Tag Archives: Medicine

As the gap between humans and computers becomes smaller every day, the startup Neuralink, backed by figures including Elon Musk, Vanessa Tolosa, and other individuals, recently hosted a public conference in which they revealed their efforts create neural interfaces between brains and computers. The futuristic dream of a brain-computer interface for mutual exchange of information between humans and works of artificial intelligence may sound like something out of a science fiction dream, but the neural interface, a device to enable communication between the human nervous systems and computers, would include invasive brain implants and noninvasive sensors on the body.

During the livestream on July 16, 2019, Neuralink revealed their work to the public for the first time with the pressing goal of treating neurophysiological disorders and a long-term vision of merging humans with artificial intelligence. With $158 million in funding and nearly 100 employees, the team has made advances in flexible electrodes that bundle into threads smaller in width than human hair inserted into the human brain. As the computer chip processes brain signals, the first product “N1” is meant to help quadriplegic individuals using brain implants, a bluetooth device, and a phone app.

In their paper “An Integrated Brain-Machine Interface Platform with thousands of channels,” Musk and other team members noted that electrode impedances after coating were really low allowing for efficient information transmission. Each electrode uses pixels at 3 Hz bandwidth to measure spikes, a neuron’s responding to stimuli that are generally about 200 Hz but can reach up to 10 kHz at times. The dense web that the team creates would let them feed the entirety of a brain’s activity to a deep learning program for creating artificial intelligence at a great degree of accuracy, study the neuroscientific basis for phenomena, or even decode the basics of other features such as language. For the Human Connectome project, an initiative to create a complete map of the human brain, Neuralink’s scale would give more precision than the project has done before.

This precision could address the ethical issues raised when the cognitive response of a brain-computer interface doesn’t appropriately match what a patient communicates. Neuralink’s work should take into account the risks associated with such a fine level of precision. Most strikingly, brain-computer interfaces so intimate to who we are raise the ethical issues of whether neurologically compromised patients can make informed decisions about their own care. Philosopher Walter Glannon said in his paper “Ethical issues with brain-computer interfaces,” the capacity to make decisions is a spectrum of cognitive and emotional abilities without a specific threshold that would indicate how much constitutes the ability to make an informed decision. Just as philosophers and ethicists have studied the basis for ethical frameworks in the decision-making process among physicians, patients, and other roles in health care, the complex semantic processing of brain-computer interfaces may not constitute enough to show a patient has the cognitive and emotional capacity to make an informed and autonomous decision about life-sustaining treatment. It would need some a behavioral interaction between the patient and the health care professional so that the brain-computer interface’s response reflects only what it’s capable of communicating.

Tim Urban of “Wait But Why” described Neuralink as Musk’s effort to reach the “Wizard Era” – in which everyone could have an AI extension of themselves – “A world where AI could be of the people, by the people, for the people.” The promise of cyborg superpowers as humans step into the digital world calls back to science fiction stories such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jason and the Argonauts. From the electrode array that joins the limbic system and cortex of the human brain gives Nerualink the information for those regions of the brain. It creates a reality in which information and the metaphysical nature of what we are depend less on the physical structures of the brain itself, but, rather the information of the human body. Prior to artificial intelligence, the brain evolved to develop communication, language, emotions, and consciousness through the slow, steady, aimless walk of natural selection, and a collective intelligence that can contribute to machine learning algorithms like Keras and IBM Watson. The Neuralink interface would let us communicate effortlessly with anyone else in the collective intelligence. The AI extension of who are means that the machines that are built upon this information are part of us as much as they are machines. With machines connecting all humans, we achieve a collective intelligence that goes against how human and animal minds have evolved over the past hundred million years.

Modern science can uncover ancient wisdom. While it may seem regressive or pseudoscientific to study concepts from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), they reveal deeper meanings about who we are as humans when subject to scrutiny by the scientific method. The herb formulas, plant-derived nature produces of TCM are still used in disease prevention and treatment despite the dominance of modern science. When medical researchers performed machine learning classification methods on 646 herbs are according to organ systems, known as Meridians, they found the 20 molecule features were most important for predicting these Meridian. It included structure-based fingerprints and properties of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion. As the first time molecular properties of herb compounds have been associated with Meridians, this provides molecular evidence of Meridian systems. 

The Meridian system dictates how he life-energy qi flows through the body. Qi includes actuation of the body, warming, defense again excess, containment of body fluids, and transformation between qi and food, drink, and breath. Each Meridian corresponds to a yin yang quality, an extremity (hand or foot), one of the five elements (metal, fire, earth, wood, or water), an organ (such as heart or kidney), and a time of day. The yin yang qualities describe how complementary, opposite forces of the universe interact, such as Greater Yin or Lesser Yang. Given these roots in traditional, non-scientific thought, scholars have debated the scientific justification behind why and how TCM works. In their paper “Predicting Meridian in Chinese Traditional Medicine Using Machine Learning 2 Approaches,” the researchers assumed Meridian can be found through scientific methods to begin with. The five elements are qi are metaphysical, not modern physiological or medical phenomena. The researchers emphasized the need to examine the herb medicine actions as they relate to disease etiology to create a formal understanding of TCM.

Qi and yin yang as they relate to human health date back to texts of discussion and debates from the Warring States period (475–221 BC) of ancient China. Philosopher Zhaunghzi noted qi was the basis of the body’s physical being with the six qi (wind, cold, summer heat, fire, dryness, and damp) in harmony with one another as they affect the seasons. These theories would be used in medicine to describe relations and analogies between the body, the state, and the cosmos, or the universe.

With the ethical concerns raised by issues of gene editing of human embryos, academic ethics research has set the foundation for and discussed the bioethical threats mankind faces. Alongside artificial intelligence (AI) and similar issues such as data science privacy and the power of social media, the steps into baby manufacturing are illustrated through a mix of modernist and postmodernist ideologies and require a revised notion of a biological-digital autonomy that can account for the changing self. The CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology have already shocked and disgusted scholars in science and philosophy around the world. Questions of how much of who we are we should be able to change and what we should do with the rapid power of artificial intelligence on the horizon have taken center stage. With the newfound metamodernism appraoch to science, reality, and existence, we step into gene editing the same way we jump off the deep end of a lake and hold our breath until we rise to the surface.

The oft-repeated truism “science is moving so fast that ethics just can’t keep up” couldn’t be farther from the truth. Ignoring the baseless assumption that science and ethics were racing against one another, the scientistic idea that philosophers and ethicists in similar fields have not addressed the power and potential of science would be to disregard the decades of ethics research on genetic engineering. The claim also seems to treat science as an uncontrollable force that must be braced against because we can’t do anything to stop it. It’s false that mankind has complete control over nature, but the notion inaccurately portrays mankind as weak and vulnerable to the world when we can take a metamodernist approach that rests somewhere in between. Researchers in ethics have been paying close attention. They’ve been studying everything closely.

Society and individuals have been shifting from postmodernism into metamodernism. We create the self as something between a postmodernist and modernist notion of reality through gene editing. As opposed to postmodernist traditions that nothing is real and modernist ones that reality is there beyond media, language, and symbols, right now we’re sure reality is somewhere in the middle in our notions of metamodernism. We are both a modernist believer in the power of science and technology and a postmodernist skeptical of the reality we find. Genetic engineers have begun using pluirpotent stem cells, ones that have the same properties of embryonic stem cells but come from manipulating ordinary adult cells rather than destroying embryos, that are more effective in providing dozens or hundreds of offspring for individual parent cells. As more stem cell research goes into how male sex cells can result from female cells and vice versa, this could even allow single parents or same-sex couples to produce biological children. Researchers have even predicted scenarios in which children result from the DNA of more than two biological parents, known as “multiplex parenting.”

Recent success in both cloning and CRISPR technologies have let scientists understand better the embryology and developmental physiology of human embryos as a result of the pluripotent stem cell advancements and in vitro fertilization (IVF). We must warn of the issues that may arise as stem cell reproduction methods gear towards manufacturing embryos for desirable traits. Couples who choose to keep their unwanted embryos frozen or donate them to further research or to other couples need to be aware of how those embryos are being used to assess their role of responsibility in stem cell research.

This stem cell method comes with the advantage as the daughter cells result similar to the adult ones, and researchers have posed solutions for the issues of eugenic control that would result. We can critique these ideas for their shortcomings in characterizing the eugenics movement. These movements do not thoroughly emphasize the social forces governing how individuals would be manufactured. To address the issues raised by gene editing, we need a deeper, more multidimensional view of the moral problems raised by eugenic control that accounts for the changing self and reality in a metamodernist world. We can engage in these subjects through personal narratives and humanized ideas of who we are that embrace ethics and threats of existentialism.

Researchers have, however, brought up solutions that derive from dangerous principles of eugenics and extreme notions of individual autonomy. In the transition to metamodernism, they prevent mankind from pushing back against looming threat of a full-fledged surveillance state, and, instead disregard the idea that a particular line of research can be inherently morally wrong. These transhumanist thinkers such as philosopher Nick Bostrom (who has also warned about the threat of Superintelligence) who proposes a solution to use stem cell sex cells for performing eugenic selection for intelligence, partially as a method for combating superintelligent AI. If humans can replicate natural selection on a group of embryos over the course of several generations, they can produce the most intelligent humans possible. This eugenics approach isn’t uncommon, either. Ethics professor Nicholas Agar wants prospective parents to choose how they can improve their children in a “liberal eugenics” fashion. This sort of scientific perfection fails to capture how these humans would supposedly relate to the rest of society given that they’ve attacked the fundamental ideals of community and sharedness that humans share. Bostrom does suggest there may be religious or moral grounds to prohibit this method of creating genetically enhanced children, but claims having children at a disadvantage to those around them would cause everyone to eventually pick up the technique. This reasoning rests on a dangerous egalitarian notion of human success and morality driven by competition in a way that forces those who disagree to accept the technique. It doesn’t rest upon morally reasoned principles or the virtues of humanism and research. Much the same way individuals would rapidly evolve under Bostrom’s scheme, the entirety of society should follow suit regardless of choice.

Bostrom’s idea also doesn’t recognize the reality of how natural selection and evolution work. Much like natural selection, this method wouldn’t automatically and instantly choose the most optimal DNA. Instead, it would choose a heritable trait without regard to DNA the same way nature influences which traits are optimal for survival and reproduction. Bostrom’s method relies on knowing which parts of the DNA are responsible for the trait which can be edited directly without the need for cycling through generations. Besides, the genetic basis for these traits have been shown to be limited as the traits themselves are a complicated amalgamation of environmental interactions, genetic pathways, what epigenetic factors activate throughout an individuals’ lifetime, how nature would “select” for certain traits, and the resulting phenotypes. It wouldn’t dictate how a superintelligent human may emerge. The typical issues of the artificial selection process being prone to error and having an inherent natural selection to it raise concerns as well. All of this lies on the inhumane assumption that we may find human perfection through genes regardless of how an objectified individual may control their own fate and what right they have to do so. Indeed, the vacuous claim that “science is moving so fast that ethics just can’t keep up” only measures unethical, unjustified notions of how fast science is moving to begin with.

The ethics of some reproductive technologies become blurrier in light of the newly complex understanding of heredity’s cross-currents. A maternal surrogate, for example, will likely exchange stem cells with the fetus she carries, opening the door to claims that baby and surrogate are related. If the surrogate later carries her own baby, or that of a different woman, are the children related? Parenthood becomes even stranger with so-called mitochondrial-replacement therapy. If a woman with a mitochondrial disorder wants a biological child, it is now possible to inject the nucleus of one of her eggs into a healthy woman’s egg (after removing its nucleus), and then perform in vitro fertilization. The result is a “three-parent baby,” the first of which was born in 2016. Zimmer doesn’t presume to make ethical judgments about procedures such as this, but warns that “informed consent” in such cases can be unexpectedly difficult to determine.

The more honored individuals in bioethics such as Stanford law professor Henry Greely have voiced similar arguments. Greely has argued insurance companies and government agencies can help fund the effective DNA sequencing methods in fighting genetic disease. In his book The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, he predicts how we may perceive and judge the potential of stem cell technologies. He notes he wouldn’t ban embryos created from a single parent, but would still require pre-implamentation genetic diagnosis to select for optimal offspring. But, above all, Greely emphasizes that these should be closely scrutinized by a standing commission that can recognize what principles all people would believe in. What sort of principles all individuals would agree upon, such as the four common principles of medical ethics: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice, are up for debate. The principles of parenthood should be upheld even for extreme scenarios of the future that may select for the most desirable traits such that biological parenthood becomes meaningless. We must protect every notion of humanity that comes from our current methods of reproduction, both biologically and artificially, to address these issues.

With the growing threat of AI, namely that computers may become more and more human-like, our autonomy should reflect how the self has been changing through these innovations. The self can be changed artificially much the same way robots and computers are programmed, but they’re not completely fragmented that humans share nothing with one another. These stem cell methods can give humanity a more unified individualistic self that, when appropriately regulated, allow for even modified individuals to exercise appropriate rights and responsibilities. Greely’s ideas still disgust by suggesting market-driven factors to influence human reproductive choices. The principles that doctors and scientists must stand upon are far too likely to become cold, calculated treatments for dehumanized problems. Professor of public health Annelien L. Bredenoord and professor of bioethics Insoo Hyun argued in “Ethics of stem cell‐derived gametes made in a dish: fertility for everyone?” multiplex parenting will shake the very notions of responsibility and autonomy and moreso than other reproductive techniques. They will disgust individuals, citing ideas of the reaction by professor of philosophy Martha Nussbaum’s book Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Phyisican Leon Kass noted there is wisdom in this repugnance in his paper “The Wisdom of Repugnance: Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Humans.” No amount of sociological or psychological research into the well-being of multiplex children can prevent this natural sense of disgust that we feel at this idea – and with good reason. We must hold onto this disgust and other aesthetic, physiological responses and assess them to the extent which they provide us with moral clarity. From there, a metamodernistic view of gene editing can take place. Writer Carl Zimmer noted in She Has Her Mother’s Laugh that he doesn’t make ethical judgments about multiplex parenting, but “informed consent” in such cases can difficult to determine.

Reading, learning, and writing about these issues is the first step. For anyone to learn more about science and technology in this age would help spread humanism to fight ignorance. These issues need to enter the sphere of public debate and discussion in contrast to how they’re currently only governed by scientists, ethicists, and philosophers. We need laws in place to prevent these catastrophic consequences long before they occur. In our metamodernist society, we need not reject science and technology entirely. We may remain skeptical of the notions of progress and reality, but only to a point where we can begin a new direction for scientific research. Given the existential crises of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, we may imagine a moral society through personal development and psychological growth in wrestling with and understanding these struggles. We need a humanized notion of reproduction to address psychological needs of individuals in a society that has the power of gene editing. We can create a grand narrative that mankind has an overarching worldview to connect all humans to one another, but hold it lightly enough to recognize the limits of what we know and should do. We can understand that we may create an idea of “reality” and methods of understanding the world around us that respect scientific research while still questioning the authority of problematic research techniques. By creating a “reality,” we can embrace the truths that we can create a moral society that determines who we are despite the changing self brought upon by genetic engineering and the digital age. We can determine what is honest, authentic, and true without being cynical, showing contempt for the beliefs and sensibilities of others, and turning to eugenics approaches for solutions. Metamodernism, as it begins to infect all areas of life, means our scientific research should seek elegant, morally refined methods that we embrace for knowledge.

Only then will we come closer to our selves in a metamodernist future. The intellectual thought to counter the doomsday dystopia scenarios of the future can involve selecting for desirable traits in offspring through trustworthy, verified methods that acknowledge the rights and responsibilities of the individual. We must remain skeptical of harmful progress, but remain open to gene editing technologies insofar as they may help mankind without raising ethical concerns.

Mental illnesses are much more than biological, physiological phenomena. Any attempt to reduce them down to the same features as other illnesses such as fever or cancer is inherently flawed. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS, pronounced “gee wahs”), attempts to scan individuals for thousands of genes to determine which variations lead to traits we can observe, have shown little substance for the past few decades. GWAS supporters argue that, if we find these genetic variations (single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, pronounced “snips”) more frequently among those with a certain genetic trait (or a phenotype, an observable characteristic), the SNPs must be related to them somehow. GWAS studies themselves have already shown little correlation and similarity between one another, and, instead, many GWAS studies under the same conditions have returned significantly different results. Contemporary scholars such as Robert Plomin, in his book Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, have argued GWAS is a form of a “polygenic score” which can predict disorders. But these methods of de-humanizing mental illness and psychiatry into strict, science-exclusive disciplines have not shown the results they have claimed they will produce. Psychiatry as a field needs to return to its roots through philosophy and humanized notions of disease. Through thought-provoking questions and discussions on the nature of mental illness as it relates to the unconscious, debates between Freudians and Jungians on how to understand experience, and the resistance to pharmaceutical-lead pressures from industry to turn mental health into a for-profit system, we need a new humanized paradigm for psychiatry.

Psychiatry has dealt severe blows to Aristotle’s notion of man as inherently rational and, instead, embraced the idea that much of who we are is determined by genetics and other biological factors. The simplistic, reductionist view of mental illness as purely a genetic disorder has left psychiatry in the doldrums of intellectual activity and only furthered the stigma of mental illness itself. Regardless of these negative consequences, however, the differences between the science of the mind and that of the body are enough to present issues with this view in principle. The mind and body have different languages, different concepts (with differing levels of abstraction and complexity), and different sets of tools and techniques we use to study them. Psychological and physiological study of a patient in a state of anxiety might result in two separate and distinct sets of descriptive data, measurements, and formulations. There is no way to unify the two by translation into a common language or conceptual framework. We rely on analogy and comparison using abstract concepts of “disease,” instead. From a computational perspective, our psychophysiological and psychosomatic data consist in essence of covariance data, demonstrating coincidence of events occurring in the two realms within specified time intervals at a frequency beyond chance.

Arguing mental illnesses are just like body illnesses causes us to view those suffering from mental health issues as fundamentally flawed or different from other people. It leaves those suffering in fatalistic, defeatist views and, in many cases, even a cynical, disillusioned state of mind. In the most extreme case, they may even lead to eugenics-based arguments that throw ethics under the bus for the pursuit of scientific perfection. The body-based view of mental illness has let psychiatrists, researchers, and other industry professionals ignore much of what makes mental illnesses what they are. Depression becomes simply a lack of serotonin that Prozac will alleviate, and other illnesses only need patients to take medicine without much else. It’s easy to see how these disease models can be abused for industry-related motives to maximize profit under the veil of minimizing human suffering.

Instead, we need to view mental illness through dynamic, human-based issues everyone faces about who we are as human beings. We can, then, treat individuals from existential points of view in their methods of valuing life and finding a purpose in the world. Those entering psychiatry with backgrounds in mathematics, economics, and biology need to understand the etiology of disease, metaphysics of psychology, logic of diagnosis, and causal assumptions underlying epidemiology. They need the patience and reflective abilities to discover what the human mind undergoes when suffering from mental health issues far beyond what sort of gene may be responsible for depression or schizophrenia. Even the causal models GWAS purportedly infers need to be scrutinized for their epistemic limits before being put into practice. Since their inception, GWAS studies have put forward hundreds of genes responsible for different phenotypes, and, despite the wide availability of data and the large of amount of data to begin with, these GWAS studies haven’t had much more success than the genetics studies before them. Instead, scientists argue that, because they haven’t found correlations, the causes must be more complicated and composed of more and more genetic phenomena. They’ve yet to uncover specific mechanisms or causal relationships for disease, and rely on reductionist approaches that genes that are significantly expressed must cause the phenotypes themselves. Neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell summed it up: “Simply put, nothing really definitive comes out. In fact, the strongest result from these studies is a general one, and it is ‘negative’: there are no convergent patterns of gene expression in adult brain that characterise these various psychiatric conditions.” in his blog post “If genomics is the answer, what’s the question? A commentary on PsychENCODE.”

Psychiatry needs a deeper understanding of the etiology of disease. As Freud wrote in Mourning and Melancholia, psychopathology has two etiological components: constitutional (including genetic) predispositions and early experiential factors. He used this multifaceted dynamic view of psychiatric illness to demonstrate the role environmental factors and traumatic events play in the causation of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), especially ones early on in life. Much the same way Johann Sebastian Bach was Bach not because he simply had the appropriate genes, but through his study of music at such a young age, the brain forms through these combinations of genetics and experience. Studies such as those by psychiatrists Charles Nemeroff and Paul Plotsky have verified depressed patients release more corticotropin-releasing factors (CRFs) in their central nervous system in mammals. Memories themselves form and evolve through the prefrontal cortex as it integrates sensory information and links this information to planned movement. Research in neuroscience has revealed the prefrontal cortex is part of a short-term holding function for information, including information stored in declarative memory. Neuroscientists Joaquin Fuster and Patricia Goldman suggested the prefrontal cortex represents some aspects of working memory in recalling from preconscious to conscious. It plays essential roles in speaking, driving, weighing ethical decisions, or performing mathematical calculations. This suggests it may be involved in coordinating functions that psychoanalysis experts claim function between ego and superego. This holds promising results for the benefits of psychoanalytic therapy. The extent to which psychoanalysis may bring about changes in habits, attitudes, and conscious and unconscious behavior through differences in gene expression that produce neurophysiological changes relies on this connection between biology and psychoanalysis. Brain imaging techniques may, then, improve these techniques for neurotic illnesses through psychotherapy. Neuroscientist Eric Kandel has further argued the need for a dialogue between biology and psychoanalysis towards these goals.

Such a dialogue should address how biology and psychoanalysis have drifted apart from one another over the 20th century. Both fields have faced a mix of strides and setbacks over this time period. Advances in bacteriology would lead biologists to believe toxins in the intestine, mouth, and sinuses harm brain functions. While it may have seemed controversial at the time, recent microbial work has suggested possible that bacterial imbalance alters the body’s metabolism of dopamine and other molecules that may contribute to depression. Similarly, the theory bacteria causes peptic ulcers proposed in 1983 was met with widespread contempt, but, as experimental evidence has since shown it true, antibiotics are now regularly used to ulcers. Meanwhile, the twisted practice of the transorbital lobotomy spread across the United States in the 1940s. It was only until the 1970s it was banned in most countries, after psychiatrists raised concerns of its safety, ethics, and effectiveness. Psychiatry itself faced challenges to its legitimacy given its stance of homosexuality as a mental illness until the 1970s as well as the reformation of mental hospitals from what scientists compared to concentration camps. Psychiatrist Aaron Beck proposed the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral techniques in treating psychiatric disorders with a 1977 study showing cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) outperforming one of the leading antidepressants of the time. Researchers would further show the neurophysiological basis for CBT, suggesting the more we discover about the brain the easier it will be to disregard the apparent divide between mind and body. CBT has faced criticism, though, with its supposed effectiveness and its own theory that don’t appropriately account for agency, free will, and rationality. These chaotic, turbulent histories of both fields make a dialogue between them difficult, but possible and necessary to address the issues they face.

Psychoanalysts themselves have raised arguments for and against a reductionist biology of mind. Psychiatrist and author Marshall Edelson wrote in Hypothesis and Evidence in Psychoanalysis, “Efforts to tie psychoanalytic theory to a neurobiological foundation, or to mix hypotheses about mind and hypotheses about brain in one theory, should be resisted as expressions of logical confusion. Efforts to tie psychoanalytic theory to a neurobiological foundation, or to mix hypotheses about mind and hypotheses about brain in one theory, should be resisted as expressions of logical confusion.” Others believe there’s fertile room for cultivating psychoanalysis in the context of the science of the mind. French biologist François Jacob wrote in 1998, “The century that is ending has been preoccupied with nucleic acids and proteins. The next one will concentrate on memory and desire. Will it be able to answer the questions they pose?” in Of Flies, Mice, and Men. Kandel also believes future research on the mind will focus on memory and desire through a combination of biology and psychoanalysis with greater scientific understandings of the unconscious. Kandel has argued that research in biology will make strides in the genetic basis for the unconscious mental processes and their roles in psychopathology in solidarity with psychoanalysis.

Psychiatry needs philosophy. Researchers in the field need to draw from Plato, Freud, Jung, Adler, and many other thinkers who have put forward ideas on what it means to be human given the constrains of the human mind. When Freud laid the foundations of psychoanalysis, one may have argued that his ideas paralleled Plato’s. He adopted Plato’s theory of dreams and similar ideas of the tripartite human soul. Freud’s idea of unconscious also bears similarity to Aquinas’ who believed human acts come through reason, yet still have unconscious desires and habits. Freud contrasted Jung on the meaning of sex as the former believed it was the cause of all human desire and the latter had his doubts about that idea. Freud contested Adler’s ideas of the social realm of equal importance to the individual and that role of sole interest individuals have in advancing social welfare. Though these theories have met a combination of arguments for and against them in many different contexts over the past century, their relevance remains. Kandel has argued that we should not get stuck on Freud to idolize or denigrate him. While many of Freud’s ideas have been rejected as pseudoscientific or sexist, many elements of psychoanalysis remain in psychiatry and psychology. Psychiatric literature and psychoanalysis themselves need Nietzsche, Proust, Schopenhauer, Kant, and Descartes to put them in an appropriate context.

These issues of psychiatry have formed the foundation for many of society’s issues. We’ve created an individualistic view that our psychological shortcomings are solely due to biological deficiencies as though we were computers that simply haven’t been programmed the right way. The same way culture fashions us to understand aesthetics, value, ethics, and other humanistic qualities, our struggles with mental illness are better explained in the way our bodies understand the world. In this sense, our mental health is the way we search for meaning and satisfaction in the world. As such we need a humanized notion of mental illness.

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How can we create frameworks of practical moral reasoning in the absence of free will? Can neuroscience research shed light on how we make moral judgements? What are the general implications of neuroscience research itself? How can we differentiate between the study of the mind or the brain to begin with? In the current development of neuroscience research, scenarios have changed. Researchers are beginning to uncover a new knowledge about personal identity, emotions, awareness, and free will. All of these are key pieces in the understanding of the puzzle of the mind human. These issues that seemed to be alien to science are now exposed in the scenario of Neuroethics, the ethical issues brought upon by neuroscience as well as the neuroscience of ethics itself. As presented by Kathinka Evers, principal investigator of the Center for Research in Ethics and Bioethics from the University of Uppsala, we can investigate a slew of questions that born in this interface between the sciences of the human spirit and the natural sciences in her book “Neuroetica.” It should be remembered, in the face of this reconciliation between science and ethics, that there have been challenges and struggles to write on neuroethics. Understanding “the analysis of the concepts involved in practical moral reasoning “(p 21), and the first, according to Robert Hooke, as “knowledge of natural things, and of all useful arts, manufactures, and mechanical practices, artifacts and experimental inventions “(p.22), it’s easy to come to incorrect conclusions on these ethical issues.

Fortunately, through history not all modern thinkers have seen science in this way. As Evers points out, in accordance with philosopher Francis Bacon’s views of science, the study well-organized and detailed in nature, science should be much more than the mere school search for knowledge. The sciences have to fulfill a fundamental function, namely: to allow human beings to improve their life on earth (p.21); objective that would be difficult to achieve if it were insisted on keep excluded the philosophical, political, moral and metaphysical that are born in their same this particular case, within the neurosciences.

Now, although the ethical problems initially raised in neuroscience referred to the practice and use of brain imaging technologies, neuropharmacology or the interests of research and sponsors of this, currently neuroscientific research itself is also concentrated in the construction of “adequate theoretical foundations that are required to be able to deal appropriately with the problems of application “(p.28). This establishes a distinction clear between an applied neuroethics and a theoretical neuroethics, concerned about the capacity that could have the science of nature to improve our understanding of moral thinking. We can determine whether the former is really important for the latter by considering both concerns as part of a greater question, that is, if human consciousness can to be addressed or not in biological terms.

It should be mentioned that any attempt to expose the complete set of ideas that go through neuroethics and the development of these would be foolish. We can still refer to a small, but representative, set that begins with the idea of unifying different levels and types of knowledge, taking both the techniques and the methodologies of each discipline, in order to build bridges. Fragile as they may be, they would allow the flow of the knowledge of the neurosciences to other sciences and disciplines, integrating in turn, this knowledge in the conception that have human beings of himself. It resonates through the world and morality in a shared theoretical framework (p.30 and p.57). The materialism position may respond, aptly illustrated and proposed in chemistry by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in 1953 and extended by neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changueux, to the neuroscience of the present. It may be that far from any naive reductionism and dualism (ontological), we can assume the brain as “a plastic, projective organ and narrative, which results from a sociocultural, biological symbiosis that appeared in the course of evolution … ” (p 69), judging emotion as the characteristic mark of consciousness from an evolutionary perspective.

Following, you can expose an idea pretty striking, a neurophilosophical model of the free agency that tries to answer how even though Free will is or can be: “1) a construction of the brain, 2) causally determined, or 3) initiated unconsciously “(p.80), it is not something” illusory .” As Evers argues, first, the fact that free will be a construction of the brain not necessarily means that it is an illusion, and that perhaps if it is an illusion it will be for other reasons (p.86); second, “causality is a prerequisite for the free agency “(p.88), otherwise the behavior would be totally random, in addition, causal determinism does not imply an invariable and necessary relationship between cause and effect, to the extent that this relationship can be variable and contingent; third, although the processes non-conscious appear to be far from control aware, the relationship and influence between both are “To a certain extent mutual, and not unilateral” (p.104). Of course, to understand the development and integration of each argument to think of free will as “The ability to acquire a causal power, combined with the ability to influence the use of said power ” (p.107), you need to read chapter II of the book, where Evers makes use of different authors (Changueux, Le Doux, Libet, Freeman, Churchland, Pinker, Blakemore, Pylyshyn, among others) to recreate the scenario in which situates all this discussion and each one of his ideas.

Finally, we note the normative relevance of the neurosciences according to the understanding of the neural bases of development of thinking and moral behavior. We can mention four innate tendencies closely related that appeared in the evolution: 1) self-interest, 2) the desire to control and security, 3) the dissociation of what can be considered unpleasant or threatening, 4) selective sympathy. Regarding the latter, the author risks saying that the human being is a xenophobe with natural empathy insofar as it is “empathic by virtue of [your] understanding of a relatively large set of creatures; but […] nice so much more narrow and selective towards the restricted group [in which born or has chosen to join] “(page 132). Although understanding (empathy) can be extended to broad groups (i.e. foreigners), the affective bond that unites human beings is restricted to their group more close. There’s an indifference to the foreigner or the which is considered different.

Keeping in mind these innate preferences, there’s no doubt about the difficult situation of current moral discussions. It becomes a priority then, to establish a diagnosis in neurobiological terms to be able intervene human behavior, recognizing that the structure of the brain determines to some degree the social behavior, moral dispositions and the type of society that is created, although the latter has an influence on brain development (p.149). At the same time, we can pose the question about the scientific responsibility of neuroscience at the socio-political level in terms of its adequacy (formulation of real problems), conceptual clarity, and application of methods and techniques without forgetting the origins and interests. Making it clear what a finding or fact (if it is) of neuroscience is not can give off categorical imperatives. A duty can be universal because of knowing that you have an innate preference does not follow that it is okay or that it must conceive this fact as good or bad.

In short, “Neuroethics” is an excellent introduction for both the unnoticed reader and for professionals from different areas of health (Psychology, Psychiatry, Neuropsychology, Medicine) and other professionals such as philosophers, lawyers and politicians, concerned about the participation of neurosciences in the understanding of the mind, the behavior, socio-cultural organizations, mental health, education, but first of all in the perception of human existence and its future. It may be “A Critique of the Neuroscientific reason,” a clear demarcation of the limits of this knowledge and its uses in society, a judgment by the other disciplines, to the extent that knowledge about the brain seems to give to neuroscientists certain power to expand their ideas beyond the laboratory, expanding their horizons and its explanatory power in domains already mentioned. It’s sometimes quite assertive when plotting new research paths, other times. But other times it’s about attacking different fields of knowledge by not knowing the limits of its frame of reference and in the impossibility to purge the investigations carried out of their own cognitive biases. That would respond more to the interests of certain ideologies than to the objective to improve human life on earth.