The Cryonics Dilemma (0)

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(Introduction and Index)

Note: The hope is that this series will be edited and updated in response to reader’s comments and exposure to more of the relevant literature. So if you have any suggestions, please make them in the comments section.

To freeze oneself or not to freeze oneself? That is the question.

In this post, I’ll take a closer look at the "cryonics dilemma", mapping out the basic contours of the decision-problem faced by anyone thinking about undergoing cryopreservation. This exercise will have two main benefits. First, it will allow us to confront some of the complex, and perhaps neglected, features of the decision. And second, the mapping exercise will provide a framework into which the subsequent ethical arguments can be placed.

Before we get down to serious business, it’s worth dealing with a terminological issue at the outset. As you will have noticed, I have titled this post the “Cryonics Dilemma” and have also structured the post and the series around a dilemmatic question: should we freeze ourselves or not? But this may not be the right way to go. To me, the term “dilemma” denotes a decision-making problem in which one has two choices which lead to two morally equal outcomes — the novel/movie Sophie’s Choice provides a classic example of this.

The thing is, the cryonics decision problem may not have these key features. The outcomes may not be morally equal, and the choices may not be limited to two. Thus, it might be best not to call this a dilemma. We could, perhaps, call it an false-dilemma: something that initially appears dilemmatic but, on closer inspection, is not. But that has other unfortunate connotations, particularly in that it might lead one to trivialise the ethical dimensions of the decision, which is something we want to avoid doing at the outset. The term “the cryonics decision problem” might be the most descriptive and accurate in this context, but it lacks punchiness. So, I’ve stuck with “cryonics dilemma” and added these few cautionary words.


1. Some Elementary Decision Theory
For the purposes of this entry, and for the rest of the series too, we will be analysing the decision to undergo cryopreservation with the tools of (elementary) decision theory. Consequently, we will need to be familiar with some of the key concepts in decision theory. I'll discuss them here. Some readers might be familiar with these concepts already, they advised to skip to the next section.

Decision theory provides us with various tools for understanding, predicting and guiding decisions. The predictive powers (or lack thereof) of decision theory are irrelevant in this series. We are not concerned with predicting whether or not people will undergo cryopreservation; we are solely concerned with working out whether they ought to do so. Hence, we will be looking at the decision from the perspective normative decision theory. To do this, we need to look at two things: (i) the tools for formally modelling a decision problem and (ii) the normative axioms or assumptions that guide decision-making.

When modelling decisions, decision theorists typically break them down into four elements: agents, actions, states and outcomes. An agent is the person or entity that makes the decision. An action is a choice (i.e. sequence of bodily movements) that an agent can actually make. A state is any feature of the world that causally independent of the agent’s actions, but which may affect the outcome of the decision. And an outcome is…well, an outcome is an outcome: it is a possible state of the world after a decision has been made.

One neat tool that decision theorists often use when analysing decision problems is that of the decision tree. This is a diagram that effectively and succinctly illustrates the four elements of a decision problem. Consider the example below. There is a node, which represents a decision point; two branches, which represent the two actions available to the agent; and two outcomes at the end of these branches.

There are other ways of representing decision problems — the decision matrix being the main one — but I’ll stick with the decision tree here. One reason I do so is because the decision tree can capture the sequential nature of some decision problems -- i.e. the fact that first you make one decision, which leads to another and so on -- more effectively than the matrix. Also, a decision tree handles probabilistic decisions more effectively (at least in my opinion) than a matrix. If a decision has an uncertain outcome, this can be represented by inserting a new decision node at the end of the relevant branch and by allowing a special agent (Nature) to roll the dice and choose the outcomes according to their respective probabilities. You can think of this as nature selecting the “state” that the world is going to be in. As below.

In addition to all these tools for formally modelling a decision problem, we need to introduce some normative axioms that will help us to “solve” the decision problem. If you ever read the literature on decision theory, you’ll find that there are quite a number of suggested axioms. I’m going to keep things simple here and focus on one key axiom, namely: people ought to choose the action that leads to the (morally) best outcome. Hence, our goal in analysing the cryonics dilemma will be to work out which decision leads to the morally best outcome.

One might object that this needlessly biases our analysis in favour of consequentialism. If the purpose of this series is to examine the ethics of cryonics, it should be open to all ethical theories, be they consequentialist or otherwise. I basically agree with this criticism, but I also tend to think — like Parfit and Ord — that the three dominant strands in ethical theory (consequentialism, deontologism and virtue ethics) can be subsumed under a common framework. Thus, I think it is possible — perhaps on a strained interpretation of consequentialism — to incorporate some of the concerns of deontologists and virtue ethicists. So that when we look at the morally best outcomes in this series, we will consider effects that decisions might have on a person’s character, and on the general rules/duties that we wish people to follow.


2. An Attempt to model the Cryonics Dilemma
Now that we have outlined the key elements of normative decision theory, we can make a first pass at modelling the cryonics dilemma. On the face of it, the cryonics dilemma seems to confront the agent with a simple binary choice: (i) freeze yourself and (ii) do not freeze yourself. Furthermore, there would appear to be two obvious outcomes to these choice: (a) you are resuscitated and live an extended life ("Life") or (ii) you die ("Death"). Thus, we might be tempted to construct the following decision tree.

This is wrong for all sorts of reasons. For starters, the way in which the outcomes are placed at the end of the respective branches is hugely misleading. Obviously, if you freeze yourself, you do not necessarily live, it’s a possibility sure, but one that needs to represented in a probabilistic fashion. In other words, we need to include Nature in this decision tree. Nature will role a dice and determine whether the cryopreservation will have its intended aim or not.

Another problem with this diagram is that it may unnecessarily limit the choices available to the agent. Assuming, for sake of argument, that the ultimately goal is for the agent to extend their life, there may be other ways to do this. In particular, there may be other ways of preserving one’s body with the hope of future resuscitation. Reader gwern pointed out to me that plastination or chemical preservation may be a distinct possibility, one that might even have a higher probability of success than cryopreservation.

While I accept that there may be other choices worth considering in the model, I will not include them in my analysis. I do so for a simple reason: this series is intended to discuss the ethics of self-preservation and resuscitation, not the respective merits of the different forms of preservation and resuscitation. Cryonics is simply chosen as the most widely-known example of such a technology.

So, I’ll simply correct the decision tree here by including Nature as a decision-maker. Nature chooses successful resuscitation with probability p and no resuscitation with probability 1 - p. As follows:

Have we nailed it now? Clearly not. For one thing, we haven’t included the actual probabilities. We’ll talk about that later. More important here is the fact that the possible outcomes arising after the decision not to freeze oneself are underspecified. Clearly, one will die (unless some other form of life extension is available) but to limit the outcomes to death alone is misleading. As many of the anti-cryonics arguments point out, one could do other morally valuable things after by freezing oneself that would not be possible by choosing to freeze oneself. Thus, we need to alter the model to include post-not-freezing choices. I’ll include two here: (a) one does nothing morally valuable (that could not also be done by someone choosing to undergo cryopreservation), and so dies (Death); or (b) one chooses to do something morally valuable (that could not have been done by someone choosing to undergo cryopreservation), which creates a morally valuable outcome, but also leads to one’s death. Since the possibly morally valuable outcome is a variable in this model, I’ll simply label it “Opportunity Cost” and fill it in with appropriate examples when they arise.

So here is the, for now final, model of the cryonics “dilemma”:

3. Measuring the outcomes
Now that we have our model, we can move on and consider how to solve the decision problem. To do that, we need to follow our normative principle: choose the action that leads to the morally best outcome. But how do we know, and measure, what is best outcome?

Adjudicating which outcome is best is a long-standing thorn in the side of the decision theorist. Basically, the goal is to work out which outcomes we (individually or collectively) prefer. The problem is figuring out how to measure our preferred outcomes. Numbers of some sort are needed here in order to take advantage of the mathematical elements of decision theory, but there is a great danger that any numbers we do attach to an outcome end up being erroneous or, worse, misleading.

There are two basic approaches to this measurement problem. One is to use ordinal rankings to adjudicate between outcomes; the other is to attach cardinal values to outcomes.

Constructing an ordinal ranking is a very straightforward process. It simply requires us to state the order in which we prefer one outcome to another. So, in the case of the cryonics dilemma, we would probably say, ceteris paribus, that death is worse than life, i.e. that given a choice we would prefer to live than to die. Once we have that ranking in place, we can attach a number to the respective outcomes, largely for convenience and not for mathematical precision. Thus, assuming the higher the number the better the outcome, we can say that death garners a “0” and life is a “1”, and since “1” is better than “0”, we should choose the option that leads to "1", over the option that leads to "0".

The problem with using an ordinal ranking is twofold. First, it doesn’t allow us to say “by how much” one outcome is preferred to another. Looking purely at the numbers in my ordinal ranking, one might get the misleading impression that life is merely one unit better than death. Many people would dispute that. They might say that life is 100 times better than death, or maybe even more, who knows. The point is that the ordinal ranking simply doesn’t allow us to say anything about the “distance” between our preferences even though we would like to.

The second problem is more serious and flows from the first. It is that the ordinal ranking doesn’t allow us to incorporate any probabilistic calculations into our resolution of the decision problem. But this is precisely what we need to do if we are to successful resolve the cryonics dilemma. After all, it is far from certain that one will be successfully resuscitated in the future if one signs up for cryonics. Indeed, as others have pointed out, the probability of resuscitation is going to be determined by something akin to the Drake equation. Over on his website, gwern suggests that the probability of resuscitation is found by multiplying the following (presumably independent) probabilities:

The upshot of this is that in order to figure out the value of undergoing cryopreservation, we will need to take the value of the desired outcome (continued life in the future) and discount it (i.e. multiply it) by the probability of resuscitation. This will give us the expected value of the decision to undergo preservation.

We will then need to compare that expected value with the expected value of the other outcomes, i.e. death and opportunity cost. We might assume that these outcomes are not affected by probabilities since one is definitely going to die (p = 1) and one is in complete control of whether or not one achieves the opportunity cost outcome. But this might not be wise since whether one achieves the opportunity cost might be dependent on a variety of probabilistic factors such as the probability of suffering from weakness of the will and so on.

In any event, if we are to calculate the relevant expected values, and compare them, then we need to adopt a cardinal scale to measure each of the respective outcomes (life, death, and opportunity cost). This scale must represent the real "distances" between the outcomes.

It might be surprisingly difficult to do this. One easy-to-adopt cardinal measurement of the respective outcomes would be “number of extra life years”, however, this could run into problems. Leaving aside the fact that figuring out the likely number of extra life years could itself be difficult, it might also be the case that the value of the opportunity cost outcome cannot be measured in terms of life years. One might also object that the moral complexity of the respective outcomes is missed with such a simple metric.

This leads to conclusion that there might be no way to provide good cardinal measures for the outcomes. But I don’t see this as being a fatal flaw in the decision theoretic model of the cryonics dilemma. I think we can probably muddle along with qualitative evaluations of the outcomes, and, if needs be, attach some reasonable, albeit, conservative estimates to them. For instance, we might say that although we don’t know exactly how much better life is to death, it is at least five times better. As long as we are aware of the limitations involved in these kinds of figures, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.


4. Conclusion
That brings us to the end of this post. To sum up, the basic tools of decision theory can be applied to the cryonics dilemma. When they are, we can see that the “dilemma” is actually reasonably complex. It is a decision problem involving at least two possible choices and three possible outcomes (continued life, death and opportunity cost). A simple normative parsing of the problem would admonish us to pick whichever choice led to the morally best outcome, but figuring out which outcome is morally best can be tricky due to the lack of a good cardinal measure.

Book Recommendations ♯3: The Art of Strategy

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Game theory is something that has long fascinated me. I suspect there are several reasons for this, two of which spring readily to mind. The first is that the central ideas of game theory are often presented in story-based form. Take the classic prisoners’ dilemma for example. We are introduced to a cast of characters (two prisoners), we are told about some sequence of events in their lives (the crime and subsequent arrest), and how these events force them make strategic decisions (the dilemma). The fact that game theory has room for such stories makes it interesting and creative. The second reason I like game theory is its use of formal models. The stories are the bait, they’re what lure you in initially; the formal models are the hook, they’re what keep you there for the long term. Learning the skills of formal modelling is something that is useful in a number of domains.

For all its fascinating features, game theory can be daunting to the uninitiated. Pick up a standard textbook on game theory, and you are likely to see a bewildering array of symbols, mathematical models, charts, decision trees, and other mathematical paraphernalia. Since math phobia is so common, that’s likely to scare off a lot of people. That’s where today’s book recommendation comes in. The Art of Strategy by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff provides the most comprehensive, reader-friendly introduction to game theory there is. Certainly other introductory books, aimed at a popular audience, exist, but none of the others I have read — and I have read several — come close to this one.

What Dixit and Nalebuff manage to do in this 400-plus page volume is to be commended. They tell you why game theory is interesting, they cover all the basic concepts of game theory (the nature of strategic interactions, simple modeling of such interactions, the Nash equilibrium concept and mixed strategies), and they provide decent introductions to several of the most interesting applications of game theory (voting, auctions, bargaining, mechanism design). They do this by using interesting examples — both real and fictional — and with a minimal amount of math.

Now, if you want to get more serious about game theory, you’ll have to go elsewhere, but this is definitely a good place to begin. If I have a complaint, it has to do with the general authorial tone that is present throughout the book. It’s hard to put my finger on it exactly, but it feels like the authors are being a little bit too self-satisfied, smug and all-knowing in their explanatory style. As a result, I find they talk down to the reader and make things out to be more simplistic than they really are. That said, I’m willing to tolerate this stylistic foible on the grounds that the content is still interesting, and I definitely think you'll learn a lot by reading this book.

If you want to step up from this book, I'd recommend Dixit's textbook Games of Strategy. I think it's the most straightforward textbook level treatment of the topic, although it's not my personal favourite. I'll talk about that some other time.

Neuroscience-based Mind-Reading in the Law (Part Two)

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An image from an fMRI-based mind-reading
experiment performed by Miyawaki et al in 2008

(Part One)

This is the second part in a short series on neuroscience-based mind-reading in the law. The series works off the article “What will be the limits of neuroscience-based mind-reading in the law?” by Murphy and Greely, which appears in The Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics.

In part one, we looked at some of the basic arguments in favour of using neuroscience-based mind-reading in the legal context, as well as the problems confronting such technologies. In this part, we will take it for granted that the technologies could deliver on their promises and consider whether they would actually have an important impact on the way in which the legal system works.

As Murphy and Greely note at the outset, the legal system seems, at first glance, like the ideal place for such technologies to be deployed. For starters, as pointed out in part one, the legal system is one place in which people might have an incentive to mislead us about the true state of their mind and, hence, it is one place in which traditional mind-reading techniques might be less reliable. Furthermore, in the legal system, the content and quality of a person’s thought is often of great importance.

Murphy and Greely give three examples of this. In the realm of personal injuries law, people can recover damages for experiencing “pain”. But pain is, of course, a mental state, one that those wishing to claim damages might be inclined to “fake”. So working out whether they really are in pain could be important. In the criminal law, a person’s guilt or innocence is often contingent upon their state of mind at a particular historical moment. So having some means for working out that state of mind could be beneficial. Finally, legal decision-making is best when it is free of bias, but bias is itself part of person’s mental framework. If we could use mind-reading to filter out biased jury members or biased judges, we could improve the quality of legal decision-making.

Despite the superficial appeal of these three examples, Murphy and Greely are keen to argue that the usefulness of mind-reading in the law is not as straightforward as it initially appears. Although mental states feature prominently in the law, the actual subjective state of mind of a individual litigant or defendant’s is not always that important. Sticking to their trinitarian ethos, Murphy and Greely offer three examples of this. I’ll discuss each in turn.


1. The Mental Aspect of Criminal Liability
There is a standard formula for criminal liability. Every offence is defined in such a way that it consists of a number of “elements”. These elements fall into two general categories: (i) external elements (actus reus elements) and (ii) fault elements (mens rea elements). In order to held criminally liable, the defendant in a criminal trial must satisfy both the external and fault elements of the offence. The fault elements are typically defined in terms of someone’s mental state, e.g. what did they intend or believe at the time of the offence.

The offence of murder provides an illustration of this. The external element of murder is defined (roughly) as “the death of one (or more) persons caused by the actions of another”, whereas the fault element is defined (roughly) as “the intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm”.

At first glance, it might seem like mind-reading could play an important role in determining whether someone was criminally liable for murder. Although we noted in part one that there are problems associated with historical mind-reading, we are not going to be shackled by technological limitations here. Let’s speculate that, in the future, every human being is fitted, at birth, with a mind-reading device that records their brain states at every moment of their lives. This would effectively provide the brain equivalent of CCTV footage. If we had such a technology, and if we knew which mental states were correlated with which neural states, we could check to see whether, at the relevant time, the defendant actually intended to kill or cause grievous bodily harm. Hence, we could establish their liability for murder.

But this is not the end of it. Whilst knowing that someone intended to kill at a historical moment might be sufficient for a determination of criminal liability, it is not necessary for such a determination. One thing that has long been noted by criminal courts is that the subjective content of a person’s intentions might not be to kill, but nevertheless their subjectively intended action might have the obvious (or virtually certain) consequence of causing death. For instance, someone might plant a bomb on plane with the subjective intent of claiming an insurance payout, while lacking the intent to kill all the passengers. Still, the death of the passengers is a virtually certain consequence of their actions. Are we really going to say that such a person is not guilty of murder?

Most people think not. And criminal courts have developed doctrines of oblique (or indirect) intent to cover exactly these kinds of scenarios. As a result, people can be held liable for murder, despite not having the subjective intent to kill or cause GBH. What’s more, this is just the situation in relation to murder. In other cases, the mental element might be defined in terms of “recklessness”, and working out whether someone has been “reckless” typically involves considering the objective reasonableness of their state of mind, not just their actual state of mind. In still other cases — so-called strict liability cases — there is no fault element that needs to be proved.

While there are disputes about the moral propriety of how the criminal law determines liability, these examples illustrate how knowing what someone’s subjective state of mind was at a historical moment is not always that important in the criminal law. Oftentimes what we think an objectively reasonable state of mind would have been is what really matters.


2. Contract Law - Saying versus Thinking
This situation is replicated in other areas of law. Murphy and Greely next use the example of contract law. In order to create a legally enforceable contract, two or more parties must reach an agreement as to the terms and conditions upon which a good or service is to be bought and sold. To reach an agreement, there must be a “meeting of minds” between the two parties. That is to say, one party's mental picture or understanding of the agreement must match-up with the other's.

Again, given this description of the doctrine, one might think that mind-reading technologies could play an important role in determining whether or not a valid contract has been formed. But, once again, this is not quite true. The actual legal test for agreement depends, almost entirely, on objective factors. From what the parties said and did, does it seem like they reached an agreement? Would an objectively reasonable bystander think they had reached an agreement? And so on. The answer to these questions is not dependent on knowing the subjective states of mind of the parties. Thus, the potential for mind-reading technologies to help might be quite limited.

That said, Murphy and Greely are less dismissive of mind-reading in this context. As they point out, a reliable neuroscience-based mind-reading technology might still have an important role to play in contract law. For one thing, a reading of a person’s neural states at the moment when the alleged contract was formed might be a piece of evidence that goes towards determining whether the parties thought they had reached a deal. For another thing, it may be that the reliance on objective factors was just a way for the law to get around the practical difficulty of establishing what someone really thought. If mind-reading technologies remove this practical difficulty, then the law might revert to a largely subjective test of agreement. Finally, it may be that mind-reading could play an important role in contract negotiation, helping the parties to work out what one another really want and thus allowing them to craft an appropriate deal.


3. Tort Law - Where the mind may not matter at all
Tort law is complex. Basically, it provides a legal mechanism for a person (call them A) to claim damages from another person or persons (call them B), in the event that A is injured or harmed in some way. That’s the basic idea, but, as Murphy and Greely point out, there are different kinds of tort and each one has a different test for liability. Again, three examples are discussed.

First, there are such things as “intentional torts”, which require proof of intent to perform the tortious act on the part of B. The example the authors give is the tort of trespassing on another person’s property. In order to be liable for this, you must intend to be on another person’s property without their consent. A mind-reading device might have some utility here in proving whether or not you have the requisite intent.

Second, there are “negligent torts”. In these cases — which are the most common — B must owe A a duty of care, must have failed to live up to the standard of care owed to A, and A’s injury must have been reasonably foreseeable by B. In these cases, the state of mind of B counts for relatively little, objective factors count for far more.

Third, there are “strict liability torts”. In these cases, damages can be recovered from the mere fact that some injury or harm has been incurred, irrespective of B’s intent or state of mind with respect to that injury or harm. A classic example would be a product liability tort where a manufacturer can be held liable for injuries caused to a purchaser of their product even without proof of intent or, indeed, negligence.

One area in which mind-reading might become important in tort law is in determining the level of damages to be awarded. As noted at the start of this post, subjective states of mind, such as whether a person is experiencing pain or not, can be relevant here. Also, how much a defendant (like B) has to pay out in damages might depend on their state of mind. Punitive damages, which go beyond mere compensation for injury caused, are sometimes awarded if it can be proved that the defendant acted with “malice, oppression or fraud”.


4. Other potential legal implications of mind-reading
By peering beneath the surface of these three areas of law — crime, contract, and torts — we see how, despite initial appearances, neuroscience-based mind-reading might have relatively little to offer to the legal system. All three of these examples worked with the assumption that mind-reading might be used to assist legal decision-makers when making determinations of liability. In other words, they assumed that the legal system might like to support the use of mind-reading technologies. But of course the legal system may also wish to hinder or prevent the use mind-reading technologies, especially if these technologies impact upon the legal rights of participants in the legal system.

For example, a court might ban the use of neuroscience-based mind-reading evidence on the grounds that it would be unfairly prejudicial. The justification for this ban would be helped by the fact that some studies suggest that people are irrationally biased in favour of explanations that make use of neuroscience (Weisberg et al, 2008). Similarly, the results of a neuroscience-based mind-reading test might be banned on the grounds that they violated the privilege against self-incrimination. This would only apply if the test was not undertaken voluntarily and, to be honest, I reckon it’s pretty hard to administer an fMRI or EEG-based test to a non-compliant subject (definitely in the case of fMRI).

While I think these kinds of concerns have a legitimate basis -- and, indeed, might be used to support a more general right to cognitive liberty (or privacy) -- I sometimes worry about playing up these kinds of concerns. It seems to me that in worrying about these kinds of implications, far too much credibility is given to what is, at present, a nascent technology.

Anyway, I shall leave it there for now. I’ve skipped over one section of Murphy and Greely’s article which deals with standards of proof within the law. I hope to look at this in more detail at a later stage. Still, despite this omission, I hope I’ve given a reasonable overview and introduction to the topic.

Neuroscience-based Mind-Reading in the Law (Part One)

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An image from an fMRI-based mind-reading
experiment performed by Miyawaki et al in 2008

The philosophical, scientific and legal implications of neuroscience-based mind-reading technologies has actually preoccupied me for quite some time in my “professional” life. In fact, I’ve written a couple of peer-reviewed articles about it. That said, I don’t think my own writing about the topic has been as insightful or useful as it might have been. Consequently, I thought I might start to explore some of the issues associated with it on the blog since, invariably, the more blog posts I write about something the clearer my own thinking becomes.

I’ll start off by looking at an article by Emily Murphy and Henry Greely (both of Stanford, I believe) entitled “What will be the limits of neuroscience-based mindreading in the law?”. The article appears in The Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics - which is a nice fat collection of introductory articles on all things neuroethics-y. The article provides a decent overview of the basic issues so it’s a good place to start.

Although the article itself is relatively short (as are most contributions to these Oxford handbooks), I’m going to take a couple of posts to discuss it. This is so as to really analyse some of Murphy and Greely’s more enthymematic moments. In this entry, I’ll look at the basic pro-neuroscience-based mindreading argument (what I call the NMRA) and then consider some of the problems it faces. In the next post, I’ll look at what Murphy and Greely have to say about the potential impact of mindreading on the law.

An important fact, worth flagging at the outset, is that we all engage in mind-reading everyday. Whenever I interact with another human being, I implicitly rely on an ability to decode what they are thinking by interpreting their speech, gestures and other external movements. This capacity for mind-reading is crucial to everyday life, so crucial in fact that those who lack this skill (say, autistics and young children) are noticeable for their deficit. And yet despite its obviousness, this fact is often overlooked in discussions of mind-reading (though not by Murphy and Greely, I hasten to add).

The everyday banality of mind-reading raises interesting questions in the present context. Chief among them being: why neuroscience-based mindreading? What is it about neuroscience-based technologies (such as fMRI and EEG) that makes them particularly useful when it comes to reading minds? What advantages do they confer over the more mundane sorts of mental decoding that we engage in on an ongoing basis? Answering these questions has important repercussions for how we understand the debate surrounding neuroscience-based mind-reading.


1. The Neuroscientific Mind-Reading Argument (NMRA)
Let’s look at the first question: why are neuroscience-based technologies thought to be useful for mindreading? Many people, Murphy and Greely among them, think the answer to this question lies in the implications of mind-body physicalism. The argument appears to run as follows: the mind is ultimately reducible to (or realized by) a physical entity known as the brain; neuroscience-based technologies allow us to detect the status of this physical entity; therefore, neuroscience-based technologies allow us to read minds. QED.

Attractive as this line of reasoning may be, I think it is clearly flawed. Apart from containing some important hidden premises, the relevance of neuroscience-based technologies to mind-reading is not dependent on the truth of mind-brain physicalism, nor should one construe as being so dependent simply because one is a physicalist (as I am). All that matters for the purposes of mind-reading is that there is some more-or-less reliable link between mental events and neural events. It is this reliable link, not the reducibility of the mental to the physical, that allows us to determine mental events on the basis of neural event. As far as I can tell, such a reliable link can exist even on strong forms of mind-body dualism. After all, many dualists would agree that there is a reliable correlation between the neural and the mental.

This might seem like a pernickety point, but I think it is important: there’s no sense in limiting the appeal of neuroscience-based mind-reading unnecessarily simply because one is wedded to mind-body physicalism.

This leads me to suggest the following argument for neuroscience-based mind-reading (the NMRA):

• (1) If we wish to read someone’s mind, there must be a link between observable events and mental events, such that reliably detecting an observable event of type X will help us to determine whether someone is experiencing a mental event of type Y [mental code premise].

• (2) Every neural event X1…Xn is linked to a mental event Y1…Yn in such a way that detecting the presence of X1…Xn might allow us to know that someone is experiencing Y1…Yn.

• (3) Therefore, detecting neural events might allow us to read someone’s mind.

• (4) Neuroscience-based technologies (such as fMRI and EEG) allow us to detect neural events.

• (5) Therefore, neuroscience-based technologies might allow us to read someone’s mind.

Allow me to say a few words about this argument here. First look at premise (1). This is more complex than it might first appear. For one thing, it contains within it the assumption that mental events are distinct from observable events. This seems like a credible assumption — one of the distinguishing features of mental events is that they are, first and foremost, private. But, of course, that is not to deny that they may be linked to publicly observable events, indeed, the premise explicitly demands that some such link exists. Furthermore, the premise demands that the link be a decodable one (this is a term I’m inventing), i.e. one that allows you to determine nature of the mental event on the basis of the corresponding observable event. A decodable link need not be causal, constitutive or reductive.

Now let’s look at premise (2). This proposes that there is decodable link between neural events and mental events. This premise is certainly helped by the assumption of mind-body physicalism, but as noted above it is not dependent on that assumption. Also, the premise makes no assumptions about the nature of the correspondence between mental events and neural events. Specifically, it does not stipulate that there must be a one-to-one correspondence between mental events and neural events or vice versa; it just stipulates that there must be some correspondence, this could be one-to-many or many-to-one.

This is actually an important point, one worth expanding on in a little more detail. Throughout this discussion I have spoken about the link between mental events and observable/neural events, but I have been unclear about what I mean by “mental event”. It’s probably worth clarifying this now. What I mean by “mental event” is not just an intentional state with a specific kind of content (e.g. the desire to eat ice-cream or the belief that ice-cream is good for you) but also the general category or quality of intentional state (e.g. an “unwelcome desire”, “false belief” or “malevolent intention”).

I construe the term broadly because I want to avoid implanting in the reader’s mind the belief that mind-reading requires the ability to determine the fine-grained content of person’s thoughts. While this might be ideal, oftentimes it is unnecessary. Oftentimes it is enough to know the general category or quality of mental event. For example, in the process of crime investigation, it might help the investigation to know whether a suspect is being deceptive or has a false belief, without also having to know the specific content of the deception or the belief.

Once we get beyond premise (2), I think the argument is relatively straightforward. The only concern that is worth addressing here is the claim in premise (4). Some people might argue that technologies such as fMRI or EEG do not really detect neural events at all, rather, they detect the (assumed) effects of neural events. I agree, but I’m under the impression that the link between those effects and their underlying neural causes is grounded in some pretty solid theory. The only thing I will say is that the link is a crude and imperfect one, so some important information is undoubtedly being missed.


2. Why Neuroscience-based Mind-Reading
If we accept the NMRA, we will have accepted very little. Essentially, all we will have conceded is that neuroscience technologies may help us to read other people’s minds. We won’t have accepted that neuroscience-based mind-reading is something that we ought to embrace, or ought to spend considerable resources developing. After all, I do a pretty good job reading other people’s minds by simply decoding their gestures, their words and their external behaviour. Why do I need expensive neuroscience equipment to help me in this regard? To answer that, additional arguments are needed. I’ll mention two here. The “greater accuracy” argument; and the “hard-to-fake” argument.

The first argument — unlike the NMRA itself — makes considerable concessions towards the truth of mind-body physicalism. Roughly, it maintains that neural events are somehow closer to or more representative of the underlying mental events than are the kinds of observable events we normally use to read one another’s minds. To put it another way, neural events provide more accurate information about mental events than do observable behaviours such as speech and gesture. And since we should generally prefer getting more accurate information to less accurate information, we should prefer neuroscience-based mind-reading to everyday mind-reading.

To put this in more formal terms:

• (6) In general, if our goal is to obtain information about an event or type of event, we should use the information source that is most representative of (or most accurate about) that event or type of event.

• (7) Neural events are more representative of (or more accurate about) mental events than are observable behaviours such as speech and gesture.

• (8) Therefore, if our goal is to obtain information about mental events, we should look to neural events more than observable behaviours.

I think this is a pretty weak argument. While those of a physicalist disposition will probably be more inclined to accept premise (7), I think there are good reasons for physicalists to reject it too. I think that speech and gesture are, nine times out of ten, far more accurate sources of information about a person’s mental states than are neural events. After all, that is one of the great marvels of language: it allows you to directly convey to another person what you are thinking. Now you’ll notice I said that this is true “nine times out of ten”. That’s because there are obvious cases in which speech and gesture are not good guides to what a person is thinking. This is what the hard-to-fake argument is designed to highlight.

What are the obvious cases I just alluded to? Well, they are the cases in which a person might have some inclination, desire or tendency to deceive you about the true state of their mind. In these cases, their observable behaviours will tend to mislead us or provide us with inaccurate information. These cases are particularly prevalent in the anti-terrorist or crime-investigation contexts since would-be criminals and terrorists often have strong incentive to mislead you about their true state of mind.

It should come as no surprise then to learn that these are the contexts in which neuroscience-based mind-reading are most widely touted. But why is that? The answer lies in a key assumption, namely: that neural events will be hard to fake. That is to say, a person won’t be able to control their neural events in the same way that they can control their speech and gestures, hence these events will get us closer to their true state of mind. This assumption allows us to make the following argument.

• (6) In general, if our goal is to obtain information about an event or type of event, we should use the information source that is most representative of (or most accurate about) that event or type of event.

• (9) When a person is being deceptive or has an incentive to be deceptive, neural events are likely to be more representative of (or accurate about) mental events than observable behaviours such as speech and gesture (because neural events are not as controllable as observable behaviours).

• (10) Therefore, when a person is being deceptive and our goal is to obtain about information about their mental state, we should look to neural events more than observable behaviours.

As you can see, this argument is similar to the previous one, but limits the context and provides a decent rationale for that limitation. I think this is definitely a better argument than the previous one, but it too suffers from an obvious flaw. The thing is, there’s no reason to think that neural events won’t be manipulable in the same way that speech and gesture are. Indeed, this is a something that many mind-reading tests (such as those based on EEG, or the classic polygraph test) have had to confront. Once people know how these tests work, they can often develop countermeasures that allow them to distort or corrupt the information that is being decoded by the test. At the same time, that’s not to say that countermeasures will always be easy to develop, and it may be that countermeasures are more difficult when the test is neuroscience-based. Thus, these kinds of test may still have the upper hand.


3. General Problems for Neuroscience-based Mind-reading
Now that we know some of the basic arguments in this debate, we can move on to consider the general problems that Murphy and Greely’s think affect neuroscience-based mind-reading. There are three of them.

The first is that the brain is an incredibly complex organ and so the code linking neural events to mental events is likely to be very difficult to work out. Here’s what Murphy and Greely say about this problem:

“To…associate…a particular Brain State A with a particular Mental State A, we need to be able to define both states accurately and to be confident that the detection of one indicates the presence of another…To define Brain State A in detail, though, we would need to understand the human brain and its relevant states in great detail. Such detail may well be, even in theory, impossible to obtain, both for an idealized human brain, and, for additional reasons, for any real, living human brain”

They then proceed to recite some interesting facts about the size of the brain, the number of neurons and other cells it contains, the number of connections between these neurons and the difference between idealised brains and the brains of actual people. While I accept all these points about complexity, I find the premise that motivates their presentation to be flawed. Murphy and Greely assume that we need a very fine-grained code, one that allows us to determine specific mental content from brain states. As I pointed out above, this assumption is questionable: sometimes a far more coarse-grained code will be enough (they make some gestures towards this argument later in the article, but they are not explicit enough for my liking). On these occasions, the complexity of the brain may be less of an impediment to mind-reading.

The second problem discussed by Murphy and Greely is that of neural plasticity. By neural plasticity they mean two things: (i) the fact that people’s brains can change over the course of their own lifetimes in such a way that different anatomical regions can acquire different functions; and (ii) the fact that the functional anatomy of different people’s brains can be different. That both forms of plasticity seem to exist creates many problems for proponents of neuroscience-based mind-reading. The main one being that the experimental evidence supporting (some) versions of the technology rely on correlations between the mental states and neural activity of particular individuals on particular days.

The third problem is something the authors call “the time travel problem”. It is the fact that, especially in the legal context, when we engage in mind-reading we typically don’t want to know what someone is thinking right now, instead we want to know what they were thinking at a historical moment (e.g. the time when they committed a crime, or signed a contract, or something along these lines). Murphy and Greely acknowledge that this problem might be circumvented if all we wish to do is figure out whether someone is currently lying about the state of their mind in the past, but they add that the ability to reliably distinguish a presently deceptive state from a non-deceptive state depends on how accurate someone’s present memories of their past mental states actually is. And, of course, present memories of the past may not be accurate at all.

Okay, so that brings us to the end of this post. As we have seen, the basic argument in favour of neuroscience-based mind reading (the NMRA) is more complex and resilient that we might first have thought: it does not rely on the truth of mind-body physicalism, and may not demand fine-grained mind-reading. We also saw how neuroscience-based mind reading is only likely to be useful in contexts where deception is a major problem. Finally, we looked at three general problems facing this kind of mind-reading. In the next post, we will consider how mind-reading might impact upon the law.

Update

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Sorry for the delay in getting new posts up. I've been annoyingly busy in the real world over the past couple of weeks, a situation that has not been helped by some impromptu travelling. I should get some new stuff up over the weekend, including the first proper installment in the "Should we freeze ourselves?" series.

In the meantime, some of you might be interested in seeing a paper that I recently had published (Firstview) in the journal Religious Studies. It might just be the computer I'm using, but I think it's available for free at the moment. If not, you can always download a longer uncorrected version on my personal webpage (which also features links to some other stuff I've written).

Should we freeze ourselves? (Index and Introduction)

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This post serves as both an index and introduction to my new series posts on the ethics of cryogenic suspension. Cryonic suspension, for the purposes of this series can be defined in the following manner:

Cryonic suspension: Is the process or technology through which a mature human body (or some part thereof, typically the brain or head) is frozen and stored in the hope that it will be revived at a future date.

Definitions are always imperfect — somebody will probably argue that I’ve left something out of the above — but I think this one can be accepted (as a stipulation if need be) since it is the kind of cryonic suspension mentioned therein that is of concern in this series. The series explores the ethical arguments arising from the question: should we have ourselves cryogenically suspended?


1. The Structure of the Series
This series structured in an unusual manner, at least in comparison to other series on this blog. For starters, each post in the series deals with one — and only one — argument for or against cryonic suspension. Typically, I’d cover several arguments in one post, but I decided this more fragmented approach afforded some advantages.

Primarily, it gave me an excuse to avoid writing lengthy introductions to each post reviewing key parts of the preceding discussion. Although I usually enjoy writing such introductions, they can become tiresome. In addition to this, the fragmented format allows for easy revision and expansion of the series. Again, this is unlike my previous efforts. Why so? Well, primarily because I found the academic literature on the ethics of cryogenics to be rather sparse. Indeed, I only managed to locate one academic article on this topic (as well as some internet resources):

David Shaw, “Cryoethics: Seeking Life After Death” (2009) Bioethics, 23(9): 515-521

So I’m going to base my initial draft of the series on Shaw’s article, along with my own elaborations thereof. But I’m hoping that by publishing the series here, I might be presented with some additional resources to consider and arguments to address. That way, I can expand on what I initially say and build a fairly comprehensive database of arguments for and against cryonic suspension.

My goal is to write one entry per week in this series. I’m hoping this is a reasonable and attainable goal. I haven’t always been the best at completing the series I start — indeed, regular readers may note that I’ve essentially abandoned the custom of announcing series in advance of writing them, preferring now to cobble series together from previously written material — but I feel more confident about completing this particular one because the workload on the individual posts should be relatively low.


2. Cryogenics and Disorienting Dilemmas
Why am I doing this? I think it’s worth emphasising here that I come to this issue as a non-advocate. In other words, unlike many of those writing about cryogenics on the internet (at least, unlike many of the people I have read) I’m not writing this series with the explicit aim of convincing you that you ought to have yourself cryogenically suspended. Instead, I’m writing it with the explicit aim of dispassionately analysing the arguments for and against cryogenics.

That said, I do have something of a bias when it comes to this topic. The bias is my belief in the positive role that it can play in teaching students critical thinking skills. In his book, Teaching for Critical Thinking, Stephen Brookfield says that critical thinking is a process that consists of four stages: (1) identifying the assumptions that frame our thinking and determine our actions; (2) checking out the degree to which these assumptions are accurate and valid; (3) looking at our ideas and decisions from multiple perspective; and (4) in light of all this, making informed decisions. And although we may quibble with this four-stage model, I think Brookfield’s definition captures the important elements of critical thinking. It is a skill-set which all educators should try to inculcate.

In outlining some of the techniques that teachers can use to inculcate the skills of critical thinking, Brookfield highlights (chapter 3) the potential of disorienting dilemmas. These can be defined in the following manner:

Disorienting Dilemma: Any decision-making problem (real or hypothetical) that forces you to reassess or think differently about something which you previously have taken for granted.

Such dilemmas get their name from the notion that they are so unsettling that they “diorient” you from your worldview. They are important in teaching critical thinking in that they tend to be a highly effective way in which to encourage the four-stage process outlined above. Strictly speaking, they need not always be dilemmas since that term connotes a decision-making problem in which there are two possible courses of action. They could be trilemmas, or quadrilemmas or whatever. In the case of cryogenics there is a dilemma to contend with: should you freeze yourself or not? (We'll talk about the precise nature of that dilemma in more detail in the first proper entry of the series).

It is my contention that this dilemma can be genuinely disorienting. A proper consideration of the issues that bear upon it, will force you to confront assumptions of fact and value. What’s more, it will force you to think seriously about the degree of confidence that you place in your moral and factual beliefs.

It is thus because of its potential to serve as a disorienting dilemma, and not because of some desire for eternal or prolonged life, that I am enthusiastic about analysing the case for cryogenic suspension. This might seem slightly odd to cryo-enthusiasts, but it’s how I feel about it.


3. The Index Proper
I think there’s been quite enough stage-setting in this post, it’s time to get on with the main event: the index to the series itself. As I said above, in this first draft of the series, I’m going to be using David Shaw’s article on cryoethics as my basic guide to the topic. And since Shaw’s article looks solely at the ethics of cryonics, I will avoid, for the time being at least, considering the technological feasibility of cryonics. I may consider this at some future point, but such an eventuality is unlikely for two main reasons: (i) it’s well outside my own area of expertise and (ii) as we shall see, the technological feasibility of cryonics does not need to be particularly strong for the main arguments to work.

There is one complication surrounding the term “ethics” that is worth mentioning here. In his article, Shaw draws a distinction between prudential and ethical arguments. A prudential argument being one that works from the premise that every person acts in accordance with (their perception) of their own self-interest, and a moral argument being one that works from some premise based on an objective value (e.g. “we ought to maximise human welfare”). If I were in a metaethical mood, I might challenge that distinction on various grounds, but since I’m not in that mood right now, I won’t. I will just use the phrase “the ethics of cryonics” to refer to both the moral and prudential arguments surrounding cryogenics. It might be worth bearing that in mind as you read along.

Anyway, at last, the index.


Series Index


0. The Cryonics Dilemma Considered

1. You should not freeze yourself

1.1 The Loneliness Argument
1.2 The High Cost Argument
1.3 The Opportunity Cost Argument
1.4 The Unproven Technology Argument
1.5 The Non-Physicalist Argument
1.6 The “Revival is Unlikely” Argument
1.7 The “Revival Before Cure” Argument
1.8 The "Life will be Boring" Argument
1.9 The Environmental Cost Argument
1.10 The Better Causes Argument
1.11 The Organ Donation Argument
1.12 The Death-Definition Problem
1.13 The Slippery Slope Argument

2. You Should Freeze Yourself

2.1 The Future Benefit Argument
2.2 The Time Travel Argument
2.3 The Wager Argument

Book Recommendations ♯2: Contemporary Theories of Liberalism

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(Series Index)

It’s been a slow week on the blogging front (busy on other fronts though), so the best I can do to fill the gap is to come up with another book recommendation. If you have any book recommendations you’d like to share, please do so in the comments section.

Gerald Gaus is one of my favourite political philosophers. His work on the theory of justificatory liberalism, in his 1996 book Justificatory Liberalism and his more recent magnum opus The Order of Public Reason, is provocative, original and rigorous. Admittedly, one of my chief reasons for liking his work is that his opinions seem to chime well with my own, so I’m definitely biased here. But I can only speak from the perspective of my web of beliefs and from that perspective his characterisation of the structural problems of liberal democracy, and his attempted resolution of same seems about right to me.

There are three main virtues to Gaus’s writing. First, he has a gift for conceptual clarification, rendering the often heated and fuzzy terminology of political theorists more perspicuous and stable. Second, he has gift for explanation, helping the reader to understand difficult and often diverse ideas and concepts in depth, not just in abstract. And third, he is rigorous and formal when evaluating the arguments of others and when developing his own.

All three virtues are on display in his book Contemporary Theories of Liberalism, which is today's book recommendation. It provides an excellent introduction to and survey of what Gaus calls “post-Enlightenment” theories of liberalism. This a term that deserves some unpacking. All liberal theories are, to some extent, premised on the idea that government should respect human freedom and enhance human welfare (whatever these things might be). In his opening chapter, Gaus divides such theories into two camps: the Enlightenment theories and the post-Enlightenment theories. In the first camp, there are those theories that believe the use of reason will allow us to achieve a convergence in moral and political views. Thus, all rational adults will agree upon the preferred shape and form of political organisation and the preferred content of public policy. In the second camp, there are those theories that believe human reason is unlikely to lead to a convergence in moral and political views, and that the job of political theorists is to work around these differences.

Following this opening chapter, Gaus proceeds to describe and evaluate seven different post-Enlightenment theories of liberalism. These are:

1. Berlin’s Pluralism: This is the view that values are plural, intransitive, and incommensurate. As a result, it is impossible to identify preferred forms of existence or government.

2. Hobbesian Modus Vivendi: This is the view (associated with the work of John Gray but with its origins in Hobbes) that politics is simply a matter of discovering a working compromise (modus vivendi) between the radically divergent worldviews of rational individuals.

3. Collective Reasoning Theories: This is a family of views that propose there is a distinct form of reasoning (“collective” as opposed to “private/individual”) for dealing with social coordination problems such as those inherent in the post-Enlightenment view.

4. Deliberative Democracy Theories: This is the view that the essence of a liberal democratic society is that it provides a set of processes and mechanisms for public deliberation. This view is most closely associated with the work of Jurgen Habermas.

5. Judgment Aggregation Theories: This is a family of views proposing that one way in which to solve the problem of plural values is through aggregating divergent individual votes and using the results of the aggregation as the basis for public policy. This, of course, is the essence of democracy, but it turns out there are a number of complications associated with the method of judgment aggregation.

6. Rawlsian Liberalism: This is the view that, contrary to the radical pluralists, there is a shared liberal conception of justice, which can be arrived at from different starting points. This gives rise to a unique view of the nature and purpose of public reason.

7. Justificatory Liberalism: This is Gaus’s own view. It maintains that the proper function of a liberal government is to justify its coercive policies to morally equal persons. It also proposes how this might be done.

While discussion of each of these theories is excellent, two sections of the book stood out in particular for me. The first was the careful attempt to define and tease out the implications of value pluralism in Chapter 2, and the second was the overview of judgment aggregation theories in Chapter 6. I’ve used both in some of my own writing and in my classes.

Overall, I highly recommend this book. It’s short, but not superficial; fair, but not dispassionate; and rigorous, but not dull. It would serve well as a textbook for a course in contemporary political theory and as general reading for anyone interested in the area. It allows you to see that there is some pretty interesting, and highly sophisticated work being done in political philosophy these days, work that should not be ignored.