Friday 14 September 2018

NTU Philosophy Student Conference

BRITISH PERSONALIST FORUM STUDENTS’ WORKSHOP ON ‘ETHICS OF THE PERSON’ SATURDAY NOVEMBER 10th, 10.00 to 4.30. at ROOM 307, THE BOOTS LIBRARY NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY, 50 SHAKESPEARE ST, NOTTINGHAM google.co.uk/maps/@52.9581654,-1.1541771,17z NO FEES! Drinks and snacks will be available in the cafĂ© in the library. This Workshop is designed primarily for undergraduate and postgraduate students but everyone is welcome. (Students at Nottingham Trent University will be given advance notice.) Would all who wish to attend please contact us at webmaster@britishpersonalistforum.org. uk by November 3rd so that we can arrange the seating. PROGRAMME 10-10.30 Registration and welcome; 10.30-12.30 Four 30 min. sessions. 12.30-1.30 Lunch 1.30- 3.30 Four 30 min. sessions. 3.30-4.30 General Discussion and Close. PAPERS We prefer speakers’ own thoughts about their chosen topics, or at least critical accounts of work by others with positive alternatives to any negative ones. The maximum time given for each paper will be 20 mins, and this will be strictly enforced to allow for 10 minds discussion. The deadline for submission of papers: 12 noon, Friday October 12th Please send them to webmaster@britishpersonalistforum.org.uk SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR TOPICS The role and value of persons in: Utilitarianism or other consequentialisms, Kant’s ethics, situation ethics and moral particularism, virtue ethics, individualism or collectivism, or any other system of ethics. What aspects of persons are morally significant? The choice of either egoism or altruism. Justice and persons. For more about Personalism go to britishpersonalistforum.org.uk and follow the links.

Friday 4 May 2018

Scientists reanimate disembodied pigs’ brains – but for a human mind, it could be a living hell

Scientists reanimate disembodied pigs' brains – but for a human mind, it could be a living hell



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Another life? Shutterstock
Benjamin Curtis, Nottingham Trent University
Do you want to live forever? If so, there’s some good news. Or so it seems. For it appears that we may have taken a step closer to making immortality reality. In a recent meeting at the National Institutes of Health, Yale neuroscientist Nenad Sestan revealed that his team has successfully reanimated the brains of dead pigs recovered from a slaughterhouse. By pumping them with artificial blood using a system called BrainEx, they were able to bring them back to “life” for up to 36 hours.
Admittedly, the pigs’ brains did not regain consciousness, but Sestan acknowledged that restoring awareness is a possibility. Crucially, he also disclosed that the technique could work on primate brains (which includes humans), and that the brains could be kept alive indefinitely.
But could you really survive the death of your body? And would such an existence be worthwhile anyway? In fact, the answers to these questions are far from clear. So perhaps the news for those seeking life eternal isn’t so good after all. It certainly raises a whole host of worrying ethical questions.

Trapped inside your own mind

Even if your conscious brain were kept alive after your body had died, you would have to spend the foreseeable future as a disembodied “brain in a bucket”, locked away inside your own mind without access to the senses that allow us to experience and interact with the world and the inputs that our brains so crave. The knowledge and technology needed to implant your brain into a new body may be decades, if not centuries, away.
So in the best case scenario, you would be spending your life with only your own thoughts for company. Some have argued that even with a fully functional body, immortality would be tedious. With absolutely no contact with external reality, it might just be a living hell.
According to some, it is impossible for a disembodied brain to house anything like a normal human mind. Antonio Damasio, a philosopher and neuroscientist, has pointed out that in ordinary humans, brain and body are in constant interaction with each other. Every muscle, nerve, joint and organ is connected to the brain – and vast numbers of chemical and electrical signals go back and forth between them each and every second. Without this constant “feedback loop” between brain and body, Damasio argues, ordinary experiences and thought are simply not possible.



So what would it be like to be a disembodied brain? The truth is, nobody knows. But it is probable it would be worse than being simply tedious – it would likely be deeply disturbing. Experts have already warned that a man reportedly due to have the world’s first head transplant could suffer a terrible fate. They say his brain will be overwhelmed by the unfamiliar chemical and electrical signals sent to it by his new body, and it could send him mad. A disembodied brain would be likely to react similarly – but because it would be unable to signal its distress, or do anything to bring its suffering to an end, it would be even worse.
So, to end up as a disembodied human brain may well be to suffer a fate worse than death.

Would you even be you?

It is far from clear whether your disembodied brain would even be you. The question of when people die is the subject of ongoing philosophical debate as well as my own research. In a number of published papers, I have investigated this question and how it relates to what makes us who we are, how we persist over time, and what changes we can survive. Some working in this area think we are purely psychological beings, and so could survive as disembodied brains so long as our memories and personalities were preserved.
But according to one view, known as “animalism”, we are inseparable from our whole organism – our entire body, made up of cells, flesh, bone and organs. According to this philosophy, what makes us “us” dies when our whole organism dies – even if our brain survives. So, because you die when your body does, your brain cannot be you. And so even if it has the same personality and memories as you, it can only be, at best, a psychological duplicate of you.
But we should also be deeply concerned about the possibility of reanimating conscious human brains from an ethical standpoint. According to the dominant view in ethics, living human beings possess full moral status – that is, they are deserving of the highest possible degree of moral respect. They have such a status by virtue of possessing high-level psychological properties that are grounded in the capacities of the conscious human brain. And so, according to this view, irrespective of whether your disembodied conscious brain would be you, it would still be an entity with full moral status.
The ConversationAnd so the bottom line is this: to keep a disembodied conscious human brain alive may well be to subject an entity with full moral status to an existence of hellish tedium, or to the mental torture of inescapable madness. Essentially, to a fate worse than death. In my view, not even the promise of eternal life is worth this terrible risk.
Benjamin Curtis, Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics, Nottingham Trent University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Tuesday 24 April 2018

Philosophy of Religion Talk - Weds May 2nd, 2-4

There will be a talk on the Philosophy of Religion, next Weds, May 2nd 2018 at 2 'til 4 - room tba. Dr Conor Cunningham of the University of Nottingham will be presenting a paper entitled 'Soul and the Marriage of Discourse: The Nightmare Dreams'. In his talk, Conor will be exploring the important ethical and metaphysical question of whether there is 'life before death'. Here is an abstract of his presentation: Given materialism we are dead, we are the living-dead: we face the most pressing of questions: Is there life before death? The illegitimate ascendency of scientific discourse as the master mode of knowledge has led us as a species to this abyss, wherein truth goodness and beauty are gone, all ethics too, and all explanation for any intelligibility - all thought, even the slightest. Against this, the ancient notion of scientia (knowledge) rejects all modes of reductionism, or scientism, instead calling for a marriage of discourse, within which disparate modes of engagement with existence generates plenitude, rather than atrophied accounts of reality with its accompanying nihilism. Conor is a self-consciously 'punk philosopher' - and so he should provide us with entertaining food for thought and some much need intellectual stimulation! Please contact Neil Turnbull (neil.turnbull@ntu.ac.uk) if you would like to attend this event.