Caught a story through Digg about the ‘Most severly wounded’ soldier.

TAMPA, Florida: He lies flat, unseeing eyes fixed on the ceiling, tubes and machines feeding him, breathing for him, keeping him alive. He cannot walk or talk, but he can grimace and cry. And he is fully aware of what has happened to him.

Four years ago almost to this day, Joseph Briseno Jr. was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range in a Baghdad marketplace. His spinal cord was shattered, and cardiac arrests stole his vision and damaged his brain.

If he had just died, this story would have never made Digg. Many commenters are using it as a case against war or the state of medical coverage in our country. However, the real tragedy here is not the war or the inadequacy of veterans medical insurance. It’s more complicated.

He is no more a case against the war as the several who have died. Because of enhanced armor and field medicine we are saving more of our troops than ever before. This of course leaves many with horrible injuries yet still alive (the amount of brain trauma from this war is a big issue here). It’s really not surprising that this has happened.

If a lesson is here to be learned it is that our medical technology has advanced further than our ethics. We can keep people alive and even bring them back from death, but often leaving the patient even worse off because of oxygen deprivation. In this case, the soldier is not only paralyzed but blind and has brain damage because of the cardiac arrests that they saved him from.

Resuscitation has a success rate anywhere from 1-30% depending on the celerity and skillfulness of the response. Though even when people do survive many die shortly afterwards or suffer permanent damage to their brain and body. Until we can protect against oxygen deprivation or fuse spinal cords we need to rethink emergency resuscitation and our attitude of “save at all costs.”

For those of you too busy to keep abreast of the latest internet kurfluffle, the LiveJournal community has been in a bit of an uproar over the mass deletion of journal accounts and communities. It seems in the rush to “protect children” Barak Berkowitz, chairman and chief executive of Six Apart, got a bit carried away.

“Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues. It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what’s not.”
–Barak Berkowitz, chairman and CEO, Six Apart

As with any broad swipe based on keywords, several child abuse survivor help groups and the like also got deleted in the process. The chairman has apologized for this and I’m sure this regrettable bit of collateral damage will be rectified.

However, more unknown is the status of the gray area content such as the slash fiction communities that got the cut. Slash fiction is SciFi/Fantasy/Comic fan fiction where one or more fictional characters has a sexual romp with another in all it’s lavishly detailed glory. It’s not really my cup of spanish fly, but whatever floats your panties.

That danged first amendment… or Liberals have morals?

Here in lies the problem of course, not everyone shares my liberal ambivalence with slash fiction and other harmless fetishes. Obviously most BoingBoing readers do as evidence by this hard-line first amendment quote:

“So the only policy that’s safe from turning into tyranny is to allow all speech, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you. Yes, people could be harmed; yes, even children. Freedom is more important.”

This stance nicely exemplifies the definition of liberal morality put forth by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt: The moral foundations theory, put forth by Haidt, states that there are five innate psychological morality systems. Liberals base most of their morals on the measure of Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity; whereas, conservatives balance these with the foundations of Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. This also can be described as a tendency to base morality on a individual rights basis versus a structural community basis. For more on this, I highly highly suggest you watch the fascinating video talk of Haidt on morality at the 2007 New Yorker Conference.

Rationality comes late to the game

Haidt also is known for his hypothesis that morality is largely instinctual and any rational statements are all developed post-hoc. This doesn’t mean that it is in-born only that one learns morality through mostly subconscious socio-emotional means rather than rational means. For more on this read “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment [PDF] and/or The Believer magazine’s interview with Haidt.

Haidt’s ideas are very interesting and they explain a lot more than George Lakoff’s strict father/nurturant parent model of conservative vs. liberal morality. Lakoff also has a lot of interesting things to say, but I’ve always been a bit skeptical of it’s veridicality because the metaphor is too convenient.

In any case, no matter which morality theory you side with, it’s obvious that conservatives and liberals have very different flavors of morality. If we want to develop a communication between the two sides, rather than pure chest pounding, we need both sides to better understand one another—and themselves. This stands true whether we are ones to fantasize about the Jesus references in Narnia or the homosexual subtext of Sam and Frodo.

Read an interesting article about a recent fMRI study of altruism.

Here’s an excerpt:

“We went into this experiment with the idea that altruism was really a function of the brain’s reward systems — altruistic people would simply find it more rewarding,” [Huettel] said.

But instead, a whole other brain region, called the posterior superior temporal cortex (pSTC), kicked into high gear as altruism levels rose. The pSTC is located near the back of the brain and is not focused on reward. Instead, it focuses on perceiving others’ intentions and actions, Huettel said.
…
The researchers found that pSTC activity was highest when study participants were observing the computer play the game on its own — not when they were playing themselves.

So in straight talking terms, people who are rated as highly altruistic according to a self-report test also have higher activation of the pSTC region which from other studies is correlated with one’s “theory of mind.”

I’m betting that the scientists went in expecting to see the reward center light up when they played the game but not when the computer played it. Instead they got no activation in the reward center, so instead they launched off on a different conjecture assuming that the reward centers don’t have any role to play in altruism.

Possibly, but a more likely reason is that playing their little altruism game in a loud claustrophobic MRI tube just doesn’t translate to real world acts of altruism. Plus, I’m betting the game just wasn’t all that fun to play. As a result, altruistic acts might activate the reward centers, but we just don’t know from this study.

Still their findings of increased pSTC activation are interesting. It indicates, but doesn’t prove, that (self-reporting) altruists also have a high functioning “theory of mind.” To put it another way, altruists who are self aware of their own altruistic nature are also probably keenly aware of the (altruistic or non-altruistic) intentions of others—relating nicely to the evolutionary concept of reciprocal altruism.

I’ve been involved in an interested email exchange lately with a friend who sent me a mass email about Reiki. My request to be removed from his “bullshit Reiki spam list” was admittedly a bit overly confrontational. However, the dialog since has been more cordial and has had the benefit of allowing me to better reflect on my attitude and behavior towards Reiki and other specious claims.

Of course, I could have just said a simple “no thank you” (or run a email filter of his name and the word “reiki”). This avoidant approach feels wrong to me given my desire to discourage medical psuedoscience, and my basic underlying goal of encouraging skepticism for unproven ideas/beliefs of all stripes.

In asking myself why this has become important to me, I came upon an answer that links with my artist/punk/freak roots: “Question Authority”

I run in circle of burners, artists, punks, and related freaks for whom the motto of “Question Authority” is often tossed about. Unfortunately, many of these same people end up mistaking the lure of sub/anti-culture authority for the noble act true questioning. While rebelling from mainstream thought, they fall for specious claims like reiki and astrology and echinacea and the utopian dreams of a worldwide gift economy. These beliefs are tantalizing due to the intrinsic draw of anecdotal experiences of ones peers or idols and the sense of freedom invoked by believing something seemingly novel.

True questioning is a search for answers beyond any authority sprouting it’s opinions‚Äîwhether that authority is a priest, guru, teacher, politician, scientist, celebrity, tv, book, blog, parent, friend, lover, or even one’s self. Separating the underlying reality from the influence of authority, the tyranny of peer pressure, and our own cognitive biases is often a difficult process full of half starts and dead ends, but it is an admirable and worthwhile goal.

The motto of “Question Authority” may be rooted in punk, but it is grounded in scientific empiricism.