Amelia and David discuss ethics within science, beginning with what the ends of science are (or perhaps ought to be). We then move on to many of the ethical tensions within science broadly, including the ethics of compensation in human subject research, how to best use gene editing, and the dynamics of animal research.

References and Additional Resources

• One text which exemplifies a lot of the critiques of the supremacy of science associated with moral evils is Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer & Adorno
• Introduction to Effective Altruism: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
  • We mentioned this briefly, but didn’t sufficiently explain the philosophy (which we will hopefully cover on a later episode)!
• Note on David’s comments about Bush and political discussion of cloning bans: while Bush did discuss and push for cloning restrictions, the potential ban did not make it past the senate.
• Insulin production and genetics: https://library.plc.wa.edu.au/year10/biology/gm/insulin_producing_bacteria#

Please send any questions, feedback, comments, or objections to our email at thethoughtexperimentpod@gmail.com!

Why and how is it that we have a conscious experience of the world? What even is consciousness? This episode, David and Amelia explore these abstract questions and their surrounding philosophical landscape.

References and Additional Resources

• Searle’s Consciousness Paper: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.neuro.23.1.557
• More on the hypothetical “zombies” we brought up which may act identically to us but lack consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
• Arguments for epiphenomenal qualia: https://www.sfu.ca/~jillmc/JacksonfromJStore.pdf

Please send any questions, feedback, comments, or objections to our email at thethoughtexperimentpod@gmail.com!

This episode, Amelia and David discuss brain machine interfaces– how they work, what the limits are, and what the future might look like.

References and Additional Resources:

• Restorative speech BMI in the news: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/health/ai-stroke-speech-neuroscience.html?searchResultPosition=1
• Continuous machine learning: https://levity.ai/blog/what-is-continuous-machine-learning
  • This is exactly what Amelia was unknowingly talking about, where AI is constantly updated as data changes

Please send any questions, feedback, comments, or objections to our email at thethoughtexperimentpod@gmail.com!