The Ethics of Neuroscience (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The Ethics of Neuroscience (2017)

lens.monash.edu

45 pointsrbanffy11 comments

I contribute to an effort to run a clinical trial for applying statistical models to drug-resistant epilepsy, for patients who will undergo surgery. The results are complex both scientifically and morally. We saw a patient undergo a "failed" surgery in the sense that seizures continued but GPA shot up to 4.0. That patient is coming back for another surgery, but clinicians aren't sure what to do. Not to mention that total cost is something like 50k+ euros: what other pressing problems could be solved with a large budget?

Outside of invasive neurosurgery, it's also difficult to draw the line between stimulation & behavioral protocols, which can rewire the brain, that are good and those which are bad (for whom? by what metric?). The questions have little to do with neuroscience imo.

The other day I was joking about "fixing" conservatism by frying their amygdalae. I'm pretty sure it's unethical, but, boy, it sure would solve a whole lot of problems.

Just to be clear, I wasn't serious as I am not being serious right now. Amygdalae are useful to prevent us from doing stupid dangerous things.

It's interesting that brain damage or impairment reliably causes "liberal" and atheistic feelings in the laboratory.

>reliably causes "liberal" and atheistic feelings

I'm sorry, where are you getting this from? That seems contradictory to common knowledge in this subject, and if you want to do a silly thing like label certain behaviors "liberal" or "conservative" in the context of U.S. politics.

I think it's a joke.

I hope so, perfectly happy to have it go over my head.

Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just relaying what the research says. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal..... There are other studies that electromagnetically impair amygdala function which induced hyper empathy and atheism in the lab, but sadly I haven’t been able to find them again on Google.

That study doesn't even remotely support what you said. If that's all you can find you're basically just making stuff up.

Another way to see it is that we accidentally stumbled in a way to surgically improve the human brain by damaging the part that holds us back ;-)

Mandatory meditation training would also likely have large positive effect, while being much cheaper, but this is a good illustration of why none of the discussion is specific to neuroscience: we know how to improve a situation but there's insufficient moral/politic/economic ground to do so.

Please don't post ideological flamewar comments to Hacker News. We need established users like you to do better than this.

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