Lynn Underwood

Art, science, and personal experiences all help us better understand who we are and how we can flourish

Category: ethics

My work in ethics has been informed by my work on the nature of the human person, epistemology and measurement, disability, and compassionate love.

I was one of the first to teach a course in Neuroethics to undergraduates. This field requires attention both to major philosophical and theological questions as well as to the technical findings of neuroscience.

  • We are not machines and AI is not human

    A chapter in a book I am working on explores how we are not machines, yet can be duped into thinking that we are. It is part of a book that centers on how a person can flourish in difficult circumstances. As I was writing it, the Generative AI, Chat GPT, and computer future fears surfaced in the media, and we have been alerted to an acceleration of human-seeming abilities of technology. I found myself concerned with issues that are arising now, rather than long term fears, and wrote a paper for the US Office of Science and Technology Policy with recommendations for action. There are many people who can speak to so many issues raised by AI, but I thought there were some things that were being left out of discussions, and my scholarship in human relationships might be helpful in making recommendations for action and making a case for those.

    We need to protect real human-to-human relationships and strengthen our relationships with one another in the wider social world. What can we do to help us see ourselves as we are, not as machines, and help us to relate realistically to human-seeming Generative AI objects with various levels of verbal, visual, auditory, and tactile characteristics? How do we encourage people to see the value of human-to-human interactions, of giving and receiving compassionate love, and accepting others and ourselves, flawed yet of value at a fundamental level? It is in our relationships with one another, embodied and truthful, that we express ourselves in a way that leads to fullness of life for ourselves and the people we encounter in our day to day lives. We need to put guardrails in place to help us to affirm these important characteristics of our lives in the midst of the increasing proliferation of human-seeming machines and technology.

    Email me at lynn@lynnunderwood.com if you want the whole paper on AI and relationships that I submitted to the Office of Science and Technology Policy .

  • fun and philosophy

    ‘The History of Philosophy without any Gaps.” is a podcast I have listened to for years and love. I have learned so much.  Many of the episodes, on topics of particular interest to me, I listen to 2 or 3 times. If I find this fun, what does this say about me? The presenter, Peter Adamson, has a sense of humor, and is open-minded, and has such a knowledge base, and provides a depth of content that he expresses so well.  I listen on iTunes, but here is a link to his website: https://historyofphilosophy.net/ If you want to get a taste of it, look under ‘themes’ and find something of interest.  I couldn’t resist drawing the host.

  • parting the curtain

    My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.

    -Eudora Welty, author

  • how to fight

    If you feel like fighting fire with fire, remember real firefighters use water.watercompressedlynnunderwood

  • to live is to change

    I like stability, and I often stick with something too long because I don’t want to wimp out. This quote from John Henry Newman is good for me to hear. He changed from one church to another, and also knew that all religious institutions need to change to be alive. Change is an important part of being alive. The world is not static, and we cannot be either. It may be uncomfortable to change, but if we do not remain open to change, we are just not going to be able to engage fully in this wild world.

    drawing by lynn quote by newman
    drawing by lynn quote by newman

  • too many

    art by lynn
    art by lynn

    “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times.” – Thomas Merton

  • delusion of total self-sufficiency

    drawing by lynn
    drawing by lynn

    It is delusional to think that we are fully self-sufficient. Last Saturday I led an all-day retreat on “Flourishing in Difficult Circumstances.” One thing we  talked about was how the sense of total self-sufficiency is a delusion, one that is prevalent in our western culture. One of my Power Point slides was this drawing I did long ago….I found it folded up in my files, and I recently hung it up in my study. Of course the importance of personal responsibility cannot be undervalued, but difficult circumstances can vividly remind us of how we all do need help.

  • Freedom

    jean vanierJean Vanier inspires me. He started the L’Arche communities. They bring people who are marginalized and restless from lack of community and care, together with those who learn to care for them. They especially create small caring communities for those who have developmental disabilities.

    I met Jean Vanier over 30 years ago while living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  A small room of about 20 people had gathered to hear him speak and talk with him. Meeting him made a strong impression on me, and I followed up by reading anything by him I could get my hands on. He was from an important political family in Canada, had served in the Navy in WWII, and then pursued a PhD in philosophy.  It was after this that he came to establish the L’Arche communities. As he spoke of the gift that those who had mental developmental disabilities were to him in his life, it helped me to see that what I had most valued in myself up to that time, my intellectual abilities, were not the most important thing in my life. The communities he started were based on mutual respect – those with developmental disabilities have things to share with us, things they can teach us, things they can give us. His life demonstrated how he really valued all people. We all have different gifts, and discovering those is an opportunity for each of us.

    In addition to his writings on disability and community, he has also described human freedom in ways that I have found worth pondering.  In his book, Being Human, he wrote:  “Aristotle talks of our passions as being like a horse which has a life of its own.  We are riders who have to take into account the life of the horse in order to guide it where we want it to go.  We are not called to suppress our passions or compulsions, nor to confront them head on, nor to be governed by them, but to orient them in the direction we want to go….We set out on the road to freedom when we no longer let our compulsions or passions govern us.  We are freed when we begin to put justice, heartfelt relationships, and the service of others and of truth over and above our own needs for love and success or our fears of failure….”

  • “philosophy talks” interview

    I discussed  “Unconditional Love,” on “Philosophy Talks” Radio Program, Stanford University, December 9, 2012. Available as a podcast on itunes or at http://philosophytalk.org/

  • metaphor and the self

    Metaphor and the Self: A Role for the Arts in Understanding Suffering and Treating the Person in Distress, Lynn Underwood, International Neuroethics Conference, Brain Matters 3: Values at the Crossroads of Neurology, Psychiatry, and Psychology, October 24-25, 2012

    Abstract:

    Research shows that the metaphors we use affect our behaviors and attitudes in significant ways. (Holding a cup of hot coffee rather than a cold drink can cause us to have a more friendly attitude towards those we meet; Boroditsky’s work showing how reading about a description of crime as a virus rather than a beast can influence our decisions on the best ways to control the same criminal behaviors.) These effects usually happen implicitly – we are not aware of them. The machine metaphor recurs in our descriptions of the brain and the overall functioning of the body and has become an automatic default. It can be useful in simplifying complex systems, and medical training encourages this. Even efforts to promote humanism in medicine slide in this direction, as communication, empathy and ethical decisions are formulated in mechanistic terms.

    This kind of thinking can get in the way when we treat conditions for which no “physical” cause can be found. Self-reports made by the person and their experiences of suffering are essential to the identification of the roots of the problems and opportunities for treatment. However if one buys into the machine metaphor too much, the experience of the person is given less weight in the overall assessment, while objective features such as brain scans, blood chemistry and physiologically evident symptoms are given the final say. Measurements based solely on a machine model lead to interventions that presuppose a kind of person that is incongruous with the way we live our lives, and what is most important to us.

    Visual art, film and literature can give insight into the nature of the human person that offers alternative metaphors for the human person, and opens opportunities for creative approaches to treatment and evaluation of outcomes. This presentation would elaborate on those, and give specific examples of how they can help yield more effective treatments and decisionmaking.

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