Underneath cold logic lies a warm heart

Objectivity.

We might think we are logical. But every now and then someone comes along and smashes our preconception that we are sane, sober. That event makes us rethink who we are, what we know. And in the end, all we can do is state the obvious: we are subjective, no matter how hard we try not to be.

I am one of the people who take pride in the ability to distance oneself from situations. Just stand back and see what is really going on. It is one of the abilities that Forbes[1] claims successful people use to fight stress. It eases assessment and the following decisions appear to be more solid in nature and turn out to be more effective. For some it is easy, for others it is impossible.

To train oneself in the art of stepping away from the situation, one can simply look at everyday things, from complex machines to simple devices. And simply think of their essence, how they are put together, what do they do? How does a crane go up, what's the point of having rebar rods in concrete, how do pump valves work? Simple curiousities that open up a whole new world and force you to look beyond what's plainly visible. It forces you to look deeper into any problem, analyze it to find alternative solutions, pros and cons for these solutions to understand why these alternatives are not used. It is a bit of analytical thinking that can be trained with little everyday exercises that one can do almost anywhere at any time. As long as you can think, you can never be truly bored.

However, training analytical thinking is as effective as Pavlov's dog conditioning. It certainly has effect, but it does not rule out alternative mechanisms, it does not rule out malfunctions. Every once in a while even the most objective mind will miss or ignore something willingly and create subjectivity. Every once in a while it reassesses its values and hopes, thus changing the criteria on which its decisions and evaluations are based. Every once in a while a bit of subjectiveness will come in no matter what we do. After all, we are human. We use our gut instinct, we jump in strange places, we travel in the dark. Just hoping that we make it through, hoping we find a piece of light.

Sometimes subjectiveness is induced by a certain emotional event or by an emotional reaction to someone we meet. It could be something that rocks your boat, or something that rocks your world. It can range from winning a huge scholarship to seeing a nice smile and sinking in it. As long as it creates a spontaneous emotional response, it creates a high risk of subjectiveness. Which isn't necessarily bad, sometimes things feel funny for a reason. Instincts are what have kept us alive thus far, they have guided us through thick and thin so that we could arrive at this moment in time to read these words, written by someone who reached the point of writing them thanks to listening to his instincts.

As I mentioned earlier, I am an avid fan of objectivity, of mental distancing. Surprisingly many situations can be solved by it, resulting in mature and responsible decisions. But no extreme is ever effective, and as such, one can hardly ever ignore feelings when we find someone special. Friendships are difficult to form without listening to instincts, relationships are impossible. Our everyday life requires the use of subjective analyses since every single situation in our lives includes unknown variables. The more complicated the situation, the more we need to analyze it before we can trust our instincts, for they can be mistaken. Often enough we cannot see enough, and hence we must use our gut. Then again, if you listen to every gut feeling, you never get anything done.

"There is no certainty, only opportunity."

The brain is the most important part of the body. According to the brain.

Neurophysiology is a rather fascinating science. Difficult to research as most methods by necessity are invasive and possibly harmful. Yet infinitely complex in its nature. Just think of the myriad of emotions you are able to experience, think of the information you are able to analyze and store, think of all the creative ideas any person can come up with. And then think about 9% of all Europeans (according to research) have suffered or are suffering from more serious mental problems, most of it being depression. 20% of American homeless people suffer from skizophrenia. How to differentiate brilliance from madness of a molecular or neural scale? How do you know whether a person is depressed, not just feeling a little under the weather?

It is difficult to tell these states apart by looking at the symptoms, it is more difficult to find the causes. In a way, the causes of mental illnesses use security through obscurity. With all of these different brain functions manifesting at all kinds of different times, how do you tell which specific reaction (or lack thereof!) is causing a specific pathology? Without years, or even decades of thorough research, you just don't. You take a stab in the dark and hope you can solve it in time.

When speaking of electrical signals, you can think of a brain as a glob of Jello. In fact, the comparison is frighteningly apt. If you were to add electrodes to both (a brain and a glob of actual Jello), you can get brainwaves from both (if the Jello wobbles, which if you have any sense of fun, it will). But as Jello is not really a brain as a whole, sometimes neither is the brain. Alien hands might not be very common, but they do occur. For those that don't know, alien hand occurs when there is a communication problem between the right and the left hemisphere. Just imagine a married couple refusing to talk to each other after a fight. The problem with no communication is that one side does not know or understand what mischiefs the other side is up to, and can panic. Especially if at least one side is irrational. That can lead to one side of the body attempting to harm the other side, inevitably hurting itself in the process.

So that's all the brain is. A ball of fun directing our every move, regardless of whether it understands why or how. A mix of wires so complex that 'thought' and 'emotion' are possible. Most actual effective neurons are concentrated in a rather tiny spot at the back of the head, with a lot of the rest filled with glial cells that work as isolation and support. Put simply, it is a bunch of tangled wires that by some amazing process have combined into a central processing unit with subunits that process different kinds of informational input. We know how neurons work, but we don't know how the system works. We can't even reproduce the existing networks. That's what modern neuroscientists and computer scientists are trying to do - create a simulation of neurons and see if and how they create a brain-like structure. If it works, who knows, maybe the next step is organic computing.

If you know that a healthy brain is infinitely complex, just imagine a brain with a quirk in it. Then you understand why mental illnesses are so darn difficult to define, locate cause of, and remedy. Even thinking about it changes your brain, possibly causing a fault or a kink in it. Now that is scary.

A piece of him, a dash of her, mix it up and you get a new person.

'The sale of human organs should be legalized.'

This topic reminds me of this other quote:

"Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter -we- are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself."

Chairman Sheng-ji Yang
"Looking God in the Eye"

Human organs are no more special than the genetic code. Even now scientists can create surprisingly accurate depictions of people by reading their DNA. While this technology is mostly of use in crime fighting, DNA is used, prodded and poked all the time. It is tested on, it is experimented with. Gene-storing centers basically buy and sell gene information to each other. So why not do the same with human organs? After all, in dire situations you are more likely to benefit from somebody else's organ than somebody else's DNA.

But first things first. Is there a need for a legal human organ market? We already have donors, in some countries the donor system is opt-out (meaning if you do not specifically say you do not wish to be a donor, you are a donor by default). So people in need who meet the demands for a donor recipient are already taken care of, in some part. In others, it is opt-in, which makes keeping the supply up a bit more challenging. But let's be honest, who wouldn't opt-in with the current systems, probably wouldn't opt-in with a free market. Naturally you cannot help people in demand if you have an insufficient supply. But short of organ harvesting from living people, a legal donor market won't increase the supply.

Sure, one could imagine that the market would encompass the world, whereas the donor program generally only works between countries relatively close to one another. The problem with long-distance organ donorship is transportation and storage. Getting a heart or a lung to a destination thousands of kilometres away without critical deterioration is tricky. It is expensive and extremely time-sensitive. Getting it to work with even longer distances is even more problematic and more dangerous. Simply put, getting the market to go world-wide would be quite a daunting task, and a very possibly impractical one at that. That means the supply won't increase anyways.

Quite frankly, the only legal way this new open market would increase supply is if the donors were to be reimbursed for their generous contributions. In other words, people would have to sell their dying bodies for spare parts. Even if we manage to keep it on the level, are we as a society ready for that? For argument's sake let's say we are. But even so, is gaining a marginally larger supply of donors worth the painful transition phase from a voluntary donorship policy to a capitalism-based one, and do we lose a bit of our souls doing it? Or are good deeds indeed good regardless of motivation and intent?