The Ethics Blog

A blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)

Month: June 2024

Philosophy on a chair

Wooden chair
25 June, 2024 / / 2 Comments

Philosophy is an unusual activity, partly because it can be conducted to such a large extent while sitting still. Philosophers do not need research vessels, laboratories or archives to work on their questions. Just a chair to sit on. Why is it like that?

The answer is that philosophers examine our ways of thinking, and we are never anywhere but where we are. A chair takes us exactly as far as we need: to ourselves. Philosophizing on a chair can of course look self-absorbed. How can we learn anything significant from “thinkers” who neither seem to move nor look around the world? If we happen to see them sitting still in their chairs and thinking, they can undeniably appear to be cut off from the complex world in which the rest of us must live and navigate. Through its focus on human thought, philosophy can seem to ignore our human world and not be of any use to the rest of us.

What we overlook with such an objection to philosophy is that our complex human world already reflects to a large extent our human ways of thinking. To the extent that these ways of thinking are confused, limited, one-sided and unjust, our world will also be confused, limited, one-sided and unjust. When we live and move in this human world, which reflects our ways of thinking, can it not be said that we live somewhat inwardly, without noticing it? We act in a world that reflects ourselves, including the shortcomings in our ways of thinking.

If so, maybe it is not so introverted to sit down and examine these ways of thinking? On the contrary, this seems to enable us to free ourselves and the world from human thought patterns that sometimes limit and distort our perspectives without us realizing it. Of course, research vessels, laboratories and archives also broaden our perspectives on the world. But we already knew that. I just wanted to open our eyes to a more unexpected possibility: that even a chair can take us far, if we practice philosophy on it.

Pär Segerdahl

Written by…

Pär Segerdahl, Associate Professor at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics and editor of the Ethics Blog.

This post in Swedish

We challenge habits of thought

Share this post

End-of-life care: ethical challenges experienced by critical care nurses

Hospital machine
11 June, 2024 / / 1 Comment

In an intensive care unit, seriously ill patients who need medical and technical support for central bodily functions, such as breathing and circulation, are monitored and treated. Usually it goes well, but not all patients survive, despite the advanced and specialized care. An intensive care unit can be a stressful environment for the patient, not least because of the technical equipment to which the patient is connected. When transitioning to end-of-life care, one therefore tries to create a calmer and more dignified environment for the patient, among other things by reducing the use of life-sustaining equipment and focusing on reducing pain and anxiety.

The transition to end-of-life care can create several ethically challenging situations for critical care nurses. What do these challenges look like in practice? The question is investigated in an interview study with nurses at intensive care units in a Swedish region. What did the interviewees say about the transition to end-of-life care?

A challenge that many interviewees mentioned was when life-sustaining treatment was continued at the initiative of the physician, despite the fact that the nurses saw no signs of improvement in the patient and judged that the probability of survival was very low. There was concern that the patient’s suffering was thus prolonged and that the patient was deprived of the right to a peaceful and dignified death. There was also concern that continued life-sustaining treatment could give relatives false hope that the patient would survive, and that this prevented the family from supporting the patient at the end of life. Other challenges had to do with the dosage of pain and anti-anxiety drugs. The nurses naturally sought a good effect, but at the same time were afraid that too high doses could harm the patient and risk hastening death. The critical care nurses also pointed out that family members could request higher doses for the patient, which increased the concern about the risk of possibly shortening the patient’s life.

Other challenges had to do with situations where the patient’s preferences are unknown, perhaps because the patient is unconscious. Another challenge that was mentioned is when conscious patients have preferences that conflict with the nurses’ professional judgments and values. A patient may request that life-sustaining treatment cease, while the assessment is that the patient’s life can be significantly extended by continued treatment. Additional challenging situations can arise when the family wants to protect the patient from information that death is imminent, which violates the patient’s right to information about diagnosis and prognosis.

Finally, various situations surrounding organ donation were mentioned as ethically challenging. For example, family members may oppose the patient’s decision to donate organs. It may also happen that the family does not understand that the patient suffered a total cerebral infarction, and believes that the patient died during the donation surgery.

The results provide a good insight into ethical challenges in end-of-life care that critical care nurses experience. Read the article here: Critical care nurses’ experiences of ethical challenges in end-of-life care.

Pär Segerdahl

Written by…

Pär Segerdahl, Associate Professor at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics and editor of the Ethics Blog.

Palmryd L, Rejnö Å, Alvariza A, Godskesen T. Critical care nurses’ experiences of ethical challenges in end-of-life care. Nursing Ethics. 2024;0(0). doi:10.1177/09697330241252975

This post in Swedish

Ethics needs empirical input

Share this post

Artificial consciousness and the need for epistemic humility

4 June, 2024 / / 2 Comments

As I wrote in previous posts on this blog, the discussion about the possibility of engineering an artificial form of consciousness is growing along with the impressive advances of artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, there are many questions arising from the prospect of an artificial consciousness, including its conceivability and its possible ethical implications. We  deal with these kinds of questions as part of a EU multidisciplinary project, which aims to advance towards the development of artificial awareness.

Here I want to describe the kind of approach to the issue of artificial consciousness that I am inclined to consider the most promising. In a nutshell, the research strategy I propose to move forward in clarifying the empirical and theoretical issues of the feasibility and the conceivability of artificial consciousness, consists in starting from the form of consciousness we are familiar with (biological consciousness) and from its correlation with the organ that science has revealed is crucial for it (the brain).

In a recent paper, available as a pre-print, I analysed the question of the possibility of developing artificial consciousness from an evolutionary perspective, taking the evolution of the human brain and its relationship to consciousness as a benchmark. In other words, to avoid vague and abstract speculations about artificial consciousness, I believe it is necessary to consider the correlation between brain and consciousness that resulted from biological evolution, and use this correlation as a reference model for the technical attempts to engineer consciousness.

In fact, there are several structural and functional features of the human brain that appear to be key for reaching human-like complex conscious experience, which current AI is still limited in emulating or accounting for. Among these are:

  • massive biochemical and neuronal diversity
  • long period of epigenetic development, that is, changes in the brain’s connections that eventually change the number of neurons and their connections in the brain network as a result of the interaction with the external environment
  • embodied sensorimotor experience of the world
  • spontaneous brain activity, that is, an intrinsic ability to act which is independent of external stimulation
  • autopoiesis, that is, the capacity to constantly reproduce and maintain itself
  • emotion-based reward systems
  • clear distinction between conscious and non-conscious representations, and the consequent unitary and specific properties of conscious representations
  • semantic competence of the brain, expressed in the capacity for understanding
  • the principle of degeneracy, which means that the same neuronal networks may support different functions, leading to plasticity and creativity.

These are just some of the brain features that arguably play a key role for biological consciousness and that may inspire current research on artificial consciousness.

Note that I am not claiming that the way consciousness arises from the brain is in principle the only possible way for consciousness to exist: this would amount to a form of biological chauvinism or anthropocentric narcissism.  In fact, current AI is limited in its ability to emulate human consciousness. The reasons for these limitations are both intrinsic, that is, dependent on the structure and architecture of AI, and extrinsic, that is, dependent on the current stage of scientific and technological knowledge. Nevertheless, these limitations do not logically exclude that AI may achieve alternative forms of consciousness that are qualitatively different from human consciousness, and that these artificial forms of consciousness may be either more or less sophisticated, depending on the perspectives from which they are assessed.

In other words, we cannot exclude in advance that artificial systems are capable of achieving alien forms of consciousness, so different from ours that it may not even be appropriate to continue to call it consciousness, unless we clearly specify what is common and what is different in artificial and human consciousness. The problem is that we are limited in our language as well as in our thinking and imagination. We cannot avoid relying on what is within our epistemic horizon, but we should also avoid the fallacy of hasty generalization. Therefore, we should combine the need to start from the evolutionary correlation between brain and consciousness as a benchmark for artificial consciousness, with the need to remain humble and acknowledge the possibility that artificial consciousness may be of its own kind, beyond our view.

Written by…

Michele Farisco, Postdoc Researcher at Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics, working in the EU Flagship Human Brain Project.

Approaching future issues

Share this post