Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your BrainOkay, so I'm writing this a little bit late to hop on the old Schiavo train, but I think I'm still coming in well ahead of schedule regarding the our injured soldiers coming back from Iraq. People in the medical profession are describing what they're seeing in soldiers coming back from Iraq as an epidemic of brain trauma - a consequence of better body armor and improved battlefield medicine. Many of the soldiers who listed as wounded (Currently 17,469 - according to ICCC) would have been KIA in previous conflicts had it not been for such improvements. But, of course, the downside is the severity of wounds that the soldiers are left with. The medical community has never seen injuries like those coming back home. Hell, they even coined the term "polytrauma" to refer to the injuries sustained by US servicemen/women in Iraq. Polytrauma. That's "poly" as in multiple and "trauma" as in...well I'm sure you've caught on by now.
The spectrum is undoubtedly large with flesh wounds on one end and severe brain trauma on the other. The dark end of this continuum is what I'm interested in - I read a story a while back in the NYT about a soldier who came back from Iraq in a "persistent vegetative state" (alternatively, here's a story from the other side). The question that I'm asking here is what list should people like this be on - injured or killed? The bigger question is this: what does it mean for us to die?
I know, it seems silly. But, believe it or not, it's a question that philosophers have been wrestling with for ages (and continue to do so today). From the way I understand it, what you take death to mean depends on what you take life to mean - more specifically human life. What makes us human? Everything that's alive dies, but the category of everything living extends way beyond people. So what seperates the men from the hamsters? Here it might be worthwhile to make a distinction between two terms: a concept and a criteria of death.
A criteria of death is something most people are probably familiar with. You see it in the movies all the time - our intrepid hero bursts into the apartment to find someone laying on the ground, then they place their fingers on their neck and look up at the camera, "She's gone". That's a criterion of death, or more specifically, the cardiovascular criterion. By checking the pulse, you're testing the functioning of the cardiovascular system - if you get no pulse, the heart is not beating which many people take to mean that death has occurred.
Not so fast, says me. More recently, the medically acceptable criteria of death has become the whole-brain definition of death. When death is suspected, electrodes will be placed on the scalp to determine if the neurons of the cortex are firing. If they're not firing, then the person is for all intents and purposes, dead. You can restart a heart. You can't restart a brain.
The criteria of death often change as technology advances. First it was the mirror in front of the mouth (if there's fog, then they're alive), then checking the pulse, now the EEG. The concept of death, however, remains constant. The concept of death refers to that which the criteria attempts to measure. The question of what it actually means to die is arguably the murkier of the two. What are the characteristics that make us human that we lose when we die? The question is important, because surely (at least if you don't hold that all life is, literally, one) our death is different from the death of a tomato plant. Even more important, if we can't fix on what it means for us to be dead, then by reflection, we can't fix on what it means for us to be alive.
There are plenty of ways to take this question, but in my mind (harharhar) the best way seems to fix on the characteristics that make us unique as a species: namely our higher cognitive abilities. To the best of my knowledge, the neuroanatomical source of these abilities stems from our neocortex / frontal lobe. Okay - you've been a good reader and stayed with me 'till now, here's my point: these characteristics (e.g. abstract reasoning), or rather the loss of these characteristics is, for us, the concept of death. Likewise, neural death in the neocortex / frontal lobe should be a more accurate reflection of the criteria of death as opposed to a whole-brain definition of death, which includes areas responsible for respiration, thermoregulation, etc. The philosopher / bio-ethicist Robert Veatch argues for this point.
The whole debate gets a bit more complex from this point, and I'm not concerned with splaying out the arguments in more detail (as it's mostly over my head), but I want you to think about the consequences of such a shift in the underpinnings of accepted medical practice and terminology. It was stunning to me when I realized that there would have been no Schiavo debacle, no heart-wrenching decisions for families to make, no moral ambiguity in what to do with a drunk driver who puts a pedestrian into a coma - they are already dead. The irreversible loss of the traits that make us human, the cell death in the frontal lobe / neocortex, they both point to one thing - and that is death. Terry Schivo died all those years ago when she suffered irreversible brain damage stemming from the interruption of oxygen to her brain. Likewise, our soldiers who are laying in hospital beds all around the country in irreversible comas - never to recover - in fact died on the battlefield. They're on the wrong list.
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Almost everything we think of as intelligence — perception, language, mathematics, art, music, and planning — occurs here. your neocortex is reading this weblog entry.
The average human neocortex, spread out, would be about the size of an unfolded dinner napkin, built of 6 layers, in total about the thickness of a 6 business cards. Anatomists estimate the typical human neocortex to contain around 30 billion neurons (perhaps less, perhaps more). These cells contain all of your memories, knowledge, skills, and life experience. They are "you".
Hawkins didn't originate that metaphor. I remember it from my Psych 101 days 20 years ago. But it appears to be true. Everything that is you, that makes you unique as an individual, all your thoughts, hopes and dreams lies in that little napkin sized sheath of cells. Anything else is just infrastructure really.
I think some day we will figure out how memories are encoded and how the brain processes information. Along with that will likely come an understanding of how to "read out" the brain and the possibility of creating, be it through robotics and cybernetics or cloning and genetics, another 'you'. And on that day, for those who can afford it and with access to the right facilities, death will become meaningless.
There are many who fear that day, and I think that's ultimately where religious fundamentalists fear such technologies, because it is on that day also the soul dies and with it the last vestiges of religion. Although I suppose if we were able to recreate a person perfectly, along would come their religious beliefs too and it would be something to see a robot with a belief in god.
Edited for missing words.
Even if we get to the day where we abandon the folk psychology vernacular of hopes, dreams and desires and replace it with hard and fast neuropsychological facts. On that day, when we have all the facts about our brains and bodies and we can create numerically identical clones, I'm still not convinced that death would become meaningless.
Suppose we can, right now, create a numerically identical (exact same psychological characteristics and physical makeup. Suppose that, in fact, we do. Then suppose that one of you must die, and you are given the choice - you, or your clone. I know I would pick my clone to be the one to bite the bullet, because the clone isn't [i]me[/i].
I'm not arguing for the existence of a soul here or anything like that - but perhaps consciousness and personal identity is an idiosyncracy of our neural "hardware". It's true that both myself and the clone would be identical, but we have seperate consciousnesses - we're not like the borg or anything.
Maybe I'm wrong, but regardless, I don't think I'm going to live long enough to see that day. Perhaps I could have my head frozen...
But even so, so what? You go to sleep every night and for the most part your consciousness is destroyed (or at least significantly altered). Ever had an operation under general anesthesia or otherwise been totally unconscious? It seems to me that our consciousness is destroyed and recreated on a constant basis and we don't suffer psychological harm from that, or even worry about it.
Here's another thought experiment. Suppose you are on a doomed spaceship but thankfully it's equipped with a new fangled Destructomatic Emergency Life Preserver. Now, the Destructomatic works by instantly reading out both your brain and your the structure of your physical body and then transmitting it to a Emergency Reconstruction Station on Earth (or someplace convenient). Of course, your body (and mind) is destroyed in the reading out process. And, because of the large amount of information, it takes a few hours to transmit the whole signal.
But to "you", you remember only stepping into the Destructomatic, losing consciousness and reawakening on Earth a few hours later. How would that be any different than going to sleep? I'm sure if the "you" lived on in the doomed spaceship for those few hours during transmission, and maybe even long enough to talk to the "new you" back on Earth then maybe the "new you" would suffer a little bit from seeing the "old you" die but I just don't think it would be that big a deal after people got used to the idea.
Relevant book recommendation: Kiln People by David Brin. Very thoughtful, a whole lot of fun and rather aggravating at the end as Brin slips into pseudomysticism (Brin is a theist, but he's on our side even if we might not always agree with him).
On a related, but irrelevant note: If you were a vegetarian for moral reasons and suddenly a pefect Star Trek style matter replicator existed, would it then be OK to eat meat?
is a complex one for sure. I certainly don't presume to have any of the answers, or for that matter understand the more naunced aspects of what's happening when people refer to "identity".
But, consider the following. Using your example, let's say that just prior to the destruction of the spaceship you do use this machine to analyze your entire physical makeup (right down to the number of synaptic connections), store it, destroy your body, and transmit the data to a "reconstruction station" on Earth. But let's say a fire on-board has damaged some of the equipment, and instead of transmitting it to just one station, it transmits the information to several. Consequently, several hours later, there are several people waking up on earth whose last memory is of entering the deconstruction machine on-board the doomed spaceship. They are all identitcal in every respect - same bodies, same brains, same memories, same fears, same hopes, etc. Are all of these people "you"? Hell if I know.
On the issue of sleep, I think the whole experience may be subjectively similiar - but sleep doesn't involve the destruction of our body and brain. I do think that we maintain a minimum level of consciousness during sleep - from what I've read, we actually dream in all stages of sleep (at least 2-REM). The dreams we experience in Non-REM sleep are typically more mundane and less story-like while the dreams we experience in REM sleep are the fantastic and surreal ones we can remember. Several areas of the brain important for encoding new memories are inactive during sleep, but other areas (not only the ones essential for regulation of physical function) remain active. In other words, we still retain some aspects of consciousness (though markedly different from the consciousness in our waking life), but remembering it might be a different issue altogether. Some of that is just completely hypothetical on my part, but there is evidence to support the notion of retrograde amnesia on sleep onset (Dick Bootzin, a sleep researcher at the University of Arizona did a study on this I believe).
And as for your question, I think it would be okay. I'm not a vegetarian, but I take it the reason for the lifestyle is the aversion to causing harm to animals. If the harm or mistreatment is removed, then I can see no reason why one would object.
