On bodies, brains, and burials.

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.

Morality of chemical enhancement.

So, what do we all think of drugs?

This has been stewing in my head for a while, ever since I saw a poster presentation on MPH use among university students. This post itself was sparked, rather geekily, by an episode of Star Trek TNG. I’ve never watched the show before, so please forgive me if some of my posts are inspired by episodes as I go.

This ties in a little with my question of the natural fallacy from before. Take MPH, for example. Is it wrong or immoral to use the drug to enhance your studying (because it assists with attentional function)? If so, why? We enhance ourselves with glasses, for example, or with clothing in winter. But are those just corrective? Is the main argument that one shouldn’t use things intended to correct a disability when you don’t possess that disability yourself?

I don’t think that’s the main argument. Otherwise, there would not be the strong social taboo against mood-changing drugs. There is a strong effort to help people with schizophrenia, or anxiety, or bipolar, or major depression, off stabilizing or mood-enhancing drugs. I think there is a rational argument to be made there because these drugs often have undesirable side-effects, but there is also a prominent note of wanting people to experience life ‘naturally’. People don’t even want to take pain medication if they don’t absolutely have to.

I’m not sure what it is, entirely, and I’m straying a bit far from my point, so let’s go back to my original thought. MPH and students. We use caffeine to stay awake and alert when studying or writing papers. We use alcohol as social lubrication. We use computers to facilitate our studies. The objection seems to be that drug use to aid in studying is somehow cheating, like using performance-enhancing drugs in sports. But even there, how is it cheating? Other athletes could use enhancing drugs too?

Is the argument that those who choose not to use drugs will thereby be at a disadvantage? But those of us who choose to have social lives have a disadvantage over those who choose to focus all their efforts on their studies. Those of us who choose to take public transport instead of driving will get places more slowly.

The only real arguments I can see are economic – that those who can’t afford it will fall further behind; or medical – that those who are compelled to use drugs to stay competitive will open themselves up to health problems from side effects.

So.

Let’s say someone invents a drug with no physiological side effects, which is inexpensive, and which enhances cognitive and academic performance.

What would be the problem with using it?

Human demarcation

I’m wrestling with a post on Popper and manifest truth, but in the meantime, some thoughts on drawing species lines.

What came first, the chicken or the egg? I read an answer somewhere which was quite good – ‘a slightly different egg.’ The first hen, you see, would not have been recognized as such. This is because you cannot point to a single animal and say ‘See? That’s the first chicken.’ Individuals do not evolve, and they do not found whole species. Eve is a myth. (The case of the modern domestic chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is a bit confused, as it might have come about due to deliberate cross-breeding between related species, so let’s just say ‘chicken’ to denote a generic bird of a definite species.)

In fact, new species are almost entirely noted in retrospect, when you can say ‘This chicken descended from this chicken-like ancestor.’ The ancestor is not a chicken, and likely cannot breed with modern chickens (an sufficient but not necessary aspect of a distinct species). Many proto-chickens likely bore young which were very similar to modern chickens, many of which bore young which were even more similar to modern chickens, until eventually without realizing it you have ancestral chickens and modern chickens, and aren’t quite sure when in the last hundred/thousand/more years it happened.

This is entirely the same with humans.

An amusing pastime is watching ‘creation scientists’ try to demarcate archaeological finds of hominid (Hominidae refers to all of the great apes, including Homo sapiens) as either ape or human. By ignoring the various gradations, and the fact that any shift from ‘more ape’ to ‘more human’ is obvious only because the fragmentary nature of the fossil record gives us snapshots rather than a continuous view of hominid evolution. This game can be played all across the internet (and in real life), but some good examples of it in play are here, here, and here.

What is human, and what is not, are not clear distinctions. At the risk of digging myself a deeper hole that I can write myself out of in the next year or so, I plan to return to this concept, that in science while there are categories they are non-rigid categories. Something similar applies to sex and gender, but that’s whole other kettle of fish.

But – since this was on my mind today – how do you draw the distinction between human and cyborg? I know this might seem something of a non-sequitor, but it’s something of great interest to me. I and many of my friends read sci-fi, and have played games, in which the characters are part-human and part-machine. These media typically assume that as you add artificial limbs or functions you become less human.

Are we less human now? Because much of the speculation in the books revolves around things we already possess and do. Artificial eyes? (We have them). Are they somehow different than looking through a camera with your own eyes, aside from considerations of rejection or infection? Does wearing night-vision goggles make you a cyborg? How about surgically implanted memory storage? It’s no different than storing information on a computer, which becomes an accessory to your memory function. Computers in fact make much of this debate possible, as for many people in developed countries they are a daily necessity for their jobs. If I lose a tooth and have it replaced by a plastic tooth, am I a cyborg? What if I receive a hip replacement? An artificial leg?

At what point am I no longer human? The answer, I think, is so long as my brain is intact I will remain human, for all intents and purposes – or at least enough of one to pass a Turing test.

A natural fallacy

There is a pervasive belief, even among scientists and rationalists, that those things which are ‘natural’ are better than those which are ‘unnatural’ or ‘artificial’. Thus, they prefer herbal medicines over pharmaceuticals, natural fabrics over synthetics, and midwives over hospitals.

Now, sometimes one wishes to make an aesthetic choice – I may prefer to wear a leather or heavy cotton coat over a warmer and tougher coat, for example. But when it comes to science and medicine, aesthetic choices should take a backseat to what works.

I have several objections to the argument that natural things are to be preferred.

1. Natural is not a priori better. There are ‘natural’ things which are harmful – not just intestinal parasites, malaria, and tooth decay, but also more nebulous things such as hierarchy, or ‘cheaters’. Dying in childbirth is natural. These things are rightly viewed as problems to be solved, not things to be upheld. Many naturally occurring compounds are toxic, at least as much so as many synthetics.

2. Conversely, artificial is not a priori worse. Glasses correct degenerating vision, quinine kills malaria, toothpaste and fluoride stop tooth decay. Artificial things have greatly benefited our societies. Birth control pills for example, has given woman greater reproductive autonomy, prevents unwanted or unsupportable pregnancies, and can be used to regulate menstrual cycles. C-sections can ease births which would otherwise kill the child, mother, or both. Compared to herbals, artificial preparations use standardized amounts and isolate the compound that has its effect, allowing one to use less than one would require if taking the unprocessed herb. Cooking is just as artificial a process, and yet we do not shudder at well-grilled meat because it is somehow unnatural.

3. Natural and artificial are not useful terms. Everything that exists is natural. Anti-retrovirals make use of naturally occurring vulnerabilities in retroviruses to certain chemicals. Birth control mimics a natural state in which ovulation is suppressed or cervical mucus is thickened. We cannot make use of anything outside of nature – the worst than can be said is what we use may have unforeseen consequences.

4. Because of an irrational attachment to the label ‘natural’, things which are natural but uncommon or non-normative are painted with the same brush of loathing as artificial things. Thus, people go to great effort to demonstrate that being gay is not a choice, and that is occurs in the so-called ‘natural world’. While I don’t take issue with either claim, they are a distraction from the main issue – ‘natural’ or not, it shouldn’t make a difference. Similarly, surgical and hormonal self-modification is seen as unnatural, particularly in the case of trans-folk, who have to go to great lengths to defeat the idea that their bodies are somehow artificial or unnatural. But these things merely augment nature, or use nature’s tools. They are not somehow outside of nature.

I’m not entirely sure where this fallacy comes from. I suspect some of it comes from Christianity – the idea that the world of humans and their tools is inherently sinful compared to the ‘natural’ world created by God is a powerful and long-standing influence. I suspect a Greek scholar could tell me a great deal about pre-Christian Hellenic trends in this mode of thinking, minus the God part.

In general, I think it is a pernicious idea which has little utility, and we would do well to discard it.