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Breaking Bioethics
The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the Wellcome Trust: WT087439--The Human Body: Its Scope, Limits and Future. This article was presented at the Neuroethics Network meeting at ICM (Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Épinière) in Paris, France, June 2014.
This section provides reactions to current and emerging issues in bioethics.
Preamble
Our story of mind reading begins with poetry. The science of the brain--neuroscience--is, at least in part, in the mind-reading business. Neuroscience attempts, inter alia, to replace the eyes as windows to the soul. We start with poetry because, historically, poets have been the neuroscientists who have best understood the ways in which the mind works. And we are concerned with hot baths because one of the greatest of all poets, Homer, used this image as a metaphor for the human condition, a condition that not only appreciates hot baths but also notices their absence and understands the wider meaning of both these states.
In a wonderful essay on Homer's Iliad, Simone Weil analyzes Homer's portrayal of the moral realities and ironies of human life in a memorable passage. She starts with these famous lines from The Iliad, in which Andromache, Hector's wife, awaits Hector's return from battle:
She ordered her bright-haired maids in the palace
To place on the fire a large tripod, preparing
A hot bath for Hector, returning from battle.
Foolish woman! Already he lay, far from hot baths,
Slain by grey-eyed Athena, who guided Achilles' arm.1
Weil comments: "Far from hot baths he was indeed, poor man. And not he alone. Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all of human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths."2She might have said, for it is surely consonant with the wistful regret of both Homer and her own commentary, that nearly all of human life takes place far from comfort or understanding.3But this passion for understanding the hearts and minds of others, even far from hot baths, reminds us of both its attraction and importance.
Hector's last words as he lies dying at the hand of Achilles and as far as it is possible to be from...