Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide.

A nursing home in Norway, Thomas Bjarkan, (Wiki..)

by Louis Shalako

One of the foremost ethical dilemmas of the 21st century will be the question of euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Would you help someone to die if they asked you?

Would you help your own child to die if they were terminally ill and their lives were nothing but an unremitting hell of unbearable suffering?

Do we have the right to die on demand or to demand that on behalf of our children?

If we ourselves asked for an assisted suicide, should our wish be granted?

After much controversy, Belgium has approved euthanasia of children.

“"Why wouldn't you give children, who are incurably sick and who are unbearably suffering the same possibilities adults have?" asked Dr. Jan Bernheim from the research team for terminal care at the Free University Brussels, speaking to DW before the law was approved.”

“In Belgium euthanasia implemented by doctors has been legal for 11 years. Almost 1,432 elected to be euthanized in 2012 alone.” The population of Belgium is about 10.8 million.

“The debate over euthanasia has heated up over the last few months after several spectacular cases emerged. In the October version of the Belgian magazine ‘Panorama,’ TV journalist Dirk Leestmans reported on a detainee who was granted the right to be euthanized.

“The inmate said the detention and the conditions in jail had caused him extreme psychological suffering and he therefore wanted to die. The case is still being reviewed by the courts. The inmate hasn't been euthanized yet, but his request seems poised for approval.”

“This is not the only case that created an international sensation. At the beginning of October, a 44-year old, going by the name of Nathan, was euthanized after a failed sex change operation. He said his wish to die was legitimate because of unbearable psychological suffering.”

“Carine Brochier of the European Institute of Bioethics in Brussels says, ‘Family members, hospital staff and doctors are extremely burdened by the euthanasia law.’”

"Euthanasia is not easy. It's not fun to kill someone. Euthanasia is really killing and that's not good for the person doing it, even if it is to kill suffering. It's also killing society," Brochier said.

Euthanasia has been around for a long time. It’s nothing new. It goes back to the Stone Age.

France is slowly moving towards assisted suicide.

“On the strength of the panel’s recommendations, left-wing daily Libération expects the socialist government to present a draft text by next summer, although widespread grassroots opposition earlier this year to the legalization of same-sex “marriage” might make president François Hollande wary of bringing yet another sensitive issue to the fore.

“It is the President himself, however, who decided last September to have the National Advisory Ethics Committee (CCNE) assemble a representative panel of French citizens chosen by a commercial polling company, IFOP, so that it could express ordinary people’s opinions on end of life. The 18 ‘sages’ gathered for four consecutive weekends in order to hear officially mandated experts, many of them favorable to at least one form of voluntary ending of life, including Jean-Luc Romero, president of the Association for the right to die with dignity (ADMD).”

From the same story comes the following.

“’The possibility of committing suicide with medical assistance, as well as assisted suicide, constitute in our view a legitimate right of the patient who is in the end phase of his life or who is under the burden of an irreversible pathology, a right which rests mainly on his informed consent and full consciousness,’ they write.”

 “In practice, this would mean non-terminally but incurably ill patients – such as tetraplegics – should be eligible for this type of assistance, which is in fact akin to homicide.” (Life Site News.)

(Tetriplegic is another term for quadriplegic. – ed.)

The wording is significant, as it entails the right, “…to obtain medical help in order to finish life with dignity.”

The B.C. Supreme Court upheld the province’s ban on assisted suicide, which will now be appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. It’s important to see the distinctions.

Euthanasia is present in all societies. It is simply not much talked about. It’s not exactly the same as assisted suicide.

A friend’s dad was on a respirator after a major heart attack. A doctor spoke with the family after two weeks and told them there wasn’t much hope for recovery.

Under Canadian law, patients or anyone who makes a will can specify that ‘no extraordinary means’ will be used to keep them alive in the event of a major medical event.

My friend’s sister and mother could not bring themselves to do it. That left it up to my friend, and there’s no doubt it affected him deeply. He and the doctor put their hands on the switch at the same time.

They turned the respirator off. His father died of complications resulting from a heart attack. They have to put something as the cause of death on the official death certificate. He was eighty-seven years old.

The end of a life.

My own father suffered from Parkinson’s Disease and after ten years, his condition was deteriorating on a daily and weekly basis. He was having a lot of falls, and a lot of choking incidents, and his quality of life was not very good. And yet he was prepared to continue living, which is only normal—he would have very much liked it if medical science had found a cure for Parkinson’s Disease. Whenever something happened, he would be bedridden for some time, and then he seemed to be recovering, but never to the level he had enjoyed before. That is a feature of Parkinson’s.

I got the call about six a.m. one morning. He’d had some kind of problem, and he was in the hospital. His lungs were full of blood, and he was unconscious, and yet with his eyes open, wide and staring at the ceiling. 

With my siblings all there, the doctor asked us what we wanted to do. 

The sound of his breathing was horrifying. That great body wanted to live, but Parkinson’s had killed him, or it was killing him. Finally.

The doctor explained as we agonized.

“We can operate, but there’s no telling if we can really do anything for him…or what would be left if he did regain consciousness.” The doctor’s voice was calm and sympathetic, but he’d clearly seen all of this before. “I can give him something to make him more comfortable—”

"So what are you trying to say, Doctor?"

"Your father is dying. Here, today, in this room. You need to understand that. It's really just a question of how long."

We decided that that was the thing to do—to give him something to make him more comfortable, and my siblings left the room while I took a turn, holding onto my father’s hand, and the nurse stuck a big ampoule of something into him.

It’s hard. There’s nothing harder than easing your loved one into the afterlife or the next world, which I don’t really believe in.

I thought his breathing would just stop, and he kept going. My siblings weren’t prepared to deal with this, and as the eldest I took a lot of responsibility for my father that day.

I was glad they were out of the room and didn’t have to see this. My sister just couldn’t handle it and my younger brother wasn’t much better.

It was a way of acknowledging my father, for all the responsibility that he took for his children over the years. 

It was the right thing to do for a first-born son. He had expressed his wishes clearly for us, and had signed the declaration while still of sound mind, although his body was ravaged by the disease.

My father’s suffering was finally over, and there was nothing there to bring back. It would have done nothing more than to extend his suffering. It’s not that I haven’t thought about it since.

What if we had gone ahead with an operation? He might have lived another six weeks in a hospital bed, and the next medical crisis would have killed him anyways. Why put him through that suffering, why put the rest of the family through all that?

But to go against his wishes, clearly stated, would be wrong. To keep him alive by extraordinary means would have been wrong.

There was no doubt my father was going to die—the question was how long it would take. Three hours, three days, three weeks—it was going to happen.

The four hours between the time I got the phone call and the time he died was the toughest four hours of my life. When I think about it, I sure wouldn’t want to take four hours when I die—

The really strange thing is that even with three full ampoules of morphine in him, the body still kept drawing in those deep racking, breaths, and that horrible drowning, sucking noise just kept going, on and on.

At some point the nurses came into the room and ushered me out. A few minutes later as I sat in a waiting room, one of them came out and told me that my father was gone.

But that’s why there was more than one family member and more than one medical person involved in the decision. No one should be asked to shoulder that responsibility alone.

Euthanasia probably happens in the western world, it happens in Canada and the U.S., and in every other developed nation that the reader would care to name. It happens even more frequently in the undeveloped world, out of natural human feelings of compassion and empathy.

It happens because it is a necessity, even though we call it something else, palliative sedation.

(Jacob Windham, Wiki.)

So Belgium’s decision to liberalize euthanasia, certainly of the elderly, simply regularizes a situation that already exists, it’s just that no one really wants to talk about it. It’s a serious subject and a troubling one at that.

Those laws will benefit the survivors. It will take some of the burden off of them, and the doctors, but with reasonable minds and loving hearts, it will never be easy. To take the life of a suffering child, even at the child’s own decision, would be ten times worse for all concerned.

We have to think of the living, their survivors, as well in this debate.

It is certainly possible that there could and most likely would be abuses under more liberalized euthanasia.

Euthanasia is different from palliative sedation, and that is different from assisted suicide. It is a series of issues or questions.

Polls reveal much about the debate and the issues raised.

“Widespread support in Quebec for Bill 52, legislation proposing to legalize ‘medical aid in dying,’ drops sharply when Quebecers are told of the dire consequences similar statutes have brought in other countries, a new poll has found.”

“In the poll, conducted by Abingdon Research from October 24-26, respondents first gave their initial impressions of the legislation and then gave their final impression after being asked their opinion of various scenarios that have come up with similar legislation.”

“Scenarios included doctors killing elderly or disabled people without their consent, doctors helping suicidal teens carry out their deaths, or abusive family members pressuring the elderly to seek ‘medical aid in dying.’”

These concerns are certainly valid, each to some degree, yet it's kind of sensationalized as well, and it’s amazing how fast those poll results can change when the information changes and the presentation changes. But it’s important for voters and citizens to be well-informed and to think about a decision, whether legislative or in their own personal life and circumstances.

“LifeCanada, the national pro-life educational group that commissioned the poll, said the results show that support for Bill 52 is ‘a mile wide but a foot deep.’”

That seems like fair comment, but then this is a contentious issue—and respondents are sophisticated enough to know that. We probably don’t spend enough time thinking about many of the political and social issues of the day.

What’s interesting about the Canadian body politic is that it’s not divided up solely on ideological grounds. 

People really had to scratch their heads a bit on this one.

In the twenty something years since the Sue Rodriguez case, has Canada’s social landscape shifted?

A British Columbia group will ask the Supreme Court that question. (National Post.)

“Four months after the 1994 decision, Ms. Rodriguez died by assisted suicide in her B.C. home. The procedure, a lethal injection, was carried out illegally by an anonymous doctor.”

“’This is a matter of extreme urgency; the fate of gravely ill Canadians hangs in the balance,’ said Grace Pastine, litigation director for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which launched the case in 2011.”

There are some important distinctions to be made, questions to be asked.

What is the difference between the merciful easing of a terminally-ill elderly person into death, and the assisted-suicide of a younger person whose ailment makes life unbearable or unliveable?

The ultimate vacation: traveling to Switzerland, the world’s capital of assisted suicide. (National Post.)

Disclaimer: Under Canadian Law it is an offence to counsel to commit suicide, and it is an offence to harm yourself or to try to harm yourself or to threaten to harm yourself. Few serious authors state otherwise.

This author still encourages families and friends to ask themselves these questions, and to discuss them with each other, so that last wishes are known, and actions are open and responsible so that the dying may pass with dignity and so that the living can go on with their own lives without fear and regret.

Here is the Roman Catholic Church’s position on euthanasia.

“No matter how ill a patient is, we never have a right to put that person to death. Rather, we have a duty to care for and preserve life.”

“But to what length are we required to go to preserve life? No religion or state holds that we are obliged to use every possible means to prolong life. The means we use have traditionally been classified as either ‘ordinary’ or ‘extraordinary.’”

“Ordinary" means must always be used. This is any treatment or procedure which provides some benefit to the patient without excessive burden or hardship.”

“’Extraordinary’ means are optional. These are measures which do present an excessive burden.”

The only thing I learned from all of this is that it really is a slippery slope.

END

Additional Resources.

Euthanasia.

Palliative Sedation.

The Slippery Slope.

The Terry Schiavo Case.

Living Will. The living will should also provide some direction for end of life wishes, including a statement of whether the loved on would or would not prefer ‘extraordinary means’ to continue life in the absence of any real hope of recovery.

Would You Have Sex With a Robot?

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How Many Cyborgs Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb?

How many cyborgs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Richard Greenhill, Hugo Elia, Shadow Robot Company.

by Louis Shalako


How many cyborgs does it take to change a light bulb?

The quality of the answers that we get depends on the quality of the questions we ask.

Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

But if we ask a smart question, we might get a smart answer.

Will we be assimilated by the human-machine interfaces which researchers are presently contemplating.

“Thus far, the main purpose for developing brain-computer interfaces has been to allow amputees and those who suffer from paralysis to mentally control a mobile robot or robotic prosthesis. They have already made possible some remarkable feats, such as partial restoration of hearing in the deaf, direct brain control of a prosthesis, implanting false memories in a rat, and downloading a rat’s memory of how to press a lever to get food and then uploading the memory after the original memory has been chemically destroyed. If this sounds like science fiction, consider that scientists have already moved beyond the interface technology and into nanoscale wiring implanted in synthetic tissue. A joint MIT, Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital research team led by Robert Langer, Charles Lieber and Daniel Kohane developed a technique for growing synthetic biological tissue on a substrate containing biocompatible, nanoscale wires. This announcement came seven weeks after the announcement in London of the first-ever successful implantation of a synthetic organ, a fully functional trachea grown from the patient’s own stem cells, work led by the pioneering researcher Paolo Macchiarini. And if scientists can implant wiring, then, in principle, they can turn the body or any part of it into a computer. But while most people have no problem with prosthetic limbs, even those directly actuated by the brain, nor with pacemakers or cochlear implants, people may feel uncomfortable becoming part machine. At what point does the interface between body and machine dissolve? When bodies can be made part machine, is it necessary to redefine personhood? Will people all be assimilated?”

--Reilly Centre, Notre Dame.

Here’s the answer to that last question: no.

That’s right, the answer is no.

What will happen is that the human race will assimilate all of the new technology. I really don’t think we will let it eat us or enslave us. We’re a little too practical a species for that.

Google just bought Boston Dynamics, maker of the famous Big Dog. Google, along with other companies, is heavily into artificial intelligence research. With modern brain imaging and mapping, at some point in these studies, hardware and software applications will be able to ‘read’ a thought.

That would be useful for airport security. Imagine an oblong or rectangular frame that you walk through much like a metal detector. It reads your brain and it checks a few things, like if you’ve been recently thinking of a criminal or anti-social act. Biometrics will detect if you are nervous. Biometrics will check your retina to match up with your records. As far as airport security goes, a lot of folks wouldn’t have a problem with that, (as long as it doesn’t take forever, right?) and as long as it’s not too invasive, and if it serves a legitimate need, they might be able to live with it.

But if brain waves can be read and interpreted, they can also be recorded. They can be stored, and downloaded, and if the machine is accurate enough, it might even be admissible as evidence in a court of law.

As a benign example, (and yet most of us are immediately thinking of criminals cases) a plane crashes and one of the victims is identified solely by the retinal and brain scans made prior to take-off.

This is of some interest, for his surviving friends and family at least know for sure what happened. He or she can be presumed dead, and while the author acknowledges the trauma and grief for the friends and family, it is also necessary to provide through the provisions of the last will and testament for the survivors and heirs.

In that sense it’s a kind of benign use of artificial intelligence, and the ability of a machine to record someone’s last thoughts might be of great comfort—or a great tragedy, depending on what those thoughts were. Most likely the ‘average’ passenger probably did think fond thoughts about friends and family in the immediate time period.

The families might be comforted by having a recording of such thoughts. It is also true that some might be denied boarding privileges, and some potential criminal or anti-social acts would be prevented by detection before they could be brought into action.

It’s not immediately obvious to this writer how the average person would end up like the Borg, with no real mind of their own and end up powerless thralls to a universal computer system that has taken on a consciousness of its own. Some human agent would have to make that happen, possibly a mistake in coding somewhere along the line, unintentional or otherwise.

Computer-brain interfaces are making great leaps.

Scientists have learned how to plant false memories in a mouse, and the author also recently saw a story where scientists used the mind or brain of a human, and they controlled a mouse’s tail by thought alone.

“Scientists haven’t yet found a way to mend a broken heart, but they’re edging closer to manipulating memory and downloading instructions from a computer right into a brain.

Researchers from the Riken-M.I.T. Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took us closer to this science-fiction world of brain tweaking last week when they said they were able to create a false memory in a mouse.

The scientists reported in the journal Science that they caused mice to remember receiving an electrical shock in one location, when in reality they were zapped in a completely different place. The researchers weren’t able to create entirely new thoughts, but they applied good or bad feelings to memories that already existed.”

Maybe in a hundred years, if someone can control your neighbour, he can control you, and this doesn’t necessarily need hard-wiring once we comprehend all the machine aids people are going to be hooking up to their brains and their bodies in the very near future.

We’ve all seen the runner with the springy artificial legs and carbon-fibre feet.

But being able to read a brain might also lead to the ability to ‘reframe’ someone’s brain.

We can rebuild him.

The most positive use of the new technology would be medical—they might cure mental illnesses, they might cure brain dysfunctions of any kind. They might be able to restore at least some memories, anything that might have been recorded of his life prior to losing his memory.

Let’s say that happens to a guy, he was in a car accident. Let’s call him Stan. He went into a coma, and lost all his memories. He has amnesia.

Stan could at least know that he really was Stan! Fragmentary memories might be restored to him, like shots from the security camera in his apartment building, his shopping list and his favourite grocery store would all be recorded somewhere in a vast database. Pictures of his wife and kids, his dog, and his mom and dad would be uploaded. He could be retrained by having relevant skills and experiences of his employment downloaded or uploaded to his brain, whichever way the reader prefers to express it.

This particular technology could obviously also be abused.

Conceivably, if Stan was killed, and yet his brain was successfully downloaded wirelessly  before ‘signal degradation’ became too pronounced, Stan could be input into a machine intelligence that already existed. The machine intelligence would take care of all autonomic chores, making the legs go and providing the body with the equivalent of oxygen. In his new status that’s electrical power for Stan as a purely electronic entity will no longer require oxygen, food or water.

Stan would be riding around in Big Dog’s head and yet this author thinks that if Stan still had all his memories, it would be seamless enough. Essentially we have transplanted the brain of a man into the body of a pig, which has always been a big dream of science. (The author is kidding. – ed.)

In the future, if all or most babies are implanted with an ID chip upon birth, whether natural or otherwise, then all that would have to be done is to recover that chip from Stan’s body, or recover that code sequence, and Stan’s body, let’s call it ‘Big Dog,’ has essentially become Stan in fact.

That’s because our airport security robot now reads the ID chip, identifies the dog-like robot as ‘Stan,’ the guy who got killed but didn’t die because his brain was downloaded into the robot previously known as Big Dog.

With artificial intelligence, a vast database and number crunching ability, Stan’s whole life will flash before the airport security robot’s virtual eyes and he will either be admitted or denied entrance.

We have transplanted the brain of a man into the head of a pig.

The neuroplasticity of the brain makes it possible to learn new tasks. Future human beings will have bumps in different places on their brains!

But what bout the neuroplasticity of the mind, once freed from biological concerns?

It sounds funny, but it’s true. Stan is going to have to get used to a few new ideas, not least of which is that he no longer has a physical body but now resides in a machine. He might not have to unlearn a few tasks, for they will always be with him as memories, but he will have to learn a few new ones.

What use is the ability to cook for Stan? He can make dinner for his family, that task can stay in his biological brain. But the machine’s little doggy legs can carry him, and they are governed by the machine part of his makeup. It is the interface between biological and electronic brain that will really have to grow, and to adapt, and to learn. There’s a lot more to it than an old-fashioned prosthetic arm, where patients would twitch a shoulder or bicep muscle to close the fingers so they could pick up a knife or fork and eat their dinner. The human brain learns that task well enough so that people no longer have to consciously do it, they just reach and pick up the object without thinking.

Stan has to get used to a whole new way of living, and he also has to get used to a whole new way of looking at life. Stan will redefine our ideas of what a person is, what consciousness is, and what life and death is.

We will have detached consciousness and personhood from the physical body and set it free of those limitations. Once you have removed all biological processes from Stan, and Stan from any need for them, all you have to do is maintain the machine, change the batteries or charge them up, and Stan can go on indefinitely. As long as backup copies of Stan exist, he could essentially live forever. Once a record of his mind has been made, we could make endless copies of Stan.  Stan could exist in two places at once, and the two Stans could be linked in realtime so that they could enjoy two separate experiences, even at the same time.

Stan might be at a Leaf’s game in Toronto, enjoying his day off, and his machine-double could be in Paris negotiating a business deal, and both Stan’s could be aware of each other. Stan would be multi-talking, and muttering and talking to himself, but he would be able to cope with it.

Without the need to regulate the autonomous nervous system, the part of Stan’s mind that was subconscious and operated his physical body for him is no longer necessary, however, he now has machine resources at his disposal. He has a memory bank, and his consciousness has essentially all the time in the world to learn how to use it. Without cell death, without aging, with more than one of him running around, Stan would just keep getting smarter and smarter.

More seriously, Stan’s new life need not be a bleak hell of isolation and sensory deprivation. Let’s give him a more human body, one with bipedal locomotion.

Will he be able to give and receive affection? His new body will need periodic cleaning. Would he enjoy a hot shower, that most basic of modern luxuries?

One might think so, especially with the development of ‘haptics,’ in this case some nice new e-skin.

“The development of electronic skin, or ‘e-skin,’ brings the next milestone in the continuing symbiosis—and perhaps melding—of man and machine.”

“The thin new material may soon imbue robotics with a more sensitive touch while wallpapering much of the world with touch-screen capability.”

"With the interactive e-skin, we have demonstrated an elegant system on plastic that can be wrapped around different objects to enable a new form of human-machine interfacing."

Stan could not just give the wife and kids a hug but experience it in much the same way he used to before. 

He would feel their warmth, and their touch, and perhaps smell a bit of garlic on his wife’s breath.

Here is the Wikipedia definition of a human-machine interface.

“Human-machine interface is the part of the machine that handles the Human-machine interaction.”

“Common practices for interface software specification include use cases, constrain enforcement by interaction protocols (intended to avoid use errors.)

Our friend Stan could be ‘constrained’ from interfering with his own internal systems, for surely he would have that capability. It might be wise to prevent him from switching himself off, or, alternatively, Stan or his doctors/builders/team (for that’s what it would take, some kind of infrastructure) might be able to switch him off at night, and let the mind get a good night’s sleep. Biologically, the mind needs rest because of the way our brains are structures, and so our minds are also structured to conform to those capabilities. Short-term memory fades quickly, and our night-time brain activity may be involved in reducing that and making sense of all our daily stimuli, and ultimately transforming it into long-term memory. Dreaming may be a part of this process, and Stan will dream.

Much of the need for sleep is tied to the needs of the body. How much the need for sleep is tied to the psyche, is a little less clear. Even sharks sleep, and while they process just as much sensory data as we do—their environment is just as all-enveloping as our own, it’s also a little more monotonous. It’s all water, every thing is blue all the time. Our environment is so much more colourful, and there’s a lot more stuff in it. And yet it is also conceivable that Stan could go days without sleep when he wanted to, or when some necessity arose.

This author, and the average reader no doubt, has experienced a day or two of sleep deprivation once or twice in our more normal biologically-based lives, our ‘carbon-based’ life-forms, but Stan need never get tired in the same sense that we do.

In purely psychological terms, it would require some orientation time and most likely some guidance, both carbon-based and perhaps from those who have gone before him. These might originally have been disabled people, as in terms of medical and scientific research, the disabled would be seen as prime candidates for the human-machine interface.

The blind will see, the deaf will hear, and the quadriplegics will walk again. They’ll just have bits and pieces of plastic and metal sticking out of them, or holding it all together at first. Those will truly be hybrid human/machines. They might even look a bit like the Borg.

Our minds dream for a reason, and one would think that a system of artificial intelligence with our own unique personality imprinted upon it, would retain the need to rest, to play, and to engage in real human relationships.

It is a kind of immortality, one that goes beyond the limitations of the physical body.


END

Check out The Case of the Curious Killers here on Amazon.