Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: Academics

Classes and coursework.

Robo Sapien (Discovery Channel)

...and everything else, Academics, Bioethics

The Discovery tagline is “The merging of man and machine: science fiction or science fact? Witness the birth of a new species!” I figure, okay, this should be interesting (and regret not knowing about it in time to tell Summer or Linda about it, since I suspect they might have found it interesting, given the recent fMRI debate at AMBI).

Being me, I’m thinking a lot about notions of consent and experimentation on people (with lots of breaks to stop and squeal and try to photograph the raccoons on my patio – what can I say, I’m easily distracted by cute). In the first cyborg study this show is talking about, they realize that a man is not in a coma, but locked inside a completely paralized body. They hook electrodes into his brain, and he slowly learns to communicate via cursor and keyboard that he controls with his brain (something we’ve all heard of at this point). And of course, our immediate reaction is that this is fabulous; none of us can contemplate the horror of being locked inside a paralized body and think “oh, that’s for me!” So freeing someone, even in a limited manner that a cursor across a keyboard would allow, seems like a good idea. But I have to wonder about the idea of experimenting on the very vulnerable: on the one hand, who else do we experiment on for technology like this? But on the other hand, this is a small population of people and families who’re desperate for anything that will help, and will say yes to anything on the hope and prayer that it will make the situation better. They’re exceedingly vulnerable, and it seems like it would be easy to take advantage of that to pursue science. What kind of precautions and committees are in place to make sure that this taking advantage isn’t happening?

Well, no – even beyond that. Can you set up a committee or an IRB that can make sure there isn’t a taking advantage of going on? I’m not sure that’s possible. It might simply be in the nature of the research that, if it is to happen, it will involve taking advantage of the vulnerable.

One of the next stories covered on this show is about a man whose spine was severred in a fight; Cyberkinetics did a 12 month study with their “Braingate” technology – implanting electrodes into a subjects brain, with basically a socket that you could plug a computer into. They wanted to spend a year trying to get Matthew to use a cursor to control a screen, television remote, computer, and etc – and within three days he managed to do so. They would plug the computer in and he described feeling free, being able to do things for himself, from reading and answering email to watching TV and channel flipping without needing someone else around to help.

While the above concerns about vulnerability are still in play, Matthew at least was not fully locked in his body and could consent. He did, the experiment happens – and a year later, it ends, and they remove the electrodes and ability to plug in to the computer, despite thet fact that it was a resounding success and he gained a lot of freedom. Why it was removed wasn’t specified, but my guess is that was part of the FDA-approved trial guidelines. And we, or at least I, have to wonder if this is right? Can we, should we, give someone this ability, which must be wonderful, and then take it away saying “sorry, we know it worked wonders for you, but we can’t let you keep it”? This seems wrong, to offer a treatment, to give hope, and then say “sorry, terribly sorry, but…” Regardless of what you say at the outset of the trial, regardless of whether or not you tell them upfront that the technology will need to be removed, knowing something at the abstract level versus how you feel about it after a year of the experience is going to be different. How do you give someone an enhanced quality of life, and then justify taking it away? I don’t think you can.

One of my favourite things to hear was a doctor talking about augmentation, saying that a top tennis player will tell you that the racket has become an extension of their arm – it is part of them, and so far as the brain is concerned, it simply is their arm. This dovetails beautifully with posthuman theory, and of course leaves me wistful for CHID, and sitting around discussing the cyborg. A few pokes around Google, and I found a couple of interesting links:
Cybofree – Cyborgs, Fantasy, Reality, Ethics and Education
Human Genetic Enhancements: A Transhumanist Perspective
…and discovered that Dante coined the term “transhumanize” in The Divine Comedy way back in the late 1200s. Neat, eh? Now granted, how we use the term transhuman today doesn’t precisely map onto Dante’s terminology; he was certainly thinking much more in a philosophical sense while we use it to almost singularly refer to the cyborg and the posthuman, changes to the actual flesh, but I think we could borrow from contemporary phenomenology and argue that to change the body is to change the philosophy. And besides, the bottom line is the same: something greater than the normative human condition.

disappearing into experience

...and everything else, 2006 (NY), Academics, University at Albany

The things that make you disappear into experience are random things. Or, to place it in Sartre’s terms, since I really should be writing about Sartre and not the other things swirling in my mind, some things hit so hard and fast they drop us from the reflective into the non-reflective, me-in-the-world. Like the red stained wood and Elliot Bay ferry images of Seattle’s Best Coffee.

It’s funny; Grey’s Anatomy doesn’t really make me homesick. It makes me laugh, because the closest they’ve been to Seattle is some alternative world Seattle where you go north on 99 from Queen Anne to get to Downtown. There are occasionally things I recognize, like flyers for the 5 Spot, but it’s so obviously a fictional place I feel no greater affinity for it than I do any other place I’ve never been.

But for just a moment, the pure, non-reflective experience of this Seattle’s Best had me both wondering where I was and experiencing Seattle, and missing Seattle. I miss the sharp smell of the saltwater air, the breezes racing up streets, playing hide and seek with you as you run through the Downtown grid, the misty dripping of the weather, the campus, the people. I miss going to wine bars with friends, meeting up for coffee or movies, the occasional night dancing, sitting in my cramped living room with the cats, doing shots to Stargate, birthday parties… I miss the life I had.

Isn’t it weird, when we slip into experiential being, and forget where we are? I had that a lot last weekend in Denver — I was around everyone I see here in Albany, and inside, so it was hard to remember that I was actually in Denver and not simply at a long affair at home. Stepping up to the Seattle’s Best counter, looking at the ferry/Public Market picture, I had that same sort of experiential dissonance, where for a moment, I knew I was in Seattle, and if I turned around and walked outside, it would be damp, grey, cold, and familiar. The moment I moved to reflective self, to saying “I am thinking I’m in Seattle”, I was of course able to say “no, idiot, I’m standing in Albany thinking I’m thinking I’m in Seattle” (which I suppose leaps from the first to second reflective state), but there is still a sharp jarring between the non-reflective and reflective. I feel I’m in one place, while I know I’m in another.

I wonder if any of the phenomenologists have an answer for that?

Clifford Geertz, 1926 – 2006

...and everything else, Academics

I see, via Crooked Timber, Clifford Geertz has died, following heart surgery at UPenn. He was an amazing author, prolific and provoking, and of course, so critical to critical theory.

I think my favourite part of the obit is this:

His internship as a copyboy for The New York Post dissuaded him from becoming a newspaper man. “It was fun but it wasn’t practical,” he said,…so he switched to philosophy.

The idea of philosophy being more practical than newspaper, how can you not love it?

No Shrinking Violet

Academics, Albany Medical College, AMBI, ASBH 2006

This post will be a little abstract, and I admit might be more for my own thought process than anyone else’s. But I’m digesting a lot of mental information, and this is a way for me to roll an idea around and see if it’s going to germinate into something, somewhere.

If you ask me, or we talk long enough, chances are good you will hear me describe myself as shy. Of course, chances are equally good your reaction will be outright laughter, disbelief, and telling me that I’m no shrinking violet. Which is a fair reaction, and I begrudge no one it, but experientially, my perspective and yours are different.

You (and I speak in the vaguest sense here) see the me who’s worked on the smile that flashes dimples and scrunches her nose, who’s taken years of sign language and body language skills and can control her non-verbal posture, and to a degree manipulate your response to it. You see the me who’s talked to herself in the elevator, or along the walkways to meeting you, practicing conversation and pep talk, who’s tried out phrases and checked her hair three hundred times to make sure everything is just so.

But I live all those experiences, the uncertainty and doubt and fidgeting and pacing and talking to myself. You get the finished project, but I make myself daily and am intimately tied to that process – I see me for me, and the me-in-the-world is not the me you’re reflecting on.

Shy, however, might not be the right description. Instead, what it might be is introversion. Can you be an outgoing introvert? I think so, just like I think you can be both extraverted and shy. In my case, I do enjoy talking to people, I do like connection and exchange of ideas and all those sorts of things. But I also get tired. I become circularly reflective on every last detail and word of the conversation, analyzing the most minute datapoint and trying to decode the meaning. And the exhaustion that sets in after days of being around people – well, it leaves me like I am tonight, flattened and in bed before 10. It’s simply tiring to be around people, and to always feel like I’m working at overcoming the impulse to fade into the nearest corner, back to the wall, becoming nothing more than a pair of eyes filtering the world.

There is some more to this, of course, that drifts into gendered analysis of experience, and I’ll get to that soon. But 9 hours after writing the original piece above, and a hard night’s sleep later, I’ve got another few hours of ASBH before I begin the long journey home. So much for real-time blogging of the conference! (I do, however, have copious notes that will make their way out into the world in short order.) Next year, I think there needs to be a blogging station, where we sucker prominent bioethicists into posting their thoughts about the conference, or sessions they just attended – small soundbites. Not to mention podcasting…

“my god there are a lot of you”

Academics, AMBI, ASBH 2006

So, after some lighthearted negotiation, it’s been determined that “I am” to AMBI, their first PhD student. It’s not entirely accurate, but it’s also not entirely inaccurate, and it’s easier to introduce me to people that way.

So, for most of this evening, that’s how I’ve been introducing myself – Kelly, from UA and AMBI. To which I have heard “one of McGee’s, eh?” or “oh, you’re one of them – my GOD there are a lot of you” more than once. Much, much more than once. It’s all rather amusing, and a little nerve-wracking.

However, people’s evil plans are paying off, and I’m actually meeting folks. Having lunches and coffees and good god 7:30am will be early breakfasts, and I’m slowly asserting myself a bit more and learning the art of the mingle. I think the most surprising thing of the day, aside from hydroplaning in a Boeing 777, was learning a particular familial relationship I had not known before.

I have academic-y things to think and talk about, at same point where I’ve had more than three hours sleep in the last 48.