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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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During our long hiatus, I received an email from one of our listeners who wrote me the following.
I have been listening to your show for quite some time now.
I had been trying for a long time to find a good philosophical podcast,
an interesting phenomenon in itself, but had perpetually met with failure until.
Love at first listen, I found entitled opinions.
That's one way of defining entitled opinions, a show for those who otherwise meet with perpetual failure.
When they search for a good philosophical podcast.
We cover a lot more than philosophy around here as the brigade knows well.
But whether the topic is literature, biology, cosmology, psychiatry,
religion, evolution, or corporations, entitled opinions brings an insurgent,
extracurricular philosophical reflection to bear on it.
Trying to make it real compared to what?
That's our spirit.
They can eat their dinner on philosophy talk, eat their pork and beans.
On entitled opinions, we eat more chicken any man ever seen.
That's right, the band is at hand, the priest is at the feast, amor is at the door,
what gets put on in the east gets taken off here in the west.
So you just get here and we'll take care of the rest.
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My guest today turns out to be the person who wrote me the email in question.
But before we engage her on the topic of bioethics, I would like to take a moment to clarify
something I mentioned toward the end of the recent show we aired on Charles Darwin.
And which I brought up again during our show with photographer Lena Herzog.
It has to do with what I called nature's essayistic manner of going about the business of natural
selection. A number of you were intrigued enough to ask me to clarify and elaborate exactly what I
meant when I declared that if I were God and my intention were to create the most diversified,
complex, wondrous, and beautiful biosphere possible, I could think of no better mechanism to put
in place than the creative, albeit cruel process of natural selection.
I define that mechanism as essayistic in the sense that at any given moment in the development of
an individual species or biogroup, there exists an enormous overload of putulating genetic
possibilities and random mutations, the vast majority of which are not selected successfully,
but which nevertheless continue to get generated, discarded, and recombined in the great
cauldron of the evolutionary process. Since only a tiny fraction of the proliferating possibilities gets
realized, most of nature remains in a state of sheer potential, a potential for life rather than
life itself. And if we could do an inventory of this near life, I don't know what else to call it,
we would be astonished at how ingenious creative evolution actually is when it comes to monitoring
the fierce struggles that take place on the boundary lines between possibility and actuality.
The genius of nature is that it really does not know what it is doing when it evolves its species.
Not if we conceive of knowledge, the way the Western tradition has tended to conceive of it.
Aristotle, with his unparalleled common sense, declared that a craftsman must have four
knowledge of what he intends to build if he hopes to bring it into being. Thus, the carpenter must
know the form of a table must have in his mind a concept of table before he can go about making one
out of the wood in his workshop. A house does not come into being by chance but by design.
The ontotheological idea of God in the Western tradition is largely that of the ultimate craftsman
in whose divine mind the design of creation pre-exists the act of creation.
God produces the world through his foreknowledge of its species and his power to actualize them into
being from out of the chaos of undifferentiated matter. Grasping the essence and totality of the
whole beforehand God assigns its parts accordingly. This is more or less what Leibniz meant when he declared
that we live in the best of all possible worlds, namely that God through his omniscience and goodness
actualize the mayor, the moan, perceived the best of possible worlds and that he really had no choice
in the matter. Nature does something similar but in a very different way, namely without necessity
and without foreknowledge. What became clear with Darwin is that nature does not operate like a craftsman
or what amounts to the same like the ontotheological God of creation. For nature does not know what
it is doing does not foresee its creative evolution. Instead it has a surcharge of vital options that
it casts into the arena of life and its surrounding ring of near life allowing those options to
strive for self-realization or self-perpetuation by whatever means available. In other words,
Nature assays. It attempts, experiments, tries and ventures the new, the variant, the possible and the
unprecedented. Nature is through and through, possibleitarian, forever incubating, combining and
assaying the range of possibilities. In the Western tradition nature has often been compared to a book
But if nature is like a book, that book is more of a collection of essays than a systematic
treatise or traditional novel. With this difference that its essays are writing themselves without
understanding the sentences out of which they are composed. In the realm of nature, making comes first
and knowledge if it comes about it all comes later. That's why here I would call on the authority
of one of the great trustees who sits on the board of entitled opinions, Jambatista Vico. Vico wrote a
century before Darwin, yet most of the modern science that came after him confirmed, Vico's
epistemological principle that we only know what we ourselves make. Vero mitt factum convertum tuur,
the true and the maid are convertible. First we make, then we come to know. Again, that is how
natural selection operates. First it makes through trial and error, first it assays, and when one
of its essays gets selected, it keeps a genetic code of its own blueprint for further replication.
This is what I meant when I spoke about nature's essayistic el-an-vita.
Now onto our show, the guest who joins me on entitled opinions today is Tamara Kiali. She is a post
doctoral fellow in the novel tech ethics team at Dalhousie University up in Canada.
She recently completed her PhD in the Department of Social Sciences at Cambridge University
with a dissertation on issues of control, responsibility, and the self-indipression,
using qualitative interviews with women to explore her topic.
Tamara has lectured in bioethics at Sydney University and the Australian National University.
She has a variety of research interests but is primarily interested in neuroethics
and the ethics of reproduction. For example, questions such as what policy schools and universities
should adopt on the use of cognitive enhancers to improve exam performance as well as issues related
to the genetic engineering of children and embryo selection for non-medical reasons.
Tamara joins me today to talk about bioethics. We've never done a show on bioethics before,
and I for one am looking forward to our conversation, but I can't resist mentioning one other
anecdote. In her email to me, Tamara informed me that after finishing her dissertation, she took a
part-time job in one of the college libraries at Cambridge and that it was tedious work,
work that involves scanning books into the computer system, but she could listen to her iPod
while she worked and I'm quoting her again. I wanted to listen to something intellectual
and stumbled upon entitled opinions and actually looked forward to work because of it.
When I listen to it, I feel that I'm tuning into an underworld of kindred spirits.
So here you are. Welcome to the underworld. Thanks very much. It feels unreal to actually be on
the other side. Having already listened to a number of shows, Tamara, you know by now that I am
extremely wary of what Martin Heidegger called "technicity," above all when it comes
to forms of biotechnology. I mean things like genetic engineering of crops, which is a widespread
practice these days, and one that raises for me a host of social, political, ecological,
and ethical questions. I also mean things like the reproductive technologies that are in place
today, the genetic engineering of children, cognitive enhancement, and embryo selection,
but before we get into some of the controversial issues, could I ask you to please say a word about
your discipline? Namely, bioethics. What exactly is bioethics in your view?
So I understand bioethics to mean any ethical issues concerning biology,
biological research and applications of biology as well as medicine,
being the clinical practice, medical research, and medical technologies.
So this is very wide, and if you think about it, actually, it's also very interdisciplinary,
so it involves not just philosophers, but also sociologists, lawyers, medical practitioners,
anthropologists, all of these sort of disciplines can weigh into bioethics. So it's quite for me,
it's a wide definition. It can encapsulate practices such as abortion, euthanasia. These are
quite old practices, and it can go all the way to IVF, that's in vitro fertilization,
pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which is embryo selection, basically,
and perhaps in the future genetic engineering of children, as we already said, genetic engineering of
crops, and also neuroscientific advances. So you're describing here of biotechnologies,
yes. About which bioethics has something to say, do you understand bioethics to be offering,
or should it be offering a set of prescriptions or moral mandates, ethical imperatives,
to regulate the development and dissemination of bio technologies, or do you understand bioethics to
be something that does not presume to aim, at matters of principle, general, let's say,
universal principle, but applies to local practices in their particular circumstance.
And as you were mentioning, you're interested in the social context, as well as natural context,
and the repercussions that certain bio technologies will have in particular environment.
So... Yeah, I think it depends what kind of a bioethicist you are.
If you're taking the case-based approach, which I tend to take, you will look at
different bio technologies on a case-by-case basis, and look at often your intuitions and apply ethical
ethical principles out from there, expanding out from what your particular intuitions are.
I don't actually want to pin myself down to that particular approach, but
I do often feeling client towards it. The other approach is a principleist approach, which, as you said,
works from particular principles and flows out from that to apply those principles to
different ethical problems and issues. And ideally bioethics is seeking answers to seeking
to gain the most ethical solutions to problems that perplex us, and controversial
technologies that people are worried about and what we should do with them.
Well, let's take a few cases, if you don't mind. You talked about abortion and euthanasia as being
classical. They do not directly associate with biotechnology, but they do have a lot to do with
bioethics if you want to look at it that way. So let's take some traditional classical instances
before we talk about the much more sinister for me, sinister cases of what I guess we're not
calling novel tech. So abortion, for example. How do you approach an issue like that?
So for me, I'll say upfront that I take somewhat different perspective on abortion to the way it's
often debated in bioethics. So most people will be familiar with the debates on the moral status of
the embryo and the fetus, and the rights of the mother versus the rights of the fetus,
and various different very good philosophical arguments have been proposed about it.
I will say upfront that I am pro-choice. I come from a feminist perspective, but at the same time,
I have read some, I've done a bit of research on the sociological, the social context of abortion.
Mainly, I was, what fueled this actually was questions around, well, since contraception is
so widely available. Of course, it depends on which country you're in, but in many countries like
the UK and Canada and Australia, which I'm most familiar with, it's relatively easy to
get a hold of contraception, it's quite affordable, and yet why are there still so many
unplanned pregnancies to begin with? And the answers that I found to that shocked me quite a bit,
and what I found was that if you look at the demographics of abortion, what are the kinds of
people that are requesting it? There was, I'll take as an example, one quite large study that was done
in Australia of in 1996, there was close to 15,000 women aged between 18 and 23 that were surveyed.
And the women who reported teenage terminations were more likely to be in a de facto relationship,
less well educated, have no private health insurance. And these are things that you may well predict
when I ask people what would you predict. They often come up with these things, but what I didn't
expect was also that they are also more likely to have been a victim of partner violence.
And the shocking stat on this was that partner violence is the strongest predictive factor
of pregnancy termination among young Australian women. And women who had ever experienced partner
violence were more than twice as likely to have had an abortion than those who had not experienced
partner violence before. And that's actually probably an underestimation. So when I put that in the
context of the debate, it looked to me quite shocking because I hadn't envisaged that partner
violence would be such a strong predictive factor of abortion. And it's, it figures so little in
the debates. So it started to become clear to me that maybe abortion is a little bit like a bandaid
solution that yes, it probably prevents women from when we don't want women who have been the victims
of partner violence to also then be forced to have a baby that they don't want.
But what is the problem that we're trying to solve? If what's that issue here, if a big
fueling factor is coercion and violence, that's fueling the need for this technology, if you will,
then we're not really solving the root of the problem. And there's a more social problem that
maybe we need to approach with different techniques in at the same time.
Well, I don't understand why those who are in abusive relationships are less prone to take
birth control than those who are not. I mean, if you're, if you say contraception is readily
available, why are they getting more pregnant in abusive relationships and hence are having more
abortions? I mean, that, but these are sociological statistical issues that I guess would be
interesting to pursue if we're interested in the sociology of the bioethical issues here in this case.
And I appreciate the fact that you want to deal with the particularities of cases. And in this case,
you're bringing forward empirical evidence that actually you're right. It's not part of the usual
discourse when you figure out that there's some other things going on in the case of people who
do opt for these abortions. But that, again, is not a matter of principle. This is a matter of
looking at the embeddedness of a certain practice of, let's say, abortion or euthanasia within
in the larger social context. I guess I, my, the listeners of this program, the regular listeners
know that I have some particular set of concerns that are less sociologically oriented and
what can I say? Existentially oriented, politically oriented as well, and certainly philosophical in
nature. And I guess I'm interested in pushing you a little bit in that direction. And so,
do you, would you agree that there is a qualitative difference between what you call these
classical, bioethical and biotechnical, technological issues like abortion and euthanasia,
which you don't really need any biotechnology for, they've been practiced for millennia, it's not
something that arises necessarily with our own modernity. There are more refined ways to achieve
these results if you like. But that there's a qualitative difference between those and certain
novel technologies that are being experimented with as we speak and which are seem destined to develop
into ever more sophisticated forms of things like cognitive enhancement of
offspring's, you know, their abilities or cloning, genetic engineering, and so forth.
Is there, am I being naive to think that there's, that we're talking about a new sort of game here?
Related to the old, for sure, with the new set of rules and that there's something that is far more
worrisome going on? I think you're right in thinking that there is something on a different
scale here. I think what we're trying to achieve is very similar to what we've always been trying
to achieve. But by a novel by a text, I think up the ante, because splicing fish genes into a
tomato-no amount of selective breeding is going to achieve that. So that is something unprecedented
that we couldn't have achieved otherwise. Novel technologies to do with neuroscience
are really moving quickly. They're fascinating, deep brain stimulation, and as we're going to talk about
later on, FMRI, scanning and computer technologies, these are fields which are proposing to do things
that really we only dreamed about before or were in sci-fi novels. So I think, yeah, we have to
recognize what is similar. So when it comes to, for example, genetic engineering of children,
which we can't currently do, but there's a lot of debate about what we might do in the future.
And I think it is very worthwhile, recognizing where there are similarities between
trying to engineer children, if you will, environmentally, say by using private school tuition,
special classes, tennis lessons, music lessons, for example, which seem to have the same aim
as say engineering a special musical or sporty gene.
Right. That's the issue, isn't it? Because I agree, environmental engineering, you could say,
is on the same order as genetic engineering because it brings about a similar set of results,
if you're one of these ambitious parents who will do anything to get their child into Harvard
or Stanford or what have you. And they, for me, are the problem, not just the parents, but those who
will go to, will use any means necessary to achieve their own
a venal objective. But here, I'm thinking now Francis Fukuyama's book, our post-human future,
where he speaks about genetic engineering and cloning, but he says that the real problem facing us
is psychopharmacology. Because, and I think if I remember correctly, he discusses the example of
Ritalin, which is the drug that is prescribed massively for boys who have a kind of
bongchous behavior and attention deficit disorder, another kind of fabricated medical condition
that benefits the pharmaceutical industries that promote the drug. And that even the parents who
are aware that they might be using a drug in order to suppress perfectly natural, healthy
behavior in their children will do so nonetheless because it makes their own lives easier.
Now, you can imagine that if they're willing to over prescribe Ritalin to their kids, that how
much more ready will parents be to prescribe things that are not just going to make their lives
easier, but are promoted that are going to make their children's the prospects for their children's
future more bright and are going to make them more athletic and more intelligent and more beautiful.
And where we're already starting to see a genetically engineered, so what really worries me is the
consensus in the population at large. What happens in the laboratories is one thing. And the
scientists and who are trying to make a name for themselves by advancing as far as they can,
biotechnological advances, that's one thing. We could deal with them as a different kind of
pathology. The pathology that worries me, and I think if I understand Fukuyama correctly, it
worries someone I came to say, there is such a readiness on the part of this citizenry as a whole
to wholly embrace mine in a mindless way, biotechnologies whose consequences for human society as a whole,
and for our whole political system as a whole, cannot possibly be foreseen, controlled,
or predicted at the moment in which one is adopting these things. So
is I know that you've worked on cognitive enhancement from the psycho pharmaceuticals. Do you have a
bioethical position or stance on this issue? Yeah, well, I would actually agree with you
somewhat on your assessment of Ritalin. No doubt there is probably a small percentage of children,
maybe that have some kind of a real problem of attention deficit, high-viractivity disorder.
But the stats on it show that countries like the US far outstrip any other country when it comes to
the consumption of Ritalin, the prescription of Ritalin for children. And it does seem like there's
a number of factors that converge in favor of this. So of course the pharmaceutical companies
have an interest in selling their drug. Teachers have an interest in keeping their children under
control and don't like dealing with problem children or children that are, as you said, too rambunctious,
and parents don't like feeling that maybe they're at fault, maybe they're not disciplining
their children enough. So it's easier to say, well, maybe my child has a problem that just needs to
be medicated. And so it's a number of factors all rolled into one. And of course the child can also
buy into this. I think the part of the problem with this over-medicalization of perhaps
behaviors that are quite normal and natural is what happens to the child's feelings of responsibility.
When they grow up, how long are they going to feel dependent on this medication in order to function?
And these kind of issues are issues that we find occur also in depression.
These issues of the self-control and responsibility that people grapple with when they take
psychopharmaceuticals and it's not even for enhancement. What we're talking about here is a
ostensibly treatment of depression and of ADHD. So what happens when we take these medications and
there seems to be nothing wrong with us? What we're trying to do is, for example,
there's a drug called Madaffinil, which is supposed to be prescribed for people who suffer from
narcolepsy over sleeping during the day, sleeping too much. But it can be taken by, say, truck drivers
who need to stay awake, nurses on night shifts, or even students. There might be students in
Stanford right now who are taking Madaffinil to stay awake and alert and perform better at exams
or their school performance. So if we start to become the field dependent on these kind of drugs,
I think we need to think about what's going to happen.
Well, that's great. Tamara, we can go on thinking about it and having hypotheticals.
Do you have a stance on, so, well, now you've raised the question in a different way,
if parents are so ready, a certain kind of bourgeois parent, I mean, bourgeois in the
Nietzsche-in-sense of the last man type, to risk their children's perhaps health as well as
psychic health by over prescription of riddle-in. And I don't think there's hardly
an intelligent parent that doesn't realize that there is a lot of risk, at least some risk involved.
If they're willing to take that risk, what will cause them to hesitate if given the option to remove
in the future the gay gene from their, the embryo of an unborn child? Or an alcoholic
gene? Or some, so already we're talking about this absolute sovereignty of the parent over the biological
social, psychological destiny of a parent, and that you're removing from all future generations
a genetic legacy that otherwise would have been active in the future progeny of that unborn child.
So the difference between psycho-pharmaceuticals and this intervention in the genetic makeup is that
there's something irreversible in the decision to remove if they were to find the gene for
homosexuality or the gene for, I'll call it, or any kind of deviant behavior that this sort of,
what Hannah Arendt calls acting into nature, where nature and the difference between action in the
world, in the human world to which action properly belongs, I'm entirely with Hannah Arendt on that,
and acting into nature where human action has no business extending itself into nature is that
in the human world what she calls promise and forgiveness are always open, whereas in the world of
nature is unforgiving, and you cannot make a promise, as human beings we cannot promise that something is
going to be fine before we act into nature and find that it's not fine after all. We cannot
hold that promise, we cannot honor that promise nor is nature forgiving of these kinds of
mistakes. In fact, it can lead to disasters. This is a bioethical issue that worries me a great deal
because we seem to be very close, as we speak, to these kinds of decisions being handed over to
individuals who have shown on record not to have much compunction when it comes to engineering
their own children's social outcome and their chances for success.
Yeah, I actually find myself agreeing with you here, on the in a sense that yes, these things are
potentially irreversible, so we better darn well know what we're doing when we do them.
My worry is not so much acting into nature just because it's nature and nature has rules
that we shouldn't be playing around or playing God with. And if I can fight on philosopher with another,
I might throw sat at an hour and sat says, "Ajron Polsach, that is, that we have to recognize that
we have a fear of freedom of our own freedom." Now, that doesn't give a carte blanche to do anything
that we want. I think we should recognize when we feel worried or scared about doing something and
try to tease out, and this I think is part of the job of a bioethicist, is to tease out exactly
why we're worried and the risks associated with it, with what it is that we're proposing to do,
but also not be afraid to question our current practices. So if we find that, well, let's say, for example,
genetic engineering of our children to become musical geniuses, has the same intention behind it as
making them and forcing them to play piano for hours and on end. If we feel that those two practices
have a lot in common, I don't think we should be afraid to question our current practices then.
And then in that case, it might be that new bi-technologies that come up when we debate them,
and then perhaps they shine a new lens on current practices that we weren't questioning,
that maybe we might say, well, maybe we need to rethink what our intentions are behind having
children in the first place and having, why do we want to have particular children? What is
fueling this need? And that is something I'm really interested in.
Well, I can appreciate that. I find that it's eminently reasonable. And yet, I also do not believe
that reason has a lot of compelling power when it comes to regulating or warning people
let alone the industries that promote these practices about the potential danger. So you speak
about Jean-Paul Sath and throw him at Hana-Au'in. Sath, yes, he did say that we have a fear of our own
freedom. Sath was the one who resisted any attempt at the naturalization of the human. He thought
that the human was an exception to the order of nature because precisely this unconditional freedom
of the self, which is not reducible to any of its natural determinations. He called for radical self
responsibility that we have to take responsibility for all, that we are the authors of our own lives,
and that we are the authors of our world. We have the world we deserve, he said.
Therefore, I agree that from a searching perspective, what he would call for is a radical assumption
of responsibility for our actions in this fear. And that means that we have to take full cognizance
of what it is we are bringing about. Now, if you can assure me that it is all possible
at the present moment to take full cognizance of what we are bringing about, then I will be persuaded
that we can apply with that we can take full Sartrean responsibility for what we are doing.
I happen to believe that there is such a huge mismatch between what biotechnology, what it has released
into the world in terms of possibilities for the alteration of natural processes and the alteration
of the human species itself, such a disconnect between that, and the absolute crude
primitiveness of our own consciousness and awareness that we are still the same extremely fallible
if not wretched and depraved creatures that we always were, that if you hand over to our own
desires and decisions, questions about the fate of the use of these biotechnology, I fear,
in fact, I'm almost certain that we're in for a heap of trouble because I think human motivation
is mostly profane and it doesn't think long term, it's objectives have proven to be extremely self-centered
and narrow and so forth. So I just worry about handing over to individuals' desires, these kind
of decisions because I don't think most people and even governments, if you want to go that far,
have shown that they're willing to step up to the responsibilities of this unconditional freedom
that Sartrean was talking about, especially in this area. I agree with you, I think Sartre
places a lot of emphasis on the responsibility that we have to take. I think there is a real
emphasis within bioethics on individual choice. That seems to reign supreme, at least it's the most
popular view that bioethics is take, is that if anything we should veer on the side of allowing
parents to decide what choices they make with technology, if this were to become available,
they should be able to decide under the banner of reproductive choice, reproductive freedom,
what children, how many children to have, if they want children and within that, what kinds of
children to have. I'm skeptical of this though, not just because I wonder whether parents are really
ready to take responsibility for the consequences, but also whether society is really equipped for
the consequences, and I think we need to look more not just at individual practices or likely
practices that individual parents are going to take, but the likely effects that these practices are going
to have for society, for example, if genetic engineering of children were to become available,
the way that society's structured right now means it will probably be quite expensive,
probably only available to the rich, and for that reason could just amplify the advantages that
the rich could have, and widen the gap even more between the rich and the poor. There could be a genetic
arms race in the sense that even if you don't particularly want to engineer your child,
because Joe Blow, next door, and everyone else is doing it, you feel your children might be at a
disadvantage if you don't do it. So I think-
Well, that's I agreed, but then again, I don't want to insist too much on Fukuyama, I'm not a Fukuyama
niece, as it were. However, he being a political scientist is interested in the political
response to the dangers of post-humanist biotechnologies, and he thinks it's necessary to have
governing bodies at the national and international level that would regulate and draw lines beyond
which you cannot go. So I'm thinking, for example, of bi analogy in the sports world about all this
kind of doping that we never hear the end of, these things, I mean, Lance Armstrong,
recently being stripped of all his titles, and then you read about the various kinds of
enhancements, physical enhancements that certain drugs and techniques could provide. But if
everyone in a particular sport, we saw that in baseball, if everyone in a particular sport is
abusing steroids or certain kind of enhancers, then if you want to play that game,
you're going to have to start using those enhancers yourself. Otherwise, you're just not going to be
able to play the game. And if you have what you call a genetic arms race, and if you have the
freedom where some people are allowed to engage in it, then it's going to force everyone else.
That's why I'm with Fukuyama and he says, what we need is to have proscriptions against certain
the adoption of certain technologies, just the way they do it in sports. So anabolic steroids
are not permissible, or cognitive enhancement at the genetic level or even through
former psychopharmaceuticals are just that, yes, that these kinds of regulation are absolutely necessary
at the collective level. Everyone has to play by the same set of rules. Otherwise,
yeah, we're going to turn into a race of immortals and mortals, the damned and the saved,
all belonging to the same species. If the human species remains a human species, because that's
something that Hannah Arendt already 50 years ago, I have a quote here from her. She was reflecting
on contemporary sciences, acting into nature. And she was thinking about things not every day
to the biotechnology as much as, for example, nuclear fission and fusion, which are events that in
nature take place only in remote stars and collapsing stars, but we have found a way on earth to
produce something that would never ever take place on earth through this acting into nature. And what
does it give us? It gives us the atomic bomb. Welcome to the new world is such. She says, quote, "All
are pride in what we can do will disappear into some kind of mutation of the human race."
As if she were sensing that a post-human future was at hand, and let me quote her again,
"The stature of man would not simply be lowered by the unearthly nature of contemporary science,
but have been destroyed altogether." So here is one of the dangers is not modifications within
the human realm, but such a transmutation, such a mutation of human nature itself that we can no longer
call ourselves human, at least not the way we've been human since our early prehistory.
Yeah, it's actually something I found an anthropologist that could probably,
I think she would agree with your sentiments here. And she, her name is Amber case,
and anthropologist who is interested in cyborgs. And she believes we're actually already cyborgs
because if you take the definition of cyborg to be an organism, the quote is, "To which
exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new environments."
So we can look at, say, spacesuits as being an example of one of those or
deep-sea divers who wear special suits to adapt to that environment. But-
The iPhone.
The exactly, well, she raises the iPhone and mobile phones and laptops as examples of
technology that is an extension of who we are, but less in the physical sense and more in the
mental sense, that it's an extent of our mental self now, not just our physical self, which is
challenging and changing the nature of humans and what we look like.
And she argues that online personality is like a second self, so your webpage, your Facebook,
is a second self presentation. So in that sense, I might agree with Hannah Arendt. I'm not
skeptical of technology per se, just simply because it's fiddling with nature. But I do worry when
we up the ante with doing things that are irreversible and doing things that
we might be doing prematurely before we know the full implications. And if we're still looking narrowly,
if we're not looking at the wider implications, not just for other human beings, but for
other animal species and for the biosphere.
Well, can you say something about this new
technology that you were telling me about before coming on air of mind reading,
what do you call it? There's an acronym for it. I don't remember what it is.
Actually, I'm not sure if there is an acronym for it. It uses fMRI imaging of the brain and
along with computers. And it is aimed to read your mind.
The thing that they've managed to do so far, they've done a couple of things. One of them is they've
got a bunch of volunteers, the scientists, and get them to watch a Hollywood trailer,
a movie, Hollywood movie trailer, and match up the images that they're seeing with the fMRI
images of their brains as they're seeing each image. And then they take away the Hollywood trailer
and they tell the participants, "Okay, now I want you to visualize some of the images that you just
saw." And what the scientists are able to do is just by looking at the fMRI scan of the brain,
they can tell what image that person is thinking of. So far, they can only do it for images that
the person's already seen and the computer has been able to match it up with. But of course,
they're looking into extending this to be able to just tell what images you're thinking of.
Well, you see for someone like me, this is horrifying to an unspeakable extent because
on the one hand, there's nature that one acts into nature and you can genetically modify crops and
so on. Then there's biotechnology that has to do with the body. And let's say enhancement or
even musical talents. But then as you said, now we're talking about what we are going to soon be
capable of doing when it comes to our minds and our mental life and that you have these prosthesis
which have to do with our mental selves, not our physical selves, the iPhone, the computer.
And when you talk about the cyborg, if you're getting to that point where now you can collapse
the boundary between a person's inner thoughts and the neighbors inner thoughts, that is the
board collective where now there is no more self. As Hannah Arent would say, the thinking self,
which is in a dialogue with itself in solitude, it's my dialogue with myself that takes place,
I don't want to say inside the brain, it's not, it's a mental space. But that space of solitude,
which is impenetrable by the other, requires that I meet my neighbor, my fellow citizen in a space
in the world that comes between men, as she says. And I do it through language, speech, deed,
action, and this is the world of appearance. If we are going to collapse that the space between
minds and have a board collective where now, then we are a synthetic and organic,
the synthetic is not just attached to the organic, it becomes the actual destiny of the organic.
And for those of us who are committed to preserving what is human about the human species,
that it is horrifying. Yeah, actually, that seems to resonate a lot with what the
anthropologist Amber Case is saying, that when we are needing to be constantly connected to people
on our mobile phones, and then we feel lost when we lose our mobile phone. And we feel this
constant need to be texting, interacting on the internet, and there is no space for self-reflection.
We seem to be increasingly afraid of just sitting there and thinking and being alone with our thoughts.
And the replacement of electronic communication for a person-to-person interaction
might have some really strange effects on getting to know your neighbor and as well as getting to know
yourself. So I do think that if we lose our or have less time for self-reflection, we have less time
for long-term planning, daydreaming, I think is important for long-term planning and our idealism.
Well, again, what terrifies me the most is not so much the technology. The existence of the
technology terrifies me to the extent that I'm sure there's a host of people and my neighbor or
my fellow citizen who are enthusiastic about the prospect of this kind of mind-reading technology,
and who would be more than happy to be able to download directly into their brains things from
the internet so that they only have to have the mediation of the computer. And as you were
telling me, if you could download a Spanish language program before you go to Spain, it's just right there,
the amount of people who would willingly and enthusiastically embrace it, I think that's where the
devil lies is in the, again, as I said at the beginning of the program,
it's the consumer. And the consumer's demand, if we allow the consumer's demand to dictate
the policies regarding these novel biotechnology's, then I think we're in a heap of trouble.
Yeah, exactly. I think the problem is that these are potentially really powerful tools that could be
used for good as well as bad. This mind-reading technology could potentially solve a lot of
issues. There are people, for example, who are completely paralyzed, but by the use of mind-reading
might be able to move robotic instruments to help them. But at the same time, you can obviously
envisage how it could be used for bad. And if we were, like I said, in the future, this hasn't been
developed yet, but if we were able to download software onto our brains just like, just like we can to
our computers, if this were to replace education, I think that would be very dangerous and scary.
We can see, obviously, the advantages of this kind of technology, but I think in the context of a
consumer's culture that has really overtaken the world. We need to look at how is it most likely
going to be used, not just how in principle will it be used? Well, it sounds to me like you are in the
most essential domain that is around there today, certainly in our academic worlds, which is
bioethics, because it's a whole new world that we're entering. And we didn't even talk about
the way bioethics is originally a concept about medicine in the biosphere as such, and that not
only is it's relation to animals, but with plant life and with all of life. So, yeah, sure, that was
one of the conceptions of it back in 1970 by a biochemist by the name of Potter, but it's since been
left aside, and I think it would be quite advantageous if we were to revisit that definition again.
Right. So, I am delighted that I was able to provoke some entitled opinions out of you on this
topic, because I appreciate the way that you measure the judgments, because it does, it will require a
discriminant form of judgment, and case by case sort of study looking in the details. I would
probably be very bad in a kind of policymaking body because my extremism would probably
cause most people to just kind of discount as not being within the ballpark of these things, but
but it's so much fun to be extreme. Well, that's me. We can do it on the rate of good on entitled
opinions. So, Tamara Kiali, thanks again for coming through to talk to entitled opinions. You are
here from Dalhousie in Canada, and the next time you come through the Bay Area, let me know, because
we have a lot to continue on this discussion. And let me remind our listeners we've been speaking with
Tamara Kiali from Dalhousie, Ph.D. from Pecambridge, Bioethuses, Neuroethuses, and I am Robert Harrison for
entitled opinions. Take care.
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