiments to improve ability to lie.
Can you be gay by choice?
Choosing one’s own (sexual) identity: Shifting the terms of the ‘gay rights’ debate
By Brian Earp
Can you be gay by choice? Consider the following, from the Huffington Post:
Former “Sex and the City” star Cynthia Nixon says she is gay by “choice” – a statement that has riled many gay rights activitists who insist that people don’t choose their sexual orientation.
Skipping intuitively over the is-ought gap
By Charles Foster
I spent a lot of the weekend at a very good conference entitled Moral Evil in Practical Ethics.
There was, I think, a complete or almost complete consensus about many things. Here are two: (1) Evil exists, and is of a different quality from merely sub-optimal moral behaviour. (2) To recognise evil implied a duty to do something to combat it. Everyone in the room seemed to see (2) as a corollary of (1).
This second proposition is a classic ‘ought’ claim. But how did we get there? The audience included many distinguished philosophers. Were we all plunging naively but disastrously into the is-ought gap? Was the conclusion sloppily reached, and untenable? Continue reading
10-year-old gets a tattoo, mother gets arrested
By Brian Earp
See Brian’s most recent prior post on this blog here.
See a list of all of Brian’s previous posts here.
Inking arms, piercing ears, and removing foreskins: The inconsistency of parental consent laws in the State of Georgia
Gaquan Napier watched his older brother die in Acworth, Georgia after being hit by a speeding car. He was with him in those numbing final moments. And now Gaquan wants to keep his brother close to his own heart as he picks up the pieces and moves through life: in the form of a tattoo on his upper arm. Malik (that’s his brother’s name) plus the numbers from Malik’s old basketball jersey. Rest in peace. A memorial to his sibling and best friend, whose life was cut tragically short.
Gaquan is ten years old. So he asked his mother, Chuntera Napier, about the tattoo. She was moved by the request, by the sincerity and maturity of her son’s motivations. She consented. She took Gaquan to have the remembrance he wanted etched into his arm in ink.
Now stop the presses. Chuntera was arrested last week under child cruelty laws and for being party to a crime. Someone at Gaquan’s school had seen his tattoo and tattled to the authorities. But what was the offense?
Ending life and end-of-life care
Eve Richardson, chief executive of the National Council for Palliative Care and the Dying Matters coalition, argues that the government needs radically to improve end-of-life care in the UK, and makes several excellent suggestions about how that might be done.
I agree wholeheartedly, and would like to add a suggestion of my own: that end-of-life or terminal care should be a medical specialization not restricted to hospice care. Hospice care involves merely the palliation of patients’ symptoms (where such palliation is possible – sometimes, as in cases of advanced cancer, for example, pain cannot be controlled, and patients are left to die in agony). Such care should include voluntary euthanasia as a possible intervention. What might we call such a specialization? I suggest telostrics (telos being the ancient Greek word for end).
Of course, I am assuming that such euthanasia would be legal. But as it certainly should be, and quite probably soon will be, my suggestion here is not out of place.
It might be thought preferable that a loved one – a friend or relative – administer the fatal dose. That might indeed be best, but there may well be cases in which there is no suitable person available, or in which the patient would be concerned about the potentially traumatic effect it might have on that loved one.
What about an ‘ordinary’ medical practitioner? Why do we need a specialism that includes euthanasia? Again, this may work in some cases. But there is still a danger of trauma, and choosing what’s best for any particular patient may itself be difficult. Further, the issues surrounding end-of-life decisions, both for patients and their relatives, are complicated, and experience in them will often be beneficial for all concerned.
But aren’t doctors trained to sustain life? And won’t they be naturally traumatized by their killing others, just as most of us would be? Not all doctors think this way. Some of them see their role as making the lives of their patients as good as possible, and this may involve bringing that life to a less agonizing conclusion. Such doctors might, if my proposal were adopted, choose to become telostricians.
We ARE lords of the planet – that’s the problem
The lord of the manor is not a typical peasant, and doesn’t have the same responsibilities. Nowadays, it is quite fashionable to see humans as part of the natural world, part of a cycle of life, dependent on a nature that could eradicate us in an instant if it chose to. The truth is far less comforting.
We are the lords of the planet. Some have made the entertaining claim that we are not even a very successful species, that technological intelligence isn’t evolutionarily very useful. Yes, viruses and bacteria are wildly successful, cockroaches and beetles have the numbers and the resilience, and all our client species – species that profit from human existence, such as dogs, rats, cattle, wheat and rice – are doing well. We are not the Earth’s only evolutionary success story. But we are a success; we have a population of over 7 billion, dwarfing that of any other wild large mammal. We are reshaping the world on ever larger scales, changing the appearance of the whole planet (rarely for the better, of course). We’ve depopulated the oceans and lit up the sky at night. We’ve put men on the moon, and already have started building space stations, thus claiming an empty but huge ecological niche.
Yes, of course, if the whole natural system turned against us, if our agriculture collapsed or the Earth’s climate disintegrated, we couldn’t ride that out (though some day soon, we could probably even survive that). But the fact that the lord of the manor couldn’t survive if all the peasants revolted at once didn’t make him any less a lord, and them more than peasants.
I understand why people would wish for us to be part of the natural cycle; for if that were the case, then conservation and sustainability would be in our enlightened self-interest. And we could certainly make great improvements in how we log, mine and fish, thinking for the long term rather than the short. But a world in which humans followed their selfish but enlightened self interest, kept their own resources sustainable, their air breathable and their water drinkable, is still a world in which most natural species would be annihilated, and anything of not explicit worth for humans was destroyed. Human self-interest won’t save much of the planet.
Instead, we are the lord of the manor, with no possibility of shrugging that off or of calling a council of villagers to devolve power and decision-making. We need to explicitly decide what gets saved and what dies, what the limits of our exploitation will be, and what costs we are prepared to pay for that. Nature is now our responsibility.
Censoring Foetuses
In the US, Randall Terry is challenging Obama for Democratic leadership. Strangely, his reason for doing so is in order to be able to show graphic anti-abortion adverts featuring aborted foetuses, holocaust victims, and a black person being lynched. Continue reading
What is so bad about polygamy?
By Brian Earp
What do gay marriage and polygamy have in common?
To find out, watch this exchange between US Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, and a New Hampshire college student. Here’s an edit to give the gist:
Student: How about the ideas that all men are created equal, and the rights to happiness and liberty? [Applause.]
Santorum: Ok, so — Are we saying that everyone should have the right to marry?
Audience: Yes! Yes!
Santorum: Everyone? Ok, so, anybody can marry anybody else.
Audience: Yes, yes!
Santorum: So anyone can marry several people? …
Lawmaker Steals Leather Pants: Brain May Be Responsible, Lawyer Says
The title of this post is an edited version of a headline that appeared this week at ABC news. The story behind it is that a Californian politician named Mary was caught shoplifting, and her lawyer says that her impaired judgment may have been caused by a benign brain tumour.
We can accept that in principle, a brain tumour could undermine Mary’s moral responsibility and excuse her actions, because we now know that tumours can press on parts of the brain and prevent them functioning properly – causing all kinds of unusual thoughts and behaviours. And Mary could hardly be held responsible for her having a brain tumour. She didn’t choose to have it; it just happened to her.
Would you swim in Hitler’s pool?
A friend of mine recently returned from a visit to a beautiful and imposing villa, now the British ambassador’s residence in Rome. During World War II it housed the German embassy, and prisoners were tortured in the cellars.
The swimming pool was built for Adolf Hitler, and this information, said my friend, would put her off from using it. Continue reading
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