1 11/2/2005

1
Brain Repair and the Near Future of Death

• James J. Hughes Ph.D.
• Author Citizen Cyborg
• Executive Director, World Transhumanist
  Association Institute for Ethics and Emerging
  Technologies
• Public Policy Studies, Trinity College, Hartford
  CT

2
Biopolitical Struggle

• Radical life extension not just scientific
  progress
• Also requires legal and cultural evolution
• From bioconservatism to transhumanism
• Human-racism vs. personhood
• Who is a citizen with a right to life? abortion,
  stem cells, great ape rights, chimeras, brain
  death
• Brain Repair will be central

3
Biopolitical Values
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From Human-racism

• Human-racism Human embodiment is the basis of
  rights-bearing
• Humans have souls or crypto-spiritual human
  dignity
• Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and
  Human Rights (UN General Assembly, 1998)
• The human genome underlies the fundamental unity
  of all members of the human family, as well as
  the recognition of their inherent dignity and
  diversity.
• Annas/Andrews Treaty human enhancement should be
  a crime against humanity

Embryonic citizens?
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to Personhood

• Is hairlessness one of the genes necessary for
  citizenship?
• Persons conscious beings, aware of themselves,
  with intents and purposes over time
• You can be human and not persons fetus, PVS,
  braindead
• You can be a person and not human great apes,
  AI, posthumans
• Legal personhood confers the right to life and
  personal continuity

6
Continuity of Personal Identity

• Human-racism identity body
• H identity memory, personality
• Thought Experiments
• Scoop out my dead brain and keep me on life
  support
• Scoop out my dead brain and replace it with
  someone elses
• Scoop out my dead brain, and grow a new one
• Who would I be legally?

7
Alcors Definition of Death

• Death irreversible loss of the structural
  information which encodes memory and personality
• Alcor Cryonics Reaching for Tomorrow

8
Schiavo and Religious Right

• Christian Right mobilizing
• Abortion
• Assisted dying
• Stem cells
• Schiavo, living wills, PVS
• Artificial reproduction
• Pope Benedict

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New BioConservative Alliances

• Religious Right
• CS Lewis The Abolition of Man
• Neoconservatives
• Fukuyama Our Posthuman Future
• Deep Ecologists, Romantic Luddites
• Aldous Huxley Brave New World
• Left-wing/Feminist Critics of Biotech
• Jeremy Rifkin Algeny
• Gena Corea The Mother Machine
• Pro-Disability Extremists
• Not Dead Yet

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Trans-humanism (H)

• 18th century rationalism and skepticism
• Dignity and worth of humanity
• Liberty, equality, democracy
• Our capacity for self-realizationthrough reason,
  without supernatural assistance

• Transhumanists are humanists who emphasize what
  we have the potential to become through reason.

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H Radical Human Rights

• Liberal democracy personhood not race, gender
  or species as base of citizenship
• Citizens have right to self-ownership,
  self-determination Control own bodies brains

John Locke 1632-1704
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Secular Bioethicists Moving To H

• Greg Pence, author Who is a Afraid of Human
  Cloning?
• Greg Stock, author of Redesigning Humans
• Religious Right (Schiavo) and Kassites
  polarizing, scaring bioethicists
• Forced to defend autonomy technology against
  religious thuggery and nonsense yuck factor
  arguments

Arthur Caplan enhancing intelligence or
changing personality or modifying our memory,
maybe that should be available to everyone as a
guarantee of equal opportunity.
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Tech Spurs Ethical Change
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Recent History of Death

• 1960s respirators, organ transplantation
• 1968 Beecher paper in JAMA arguing for whole
  brain death definition
• 1981 Presidents Commission drafts uniform model
  (whole brain) death law
• Today brain death the law in most states, most
  countries

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Unstable Compromise

• 1970s and 1980s debate
• Heart death vs.
• Whole brain vs.
• neocortical/personhood death
• Whole brain death a compromise because
• The whole brain dead would die in days
• Declaring the vegetative dead politically
  impossible

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Whole Brain Death Unravels

• Diagnostic procedures inconsistent, incoherent
• Electrical activity persists in most brain
  dead
• Shewmon 1999 Whole brain death is survivable
  indefinitely
• Maintaining Schiavos indefinitely untenable

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Just Forget Death?

• Fost, Youngner, et al. forget death - when do
  we turn off respirator and take organs
• Emanuel choice in the dying zone between PVS and
  heart death
• Self/family can choose euthanasia after permanent
  unconsciousness
• no cremation/burial until heart death
• after heart death treatment must stop

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Tech challenges permanence

• The pronouncement of death is thus an
  arbitrary (if admittedly very practical) medical
  and legal construct, which amounts to a statement
  saying in effect Your affliction has exceeded
  our current level of medical skill and we are
  currently powerless to restore you to function
  therefore we give up.
• Alcor Cryonics Reaching for Tomorrow

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Emerging Brain Repair Tech

• Tech that will be applied to brain repair
• Neuro-protective drugs
• Neuro-genesis drugs
• Neurogenic gene therapies
• Stem cells and tissue engineering
• Neural stimulation
• Neural prostheses
• Nano-neural-bots
• The accelerating convergence of all these

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NBIC Nanowiring the Brain
Neuro-vascular central nervous
recording/stimulating system Using
nanotechnology probes, Rodolfo R. Llinás, Kerry
D. Walton, Masayuki Nakao, et al.
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DNR, NBHD the Probably Dead

• Do not resuscitate (DNR) orders
• Potentially revivable, but allowed to remain dead
  in order to facilitate a dignified death
• Non-Heart Beating Donor Protocol
• Being declared dead depends not only on how
  unlikely it is you can be revived,
• But also on people not wanting to bring you back
• PVS is probabilistic diagnosis

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Brain Damaged/Dead as Missing Person

• Missing persons
• Potentially alive, but legally dead
• time
• evidence
• If they reappear
• Reimbursing those wrongly declared dead preferred
  to leaving affairs in limbo

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Search Parties for the Missing

• If advance directives and prognosis permit,
  declaration of death will wait for trial of brain
  repair
• Otherwise, they will be declared dead.
• But what if brain repair recovers 20?10 1
• For biocons, success
• For Hers, failure

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Testing for Continuity

• Below threshold, different person
• Advance directive could give body to future
  person
• Advance directives and squatters rights

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Information Loss

• How much info can be lost before we, and the law,
  consider the reconstituted mind a new person?
• Alcor on Information Loss
• ...even if today's patients do make it there, it
  is possible (and with sub-optimal suspension even
  likely) that they will wake with varying degrees
  of amnesia. In particularly bad cases, cell and
  tissue repair technology might only result in
  revival of a biological twin of the suspended
  patient.
• Alcor Cryonics Reaching for Tomorrow

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HETHR Conference

• Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights
• May 26-28, 2006
• Stanford University Law School
• Rights of transhuman persons
• uploads, cyborgs
• Rights to transhuman technology
• Life extension

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For more information on H

• World Transhumanist Associationtranshumanism.org
• Institute for Ethics and Emerging
  Technologiesieet.org
• Betterhumans.com(online magazine daily news
  feed)
• Me director_at_ieet.org