All posts tagged: Causation

The Apparent Mental Causation of Science and Pseudoscience

The Apparent Mental Causation of Science and Pseudoscience

Published by Sam Flores

In his lecture “On Freedom,” famous Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski said: You can, and even, I think, should, believe in the freedom of choice and the creation of new ones; freedom is our elementary experience, the experience of everyone—it is so elementary that it cannot be broken down into parts that can be analyzed separately, which is why freedom may seem to be an unprovable reality. … We are truly the perpetrators of actions, not just the tools of various forces that clash in the world, although, of course, we are subject to the laws of nature. … This freedom is therefore given to people together with their humanity, it is the foundation of this humanity, it creates man as something distinguished in being itself. (Kołakowski 2003) His words reflect the attitude of our civilization toward the issue of freedom of choice fairly well. We perceive it as the foundation of humanity, at the same time treating it as the foundation of social life. Without a belief in freedom of choice, the concept of responsibility …

Normothermic Regional Perfusion, the Dead Donor Rule, and the Metaphysics of Causation

Normothermic Regional Perfusion, the Dead Donor Rule, and the Metaphysics of Causation

Published by Jenni Sidey

Over the last decade, a novel method of organ donation after circulatory death (DCD) known as normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) has come into widespread use in various European countries. Although DCD is well established in the U.S., NRP has generated significant controversy, and the American College of Physicians (ACP) has issued a statement recommending a freeze on its implementation until outstanding ethical concerns are more thoroughly resolved. At the center of the controversy is the contention that NRP kills the donor. In its “controlled” form (cDCD), donation after circulatory death follows a request by a patient with a do-not-resuscitate order (DNR) or a surrogate decision-maker for such a patient to withdraw life-sustaining treatments (LSTs) due to a poor prognosis. Once LSTs are withdrawn and the patient sustains cardiac arrest, physicians wait for five minutes before declaring the patient dead based on circulatory criteria. In “standard” cDCD, surgeons rapidly retrieve organs and place them in cold storage. Unfortunately, however, organs tend to suffer damage during the five-minute “hands-off period” following cardiac arrest when they are deprived …