Blog Action Day 2008-10-15
October 16, 2008
On Blog Action Day (2008-10-15) bloggers are contributing to a global conversation by writing posts that raise awareness about poverty.
John Hilary asks, Can blogging end poverty?
Hilary, John. 2008-10-15. “Can blogging end poverty?: The online community is being encouraged to campaign against issues like climate change and inequality. Does it work?” CommentIsFree > The Guardian.
The Ethical Brain: Chemical Conscience, Homeostasis and Religion
October 9, 2008
Michael S. Gazzaniga [1] argued that our beliefs about the world and the nature of human experience are merely tendentious and our memories fallible. Therefore we should rely not on “the ubiquitous personal belief systems held by billions of people (which he describes as akin to believing in Santa Claus (Gazzaniga 2005:163) but on modern science to seek out, understand and define our universal ethics grounded in the natural order (Gazzaniga 2005:178). From his viewpoint great religions of the world were conceived by ill-informed humans (not received from the Divine) who lacked competing data about the essence of the natural world (Gazzaniga 2005:162). He explains religious experiences as Temporary Lobe Epilepsy (TLE). He compares the conception of a fetus to the “conception” of a house at Home Depot. When is a fetus a person? When is a house a house? Gazzaniga believes that a fertilized egg is hardly deserving of the same moral status we confer on the newborn child or the functioning adult (Gazzaniga 2005:17-8). He also argued that the aging brain’s level of consciousness should be assessed by scientific means and euthanasia considered as an option (Gazzaniga 2005:33). His reasoning is not robust and appears to be directed to those already converted to his belief system.
However, it is his argument for brain enhancement through genetic intervention that causes a shiver of repugnance:
“Perhaps we should be free to try whatever we can think to try- this is the nature of scientific inquiry. Let an innate moral-ethics system assert itself and stop us from going too far. We have never annihilated ourselves; we have managed to stop short of doing that so far. I am confident that we will always understand what is ultimately good for the species and what is not (Gazzaniga 2005:54).”
One wonders on what planet he has been living.
We are currently listening to political debates around the clock as two nations head to the polls. Different value systems clash as “facts” are presented on each side of debates over contentious issues. We live in a time when scientific facts themselves are challenged as informed readers inquire about motivation and agendas of scientific researchers. Who finances the research? We are all too aware of the ease with which policy makers and decision makers choose comfortable truths over the uncomfortable.
Gazzaniga oversimplifies the awe-inspiring mind-soul-spirit by reducing humans to the chemical brain. He grossly underestimates followers of religions capable of making ethical decisions by considering both scientific information and their religious principles.
He argued that universal ethics are social, contextualized, influenced by emotions and natural survival-instincts. Whether your guide in life is simply “received wisdom” or “the confluence of neuroscientific data, historical data, and other information illuminating our past” he claim s we all share the same hard-wired moral networks and systems and therefore respond in similar ways to similar issues. He further claims that social systems explain individual feelings which are institutionalized into social structure (Gazzaniga 2005:162).”
According to his logic philosophers involved in neuroethics[2] should “use understandings of the brain’s hard-wiring to contextualize and debate gut instincts that serve the greatest good- or the most logical solutions- given specific contexts (Gazzaniga 2005:178).”
“Neuroscience reads brains, not minds. The mind, while completely enabled by the brain, is a totally different beast (Gazzaniga 2005:119).”
Gazzaniga (2005:iv-v) describes neuroethics as a spin-off of bioethics [which] was developed and defined to take medical ethics further, as scientific findings became more advanced and needed more specialized philosophers thinking about what is acceptable and unacceptable in areas like genetic engineering, reproductive science, defining brain death, and so on. [. . . Neuroethics are involved] whenever a bioethical issue involves the brain or central nervous system (2005: v).”
“We now step into the world of neuroethics. This is the field of philosophy that discusses the rights and wrongs of the treatment of, or enhancement of, the human brain.” “Was the medical team acting ethically, putting the patients’ interests first, or was it influenced by the humanitarian prospect of the advancement of specific knowledge about the brain — or by the attraction of the world fame and professional prestige that would follow a high achievement?” “Not just neurosurgeons but other brain scientists are thinking long and hard about the morality (right or wrong) and the ethics (fair or unfair) of what such breakthroughs as genomics, molecular imaging and pharmaceuticals will make it possible for them to do.” “In the treatment or cure of brain disease or disability, the public tends to support neuroscience’s needs for closely controlled and informed experimentation. But in the enhancement of the brain’s ability to learn or remember, or to be cheerful at home or attentive in school, many of the scientists are not so quick to embrace mood-manipulating drugs or a mindless race to enhance the mind (Safire 2003-07-10).”
“The brain’s ethical sense may run deeper than we think. ”The essence of ethical behavior,” writes the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio in Looking for Spinoza, his newest book, ”does not begin with humans.” Ravens and vampire bats ”can detect cheaters among the food gatherers in their group and punish them accordingly.” Though human altruism is much further evolved, in one experiment ”monkeys abstained from pulling a chain that would deliver food to them if pulling the chain caused another monkey to receive an electric shock. Damasio does not believe that there is a gene for ethical behavior or that we are likely to find a moral center in the brain. But we may one day understand the ”natural and automatic devices of homeostasis” — the brain’s system that balances appetites and controls emotions, much as a constitution and a system of laws regulates and governs a nation (Safire 2003-07-10).”
“[Brain] scientists . . . debate going beyond the cure of disease to the possibilities of meddling with memory or implanting a happy demeanor (Safire 2003-07-10).”
“Maybe the human brain has a self-defense mechanism that causes brain scientists to pause before they improve on the healthy brain. Would we feel guilty about discovering the chemistry of conscience (Safire 2003-07-10)?”
Folksonomy, taxonomy, tags, key words, classification, semantic web
cognitive neuroscience: moral and ethical aspects, ethics, Damasio, science and religion, chemical conscience, meddling with memory, permalink,
Health
Notes
- Michael S. Gazzaniga is President of the American Psychology Society, and director of the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth College.
- According to Gazzaniga it was William Safire who coined the term neuroethics to describe the field of philosophy that discusses the rights and wrongs of the treatment of, or enhancement of, the human brain.”
- The Dana Foundation: “The Dana Foundation is a private philanthropy with principal interests in brain science, immunology, and arts education. Charles A. Dana, a New York State legislator, industrialist and philanthropist, was president of the Dana Foundation from 1950 to 1966 and actively shaped its programs and principles until his death in 1975.”
- Some of these bibliographic entries were inserted using Zotero’s capacity to let “users choose a citation format, such as Chicago, MLA, APA, or others. To add a source from Zotero, a user simply drags that source into an application such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs [and WordPress!!!!], and a properly formatted citation is inserted. Zotero also generates a bibliography of all the sources included in a paper.” I did not choose my preferred citation format or generate the bibliography in the proper Zotero mode yet. This needs tweeking on my part but it was successful.
Citations from Antes, Geertz and Warne (2004).
4. “Body, Emotion, and Consciousness: The Portuguese born neurologist at the University of Iowa College of Medicine and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Antonio R. Damasio, has argued in a number of books that studies of the brain, cognition and consciousness are seriously hampered because neuroscientists traditionally ignore the role of functions and emotions in the brain. 47 He claims that “it is possible that feelings are poised at the threshold that separates being from knowing and thus have a privileged connection to consciousness” (Damasio 1999:43). Emotions are at a fairly high level of life regulation, and when they are sensed, that is when one has ‘feelings,’ the threshold of consciousness has been crossed. Emotions are part of homeostasis, which is the automatic regulation of temperature, oxygen contentration or pH in the body by the autonomatic nervous system, the endrocrine system and the immune system. According to Damasio, homeostasis is the key to consciousness (Damasio 1999:40). Damasio defined consciousness as constructing knowledge about two facts: “that the organism is involved in relating to some object, and that the object in the relation causes a change in the organism” (Damasio 1999:20). Understanding the biology of consciousness becomes, then, a matter of discovering “how the brain can map both the two players and the relationship they hold” (Damasio 1999:20). The interesting thing is that the brain holds a model of the whole thing, and this may be the key to understanding the underpinnings of consciousness (Antes, Geertz, Warne 2004:365).”
“[Damasio's] explanation for this enigma is precisely as follows: “I have come to the conclusion that the organism, as represented inside its own brain, is a likely biological forerunner for what eventually becomes the elusive sense of self. The deep roots for the self, including the elaborate self which encompasses identity and personhood, are to be found in the ensemble of brain devices which continuously and nonconsciously maintain the body state within the narrow range and relative stability required for survival. These devices continually represent, nonconsciously, the state of the living body, along its many dimensions. I call the state of activity within the ensemble of such devices the proto-self, the nonconscious forerunner for the levels of self which appear in our minds as the conscious protagonists of consciousness: core self and autobiographical self.” (Damasio 1999:20) cited in (Antes, Geertz, Warne 2004:365).”
“This is, indeed, a radical embodiment theory and should be of interest to scholars of religion involved in studies of central religious concepts such as personalities, personhood, selves and souls. The very fact of plurality of selves in Damasio’s model should prove useful to the study of religions that deal with multiple selves and souls (Antes, Geertz, Warne 2004:365).”
Webliography and Bibliography
Antes, Peter; Geertz, Armin W.; Warne, Randi R. 2004. Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Religion. Walter de Gruyter: Berlin/New York.
Anthony Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, 1999).
Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Ethical Brain (New York: Dana Press, 2005).
Henry T. Greely, “Prediction, Litigation, Privacy, and Property: Some Possible Legal and Social Implications of Advances in Neuroscience,” in Neuroscience and the Law: Brain, Mind, and the Scales of Justice . Dana Press.
Safire, William. 2003-07-10. “The Risk that Failed.” New York Times.
Educause, “7 Things You Should Know About Geolocation,” 2008,
Wikinomics: Four Principles
October 5, 2008
The four principles of wikinomics are openness, peering, sharing and acting globally (Tapscot and Williams 2008:270).
I disagree with blogger James Madigan in his review of Wikinomics in which he accused the authors of hyperbole and oversell. Madigan, www.jmadigan.net, was underwhelmed by Tapscot and Williams’ ‘evangelical’ enthusiasm of potential benefits of the specific collaborative techniques that wikinomics offer. Madigan acknowledged that outsourcing, open source software and Creative Commons licensing helped the company he once worked for, GameSpy. But he argued that Tapscot and Williams underplay the dark side of wikinomics.
Tapscot and Williams do not advocate that Web 2.0 Enterprises adopt the missionary position. They need to maintain solid internal goals before investing resources. However these principles are complementary to proprietary approaches with companies maintaining their core intellectual properties (Tapscot and Williams 2008:312-3).
They cite the Swiss drug maker Novartis as Tapscot and Williams consider the Novartis initiative as encapsulating wikinomics principles of openness, peering, sharing and acting globally (2008:288).” Novartis provided free Internet access without restrictions to all its raw data on its multi-million dollar research to unlock the genetic basis for type 2 diabetes.
In his book entitled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, (2007) Andrew Keen cautions against the inaccuracy of information shared on the Internet which he considers to be lacking in the more reliable and legitimate vetting processes where expert gatekeepers protect quality. Keen argued that the unintended consequence of Web 2.0 and the democratization of media results in democratization of talent and the flattening of culture by the masses who assert uninformed opinions, lack aesthetic judgment and are incapable of evaluating quality content. According to his arguments a democratized media would never have produced Mozarts, Hemingways, Universals or the Warner Brothers (Tapscot and Williams 2008:272).
Keen’s arguments resonate with those of Robert Hutchins (1936) and Allan Bloom (1987) who argued that mass movements threaten educational standards and eventually modern democracy. Tapscot and Williams liken Keen’s defense of the “old model” with its gatekeepers to saying that “democracy is bad for the average citizen because the average individual is a poor judge of his or her own interests (2008:272).
The most wide-spread pedagogical model in Canadian public education systems in 2008 is based on active, participatory teaching, learning and research methods and theories in many ways similar to those proposed by John Dewey in the 1930s. Dewey promoted an educational model of active, participatory learning to prepare citizens who would be “informed participants in a well-functioning democracy, resisting threats to democratic freedoms posed by political and corporate monopolies, aware of the importance of intellectual independence and individual rights, but also understanding that rights engender responsibilities to the community at large (Gonshak 1997).”
In a Calgary school, for example, Grade Five students “research” the Arctic regions online with much of the material based on wikipedia entries. They compile the information using PowerPoint and paper posters presented to the rest of the class. Grade Seven students “research” specific historical topics such as the fur trade in a debate format again using online sources to produce their arguments. The goal is not to memorize truth claims about historical events. It is a more sophisticated form of memory work. Students learn how to think critically and to investigate truth claims using a variety of sources. In the end it is meant to lead to the individual investigation of truth. By junior high, if not before, these students are already aware that wikipedia is written in a collaborative, organic fashion and that not all entries can be fully trusted. By highschool they will hopefully have a fairly balanced picture of the risks and benefits of Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons and William Gibson’s cyberworld.
This is a 180 degree turn about from the ontological certitude of the 1950s and it is probably the knowledge industry nightmare that Hutchins and Bloom feared.
This generation of students will continue to refine and reshape wikinomics. While winning companies like Wikipedia successfully benefitted from mass collaboration, they also provided open access to information.
“Winning companies today have open and porous boundaries and compete by reaching outside their walls to harness external knowledge, resources and capabilities. They’re like a hub for innovation and a magnet for uniquely qualified minds. They focus their internal staff on value integration and orchestration, and treat the world as their R & D department. All of this adds up to a new kind of collaborative enterprise- an Enterprise 2.0 that is completely shaping and reshaping clusters of knowledge and capabilities to compete on a global basis [. . .] Leaders must prepare their collaborative environments. Capabilities to develop new kinds of relationships, sense important developments, add value, and turn nascent networked knowledge into compelling value are becoming the bread and butter of wealth creation and success (Tapscot and Williams 2008:315).”
Selected Timeline of Critical Events in Wikinomics
1936 Robert Hutchins wrote The Higher Education in America in which he argued that the the goals of education was to provide an elite group of intellectually superior students destined for positions as future decision-makers, with truths of Western culture. Mortimer Adler and Hutchins created the Great Books program at the University of Chicago, a program which later included conservative academics like Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom. In John Dewey’s scathing review of The Higher Education in America he argued that Hutchins’ traditional pedagogy was a process of passive transmission in which teachers were reduced to being a mere conduit and students, inert receptors. Dewey promoted an educational model of active, participatory learning to prepare citizens who would be “informed participants in a well-functioning democracy, resisting threats to democratic freedoms posed by political and corporate monopolies, aware of the importance of intellectual independence and individual rights, but also understanding that rights engender responsibilities to the community at large (Gonshak 1997).”
1987 Allan Bloom (1930-1992) published his bestseller The Closing of the American Mind in which criticized American higher education. Bloom argued that American political and intellectual life in the 1980s cure was in desperate need of a cure of the malady of the times by reintegrating the Great Books of Western Thought as a source of wisdom in prestige universities to restore seriousness to education and to open students to a philosophic experience. Bloom was shaken by his first hand experiences as professor at Cornell University during the 1960s mass movements and student uprisings that shook the foundations of academia. He equated the violence and political uprising on academic campuses in the 1960s with a general social malaise. (Bloom’s mentor was Leo Strauss who was critical of the way that universities gave way under the pressure of mass movements in Europe in the 1930’s.) The university “epitomizes the very spirit of free inquiry, which in turn is at the root of a free society, he concludes that ”a crisis in the university, the home of reason, is perhaps the profoundest crisis” for a modern democratic nation (Kimball 1987). Roger Kimball, managing editor of the conservative New Criterion, anticipated that The Closing of the American Mind would have many critics and it did because of its,
avowedly traditional vision of what it means to be an educated person. And no doubt many will object that this portrait of liberal education is in many ways a caricature or an exaggeration. Certainly, there are exceptions to the rule of mediocrity and ideological posing that Mr. Bloom anatomizes in these pages (Kimball 1987).”
Kimball (2005) re-iterated Bloom’s question on the role of higher education,
“The chief issue is this: Should our institutions of higher education be devoted primarily to the education of citizens–or should they be laboratories for social and political experimentation? Traditionally, a liberal arts education involved both character formation and learning. The goal was to produce men and women who (as Allan Bloom put it) had reflected thoughtfully on the question ” ‘What is man?’ in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs (Kimball 2005).”
2003 Flickr started as an online multiplayer game in which the photo-trading feature was almost an afterthought. Hundreds of thousands of Flickr users social community unexpectedly changed the direction of the company by uploading, tagging and describing their own photos and commenting, rating (favouriting) and awarding those of other Flickr users (Tapscot and Williams 2008:310).”
2005 Roger Kimball, managing editor of the conservative New Criterion praised ”the rise of conservative talk radio, the popularity of Fox News . . . and the spread of interest in the Internet with its many right-of-center populist Web logs” as ”heartening signs” that conservatives are becoming ”a widespread counter to the counterculture” of universities.
2007 Swiss drug maker Novartis provided free Internet access without restrictions to all its raw data on its multi-million dollar research to unlock the genetic basis for type 2 diabetes. Tapscot and Williams consider the Novartis initiative as encapsulating wikinomics principles of openness, peering, sharing and acting globally (2008:288).”
2007 Andrew Keen’s book entitled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, was published in which he cautions against the inaccuracy of information shared on the Internet which he considers to be lacking in the more reliable and legitimate vetting processes where expert gatekeepers protect quality. Keen argued that the unintended consequence of Web 2.0 and the democratization of media results in democratization of talent and the flattening of culture by the masses who assert uninformed opinions, lack aesthetic judgment and are incapable of evaluating quality content. According to his arguments a democratized media would never have produced Mozarts, Hemingways, Universals or the Warner Brothers.
2008 The most wide-spread pedagogical model in Canadian public education systems are based on active, participatory teaching, learning and research methods and theories in many ways similar to those proposed by John Dewey in the 1930s. For example, Grade Five students “research” the Arctic regions online with much of the material based on wikipedia entries. They compile the information using PowerPoint and paper posters presented to the rest of the class. Grade Seven students “research” specific historical topics such as the fur trade in a debate format again using online sources to produce their arguments.
Folksonomy: Internet:social aspects, Internet:economic aspects, Information society, social change, self-publishing,
Webliography and Bibliography
Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Foreword by Saul Bellow. 392 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Gonshak, Henry. 1997. “Review of Ryan, Alan. 1995. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Kimball, Roger. 1987 “The Groves of Ignorance.” New York Times.
Kimball, Roger. 2005-05. “Retaking the University: a Battle Plan.” New Criterion.
Keen, Andrew. 2007. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture. New York: Doubleday.
Madigan, James. 2008-08-15. “Book Review: Wikinomics.” 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008.
Ryan, Alan. 1995. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Sleeper, Jim. 2005-09-04. “Allan Bloom and Conservative Mind.” New York Times.
Tapscot, Don; Williams, Anthony D. 2008 [2006]. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Penguin Group: New York/Toronto/London.
Tapscot, Don; Williams, Anthony D. Wikinomics: the blog
