Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Sam Harris the 46 year old American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, and the co-founder and CEO of Project Reason has published an article on his web site titled ‘Response to Controversy’ in which he states “A few of the subjects I explore in my work have inspired an unusual amount of controversy. Some of this results from real differences of opinion or honest confusion, but much of it is due to the fact that certain of my detractors deliberately misrepresent my views. The purpose of this article is to address the most consequential of these distortions. A general point about the mechanics of defamation: It is impossible to effectively defend oneself against unethical critics. If nothing else, the law of entropy is on their side, because it will always be easier to make a mess than to clean it up. It is, for instance, easier to call a person a “racist,” a “bigot,” a “misogynist,” etc. than it is for one’s target to prove that he isn’t any of these things. In fact, the very act of defending himself against such accusations quickly becomes debasing. Whether or not the original charges can be made to stick, the victim immediately seems thin-skinned and overly concerned about his reputation. And, rebutted or not, the original charges will be repeated in blogs and comment threads, and many readers will assume that where there’s smoke, there must be fire.  Such defamation is made all the easier if one writes and speaks on extremely controversial topics and with a philosopher’s penchant for describing the corner cases—the ticking time bomb, the perfect weapon, the magic wand, the mind-reading machine, etc.—in search of conceptual clarity. It literally becomes child’s play to find quotations that make the author look morally suspect, even depraved.”

Inspired by Sam Harris ow.ly/k4j2H Image source Twitter ow.ly/k4iUP

Adrian M Owen the 46 year old British neuroscientist has discovered a way to use brain scans to communicate with people previously written off as unreachable. David Cyranoski in an article published on Nature.com describes how he is attempting to make his methods available in a clinic environment. Cyranoski states “Currently, there are tens of thousands of people in a vegetative state in the United States alone. Owen reckons that up to 20% of them are capable of communicating; they just don’t have a way to do so. “What we’re seeing here is a population of totally locked-in patients” …Owen now wants to put his technique into the hands of clinicians and family members. … Even if a person in a vegetative state is ‘found’, there is no guarantee that he or she will later be able to return a normal life. Owen nevertheless insists that “clarifying” a patient’s state of consciousness helps families to deal with the tragedy. “They want to know what the diagnosis really is so that they can move on and deal with that. Doubt and uncertainty are always bad things.” …Owen’s methods raise more difficult dilemmas. One is whether they should influence a family’s or clinician’s decision to end a life. …Even more ethically fraught is whether the question should be put to the patients themselves. …Owen hopes one day to ask patients that most difficult of questions, but says that new ethical and legal frameworks will be needed.”

Inspired by Nature.com ow.ly/c4ZZ9 image source Simon Strangeways ow.ly/c4ZTp

Susan Adele Greenfield the 61 year old UK Baroness and neuroscientist who specializes in the physiology of the brain pertaining to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, has expressed concerns that digital technology may be having negative impacts on early development of children’s brains. Greenfield suggests that social networking sites in particular may be having an impact that we will not become aware of for several decades, pointing to the fact the human brain can change and the environment is capable of doing so. Criticized in some academic circles for her lack of clinical research to support her contention, Greenfield’s likens her critics to “like the people who denied that smoking caused cancer”. Greenfield says she is not criticizing the technologies themselves, but rather how and the extent to which technologies are used.

Inspired by Frank Swain http://ow.ly/5XBep image source University of Oxford http://ow.ly/5XBdg