Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Heart of Men?

A Special Halloween post:

No, not the Shadow - try Selmer Bringsjord, cognitive scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Although he admits it is 'creepy,' he is working on what is evil and how to formally define it. According to the article in Scientific American, Bringsjord says that to be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others:

"Bringsjord's research builds on earlier definitions put forth by San Diego State University philosophy professor J. Angelo Corlett as well as the late sociopolitical philosophers and psychologists, Joel Feinberg and Erich Fromm, but most significantly by psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck in his 1983 book, People of the Lie, The Hope for Healing Human Evil. After reading Peck's tome about clinically evil people, 'I thought it would be interesting to come up with formal structures that define evil,' Bringsjord says, 'and, ultimately, to create a purely evil character the way a creative writer would.' " His team has developed a computer representation of evil, a character called "E."

Peck described evil as "anti-love"and suggested that one of the dangers of studying evil that one may become tainted by it.

"Bringsjord acknowledges that the endeavor to create pure evil, even in a software program, does raise ethical questions, such as, how researchers could control an artificially intelligent character like E if "he" was placed in a virtual world such as Second Life, a Web-based program that allows people to create digital representations of themselves and have those avatars interact in a number of different ways.

'I wouldn't release E or anything like it, even in purely virtual environments, without engineered safeguards,' Bringsjord says. These safeguards would be a set of ethics written into the software, something akin to author Isaac Asimov's 'Three Laws of Robotics' that prevent a robot from harming humans, requires a robot to obey humans, and instructs a robot to protect itself—as long as that does not violate either or both of the first two laws.

'Because I have a lot of faith in this approach,' he says, 'E will be controlled.' "

If only the same could be said for everyday encounters with evil -- Sounds a like a great topic for a podcast.

The whole article in Scientific American can be accessed here.

Some bioethics stories of note this past week....

For you trekkies, could this be Data version 1.3? -
Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, spends a lot of time in Second Life, but not for recreation or entertainment -- he and his team at RPI (RPI) are the creators of synthetic agent Edd Hifeng, who they have endowed with a limited ability to converse and reason.

See the rest of the article here.

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Do difficult times call for deep brain stimulation?

Brain-stimulation devices for treating depression have faced unexpected setbacks. To serve the 40 million or so sufferers who fail to respond to antidepressant drugs, a few companies have tried to treat the disorder with electronic implants and electromagnets. These therapies, however, have stumbled en route to the doctor's office.

To take a crack at those intractable cases, experiments exploring five device therapies will start this year. In total, nine different technologies are now under investigation in at least 27 human trials.

Full story here.

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A Superhighway to Bliss

JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana.

But she did it by having a stroke.

On Dec. 10, 1996, Dr. Taylor, then 37, woke up in her apartment near Boston with a piercing pain behind her eye. A blood vessel in her brain had popped. Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.

Access the rest of the story here.

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Concerns about carbon nanotubes as carcinogenic

Nanotechnology experts are calling for prompt government action to ensure that carbon nanotubes are properly regulated, after researchers discovered that some carbon nanotubes can cause precancerous growths in the same way that asbestos does.

Researchers led by Ken Donaldson of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Inflammation Research, UK, found that in mice, long, straight, multi-walled carbon nanotubes can cause the same kind of damage as that inflicted by asbestos fibres when they are injected into
the lung's outer lining, called the mesothelium.

Full article accessible here.

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How Our Brains are Wired for Belief

From the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, transcripts from a discussion about how recent advances in neuroscience and brain-imaging technology have offered researchers a look into the physiology of religious experiences. The whole article and transcripts accessible here.