Abstract
Our legacy of scientific nihilism raises important ethical questions about the use of neural technologies to prolong life and the creation of conscious machines. Bioethics of displacement recognizes the interconnectedness of individuals in their social, cultural, and historical contexts, so it's ready to delve into the implications of end-of-life care and the nature of death in a post-human society, tracing the common roots of philosophy, psychology, art, linguistics, and neural nets. To make things harder, people in power have reduced others to mere things across history. So, the author inquires into the psychological factors that allowed people to participate in atrocities, such as cognitive dissonance, psychological inflexibility, desire for revenge, sense of moral superiority, and obedience to authority along with leaders' psychopathic traits with a knack for Gehenna politics. Ultimately, the author reflects and ponders the complex issues surrounding death, telling the dead from the living and the creation of conscious machines to build a better future for ourselves and our creations.
TopWe Can’T Get Rid Of Our Scientific Nihilistic Legacy
The first modern realistic sci-fi novel, Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith (Lewis, 1998), originally published in 1926, was actually a romance that today echoes in bioethics. The protagonist’s loving attitude gets twister and twister before realising that his overrational Lacanian Cupid was not to protect life but to control it. A former collaborator of Lewis, Paul de Kruif, openly talked about his own work experiences again in 1962:
I was a nihilist, period. For me, the world was too full of people and animals. And having no spark of reverence for all life, I had no ethics. (Kruif, 1962, p. 39)
Although Arrowsmith was awarded a Pulitzer and Lewis became the first American to gain a Nobel Prize of Literature four years later, I think Paul de Kruif is more interesting here. Before participating in the famous novel, he was a medical researcher in the Rockefeller Foundation fired by participating (anonymously!) in the book titled Civilization originally published and edited by Harold Stearns in 1922. In this book, de Kruif described the scientific approach to disease prevention and treatment as a “mélange of religious ritual, more or less accurate folk-lore, and commercial cunning.” (Stearns, 1922, p. 455) The critique was not directed against the Rockefeller Foundation but its director Simon Flexner kicked out de Kruif the very same day he found who wrote it. De Kruif’s former boss was bitterly disappointed by the attitude of an important member of a “big, happy, harmonious family” (Henig, 2011). The neuroticism of truly bright scientists like Flexner himself and his successor the Nobel in Medicine Herbert Spencer Grasser, I mean physicians whose research has contributed to save numerous lives, also paved the road for the Rockefeller Foundation participation in the Guatemalan Tuskegee twenty four years later. The victims are still looking for justice in a blatant case of profit over the patients (Bollinger 2019). 1
Figure 1.
“Worse Than Tuskegee.” Left: The syphilitic chancre of a female psychiatric subject who was exposed to syphilis twice and after some treatment passed away. Right: Lawsuit plaintiff Frederico Ramos, age 91, sits on the porch of his son's house in San Agustín Acasaguastlán, Guatemala, Sept. 3, 2016.
The Guatemalan syphilis experiment was sponsored by the Public Health Service Venereal Disease Research Laboratory in Washington, the pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johns Hopkins University and the Rockefeller Foundation. The avoid do no harm principle was painstakingly applied (Rodriguez & García, 2013).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Wholeness: Being complete and transcending conflicts and divisions.
Cognitive Dissonance: Psychological discomfort when holding conflicting beliefs or attitudes, causing a need to justify or change behaviour.
Nihilism: The belief that life lacks inherent meaning, values, or purpose, often in a pessimistic way.
Spiritual Machine: AI that recognizes, feels, senses, or believes that there is something greater than itself that is cosmic or divine in nature.
Social Stakeholders: Individuals or groups with an interest in an organisation's decisions, including employees, customers, communities, and government.
Post-structuralism: A philosophy that critiques fixed structures of power and knowledge, emphasizing the changing nature of truth.
Conscious Machines: Advanced artificial intelligence systems that possess self-awareness and exhibit qualities of human-like awareness, potentially passing the Garland Test.
Philosophy: Epistemic displacement.
Death: The moment when the others utterly stop reflecting about you, when you’re not considered to be sharing.