WHOOPS …did they pull the plug on Terry Schiavo too quickly? I recently came across the following quote about vegetative states from a Scientific American article:

in a persistent vegetative state . . . . patients show no sign of recognizing or interacting with their surroundings . . . [however] . . . [s]cientists at the University of Cambridge and the University of Liège in Belgium reported that they had used MRI brain-imaging technology to detect signs of awareness in a 23-year-old woman who had been in a vegetative state for five months. ‘The brain scan showed us that not only was she able to understand speech, she was able to follow simple instructions,’ says Adrian M. Owen, lead author of the study.

So, was Terry Schiavo still conscious when they took her off the feeding tube? The problem is that we still don’t know exactly what consciousness is. How do we judge consciousness? How would we know if a super-sophisticated computer system gains consciousness sometime in the future? You know when you are conscious . . . . but you need to be conscious to know that you are conscious. You think that you know when another human being is conscious; but since you cannot directly share that person’s consciousness, you can’t really know for sure. There may well be twilight zones, and Terry Schiavo may or may not have been in such a zone when they pulled the plug.

The vegetative patient’s response to speech, as indicated by the MRI tests, may indicate some form of consciousness. But then again, these brain responses could also be occurring solely at a sub-conscious level, where much of our day-to-day waking activity is directed from. For you baseball or softball players who might doubt that half of what we do each day comes from the “zombie” part of us, think about this — could you consciously hit a fastball? If you were to concentrate intensely as the pitcher winds up and think the whole thing through as the ball approaches, you would never get to first. You absolutely need to put your mind on automatic. You let your motor coordination mechanisms in the sub-conscious brain guide your arms as you take the swing. If you have very good brain mechanisms to coordinate your muscles, you will get a hit maybe 1 in 3 times at bat. If not, then you’re not an athlete (as I’m not), so forget about sports. Take up another interest.

One of my main interests is the topic of human consciousness. And right now, a lot of thinking and research is being done on it. But there is still a whole lot of uncertainty left. Actually, the more that scientists and psychologists and philosophers talk about consciousness, the more uncertainty there seems to be. The Terry Schiavo case came down smack-dab in the middle of that uncertainty. There were many people on either side of the issue who seemed quite sure of themselves — i.e that Ms. Schiavo was still consciousness and thus should have been kept alive, or that she was clearly not conscious and should have been left to die.

They were all fooling themselves. The nasty truth is that we just don’t know all that much about human consciousness at present. Maybe Ms. Schiavo should have been left alive, as a gesture of humility in the face of the great uncertainties we have regarding our own minds. Or maybe she should have been unplugged, given that we live in a world of limitations; the world is one big emergency ward, where triage is the name of the game. That was what the issue really came down to – two very unsatisfying alternatives. But hardly anyone seemed to grasp this. And once the politicians got involved, the whole thing was a melt down. Let’s hope that more honest thinking and discussion can prevail the next time that a case like Terry Schiavo hits the media.