Man, Mind or Machine

In his book "Beyond Boundaries: The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains with Machines and How it will Change Our Lives," Nicolelis discusses ways in which we may use computers and robotics to allow spinal cord patients an opportunity to walk again, or how we may be able to access the Internet by simply closing our eyes and thinking about the Web site we wish to view. 

 

While the possibilities are both exciting and seemingly endless, this type of technology raises questions about the nature of man, as well as raising security issues that will likely have to be worked out before introducing these sorts of technologies to the public. 

 

An age-old question asks whether the "self" is located in the body, or if there is a mind separate from the body where the "self" resides. Is there a true, essential self? Do things like gender and the mind actually exist — or are our "selves" merely a product of cultural language and discourse? Is there room for dualism in the modern, materialist world?

 

Dr. Reuben Isern, a Beaumont rheumatologist, said what we think of as the "mind" or the "self" is actually an epiphenomenon created through the interaction of the various phenomena in the body. The interaction gives rise to what we call the mind. 

 

"It's all integrated with chemistry," he said. "Even though I was raised in a very religious family, I'm a scientist first. So one has to ask, is there a soul that floats above, independently, but still creates who you are? Or is it the chemistry that creates the feeling of what we call the soul or spirit — all merely the integration of neurotransmitters and receptors, and the interaction of these — that creates this feeling or experience? 

 

"My feeling is that it is all chemistry. There is not this thing floating out here that controls us called the soul — and science could not even map out that kind of concept. But you can map out the brain chemistry and the integration thereof — because we know what areas of the brain do what and how they talk to each other. So we know that it's all in there," Isern said, pointing toward his cranium. "Not withstanding spiritual things — it is really all about the brain, which is an unbelievably powerful thing."

 

One can look at the concept of thought like a television set. Think of the set and all of its various electronic parts as the body. Through the interaction of the parts of the television, an image forms on the screen. The image itself is analogous to thought. The image does not occur on its own, there is not the soul of a sitcom floating around in space waiting for a body or TV to occupy. The image depends on the machine interpreting data that is input into the system. That data is then presented as an observable experience. 

 

"The picture can be broken down to individual pixels, or current in a tube, but that doesn't express what is actually on the screen," Garrick Harden, Lamar University assistant professor of sociology, said.

 

Harden said the analogy can be extended to the emotion of love as well. 

 

"You can break it down to the rush of endorphins and what have you, especially in romantic love, but at the same time, what does that say about the phenomenological experience of love?" Harden said. "Nothing. It just tells you the biochemistry of it."

 

Harden said that while society creates dualisms to attempt to explain the world, many of the old debates such as nature versus nurture have started to sound naïve. 

 

"You can make dualisms work, but they aren't a very accurate reflection of what you are trying to describe," he said. "In creating this dualism of the self and the body, we end up also objectifying the body as something outside of the self that is constantly an object of the self, instead of actually being the self. This object, this body, this thing that we have culturally created as a meat-suit that we are constantly walking around in, is itself always ahead of where we are — it is always changing faster than we can update."

 

Harden said that there is a question of location when dealing with the concept of the self. With technologies that would, in theory, allow people to upload their memories to a computer, this concept becomes even more complicated.

 

"You have the front stage, that face you put on, the unified self that you perform for other people in your public interactions," he said. "And then you have this constant series of backstages ad infinitum, where you can never actually get to the final backstage because there is no final backstage. The self is something that is defined by its fluidity. And so, in this sense, if you are your body and you are your memories — if you can technologically separate the body from the memories — where is the self located? Is it in the memories? Is it in the body? Did you just actually create a soul by being able to do something we have never been able to do before?"

 

Harden said there seems to be a sliding scale of emotional involvement when it comes to human and machine interaction. 

 

"There seems to me, that emotionally there is this difference between the combinations of the technological and the organic when you're talking about something like getting into a car to drive," he said. "But whenever you get into a car, technically you are a cyborg — or communicating with a phone and extending your senses of hearing and your speech to much greater distances. 

 

"I can understand that as a cyborgization, but I feel an emotional disconnect from turning around and saying, ‘But that is no different from having robotic legs or robotic arms or a robotic heart.'

 

"The question for me is — how do you define what it is to be human? And every possible definition you can come up with can be immediately deconstructed. Anything you propose can be torn down, and so it seems like forming a definition for human has become impossible. But at the same point in time, there has got to be a line between, or some kind of connection to, the organic body that is a part of you."

 

With any new technology, Harden said that society experiences a kind of "cultural lag."

 

"Cultural lag speaks to how much time it takes for a culture to adjust to a new technology," he said. "So anytime you introduce something new, you are going to have disruptions. There is an almost ‘frontier-like' mentality when dealing with new technology because there aren't yet any regulations, because you aren't sure what the regulations should be until you introduce (the technology)." 

 

Larry Elliott, Lamar University associate professor of communication, said there is a big issue with technology progressing faster than laws can keep up with them. In issues dealing with fixing a person's memories into a tangible form, uploading them to a computer and transmitting or broadcasting them over the Internet, the government is simply not equipped to deal with the legal implications of this rapidly progressing field of technology.

 

"One side would say that your intellectual property, once it's fixed in a tangible form, meaning as a picture, a recording — that it is copyrighted," Elliott said. "But if your thoughts are being broadcast, then they wouldn't be protected. A lot of it depends on what does ‘fixed in a tangible form' mean? Are your thoughts fixed in a tangible form? — probably not. One of the big challenges is that nobody knows what to say when you are faced with a new technology. We have all of these privacy laws, but how private would your thoughts be if someone could read them?" 

 

Elliott said the original framers of the Constitution did not anticipate such a legal necessity to privacy, but the need seems to grow with each new technological development. For example, he said, take the issue of wiretapping the phone outside your house.

 

"Seventy years ago, we didn't see that as an invasion of privacy, although now we can see that it was," he said. "So people try more and more to protect their privacy because the technology used to invade your privacy increases. The main problem is there isn't any law there. And when there is a law there, you have to ask, ‘How does this thing compare to the past, and therefore, how can we apply the law from the past to the future we could have never anticipated?' Like heat-seeking thermal imagery that can tell whether you're growing marijuana in your house that's the same kind of thing — they are looking inside your house and not your head, but if they can look inside your head, would that be illegal? 

 

"It seems like the Fourth Amendment right to privacy gets more and more sacred as more technology develops to invade your privacy — like those machines they have in the airport that can look through your clothes. It's the same thing — we can look through your walls, we can look through your clothes, we can look through your head! Where should we stop? I'm sure that if we could see through your head, the government would love to know about it."

 

The legal and ethical problems that can arise from technologies that would connect people to machines are as many in number as the benefits of such technologies.

 

Isern brings up the notion that in a bi-lateral system, where one has a two-way path from his brain to his computer, the possibility of having one's head re-wired by a virus or other malicious code is a very real threat.

 

"What we can hope for is a unilateral connection so that we can have some control over what is being looked at," Isern said. "If you upload your brain to a computer, in theory, it would have to be back and forth and continually updating. So if someone puts in a virus, it will mess the whole thing up and it goes into your brain and you get reprogrammed. If your brain is trained to respond with and act like a computer, why not input a virus that will reprogram the whole brain and make a person nuts? That's where the danger is.

 

"Just like hacking into a computer, people could potentially hack into your brain. So, in theory, someone could go into that long chain of thought that you uploaded from your brain and put a little piece of ‘DNA' or ‘code' in there that will disrupt the original process and then you're reprogrammed. I think the key would be unidirectional, so that you can control things but they can't turn around and influence you."

 

Isern said there are also potential problems regarding interpretation of the data input into the machines.

 

"What can be done? The sky is the limit," he said. "But with the good comes the bad, and as we become so interconnected, you lose what has become so sacred to the human being — you lose your privacy. It's one thing to have privacy in your home, on your cell phone — but what if we lose the privacy of our thoughts?  There are things in the brain that you may not even want to know yourself — things that have been repressed, and for good reasons. What if it incorporates these things and screws up the whole system? 

 

"One of the survival techniques of the human being is to suppress trauma. The computer is not going to have the same capability to think, it will have to be programmed by humans. So all of a sudden, it integrates all of that stuff. If we don't even know how that information is suppressed and stored in the brain, how can we tell the computer to suppress it?"

 

Edythe Kirk, Lamar University associate professor of psychology, said that any man-made system will only be as good as the people who created and programmed it. Computers are limited to the functions they are preprogrammed to operate.

 

"It doesn't have the ability to discern and that's the problem with any kind of computer or computing machine — they can only do the things that we tell them to do. If you have worked with Microsoft products for any length of time, you know that the products are only as good as the programmers, and the programmers are sometimes not so good. Or they make assumptions about what they think we want. So I can see all sorts of problems or issues with that, too. How does it decide what information to use and how does it decide what to do with that information?"

 

While uploading a person's memories to the Internet is still a thing of science-future, there are countless possibilities with the current technologies.

 

"What would be the coolest thing, would be to train your brain to talk to a device in the body to bypass a disability so that the person can feel normal and not like some kind of robot," Isern said. "There are ways of creating robotic arms and to use the brain to control them electronically through wires. But you can see where that would be more for people who lose a limb or something like that. Ideally, it would be something that would allow a reconnection, or allow one area of the brain to talk to another.

 

"If you have an electronic eye, why not enhance it with a chip that would allow you to access the Internet? Then you can see it in your brain with your eyes closed. You could sit there and scroll through the Web just by thinking."

 

Kirk said that the technology to give movement to accident victims, or allow people to move an avatar in a digital realm, is merely a matter of translating chemical signals into electrical signals that a machine can interpret.

 

"The signal is basically a chemical signal that gets transduced into some kind of electrical signal that comes out and interfaces with a device of some sort," Kirk said. "Whether it's a robotic arm or a computer. A behavior could be executed pretty easily, because those are pretty simple commands. The stuff with robotic arms has been going on for quite a few years now. I think they have most of those things pretty well worked out, but they are very primitive, motor kinds of controls. They are not higher order kinds of reasoning and judgment kinds of things for the most part."

 

Kirk said that the brain constantly maps out its surroundings and incorporates them into its experience. This said, it should be possible to train the brain to interact with machines in much the same way we learn to drive a car. The brain will begin to incorporate these extensions of the body into its concept of "self."

 

"We incorporate those things into our episodic memory. It's almost like we have a tape of our entire existence, and all of those things are going to affect brain chemistry. And if it affects brain chemistry, it can affect brain structure and function."

 

According to Nicolelis, a good example of the ability of the brain to incorporate its surroundings into its own self image, is separation anxiety from a device, like a car or cell phone, or from a loved one. Nicolelis says that the reason it feels as if we have lost a limb when we lose our phone or significant other is because, in effect, we have. The brain has already incorporated that person or device into its "image of self," and losing a friend is paramount to losing an arm. As far as the brain is concerned, that extension of "self" should still be there, and the brain searches for it until it learns to stop listening for echoes of its past.

 

While complete interconnectivity with machines is still closer to science fiction than science fact, researchers are constantly breaking new ground that will forever change our lives.

 

Whether communicating vast distances via cell phones, traveling through time and space in a vehicle, or operating a robotic arm using only cognition, man has become a cyborg.