There is a myth about how science progresses: great men have a eureka moment, and rush in to the lab to do the definitive experiment, often bravely and with the opposition of the Science Establishment, and single-handedly revolutionize a discipline. It’s nonsense. I can’t think of a single example of that kind of work that has gotten anywhere — the closest might be Isaac Newton, who developed some great ideas working privately at his home in Woolsthorpe, but even he was tightly connected to a community of fellow scientists. Science is very much a communal and communicative endeavor, and is built “on the shoulders of giants.”
So I do not approve of the work of Phil Kennedy, which looks like a lot of hare-brained Frankensteinian self-indulgence. Kennedy could not get approval for his experiments in implanting electrodes in human brains — I wonder why? — so he charged off to the Caribbean and had bits of wire and glass stuck deep into his own brain. It did not go well.
The brain surgery lasted 11 and a half hours, beginning on the afternoon of June 21, 2014, and stretching into the Caribbean predawn of the next day. In the afternoon, after the anesthesia had worn off, the neurosurgeon came in, removed his wire-frame glasses, and held them up for his bandaged patient to examine. “What are these called?” he asked.
Phil Kennedy stared at the glasses for a moment. Then his gaze drifted up to the ceiling and over to the television. “Uh … uh … ai … aiee,” he stammered after a while, “… aiee … aiee … aiee.”
Don’t worry, he got better — his deficits were caused by post-operative swelling of his brain, and that eventually diminished, and he started recording data off his electrode.
When Kennedy finally did present the data that he’d gathered from himself—first at an Emory University symposium last May and then at the Society for Neuroscience conference in October—some of his colleagues were tentatively supportive. By taking on the risk himself, by working alone and out-of-pocket, Kennedy managed to create a sui generis record of language in the brain, Chang says: “It’s a very precious set of data, whether or not it will ultimately hold the secret for a speech prosthetic. It’s truly an extraordinary event.” Other colleagues found the story thrilling, even if they were somewhat baffled: In a field that is constantly hitting up against ethical roadblocks, this man they’d known for years, and always liked, had made a bold and unexpected bid to force brain research to its destiny. Still other scientists were simply aghast. “Some thought I was brave, some thought I was crazy,” Kennedy says.
I’d score him as foolhardy and arrogant. I don’t even know what one could do with the data — no one is going to replicate it, there’s nothing to test, and future technologies will probably make Kennedy’s mad adventure irrelevant and unnecessary to replicate. This is a dead end, and risking scrambling your brain is not a smart gamble.
Further, this idea that one has to work around “ethical roadblocks” is troubling. There are “ethical roadblocks” to murdering someone; we don’t generally consider it a virtue if someone works out a clever way to kill a person that isn’t prosecutable under the law. We are talking about brain surgeries on human subjects — damn right there better be ethical limitations imposed on that. The only way around that is to demonstrate that the proposed procedures are safe and pose negligible risk, with incremental experimental work in animals and with duplication and verification by multiple investigators. Transhumanists might dream of some amazing Prigogenic leap that abruptly makes their cyborg aspirations reality, but it’s not going to happen that way.
I also shouldn’t want scientists to be encouraged to come up with ways to get around ethics. What next, is informed consent getting in your way, so you need to come up with a cunning plan to avoid it?
For scientists to think of “ethical roadblocks” as something to mourn and begrudgingly accept is monumentally fucked up and it says something terrible about a fundamental problem in many scientists, possibly a systemic problem in science.
And yet the transhumanuts and techbros will celebrate this guy as a bold visionary bravely fighting against the forces of ignorance of our luddite mehum society.
Well, can’t say it would be something I would do, but I certainly prefer him doing it to himself rather than doing it to someone who either didn’t consent or couldn’t consent.
There is a persistent meme in libertarian circles that, one day, some far-seeing government will remove all “ethical roadblocks” and permit a free-for-all in human experimentation. That nation will then go on to invent a cure for aging; a cure for the inexplicable unattractiveness of libertarians to people of the opposite sex; and a cure for the inability of humans to fart unicorns at will, one presumes. Then, everyone will have to go along with it because, hey, no aging and unicorns, right? Thus proving that Regulation Is Bad. I guess it’s a bedtime story for their little libertarian children. Or a rip-off of “Bug Jack Barron” by Norman Spinrad, I’m not sure.
Then there is this
Cat Mara, thanks for reminding me of the title of that story. I’d read it years ago, and was creeped the fuck right out.
Didn’t he read “Flowers for Algeronon”??? I did and I know what comes next.
Bizarre. Single-neuron recordings in humans are absolutely valuable from a basic science research perspective — but we can and do get those from human patients with diseases that require brain surgery, like epilepsy or Parkinson’s, who generously volunteer their time to contribute to basic science using the electrodes that are already being implanted for therapeutic reasons. And in those cases we can record more than just 1-3 cells. I honestly have no idea what kind of interpretable data we could get from Kennedy’s self-experiment that would advance the field; we can already expect neural activity in language centers to be correlated with speech production, and I can’t imagine how he’d have the statistical power to say much more than that.
The description in the article of Kennedy’s clunky, outdated tech, and in particular of that Windows 95 PC, was poignantly tragic to me, and says a lot about this guy’s approach. He’s chasing a vision of the future that was born in the past, blinded to the reality that the present’s science has rendered so much of his science fiction archaic. As the article points out, better, safer, and more sophisticated techniques have been and are being developed to pursue neural prostheses.
@1: Don’t extrapolate from Phil Kennedy, someone who is by all appearances working pretty marginally these days, with next to no funding and being reduced to self-experimentation to pursue his eccentric ideas, to “many scientists” to infer a “systemic problem in science.” Scientists bemoan the bureaucratic red tape associated with ethics review all the time, as a frustrating and sometimes byzantine administrative headache, but this is because no one likes paperwork. I’ve never heard a single one of my colleagues complain about “ethical roadblocks.” To the contrary, on a few occasions I’ve been in discussions about possible experiments and had a colleague assert that while a particular experiment might be useful, it wouldn’t be ethical.
From the linked article:-
*Sigh* Once again; Ghost in the Shell – not a documentary…
Why are some transhumanists so eager to live out extended lives in cold metal exoskeletons anyway? To put it mildly, it doesn’t seem like it would afford you much quality of life. It is also so oddly dated as a concept. Why abandon one’s biology so lightly, when you could just as easily (in fact, much more easily) imagine a future where that biology itself can be engineered to offer most of the abilities conferred by the metal box approach while still retaining all the… let’s just say considerable advantages of good old fashioned flesh (not least of which being the various pleasures thereof) . There is even a title for that kind of fiction – biopunk.
I could maybe envision a future where our bodies are supplemented by limited and sensibly applied cybernetics, and further enhanced with some kind of heavily regulated genetic engineering, but replacing our whole bodies with full body mechanical prosthetics doesn’t seem very likely, or an especially good idea to begin with, not to mention probably being one heck of a difficult notion to sell to most people.
@10
Well, I mean, I suppose it would be ideal to have a meat body with all the benefits of the metal box approach, I don’t think the lack of said “advantages” would necessarily be much of a motivation for me to not go robot if that was an option. My current meatsleeve has a pretty long list of things that make living bad.
Of course, this is all silly sci-fi speculation either way, like whether you’d rather fly the Millennium Falcon or the Enterprise.
Vivec @ 11;
I see your point, but I just think that it might be a hard sell to get people to abandon their flesh, and in any case a technology base high enough to make robot body proxies would almost certainly also be advanced enough to create or modify good old fashioned ‘meat sleeves’ to not have any of the old problems that bedevil humanity, and where the choice was between a robot proxy and an enhanced flesh and blood body where there wasn’t much to choose between the two in terms of performance, then it seems likely to me that the robot option would wind up as the HD DVD to the enhanced biology’s Blue Ray – a format that works fine but nobody really uses.
Exactly right, and yet there are still no shortage of people who obsess about such things, and at least one prepared to have his own noggin sawn open in pursuit of it. People are certainly strange, and transhumanism enthusiasts more than most. Still, so long as they aren’t sawing open other people’s noggins without their consent, then things aren’t as bad as they might be.
Funnily enough, there is a setting called Eclipse Phase where this is actually the case.
Really rich people can just sleeve into bodies on a whim the way you’d get dressed in the morning. Normal people sleeve into bodies if it becomes necessary for their job or to prolong their life. Poor people sleeve into robot bodies until they can work their way up to afford a meat body. Really poor people only exist on the internet, because they can’t even afford the placeholder robot body.
Vivec @ 13;
Eclipse Phase you say? Hmmm… I think I may have heard that title somewhere. I will definitely look into it. It sounds like a pretty interesting setting especially in light of your other comment;
You have to love a little sharp social commentary with your sci fi, and (in the very unlikely event) that such technology should ever become a viable possibility, such an outcome sadly seems all too likely…
So, you want to smell the roses? Can you afford a nose, buddy? What is life, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare, eh? Well, that is just dandy, and sure you can do that if it is your bag, just as soon as you make enough scratch to make the payments for optical sensors…
I can also imagine the other inevitable problems – if trans* persons wanted to resleeve into bodies that matched their (digital?) brain’s gender identity (an actually socially useful application of such technology), there would inevitably be religious groups who would scream blue murder about it and try to get the practice banned as ‘unnatural’ (and would probably react the same way toward a biologist who wanted to live out life in the glory of a cephalopoid form, for instance…), but oddly enough would almost certainly have nothing to say about a billionaire who wanted to live inside a combat robot chassis. Or people who wanted to resleeve into younger bodies at the first sign of a wrinkle or a grey hair.
Then again, cognitive dissonance and good old fashioned hypocrisy are one of those human constants that never seem to go out of fashion.
@14
The game actually covers both the trans issue and the “cephalopod” issue.
Basically the concept of bodies=gender or human=meaty humanoid goes by the wayside, with people just sleeving into whatever body they feel comfortable in. Some people prefer one type of the body over another, but in general the “thinky bits” are how they define gender and humanity.
Some people alternate the sex of their sleeves for variety with no bearing on their gender, while some people just stick to one. Either way, a person in a sleeve with a penis, vagina, or neutral genitalia isn’t considered to be any particular gender.
Some people even choose to sleeve into animal bodies or robots. Some of the example characters are a deep-space engineer that prefers an octopus body, while another is a drug dealer that prefers a giant robot snake body.
Also iirc there are one or two puritannical factions that either stick to traditional human bodies out of religious reasons, or because they’re a super repressive government that makes everyone easy to control.
Interesting stuff @vivec. This fictional world seems to have evolved a bit beyond our current ridiculous hangups about gender identity at least. Here’s hoping the real world catches up some day in the not too distant future in this regard at least.
Consider the works by John Varley, who considered surgical medicine a mechanistic procedure, where one can reconfigure one’s body to match one’s conception of it. Gender swapping became so common that it became completely unremarkable, and part of S.O.P. for people, to explore all the options available to them. Of course, being a Speculative Fction, he explored possible abuses of that capability. Worth reading, IMO.
the more I think about it the idea of living out eternity inside a machine by abandoning the body it begins to resemble Dante’s 9 level of hell encased in ice.
if you they say that all the physical sensations needed will be supplied by the hardware then they begin to resemble the experience of the opium smoker either way it has the appeal of a nightmare.
uncle frogy
The best part about Eclipse Phase: they had a problem with MRAs polluting their forums a little while back, and they all but told the MRAs to fuck off. Quoting from their blog post on the matter, “If you self-define as an MRA, please fire yourself as an Eclipse Phase fan. We don’t want you.”
Eclipse Phase explores some rather horrifying possible consequences of transhumanism, too (again while providing biting social commentary on modern issues). One example of rampant exploitation of the poor is corporations promising a body to poor workers after an extended period of work (i.e. work for us for a year and we’ll give you a body of your own). After a year of work, quietly dispose of the worker, load his mind’s backup from a year ago, and make him the same offer again.
#14, Gregory Greenwood
So, you want to smell the roses? Can you afford a nose, buddy? What is life, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare, eh? Well, that is just dandy, and sure you can do that if it is your bag, just as soon as you make enough scratch to make the payments for optical sensors…
Needs more pessimism.