‘Mind-reading’ AI: Japan study sparks ethical debate

David McElhinney

Aljazeera.com

Originally posted 7 APR 203

Yu Takagi could not believe his eyes. Sitting alone at his desk on a Saturday afternoon in September, he watched in awe as artificial intelligence decoded a subject’s brain activity to create images of what he was seeing on a screen.

“I still remember when I saw the first [AI-generated] images,” Takagi, a 34-year-old neuroscientist and assistant professor at Osaka University, told Al Jazeera.

“I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and saw my face, and thought, ‘Okay, that’s normal. Maybe I’m not going crazy'”.

Takagi and his team used Stable Diffusion (SD), a deep learning AI model developed in Germany in 2022, to analyse the brain scans of test subjects shown up to 10,000 images while inside an MRI machine.

After Takagi and his research partner Shinji Nishimoto built a simple model to “translate” brain activity into a readable format, Stable Diffusion was able to generate high-fidelity images that bore an uncanny resemblance to the originals.

The AI could do this despite not being shown the pictures in advance or trained in any way to manufacture the results.

“We really didn’t expect this kind of result,” Takagi said.

Takagi stressed that the breakthrough does not, at this point, represent mind-reading – the AI can only produce images a person has viewed.

“This is not mind-reading,” Takagi said. “Unfortunately there are many misunderstandings with our research.”

“We can’t decode imaginations or dreams; we think this is too optimistic. But, of course, there is potential in the future.”

The info is here.

Note: If AI systems can decode human thoughts, it could infringe upon people's privacy and autonomy. There are concerns that this technology could be used for invasive surveillance or to manipulate people's thoughts and behavior. Additionally, there are concerns about how this technology could be used in legal proceedings and whether it violates human rights.

Empirical Work in Moral Psychology

Joshua May
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Taylor and Francis
Originally published in 2017

Abstract

How do we form our moral judgments, and how do they influence behaviour? What ultimately motivates kind versus malicious action? Moral psychology is the interdisciplinary study of such questions about the mental lives of moral agents, including moral thought, feeling, reasoning and motivation. While these questions can be studied solely from the armchair or using only empirical tools, researchers in various disciplines, from biology to neuroscience to philosophy, can address them in tandem. Some key topics in this respect revolve around moral cognition and motivation, such as moral responsibility, altruism, the structure of moral motivation, weakness of will, and moral intuitions. Of course there are other important topics as well, including emotions, character, moral development, self-deception, addiction, well-being, and the evolution of moral capacities.

Some of the primary objects of study in moral psychology are the processes driving moral action. For example, we think of ourselves as possessing free will, as being responsible for what we do; as capable of self-control; and as capable of genuine concern for the welfare of others. Such claims can be tested by empirical methods to some extent in at least two ways. First, we can determine what in fact our ordinary thinking is. While many philosophers investigate this through rigorous reflection on concepts, we can also use the empirical methods of the social sciences. Second, we can investigate empirically whether our ordinary thinking is correct or illusory. For example, we can check the empirical adequacy of philosophical theories, assessing directly any claims made about how we think, feel, and behave

Understanding the psychology of moral individuals is certainly interesting in its own right, but it also often has direct implications for other areas of ethics, such as metaethics and normative ethics. For instance, determining the role of reason versus sentiment in moral judgment and motivation can shed light on whether moral judgments are cognitive, and perhaps whether morality itself is in some sense objective. Similarly, evaluating moral theories, such as deontology and utilitarianism, often relies on intuitive judgments about what one ought to do in various hypothetical cases. Empirical research can again serve as an additional tool to determine what exactly our intuitions are and which psychological processes generate them, contributing to a rigorous evaluation of the warrant of moral intuitions.

The info is here.

Buddhist Ethics

Maria Heim
Elements in Ethics
DOI: 10.1017/9781108588270
First published online: January 2020

Abstract

“Ethics” was not developed as a separate branch of philosophy in Buddhist traditions until the modern period, though Buddhist philosophers have always been concerned with the moral significance of thoughts, emotions, intentions, actions, virtues, and precepts. Their most penetrating forms of moral reflection have been developed within disciplines of practice aimed at achieving freedom and peace. This Element first offers a brief overview of Buddhist thought and modern scholarly approaches to its diverse forms of moral reflection. It then explores two of the most prominent philosophers from the main strands of the Indian Buddhist tradition – Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva – in a comparative fashion.

The info is here.

A Short History of Empathy

By Susan Lanzoni
The Atlantic
Originally published October 15, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

In the past few decades, interest in empathy has spread beyond psychology to primatology and neuroscience. In the 1990s, neuroscientists studying monkeys discovered mirror neurons, cells in the animals’ brains that fired not only when a monkey moved, but also when the monkey saw another one make the same movement. The discovery of mirror neurons spurred a wave of research into empathy and brain activity that quickly extended to humans as well. Other recent studies have further widened empathy’s reach into fields like economics and literature, finding that wealth disparities weaken empathic response and that reading fiction can improve it.

But as Kristof and Bloom illustrate, there is still some cultural debate about what empathy means today. And in the psychology community, the answers are no more clear-cut. Critics of the mirror-neuron theory, for example, question not only the location of these neurons in the human brain, but whether simulation of another’s gestures is a good description of empathy in the first place. The social psychologist C. Daniel Batson, who has researched empathy for decades, argues that the term can now refer to eight different concepts: knowing another’s thoughts and feelings; imagining another’s thoughts and feelings; adopting the posture of another; actually feeling as another does; imagining how one would feel or think in another’s place; feeling distress at another’s suffering; feeling for another’s suffering, sometimes called pity or compassion; and projecting oneself into another’s situation.

The entire article is here.