Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Pain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pain. Show all posts

Monday, October 18, 2021

Artificial Pain May Induce Empathy, Morality, and Ethics in the Conscious Mind of Robots

M. Asada
Philosophies 2019, 4(3), 38
https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies4030038

Abstract

In this paper, a working hypothesis is proposed that a nervous system for pain sensation is a key component for shaping the conscious minds of robots (artificial systems). In this article, this hypothesis is argued from several viewpoints towards its verification. A developmental process of empathy, morality, and ethics based on the mirror neuron system (MNS) that promotes the emergence of the concept of self (and others) scaffolds the emergence of artificial minds. Firstly, an outline of the ideological background on issues of the mind in a broad sense is shown, followed by the limitation of the current progress of artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on deep learning. Next, artificial pain is introduced, along with its architectures in the early stage of self-inflicted experiences of pain, and later, in the sharing stage of the pain between self and others. Then, cognitive developmental robotics (CDR) is revisited for two important concepts—physical embodiment and social interaction, both of which help to shape conscious minds. Following the working hypothesis, existing studies of CDR are briefly introduced and missing issues are indicated. Finally, the issue of how robots (artificial systems) could be moral agents is addressed.

Discussion

To tackle the issue of consciousness, this study attempted to represent it as a phenomenon of the developmental process of artificial empathy for pain and moral behavior generation. The conceptual model for the former is given by, while the latter is now a story of fantasy. If a robot is regarded as a moral being that is capable of exhibiting moral behavior with others, is it deserving of receiving moral behavior from them? If so, can we agree that such robots have conscious minds? This is an issue of ethics towards robots, and is also related to the legal system. Can we ask such robots to accept a sort of responsibility for any accident they commit? If so, how? These issues arise when we introduce robots who are qualified as a moral being with conscious minds into our society.

Before these issues can be considered, there are so many technical issues to address. Among them, the following should be addressed intensively.
  1. Associate the sensory discrimination of pain with the affective and motivational responses to pain (the construction of the pain matrix and memory dynamics).
  2. Recall the experience when a painful situation of others is observed.
  3. Generate appropriate behavior to reduce the pain.

Monday, August 20, 2018

Massachusetts allows school to continue with electric shocks

Jeffrey Delfin
theguardian.com
Originally posted July 12, 2108

Here is an excerpt:

The device is not used in what we might call “electroshock therapy” – where small shocks are passed through the brain under anesthesia. Rather, the GED is used as a variation of “aversive conditioning”, in which negative stimulation is applied to a patient when he or she performs an unwanted action. The patient is awake, and feeling pain is the point of the shock.

The GED, when activated, outputs an electric shock that is distributed to the patient’s skin for up to two seconds. Students wear a backpack containing the shocking device, with electrodes constantly affixed to their skin. Staff are able to shock students at any point during the day. Previous attendees at JRC have spoken of up to five electrodes being attached to their bodies. One, Jen Msumba, who blogs about her time at the facility, said electrodes were applied under their fingers or the bottom of their feet to increase the pain.

“We’ve all experienced aversive conditioning. We touch the stove while it’s still hot, it hurts, then we become very cautious about touching it,” says Dr Jean Mercer, the leader of the group Advocates for Children in Therapy, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to ending harmful practices for treating children’s mental health.

The information is here.

Monday, January 29, 2018

Deontological Dilemma Response Tendencies and Sensorimotor Representations of Harm to Others

Leonardo Christov-Moore, Paul Conway, and Marco Iacoboni
Front. Integr. Neurosci., 12 December 2017

The dual process model of moral decision-making suggests that decisions to reject causing harm on moral dilemmas (where causing harm saves lives) reflect concern for others. Recently, some theorists have suggested such decisions actually reflect self-focused concern about causing harm, rather than witnessing others suffering. We examined brain activity while participants witnessed needles pierce another person’s hand, versus similar non-painful stimuli. More than a month later, participants completed moral dilemmas where causing harm either did or did not maximize outcomes. We employed process dissociation to independently assess harm-rejection (deontological) and outcome-maximization (utilitarian) response tendencies. Activity in the posterior inferior frontal cortex (pIFC) while participants witnessed others in pain predicted deontological, but not utilitarian, response tendencies. Previous brain stimulation studies have shown that the pIFC seems crucial for sensorimotor representations of observed harm. Hence, these findings suggest that deontological response tendencies reflect genuine other-oriented concern grounded in sensorimotor representations of harm.

The article is here.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Your Right to Die Isn’t Enough

By Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig
The New Republic
Originally published July 15, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Some opponents of assisted suicide legislation are concerned that, with assisted suicide on the table, exhausted doctors and cash-strapped families might coerce ill family members into taking this cheap, quick way out rather than suffering through further treatments and payments for terminal illness. Others worry that legal assisted suicide will transform culture in such a way that the option to die will eventually be interpreted as an obligation to do so after a certain point, creating a slippery slope from legal to de-facto compulsory. Still others fear that euthanasia advocates don’t appropriately take into account the possibility of spontaneous remission, and worry that readiness to end the lives of terminally ill patients would foreclose the possibility of recovery for those with the potential for it, however slim.

There is little evidence that legal euthanasia contributes to the coercion of the poor, and numbers on spontaneous remission can usually be adduced for any given terminal disease, which helps prevent the what-if objection from gaining much traction. Yet there is reason to worry about a slippery slope forming between the legal but rare option of euthanasia for the terminally ill and the haphazard elective suicide of persons with no real physical illness. At this moment, for example, a 24-year-old Belgian woman is awaiting assisted suicide for no reason other than her unhappiness. She won’t be the first: a friend of hers who also suffered from depression was euthanized for that condition less than two years ago, following in the footsteps of numerous people with sad life experiences or momentary shocks who, thanks to Belgian law, sought death instead of treatment.

The entire article is here.

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Law and Ethics

Richard Marshall interviews Matthew Kramer
3:AM Magazine
Originally published on August 22, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

3:AM: If capital punishment is a central contemporary issue so is the use of torture. Why do you argue that torture is always wrong?

MK: There is no single answer to that question, because there are many different types of torture, and the explanation of the wrongness of torture is not uniform across those types. (When I refer to the sundry types of torture, I am not differentiating among them on the basis of the techniques employed; rather, I am differentiating among them with regard to the chief purposes for which torture is undertaken.) Let me say a bit here about the most frequently discussed type, interrogational torture. My 2014 book Torture and Moral Integrity maintains that such torture is always and everywhere morally wrong. The gravity of the wrong varies, but the wrongness itself does not. Hence, it should be apparent that that book is as robustly deontological as any of my previous volumes. (“Robustly deontological” is definitely not equivalent to “robustly Kantian.” My book on torture contains numerous objections to Kantianism as well as to consequentialism.)

Interrogational torture involves the deliberate infliction of severe pain for the purpose of extracting information from someone (either from the person on whom the pain is directly inflicted or from someone who is likely to care deeply about that person). The deliberate infliction of severe pain for that purpose is always morally wrong because of the overweeningness of the control exerted both through the infliction itself and through the aim which it is undertaken to achieve. The overweeningness of the control exerted by the infliction itself has been brought out especially incisively in recent years by David Sussman, and the overweeningness of the aim pursued has been brought out especially incisively in recent years by David Luban. Hence, I draw upon their writings as well as those of many other philosophers in my ruminations on torture.

The entire interview is here.

Sunday, August 30, 2015

Inside the Monkey Lab: The Ethics of Testing on Animals

By Miriam Wells
Vice News
July 7, 2015

"Of course it's pitiful for the monkeys. Everyone feels the same — you see it and you don't want it. But the point is if you want something different then you have to make something different. It doesn't happen overnight."

Speaking to VICE News, Jeffrey Bajramovic, a scientist from the Biomedical Primate Research Centre (BPRC) in Holland, was refreshingly honest. What happens to the monkeys tested on inside the center — a not for profit laboratory which is the largest facility of its kind in Europe, housing around 1,500 primates — is horrible. Those sent for experimentation suffer pain and distress, sometimes severe, in studies that sometimes last for months, before ending their lives on an autopsy table.

But the tests they undertake contribute to the understanding of and development of vaccines and treatments for some of the world's most deadly and prevalent diseases. And in a grim paradox, as Bajramovic pointed out, the captive primates are also contributing to the development of alternative research methods that scientists can use so that ultimately, they don't have to test on animals at all.

It's a messy and emotional ethical dilemma that VICE News came face to face with when we gained rare access to the BPRC to see just what happens inside.

The entire article is here.

WARNING: There is a graphic and disturbing (to me) video embedded within the article.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Common medications sway moral judgment

By Kelly Servick
Science Magazine
Originally published July 2, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

The researchers could then calculate the “exchange rate between money and pain”—how much extra cash a person must be paid to accept one additional shock. In previous research, Crockett’s team learned that the exchange rate varies depending on who gets hurt. On average, people are more reluctant to profit from someone else’s pain than their own—a phenomenon the researchers call “hyperaltruism.”

In the new study, the scientists tested whether drugs can shift that pain-to-money exchange rate. A few hours before the test, they gave the subjects either a placebo pill or one of two drugs: the serotonin-enhancing antidepressant drug citalopram or the Parkinson’s treatment levodopa, which increases dopamine levels.

On average, people receiving the placebo were willing to forfeit about 55 cents per shock to avoid harming themselves, and 69 cents to avoid harming others. Those amounts nearly doubled in people who took citalopram: They were generally more averse to causing harm, but still preferred profiting from their own pain over another’s, Crockett’s team reports online today in Current Biology. Levodopa had a different effect: It seemed to make people just as willing to shock others as themselves for profit.

The entire article is here.

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Reducing Social Stress Elicits Emotional Contagion of Pain in Mouse and Human Strangers

By Loren J. Martin, Georgia Hathaway, Kelsey Isbester, Sara Mirali, Erinn L. Acland, Nils Niederstrasser, Peter M. Slepian, Zina Trost, Jennifer A. Bartz, Robert M. Sapolsky, Wendy F. Sternberg, Daniel J. Levitin, Jeffrey S. Mogil
Current Biology, 2015; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.11.028

Highlights

• Emotional contagion of pain in stranger mice can be elicited by stress reduction
• Emotional contagion of pain in cagemate mice can be blocked by stress
• Emotional contagion of pain in humans occurs in friends, but not strangers
• Stress reduction in humans can elicit emotional contagion of pain in strangers

Summary

Empathy for another’s physical pain has been demonstrated in humans and mice; in both species, empathy is stronger between familiars. Stress levels in stranger dyads are higher than in cagemate dyads or isolated mice, suggesting that stress might be responsible for the absence of empathy for the pain of strangers. We show here that blockade of glucocorticoid synthesis or receptors for adrenal stress hormones elicits the expression of emotional contagion (a form of empathy) in strangers of both species. Mice and undergraduates were tested for sensitivity to noxious stimulation alone and/or together (dyads). In familiar, but not stranger, pairs, dyadic testing was associated with increased pain behaviors or ratings compared to isolated testing. Pharmacological blockade of glucocorticoid synthesis or glucocorticoid and mineralocorticoid receptors enabled the expression of emotional contagion of pain in mouse and human stranger dyads, as did a shared gaming experience (the video game Rock Band) in human strangers. Our results demonstrate that emotional contagion is prevented, in an evolutionarily conserved manner, by the stress of a social interaction with an unfamiliar conspecific and can be evoked by blocking the endocrine stress response.

The entire article is here.

A Science Daily article and summary can be found here.

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

The social brain and its superpowers: Matthew Lieberman

Published on Oct 7, 2013
TEDx video

Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman explains that through his studies he's learned that our kryptonite is ignoring the importance of our social superpowers and by building on our social intuition, we can make ourselves smarter, happier, and more productive. In this TEDx Talk, Lieberman explores groundbreaking research in social neuroscience that reveals that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental than our need for food or shelter and that the social pain and pleasure we experience has just as much impact as physical pain and pleasure.


Saturday, November 16, 2013

Your pain, my gain: Feeling pleasure over the misfortune of those you envy is biological

Press Release
Princeton University
Released October 28, 2013

Mina Cikara found her thesis when she wore a Boston Red Sox hat to a New York Yankees baseball game. Nicknames and vulgarities were among the souvenirs she took home. And, after hearing about the name-calling and heckling her then-PhD student endured, Princeton professor Susan Fiske was compelled to join her in pursuing the phenomenon further, exploring why people fail to empathize with others based on stereotypes.

Through a series of four experiments – one involving the aforementioned sports rivalry – the researchers found that people are actually biologically responsive to taking pleasure in the pain of others, a reaction known as "Schadenfreude." By measuring the electrical activity of cheek muscles, the researchers show that people smile more when someone they envy experiences misfortune or discomfort. While these findings hold significance for interpersonal relationships, the researchers also cite associated policy implications, such as how other countries view and stereotype the United States especially given that many countries envy the U.S., Fiske said. Their findings were reported in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

"Jealousy and envy are highly correlated," said Fiske, coauthor of the study and the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School. "When we ask people on surveys who is envied in American society, they report the same groups: objects of jealousy. This is all very much based on stereotypes. And so, in this study, we sought to better understand who is among these envied groups and whether that envy and jealousy elicits a harmful response."

"We were interested in the conditions under which people fail to empathize with one another and how, for some of those people, they experience happiness at another's expense," said lead author Cikara, now an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. "We wanted to start in a place where people would be willing to express their opinions and willingness to harm more freely, like we see in sports. We asked ourselves: what is it about rivalries that elicit a harmful response? And can we predict who will have this response?"

The entire press release is here.