4 ms·

This reads as extremely ethically dangerous. I'm not sure it's possible to justify any course of treatment leading towards individual neurocircuitry 'tweaks',

This reads as extremely ethically dangerous. I'm not sure it's possible to justify any course of treatment leading towards individual neurocircuitry 'tweaks', even for an unambiguously good cause. Harkens too closely to 'scientist seeks to cure homosexuality through direct brain stimulation' in the 1950s. ( en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Galbraith_Heath )

ceejayoz 6y ago
Ethics in human experimentation have come a long way since the 1950s.
- gramontblanc 6y ago
  Is there an outside definition of medical ethics that can really be impartially compared from generation to generation? I'm certain all previous generations thought they were acting in good faith as well. Progress towards 'changing people's minds' is dangerous for the same reasons across all times and places.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    >Is there an outside definition of medical ethics that can really be impartially compared from generation to generation? That's a legitimate criticism of doing anything, but the problem is that it applies to, well, anything. Anything you do today could be seen as a horrifying atrocity by future generations, unless there exists some kind of boundary on what ethical stances a culture might adopt. There could be limits, but in that case there is an outside definition of medical ethics. If there isn't an outside definition then maybe in 100 years haircuts will be seen as mutilation[0]. [0] There are some cultures with strict rules about facial hair, so even though this example might sound ridiculous it actually serves to illustrate the point.
  - cat199 6y ago
    > Is there an outside definition of medical ethics that can really be impartially compared from generation to generation? well, doctors do take a form of the hippocratic oath which dates to ~400 BC, so ...
  - tcoff91 6y ago
    How is this different than psychiatric drugs? Those change your mind as well.
    - gramontblanc 6y ago
      (if the study replicates), the targeted precision and long term persistence of therapeutic effects. If someone prescribes you a pill for being gay and you don't want to be cured of being gay, you could always just stop taking it later if you were able to leave the despotic regime / cruel family structure / religious community binding you.
Hydraulix989 6y ago
It seems less ethically dangerous than Electroconvulsive Therapy.
- gramontblanc 6y ago
  I agree, and think both pose serious social problems (already realized with ECT) just by their availability as treatments.
whatshisface 6y ago
>Harkens too closely to 'scientist seeks to cure homosexuality through direct brain stimulation' in the 1950s. Let's say we lived in a world where in addition to having their sex changed, people could have their gender and sexual orientation changed. Would there really be anything wrong with that? In the 1950s, it was a forced medical procedure, but what if the wrongness came from its involuntary application and not its intrinsic nature?
- gramontblanc 6y ago
  Yes? Do you approve of the idea of using any combination of therapies found effective to cure people of believing in their religion, or to 'solve' political dissidents? Intellectual freedom,literally in this case, is important.(1) 1. Die Gedanken Sind Frie
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    >Do you approve of the idea of using any combination of therapies found effective to cure people of believing in their religion, or to 'solve' political dissidents? What I'm suggesting you consider is, what if it's only done voluntarily? For example I can't imagine a political dissident voluntarily subjecting themselves to belief neutralization. I have a hard time imagining how the voluntary rule could allow any of the authoritarian outcomes.
derefr 6y ago
What's the difference between this, and e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_a..., or use of propranolol together with therapeutic hypnosis to recall—and then block/degrade—fear memories during reconsolidation? In all three cases, you've got a specific "associative" pathway that's bothering someone and interfering with their lives, that they seek out treatment for; and in all three cases, the solution is to get their brain to just not activate that specific association any more, in effect just ripping/burning out the synapse that causes a memory of X to in turn activate emotions or memories of fear/shame/trauma/etc. I say "in effect", because the brain is electrochemical; and so it wouldn't seem to matter whether you blow an association away at the electrical level (by e.g. physically removing/necrotizing/calcifying the synapse-as-"wire", as ECT does; or by increasing its "resistance" by reorganizing it at a molecular level, as TCM probably does), or you do it at the chemical level (by e.g. re-training nearby junctions so the "carrier signal" feeding into the synaptic junction is too "noisy" to pass signal along, so even if the path activates, descending connections don't receive useful information from it, and so learn to ignore it; and/or by temporarily starving/blockading the ion pores it uses to receive voltage-generating ions through, starving it of its ability to work as a transistor for the signal it wants to generate—until, again, descending connections learn to ignore it, even when it comes back fully functional after removal of the blockade.) But, as a separate ethical argument, I'd like to also point out: people do, obviously, have the right to self-modify their neuronal architecture. They must be fully informed and consenting as to the consequences of such, and must want those consequences—think them better than the alternative, than all alternatives. But then they should be allowed to do so. And, since they—as lay-people—can't do so by themselves, trained specialists should be there to help them to safely perform the modification they want to perform. That's the same bar that a patient already has to pass, to qualify for e.g. hormone-replacement therapy targeting gender dysphoria. Medicine already has an infrastructure for ensuring patients want what they want, here. And that infrastructure (mostly coincidentally) already prevents doctors from just deciding to do these things to patients without the patient putting in the effort themselves to go through this "one thousand consent forms over a space of months" rigamarole. (Many people might say, in fact, that the existing infrastructure sets the bar too high—for example, that doctors make demands of patients to prove specific preferences over desired outcomes of treatment that align with the "on-label" use of the treatment, rather than accepting patient requests to use such treatments for their well-known "off-label" effects. In the HRT case, many people who identify as non-binary want to get HRT for their own reasons, but some doctors don't want to give it to them, because it's only indicated for a specific kind of gender dysphoria related to wanting to achieve a clear end-state of a binary gender.)
stupidcar 6y ago
Isn't every treatment we have for depression some form of neuro-circuitry tweaking? Whether you're using prescription medication, electroconvulsion, psychosurgery, counselling or self-medicating with legal or illegal drugs, you're deliberately altering your brain function in the hope that it'll result in temporary or permanent changes to your feelings and behaviour. What makes this procedure more ethically dangerous than those?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
asdfman123 6y ago
Okay, you don't have to be treated for depression. Let the others who have it take back their lives.
- lstodd 6y ago
  This. If you want to keep your depression, please feel free to.
  - asdfman123 6y ago
    People who underestimate it actually make me angry. Not only does it take your life away, it takes it away and leaves a giant black hole, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

ceejayoz 6y ago

Ethics in human experimentation have come a long way since the 1950s.

gramontblanc 6y ago
Is there an outside definition of medical ethics that can really be impartially compared from generation to generation? I'm certain all previous generations thought they were acting in good faith as well. Progress towards 'changing people's minds' is dangerous for the same reasons across all times and places.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  >Is there an outside definition of medical ethics that can really be impartially compared from generation to generation? That's a legitimate criticism of doing anything, but the problem is that it applies to, well, anything. Anything you do today could be seen as a horrifying atrocity by future generations, unless there exists some kind of boundary on what ethical stances a culture might adopt. There could be limits, but in that case there is an outside definition of medical ethics. If there isn't an outside definition then maybe in 100 years haircuts will be seen as mutilation[0]. [0] There are some cultures with strict rules about facial hair, so even though this example might sound ridiculous it actually serves to illustrate the point.
- cat199 6y ago
  > Is there an outside definition of medical ethics that can really be impartially compared from generation to generation? well, doctors do take a form of the hippocratic oath which dates to ~400 BC, so ...
- tcoff91 6y ago
  How is this different than psychiatric drugs? Those change your mind as well.
  - gramontblanc 6y ago
    (if the study replicates), the targeted precision and long term persistence of therapeutic effects. If someone prescribes you a pill for being gay and you don't want to be cured of being gay, you could always just stop taking it later if you were able to leave the despotic regime / cruel family structure / religious community binding you.

Hydraulix989 6y ago

It seems less ethically dangerous than Electroconvulsive Therapy.

gramontblanc 6y ago
I agree, and think both pose serious social problems (already realized with ECT) just by their availability as treatments.

whatshisface 6y ago

>Harkens too closely to 'scientist seeks to cure homosexuality through direct brain stimulation' in the 1950s. Let's say we lived in a world where in addition to having their sex changed, people could have their gender and sexual orientation changed. Would there really be anything wrong with that? In the 1950s, it was a forced medical procedure, but what if the wrongness came from its involuntary application and not its intrinsic nature?

gramontblanc 6y ago
Yes? Do you approve of the idea of using any combination of therapies found effective to cure people of believing in their religion, or to 'solve' political dissidents? Intellectual freedom,literally in this case, is important.(1) 1. Die Gedanken Sind Frie
- whatshisface 6y ago
  >Do you approve of the idea of using any combination of therapies found effective to cure people of believing in their religion, or to 'solve' political dissidents? What I'm suggesting you consider is, what if it's only done voluntarily? For example I can't imagine a political dissident voluntarily subjecting themselves to belief neutralization. I have a hard time imagining how the voluntary rule could allow any of the authoritarian outcomes.

derefr 6y ago

What's the difference between this, and e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_a..., or use of propranolol together with therapeutic hypnosis to recall—and then block/degrade—fear memories during reconsolidation? In all three cases, you've got a specific "associative" pathway that's bothering someone and interfering with their lives, that they seek out treatment for; and in all three cases, the solution is to get their brain to just not activate that specific association any more, in effect just ripping/burning out the synapse that causes a memory of X to in turn activate emotions or memories of fear/shame/trauma/etc. I say "in effect", because the brain is electrochemical; and so it wouldn't seem to matter whether you blow an association away at the electrical level (by e.g. physically removing/necrotizing/calcifying the synapse-as-"wire", as ECT does; or by increasing its "resistance" by reorganizing it at a molecular level, as TCM probably does), or you do it at the chemical level (by e.g. re-training nearby junctions so the "carrier signal" feeding into the synaptic junction is too "noisy" to pass signal along, so even if the path activates, descending connections don't receive useful information from it, and so learn to ignore it; and/or by temporarily starving/blockading the ion pores it uses to receive voltage-generating ions through, starving it of its ability to work as a transistor for the signal it wants to generate—until, again, descending connections learn to ignore it, even when it comes back fully functional after removal of the blockade.) But, as a separate ethical argument, I'd like to also point out: people do, obviously, have the right to self-modify their neuronal architecture. They must be fully informed and consenting as to the consequences of such, and must want those consequences—think them better than the alternative, than all alternatives. But then they should be allowed to do so. And, since they—as lay-people—can't do so by themselves, trained specialists should be there to help them to safely perform the modification they want to perform. That's the same bar that a patient already has to pass, to qualify for e.g. hormone-replacement therapy targeting gender dysphoria. Medicine already has an infrastructure for ensuring patients want what they want, here. And that infrastructure (mostly coincidentally) already prevents doctors from just deciding to do these things to patients without the patient putting in the effort themselves to go through this "one thousand consent forms over a space of months" rigamarole. (Many people might say, in fact, that the existing infrastructure sets the bar too high—for example, that doctors make demands of patients to prove specific preferences over desired outcomes of treatment that align with the "on-label" use of the treatment, rather than accepting patient requests to use such treatments for their well-known "off-label" effects. In the HRT case, many people who identify as non-binary want to get HRT for their own reasons, but some doctors don't want to give it to them, because it's only indicated for a specific kind of gender dysphoria related to wanting to achieve a clear end-state of a binary gender.)

stupidcar 6y ago

Isn't every treatment we have for depression some form of neuro-circuitry tweaking? Whether you're using prescription medication, electroconvulsion, psychosurgery, counselling or self-medicating with legal or illegal drugs, you're deliberately altering your brain function in the hope that it'll result in temporary or permanent changes to your feelings and behaviour. What makes this procedure more ethically dangerous than those?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

asdfman123 6y ago

Okay, you don't have to be treated for depression. Let the others who have it take back their lives.

lstodd 6y ago
This. If you want to keep your depression, please feel free to.
- asdfman123 6y ago
  People who underestimate it actually make me angry. Not only does it take your life away, it takes it away and leaves a giant black hole, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.