The Long Road

12/14/2003 Archived Entry: "Guest Column #5"

Guest Column by someone else who whishes to remain anonymous. It's a little different this time as its a paper.

Got something to say? Email me and I'll put it up next Sunday.

Privacy
People have the ability to make decisions. One may abstract away from the internal workings of the mind and look upon the act of a single decision as a temporal delay, standing between stimulus and response. This seems very “harsh” on the state of consciousness and thus our very humanity. But why “harsh?” What is cut when we classify the process of human decision as a temporal delay? What makes “choice” so important?
Processing stimuli and coming up with some adequate response has always been important. It started off as simple feedback mechanisms, neural arcs to some central processing system. Things had to be fast; these living things had to respond quickly, before they burned themselves or cut themselves or fell down a long way or were eaten. Pretty impressive hardware developed along the way to allow efficient calculations: early fishes got a primitive vestibular system, a nose; bony fish traded in the old vestibular system and reduced the processing of that information in the cerebellum, got eyes or better eyes, a balloon in their stomach so they could stand still and socialize, and a nose job; amphibians slapped some ears on (no outer ear of course); reptiles got rid of a progressively-useless line across their body of little sensors that were used for detecting electrostatic changes in their ancestral aquatic habitat; mammals multiplied the size of their brains and really cared about their kids. At some place along the evolutionary development of these biological sense-processing-machines it became valuable to use old response-events to direct future behaviour: if you ain’t dead yet, keep doin’ what you’re doin.’ Born was the concept of dispositional reference: the ability of neurons to track the activity of other neurons, to watch (albeit not always very accurately) what is going on and make a note of it. Every time you remember how to use that old, rusty can opener, comb your hair, put your clothes on, a whole bunch of dispositional nerves are firing.
Consciousness developed out of the ability to monitor these dispositional references, a nested dispositional reference if you ‘will’: consciousness is the ability to see this time delay; the purpose of this knowledge is to further develop our abilities to act on things; to increase the acuity of response, to make responding to new things simply, by referring to past things and produce a desired action.
If God knows what’s going to happen, are you really choosing anything? I’ve always dealt with that in my own way: “sure maybe someone DOES know what’s going on, but that doesn’t mean I’m not choosing it.” Neurologists can hook people up with electrodes on their brains and see someone’s willed arm movement slightly before it happens. If it is not God but a computer; if it is not divine wisdom but an incredibly robust calculation that handles all of the energy, all of the quarks and muons and weak-gauge bosons and even perhaps the one-dimensional vibrating strings of today’s theoretical physics: if a computer takes the admittedly large set of data, runs very fast (but that’s fine, we’ll have quantum computing in our lifetime, changing the Boolean set-theory logic of the 20th century and leaving a computer at worst millions of times more powerful than our current technology) and spits out your next move just before you do it: is that more compelling? Maybe the machine can then poke you and anticipate your rising pulse, fight-or-flight response; it sees the shadow of you rise from the shadow of the chair in the white (naturally padded) room in which you sit and sees you scream at the over-head cam (in instant replay as well): “Let me out of this _ cage, I’m a human being for (random name of deity)’s sake!!!”: all long before the real you does it; all printed out on a nice strip of dot-matrix paper (the computer could certainly stream the paper underneath the door for you to read, where your food slot is [it knows you’re not hungry]; but that would change your response and another printout would have to be made: it’s just a long, drawn out process for the poor computer, don’t you see).
Certainly the SIZE of the data set is not an arguable position. It doesn’t matter how many engineers we need to solve the n-dimensional matrix, or how many iterations of how many transistors of however much silicon representing a single NOR gate we use to get there; the question(s) is (are) simply: “are we just a part of a very large calculation”? What part of our will is illusory?

INTERRUPTION

The privacy of every person engaging in a patient-doctor relationship deserves special consideration. As a subset of the client-professional relationship, there are important power-differences between the two elements that make the combined decisions of the two parties quite difficult. The doctor’s primary motive of practice is to ensure the health of the patient; the patient has personal goals of his/her own that will qualify modes of medical treatment. Neither party can completely know the other’s expertise, and complete disclosure is impossible on both ends. Doctors cannot transfer their years of specialized training; patients can better communicate what they know but the information conferred is affected greatly by the circumstances surrounding the patient. Many aspects temper the nature of a patient’s testimony when (s)he is receiving medical care including the incredible stress related to illness, lack of real knowledge regarding medical outcomes, the process of denial, and the social and selfish desire to be thought of highly by the doctor that buffers their ego and may imply better care
Removing the obvious transgressions in which a doctor either does not obtain permission at all before performing high risk surgery still leaves an incredibly large area of consent.
Extreme privacy advocates demand a complete deception-free nature from the medical profession: it is claimed that we do not want to be lied to, that denial is only a small component of patients, that the topic of patients not actually wanting to know the truth is not reasonably considerable and so rhetorically invalid. There is also an appeal to the right of people to see and prepare for their death.
Conversely, some doctors recognize the substantive benefits of deception: people can live the rest of their lives happily, empowered by ignorance, by withholding the truth or even lying.

ZOOM OUT
We don’t really like the idea of deciding what is best for us, because it seems to attack our will, our privacy.
If we actually believed these things, I’m fairly sure that the human mind would inductively apply the reasoning to other people: empower all with some relative fairness in our world: give all of us the ability to choose equally. We would not allow the fact that some people’s ancestors got seasick easily and didn’t jump the pond to carve up the free world. We would not penalize people because of their birth country, their poor economy and resulting low education, single mother homes.
But what value is there in a process? What value is gained by suffering? What can be given to a people such that the missing process of achieving these things does not harm them? Uh oh, this sounds like a privacy argument again. Maybe people need the process of suffering. Socialism has a problem generally in that some people forget or do not understand the reason why all people need to work: they choose badly, get lazy. The rest of society doesn’t want to be encumbered by their choices. There is a similar problem with just giving all people equal rights. Cultures are different, responsibilities are different: some people can’t understand the reason why everyone needs to be able to make decisions. Certain people are responsible for making certain decisions, and others are not. Therefore, perhaps people need to work things out on their own. Do a bad job at work until they start making the right decisions. Let them cut off their hands for stealing, let them persecute and kill each other because of their beliefs until they find their own privacy.
That’s not quite good enough though. I sure as hell didn’t construct democracy for myself, rights to health care, education, and I’m pretty sure there is rational support for such a system outside my own experiential tamperings. Doesn’t it seem like some redistribution of wealth (including the richness of a system, or concept) is necessary if we claim to espouse a role for privacy? At least leave the doors open to each country; that seems like a mandatory requirement for a country. People should be allowed to leave if they want.
Where that falls in the realm of patient-doctor relationships is unclear. It seems like doctors should have a composite list of their values, and that patients should be able to transfer freely in-between caregivers. The list of values: 1) I am a doctor, interested primarily in your health and quality of life. 2) I am a Christian who does not believe in the inerrancy of the Bible but does attempt to follow Jesus’ teachings. 3) I will attempt to describe technical aspects of your health so that you may understand your condition and make the ultimate decision regarding treatment. 4) However, I AM willing to lie to you if I think it is in your best interests. These are extreme cases in which I generally will not inform you of a terminal illness if I think that your quality of life is better served by not knowing the true nature of your disease.” However, then no deception is going to go unprobed, deception will be a useless tool, and patients who are healthy are going to have to wonder about their condition…plus we’re going to need more lawyers to read and write this crap, and who wants that.
We can’t very well inform people that we’re trying to do what’s best for them without letting them know we’re taking something from them, ruining our coveted consequence. We can’t slide the printout under the door, it makes us have to do a new one.
Bah. It’s ok, I’ll trust you. The whole computer-thing seems right and as long as the end result is the good of my health, I’ll mind the deception, but not too much. It’s my kids that matter anyway, those are the ones I’m leaving behind. Be good to them, won’t you? By the way, what is ‘good’ anyway? You knew I was going to ask, didn’t you.

OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSE OF THIS DISCUSSION
The concept of a thinking computer is obviously not mine. I’ve picked it up in about 15 different places, and it seems dissatisfactory to cite it to anyone specifically; however, Kary Mullis is the most recent source. For me, it more adequately satisfies the question of choice, within a calculation, than the question “If God knows all things, is there choice?” Also, “I mind, but not too much” is a quote from Aristotle’s will. I assume he’d mind me butchering his sentiment a little bit, but again, not by too much. Also, no lawyers were harmed in the making of this essay. I do not have a particular problem with lawyers, they just present more problems regarding consent than I have space for (seeing as I was very direct and to the point, cut all the fat from this essay, so to speak); plus you are married to one.

Replies: 3 comments

Original feedback mechanisms DID NOT involve a central processing system, nor was the fast processing of information a requirement at the time.

Posted by dAN @ 12/15/2003 11:28 PM EST

too much mincing for me, dAN. If that is your desired response please elaborate.

Neural arcs, invertebrate or vertebrate, are associated with some sort of pathway that was generally central to the body.

Fast processing has always been an issue. Even hemichordate neural systems required fast responses for feeding most efficiently on material floating through the ocean.

Posted by jER @ 12/24/2003 01:47 AM EST

this is the wrong place for that comment =D

Posted by Rayne @ 12/31/2003 02:37 PM EST