Training Course in Neurobioethics VII Edition

REMAPPING THE TERRITORY – VII Edition 2023-2024 – ONLINE

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OBJECTIVES AND PROGRAM

August 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the introduction – in the scientific arena – of the neologism “neuro-ethics” by Harvard neuropsychiatrist Anneliese Alma Pontius (1921-2018). Since 2009, thanks to the work of the Interdisciplinary Research Group in Neurobioethics (GdN) of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum (APRA) in Rome, the term has acquired a personalist connotation.

After 15 years of research experience – and since 2017 having delved into the contexts of transhumanism, the so-called “head transplantation” in humans, robotics (roboethics), artificial intelligence (algor-ethics), neurotechnologies and current developments in virtual reality, augmented reality, and the Metaverse, from September 2023 to June 2024, the GDN will be offering a training course on neuroethics with the aim of critically “remapping” this interdisciplinary context of reflection on the neurosciences and their interpretations.

The Course also aims to raise the participants’ awareness about the relevance of neuroethical reflection in the multiple contemporary scenarios in which we live, move, and are. This 7th Advanced Training Course “Neurobioethics: remapping the territory” will offer a package of 10 seminars, round-table discussions, and the conference in March 2024 within the framework of the Brain Awareness Week promoted by the DANA Foundation, through which the historical genesis of the birth of neuroethics and the different paradigmatic models encountered today will be compared. Along the way, various areas of this reflection will be specifically presented: from the context of consciousness to neuroaesthetics, from neurolaw to sexual difference, and even including trans and posthuman backdrops.

The course will be in Italian and English and streamed online. Participants will be able to follow the course in synchronous and asynchronous modes.

Promoters:

Faculty of Philosophy

UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights

Institute of Science and Faith

COURSE STRUCTURE

September 29, 2023 to 27-10-2023

The course consists of a monthly two-hour meeting (seminar or round-table), 5-7 p.m.

29/09: 17-19:00
27/10: 17-19:00
24/11: 17-19:00
15/12: 17-19:00

26/01: 17-19:00
23/02: 17-19:00
15/03: World Brain Week Conference

19/04: 17-19:00
24/05: 17-19:00
21/06: 17-19:00

The specific contents and speakers will be communicated month by month and will range from technological, neurological, neurosurgical, psychiatric, psychological, ethical, bioethical, legal and theological aspects related to the concept of “Metaverse”.

WHO SHOULD APPLY?
The program is aimed at all those who wish to learn more about neuroscience and its interpretations to better understand themselves, the advances, and risks. In particular, politicians, engineers, physicians, bioethicists, philosophers, theologians, teachers, and formators. At the end of the Course, participants will be awarded a certificate for the advanced course and 3 ECTS credits will be awarded after the evaluation of a written synthesis paper.

ACADEMIC FEE

350 euros by 29-09-2023

400 euros by 27-10-2023

Training Course Coordinator:

Prof. Fr. Alberto Carrara, L.C.

alberto.carrara@upra.org

For further information

Faculty of Philosophy

Renato Zeuli

E-mail: filosofia@upra.org
Tel.: +39 06 91689913

The creativity of artifacts: oxymoron, paradox, or a new frontier?

By Claudia Fini, Chair Intern 

The seminar presented by Professor Maria Addolorata Mangione, MD, PhD is part of the third specialization course in Neurobioethics organized by the Research Group in Neurobioethics of the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights. The seminar is characterized by a specific identity that addresses the implementation of artificial intelligence in the artistic field. It offers a reflection that combines sociology and philosophy to guide the application of artificial intelligence to the arts.

The expertise of artificial intelligence is exponentially improving. Digital systems have been equipped with increasingly sophisticated techniques for the analysis of situations of different orders and can reveal patterns even unknown to the human mind. In addition, these operations are carried out at speeds that exceed our cognitive abilities. We have gradually assigned a new position and a new vocation to digital technologies and their promises: that of enunciating the truth. This change has quickly led to an altered anthropomorphism driven by the continuous attempts to emulate human cognitive faculties and transcend their limitations. The phenomenon, however, remains fragmentary. Rather than accept the totality of human abilities and faculties, artificial intelligence is only concerned with the reproduction of specific tasks.

Artificial intelligence applications are being increasingly adopted to aid human decision making. Although AI has the concrete potential to improve human life and activities in countless ways, its implementation depends heavily on the trust placed in its performance. Human trust in technology is based on our knowledge of how these systems work and our assessment of their safety. To trust judgments based on algorithms, we must make sure that these are accurate and rational as well as safe and ethical. In this context, the Neurobioethics group of the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights aims to provide answers to difficult ethical questions on the role of artificial intelligence and its relationship with humanity and society.

Aesthetics and art are apparently very far from those issues that directly involve the reality of existence. At the same time, however, these disciplines extend to a border area, namely the world of symbolic and mythical productions. The advent of artificial intelligence and algorithms in art meets a blank canvas, leaving ample room for a range of almost infinite possibilities. Despite the ability of technology to perform the purely procedural aspects that characterize a specific form of art, AI is not yet able to reproduce the genius and creative flair that characterizes each artist when committed to the creative process.

Rodin’s The thinker recalls that integral anthropology to help us shed light on a universal path for the elaboration of our reflections. It is a muscular figure, in which great attention has been given to the definition of the details of muscle tension. Rodin’s stylistic choices underline the close link between the intellectual activity and the body of the person, therefore the substantial union between the spiritual or intellectual soul and the body. Rodin’s The thinker reminds us that the person is the totality of body and spirit and cannot be traced back or reduced to one dimension.

 

AI and literature

Figuratively speaking, in 1967 Roland Barthes suggested that “the reader’s birth should be redeemed by the author’s death.” As artificial intelligence takes its first steps in narrative writing, Barthes’ metaphor might one day become a reality. An interesting project undertaken by Philip M. Parker, Marketing professor at INSEAD Business School, perfectly illustrates the literary applications of AI. Parker’s invention consists of a computer program capable of writing books on different topics in about 20 minutes. So far, hundreds of thousands of books have been created by the patented algorithm with Amazon listing over 100,000 books attributed to Parker’s business and ICON Group International Inc.

The system automates the writing process by creating information databases and identifying templates for the information to be packaged in the form of a coherent text. Since digital e-books and print-on-demand services have become very popular, topics can be listed on Amazon without being “written” yet. The system’s success (and cleverness) relies on the artificial emulation of the human literary process. Typically, this would have been done by several experts for each given subject requiring an exponentially higher amount of time and resources, all factors that are cut down to zero through Parker’s technology.

This prompts us to the question: can artificial intelligence produce creative works like a human being? Although a novel is a work of fiction, it is no secret that some genres lend themselves to predetermined formulas, such as romance novels. On the one hand, a novel written by an AI system would maintain its ultimate aim of entertaining the reader. On the other hand, to express not only original but deep personal content, investigations of a sociological statistical nature are not sufficient; what is necessary is a profound knowledge of the human soul and the dynamics of social relations. The very nature of human experience is found in literature, often represented as a crystallized emotion. The interest in AI is, therefore, reformulating the ongoing debate on what it means to be human, questioning our concepts of personality, imagination, and knowledge. AI is both the apotheosis of the logical scientific reasoning of the Enlightenment and, perhaps, also its damnation.

 

 

AI and painting

From the teardrop drawings of Pollock to Warhol’s pop art, artists have always been searching for new ways to advance their creativity. It could be argued that removing the human being from the artistic process could open up a new frontier of art where AI plays a central role for the overcoming of artistic obstacles. This new frontier of art, of course, opens the door to many philosophical debates about the concept of inspiration, experience, and copyright. The advent of AI in art could lead to a radical change in artistic and imaginative thought. Moreover, in an artistic environment dominated by artificial intelligence, it could be challenging to identify an exact creator. Although ethically dubious, this phenomenon opens the door to a future in which our imagination may no longer be the obstacle to the creation of art.

Harold Cohen, a former artist, and professor of the University of California of San Diego, started working on an artistic creation program called AARON in 1973, while he was a scholar visiting the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Lab. AARON’s ability to paint has improved year after year, learning more difficult and complex techniques from its creator. AARON learned to place objects or people in 3D space in the 1980s and was able to paint in colour from 1990 onwards. AARON does not paint with pixels, but through a machine that allows him to mix the paint and to obtain still lifes and portraits of human figures without photos or other human inputs as a reference. Over time his paintings have made their way into many of the world’s major art museums and into the hands of private collectors at the cost of hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

If AARON has the potential to represent the future of art, the Ai-Da project appears even more futuristic. Defined as “the world’s first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist” by its creator Aidan Meller, Ai-Da can draw creatively thanks to its integrated artificial intelligence (AI) technology. This production is possible thanks to its ability to receive visual data through cameras located in its eyes and virtual information processing algorithms that allow the establishment of coordinates for the realization of artistic work. Ai-Da can use a pencil or a pen producing sketches similar to historical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and Alan Turing.

The Ai-Da project is defined as revealing as its main objective is that of opening a discussion on the relationship between artificial and organic life. The very concept of life opens many debates in the world of philosophy and art. In these debates, the purely biological vision that life can be studied and identified exclusively by scientific and experimental disciplines collides with a multidimensional approach for which various levels of life are identified: animal, human and spiritual.

AI and music

The idea that music can be composed by artificial intelligence is intriguing as daunting to many. AI software for music production has reached such advanced levels in recent years that they have become routine tools used by producers to aid in the creative process. This development raises the question: Could artificial intelligence someday replace musicians?

Despite AI’s apparent novelty, it has long been utilized in music. In 1976 Ray Kurzweil presented a machine that could read the text on a page and pronounce the words aloud on the NBC Today show. The device was originally designed for the blind, but over time it became an innovative musical instrument based on artificial intelligence models. Kurzweil’s K250 synthesizer debuted in 1984 as the world’s first keyboard input instrument with the ability to generate the sounds of various acoustic instruments. Later, in the 90s, David Bowie helped develop an app called Verbasizer, capable of processing literary material and randomly reordering it to create new text combinations. While in 2016, Sony researchers employed a software called Flow Machines to create a Beatles-style melody, which was later used by composer Benoît Carré for the development of a pop song called “Daddy’s Car.”

The impact of these developments will profoundly affect all human endeavours, including music. Music will remain the communication of musicians’ emotions and human intuitions to an audience, but the concepts and process of music will undergo a profound transformation.

The epidemic in the time of artificial intelligence

By Prof. Fr. Alberto Carrara, LC, Chair Fellow

The mysterious American writer Emily Elisabeth Dickinson (1830-1886) is mostly known for her unusual life, spent mainly reclused in her house in Amherst, where she was born. Her work, in addition to her well-known poetry on the brain “The Brain is wider than the Sky”, has one poem dedicated to the storm.

Translated by Eugenio Montale in 1945, this poem, number 1593, reads:

There came a wind like a bugle;

It quivered through the grass,

And a green chill upon the heat

So ominous did pass

We barred the windows and the doors

As from an emerald ghost;

The doom’s electric moccason

That very instant passed.

On a strange mob of panting trees,

And fences fled away,

And rivers where the houses ran

The living looked that day.

The bell within the steeple wild

The flying tidings whirled.

How much can come

And much can go,

And yet abide the world!

The world learned about the Coronavirus on January 12th, 2020 when the World Health Organization (WHO) recognised it as “2019-nCoV” (i.e. new Coronavirus 2019) and its related pathology “COVID-19”. The Coronavirus has spread globally as a “storm” striking a globalized and technologized world that moved frantically and almost unstoppably towards the achievement of its growth, production and efficiency objectives, rewarding with fame the typical “hard” and “soft skills” of our industries 4.0.

For months, silence, isolation, the desert of our cities, the solitude of our monuments have become our existential “storm”.

In an evocative, though eerily empty Piazza San Pietro, on March 27th, Pope Francis described this tragic moment with these words:

“Dense darkness has thickened on our squares, streets and cities; it has taken over our lives filling everything with a deafening silence and a desolate void, which paralyzes everything in its passing: you can feel it in the air, you can feel it in people’s gestures and looks. We found ourselves afraid and lost”.

As the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari recently pointed out, on the one hand, we are living in the best time to be able to clinically and technologically face this pandemic thanks to the development of molecular medicine, biotechnology and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the coronavirus storm is exposing our vulnerabilities, leaving uncovered those superfluous certainties with which we have built our agendas, our projects, our habits and priorities.

SARS-Cov-2 (the new Coronavirus) has no boundaries, is not subject to barriers, nor walls, affects everyone, does not look at anyone, does not consider passports, social class and does not read the titles on our business cards. But the same reason why it spreads — our common human nature — makes us rediscover the common antidote: we are not monads closed in on ourselves, but we are all united and intrinsically connected to each other as no one can survive on their own. The Coronavirus should awake us from the deafening frenzy to which we were accustomed, and which now frightens us for its unrecognizable silence. The pandemic that struck us underlines how we are all deeply in communion with each other through the multiple interactions that connect us, so today more than ever we feel the thrill of the common bond to which we cannot escape: to belong as brothers. None of us lives alone, others’ lives are always present in mine in what I think, say, do, work. And vice versa, my life enters that of others.

“We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat… are all of us. Just like those disciples, who spoke anxiously with one voice, saying “We are perishing” (v. 38), so we too have realized that we cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this.”

(Pope Francis, 27th March 2020).

On the horizon, we may face a significant, longer-term problem concerning the issue of surveillance and individual control through biometric recognition that states could maintain and implement even after the epidemic crisis. Harari warns us: “one of the dangers of the current epidemic is that it will justify extreme control measures … But even after it, this idea will remain”.

We are called to reinvent our relationships and to discover our deep skills, those relating to our empathic ability, to know how to be with others, to listen, to be in solidarity, but also to be morally sound and responsible.

To reflect on this existential situation we are experiencing, the Neurobioethics Group and Brain Circle Italia organized a day dedicated to the topic “The epidemic at the time of artificial intelligence. A new anthropology for a safer world?” which took place on 23rd April 2020 live from the Neuroscience and Neuroethics Facebook page.

A panel of the highest scientific and cultural depth divided into 5 sessions debated today’s epidemic contingency in an interdisciplinary discussion. Over 5,000 people followed the event.

The digital revolution has the potential to become a new form of coexistence among people who, in their fight against the new enemy presented by epidemics, prompt us to reconsider the concepts of privacy and freedom. The need then emerges for a pact between citizens and institutions to rethink the methods of application of what Hobbes would call a new “law of nature”. But how much of our identity spaces are we willing to give up to fight these invisible threats?

Prof. Claudio Bonito presented and moderated the event. After the greetings from the academic authorities, Viviana Kasam, President of BrainCircleItalia and Father Alberto Carrara, Director of the Neurobioethics Group introduced the topic at hand.

The morning (10:30-12:30) was divided in a first scientific portion with the presentations of:

Gian Carlo Blangiardo, President of ISTAT

Luca Maria Gambardella, University of Lugano, Dalle Molle Institute of Studies on Artificial Intelligence USI-SUPSI.

In the second medical-clinical portion of the conference spoke:

Matilde Leonardi, neurologist, pediatrician, Director of UOC – IRCCS Foundation Neurological Institute Carlo Besta, Milan;

Nicolino Ambrosino, pulmonologist – Maugeri Scientific Clinical Institutes

Stefano Mazzoleni, professor of Computer Science and Big Data Analytics – Bari Polytechnic.

The afternoon (15:30-18:30) opened with the legal session, with the following speakers:

Amedeo Santosuosso, scientific director, European Center for Law, Science and New Technologies (ECLT), University of Pavia;

Avv. Tania Cerasella, lawyer, member of the GdN

Avv. Emanuela Cerasella, lawyer, Coordinator of the Neurolaw subgroup of the GdN.

The technical-analytical-philosophical session followed with the presentation of:

Damiano Sabatino, CEO Travelport and Guido Traversa, philosopher, European University of Rome – Master Coordinator in Philosophical Consultancy and Existential Anthropology.

The conference Concluded with the psychiatric session in which the following speakers are present: Donatella Marazziti, psychiatrist, University of Pisa, Professor at the Unicamillus University of Rome, Head of research BRF Brain Research Onlus Foundation

Armando Piccinni, neurologist and psychiatrist, Professor at Unicamillus University of Rome, President of BRF Brain Research Onlus Foundation.

Bioethical considerations for policymakers in businesses’ NeuroDI-Warfare.

On November 6th, our research scholar Mariel Kalkach Aparicio will participate in the session entitled “Business and the protection of the general interest and the citizen” part of the The Law, Justice and Development (LJD) Week 2019. 

Abstract

“In this session I will highlight some key components of the bioethical reflections made in research contexts which seem to be less considered in the real-world practices of business. I will focus on the challenges of policymaking within the business-consumer interaction; specifically, in the merging business activities of two types: monitoring of users’ digital trace and research in the form of Neuromarketing. Although there has been progress made in the discussion and regulation, I will argue that it is not enough specially in context of vulnerable populations. If these circumstances remain unchanged, the gap between developed economies and those in development could increase due to the use of technology.” – Mariel Kalkach Aparicio.

PROGRAM OF THE SESSION

 

Timing Speaker Topics addressed
10:00 – 10:04 Anne-Charlotte Gros Introductory remarks
10:04  -10:05 Anne-Charlotte Gros Speaker’s presentation and first question
10:05 – 10:13 Mariel Kalkach Bioethical considerations for policymakers in businesses’ Neuro-Digital-Info Warfare
10:13 – 10:14 Anne-Charlotte Gros Speaker’s presentation and second question
10:14 – 10:18 Louis-Bernard Buchman The protection of personal data : the example of the GDPR
10:18 – 10:19 Anne-Charlotte Gros Speaker’s presentation and third question
10:19 – 10:27 Frédéric Varin The fight against land grabbing in developing countries
10:27 –  10:28 Anne-Charlotte Gros Speaker’s presentation and fourth question
10:28 – 10:36 Jeffrey  Schlagenhauf (To be confirmed) 1) The Work of the OECD Centre for Responsible Business Conduct 2) The Human Centered Business Model
10:36 – 10:37 Anne-Charlotte Gros Fifth question
10:37 – 10:41 Louis-Bernard Buchman The duty of vigilance
10:41 – 10:42 Anne-Charlotte Gros Speaker’s presentation and sixth question
10:42 – 10:50 Stéphane de Navacelle

 

1) The recognition of the social and environmental interest of companies 2) The protection of whistleblowers 3) The fight against corruption
10:50  – 10:51 Anne-Charlotte Gros Speaker’s presentation and seventh question
10:51 – 10:59 Marie-Florence Zampiero-Bouquemont

 

The fight against money laundering
10:59 -11:00 Anne-Charlotte Gros Concluding remarks

Robotics and Law

On Friday 24 May, our Chair fellow P. Alberto Carrara, L.C. with  Avv. Emanuela Cerasella, coordinator of the GdN subgroup on neurolaw, is organizing a conference entitled Robotics and Law. This event is within the Neurobioethics Masterclass.  Among the participants there will be the Magistrate Dr. Giuseppe Corasaniti, a well-known scholar and expert on issues related to the legal problems in regards of information.