Progress in neuroscience may soon make possible an age of neurocosmetology: the use of drugs to let people affect the way their brains work, so as to make them more effective, more attractive, and more like their "cognitive ideal." A world where all the women are beautiful and all the men handsome might be bearable if boring. But would a society full of type-A's work at all? Can it be rational to choose to change in ways that may change who you are? Should there be moral or legal prohibitions against healthy people messing with their own brain chemistry?

Our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Amy Standen, asked, "Is neurocosmetology a word? The only two entries for it on Google are from Philosophy Talk."

Well, that suggests a topic for another day, when does something become a word? We'd have to ask Geoff Nunberg for his opinion.

I first heard this particular candidate for wordhood used bytomorrow's guest, Sam Barondes, at conference last Fall on neuroscience, bioethics and personal identity sponsored by Johns Hopkins' Pheobe Berman Bioethics Institute. Philosophers and neuroscientists talked about a few case studies which involved Alzheimer's patients, steroid addiction, frontotemporal dementia, and severe apathy, and the questions the diminished rationality such cases involved raised problems about personal identity.

Barondes a UCSF neurogeneticist and the author of分子与医学疾病,Mood Genes, andBetter than Prozac他是一个小组成员，有很多有趣的事情要说。在最后无拘无束的讨论中，他和另一位小组成员迈克尔·加扎尼加(Michael Gazzaniga)讨论了神经美容未来的可能性。我记得，加扎尼加曾担心这是一种自然的智慧，它导致了a型和b型人格在人群中的分布。如果每个人都想成为a型人格呢?一个全是a型人格的世界会是什么样子?整容手术现在很普遍。也许有一天我这个年纪的男人会没有皱纹。很奇怪，但对
functioning of society, I suppose. But a world with only type-A's? Somewhat frightening. Barondes, as I remember, was a bit more sanguine. It seemed to me a topic that had some interesting
philosophical angles. Here are some that come to mind:

• 一些哲学家区分了一阶自由和高阶自由，一阶自由指的是能够根据自己的欲望来行动，而高阶自由指的是对激发你的欲望负责。但当然，这些选择本身是基于欲望的一个人想要什么样的欲望。那么，神经美容是否基本上是人类自由的延伸，赋予我们的能力不仅仅是选择做什么，而是选择成为什么样的人?

• 我们平常相处的套路包括性格特征和个性等概念。我们倾向于认为，一个人一旦成年(如果还没有成年的话)，某些个性和性格特征就已经根深蒂固了。我们用这些来形成我们对别人会做什么的期望。我们不相信不诚实的人。我们不希望粗心大意的人当飞行员。我们对待这些个性和性格特征的方式与我们对待外貌特征的方式没有什么不同。我们不排除改变，但我们希望它是渐进的，除非是身体或情感创伤的结果。神经美容会破坏这些期望，破坏我们与他人相处的方式，甚至破坏我们对一个人的概念吗?

• Would it be such a bad thing if our very concept of a person was undermined? Derek Parfit argues some years ago that our ordinary conception of personal identity locks us into a sort of dangerous fiction. Better to think of people as processes various temporally close parts of which can be expected to have similar desires, goals, beliefs, and consciousnesses linked by memory, but longer stretches of which may
  be as unlike one another as stetches drawn from completely separate lives.
  
• Lots of things we do when we are young lock us into things we may not want when we are old: tatoos, debts, professions, educational opportunities taken and not taken. Neurocosmetology may radically increase such opportunities for the young to screw up the lives of the old --- or, by careful choices, to improve them. Is there any new principle involved when one is choosing the basic parameters of one's personality?
  
• 现在，雇主有时觉得有必要确保人们不使用某些药物。人们会有压力利用自己的神经美容。“大牌”高管会不会服用神经美容类的类固醇，所以他们可能是超级a型血的人。

These are some of the issues we may be to tomorrow, or we may not. You may have a more interesting angle. Call or email. We don't usually get to all the calls, or read all of the emails, for lack of
time. But we appreciate them all.