In the new issue of Arc (out May 28th) I explore why gaming is a new way to tell stories and lets us explore old ideas in new ways.
“I, the reader, am not culpable for the destiny of Romeo and Juliet simply because I turn the page. Games demand that we choose to take the action that gives the story weight. In that moment of confrontation – of ‘This is unfair! The game only gives two options and I don’t want to take either!’ – we realize that our only way out is either through the narrative, or via the power button.
“By throwing these rules in our way – rules we know to be programmed and designed – video games call our attention to the constructed narratives in our everyday lives. When we are presented with two choices and neither is desirable, we see the rules of the system laid bare.”
Arc is new but amazing. The last issue featured articles by folks like Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, and Bruce Sterling.
Pop Bioethics has been dormant longer than I’d care to admit.
A new career path, a new apartment in a new borough, and the loss of a beloved family member formed a triumvirate fulcrum upon which my life has pivoted this past month. Writing has been neigh impossible.
I spend a tremendous amount of time reading, watching, playing, listening to, and discussing the finer points of pop culture, bioethics, science, medicine, and technology. From this, glimmers of hints of rumors have begun to emerge. The human path towards the future is not predicted by boffins or conjured by imagineers but is instead found in the modern mythopoetic process that plays out in our media. Our values, our beliefs and our hopes forge themselves into visions through which our reality is refracted. Position yourself properly and the image shifts, lenticular. We only need dare to take the tack oblique.
More and more, the hologram of the coming century is one in which the world is shaped not by our technologies but by our rights. A proper 21st century Futurama would be populated by booths of rights activists, sociologists, philosophers, and anthropologists – more of Foucault than of Fuller, I suspect. Why? Simple. The future is here. The concern is no longer attaining but maintaining.
In this space I intend to continue exploring how we should live in the future. As with everything, my belief is that through synthesis we will find the next step in our long march forward. William Blake, who had an incredible ability to see ahead by looking inward, offers a few lines that are fine axioms upon which I can continue this project.
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.
Where man is not nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d.
There are no answers here. Only suppositions, surmises, guesses and even the occasional wild-eyed shot in the dark. My ideas are and will be founded on what I hope will be tilting towards the truth, but errors are expected, anticipated, and embraced.
On to what’s next.
Wow.
The after-birth abortion article continues to stir up discussions. For those who think that the idea is too extreme or unacceptable for a journal to publish, Julian Savulescu has some choice thoughts:
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, he added: “This “debate” has been an example of “witch ethics” – a group of people know who the witch is and seek to burn her. It is one of the most dangerous human tendencies we have. It leads to lynching and genocide. Rather than argue and engage, there is a drive is to silence and, in the extreme, kill, based on their own moral certainty. That is not the sort of society we should live in.”
He said the journal would consider publishing an article positing that, if there was no moral difference between abortion and killing newborns, then abortion too should be illegal.
Giubilini and Minerva have written an open letter in response to the uproar. The critical element:
We are really sorry that many people, who do not share the background of the intended audience for this article, felt offended, outraged, or even threatened. We apologise to them, but we could not control how the message was promulgated across the internet and then conveyed by the media. In fact, we personally do not agree with much of what the media suggest we think. Because of these misleading messages pumped by certain groups on the internet and picked up for a controversy-hungry media, we started to receive many emails from very angry people (most of whom claimed to be Pro-Life and very religious) who threatened to kill us or which were extremely abusive. Prof Savulescu said these responses were out of place, and he himself was attacked because, after all, “we deserve it.”
We do not think anyone should be abused for writing an academic paper on a controversial topic.
That two people were threatened for publishing ideas is shame.
Searing, intense, personal account of being mother to a child with Tay-Sachs, perhaps the archetypal disease used for discussing wrongful life. Emily Rapp’s take on prenatal testing is the opposite of abstract. Read it all:
That it is possible to hold this paradox as part of my daily reality points to the reductive and narrow-minded nature of Rick Santorum’s assertions that prenatal testing increases the number of abortions (a this equals that equation), and for this reason, the moral viability or inherent value of these tests should be questioned. Prenatal testing provides information, a value-less act. I maintain that it is a woman’s right to choose what to do with the information that attaches value and meaning, and that this choice is—and must be—directly related to that individual’s experiences. What’s at stake here is not the issue of testing, but the issue of choice. I love Ronan, and I believe it would have been an act of love to abort him, knowing that his life would be primarily one of intense suffering, knowing that his neurologically devastated brain made true quality of life—relationships, thoughts, pleasant physical experiences—impossible.
Here’s another set of truths for the moral and ethical mix: I was born with a physical deformity in the age before the evolution of advanced ultrasound technology that may have detected it. My mom did not have a choice about terminating her pregnancy, although when I was born and she was told that I might be retarded, that I might never walk, and that given these possibilities she might want to consider institutionalizing me, she probably wished she’d had the choice. Regardless of what she may or may not have decided had she been possessed of all the information prior to my birth, regardless of the fact that none of the doctor’s warnings had any truth to them, it would have been her choice to make.
Choice. The center of ethics.
Wow! Also, Helsinki seems to be something of an incubator for discussions of rights.
Based on the principle of the equal treatment of all persons;
Recognizing that scientific research gives us deeper insights into the complexities of cetacean minds, societies and cultures;
Noting that the progressive development of international law manifests an entitlement to life by cetaceans;
We affirm that all cetaceans as persons have the right to life, liberty and wellbeing.
We conclude that:
- Every individual cetacean has the right to life.
- No cetacean should be held in captivity or servitude; be subject to cruel treatment; or be removed from their natural environment.
- All cetaceans have the right to freedom of movement and residence within their natural environment.
- No cetacean is the property of any State, corporation, human group or individual.
- Cetaceans have the right to the protection of their natural environment.
- Cetaceans have the right not to be subject to the disruption of their cultures.
- The rights, freedoms and norms set forth in this Declaration should be protected under international and domestic law.
- Cetaceans are entitled to an international order in which these rights, freedoms and norms can be fully realized.
- No State, corporation, human group or individual should engage in any activity that undermines these rights, freedoms and norms.
- Nothing in this Declaration shall prevent a State from enacting stricter provisions for the protection of cetacean rights.
Makes me want to re-read Moby-Dick.
via io9
I laughed loud and hard when I saw this picture for the first time. What a traumatic and bizarre image.
That it needs to exist is sad. That someone thought they could stop the behavior with a sign is absurd. That someone was commissioned to create the sign is oddly funny. I guess I have a macabre sense of humor.
But there is a lesson here: For those of you who have forgotten, the job of the bioethicist to look at this and ask, Why?
The simpler and more obvious an answer, the more difficult it is to prove. The recent essay “After Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” in the Journal of Medical Ethics is already enraging more than a few people. The purpose of articles that are so obviously controversial and counter-intuitive. is not to endorse or advocate a political position and say “this is right and should be law.” Instead, they are exactly what intellectual exercise is meant to be: a reasoned exploration of an idea we find difficult and troubling. True philosophy, honest ethics, dares to ask the un-askable questions. If we are horrified by what we find, then we need to examine the very foundations of our philosophies.
If something is obvious, then that is the very thing a diligent bioethicsist should be questioning and doubting.
Ed Yong takes us through the reason recent breakthroughs in transplants (e.g. a new trachea) doesn’t mean we’ll be printing more complex anytime soon:
“A good way to think about it is that there are four levels of complexity,” says Anthony Atala from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, one of the leaders of the field. The first level includes flat organs like skin, which comprise just a few types of cells. Next up are tubes, like windpipes or blood vessels, with slightly more complex shapes and more varied collections of cells. The third level includes hollow sac-like organs, like the bladder or stomach. Unlike the tubes, which just act as pipes for fluid, these organs have to perform on demand – secreting, expanding or filtering as the situation arises.
Scientists have fashioned lab-grown organs from all three of these categories. Surgeons have implanted artificial skin and cartilage into thousands of patients. Synthetic windpipes are now a reality. Artificial blood vessels are going through clinical trials for patients on dialysis and children with congenital heart problems. Atala himself has transplanted lab-grown bladders into several patients, the first of whom has now been living with her new organ for over a decade.
. . .
The cells also need to grow along the right shapes, so getting the right scaffold is essential. For simple organs, like Beyene’s windpipe, it is possible to fabricate the whole scaffold from scratch. But solid organs have more complex shapes, so some teams start with existing organs, taken either from cadavers or from animals. They use detergents to strip away the cells, leaving behind a natural scaffold of connective tissues and blood vessels, which can then be seeded with a patient’s stem cells. It is the equivalent of stripping a building down to its frame and filling the walls back in. Scientists have made livers, lungs and even beating hearts in this way, and some have started to transplant their organs into animals.
Some researchers are excited by the potential organ-building capabilities of three-dimensional (3-D) printers. These devices are modified versions of everyday inkjet printers that squirt living cells rather than drops of ink. Layer by layer, they can make three-dimensional structures such as organs and, as of September last year, the blood vessels they contain. Atala is developing this technique – he wowed the audience at a TED conference last year by printing a kidney on stage (although not a functional one). He says, “For the level four organs, it’s just a matter of time,” says Atala. “We’re still a long way from full replacement, but I do believe that these technologies are achievable.”
It starts with asking the right questions. Patrick Lin, Keith Abney, and George Bekey’s new book Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics is packed with them:
If a robot malfunctions and harms someone, who is responsible — the robot’s owner, its manufacturer, or the robot itself? Under what circumstances can robots be put in positions of authority, with human beings required to obey them? Is it ethically wrong for robots to prey upon our emotional sensitivities — should they be required to remind us, explicitly or implicitly, that they are only machines? How safe do robots need to be before they’re deployed in society at large? Should cyborgs — human beings with robot parts — have a special legal status if their parts malfunction and hurt someone? If a police robot uses its sensors to perform a surveillance operation, does that constitute a search? (And can the robot decide if there is probable cause?)
“We Pop Way Too Many Pills And The Pills Don’t Even Work” underlines, simplifies, and circles the key points of the same argument. Also: infographics!
The single most important point to consider in both the article and video is this: the argument is not that anti-depressants don’t work at all, but that for those with mild or moderate depression, they have little to no positive effect and distract from other treatments for depression like exercise and talking therapy.
Pharmaceuticals are often wonderful and represent genuine medical advances. Like anything, they can become a false or lazy solution for both doctors and patients. Be a critical and questioning patient.
Pills aren’t bad, taking pills without knowing why or as the only solution is.
