The limits of the self

What is it that makes you you? Is it your body? Is it your brain? Could it be your “stream of consciousness”, something that could be called the “spirit” or the “soul” that emerges from your body and brain?

This is certainly not an easy question to answer. Whether you believe in an immortal soul or not, we can certainly say that consciousness as we experience it in our everyday life is nothing without the inputs from the senses or the functioning of the brain to interpret it. It’s kind of easy to define your “mind”, whatever it is, as a part of you, but what about your body?

It seems obvious that without the body, the brain that sustains our perceptions and thought would soon die. Even parts of us that don’t seem so essential primary survival is still considered as a part of the “self”. Imagine getting a finger cut off. Surely you’ll feel like a part of you is missing. Your brain, mind and habits were all centered around having that finger, even to the point where you might feel a phantom limb where it used to be as a result of the brain cells randomly firing at the lack of input. But then, there is a point where you might get used to the loss, move on, and allow your sense of self to shrink and adapt to this new reality.
Mourning a lost limb is a process to mourning a loved one. Most people who’ve been through the experience have described it as being stripped of a part of themselves, a part they cared deeply about and felt was essential to their well-being. Could it be that we integrate the environment to our understanding of who we are? Do you think you could be yourself should you be left naked on the corner of street? If you have poor vision, do you think you would be fully yourself if you lost your glasses and had no way to get them back?

Our sense of self is a construction that includes everything we cherish about our life. It is composed of our memories, thoughts and feelings that we project on parts of the material world, whether it happens to be carrying your DNA or not.

That being said, it also means that the sense of self is a dynamic entity that is in constant motion depending on your perceptions, feelings and memory. In experiments, it has been found that simply playing a video game will usually allow someone to identify more with the avatar of the game than they identify with themselves judging from the brain reaction. So while the brain is completely inside the body, just looking at an avatar in a virtual world that you can control is enough to fool at least partially your brain into thinking you are that avatar.

I believe that this idea means that finding acceptation for cybernetics and virtual realities isn’t going to be so difficult. This is already the case with disabled people who already perceive their own prosthesis as a true part of themselves. Similarly in the case of virtual reality, if a simple image on a screen is enough to create immersion of the self, surely a full body experience will be no different than our day to day experience.

This simply goes to show that what we consider to be “us” might not be so closed off as we might think.

Sources

Ganesh, S., van Schie, H. T., de Lange, F. P., Thompson, E., & Wigboldus, D. H. (2012). How the human brain goes virtual: distinct cortical regions of the person-processing network are involved in self-identification with virtual agents.Cerebral Cortex, 22(7), 1577-1585.

Not directly related but immensely interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto

Gender-Bender Award – Evolution of Gender

Well, I can certainly be grateful about that!

Thank you very much for the honnor!

Tiffany's Non-Blog

Tiffany’s Gender-Bender Award is an opportunity to celebrate those who challenge and disrupt the gender binary!

Each month, I will feature a post that in some way takes us beyond the paradigm of gender oppression.  Many types of content will be considered – poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, even visual art.  I will also consider a variety of perspectives, everything from 1800s “first-wave” Western feminism to women’s uprisings in the Muslim world today, from Stonewall-era gay liberation to 21st century activism for transgender rights and dignity.

 

This Month, I am awarding “the transhumanist chick” for “The evolution of gender“.

“In our world today, gender is considered by most to be one of the most fundamental characteristic of identity. It is one of the first information we share about ourselves and one of the first one we seek in someone else. It is so fundamental to our present…

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The evolution of gender

In our world today, gender is considered by most to be one of the most fundamental characteristic of identity. It is one of the first information we share about ourselves and one of the first one we seek in someone else. It is so fundamental to our present understanding of people that most languages are effectively making it almost impossible to talk about someone without referring to their gender at some point. First it would make sense to define what gender is.

To the casual observer, gender is usually seen as something that is stable and constant in a person and thought to be divided between male and female.  This understanding of gender stems from the fact that most people are born with clearly different reproductive organs, which usually lead to the development of a sexual differentiation during puberty such as beard, breast and a size difference during puberty. Gender is also a common marker for the creation of a fertile heterosexual relationship. Evolutionarily wise, gender makes sense.

But what would gender look like in a post-human world? One where artificial wombs and pluripotent cell development allows for any two people of any gender to have children? One where physical strength wouldn’t be relevant and could easily be accessible to anyone of any gender via robotization of labor, cybernetics and bioenhencement. How could gender even make sense in such a world?

This is not the world we live in, but these questions are obviously relevant even today. Having children is no longer the unique goal of sexual partnership and the cisgender heterosexual couples is obviously no longer the unique model. And even to non-fertile couple or people, technologies of today are capable of providing the means for them to reproduce. What about gender roles, then? Are they still relevant today? As I’ve mentioned in my post about ectogenesis, the mysticism surrounding motherhood is certainly a big hindrance to achieve any reasonable discussion about the usefulness of women being the bearers of children’s responsibilities. Even in today’s world that attempts to be as equal as possible, the burden of domestic chores and domestic roles still falls again and always on women. As if the capacity to bear children was to be systematically to be associated with the keeping of the household.

So while gender roles and sexual orientation are slowly being put into question, what of gender itself? The existence of trans people and non-binary people are certainly the proof that gender is no more fixed than it is binary. However, even trans people have to deal with the cultural system of gender, where everything, names, language, clothing, hairstyles and, most of all, bodies are gendered. In that system, identifying outside de cisgender binary system of gender becomes so much harder when people are forced by their own language and experience to put a gender on every single person they meet. So even though gender itself has the ability to adapt into numerous forms, it is still shaped and often crushed by the cultural machine that keeps pushing its expectation on it.

All of this brings back to the question: Is gender bound to disappear? Given what we are witnessing in the world among LGBT and queer feminism movement, I think we could safely say that what’s going to happen is even better. While the binary gender system might still exist as a system of reference, people of all bodies and expression will become free to play with the codes and shape their world into whatever they want it to be. In this world, technology will simply be another way to express diversity. For this to happen, flexibility will have to be introduced in the system. Gender will have to be taken out of legal papers and language will have to adapt to accept that a person is not necessarily primarily defined by their gender. Such changes will take time and will certainly cause a lot of grunting and yapping, but the freedom gained from such a process would certainly outweigh any of the possible discomfort it might cause.

From nanobots to neuroscience revolution

Nanotechnology can be said to be the science of building very small technologies. So small in fact that they are at the “nano” scale, which corresponds to a factor of reduction of 10^-9. This is very small. That being said, one of the aspects of nanotechnologies that show a lot of promise is the field of nanorobotics. Nanobots have yet to provide a wealth of usable technologies, but it is under way with such molecular sensor that can count molecules in a sample.

Now imagine that, with the advancing technology, it became possible to create a type of nanobot that could be injected in the bloodstream and that had the ability to selectively attach itself to neurons, the working cells of the nervous system. There would be a few technical challenges, including the one of having the nanobot cross the blood-brain barrier to reach the central nervous system and making sure that it can differentiate between neurons and other types of cells, but let’s imagine these hurdles to have been elucidated. Just with that aspect solved, it would certainly make it easier to deliver some medicine with fewer side effects, something that is speculated to become one of nanorobotics main advantage.

However, let’s not stay there and, if you will, let’s make our nanobot a bit more complex. Let’s simply add a sensor that is capable of measuring electrical current. Our nanobot, which could be wedged in the cell membrane of a neuron, would simply have to measure the difference of potential between the inside and the outside of the neuron. With this kind of ability, it would be able to tell if the neuron is firing or not. Of course, such an ability would be useless unless it could transmit the information wirelessly, so let’s add this to our nanobot.

Now that the whole nervous system is “infected” with nanobots that can read electrical variations and transmit them wirelessly. From then, it’s easy to scan the subject to pick-up the location of every nanobot within the nervous system. Have a supercomputer analyse the humongous among amount of data and you now have real-time exact replica of the whole nervous system’s activity. Just that much would certainly be a huge step in neuroscience in term of functional imagery. This would give incredible opportunities to test hypothesis about the functioning of the brain and deepen our understanding of it to unprecedented levels. Furthermore, the data itself could serve as the basis for an artificial intelligence program (AI) that could certainly revolutionize our thinking machines.

However, merely measuring brain activity wouldn’t be enough to understand its relationship to the mind. While a wealth of hypothesis could be tested by asking the subject to willfully do something or by presenting them with stimulations, it would still be limited. In order to ensure the best understanding of the way the nervous system works, we’re going to need to upgrade once again our bot and give it the ability to generate an electrical current, granting it the capacity to create action potential or to inhibit them. Doing so would give us an even wider range of possibility for testing and would certainly allow us to have an almost complete understanding of the actions of every part of the nervous system on it itself and on the mind-body link. Add to it an invasion of substance measuring nanobots for the effect of various hormones and neurotransmitter and we could certainly say that we will have the most comprehensive understanding of the nervous system and its relationship to the mind that’s ever been known.

With all these abilities, it would only be a step to apply it to a computer simulation that would not only be able to reproduce a human mind, but to reproduce the mind of a specific subject. The possibilities for such a development would be huge; the first of them being that it would become possible to put your virtual mind, or a thousand versions of them, up to the task of solving an unprecedented amount of problems. It would also allow to create a virtual copy of yourself that would be immortal as long as the data are available.  I’ll come back later on the implications of this point.

Furthermore, the presence of the nanobots inside a person’s nervous system would also mean that it would be possible to generate a complete and absolute virtual reality for the person simply by controlling the sensations the person is receiving. This technology would also revolutionize the way psychopathologies could be treated with the ability to act directly on the parts of the brain that are responsible for whatever problem is being reported. With an enhanced understanding of the mind-brain relationship, such an application would be made possible. More than that, by creating an interface between the brain and external computers, it would be possible to effectively make the brain’s computational capacity to go higher, AKA make us brighter! The dark side of all these wonderful aspects would be that “brain hacking” would in fact become possible. Once again, I’ll discuss this point in another post.

In conclusion, nanotechnology, though presently a budding field, could become the holy grail of neuroscience and psychology as a whole. It would also dramatically impact the fields of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and eventually could even allow us to increase our intelligence.

To read more:

Shapiro, K. (2005). This Is Your Brain on Nanobots. COMMENTARY, 120(5), 64-68.

Sharma, S., Payal, N., Kaushik, A., & Goel, N. (2014, April). Blue Brain Technology: A Subway to Artificial Intelligence. In Communication Systems and Network Technologies (CSNT), 2014 Fourth International Conference on(pp. 1106-1109). IEEE.

Technological eugenics

In my last post, I’ve discussed the more cultural aspect of eugenics, where I’ve explained that it’s already present in society through cultural norms and access to reproductive technology. This type of eugenics is, in my sense, the one that is closest to Galton’s idea of it, where “society” or the government should decide who gets to reproduce and who doesn’t. This is a more authoritarian vision of eugenics because restricts an individual’s access to reproduction. On the other hand, there can be a more individualistic approach to selective reproduction, and it would in my sense be much more respectful of people individual’s rights. An individualistic vision of Galton’s eugenics wouldn’t be very practical, given that It would simply come down to individual people choosing on their own if their genetic material is worthy of being passed down and then for them to choose the best possible genetic partner if they deem themselves worthy to create a  “better” next generation. I could certainly see a community of eugenic enthusiasts doing that, but I don’t believe it would be so different from what already happens when we choose our reproductive partners without necessarily having genetics in mind but still choosing people we find attractive based on desirable traits.

The one technology that turns the tables on individual eugenics is the possibility for genetic screening and embryo selection.  To put it simply, it is the idea that through in vitro fertilization, where multiple embryos are created, it would be possible to genetically test the embryos in order to get their genotypes, from which genes for desirable traits could be selected for or where the presence of genes for undesired traits could be selected against. This idea is usually demonized by the general public, with the typical scenario that people would all want a white blond boy with blue eyes. I believe this example to be a bit unfounded, in the sense that first, skin color is almost necessarily a combination of both parents; therefore, the only way to select against it would be to select the parent, which is something that hasn’t much to do with embryo selection. Second, I honestly have a hard time figuring out how it would be bad to have more blond hair or blue eyes in the next generation aside from an unfounded fear for the commodification of children’s traits, something that already exists when people select their partners in function of their appearance. In the end the only aspect of this scenario that I can imagine becoming a problem is if people start selecting abusively in favor of boys, something that is already happening with selective abortion and that is creating big society problems. However, I believe that the simplest way to prevent it would be to prevent by law geneticists from disclosing gender whenever the genotype is being analysed.

Outside from these critics, this type of eugenics would certainly be a good way to screen for genetic afflictions and to select against them before they become a problem. Sure, one might question the practical elimination of disabled people that it could entail, but unless it were to become mandatory to select against disability, it would still be possible for disabled people to have disabled children, if only by not using embryo selection at all. Considering that my vision of transhumanism is one where it would give more freedom to people, I believe it would be immoral to force it down on anyone. That being said, it would allow parents to be less stressed out about the possibility that their children might be afflicted with a genetic disease, especially if the said disease was known to be running in the family, and spare them from the difficulties of raising a sick or a disabled child when they might not be ready for it.

Outside of selection against undesirable traits, one of the perks of such a technique would be the ability to select in favor of some traits. For example, it could technically be possible to select in favor of a set of genes known to offer protection against some types of cancer. Another one would be to select in favor of genes that are highly correlated with intelligence. All these possibilities would in fact allow us to make sure that the second generation is better (in some aspects) than the first. As long as the technology is available to everyone and not only to a selected few wealthy people, I can only see that as something that goes in the interest of everyone, parents, children and society.

As interesting as this individual vision of eugenic is, it would still means that whatever change it would bring to society, and whatever “variety” of “better” individual it might create would still be limited by the painfully slow procession of generations. In his article about In vitro eugenics, Robert Sparrow (2013) discusses the possibility of creating multiple generations of embryo selections through the use of induced pluripotent cells. Indeed, he foresees the use of any cell to be turned into gametes, therefore making it possible to create multiple generations of embryos without having to wait for them to grow into a sexually mature person. In his assessment of the technology, he evaluates that up to 2 or 3 generations might be created every year, and suppose that, with every passing generation, it would be possible to select in favor of a “better” genotype, which would eventually allow for the creation of an artificially selected embryo that would hold as many desirable traits as possible.

The ethical implications of this are very delicate, and they involve the ethics of creating embryos for the sole purpose research and it raises the question of what is the person created through multiple generations of in vitro eugenics going to be like. One of the main concerns is about how these multiple induction of pluripotent cells and artificial creation of embryo might affect the epigenetics of cells, which might lead to non-viable or dangerously flawed embryos. This issue raises the question: If eugenicists were to create a “flawed” person, a failed experience, how are they supposed to deal with it if they only realize it after birth? The embryo would obviously turn into a person, both morally and legally and the implication of them living a life of suffering as a direct result of the human intervention would be morally unsound. Any attempt at in vitro eugenics should therefore only be done once all the implications of epigenetics were clearly understood and could be included in the assessment of which embryo would be selected for.

Furthermore, one of the main barriers to realizing in vitro eugenics is our understanding of the link that exists between genotype and phenotype. Once believed to be a “one gene=one trait” relationship, traits have now been proven to be the result of incredibly complex relationships between multiple genes, epigenetics and environment. Unless this relationship were to be fully understood, it would be practically impossible to select for desired traits since the trait itself might be encoded in a way that is too complex to be assessed.

I don’t believe eugenics to be morally bad in and by itself. What I do believe is that any technology that makes it possible should be properly framed in order to prevent the ethical hurdles they might create. I also believe that we should steer clear of any Galton type eugenics, which would force people to have children that are seen as “appropriate” for the need of society. Ultimately, I believe that it should rest into parent’s hand to make embryo selection a part of their reproductive strategy, just like it is up to them to choose their partners and to decide if they want to have children or not.

Sources

Sparrow, R. (2014). In vitro eugenics. Journal of medical ethics, 40(11), 725-731.

Wilkinson, S., & Garrard, E. (2013). Eugenics and the ethics of selective reproduction