Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: Bioethics

It’s about time I added a category for my field of study, eh?

a day of moderate success

...and everything else, Academics, Bioethics, life and living, Philosophy, Pop Culture

I actually feel moderately successful this evening. I finished working on two abstracts for ASBH, one of which was basically a rabbit pulled out of a collective hat at the last minute (but sounds very awesome, if I do say so myself); perhaps the best part is knowing that the hat-abstract (as it were) will be written regardless of its acceptance, just because my co-conspirator and I have been wanting to collaborate together for a while, and this is a perfect topic for us to tackle together. I’ve never written a paper with someone else before, so it’ll be a learning experience – and learning experiences with friends are always the best things.

I’ve got another collaboration going on this week; a fellow graduate student and I are co-presenting a paper this weekend at a school graduate conference, on the value of undergraduates having their own undergrad conferences. I’ll be drawing heavily on my experiences at NUBC, MGRS and SCCUR, but think I can easily talk for a long time on it, and especially the benefits behind it, from organizing to networking and learning how to talk to an audience.

I’m doing commentary on a historical epistemological paper, in large part because I don’t actually run away screaming when people say names like Dewey, Pierce, James, or Montague (and as a friend put, I also know they’re not Donald’s nephews). Glibness aside, I’m looking forward to it – I’m hoping that my response to the paper can double as my paper for the epistemology course I’m taking, and I need to crash my prof’s office hours to see if this would be alright with him.

I actually had some things to say in normative ethics today about Kant – in fact, I feel sort of dirty, since I ended up defending Kant, which is really never a position I expected to be in. Ever. And I’m pretty sure there’s an altar of Mill somewhere, where I need to do penance. But it’s pretty hard to argue with the idea that Kant didn’t say it was more virtuous to follow a duty you didn’t want to, only that duty is at least the base level of motivation. It was actually a really fascinating discussion that ended up being more about how Kant views feelings (passively), and how we have a more active engagement with the idea of feelings, and the very idea that to have the feeling of friendship is to automatically import a set of expected duties that are intrinsically tied to the feelings associated with the friendship. More than anything, it made me want to pick up the book that’s trying to reconcile Spinoza and Kant, especially with regard to the affects (feelings). I’m not a Kantian, and can’t ever imagine becoming one, but I can see a really interesting application here of the tied together notion of feeling/duty, and may be able to expand that out into how duty and responsibility are tied to one another.

I’ve joined a conversation with someone who does contemporary media critique on a couple of shows I really love, and had the distinct and unexpected pleasure of having that person actually compliment me on my ideas, and wonder exactly where I’ve been hiding with them and why I haven’t been involved in the conversation prior to now – the sort of thing that not only strokes my ego (which I need now and again), but makes me feel like I’m not crazy, and do actually have a knack for some of this.

I also found out that a friend’s going to be up here in April, along with several of her students, for a conference, and they’ll be staying with me. I’m looking forward to this, both because I know and enjoy one of her students quite a bit, and I’m pleased to see my friend again, but also because it gives me a firm deadline for cleaning up my apartment/getting rid of things/etc.

Things aren’t perfect – my insurance is still being a pain, my new apartment managers are being major pills, there are several other headaches (or depending, situations that make me just want to crawl in bed and cry and/or drink – H~ suggested we skip the beer and go straight to vodka shots, and I think she’s got a very solid plan there) – but for the first time in a while, things aren’t an overwhelming shade of apathetic gray. I’ve some ideas for why this might be, but I think I’m going to sit and think on those for slightly longer before I take the time to write. (Speaking of writing, I’ve been slowly getting back on the blogging horse, which a combination of power outages and allergic reactions on hands knocked me out of, and in the process have actually written up a couple of things I’m rather pleased with over at the Women’s Bioethics Blog.)

All of which is to say, again, today is the first day the world has had a bit of colour; I don’t know if you remember the movie What Dreams May Come, but a lot of the last few months has felt very much like the dim grey pictured in the movie, and today? Today I’m seeing just hints of how the colour might be able to bleed back through my life – and it’s a hopeful thing.

a scene in frustration

...and everything else, AMBI, Bioethics

My new mantra:
“That should have worked. Why didn’t that work? Why can’t I make this work?

…why does it hate me?”

Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.
I need a white board, or a butcher paper covered wall. An 8×10 pad isn’t large enough to sketch all the code bits and toggles out so that I can actually visualize what’s going on, and see where to fix it. Not to mention it would be harder for Toledo to crumple a white board, or Lunar to decide to eat it. Damn dumb cat.

That should have worked. Why didn’t that work? Why can’t I make this work?

…why does it hate me?

It’s Stronger Than A Shark

Academics, Bioethics, Stargate

And because it’s come up not once, or even twice, but three times this week, here’s the cold open of Stargate Atlantis that talks about (and pokes delightful fun at) Phillipa Foot’s trolley problem.

Also, I’ve determined that Sarah Connor is the ultimate consequentialist. Of what particular type, I haven’t yet decided (although I’m leaning towards ethical altruism).

Edited to add:
Since the video keeps disappearing from the internet, here’s a transcript.

Rodney: Let me ask you a question. Say there’s a runaway train. It’s hurtling out of control towards ten people standing in the middle of the tracks. The only way to save those people is to flip a switch — send the train down another set of tracks. The only problem is there is a baby in the middle of those tracks.
Teyla: Why would anyone leave a baby in harm’s way like that?
Rodney: I don’t know. That’s not the point. Look, it’s an ethical dilemma. Look, Katie Brown brought it up over dinner the other night. The question is: is it appropriate to divert the train and kill the one baby to save the ten people?
Ronon: Wouldn’t the people just see the train coming and move?
Rodney: No. No, they wouldn’t see it.
Ronon: Why not?
Rodney: Well … (he sighs) … Look, I don’t know — say they’re blind.
Teyla: All of them?
Rodney: Yes, all of them.
Ronon: Then why don’t you just call out and tell them to move out of the way?
Rodney: Well, because they can’t hear you.
John: What, they’re deaf too?
(Rodney throws him a look)
John: How fast is the train going?
Rodney: Look, the speed doesn’t matter!
John: Well, sure it does. If it’s going slow enough, you could outrun it and shove everyone to the side.
Ronon: Or better yet, go get the baby.
Rodney: For God’s sake! I was just trying to …

Seeing Sideways: Stepping into Anorexia

...and everything else, Bioethics

For those of you who have read The Secret Life of Lobsters, the word umwelt will be a familiar one. It’s a biological term (German, of course – all the great descriptive words are, aren’t they?) introduced by Jakob von Uexküll that literally means the surrounding world, or environment, and practically means the sensory experience that gives an organism its subjective experience of the universe.

To put it in terms that the philosophers in the room might understand, it’s the biological take of Nagel’s phenomenal, subjective question of "what is it like to be a bat?"

In The Secret Life of Lobsters, umwelt is brought up when discussing how it is a lobster sees in the water – specifically, the fact that a lobster actually sees scent. (It’s a fascinating book, and I highly recommend it – especially to those of you who enjoy books on food and food origins). Where I didn’t expect to see umwelt so immediately was on MSNBC; yet after finishing the book and watching football, I turned to do my nightly crawl of news and found just that.

This narrative on MSNBC is titled "Anorexia nearly killed my wife", subtitled "To better understand a loved one’s illness, Tom Cramer stopped eating, too". And that’s precisely what the story is – a narrative of a husband’s perception of his wife as she developed anorexia, his reaction to her not eating (a very typical attempt to bribe and pressure her into eating), and then finally, his decision to mimic her behaviour and severely limit his calories. He did this out of desperation, as an effort to understand just what being anorexic was like, to understand the hold it could have on his wife – something, anything, that could allow him the small break he needed into her psyche so that he could help her, and help their family.

It’s a small but fascinating glimpse into umwelt, as he himself moves from what we would consider ordered to disordered thinking, from being hungry and fatigued to feeling challenged and buoyed by his control and the lack of eating. Although he stopped his experiment after a week, it was enough time with another perspective, a different subjective experience, umwelt, that he has been able to support his wife on her journey towards wellness since.

An example of why an ability to shift umwelt is necessary becomes clear in the recent UCSF missteps over MRSA USA300, the new strain of community acquired staff that had been widely reported as a new gay disease – not necessarily because of malicious intent on the part of the media (although the sensationalism is hard to deny), but because in their effort to be precisely clear to fellow researchers who would be peer reviewing their work, the UCSF scientists used language that has precise meaning within the public health community, but has a much broader meaning to the general public. When the media read the report, what they say, the meaning they interpreted, was clear – and utterly incorrect, because their umwelt was wrong, and although they were both using English to communicate, they weren’t using the same specialized form of the language.

Many years ago, in my former life in the computer industry, there was a very small group of people who had a highly valued and rare skill. They were able to interact with both the computer programmers and the lay person, shifting their language to be appropriate to who they were talking to. They could talk tech with the best of them, and then turn around and translate that tech-speak into something the general public could easily understand. (And anyone who has ever tried to follow a stereo installation manual or computer guide knows how valuable someone who speaks both languages is.) In Marvelous Possessions, Stephen Greenblatt calls these people the Go-Betweens, who can navigate and translate across multiple worlds.

We tend to see and think of ourselves as all the same, and discount the fact that even within our human sameness, the range of subjective experience is so vast, so different, that at times we need to step out of our own way of thinking and try to see the world in a new light. At my alma mater, we called this parallel thinking, in biology it’s umwelt – and it strikes me that the medical humanities, especially those of us working in applied, clinical or bioethics, would do well to either adopt the term or come up with our own for it, as it seems to me something that is at the very heart of what it is we do.

Originally posted at the Medical Humanities blog