New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | August 25, 2005

Cathy Young's neurons fire, causing her finger muscles to constrict rhythmically, depressing keys on the keyboard, producing symbol strings which, when absorbed by your optic nerve, produce further neural firing.

Comments

|8.25.05 @ 7:47AM|#

Martha J. Farah sympathetically cited the warnings of Leon Kass, the conservative chairman of the President�s Council on Bioethics, that some advances in this area may undermine intrinsic human worth. Said Farah, �There is an intuition that I think we all share, regardless of our ultimate judgment of right and wrong, that says it�s a little bit like treating a person as a thing, to say we�re just going to open up the hood and make them run better.�

So if Farah ever gets appendicitis, she'll just die with diginity, like a proper human, rather than have some doctor cut her open like some thing that needs tweaking so she can run better?

There are legitimate reasons people might have qualms about these new technologies, but opposition to doctors "treating us like things and making us run better" isn't one of them.

|8.25.05 @ 7:47AM|#

I know perfectly well there are only two "i"s in "dignity."

|8.25.05 @ 8:35AM|#

even if we DO acquire a biological understanding of behavior, the Soul Theorists will still be around (and probably asking it to be taught in public schools).

After all, what is a soul? An invisibile thingie that follows you around that nobody can prove or disprove that somehow interacts with your body and makes it do stuff?

How is science ever going to disprove that to the believers? It can't. Any more than it can't prove that the Magic Billiard Ball Fairy isn't what makes the 8-ball move when i hit it with the cue ball.

|8.25.05 @ 9:28AM|#

"Cathy Young's neurons fire, causing her finger muscles to constrict rhythmically, depressing keys on the keyboard, producing symbol strings which, when absorbed by your optic nerve, produce further neural firing."

Is it wrong that this sentence makes me hot?

|8.25.05 @ 9:51AM|#

Joe:

It depends on your conception of right and wrong as they pertain to your neuromorality.

Franklin Harris|8.25.05 @ 11:55AM|#

Yes.

|8.25.05 @ 1:15PM|#

I don't get why people give materialism such a bad rap. So what if we're just bags of protein, lipids, and so forth? I suppose it is a little unnerving to imagine, but everyone needs to come to terms with reality at some point in their life. Just because a being is the sum of its parts doesn't mean that its existence is in vain.

He retorted that biophysical creatures can still have dignity and that human dignity specifically resides in rationality.

Rationality can exist as a result of purely physical and or mechanical means. That is apparent in human beings.

|8.25.05 @ 2:29PM|#

Is it wrong that this sentence makes me hot?

No, but it sure tells us a lot about your sexual habits! :-)

|8.25.05 @ 2:35PM|#

"Rationality can exist as a result of purely physical and or mechanical means."

I'm a nonbeliever when it comes to religion and gods, etc. I once had a discussion with a woman who had been raised as a Pentecostal and she asked me "Well if you don't believe in God or the afterlife, what do you think happens to us when when we die?"
My response was to ask: "Where does the light go when you unplug the lamp?" I don't think I have ever before seen someone shudder as did when I asked that.

|8.25.05 @ 3:07PM|#

jw - I like it.

smacky - that's what I always say. It's like these people are so unimaginative that they have to believe in something beyond themselves just to have a purpose. Fuck that.

|8.25.05 @ 7:10PM|#

My response was to ask: "Where does the light go when you unplug the lamp?" I don't think I have ever before seen someone shudder as did when I asked that.

Personal nonexistence is a hard concept to get comfortable with, but is it really worse than crossing your fingers, picking a religious belief to follow, and hoping you chose the right one and won't suffer eternally after death, be reincarnated as a lower animal, etc.? I've never quite gotten that.

|8.26.05 @ 7:55AM|#

"So if Farah ever gets appendicitis, she'll just die with diginity, like a proper human, rather than have some doctor cut her open like some thing that needs tweaking so she can run better?"

Treating the mind is different.

If I walk into the hospital as "Fluffy with appendicitis" and the doctors perform surgery on me, I walk out as "Fluffy without appendicitis".

If I have a non-state-approved personality, and I have this problem "fixed" in a hospital, I walk in as "Fluffy" and I walk out as "Some Other Person That Is Not Fluffy". A sufficient level of control over mental functioning [and I am not qualified to say where that level is, other than to say it's somewhere over "vodka" and probably hovers in the "lobotomy" range] is the equivalent of assassination.

|8.26.05 @ 8:30AM|#

Fluffy--

I agree entirely with your concern; I'm just saying that that is NOT what Farah said. Or rather, that she used a bad analogy to express her concerns. If Farah had talked about the possibility of doctors "curing" conditions like a tendency to question authority, I'd've supported her one hundred percent. But no; she merely talked about how bad it is for doctors to view human beings as things in need of fixing. Well, that's pretty much the whole basis for modern medicine.

|8.26.05 @ 9:45AM|#

"But no; she merely talked about how bad it is for doctors to view human beings as things in need of fixing. Well, that's pretty much the whole basis for modern medicine."

Right, but as the article indirectly points out, that view arose in a time when "dualism" was dominant, so medicine wasn't really about fixing human beings, but was rather about fixing the flesh-and-bone vehicles that human beings use to walk around. The collapse of the dualist outlook in science generally means that medicine is in danger of transforming itself from an advanced kind of "auto" mechanic work to work that is done on the "drivers" themselves.

I think that's the distinction - you move from viewing human bodies as things that need fixing to viewing human beings as things that need fixing when you come to regard human beings as all body. And once you have made that jump, all the old lessons and analogies to previous medical practice aren't really valid anymore, because you've changed the context in which those analogies are being made. That means that, once you make the jump, even if human beings are all body, our previous cultural history of deferring to medical tinkering isn't a relevant precedent, because we've changed the definition of the number of aspects of life subject to that tinkering.

Java Games|8.26.05 @ 8:10PM|#

Thanks for the good material.

|8.27.05 @ 12:56PM|#

jw

"My response was to ask: "Where does the light go when you unplug the lamp?" I don't think I have ever before seen someone shudder as did when I asked that."

yes becouse it is only stupid simple minded poeple who are afraid that belive in god and a soul...bleh

smacky

"I don't get why people give materialism such a bad rap. So what if we're just bags of protein, lipids, and so forth?I suppose it is a little unnerving to imagine, but everyone needs to come to terms with reality at some point in their life."

Becouse Man has evolved to believe in gods not biology. Your bent belief system that thinks that people worship god and think of them selves as souls becouse they are scared or dumb is completely wrong.

it is sad really when the only thing that can be said here on religion and materialism is "hey i am a bigger athiest then you are" "and "religious poeple are dumb" *sigh*