Scientists 'may have crossed ethical line' in growing human brains

Ian Sample
The Guardian
Originally posted October 20, 2019

Neuroscientists may have crossed an “ethical rubicon” by growing lumps of human brain in the lab, and in some cases transplanting the tissue into animals, researchers warn.

The creation of mini-brains or brain “organoids” has become one of the hottest fields in modern neuroscience. The blobs of tissue are made from stem cells and, while they are only the size of a pea, some have developed spontaneous brain waves, similar to those seen in premature babies.

Many scientists believe that organoids have the potential to transform medicine by allowing them to probe the living brain like never before. But the work is controversial because it is unclear where it may cross the line into human experimentation.

On Monday, researchers will tell the world’s largest annual meeting of neuroscientists that some scientists working on organoids are “perilously close” to crossing the ethical line, while others may already have done so by creating sentient lumps of brain in the lab.

“If there’s even a possibility of the organoid being sentient, we could be crossing that line,” said Elan Ohayon, the director of the Green Neuroscience Laboratory in San Diego, California. “We don’t want people doing research where there is potential for something to suffer.”

The info is here.

Bridging cognition and emotion in moral decision making: Role of emotion regulation

Raluca D. Szekely and Andrei C. Miu
In M. L. Bryant (Ed.): Handbook on Emotion Regulation: Processes,
Cognitive Effects and Social Consequences. Nova Science, New York

Abstract

In the last decades, the involvement of emotions in moral decision making was investigated using moral dilemmas in healthy volunteers, neuropsychological and psychiatric patients. Recent research characterized emotional experience in moral dilemmas and its association with deontological decisions. Moreover, theories debated the roles of emotion and reasoning in moral decision making and suggested that emotion regulation may be crucial in overriding emotion-driven deontological biases. After briefly introducing the reader to moral dilemma research and current perspectives on emotion and emotion-cognition interactions in this area, the present chapter reviews emerging evidence for emotion regulation in moral decision making. Inspired by recent advances in the field of emotion regulation, this chapter also highlights several avenues for future research on emotion regulation in moral psychology.

The book chapter can be downloaded here.

This is a good summary for those starting to learn about cognition, decision-making models, emotions, and morality.

In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace

Pew Research Center
Originally published October 17, 2019

The religious landscape of the United States continues to change at a rapid clip. In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.

Both Protestantism and Catholicism are experiencing losses of population share. Currently, 43% of U.S. adults identify with Protestantism, down from 51% in 2009. And one-in-five adults (20%) are Catholic, down from 23% in 2009. Meanwhile, all subsets of the religiously unaffiliated population – a group also known as religious “nones” – have seen their numbers swell. Self-described atheists now account for 4% of U.S. adults, up modestly but significantly from 2% in 2009; agnostics make up 5% of U.S. adults, up from 3% a decade ago; and 17% of Americans now describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” up from 12% in 2009. Members of non-Christian religions also have grown modestly as a share of the adult population.



The info is here.

Punish or Protect? How Close Relationships Shape Responses to Moral Violations

Weidman, A. C., Sowden, W. J., Berg, M. K.,
& Kross, E. (2019).
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167219873485

Abstract

People have fundamental tendencies to punish immoral actors and treat close others altruistically. What happens when these tendencies collide—do people punish or protect close others who behave immorally? Across 10 studies (N = 2,847), we show that people consistently anticipate protecting close others who commit moral infractions, particularly highly severe acts of theft and sexual harassment. This tendency emerged regardless of gender, political orientation, moral foundations, and disgust sensitivity and was driven by concerns about self-interest, loyalty, and harm. We further find that people justify this tendency by planning to discipline close others on their own. We also identify a psychological mechanism that mitigates the tendency to protect close others who have committed severe (but not mild) moral infractions: self-distancing. These findings highlight the role that relational closeness plays in shaping people’s responses to moral violations, underscoring the need to consider relational closeness in future moral psychology work.

From the General Discussion

These findings also clarify the mechanisms through which people reconcile behaving loyally (by protecting close others who commit moral infractions) at the cost of behaving dishonestly while allowing an immoral actor to evade formal punishment (by lying to a police officer). It does not appear that people view close others’ moral infractions as less immoral: A brother’s heinous crime is still a heinous crime.  Instead, when people observe close others behaving immorally, we found through an exploratory linguistic coding analysis that they overwhelmingly intend to enact a lenient form of punishment by confronting the perpetrator to discuss the act. We suspect that doing so allows a person to simultaneously (a) maintain their self-image as a morally upstanding individual and (b) preserve and even enhance the close relationship, in line with the finding in Studies 1d and 1e that protecting close others from legal fallout is viewed as an act of self-interest. These tactics are also broadly consistent with prior work suggesting that people often justify their own immoral acts by focusing on positive consequences of the act or reaffirming their own moral standing (Bandura, 2016). In contrast, we found that when people observe distant others behaving immorally, they report greater intentions to subject these individuals to external, formal means of punishment, such as turning them in to law enforcement or subjecting them to social ostracization.

Should we create artificial moral agents? A Critical Analysis

John Danaher
Philosophical Disquisitions
Originally published September 21, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

So what argument is being made? At first, it might look like Sharkey is arguing that moral agency depends on biology, but I think that is a bit of a red herring. What she is arguing is that moral agency depends on emotions (particularly second personal emotions such as empathy, sympathy, shame, regret, anger, resentment etc). She then adds to this the assumption that you cannot have emotions without having a biological substrate. This suggests that Sharkey is making something like the following argument:

(1) You cannot have explicit moral agency without having second personal emotions.

(2) You cannot have second personal emotions without being constituted by a living biological substrate.

(3) Robots cannot be constituted by a living biological substrate.

(4) Therefore, robots cannot have explicit moral agency.

Assuming this is a fair reconstruction of the reasoning, I have some questions about it. First, taking premises (2) and (3) as a pair, I would query whether having a biological substrate really is essential for having second personal emotions. What is the necessary connection between biology and emotionality? This smacks of biological mysterianism or dualism to me, almost a throwback to the time when biologists thought that living creatures possessed some élan vital that separated them from the inanimate world. Modern biology and biochemistry casts all that into doubt. Living creatures are — admittedly extremely complicated — evolved biochemical machines. There is no essential and unbridgeable chasm between the living and the inanimate.

The info is here.

Elon Musk's AI Project to Replicate the Human Brain Receives $1B from Microsoft

Anthony Cuthbertson
The Independent
Originally posted July 23, 2019

Microsoft has invested $1 billion in the Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence venture that plans to mimic the human brain using computers.

OpenAI said the investment would go towards its efforts of building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can rival and surpass the cognitive capabilities of humans.

“The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“Our mission is to ensure that AGI technology benefits all of humanity, and we’re working with Microsoft to build the supercomputing foundation on which we’ll build AGI.”

The two firms will jointly build AI supercomputing technologies, which OpenAI plans to commercialise through Microsoft and its Azure cloud computing business.

The info is here.

The Ethics of Contentious Hard Forks in Blockchain Networks With Fixed Features

Tae Wan Kim and Ariel Zetlin-Jones
Front. Blockchain, 28 August 2019
https://doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2019.00009

An advantage of blockchain protocols is that a decentralized community of users may each update and maintain a public ledger without the need for a trusted third party. Such modifications introduce important economic and ethical considerations that we believe have not been considered among the community of blockchain developers. We clarify the problem and provide one implementable ethical framework that such developers could use to determine which aspects should be immutable and which should not.

(cut)

3. A Normative Framework for Blockchain Design With Fixed Features

Which features of a blockchain protocol should or should not be alterable? To answer this question, we need a normative framework. Our framework is twofold: the substantive and the procedural. The substantive consists of two ethical principles: The generalization principle and the utility-enhancement principle. The procedural has three principles: publicity, revision and appeals, and regulation. All the principles are necessary conditions. The procedural principles help to collectively examine whether any application of the two substantive principles are reasonable. The set of the five principles as a whole is in line with the broadly Kantian deontological approach to justice and democracy (Kant, 1785). In particular, we are partly indebted to Daniels and Sabin (2002) procedural approach to fair allocations of limited resources. Yet, our framework is different from theirs in several ways: the particular context we deal with is different, we replace the controversial “relevance” condition with our own representation of the Kantian generalization principle, and we add the utility-maximization principle. Although we do not offer a fully fledged normative analysis of the given issue, we propose a possible normative framework for cryptocurrency communities.

Dimensions of decision-making: An evidence-based classification of heuristics and biases

A. Ceschia and others
Personality and Individual Differences, 
Volume 146, 1 August 2019, Pages 188-200

Abstract

Traditionally, studies examining decision-making heuristics and biases (H&B) have focused on aggregate effects using between-subjects designs in order to demonstrate violations of rationality. Although H&B are often studied in isolation from others, emerging research has suggested that stable and reliable individual differences in rational thought exist, and similarity in performance across tasks are related, which may suggest an underlying phenotypic structure of decision-making skills. Though numerous theoretical and empirical classifications have been offered, results have been mixed. The current study aimed to clarify this research question. Participants (N = 289) completed a battery of 17 H&B tasks, assessed with a within-subjects design, that we selected based on a review of prior empirical and theoretical taxonomies. Exploratory and confirmatory analyses yielded a solution that suggested that these biases conform to a model composed of three dimensions: Mindware gaps, Valuation biases (i.e., Positive Illusions and Negativity effect), and Anchoring and Adjustment. We discuss these findings in relation to proposed taxonomies and existing studies on individual differences in decision-making.

A pdf of the research can be downloaded here.

Language Is the Scaffold of the Mind

Anna Ivanova
nautil.us
Originally posted September 26, 2019

Can you imagine a mind without language? More specifically, can you imagine your mind without language? Can you think, plan, or relate to other people if you lack words to help structure your experiences?

Many great thinkers have drawn a strong connection between language and the mind. Oscar Wilde called language “the parent, and not the child, of thought”; Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”; and Bertrand Russell stated that the role of language is “to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”

After all, language is what makes us human, what lies at the root of our awareness, our intellect, our sense of self. Without it, we cannot plan, cannot communicate, cannot think. Or can we?

Imagine growing up without words. You live in a typical industrialized household, but you are somehow unable to learn the language of your parents. That means that you do not have access to education; you cannot properly communicate with your family other than through a set of idiosyncratic gestures; you never get properly exposed to abstract ideas such as “justice” or “global warming.” All you know comes from direct experience with the world.

It might seem that this scenario is purely hypothetical. There aren’t any cases of language deprivation in modern industrialized societies, right? It turns out there are. Many deaf children born into hearing families face exactly this issue. They cannot hear and, as a result, do not have access to their linguistic environment. Unless the parents learn sign language, the child’s language access will be delayed and, in some cases, missing completely.

The info is here.