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Is your mobile phone part of your body?

by Rebecca Roache

The Frontline reports that sensors carried on the body of mobile phone users could soon be used to boost the UK’s mobile phone network coverage.  If only half of the 91% of the UK population who owns a mobile phone carried such sensors, then nearly half of the UK population would become part of a ‘body-to-body’ mobile phone network.

When technology becomes as wearable and ubiquitous as this, it raises some interesting questions about what sort of things people are, and about the division between the body and the surrounding environment.  What, after all, is a body?  At first glance, a person’s body is that mass of flesh, blood, and bone that we point to when we point to him or her: all very simple and straightforward.  Things get more complicated when we consider someone who has received an organ transplant.  Does a transplanted organ become part of the body of the person who receives it?  I would say so.  Assuming that the transplant is successful, it functions just like the organ it replaces; and an injury to the transplanted organ would be considered an injury to the recipient.  What about artificial devices that replace or supplement organs, like cochlear implants: do these count as body parts too?  I would imagine that most of us would be less willing to view such things as body parts.  However, if transplanted organs are to count as parts of the recipients’ bodies, refusal to accept cochlear implants as body parts seems mere prejudice.  Both enable the recipient’s body to perform a familiar and normal bodily function; and whilst a transplanted organ is – unlike a cochlear implant – undeniably a body part, it is pre-transplant no more a part of the recipient’s body than a cochlear implant.  So, perhaps we should consider cochlear implants to be body parts too.  If we accept something like a cochlear implant as a body part, though, what else might we feel bound to include?  What about less permanent replacement body parts, like false teeth and prosthetic limbs?  Tools that are not intended to replace body parts, but which nevertheless enable certain people to perform something like a familiar and normal bodily function, like wheelchairs?  Tools that enable people to perform functions that are not familiar and normal bodily functions, like pencils and screwdrivers?  Where do we draw the line between the body and the surrounding environment?

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Death Aquatic

Can science tell us how chefs should treat lobsters? The Independent this week implies it can. It seems that this is important to diners who want reassurance that their dinner has not been killed in a “barbaric” manner.

Science may of course discover the quickest or easiest method of killing. Norwegian researchers in particular have dedicated significant time to this research. Of methods including ice, nitrogen gas, freezing, gradual or rapid heating, piercing of ganglia, salt baths and carbon dioxide gas, apparently electricity is best. A commercial product, “Crustastun” offers the ability to replicate this in the kitchen. However, the retail cost of £2,500, puts this out of the reach of all but the richest, most gadget obsessed or humanitarian seafood lovers. But there is a more basic question: do lobsters really feel pain?

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Why Bioenhancement of Mathematical Ability Is Ethically Important

by Julian Savulescu

In a paper just released today, Cohen Kadosh and colleagues (Cohen Kadosh et al., Modulating Neuronal Activity Produces Specific and Long-Lasting Changes in Numerical Competence, Current Biology (2010), doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.10.007) described how they increased the numerical ability of normal people by applying an electrical current to a part of the skull. So what? Most of us don’t do that much maths after leaving school and manage just fine.

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Inviting invasion: deep space advertisments and planetary security

The Register warns that Dixons risks future of humanity with Star Wars-themed ads: the electronics chain, not satisfied with merely human customers also as a publicity stunt broadcast its ads into deep space, presumably for aliens to receive. This is done using the firm Deep Space Communications Network, who offers to beam messages into space using their satellite dish. Earlier this year an invitation to the Klingon opera 'u' was beamed towards Arcturus using a Dutch radio telescope. Are these stunts putting mankind at risk?

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Are some temperaments “better” than others?

by Alexandre Erler

Jerome Kagan’s latest book, The Temperamental Thread, is – as usual with Kagan – a fascinating read. It draws on the three decades of research done by Kagan on the topic of human temperament. In a famous series of studies, Kagan examined the way infants reacted to unfamiliar or unexpected events. He found that about 20 per cent of these infants were unusually responsive to such events, exhibiting vigorous motor activity and frequent crying. He calls these infants “high reactives”, and found after following their evolution during their subsequent years that they were biased to become timid, subdued toddlers and shy adolescents who become uneasy when they cannot predict or control the future. About 20 per cent of these high reactives proved unable to cope with their temperament and were subsequently diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, depression, or both. By contrast, another other group of infants showed a high threshold of excitability to the same events. Kagan calls them “low reactives”. They tended to become outgoing, relatively fearless children and relaxed adolescents who like risk and challenge [3]. In the wake of Kagan’s earlier work The Long Shadow of Temperament, The Temperamental Thread paints a rich and detailed picture of the differences between these two psychological types.

 

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Sam Harris, the Naturalistic Fallacy, and the Slipperiness of “Well-Being”

This post is about the main argument of Sam Harris’s new book The Moral Landscape. Harris argues that there are objective truths about what’s morally right and wrong, and that science can in principle determine what they are, all by itself. As I’ll try to demonstrate here, Harris’s argument cannot succeed. I call the argument “scientistic” because those who take (a variation of) its first two premises to be obvious are led to exaggerate the importance of scientific measurement for determining what’s morally right, and correspondingly to underestimate the importance of moral reasoning and moral philosophy.

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Science and Morality

Roger Crisp writes… In his new book The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris claims that science 'reveals' values to us. Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of the many who have pointed out that Harris makes the common mistake of seeking to derive an 'ought' from a series of mere 'is' statements, a mistake pointed out by David… Read More »Science and Morality

Is there any point in worrying about the tedium of immortality?

by Alexandre Erler


Technologies meant to help extend the human lifespan, such as cryonics, or the procedures investigated by gerontologist Aubrey de Grey under the name “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence”, are increasingly an object of discussion, including in the popular press. A recent example of this is John Walsh’s piece in The Independent earlier this month. He is one of several authors who find it worth telling us that they wouldn’t want to live forever, even if they could. At times his article appears to aim merely at being entertaining and polemical, yet his central idea has been put forward by respected philosophers such as Bernard Williams, in his famous essay The Markopulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality. In short, the idea is that living forever would just be atrociously boring.

 

Should we draw normative conclusions from such pieces about the development and use of life extension technologies, regarding them as superfluous or even downright undesirable? I want to argue for a negative answer to that question.

 

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On Knowing (or Not)

Judy is an intelligent, articulate woman with a great sense of humor. She is also completely paralyzed on her left side. Trouble is, she doesn’t know she is. On the contrary, she knows that she isn’t.

What’s going on? Self-deception? Denial? Puzzling examples like this are scattered throughout a recent series in the NY Times, which explores what it means to know, not know, know what you don’t know and not know what you know. Follow? Me neither.

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Foetal pain and the abortion debate: believing what you want to believe

By Janet Radcliffe-Richards

Last Friday’s BBC morning news headlines included a report of two reviews by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of evidence about foetal pain. The reviews concluded that foetuses under 24 weeks could not feel pain, because “nerve connections in the cortex, the area which processes responses to pain in the brain, does not form properly before 24 weeks”, and that even after that stage “a foetus is naturally sedated and unconscious in the womb”.

The corresponding article on the BBC website added the comment that “anti-abortion campaigners challenged the reports”. There were no details about the form these challenges took or who they came from, but as the reports were reviews of scientific evidence, it sounds as though a challenge to the reports must have been a challenge to the scientific claims. Of course scientific claims are always potentially open to challenge, so if the article had reported that scientists had come forward to challenge the methodology of key studies, for instance, or the way the reviews represented the data, we would just have known there was an ongoing scientific debate on the subject. But the implication of the BBC article was that people who were against abortion were challenging the scientific claims about foetal pain. And if this is true, it is interesting. Why should people with particular moral views (about the wrongness of abortion) or political ambitions (to prevent it) issue challenges to scientific claims? Most of these people are not scientists, and there is no reason to think they have special knowledge of nerve connections in the foetal cortex. So why are the challenging what the scientists say?

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