Posts tagged philosophy

…I worry that everything I’ve been saying so far presupposes a philosophically problematic – I won’t say naïve — concept of freedom – what philosophers sometimes call contra-causal freedom. That’s a kind of absolute and total freedom that leaves our actions entirely and exclusively up to the will. I admit we don’t freedom in that sense. And maybe neuroscience can help us to see that. But I strongly doubt that either common sense or our legal system presupposes that we have freedom in that sense. And if we don’t there is no real conflict between our criminal justice system and what neuroscience is telling us about how the brain causes behavior. Is there?

Ken Taylor Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. [via]

Slap a bow on it. People forget about the lesser levels of culpability under the law, where you can still be punished for not making a “free, conscious and deliberate choice”, e.g., negligence. Putting those examples in the mix are as important, if not more so, than it is for neuroscience to address culpability and what’s considered free decisions under the law, me thinks.

Free Will from a Neurodevelopmental Perspective

bsf-fellows:

Link to a scientific review paper by BSF fellow Gerry Leisman recently published in Frontiers in Integrated Neuroscience. (full text)

Adding to my holiday reading pile.

The Moral Perspective: The more you think, the less you cheat

themoralperspective:

A new study in the journal Psychological Science suggests that the human tendency to cheat is a natural impulse, and that given some time for reflection, humans are less likely to cheat.

The research experiment — conducted by Shaul Shalvi, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, and his…

Which has always amazed me neuroanatomically speaking. In 2002, the first research re: fMRI and lying was published and found that the distribution of deception-related activation in the brain suggests that lying involves both conflict and suppression of the truth. So it turns out, if lying and cheating is instinctual, it certainly doesn’t mean it’s any less neurally demanding.  

“Are Doing Harm and Allowing Harm Equivalent? Ask fMRI” Most people, as well as the law, recognize that doing harm is morally worse than not doing anything when you know there to be a risk, thereby allowing harm to just happen. To that end, you would assume that judging the former to be worse is cognitively more demanding than the latter. Well, so did Fiery Cushman. He does research surrounding neuroethics up at Brown to see “…how the brain has evolved to process moral dilemmas and make moral judgments.” People typically say they are invoking an ethical principle when they judge acts that cause harm more harshly than willful inaction that allows that same harm to occur. That difference is even codified in criminal law. A new study based on brain scans, however, shows that people make that moral distinction automatically. Researchers found that it requires conscious reasoning to decide that active and passive behaviors that are equally harmful are equally wrong. Via This is interesting because you would think that in order to decide that doing harm is worse than non-acting that results in harm, it would require lots of conscious reasoning to arrive at that point, like most moral dilemmas. But it turns out, that’s the easy part for our brains requiring less activity…the hard part for our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which via the fMRI scans show evidence of using more “careful deliberative controlled thinking” is after weighing the two, deciding that they are both as bad. Now that makes even more sense, huh. I’ve read enough of his fascinating work to contact Dr. Cushman about an idea I had a couple months ago to see if collaborations with him are possible. He is very accessible, but it appears my new lab- AKA the hardest lab to get into ever, is taking me away from this.  Yes, I’m still waiting on that confirmation… fingers crossed so hard it hurts.  Above: Looking at a moral choice Test subjects who feel that doing active harm is morally the same as allowing harm to occur will show more brain activity. The notion that active harm is worse appears to be automatic, a psychological default requiring less thought. (Credit: Cushman Lab/Brown University)

“Are Doing Harm and Allowing Harm Equivalent? Ask fMRI”

Most people, as well as the law, recognize that doing harm is morally worse than not doing anything when you know there to be a risk, thereby allowing harm to just happen. To that end, you would assume that judging the former to be worse is cognitively more demanding than the latter. Well, so did Fiery Cushman. He does research surrounding neuroethics up at Brown to see “…how the brain has evolved to process moral dilemmas and make moral judgments.”

People typically say they are invoking an ethical principle when they judge acts that cause harm more harshly than willful inaction that allows that same harm to occur. That difference is even codified in criminal law. A new study based on brain scans, however, shows that people make that moral distinction automatically. Researchers found that it requires conscious reasoning to decide that active and passive behaviors that are equally harmful are equally wrong. Via

This is interesting because you would think that in order to decide that doing harm is worse than non-acting that results in harm, it would require lots of conscious reasoning to arrive at that point, like most moral dilemmas. But it turns out, that’s the easy part for our brains requiring less activity…the hard part for our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which via the fMRI scans show evidence of using more “careful deliberative controlled thinking” is after weighing the two, deciding that they are both as bad. Now that makes even more sense, huh.

I’ve read enough of his fascinating work to contact Dr. Cushman about an idea I had a couple months ago to see if collaborations with him are possible. He is very accessible, but it appears my new lab- AKA the hardest lab to get into ever, is taking me away from this.  Yes, I’m still waiting on that confirmation… fingers crossed so hard it hurts. 

Above: Looking at a moral choice Test subjects who feel that doing active harm is morally the same as allowing harm to occur will show more brain activity. The notion that active harm is worse appears to be automatic, a psychological default requiring less thought. (Credit: Cushman Lab/Brown University)

“How do you get a philosopher off your porch?”....... “Pay him for the pizza.”

Can Neuroscience Explain Humor?

 “Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Brain,” by Matthew Hurley and Daniel Dennett (obv one of my favs, who really is funny) and Reginald B. Adams, Jr. claim that:

The brain constantly generates presumptions about what will happen next. (…)  as it generates myriads of possible futures, and also fills in details about ambiguous situations in the present—both of which are crucial to functioning in a world of imperfect and incomplete information. (…) 

The missing ingredient in earlier theories is the particular kind of surprise and incongruity that is necessary to find something funny. The surprise, says Hurley, must arise from realizing that we made a mistake as a result of implicit assumptions, not explicit thought, or from misunderstanding information that is introduced covertly rather than explicitly. via

 But why?

Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature—aka natural selection—cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.  VIA   from @TheBrainScience