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Neuroethics: Technology Transfer and Philosophy

August 3, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

In searching on YouTube for "ethics" and "Neurology," I came across a number of results on "neuro ethics," which seems primarily concerned not with the neural basis for ethical reasoning, but with ethical issues involved in performing neurological research.

Here's Dr. Eric Racine giving a lecture called "Ethics and the Public Understanding of Neuroscience: Perspectives from the Media" in June at a conference.


Watch on YouTube.

It's 5:30 minutes in before Racine describes what neuroethics is: an interdisciplinary effort to improve patient outcomes through, e.g. neural imaging. Far from fretting about the degree to which mental function relies upon biology (although at 14 minutes in, he derides media oversimplification of the mind-brain relation), this effort is eminently practical: what does science tell us, and how do practitioners end up using this given the information being fed to them? Racine's concern here is not only what technology is available but on how it is marketed, and consequently how technology might be misused given misconceptions in the media: "The media could act as a source of ethical challenges and harms, but also as a source of ethical duties and benefits."

If this all sounds rather mundane to you philosophy fans grown to contemplate Descartes's radical doubt and Schopenhauer's concept of the world as Will, it should. One of the criticisms of Churchland that I found telling was that her work isn't original, and thus isn't important. As a philosopher, she's not actually out there performing experiments, i.e. doing science, and neither is she inventing (with this book, anyway) a fundamentally new way of thinking about ethics: her philosophical foundations are in Aristotle and Hume, and Braintrust

It's the "originality" claim that I want to take issue with here. The picture is of an intellectual landscape where good ideas float to the top, instantly accessible to all. I think this picture is based on a model of a closed academic establishment where the smartest people are put in positions of influence, so that when they put forward a truly novel position, everyone else reads about it, and so the intellectual culture advances. Any historical knowledge, of course, belies that, for just as with art, greatness comes from all corners and is more often than not unrecognized, such that good ideas, if they come to the surface at all, are usually popularized by those who did not originate them, are subject to arbitrary political pressures, and may lie dormant for centuries.

In an area of actual practice rather than mere academic study, this becomes much more acute: media and market forces often determine what ideas go where. My day job is in technology transfer communications in the transportation sector. For instance, if a state agency uses several thousand dollars to fund a study that develops an improvement in the asphalt mix recipe for pavement used in certain conditions, without action to communicate (i.e. to market) that research, even within a pretty small group of practitioners, the advance will not actually be implemented in the construction of new roads.

Racine here is concerned with medical advances, and in that case, even with professional medical associations and government regulations, there is a great deal of chaos in how advances get promulgated. For a well-known academic like Churchland to "go broad" and synthesize research by authors in different branches of science (neurology, evolutionary biology, genetics, animal behavior, etc.) is to make a positive contribution to human knowledge even if not a word of her book is original: synthesis is a legitimate and useful academic enterprise. Then again, if you're just doing "pure philosophy" for your own edification and have no concern with improving how things are done in the world, and you have the time to go read all the disparate sources she draws upon yourself, and in fact don't need someone like her to guide you to that source material, then I'm very impressed with you. Nice job!

-Mark Linsenmayer

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Filed Under: Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch Tagged With: Eric Racine, neuroethics, Patricia Churchland, philosophy blog, technology transfer

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