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Philosophical Neural Engineering

Researchers at the University of Washington have released an excellent video that nicely summarizes some of the ethical issues surrounding the development of neuroprosthetics and neuroengineering.

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American



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Researchers at the University of Washington have released an excellent video that nicely summarizes some of the ethical issues surrounding the development of neuroprosthetics and neuroengineering. I think it's very innovative that scientists and philosophers are working together at the UW Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering in order to anticipate ethical issues related to advances in neuroscience. As technology creeps into our sense of what it is to be human, scientific knowledge will have to join forces with knowledge from the social sciences and humanities in order to avoid ethical quagmires.

About Princess Ojiaku

Hey there! I'm a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the Neuroscience and Public Policy program. I'm also a musician who played in two bands in North Carolina, one called Pink Flag and another called Deals. My personal passions are science, music, and cycling as transportation.

I got into science as a kid while tagging along and watching my mom do experiments in her lab. I found that while I loved science, I didn't want to be alone in an ivory tower, crunching data that few others would understand. I also noticed that many other people thought science was this scary and incomprehensible entity of obscurity. When I realized that there were people working to make science fun and accessible to everyone, I knew that this was exactly what I wanted to do. The two things I find the most immensely interesting and continually impressing are music and neuroscience, so these are the topics that I'll focus on in my blog. Philosophy and politics are my second loves, so I might pop in an occasional post on these topics as well. Ultimately I am here to share things that give me wonder. I hope that reading Science with Moxie gives you a bit of that wonder too.

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