Nima Bassiri - Brain (via Somatosphere)

This is a fairly obtuse piece of writing, and for not any particularly good reason that I can discern. Still, it is an interesting examination of how the self has come, over the last 100+ years, to be roughly identical to the brain.

The article comes from Somatosphere and is open access.

Full Citation:
Bassiri, Nima. (2014). Brain. Retrieved March 23, 2014, from Somatosphere Web site: http://somatosphere.net/2014/03/brain.html

Brain

By Nima Bassiri



The brain speaks the truth of the self. I imagine it would not be controversial by now to suggest that this general formulation indexes a set of implicit constraints that have to some significant degree underwritten and informed the historical ontology of the modern self since the nineteenth century.

But let me be clear: to assert that the brain speaks the truth of the self is neither to endorse that we really are our brains (that we ever have been, or that we ever will be), nor is it to accept that the neurosciences either already or will at some point access a transcendental reality with regards to who or what we are. It is instead to suggest that the conditions of acceptability have long been met for neurological discourse to function as a system of knowledge capable of possessing a veridical hold on the question of selfhood, on what will comprise the intelligibility of the self, on what will count as true or false in relation to it.

Such an assessment has admittedly come into focus as a consequence of contemporary disputes about the role the brain and the neurosciences can or should play in the determination of personhood. But to say that the brain speaks the truth of the self is not some sort of conciliation for the present. Today’s disputes around the viability of describing personhood in thoroughly neural terms are grounded on a discursive possibility, the medical and epistemological acceptability of which was formalized over a century ago. It has, in other words, once again become necessary to resolve some problem of the self through neuroscientific discourse.

This is, admittedly, not a commonly held position (culturally or academically), and it is often overshadowed by a different sort of inquiry: How do we reckon with a growing tendency that suggests that scientific claims — especially those drawn out of the neurosciences — do a better job than other kinds of claims of telling us who and what we are? This question is indicative of the concern with (or, conversely the affirmation of) the scientistic attitude towards brain research, one that has emerged as neuroscientific claims have been increasingly translated into the terms of cultural value. It is to the rise of this neuro-scientism that much recent scholarship has responded, in the form of a twisting progression of critiques, appropriations, and, eventually, negotiations — a kind of “neurohelix,” as Joseph Dumit has called it.[1] It isn’t necessary to provide a systematic account of these various twists and turns.[2] What even a small sample of them shows is that the relationship between personhood and neuroscience remains an open question, and one that does not amount to a debate on the merits or drawback of neurological reductionism.[3]

What appears so striking is that much of this scholarship finds itself situated somewhere along a continuum of acceptable positions and reactions to the issue of personhood and the brain.[4] At one end of this discursive spectrum, there lies contestation, rejection, or critique, typically directed at the supposed belief (illegitimate for many) that, through the brain, the self is entirely accounted for and elucidated.[5] And at the other end, there lies affirmation or, merely, acquiescence: either a cautious concession that neuroscientific knowledge ultimately has real effects on processes of self-identification and recognition or, on the other hand, a full embrace of the so-called “neuro-turn.” In many instances authors variously deploy both ends of this spectrum at once. What emerges here is the trend towards a renovated materialism or more judicious neo-naturalism. Otherwise we encounter harsh appraisals of the epistemological groundlessness of a set of effects that scholars concede are nevertheless quite real, from an anthropological point of view.

More noteworthy, however, than any possible position one might take is the apparent acceptability of the debate itself. It has become appropriate, even necessary (once again, I will propose) to wonder whether and how neurological discourse can, as a system of knowledge, encapsulate the truth of self and others. The possibility of being a “neural person” is, first and foremost, a discursive possibility. Precisely in the extent to which we feel incited to respond, one way or another (either through rejection or affirmation) to this state of the present, the brain speaks a certain truth of the self.

But in order to understand why such a possibility has come to pass, it is not enough to trace its inevitability across the epistemological and institutional advances of brain research over the past thirty or so years. That is because, despite the fundamental metaphysical (to say nothing of medical) privilege attributed to the brain since the seventeenth-century anatomies of Descartes and Thomas Willis, it would be some time historically before it would become necessary to speak in a certain way, in a way where brain and self could resonate synonymously. It would be some time before neurological knowledge could discursively animate personhood through and through. The question to ask is: why might such a development have occurred, when it might not have otherwise? What, in other words, might have incited a neurologist, a physiologist, or a clinician, to speak in such a way when the need to do so was neither inevitable nor “inscribed in any a priori”?[6]

Let us, for instance, shift our gaze back to the late nineteenth century, the period when brain research came to be organized according to concepts, methodologies, and institutional formations that are still familiar to us today. Beginning in the late 1880s, John Hughlings Jackson, the so-called “father” of clinical neurology and neurophysiology, inaugurated a very peculiar and surprising resolution to the problem of personhood and neuropathology. Rather than correlating mental derangements caused by neurological disease to the various lacunae of personal identity — a decision that would have linked Jackson to a centuries-old view of personhood instituted by another English physician, John Locke — Jackson instead proposed that neuropathological disruptions were the introduction of another, “new” person, which he understood in a legitimately epistemological and forensic sense.[7] A disordered brain was the instantiation of another brain, which, while certainly debilitated, nevertheless retained some semblance of physiological normality; another brain, therefore, meant another self. What would have compelled Jackson to describe the relationship between the brain and self in this way? In other words, why would he have deployed such a level of formalized synonymy that speaking about a brain (normal or pathological) was, in effect, always to speak about some person (whether it be myself or another)?

To begin with, consider the context in which Jackson is writing, in terms of developments within psychiatric and neurological medicine from the 1860s to 1890s. Within the growing interest and discussion of behavioral abnormalities, there was a greater willingness to view the dangers and precariousness of pathology not in the extent to which it opposed normality, but in the extent to which disorders could so easily and in such unsettling ways intersect, overlap, and coincide with normal neural conditions and states of mind. There emerged a prevalent view of the ordinariness and regularity of being reduced to states of automatism, somnambulism, and other “masked” pathological states, where a person would be said to be simultaneously unconscious while acting in ways that appeared entirely rational and socially intelligible. It was not always easy to ascertain according to what mental process or neurological function a person was really herself, and therefore who she might be in a state of derangement. The emergence and apparent intelligibility, not to mention seriousness, of a disorder like double consciousness suggests that medical professionals felt a certain obligation not only to consider the medico-legal significance of these normal abnormalities, but to address, if only implicitly, the more underlying forensic conundrum related to the very status of “personal identity, and its morbid modifications” — to quote the title of a 1862 article by psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne (who was, along with Jackson, one of the founding editors of the journal Brain).

In the late nineteenth century, the very category of personal identity found itself in a state of medical reconsideration, something tantamount to a sort of crisis of the self, at least for anyone committed to a Lockean view of personhood. And this was a crisis indeed. Mary Douglas has argued that Western industrialized-capitalist societies, with their respective “enterprise cultures,” have come to rely on a conception of a singular self, whose claims to unity and self-accountability are, in Lockean fashion, usually tested against forensic standards and juridical constraints.[8] Furthermore, during the historical materializations of fin-de-siècle industrial and modernized life, certain neuropathologies (e.g., neurasthenia, railway spine) were profoundly coupled with the emerging civilizational imperatives of labor power, technological development, and the new political economies and legal demands that came with them.[9]

During the same period, when a unified sense of self was becoming an increasing economic, political, and legal obligation, behavioral medicine witnessed disorders related to personal identity itself – an unhealthy, yet dangerously normal disposition of becoming disunified. As Georg Simmel warned, “The metropolis extracts from man as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than rural life….”[10] Perhaps the extractions of mind are as much a cost as they are, in concert with the knowledge systems that classify and diagnose them, a requisite for entry into the political economies of industrial modernity.

Yet in Jackson’s case, thanks to the language of neurophysiology, illness was not the strict absence of personhood, but its dramatic retention, albeit in the form of the transformation of self. Through Jackson, neurological discourse justified, explained, and provided an entirely new neural architecture to rationalize the dangerously normal disposition of the illness of personal identity. And yet, by rationalizing the disunity of personhood, neurological discourse successfully enshrined the very framework of the modern self, as a classificatory limit that could be expanded and multiplied but not ruptured or undone. In its rationalization, neurological discourse itself became the unity, the singular system of knowledge (or power-knowledge, if you like) that could newly encapsulate and circumscribe selfhood and its possible diffusions.

By the end of the nineteenth century, selfhood became a problem that neurological discourse could frame, stabilize, and resolve, by establishing itself as the knowledge system that could successfully imbue meaning and coherency into the frequent incoherencies of personal identity. The language of brain research established a new truth of the self wherein the presence of personhood would be guaranteed, even in its absence – or, rather, guaranteed because the self could never be neurologically absent as such. The modern self, with its numerous political, economic, and legal imperatives, was always able to fall ill; but now, thanks to neurological discourse, the illness of one self was tantamount to the recuperation of another. Where there is brain, there will always (some) person be.

The work of a robust genealogical reappraisal of “neural personhood” (which this short entry cannot possibly accomplish) would ideally propose that the historical neurologization of self was neither inevitable nor necessary, having had less to do with neurological scientism than with a need to attend to anxieties about personhood. With that in mind, perhaps our concern in the present should not be directed towards the specter of the “neuro.” It might instead be directed at how selfhood is being problematized today, implicitly or otherwise, such that it has become necessary and acceptable (once again) to deploy the discourse of the brain.


~ Nima Bassiri is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Duke University and a postdoctoral affiliate of the Duke Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory. He teaches in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, the Program in Literature, and the Department of Philosophy.

References

[1] Joseph Dumit, “Afterword: Twisting the Neurhelix,” in The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain, eds. Melissa M. Littlefield and Jenell M. Johnson (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2012).

[2] For a discussion of some aspects of these debates, see, Etienne Pelaprat and Valerie Hartouni, “The Neural Subject in Popular Culture and the End of Life,” Configurations 19 (2011): 385–406; see also Neuroscientific Turn and also Victoria Pitts-Taylor, “The Plastic Brain: Neoliberalism and the Neuronal Self,” Health 14, no. 6 (2010): 635-52.

[3] Some examples include: Fernando Vidal, “Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity,” History of the Human Sciences 22, no. 1 (2009): 5-36. Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Nikolas Rose, “Neurochemical Selves” in The Politics of Life Itself (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Elizabeth Wilson, “Melancholic Biology: Prozac, Freud, and Neurological Determinism,” Configurations 7, no. 3 (1999): 403-19. William E. Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Emily Martin, “Self-making and the Brain,” Subjectivity 3, no. 4 (2010): 366-381; Rayna Rapp, “A Child Surrounds this Brain: The Future of Neurological Difference According to Scientists, Parents and Diagnosed Adults,” in Sociological Reflections on the Neurosciences, eds. Martyn Pickersgill and Ira Van Keulen (Emerald, 2012). Margaret Lock, The Alzheimer’s Conundrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging (Princeton University Press, 2013). Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012); and Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Malabou presents a philosophical orientation towards neuroscience that can be contrasted with the sort presented, for example, by Patricia Churchland, most recently in Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain (New York: Norton, 2013).

[4] It will become clear in the remainder of this essay why I am using “person” and “self” interchangeably, that is, according to a Lockean tradition. For more on Locke’s conception of self/person and the role Locke plays in the development of the notion of the “subject” as we come to understand it after Kant, see Etienne Balibar, Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, trans. Warren Montag (New York: Verso, 2013).

[5] See for example, Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience, ed. Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby (Oxford, 2012).

[6] Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 62.

[7] See, for example, John Hughlings Jackson, “On Post-Epileptic States” and “The Factors of Insanities,” in Selected Writings of John Hughlings Jackson, 2 vols., ed. James Taylor (London, 1958).

[8] Mary Douglas, “The person in an enterprise culture,” in Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas, eds. Shaun Hargreaves Heap and Angus Ross (Edinburgh University Press, 1992).

[9] Anson Rabinbach, Human Motor: Energy Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (University of California Press, 1992), chapter 6; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (University of California Press, 1987).

[10] Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (London: Free Press, 1950). Quoted in Human Motor, 154.

Alva Noë - MRI Scans Can't Show Us Consciousness or Personhood (Dogs Are People, Too)

In his recent column for NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture, philosopher Alva Noë argues in favor of animal intelligence and consciousness - that we don't see the dog's consciousness or personhood when you look at its brain in MRI scans. Their subjective states are best experienced when we spend time with them, not as scientists or observers but as companions.

So first up is the New York Times column by Gregory Berns that inspired Noë's column, and then Noë's column from NPR.

Dogs Are People, Too

By GREGORY BERNS
Published: October 5, 2013 


Jane Evelyn Atwood/Contact Press Images 

FOR the past two years, my colleagues and I have been training dogs to go in an M.R.I. scanner — completely awake and unrestrained. Our goal has been to determine how dogs’ brains work and, even more important, what they think of us humans.

Multimedia
Video: How Dogs Love Us (YouTube)

Now, after training and scanning a dozen dogs, my one inescapable conclusion is this: dogs are people, too.

Because dogs can’t speak, scientists have relied on behavioral observations to infer what dogs are thinking. It is a tricky business. You can’t ask a dog why he does something. And you certainly can’t ask him how he feels. The prospect of ferreting out animal emotions scares many scientists. After all, animal research is big business. It has been easy to sidestep the difficult questions about animal sentience and emotions because they have been unanswerable.

Until now.

By looking directly at their brains and bypassing the constraints of behaviorism, M.R.I.’s can tell us about dogs’ internal states. M.R.I.’s are conducted in loud, confined spaces. People don’t like them, and you have to hold absolutely still during the procedure. Conventional veterinary practice says you have to anesthetize animals so they don’t move during a scan. But you can’t study brain function in an anesthetized animal. At least not anything interesting like perception or emotion.

From the beginning, we treated the dogs as persons. We had a consent form, which was modeled after a child’s consent form but signed by the dog’s owner. We emphasized that participation was voluntary, and that the dog had the right to quit the study. We used only positive training methods. No sedation. No restraints. If the dogs didn’t want to be in the M.R.I. scanner, they could leave. Same as any human volunteer.

My dog Callie was the first. Rescued from a shelter, Callie was a skinny black terrier mix, what is called a feist in the southern Appalachians, from where she came. True to her roots, she preferred hunting squirrels and rabbits in the backyard to curling up in my lap. She had a natural inquisitiveness, which probably landed her in the shelter in the first place, but also made training a breeze.

With the help of my friend Mark Spivak, a dog trainer, we started teaching Callie to go into an M.R.I. simulator that I built in my living room. She learned to walk up steps into a tube, place her head in a custom-fitted chin rest, and hold rock-still for periods of up to 30 seconds. Oh, and she had to learn to wear earmuffs to protect her sensitive hearing from the 95 decibels of noise the scanner makes.

After months of training and some trial-and-error at the real M.R.I. scanner, we were rewarded with the first maps of brain activity. For our first tests, we measured Callie’s brain response to two hand signals in the scanner. In later experiments, not yet published, we determined which parts of her brain distinguished the scents of familiar and unfamiliar dogs and humans.

Soon, the local dog community learned of our quest to determine what dogs are thinking. Within a year, we had assembled a team of a dozen dogs who were all “M.R.I.-certified.”

Although we are just beginning to answer basic questions about the canine brain, we cannot ignore the striking similarity between dogs and humans in both the structure and function of a key brain region: the caudate nucleus.

Rich in dopamine receptors, the caudate sits between the brainstem and the cortex. In humans, the caudate plays a key role in the anticipation of things we enjoy, like food, love and money. But can we flip this association around and infer what a person is thinking just by measuring caudate activity? Because of the overwhelming complexity of how different parts of the brain are connected to one another, it is not usually possible to pin a single cognitive function or emotion to a single brain region.

But the caudate may be an exception. Specific parts of the caudate stand out for their consistent activation to many things that humans enjoy. Caudate activation is so consistent that under the right circumstances, it can predict our preferences for food, music and even beauty.

In dogs, we found that activity in the caudate increased in response to hand signals indicating food. The caudate also activated to the smells of familiar humans. And in preliminary tests, it activated to the return of an owner who had momentarily stepped out of view. Do these findings prove that dogs love us? Not quite. But many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. Neuroscientists call this a functional homology, and it may be an indication of canine emotions.

The ability to experience positive emotions, like love and attachment, would mean that dogs have a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child. And this ability suggests a rethinking of how we treat dogs.

DOGS have long been considered property. Though the Animal Welfare Act of 1966 and state laws raised the bar for the treatment of animals, they solidified the view that animals are things — objects that can be disposed of as long as reasonable care is taken to minimize their suffering.

But now, by using the M.R.I. to push away the limitations of behaviorism, we can no longer hide from the evidence. Dogs, and probably many other animals (especially our closest primate relatives), seem to have emotions just like us. And this means we must reconsider their treatment as property.

One alternative is a sort of limited personhood for animals that show neurobiological evidence of positive emotions. Many rescue groups already use the label of “guardian” to describe human caregivers, binding the human to his ward with an implicit responsibility to care for her. Failure to act as a good guardian runs the risk of having the dog placed elsewhere. But there are no laws that cover animals as wards, so the patchwork of rescue groups that operate under a guardianship model have little legal foundation to protect the animals’ interest.

If we went a step further and granted dogs rights of personhood, they would be afforded additional protection against exploitation. Puppy mills, laboratory dogs and dog racing would be banned for violating the basic right of self-determination of a person.

I suspect that society is many years away from considering dogs as persons. However, recent rulings by the Supreme Court have included neuroscientific findings that open the door to such a possibility. In two cases, the court ruled that juvenile offenders could not be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. As part of the rulings, the court cited brain-imaging evidence that the human brain was not mature in adolescence. Although this case has nothing to do with dog sentience, the justices opened the door for neuroscience in the courtroom.

Perhaps someday we may see a case arguing for a dog’s rights based on brain-imaging findings.


~ Gregory Berns is a professor of neuroeconomics at Emory University and the author of How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain.

* * * * *

If You Have To Ask, You'll Never Know

by Alva Noë
October 11, 2013

If you need empirical information about what is happening in the brain of a dog to know that dogs think, then either you've never met a dog or your own humanity is in doubt.

Sometimes it is our questions that get in the way.

Suppose two ships are sinking and you can save only one. How should you decide which ship to save? Should you save the one with the most people in it?

When this question was put by her teacher to Sissy Jupe, a young character in Charles Dickens' Hard Times, she could only weep and run away. She was unable to to take up the standpoint from which this could even be asked. For Sissy, the very question was repugnant, perhaps because it presupposed that the value of a person is the sort of thing that can be chalked up, counted and weighed. Her caring, her engagement with others, precluded that sort of calculating detachment.

I had to think of Sissy Jupe when I read Gregory Berns' essay in The New York Times about his research on the dog brain and his startling (to some) conclusion that dogs are people, too.

If you need information about what is happening in the brain of a dog to know that dogs think and have feelings and emotions, then either you've never met a dog or your own humanity is in doubt.

You can no more seriously entertain the possibility that a dog is a mere automaton than you can entertain such a hypothesis about your human loved ones. To do so would require you to stand back and look at what a dog (or a person) does (and says) as devoid of meaning and expressive power. And to do that would be disrespectful. This is the Sissy Jupe point.

It is certainly true that no amount of information about the movements and behaviors (including linguistic behaviors) of animals, human or otherwise, can suffice to establish, beyond any possible doubt, that they think and feel and have emotions, that they are conscious.

So, I ask, can it be seriously maintained that information about brain activity can settle such skeptical worries decisively? How do we know that what happens in me when my brain fires neurons is the same as what happens in you? How could we ever know that for sure?

Should prospective husbands and wives do due diligence and check MRIs before tying the knot, just to make sure they are both really people?

My own suggestion — I develop this in Out of Our Heads — is that we should not think of our appreciation of the consciousness of people (and dogs) as the sort of thing we discover on the basis of empirical investigation of their brains or their behavior. It is, rather, a presupposition of the kinds of lives we lead together.

You could not love someone (dog, or person), if you took seriously the possibility that he or she (or it) might, appearances to the contrary, turn out to be a robot. And, as the writer and professional animal trainer Vicky Hearne has argued persuasively, you can't actually work with dogs if you don't take them seriously as, well, responsible agents. A search-and-rescue dog, for example, or a seeing-eye dog, is a collaborator, not a tool.

Berns writes in his piece:

"By looking directly at their brains and bypassing the constraints of behaviorism, M.R.I.'s can tell us about dogs' internal states."

Yes, indeed. I'm all for studying dog brains and for using such studies to inform our understanding of dog psychology. But you don't see the dog's consciousness or personhood when you look at its brain. Those internal states come into focus only when we appreciate, with Sissy Jupe, that we are not detached observers, not even when we are scientists.


~ You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe

John Danaher - Can We Upload Our Minds? Hauskeller on Mind-Uploading (Part One)

Over at the IEET site (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology), John Danaher has started a series of posts on uploading human minds into machines (computers). Danaher is riffing on an article by Michael Hauskeller, entitled "My Brain, My Mind, and I: Some Philosophical Assumptions of Mind-Uploading" (International Journal of Machine Consciousness; Vol. 4, No. 1 (2012): 187 -200; DOI: 10.1142/S1793843012400100).

Here is one section of Hauskeller's paper, specifically chosen for its hyperbole and anti-flesh perspective:

2. Messy Bodies 

What we witness here is what is often described as an increasing cyborgization of the human, where ‘cyborg' can be defined as a human being some of whose parts are artificial. In light of these developments it may appear not unreasonable to expect that this is only the beginning and we will progress further until we have achieved the goal that is implicitly pursued in all those innovations that couple human beings with fast-paced hyper-technology: complete independence from nature, unrestricted autonomy. For as long as we are hooked to this organic body, we will never be entirely free and safe. The organic body is a limitation that is resented by many, and that they hope we will be able to overcome not too far in the future. "Soon we could be meshing our brains to computers, living, for all practical purposes, on an "immortal" substrate, perhaps eventually discarding our messy, aging, flesh-and-bones body altogether". [Klein, 2003] The human body is not only regarded as dispensable; it is an obstacle, an enemy to be fought and to get rid of. It ages and makes us age with it, eventually annihilating us. It is "messy", disorderly and dirty; it brings chaos and decay into our lives. "Flesh-and-bones" is a material that is deemed unsuitable for an advanced, dignified, enlightened and happy existence. So let's abandon it if we can. Good riddance to bad rubbish! "If humans can merge their minds with computers, why would they not discard the human form and become an immortal being?" [Paul and Cox, 1996, 21]. 

Yet in order to become truly immortal, our goal should be to become a "cyberbeing", a being that is more than just interlinked with machines, more than just partly a machine itself, and even more than a machine in its entirety. Gradually replacing human biology and the messy organic body by a more durable and more controllable substrate is certainly a considerable improvement, but it is by no means sufficient. Why not go a step further and, if at all possible, discard the physical body altogether? That is, any particular body, any body that is essentially and not merely accidentally ours, not only something we use and can discard when proved not useful enough or no longer useful, but rather something that defines our very existence and has, as it were, pretensions of being us. In other words, why not relocate and transform our existence in such a way that we are no longer bound to any particular material substrate, be it organic or non-organic, because all we need, if anything at all, is the occasional body to-go as a communication facilitator, a hardware on which to run the program which we then will be [Moravec, 1989]. "Imagine yourself a virtual living being with senses, emotions, and a consciousness that makes our current human form seem a dim state of antiquated existence. Of being free, always free, of physical pain, able to repair any damage and with a downloaded mind that never dies". [Paul and Cox, 1996, xv] The telos, the logical end point,  of the ongoing cyborgization of the human is thus the attainment of "digital immortality", which is more than just "a radical new form of human enhancement" [Sandberg and Bostrom, 2008, 5]. Rather, the desire to conquer death, that "greatest evil" [More, 1990], is its secret heart, that which gives the demands for radical human enhancement their moral urgency. And the best chance to attain what we desire is through the as yet still theoretical possibility of mind-uploading.

If these paragraphs seems over the top, it's because they are. Hauskeller appears to be mocking some of the beliefs of the transhumanist camp. He is a believer in the situated self, the self as a product of its body-brain, it's experiences, it's cultural and environmental embeddedness, and its relationships with others (or maybe I am reading my own views into his) - its situation in temporal reality.

The brain is only one of our organs (albeit a very important one), that is, an instrument that we use in order to accomplish certain tasks in accordance with our general desire to survive in this world. My brain is situated in a body, as is my mind, which is one of my modes of existence, no more and no less. Although, let's face it, we do not have the slightest clue how conscious experience comes about and how there can be such things as selves in the first place, it is rather unlikely that mind and self are directly produced by the brain, as is commonly assumed. There is no direct evidence for that. The brain develops and changes with the experience we accumulate during our lives, and it does so because it has a particular job to do within the system that we call a living, conscious being. It rises to the occasion. That we can manipulate the mind by manipulating the brain, and that damages to our brains tend to inhibit the normal functioning of our minds, does not show that the mind is a product of what the brain does. The brain could be just a facilitator. When we look through a window and the window is then painted black, our vision is destroyed or prevented, but we cannot infer from this that the window produces our ability to see. The brain might be like a window to the mind. Surely the mind is not in any clear sense localized in the brain. Alva Noe is right when he declares the locus of consciousness to be "the dynamic life of the whole, environmentally plugged-in person or animal" [Noe, 2009, xiii] We are not our brains, we are "out of our heads", as Noe puts it, reaching out to the world as "distributed, dynamically spread-out, world-involving beings". [Noe, 2009, 82]

Suffice it to say that I am more in line with the views of Hauskeller than I am of Danaher, who, in the article below, attempts to rebut or dismiss objections to the proposition of mind-uploading.

Can we upload our minds? Hauskeller on Mind-Uploading (Part One)

John Danaher
Philosophical Disquisitions
Posted: Jun 14, 2013

A lot of people would like to live forever, or at least for much longer than they currently do. But there is one obvious impediment to this: our biological bodies break down over time and cannot (with current technologies) be sustained indefinitely. So what can be done to avoid our seemingly inevitable demise? For some, like Aubrey de Grey, the answer lies in tweaking and re-engineering our biological bodies. For others, the answer lies in the more radical solution of mind-uploading, or the technological replacement of our current biological bodies.

This solution holds a lot of promise. We already replace various body parts with artificial analogues, what with artificial limbs, organs, and sensory aids (including, more recently, things like artificial retina and cochlear implants). These artificial analogues are typically more sustainable, either through ongoing care and maintenance or renewal and replacement, than their biological equivalents. So why not go the whole hog? Why not replace every body part, including the brain, with some technological equivalent?

That is the question at the heart of Michael Hauskeller’s article “My Brain, My Mind, and I: Some Philosophical Assumptions of Mind Uploading”. The paper offers a sceptical look at some of the assumptions underlying the whole notion of mind-uploading. In this post and the next, I’m going to run through some of Hauskeller’s arguments. In the remainder of this post, I’ll try to do two things. First, I’ll look to clarify what is meant by “mind-uploading” and what we would be trying to achieve by doing it. Second, I’ll introduce the basic argument in favour of mind-uploading, the argument from functionalism, and note some obvious objections to it.

This series of posts is probably best read in conjunction with my earlier series on Nicholar Agar’s argument against uploading. That series looked at mind-uploading from a decision-theoretical perspective, and offers what is, to my mind, the most persuasive objection to mind uploading (though, I hasten to add, I’m not sure that it is overwhelmingly persuasive). Hauskeller’s arguments are more general and conceptual. Indeed, he repeatedly relies on the view that the concerns he raises are conceivable, and worth bearing in mind for that reason, and doesn’t take the further step to argue that they are possible or probable. If you are more interested in whether you should go for mind-uploading or not, I think the concerns raised by Hauskeller are possibly best fed back into Agar’s decision-theoretic framework. Still, for the pure philosophers out there — those deeply concerned with metaphysical questions of mind and identity — there is much to grapple with in Hauskeller’s paper.

1. What are we talking about and why?

In my introduction, I noted the obvious link between mind uploading and the quest for life extension. That’s probably enough to pique people’s curiosity, but if we are going to assess mind uploading in a serious way we need to clarify three important issues.

First up, we need to clarify exactly what it is we wish to preserve or prolong through mind-uploading. I think the answer is pretty obvious: we want to preserve ourselves (our selfs), where this is defined in terms of Lockean personhood. In other words, I would say that the essence of our existence consists in the fact that we are continuing subjects of experience. That is to say, sentient, self-aware, and aware of our continuing sentience over time (even after occasional bouts of unconsciousness). If we are not preserved as Lockean persons through mind-uploading, then I would suggest that there is very little to be said for it from our perspective (there may be other things to be said for it). One important thing to note here is that Lockean personhood allows for great change over time. I may have a very different set of characteristics and traits now than I did when I was five years old. That’s fine. What matters is that there is a continuing and overlapping stream of consciousness between my five year-old self and my current self. For ease of reference, I’ll refer to the claim that mind-uploading leads to the preservation and prolongation of the Lockean person as the “Mind-Uploading Thesis” (MUT).

The second thing we need to do is to clarify what we actually mean by mind-uploading. In his article, Hauskeller adopts a definition from Adam Kadmon, according to which mind-uploading is the “transfer of the brain’s mindpattern onto a different substrate”. In other words, your brain processes are modelled and then transferred from their current biological neuronal substrate, to a different substrate. This could be anything from a classic digital computer, to a device that uses artificial neurons that directly mirror and replicate the brain’s current processes. Hopefully, that is a reasonably straightforward idea. More important than the basic idea of uploading is the actual method through which it is achieved. Although there may be many such methods, for present purposes two are important:

Gradual Uploading/Replacement: The parts of the brain are gradually replaced by functionally equivalent artificial analogues. Although the original brain is, by the end of this process, destroyed, there is no precise moment at which the biological brain ceases to be and the artificial one begins. Instead, there is a step-by-step progression from wholly biological to wholly artificial. 

Discontinuous Uploading/Replacement: The brain is scanned, copied and then emulated in some digital or artificial medium, following which the original brain is destroyed. There is no gradual replacement of the parts of the biological brain.

There may be significant differences between both kinds of uploading, and these differences may have philosophical repercussions. I suspect the latter, rather than the former, is what most people have in mind when they think about uploading, but I could be wrong.

Finally, in addition to clarifying the means through which uploading is achieved, we need to clarify the kinds of existence one might have in the digital or artificial form. There are many elaborate possibilities explored in the sci-fi literature, and I would encourage people to check some of these out, but again for present purposes, I’ll limit the focus to two broad kinds of existence, with intermediate kinds obviously also possible:

Wholly Virtual Existence: Once transferred to an artificial medium, the mind ceases to interact directly with the external world (though obviously it relies on that world for some support) and instead lives in a virtual reality, with perhaps occasional communication with the external world. 

Non-virtual Existence: Once transferred to an artificial medium, the mind continues to interact directly with the external world through some set of actuators (i.e. tools for bringing about changes in the external world). These might directly replicate the human body, or involve superhuman “bodies”.

An added complication here comes in the shape of multiple copies of the same brain living out different existences in different virtual and non-virtual worlds. This should probably be factored into any complete account of mind-uploading. For an interesting fictional exploration of the idea of virtual existence with multiple copies, I would recommend Greg Egan’s book Permutation City.

Anyway, with those clarifications out of the way, we can move on to discuss the arguments for and against the MUT.

Read the whole article, and stay tuned for future installments in this series by Danaher.

Documentary - The Corporation

This is good election year viewing . . . . From Snag Films.

The Corporation - Synopsis

One hundred and fifty years ago, the corporation was a relatively insignificant entity. Today, it is a vivid, dramatic and pervasive presence in all our lives. It is the dominant institution of our time. A complex, sobering, yet darkly amusing documentary, THE CORPORATION takes its audience on a graphic and engaging quest to reveal the corporation's inner workings, curious history, controversial impacts and possible futures. Mark Achbar, co-director of the influential and inventive MANUFACTURING CONSENT: NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE MEDIA, teams up with co-director Jennifer Abbott and writer Joel Bakan to examine the far-reaching repercussions of the corporation's ascent. 

Based on Bakan's best-selling book, "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power", the film has achieved international critical and box office success. Winner of 10 audience awards, including Sundance, and 26 awards in total from prestigious festivals around the world, it stands as the top-grossing Canadian feature documentary of all time. THE CORPORATION includes encounters and interviews with CEOs and top-level executives from a range of industries: energy, pharmaceutical, computer, tire, carpet, sporting goods, public relations, branding, news, advertising, and undercover marketing, as well as the first management guru, the first corporate-sponsored university students, a Nobel-prize winning economist, a corporate spy, and a range of academics, critics, historians and thinkers. 

THE CORPORATION reveals that legally, a corporation is granted the status of a "person", and asks: "If that's the case, what kind of person is it?" To assess the "personality" of the corporate "person," a checklist is employed, using diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and the DSM IV, the standard diagnostic tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. It turns out the operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social "personality": it is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. A disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath. THE CORPORATION depicts numerous, inspiring, corporate harm reduction strategies employed by individuals and organizations working to regulate, re-write and reform this formidable societal force.

On Anniversary of Citizens United, Group Says Occupy the Courts

From Common Dreams . . . . I'm not sure that there is much we can do about the Citizen's United decision. We need Congress to overturn the decision with legislation, and they will NEVER do that (they are the only people who benefit from the decision). The Court will not - and probably is not able to - reverse their own decision in the absence of a case that justifies the reversal.

On Anniversary of Citizens United, Group Says Occupy the Courts

“Corporate personhood and money equals political speech are court-created doctrines"

- Common Dreams staff

The coalition Move to Amend has called for a day of action today to occupy federal courthouses across the country, including the U.S. Supreme Court, to mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United vs. FEC ruling.

 

CNN reports on the timing of the action:

The event is being held around the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which removed many limits to corporate spending in federal political campaigns, organizers say.

The 2010 ruling made it legal for groups to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money for a candidate, as long as the group does not coordinate with the candidate or contributed directly to his or her campaign.

It allowed for the rise of Super PACs, which can raise unlimited funds from corporations.

Politico reports:

“Why the courts? Because frankly folks, that’s the scene of the crime,” said David Cobb, an organizer of Friday’s protests. “Corporate personhood and money equals political speech are court-created doctrines. We the people never decided it; our elected representatives didn’t decide it; ordinary people like me and you never decided it. The court created these doctrines and it’s going to take a movement to overturn it.”

One tweeter's picture this morning shows barricades going up around the Supreme Court building.

Alva Noë - What Is A Person?

This is an interesting short article from philosopher (and brain scientist) Alva Noë posted at NPR's 13.7: Cosmos and Culture blog. This piece is a succinct response to the idea proposed in Mississippi to define a fertilized egg as a human being.

What Is A Person?

November 11, 2011by Alva Noë

According to Catholic doctrine, the Father, the Son and Holy Sprit are three distinct persons even though they are one essence. Only one of those persons — Jesus Christ — is also a human being whose life had a beginning and an end.

I am not an expert in Trinitarian theology. But I mention it here because, great mysteries aside, this Catholic doctrine uses the notion of person in what, from our point of view today, is the standard way.

John Locke called person a forensic concept. What he had in mind is that a person is one to whom credit and blame may be attached, one who is deemed responsible. The concept of a person is the concept of an agent.

Crucially, Locke argued, persons are not the same as human beings. Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde may be one and the same human being, that is, one and the same continuously existing organic life; they share a birth event; but they are two distinct persons. And this is why we don't blame the one for the other's crimes. Multiple personality disorder might be a real world example of this.

  I don't know whether Locke believed that two distinct persons could actually inhabit the same living human body, but he certainly thought there was nothing contradictory in the possibility. Nor did he think there was anything incoherent in the thought that one person could find existence in multiple distinct animal lives, even if, as a matter of fact, this may not be possible. If you believe in reincarnation, then you think this is a genuine possibility. For Locke, this was no more incoherent than the idea of two actors playing the same role in a play.

Indeed, the word "person" derives from a Latin (and originally a Greek) word meaning "character in a drama" or "mask" (because actors wore masks). This usage survives today in the phrase "dramatis personae." To be a person, from this standpoint, is to play a role. The person is the role played, however, not the player.

From this standpoint, the idea of non-human, non-living person certainly makes sense, even if we find it disturbing. Corporations are persons under current law, and this makes sense. They are actors, after all, and we credit and blame them for the things they do. They play an important role in our society.

Is a fertilized human egg alive? I would say yes. Is it a human being? This is much harder to answer and is comparable to the question, is a sapling already an oak tree? However we answer it, though, it is distinct from the question whether we should extend legal protections to the fertilized eggs of human beings? And none of these questions should be confused with the question whether the fertilized egg is a person, which it is clearly not.

It is a good thing that the recent effort in Mississippi to extend "personhood" to fertilized human eggs was unsuccessful at the polls. Popular will cannot succeed in making a fertilized egg a person.

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You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook, Twitter and over at The Atlantic.