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+--- Thread: What do face transplants say about identity? + Folk concepts (/thread-4515.html)
What do face transplants say about identity? + Folk concepts - C C - Nov 19, 2017
What do face transplants say about identity & wellbeing?
https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-face-transplants-say-about-identity-and-wellbeing
EXCERPT: The delay was caused not by medical or technical challenges, but by bioethical and perceptual ones: bioethicists were concerned that the risks of the surgery and the dangers posed by the immunosuppressant medication needed to prevent rejection of the transplanted face would outweigh the benefits. Doctors were concerned about the public reaction to the manipulation of something held to be fundamental to individual identity.
The doctors were right. Public outcry was intense, heated, and – initially – strangely unfocused. [...] Face transplants reveal our deepest-held notions of the relationship between face and identity, and fundamentally challenge them. That’s hard to explain, or even to identify as a concern. Which is to say: the objections to the surgery were rooted in feelings, not in facts, though facts were to follow, providing a comfortable place for the discomfort.
[...] The growing acceptance of the surgery is due in part to the passage of time. People have had face transplants, and the world didn’t end. Recipients (as they are careful to emphasise in their post-operation interviews) still feel very much like themselves. And, despite their post-transplant faces being a blend of their original features and those of their donors, some even feel that they look very much like themselves: certainly more like themselves than they did with no face. [...] The post-apocalyptic sci-fi future foreshadowed in the many films and novels featuring face transplants hasn’t come to bear. The face transplant is no longer a dangerous and weird mechanism to upset the order of identity. [...] In another possible world, face transplants could have shown the way forward to a new and radical understanding of the limitations of using the face as the representation of identity. They haven’t....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-face-transplants-say-about-identity-and-wellbeing
Folk Concepts
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/16/folk-concepts/
EXCERPT: “Folk concept.” You may have never heard the phrase defined, or even used, but you probably already know what it means. Consider this list:
luck
Bayes’ rule
ghosts
vitamin C
Which two are folk concepts?
If you were able to instantly see that luck and ghosts are folk concepts, then you are already in possession of the folk concept of the folk concept. The descriptor “folk” invites the hearer to a conversation about less sophisticated people, behind their back. [...]
Many disciplines use the concept of the folk concept, including anthropology, sociology, botany, and psychology (not to mention folklore and history of science). Each discipline likely has its own special meaning for the term that, if not explicitly defined, is encoded in usage. The term “folk concept” is rarely defined, even by scientists studying folk concepts. This is not necessarily a fault; definitions may not get us any further than example usage and hermeneutics. [...]
Folk concepts are often imprecise and vague (healing energy, true love). If the phrase “folk concept” is also imprecise and vague, if its referents shift over time and context, if it presents a hand-wave-y spectrum rather than a hard category, then it shares the nature of the things it describes.
[...] So far, folk concepts seem to vastly outnumber things that aren’t folk concepts. Only a tiny minority of concepts have a claim to formal, scientific status, and that claim is often short-lived. Folk concepts are the ordinary background reality, and formal scientific concepts are the rare exception. Almost everything that is interesting, important, or deeply meaningful to human beings is a folk concept – including interestingness, importance, and meaning itself.
There have been a few approaches toward folk concepts in the scientific literature. One approach is dismissive of folk concepts as inherently unscientific, to be eradicated and replaced with formal precision. For example, Cunningham (1961) says:
Over the years the sociologist has learned to be properly skeptical of “folk” definitions of social phenomena. For example, concepts such as “crime” and “insanity” have proven useless in most types of scientific analysis of deviant behavior. “Leisure,” it may be argued, is also just such a folk concept. We have an intuitive feeling of what is subsumed under this rubric but find the concept a virtual Pandora’s box when it comes to formal definition of the phenomenon...
MORE: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/16/folk-concepts/
RE: What do face transplants say about identity? + Folk concepts - Yazata - Nov 20, 2017
A face is kind of a human user-interface. An individual without a face is an individual seemingly without a self, without personhood that others can recognize and respond to.
I've never perceived any ethical problem with face-transplants, though I can easily imagine psychological ones. The biggest problems are going to be the technical medical problems, preventing rejection, making sure that blood flow is right, and most difficult, giving the faces feeling and making them move correctly. (Difficult if the underlying nerves and muscles were destroyed.)
Many of the face-transplant patients I've seen have faces that just hang limply on their heads. It must be difficult to eat if you can't feel or move your lips. (I had dental work recently that left my lips frozen for a short while afterwards. When I tried to eat and drink, food just dribbled down my face. This must be 100 times worse. Speaking must be almost impossible. Imagine being unable to ever smile.
RE: What do face transplants say about identity? + Folk concepts - RainbowUnicorn - Nov 20, 2017
(Nov 19, 2017 05:59 PM)C C Wrote: What do face transplants say about identity & wellbeing?
https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-face-transplants-say-about-identity-and-wellbeing
EXCERPT: The delay was caused not by medical or technical challenges, but by bioethical and perceptual ones: bioethicists were concerned that the risks of the surgery and the dangers posed by the immunosuppressant medication needed to prevent rejection of the transplanted face would outweigh the benefits. Doctors were concerned about the public reaction to the manipulation of something held to be fundamental to individual identity.
The doctors were right. Public outcry was intense, heated, and – initially – strangely unfocused. [...] Face transplants reveal our deepest-held notions of the relationship between face and identity, and fundamentally challenge them. That’s hard to explain, or even to identify as a concern. Which is to say: the objections to the surgery were rooted in feelings, not in facts, though facts were to follow, providing a comfortable place for the discomfort.
[...] The growing acceptance of the surgery is due in part to the passage of time. People have had face transplants, and the world didn’t end. Recipients (as they are careful to emphasise in their post-operation interviews) still feel very much like themselves. And, despite their post-transplant faces being a blend of their original features and those of their donors, some even feel that they look very much like themselves: certainly more like themselves than they did with no face. [...] The post-apocalyptic sci-fi future foreshadowed in the many films and novels featuring face transplants hasn’t come to bear. The face transplant is no longer a dangerous and weird mechanism to upset the order of identity. [...] In another possible world, face transplants could have shown the way forward to a new and radical understanding of the limitations of using the face as the representation of identity. They haven’t....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/what-do-face-transplants-say-about-identity-and-wellbeing
Quote:Doctors were concerned about the public reaction to the manipulation of something held to be fundamental to individual identity.
Quote:Sharrona Pearl
is assistant professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her latest book is Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (2017).
3,200 words
Edited by Nigel Warburton
Quote:assistant professor of communication...
clear personal/profesional bias
-the story is composed & written by someone who seeks to increase communication & fundermentally focus on the communication.
this is quite different to a medical ethics concept raised by a very expereinced Medical Profesional as a topic of ethics of a procedure.
plus heavy subconscious bias
i commuicate who i am and how much value i have and hold by using my face... (thoughts around what some type of [potential]associated industry subconscious-bias of communications profesionals)
soo what camps are in play ?
1. making my amazing thesis to help me get my PHD.
2. popularity/celebrity status
3. popular social media ethics debates, what are their triggers & fast reactionary hot buttons...
4. medical ethics
5. medical science[Transplants]
6. patient rights
7. patient concerns & wellbeing
8. private industry profit engineering from COSMETIC ELECTIVE medical trends
where does that leave us ?
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/woman-who-underwent-worlds-first-8779087
Quote:By Peter Allen Patrick LionIsabelle Dinoire, 49, succumbed to two types of cancer earlier this summer after a decade taking powerful immunosuppressant drugs
- 15:07, 6 SEP 2016
- Updated16:20, 6 SEP 2016
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/chinese-face-transplant-recipient-h-2008-12-22/
Quote:One of the four people known to have received a partial face transplant has died, according to published reports.
Li Guoxing, 32, died in July at his home in southwestern China after taking herbal medicines instead of immune-suppressing drugs typically used to prevent recipients from rejecting donated tissue, his surgeon, Guo Shuzhong, told Agence-France Presse over the weekend. Li's death had been rumored for months on Chinese blogs, AFP notes.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/face-transplant-recipient-transformed-incredible-9840922
Quote:A man who received a face transplant a decade after trying to shoot himself in a suicide bid has hailed the success of the incredible operation.
Eight months since going under the knife to receive another man's face, Andy Sandness, 32, said he felt normal after simply stepping into an elevator again and blending in with other people.
“It sank in that I’m finally normal again," American Sandness told the Mayo Clinic. "It felt awesome.
"There are no words to express just how grateful I am for this gift.”
whos feelings are being whipped up as a reason for some type of ethical ideology the patient ? or the potential Cosmetic Elective customer ?
Quote:What is the definition of Maleficent?
causing or capable of producing evil or mischief; harmful or baleful. malefic, adjective. maleficence, noun. C17: from Latin maleficent-, from maleficus wicked, prone to evil, from malum evil. Word Origin and History for maleficent.
Maleficent | Define Maleficent at Dictionary.com
www.dictionary.com/browse/maleficen
thank goodnes there is a warm fuzzy on the end to try and make it all ok and perfectly innocent.
{([]}) P.S i am not suggesting infering or saying the writer is a bad person. or a person intending harm on others. i am alluding to the nature of the topic which requires informed debate around comprehended science before usurping trend reactions into legal frame work.
Obviousely the more we talk about things the better they MAY become.
ignoring issues as scientific data shows only results in further harm... so good on her, great idea... but... it is heavily potentiated to(potentialy) illicit responses that are more ego centric proxy reactive than scientifically patient orientated.