Inside the New Science of Neuroengineering 83
palegray.net writes "Wired brings us a look into the world of neuroengineering, the science of hacking the brain to improve its function. Dr. Ed Boyden is the director of MIT's Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, focusing on innovative methods of physically altering neuroanatomy for various purposes. As useful as discoveries in the field may be, the work certainly raises moral and ethical questions. From the article: '"If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality... that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we are at our core," says Dr. Debra Matthews
of The Berman Institute of Bioethics. "We place ourselves in the mind and therefore the brain. (Mood-altering surgery) feels like fundamentally modifying who a person is."'"
Boring question (Score:2)
> "If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality... that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we are at our core,"
Wouldn't altering someone's personality by altering their brain imply that 'we are our brain' (which is of course influenced by chemicals produced in other parts of the body, so in a way one could also say 'we are our bodies'), thus answering this boring question?
Re:Boring question (Score:5, Insightful)
you can stand in the way of progress (Score:3, Insightful)
because you are a clueless moron
you can also ask a completely logically valid question about the implications of a given technology
for you to confuse the two motivations makes you just as big as a fool as the busy body morons you detest
really
my morality (Score:2)
is simple humanism
i support your desire to destroy religious and nationalistic bases for morality
but unless you replace the substandard form of moralities you outline above with another morality of your own choosing, you are a nihilist, and are therefore worse in effect on your world than any of the examples you cite above
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Course, you might also wonder what logical justification there could be for harming one life to (maybe) help another.
Re:Boring question (Score:4, Insightful)
You're being extremely vague there. Eating a carrot is harming another life. Unless you reformulate your post to something more concrete, 'because I felt like eating something orange' is a logical justification I can live with.
Re:Boring question (Score:4, Insightful)
Moralists do serve a purpose. What happens then if the said therapy also contains a switch that turns the formerly depressed individuals into fearless mind controlled soldiers? Plenty people in this world would love to have that switch in their hands. In another word, would you like to join the collective?
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First we have situation A (the curing of formerly depressed individuals), where according the GP no moral/ethical issues worth discussing apply. Then you add a Bad Thing to A, yielding situation B (the curing of formerly depressed individuals and putting a switch in their brains to turn them into mind controlled soldiers). You then try to convince GP that he should embrace the moralists whining about A, because B, which does not apply, is bad.
How exactly does that argument make sense? Should we discuss the
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Speak of not making any sense, how is assuming that the application of situation A stays in the scope of situation A? The world would be so much better of a place if everything we intend to do cannot be exploited, cannot be modified, and only serves the purpose they are designated, no more, no less. Are you saying that potential exploits should not be discussed in a ethical overview of a medical practice? Are you implying that it is perfectly ethical to serve people a medcine that can cure cancer, but is kn
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Moralists do serve a purpose.
Hmm... yes, nothing else goes quite so well with plum sauce as a nice, juicy roast moralist. Except babies, of course. I love babies. [smacks lips] If I could only find some baby moralists, my culinary experience would be complete.
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I agree, no one goes crying foul when teenagers go through puberty and the hormones change them into stupid little whipper snappers that won't STAY THE HELL OFF MY LAWN!
Haves and Have-Nots (Score:2)
It seems to me, that's one of the reasons moralists are raising issues. Maybe we should get ready to bow and scrape to the supermen. Maybe that will be good. But certainly don't you think we ought to talk about it a little?
Re:Haves and Have-Nots (Score:4, Interesting)
Every human (who lives long enough) will go through puberty. Not every human will be able to afford 'enhancements.' So, should we build a society with 2 classes of humankind?... don't you think we ought to talk about it a little?
Given that we already have disparities among many lines, healthcare being one of them, I think we have sufficently covered it here just now.
These are not superman enhancements, it's still at the question asking phase. We're not using this to make people or even rats smarter. And I have to think even if we do manage that, how would that be different than what we have now? You can't tell me that a refugee in a 3rd world country is on equal footing in almost any respect to your average CEO here. If he has a machine rigged into his head to cure his depression instantly, that won't change things significantly. Heck, if we make him smarter, he might see the problems with such inequity and may change things for the better. Unlikely, but the bottom line is that this is far from real right now and wouldn't seem to be a unique problem anyway.
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Current disparities do not in and of themselves justify adding new ones!
Which is why I was in no way suggesting that they do. I WAS saying that "should we build a society with 2 classes of humankind?" is a ridiculous question: we already have.
Some of us would like to ethical issues throughly examined prior to any attempt at significant abuses, instead of waiting until after the fact.
Right, I thought that's what we were doing right now. Are you suggesting we go beyond that and stop research (which, again, has not produced any applications yet) just because we're not all on the same page that it might unintentionally create a bad situation? When it could help numerous diseases like autism, schizophrenia, epilepsy, AL
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It's a bit hard to talk when the more populist side immediatelly starts to shout "don't allow!", "sin!", "ban it!", "criminalise it!"
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Moralists are the reason medical science is stuck in the stone age
So, you're opposed to all ethics in medical science. That means you oppose the Nuremberg Code [wikipedia.org].
Sorry to get all Godwin on you but that means you're either a proto-Nazi, a troll or a clueless fuckwit. Medical ethics are important to stop crimes against humanity and it's quite proper that there should be a debate about what's OK and what isn't.
WTF mods? (Score:2)
I realise arguing against the faceless mods of /. (a duty we've all shouldered from time to time) makes me look like an idiot, but really WTF? Someone posts opposing all barriers to medical research and gets +5, I point out restrictions were put in place due to Nazi atrocities and get called a troll (maybe it's because I used a naughty word?).
Yea I know this is stupid, but I've had a few so what the hey.
At what point... (Score:1)
If somebody elects to have a procedure done to permanently alter the way their brain works, are they still the same person?
I wonder how effective this would be - even after this mood alteration is done, won't the patient still have memories from their past on how they used to act. It's interesting what kind of stress that would put on somebody's psyche to have an abrupt change in how they act, how they think and how a patient would react to
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If I ever meet myself, I'll hit myself so hard I won't know what's hit me.
Zaphod certainly seemed to think of his old self as a different person.
Interesting, but call back in 20 years (Score:4, Interesting)
It is an interesting take on an old technique. Instead of using direct electrical stimulation to stimulate the brain, he uses virally-transcoded neurons to respond to different wavelengths of light....then pipes a fiber optic cable into a mouse brain. To do what? To make it run in circles.
It's a proof of technology, but nothing more. Engineering the brain would imply we understand how it works, which, more or less, we still don't. Not really at a cellular level, not really at a systems level, not even really at a gross level either. We know an order of magnitude more than we did even a decade ago, but we are no closer to altering behavior than we were when the lobotomy was invented...the first 'neuroengineering'.
I think it is much more likely that we will first have engineered modules, either synthetic neuronal or otherwise, that will process independently and then 'plug into' our pre-existing sensory input pathways, rather than direct brain modification.
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Instead of using direct electrical stimulation to stimulate the brain, he uses virally-transcoded neurons to respond to different wavelengths of light....then pipes a fiber optic cable into a mouse brain. To do what? To make it run in circles.
A quick pubmed search led me to this article, which Boyden was an author on http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=17483470 [nih.gov]
From the intro:
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What I am saying is that it is no where close to 'neuroengineering'. Sure we can consider the implications of the day we can directly modify brains and behavior, but that day isn't today, or even anywhere close, and that this technology doesn't
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What I am saying is that it is no where close to 'neuroengineering'.
Yeah, that was pretty tangential to your point. On your point, I guess it just goes to show that everyone likes to use buzzwords to describe their research to people who will never fully understand it. I'm guilty of that too. It's a disservice, but people generally don't have the background knowledge required for any research project. If you try to bring them up to speed, even quickly, they'll nod along like they follow, but their eyes glaze over. I suspect it's the deep-rooted human tendancy to want t
Whay about psychiatruic drugs? (Score:1)
Aren't they change personality too?
Like Prozak, Paxil for example - the SSRI(Selective Serotonin Reuptake inhibitors).
People using that drugs are "on" that drugs, they have a changed personality, with no depression, but they are chemically altered - their serotonin reuptake in the brain is inhibited.
Re:Whay about psychiatruic drugs? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Step 1 - introduce Stranger A to your friend Alice, when Alice is having a bad day.
Step 2 - introduce Stranger B to your friend Alice, when Alice is having a good day.
Step 3 - ask Strangers A and B to describe Alice's personality. Ding ding ding! They describe different personalities.
But wait, you say, one person's description based on purposely limited evidence is not a complete picture of Alice's personality, the old 3-blind-men-feeling-an-elephant-and-describing-it problem. Indeed this is true. A complet
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If your dog died, you lost your wallet, broke a bone, and your girl-friend broke up with you in the span of a couple weeks, you'd probably be feeling pretty shitty in a way that would affect your behavior. However, this kind of feeling-shitty, unlike with depression, is directly caused by shitty-stimuli and leads to feeling-shitty-behavior.
No, this is environmental stimuli resulting in specific complex chemical changes occurring in the brain including but not limited to serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrin concentrations. The only difference in chronic depression is that these chemical levels are set to feel shitty by default. The only way that an anti-depressant is personality altering would be if you consider normal environmental stimuli to also be personality altering. If you believe this to be the case, then I think you have a very n
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I would certainly agree this is largely semantics, and that the shitty feelings, whatever the cause, are complex chemical responses.
However, is personality also not a chemical thing? Isn't an addictive personality due to an unusual dopamine response (can't remember whether it's signal or receptor, and over or under active, but that's immaterial here)? Are there not chemical bases behind aggressive, nurturing, apathetic personalities?
My point was not that these aren't chemical things, but rather, everything
Re:Whay about psychiatruic drugs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, I came into this a little heated. I have just had way too many friends ostracized and admonished for using drugs to treat conditions like depression, chronic anxiety, and ADD. In addition, I have lost friends who refused to consider treatment for problems based on the idea that drugs would change who they are, rather than on a preference for more traditional treatment (which they still refused).
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I think there are several general misconceptions about psychotropic drugs that make describing them as changing personality a very poor choice of words, whether you believe it to be technically accurate or not. First and foremost is that almost every person I talk to about psychotropic drugs completely misunderstands how they work. They believe that anti-depressants make you happy, resulting in such misinformed beliefs in things like "fake happiness". And not just with anti-depressants. These beliefs follow for every psychotropic drug that has ever come up in conversation with me including such straightforward things like amphetamines. Many people have expressed concern to me that psychotropic drugs change your personality, and thereby change who you are as a person. And that's just rubbish. As someone else mentioned in here, our current understanding of personality can only account for about 10% of the variation, which basically means that we don't know anything about personality, and can't at all be defined by some form of look-up table.
That's the trouble with describing psychoactive drugs. I've found that the answer to anyone who claims 'SSRI make you fake-happy' is that 'No, SSRI take away the fake-sad'. When you get depressed because you can't do anything, and you can't do anything because you are too depressed, that's not a 'real-sad' by their definition. Some people can't grok that loop that depressed people get caught in. Before I started taking them, I thought the same thing. I had reasons to be depressed; not dog died and girlfrien
What about mind altering drugs? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm bipolar and take lithium to alter the range of moods I experience - does that mean I'm no longer me?
I don't see this as an ethical issue so long as the results are within the limits of what we consider "normal" for human kind. Once we start discussing augmentations to give people x-ray vision, streaming video memory and frickin' lasers attached to their heads then we have an ethical issue.
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X-ray vision is useless because it requires a source of x-rays. But I don't see how having the ability to observe light that most humans cannot observe is an ethical issue.
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Indeed, such commentary typically makes me rage or sigh with exasperation.
We already have medical interventions that can drastically change what a person acts like, thinks and feels.
We've had brain surgeries ranging from incredibly crude to fairly sophisticated, these affect the brains and hence the minds of patients.
As you said, we have psychoactive drugs that can change the activity(or even structure) of the brain, leading to changes in all sorts of stuff.
Hell, sitting down on a couch and talking about yo
Convergence (Score:2)
Whilst AI has produced some fantastic techniques for solving countless problems through the years pretty much everyone in the field accepts that on current computer architecture it's scope is limited. For us to make any advance towards strong AI we'd need much greater computing power and some see biological computing, others see quantum computing as key here.
Perhaps you might just call it a branch of biological computing, but I've thought for a while now and said here a few times that I think realistically
i'll play counterpoint to the inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)
slashdot chorus of "let us hack away at our bodies, and use all the mind altering substances we want, the enemy here is just narrow-minded busy bodies"
there is a subtle philosophical issue at play here, and the issue is self-perception. for example: you win a chess match, or ace an exam, or win the nobel prize, while under the influence of a concentration enhancing drug, or with some sort of technological mind alteration
the question is: did YOU achieve something, or did your modification achieve something?
what happens is we develop a poverty of self-perception. you begin to think: without various crutches, i cannot achieve what i achieved. such that you have no confidence, and you have no real self-regard. you begin to think of yourself as just a piece of meat channeling some sort of technology or drug. that you yourself are not the key to your own performance
meanwhile, to achieve something without any hackery or artificial boost is to replenish self-regard and confidence
in other words, the issue is not what other people think of you, or what shrill narrow minds think of you. the issue is the damage you do to what you think of yourself with these deep modifications
emphasis: deep modifications. no, sorry, we are most certainly talking about modifications to your performance nothing at all like a good meal or a good night's sleep. some will say radical modifications are no different philosophically from simple sustenance in terms of contributing to performance. but hydrating before an exam is absolutely nothing like taking a cognition enhancer in terms of contributing something to your performance, really
if you really have to ask why, it has to do with what goes on in the mind, with the self, with your core competency, not simple rote material contribution on the periphery of what it takes to pass an exam. for example: you can't complete an exam without a pencil, and you also can't complete an exam without your mind. to think of them as equivalent contributions to your self-regard and your performance is not a valid or logically coherent argument
if you yourself don't even think any of your accomplishments are due to your own innate abilities, then you eventually have no drive in life, you become empty and self-loathing. quality of life and happiness is not defined by pure accomplishment. quality of life is derived from self-regard. it is possible to win at everything, and hate yourself, and be an unhappy person. it is also possible to try hard, do mediocre, but still have high self-consideration
when you achieve something, and you don't even believe it is because of your own abilities, you have developed a hollow, rotten chasm in your ability to enjoy your own life
in this way, a lot of you really need to pause and reconsider cognition enhancers, technological tweaks on mental abilities, and the like. no: it is not no big deal. it is a deeply serious deal, and it has absolutel ynothing to do with judgmental busy bodies, but simply because of subtle philosophical alterations on the idea of "self" that can lead to terrible consequences for your own happiness
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you didn't read my post (Score:2)
i already addressed your point
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Without mind altering medication I'd be unable to function half as well as I do now. I know that my achievements are my own but that without my drugs (my modifications) I'd have been unable to make those achievements yet I have no issues with self confidence, self worth or anything like that.
If my drugs allowed me to achieve things that would otherwise be impossible for any (not just me) person to achieve then I might start to have issues but I'm not even certain about that. I'm sure there are world record
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Re:i'll play counterpoint to the inevitable (Score:4, Funny)
slashdot chorus of "let us hack away at our bodies, and use all the mind altering substances we want, the enemy here is just narrow-minded busy bodies"
there is a subtle philosophical issue at play here, and the issue is self-perception. for example: you win a chess match, or ace an exam, or win the nobel prize, while under the influence of a concentration enhancing drug, or with some sort of technological mind alteration
the question is: did YOU achieve something, or did your modification achieve something?
what happens is we develop a poverty of self-perception. you begin to think: without various crutches, i cannot achieve what i achieved. such that you have no confidence, and you have no real self-regard. you begin to think of yourself as just a piece of meat channeling some sort of technology or drug. that you yourself are not the key to your own performance
...
Having just taken my cognition enhancer. I have just had an epiphany. This conversation is only a distraction and waste of time as /. is populated mostly by Trolls. I just realized I am a Troll. So that is why I enjoy it here.
To say something on topic. It was Abraham Maslow who said.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
So any tool will change how we perceive the ourselves and the world. But this can not be totally avoided and there will be room for those who wish to follow either path. Oh wait it is wearing off...
Feel the urge to Troll comming back...
I am sick and tired of everyone being sick and tired. If I loath myself so much I want to modify my brain and body let me. Go on and develop your mind but leave me out of it and hug a tree while your at it.
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there is a subtle philosophical issue at play here
There is another, even less subtle philosophical issue at play here: This sort of neural enhancement will certainly not be free. In fact it will probably be fairly expensive. Assuming the bugs and kinks get worked out at some point in the future and we have the means to double somebody's IQ, who gets access to that treatment?
If it is only available to "those who can afford it" then you are essentially saying that the poor (or the less-than-rich) should be content to live out their lives as second-class citi
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> This apartheid will only deepen generation after generation, with the wealthy having access to more and better wet hacks, while the unwealthy fall further behind.
That is, assuming there is no incentive to make these enhancements available to the public. But there is. Having a well educated population is an economic advantage. Sure, only the rich will be able to afford the newest enhancements, but this has always been true. The rich own the coolest cars. The rich own personal jets. The rich can afford t
Re:i'll play counterpoint to the inevitable (Score:4, Insightful)
Having a well educated population is an economic advantage, but so are things like access to lifesaving drugs and medical treatments, or even access to something as basic as clean water.
In the case of medicines and health care, the profit motive of the life sci companies means the poor do not get these treatments. Even when the outcome severely debilitates that community's ability to compete economically.
In the case of water, privatization of municipal water supplies in the developing world has shown time and again that those who can't pay will have something as fundamental as access to water cut off. Even when the outcome severely debilitates that community's ability to compete economically.
Why would neural enhancement be any different?
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Some would argue that the idea of innate abilities in the dualistic way you've put it is a silly idea to begin with. Learning something new changes your abilities. Innate abilities seem just like an arbitrary starting point. I'm ADDish, so I sometimes take dexamphetamine. I don't feel the help I've had from this has made my achievements hollow at all, as it doesn't give me abilities, but aids my own development of them. Perhaps it's because I follow Buddhist philosophy and subscribe to the theory of no-self
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Does it matter?
Defining what makes a person is a deeply complex and largely pointless exercise. Remember that we, all of us, use intelligence amplification artifacts so much as a matter of course that we don't even recognise we're doing it. And I'm not talking about such crude devices as calculators or computers, or even the kind of hit-and-miss tinkering the article's talking about, either.
Take vocal speech, for example.
I have no innate abilities (Score:1)
All my abilities are either genetic luck of the draw or results of my environment, fatalistic, but rational.
I cannot think as well as some, or socialize as well as others, so this treatment could be argued as therapeutic. All of a sudden many people said "oh its therapeutic, that's OK then". They have some idea of a threshold of what abilities are "natural" and as long as we are bringing people up to that threshold we are fine, but going past it would of course be hubris. I should stop feeding trolls, or
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No. I am every chemical in my body, I am the circuitry of my brain. If it happened in my brain, then it was I who had that thought. A drug or even circuit cannot think, it needs to be in the context of a brain and thus it gains personality.
By your logic I should have no self respect because I know that it was my genes that created my brain. So even if I win the Nobel prize, under the influence of my genes, I should go, "oh no it wasn't me really thank my parents for fucking".
But of course I don't think that
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You're missing the point though. If you were to engineer yourself in that fashion you'd alienate yourself, you'd take the weird, random, unique and individual biological mess you are now (n.b. I'm not taking the "natural is best" view here) and turn it into something mass produced.
It's something you see in drug culture, people take drugs in order to behave and feel in certain ways and in doing so lose part of themselves. In some cases it's a good thing, I think the way MDMA has changed me is a massive impro
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Let me take the opposite cant. I am reasonably tall, much stronger than the average man, and exceptionally intelligent. I earned a triple major in 4 years while being paid to go to school, all the while sleeping through classes, and procrastinating as much as possible. I competed in two body building competitions, for which I dieted between 1/3 and 1/4 the time that other competitors had to. The only unnatural aid I used for any of this was a bit of caffeine when realized it was 1 AM and I hadn't started on
Allow me to channel my English and typing mods... (Score:2)
...since without them I couldn't achieve this post.
Radical modifications are certainly different from a good meal or a good night's sleep. That's why school our children, instead of simply feeding them and putting them to bed -- we need to make the radical changes in their mental and emotional structures that allow them to read, to write, to interact successfully with others, and to engage effectively with our society and culture.
If surgical or pharmaceutical enhancements allow us to better control our tho
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the question is: did YOU achieve something, or did your modification achieve something?
what happens is we develop a poverty of self-perception. you begin to think: without various crutches, i cannot achieve what i achieved. such that you have no confidence, and you have no real self-regard. you begin to think of yourself as just a piece of meat channeling some sort of technology or drug. that you yourself are not the key to your own performance
This is a questionable assumption, at least if you are speaking in terms of everyone feeling this way. Using your chess match example, and assuming my opponent is formidable, in order for me to win I must have a lot of experience with chess. No amount of a concentration-enhancing drug is going to help me if I am not familiar with winning strategies or don't know enough to spot my crafty foe's subtle positioning or, for that matter, didn't know until sitting down to play that bishops only move diagonally.
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the question is: did YOU achieve something, or did your modification achieve something?
what happens is we develop a poverty of self-perception. you begin to think: without various crutches, i cannot achieve what i achieved. such that you have no confidence, and you have no real self-regard. you begin to think of yourself as just a piece of meat channeling some sort of technology or drug. that you yourself are not the key to your own performance
Would it really matter? Take your self-confidence boosting treatment, and go about your day feeling just fine.
in other words, the issue is not what other people think of you, or what shrill narrow minds think of you. the issue is the damage you do to what you think of yourself with these deep modifications
Right, so each person should pick the limit to which they are willing to go. In that statement alone, you've removed the over arching need for some giant moral decision to pick where that line is, and set it squarely at the feet of the individual that is being 'enhanced'. Frankly, that's where I feel it should be.
in this way, a lot of you really need to pause and reconsider cognition enhancers, technological tweaks on mental abilities, and the like. no: it is not no big deal. it is a deeply serious deal, and it has absolutel ynothing to do with judgmental busy bodies, but simply because of subtle philosophical alterations on the idea of "self" that can lead to terrible consequences for your own happiness
Or they can lead to great gains for a person's happiness. Take a person who is depresse
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There is no "I" separate from myself - if I modified myself, then it is still I myself that made the achievement.
ObCarAnalogy: If I tune up the engine of my car and it performs better, it is still my car performing better, even though it was modified. If I replace the axles on my Jeep with stronger versions, reinforce the frame, add protective plates over vulnerable components, and I find that the Jeep can now tr
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The answer is: I did it, with the help of my enhancement/modification.
Humans evolved as tool-using creatures.
Did you kill that smilodon or did your spear?
Did you catch that fish or did your fishing rod?
Did you clean your driveway or did your snow-thro
Mind and Brain (Score:4, Informative)
Most still apply Cartesian dualism (mind and brain as separate phenomena) to the brain. This error has propagated from Decartes' own self-admitted fear of The Church. He feared being persecuted as was Galileo unless he offered a sacrosanct seat for the soul. Scientifically he had no such leanings. Nor should we now, with our understanding of dynamics in complex systems. (Not to say we understand the complex system of the brain -- we don't -- but we know better why we don't.) It is probably best to consider mind in terms of process rather than object ("the" mind). More simply, "Brain is a noun, mind is a verb. Mind is what brain does." (Karl Pribram)
The subjects under consideration in TFA are no more engineering than bashing millions of atomic particles together in an accelerator is quantum engineering. Compared to the subtle and highly interdependent Hebbian cellular assemblies where processing occurs, they are massive invasive assaults.
To consider (as per the example) changes in personality only in terms of electrical and surgical interventions exemplifies the engineering slant and belies the lack of understanding of the neuro-. Changes in personality also occur due to chemical (including dietary) influences, as well as environmental factors during (life-long) development, not to mention social and other learning factors. If the ethical questions are regarding "self" and its generation, all must be considered. Thus these should not be considered (and are not) new questions for bioethics. Given the lack of subtlety of the interventions discussed, they should hardly even be grounds for considering a new outlook on the questions.
Changes in personality are probably the worst example to use. Our best understanding of personality is based on statistical correlations of test answers, self-reports and observations by trained and familiar observers, the best of which reach r=0.3 (30% correlation). That means they can explain less than 10% (for r=0.3, r^2=0.09) of the variance in the observations. Leaving 90% of the variance unexplained means you've said almost nothing useful. Since much of basic personality theory statistics are based on subjective consideration of the data ("trained" judgement in how much to rotate axis of plotted data to maximize the results) as well as subjective judgement of test results themselves (ie. inkblot test scoring) we're probably explaining for closer to 0% of the variance. Any results, then, are as illusory as personality itself.
That last statement is ironic -- an anti-truism. Despite the failure of science (especially statistics) to prove the existence of personality and its components, we continue to exhibit them. The failure is probably in our understanding and the language thereof. That being said, what was said regarding personality in TFA probably shouldn't have been either because despite the consensual agreement of its existence, we don't know much at all about what we're talking about.
The Speed Of Dark (Score:1, Informative)
Surgically or electrically vs chemically: diff = ? (Score:4, Interesting)
"If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality... that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we are at our core,"
Really?
If we drug up someone so as to flatten their emotional responses, don't we change their Neuroticism level (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits [wikipedia.org])? Is that not changing their personality?
We probably don't want to do that for its own sake, but suppose it happens as a side-effect.
How's this different?
Algol "Object Oriented"? (Score:1, Offtopic)
I've never heard Algol described as being "Object Oriented", in fact, that term was unknown in 1965 when Algol was invented.
At best, it facilitated "structured programming", but even later languages based on Algol weren't Object Oriented (i.e. PL/I).
We do it with drugs, sleep, and food already (Score:2, Insightful)
Your attitude and mood are already affected by sleep, food, medicine, and other environmental factors.
Taken over a long time, this defines your personality.
There's a reason grumpy old men become grumpy old men, for most of them it's not because they were born that way.
Direct brain manipulation is just one of many ways to alter a personality.
slighly ironic ad... (Score:2)
Jack in! (Score:1)
> "If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality...
> that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we
> are at our core," says Dr. Debra Matthews of The Berman Institute of Bioethics.
Screw that!
Just give me a chip I can plug-n-play a yappy personality so I can get with hot chicks like this [bioethicsinstitute.org].
How many dudes have you given the "can't we just be friends line" to, Debra? I got news for you, some people have no problem scrapping parts of their personality. Unload that shit
Overclocking (Score:2)
This is awesome. I guess it would void the warranty to overclock your brain, but imagine the FPS you could get. Might need some water cooling. Anyways, nice!!