So I just finished re-reading Robert F. Sawyer’s book Hybrids. It’s not without its issues, definitely. But it also had a comment on atheism and religion (specifically, Christianity, though the argument applies to a number of other faiths as well), and their relationships to war and executions. I’ve been thinking about it with all the death penalty news lately. Essentially it goes like this:
“Christians (and others) have an underlying belief that the dead are not really dead. They say, pray, and write of their dead loved ones ‘God is taking care of you’, ‘We will be together again’, ‘I know you’re watching over me’, etc. But you can’t speak with the dead. They are, after all, dead. You can’t ask them for forgiveness. You can’t be touched by them. All you have is your memories and whatever they themselves have left behind. But many faiths treat life as a sort of prologue, and that those who are wronged or who wrong others will be judged in ‘the next life’, rather than in the here and now. So long as humans continue to believe that those who have died are alive somewhere else, maybe living a better life, we will have another means to justify wars, executions, and murderous revenge. And we’ll be able to stomach injustices easier, both as oppressors and the oppressed, because there’ll be pie in the sky, by and by.”
Now, obviously this isn’t the only way humans can justify these things to themselves. As much as it’s an annoying trope, Stalin and communism managed to kill huge numbers of people without the balm of an afterlife (though I rather doubt they all lacked any belief in continued existence after death). Ideology can stand in place of a faith in an afterlife, particularly when you convince yourself that some other group doesn’t count as human, or that your continued existence is dependent on theirs ending.
The only tricky thing I find with an absolutist stance against killing, as informed by the understanding that people who die are dead, is that at times it can be necessary in order to protect oneself or others. It is this sort of thing which is invoked by atheists like Christopher Hitchins or Sam Harris; the former is the only person I’ve heard who’s formed an even half-wise convincing argument supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But even if you think it’s necessary, acknowledging that someone who dies is gone forever ought at least to forestall hasty and violent actions. But people rush to wars, rush to call for the execution of convicts, and cheer when a criminal is shot instead of captured and tried. Atheists are by no mean immune to these things, but at the very least we have a good reason to be wary of falling into those habits.
I’ll end with a quote from the Seventh Doctor, speaking of his companion Ace and why he chose to rescue her rather than preserve the sword Excalibur. “Exotic alien swords are easy to come by, Aces are rare.”
So I’ve soured a bit on SVAR. I corrected my input and now my model doesn’t work, which is frustrating, and I don’t quite understand the math well enough to fix things without a good deal of trial and error. Still, were it not for the awesome folks at AFNI, I’d be further behind.
I was listening to a conversation in our lab, between one of my profs and a former student of his. They were talking about how a lot of speech or language theories rely on certain theoretical brain networks, and were grousing a bit about how few of these models reflected actual anatomy. In particular, certain regions which are thought to be connected in a network don’t actually have direct connections via white matter fibre tracts.
As you might recall, white matter in the brain, which generally forms the pith-looking part of the brain when you look at slices, is mostly made up of axons, the long wire-type bits of neurons which connect one neuron to other neurons. Thus, you have layers of grey matter, or neurons themselves, on the surface of the brain and axons under the surface, connecting neurons both between and within regions, as well as to other neurons deeper in the brain.
I was thinking about how you might find accurate fibre tracts, so you could know which regions are directly connected to others. One way is to insert tracers into cell bodies, wait until normal brain function has caused the tracer to be transported along those neurons’ axons, and then kill the subject and cut open the brain to see where the pathway leads. When doing research intended to apply to humans, this is often done in monkeys. Obviously, this is controversial enough in monkeys, and can’t be done in humans.
But monkey brains are not entirely like human brains. Sure, we’re both primates, but a lot of the functional difference between us and monkeys comes from our brain differences. There’s a lot of debate over which parts of the monkey brain are equivalent or “homologous” to which parts of the human brain. And that doesn’t even take into account that monkeys use different parts of their brains for some things than we do. So in humans, you can try various techniques and tricks.
A popular one is called “diffusion tensor imaging”, or DTI. This is a type of magnetic resonance imaging, which uses properties of water diffusion along axons to create images of fibre tracts. Don’t ask me the details – I’m still learning how to describe simple volumetric MRI. But part of the issue is it’s a difficult, representative reconstruction of actual fibres, and has certain limitations in how specifically it can describe the tracts.
So wouldn’t it be nice to trace them directly? I was thinking about this on the way home tonight. I mean, we do have extracted brains from corpses. You could stain a region and follow – but not really, because a brain needs to be fixed (hardened) in formaldehyde in order to retain any real structure after death. Okay, but presumably you could construct some artificial support, and maybe keep it in liquid. That’s just an engineering problem. That’s not a knock against engineers, by the way, but just a way of saying it’s possible barring the actual design and construction.
But the tracing methods I recall from undergrad need an active brain, which is transporting nutrients and the tracer down along axons. But… well, we could devote some research to temporarily sustaining a brain in some kind of pseudo-skull, in an oxygen-rich nutrient bath. No reason why it’s not doable, if complicated.
And I believe, very much, that we are our brains, embodied in our flesh. A disembodied human brain would not be like a person – a body is a requisite part of that, to my mind – but it would have been a person. Imagine total sensory deprivation. Not just the mild sort done in experiments, but the sort where you literally cannot see, hear, smell, taste, or feel anything. At. All.
This never happens unless you are unconscious. There is always sensory feedback when we are the slightest bit awake and aware.
But I still think if you kept a brain alive, it would be alive. Conscious, in a way.
It really is a short step from scientist to mad scientist.
(Which is sort of cool in a way. Also – imagine the applications of living brains in jars! The possibilities are endless!)
A friend sent me a story this morning, about a dead boy and his brain.
I had a couple reactions to this. If you read the entire article it becomes apparent that it’s not so much nefariousness on the part of the medical examiner’s office as it is administrative and bureaucratic nonsense, which led to them cutting corners and not telling the family about keeping the brain. They did have authorization to conduct an autopsy, and I could see how they might feel that would involve hanging on to parts until the ME had time to do his job with them.
I feel like the whole thing might have gone differently if the boy’s classmates hadn’t come across his labeled brain in a jar at the morgue. That part’s pretty startling. You’d have thought it’d be stored somewhere with other sensitive organs, not just out on a shelf. And while I applaud the school sending field trips to morgues, it’s definitely not something you’d normally expect.
My other reaction was frustration. I do think the ME’s office acted unethically, and that the family had every right to win their lawsuit. However.
One, this all seems symptomatic of people’s irrational belief that a body needs to be whole when it’s interred. It goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, and the fact that they felt the need to have a whole new funeral and re-burial sits badly with me. It comes across to me as though the original funeral and burial didn’t ‘count’ in some mystical sense. I know, I know. The discovery of the brain hurt that original sense of closure, but I really feel it could have been solved by just burying the brain with the body, not going through the whole funerary process again.
I mean, I don’t particularly care for burial. Cremation makes much more sense, but it violates this old taboo against harming the corpse, as though we still believe the dead person is going to need it. And it is tied to religion – the Czech Republic has much higher rates of cremation (partly due to a 19th-century crematory society) than the neighbouring Slovakia, where the percentage of religious believers is much higher. Take a look at some cremation stats, and for the US look at the way they mirror the political divisions. The insistence on complete bodies for burial means there’s a big problem with getting organ donors, since people are reluctant to be cut up after they die.
You’re dead. It doesn’t matter.
Secondly, I feel like this attitude isn’t just connected to our taboos and superstitions about the dead. I think it impacts how we treat bodily integrity in the living as well. I’ll be the first to agree there are good reasons for humans to have very deep-seated problems with body alteration or damage. But it informs more than our desire to not get our arms caught in threshers.
It also affects how we treat people with missing limbs, body piercings, or surgical scars. It affects how we deal with trans-folk, and the way voluntary surgical alteration of the body is treated as sacrilegious mutilation. Even tattoos, I think, fall under this attitude.
A lot of it has to do with not ‘mistreating’ the body God supposedly gave you. Or with ‘respecting yourself’, as through that couldn’t be encompassed by what’s been done. And there definitely seems to be an attitude that if you aren’t ‘whole’ or ‘original’ God somehow won’t recognize you, or your burial won’t really ‘count’.
People are legally allowed their superstitions, and like I said I think the family’s legally in the right here. But that doesn’t mean I agree with the over-arching attitude that’s part of it. Once you’re dead, you’re dead. No one can hurt you, only your memory, and your body’s just food for worms. Frankly, it’s hard for me not to have my own attitude. Do something useful with your corpse, ’cause otherwise it’s just taking up space.
I’ve been thinking about this, since we’re right between the anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945).
First, I strong suggest reading the general Wiki page on the bombings.
Second, take a look at this film footage.
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That’s the underwater detonation of either Able or Baker, 23 kiloton nuclear fission bombs.
The creation and implementation of the nuclear weapons used in WWII, and those after, would not have been possible without the collusion (I use the term intentionally) of civilian scientists with the military. People like Oppenheimer or Luis Alvarez, while being patriotic Americans, partly viewed the creation of the bombs as an intellectual challenge. Others, such as Edward Teller, were more enthusiastic.
And of course, the same was true on all sides of the wars, from the atrocities of the German scientists to the Soviets. Even Canada, whom we Canadians like to think of as generally well-intentioned, contributed substantially via the Chalk River laboratories.
Today, too, military conventional and WMD research and production would not be possible without the active contribution of scientists.
Now, science is an entirely neutral tool. It is a means of knowing – nothing more or less. As with other neutral tools, though, the uses to which it is put are rarely neutral. I like to think they are frequently positive – vaccination, for example, or space exploration. The further enlightenment as to how our minds and brains function.
But much of what scientific discovery has produced is problematic at best. Nuclear weapons are a clear and obvious example. But what about fossil fuel engines and the technology required for their fuel’s extraction? The use of psychology in developing harsh interrogation and torture techniques? Bioweapons liked weaponized anthrax or sarin nerve gas?
I like to think science will be used to solve many of these problems. By this, I reject the primitivist solution, especially to environmental problems, which would ask us to dismantle everything and return to the lifestyles of our early ancestors. There is nothing to be gained by that, to my mind. I think the benefits of the modern world outweigh any sort of vague ‘harmony with nature’ that lifestyle would bring us.
Instead, I think genetic engineering, the development of alternative forms of energy, and green technologies will solve many of the problems which science has also been used to bring about.
But this leaves one big problem left – scientific participation in military technologies. Such technologies, unlike nuclear or coal power, are not two-edged swords. They are intended for a single purpose which ought to be anathema to a civilized society.
Doctors and lawyers and other professions have formal codes of ethics. These are fairly lax – doctors and psychologists have assisted in torture in American prison facilities, for example. These codes also hold no bounds over military doctors or psychologists – they only have effect if such people wish to work in a civilian setting.
True, enforced ethics codes are a fairly recent invention. Nothing formal guiding research ethics existed prior to the Nuremberg Code or the Declaration of Geneva. The Declaration of Helsinki, which codified the proper ethics involved in conducting research with human subjects, was originally drafted in 1964 and not really implemented until the revision in 1975.
Think about that. Given the length of time it takes for policy changes, especially things like a code of conduct, to become a part of the culture they’re concerned with, one could reasonably say there was no strong base for ethics in human research until the late 1970s. Problems still occur today – imagine what it was like then, when there was no formal concern for individual self-determination, when there was no concern for informed consent.
But other scientists still have no formal code of ethics dealing with the outcomes of their research, unless they deal with human or animal experimentation. True, there are codes of conduct dealing with plagiarism and misconduct, but none dealing with questions like ‘will this be used to kill people?’ or ‘will this poison this ocean?’
I’m not trying to lay a lot of blame at the feet of scientists. Much of the time the products of research have multiple applications, some of which may not be intended by their discoverers. Scientific findings are frequently misused, misunderstood, misstated, or made up to support particular political, social, or ideological positions (See Bad Science for some good examples).
My point is that scientists have a great deal of power through their findings. Anyone holding power needs to be careful how they wield it. Should Oppenheimer and his colleagues have refused to develop nuclear weapons?
It’s not an easy answer. They felt they were in a race with the Soviets and the Nazis, with the fate of the free world at stake. They lived in an age where the claims of nationalism and racism were not questioned in the way they are today. But I think they should have questioned themselves more than they did – the decision to drop the second bomb on Nagasaki was partly theirs.
Science can be, I believe, one of the greatest tools for good that humans possess. It can grant us independence from the vagaries and vicissitudes nature, from disease, from decrepitude. I think the scale of its view can help deliver us from petty intraplanatary regionalism. That the international communication and collaboration which facilitates it can be used to break down political barriers.
But scientists need to think about it. We do not have the luxury, any more than do soldiers or doctors, of simply going along with things. We must think about the uses to which our discoveries will be put, and work to make sure they are not misused.
